According To Hoyt

Lenin’s The State and Revolution – An Introduction – by Amanda S. Green

Last night, I talked with Sarah about today’s post. Unlike last week’s post, or even the series on Clinton’s What Happened, this post simply wasn’t coming together. I finally had to put it aside and tell her I’d get her the post this morning. I needed to sleep on it and, hopefully, inspiration would strike. In the light of day, I’m not sure inspiration struck, but I realized what the problem was. Simply put, the 1933 edition I was reading was, while my preferred edition, like wading through molasses on a day when the temperatures were below freezing. It wasn’t the subject but the translation. It flowed like the original Russian text. The problem is English isn’t meant to flow that way, not any longer. Or maybe my brain just doesn’t flow that way, not for quick reading, any longer.

So, I went trolling the internet for a different version. As I did, I kept my 1933 edition at hand as well as my Russian text of the pamphlet (which I finally found this morning). Using the preview function on Amazon and even checking out some free PDFs of the text, I finally found one I like.

The State and Revolution (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) will be the version I mainly use for the purposes of this new series of posts. Yes, the text is slightly different from the translation I prefer. But, checking it against the 1933 edition and the original Russian, it is (at least so far) accurate. The language has been updated slightly for easier readability but the meaning is still the same. Better yet, the introductory notes give not only information about the book (or pamphlet as it was originally called) but also the history of Russia and of Lenin’s life.

Many Westerners know little about Lenin the man. We think of him as the founder of the Soviet Union. We remember the images of him addressing the masses or on propaganda posters. We even remember the pictures of what was supposed to be his body lying in state inside Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow not just years but decades after his death. When I visited the tomb, more than one person did a riff on the old Memorex commercial’s tag line, changing it to, “Is he real or is he wax?”

But we know little about the man himself, much less about this particular work.

Lenin’s history as someone working against the Romanovs started when he was a young man. He joined anti-Romanov groups and by mid-1890’s “was a leading Marxist ‘underground’ revolutionary in Petrograd.” (TSAR, p vii) In 1896, he was arrested. 1897 saw him being exiled to Siberia. After serving his sentence there, he immigrated to the West in 1900. In 1903, he came to prominence during the Second Party Congress by becoming the leader of the Bolsheviks after their split with the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, also known as the Reds, would not only defeat the Mensheviks and others in the Russian Civil War (1917 -1922), they would also become the Communist Party of the USSR. Lenin led them throughout this time, both as their spiritual leader and as their figurative.

But, back in the summer of 1917, Russia was still in turmoil. World War I continued, draining Russia’s already strained resources. With Nicholas II overthrown in February of that year, Lenin and other “revolutionary figures” began returning to Russia. Lenin, who has been in Switzerland during the war, found himself facing a number of hurdles in his attempt to return to Russia, however. Russia’s allies, knowing of Lenin’s opposition to the Tsar, blacklisted him, preventing him from traveling to Petrograd via France and the North Sea. Because of that, Lenin had to travel through Germany, with approval from Berlin. That route, along with Berlin’s approval, led to the accusation of him being a German agent.

The Provisional Government leveled the charges against him, charges he denied. Very quickly, he became a leading figure in the opposition against the new government. He proclaimed “that the emergencies of war and economic disruption were resolvable only through the installation of a government of soviets.” (TSAR pg xiii). To do this, the Bolsheviks began their “campaign” to “convince the working class, the soldiers and the peasants that the party’s representatives should replace the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the soviets.” (TSAR pg xiv)

Long story short, Russia was a mess at this point. In May, a newer coalition government was formed. The Bolsheviks still didn’t hold the power they wanted and they used the upheaval to foment more dissent.  After the government banned a protest in late June 1917, the demonstration was met with force from the government. The government held Lenin responsible, even though he hadn’t been in contact with Petrograd at the time, and ordered his arrest on the charge of being a German agent.

For Lenin, this meant once again going on the run. During this time, he began writing The State and Revolution. What is interesting is realizing that it wasn’t written for those in Russia he was supposedly fighting for. It wasn’t even written for most of those in the Bolshevik Party. It was written for the well-educated, for those who could go out and debate and spread the intellectual aspect of Lenin’s beliefs.

Many don’t realize he never finished the pamphlet even though he lived 7 more years. It was supposed to have had one more chapter. Also, as noted in the preface to the second edition, written in 1918, Lenin added a new section to chapter 2.

Lenin believed The State and Revolution was his most important contribution to the political debate. He worried it wouldn’t be finished before his death and, while on the run from the government, asked a friend to make sure it was published should anything happen to him. Yet, do you know why he didn’t finish it? In a postscript to TSAR, he wrote, “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”

Preface to the First Edition

The opening paragraphs make clear Lenin understood the turmoil of World War I, following upon the problems Russia faced after the 1905 Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) made a fertile ground for a new revolution. In language similar to what we heard from certain parties during the 2016 presidential race, he did his best to stir the pot of inequality.

The imperialist war has brought about an extraordinary acceleration and intensification of the process of transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism. The monstrous oppression of the laboring masses by the state, which is fusing itself more and more closely with the omnipotent associations of the capitalists, is becoming ever more monstrous. . . The unprecedented horrors and miseries of this protracted war are making the conditions of the masses intolerable and increasing their indignation.  (pg 3)

Translate that into Bernie-speak or even Hillary-speak and doesn’t that sound familiar. Capitalism bad. Money and power are in the wrong hands. The oppressed are tired of being second-class citizens. We must rise up and take control.

And the imperialist war is nothing other than a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty [enslaving small and weak peoples, holding power for the state, etc –asg]. The struggle for the liberation of the laboring masses from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general and the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular is impossible without a struggle against opportunistic prejudices on the theme of the ‘the state’. (pg 3)

The “state” is all about the “state” and to hell with the individual. Sound familiar? As for the “laboring masses”, I can just picture Bernie making that speech. Even though this is only the preface to the work, I have to wonder what sort of world Lenin really imagined. Sure, he will write that, in a true socialist existence, the state will eventually cease to exist. But I have to wonder if he really believed that or if it was all a con. After all, he’d seen the best and the worst humanity had to offer. Was this all a big con? The irony of what he professed compared to what he wrote and what the great Soviet state turned into shouldn’t be lost on any of us.

TSAR is split into three sections. I’ll deal with each section in a single post (at least that’s the plan). Lenin’s description of the sections shows his disdain and contempt for those who didn’t view Marxism as he did. (pg 3)

• First . . . we examine the doctrine of Marx and Engels on the state, pausing to give specially detailed attention to aspects of this doctrine that have been forgotten or have been subjected to opportunist distortion. (And I will try to point out how Lenin himself fell victim to this “opportunist distortion.”)
• Then we deal with the main representative of these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the leader of the Second International which has suffered such a wretched bankruptcy in the present war. (A charge that most definitely could be leveled against the USSR, especially after Lenin’s death.)
• Finally, we sum up the main results of the experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917. (The latter of which is an interesting comment, especially considering the “revolution” was ongoing at the time Lenin wrote this. Yes, the Romanovs had been deposed and later murdered by the “revolutionaries”, but the Provisional Government maintained power until the October Revolution. The preface was written in August 1917. So the revolution had yet to see the end of its first phase.)

He closes the preface with the following:

Thus the question of the relation of the proletarian socialist revolution to the state acquires not only a practical political importance but also the importance of a most urgent current problem: how to explain to the masses what they will have to do in the very near future to liberate themselves from the yoke of capitalism. (pg 4)

As we go forward with this series, I’d like each of us to keep this last quote in mind. TSAR was written as a road map for the leaders of the Bolsheviks, to help them manipulate the masses to their side. Remember it when you listen to any politician, but especially those who talk about redistribution of wealth, of taking from one group or class in order to give to another. Look for the similarities and, when you see them, be prepared to counter with factual evidence of not only how this plan worked in the Soviet Union but also how it would impact our country.

Marx started us down this road during the “modern age” with his “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” bullshit. Lenin took that and ran with it. The reality, ignored by all too many, is that the producers of the world would become the slaves to the takers. We aren’t talking about reasonable welfare programs here. We are talking about a state of existence where the State tells you what to do, takes the results of your work and distributes it to everyone. Most humans don’t work well in that sort of existence. After a while, resistance and resentment build. If revolution doesn’t occur then resignation does. The desire to work hard and to innovate slowly atrophies and dies. Is that the kind of life you want for your children or grandchildren?

I don’t.

The best way to fight the Bernie-bots of the world or the more subtle Clintons and Obamas of the world are to recognize and understand not only what their goals are but the basis for them. Am I an expert on this topic? Hell no. But I continue to work hard to become one because it is only by understanding the historical implications and applications of their beliefs that I can help fight the current day attempts to send us down the path to socialism or worse.

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here -SAH]

 

Portugal is not a shithole.  I think I can say that impartially, since I’ve acculturated long ago, and wouldn’t go back there to live if you sent wild horses to drag me that way.

It feels profoundly uncomfortable to most Americans.  I can say that too, because I am an American, because it was built not with the dictates of the free market — I’ll sell you anything so long as you buy it — in mind, but with other dictates, including pride, appearance and a lot of other stuff.

This is why the faucets run like diuretic gerbils, the electrical boards in houses suck (and no the excuse of global warming wouldn’t wash for a minute in the US) gas and energy in general are prohibitive, and service… isn’t what you’d call wonderful.  All of which add up to profoundly uncomfortable for Americans — and yes, I know my Portuguese readers are going to say we’re spoiled, and darn tooting we are.  You ain’t whistling Dixie. And we mean to continue being spoiled — but still not a shit hole.

Not that I’m going to punch out anyone who calls it such.  I’m just going to assume they have no experience of real shitholes.

You see, you can judge a country’s status as an … ah…. excrement sinkhole by figuring out “Migration out or in?”

In Portugal this picture is complicated.  They are suffering “brain drain” as their youngest, brightest and most educated decamp for Germany, England, or even Brazil (where the picture is also complicated) but at the same time they receive immigrants from Africa, Brazil, South America, China and, weirdly, Russia (I’ve never figured out if these are descendants from people who took their crappy cars when the wall came down, and drove until they hit the ocean (or drove/walked till they hit the ocean) or whether they’re a fresh migration.  I know the first existed, but I haven’t sussed out the other particulars.)

So, Portugal is not a shithole.  What it is is a country so tied down by regulations, rules, and the ever present weight of tradition (Portugal, like many Baltic countries produces way more history than it can consume locally) that it works at cross purposes to itself.

Looking at what Portuguese (at least some) can do abroad, in terms of insane amounts of work and sometimes success, one assumes that if Portugal could eschew its perennial fascination with socialism, it would … well…. I don’t know, but it would be scary for good or ill.

I mean for a country tied up with socialism (first national, then international) for the best part of a century, it’s not doing badly at all.  Look at it this way: it hasn’t gone Venezuela.  And the gentleman in the back who just said that’s because they can’t do anything efficiently, not even socialism, is just being mean.  Yes, the Portuguese have been locked in a tragic fight throughout history with their traditional enemies, the Portuguese, but that’s no reason to look down on them.

On the serious side, and what this is leading to, what would I do if Trump said “We don’t need more immigrants from that shithole, Portugal?”

Gulp. Then get on the phone and calm dad down, because he’s 86 — and even if he’s freezing through one of the coldest winters in their history, because their electrical boards suck, being now designed to prevent global warming, and therefore unable to accommodate say a hair dryer and a washing machine running at once, much less a heater in every room — he’s very proud of his country and very patriotic and we wouldn’t want him to do himself harm by being so mad.

And then I’d shrug.  Portugal is not a shithole, true.  But there is also no reason to seek out immigrants from Portugal IN PARTICULAR.

Mind you, the US doesn’t.  The “diversity visa lottery” LOOKS FOR immigrants from failed states.  For those purposes, Portugal is lumped in with Europe, and therefore it’s almost impossible to immigrate from there, which is why the Portuguese brain drain is going to places like Germany and Great Britain.

In fact, one of my teachers who spoke five languages, and whose husband was a fully trained electrical engineer, had been on the waiting list for 10 years when I was 18, and I bet you they haven’t made it here, yet.

But you know, that’s the whole point.  I don’t think Visas should be handed out to Portuguese particularly because Portuguese are cute and colorful and produce great wine, or whatever the reasoning.

I think, if we’re going to take in immigrants, we should take them in according to their usefulness to the US.

I happen to know we have a massive shortage of engineers, for instance. So, say, if it’s determined that Portuguese engineering schools/engineers pass muster and the US decides to import a few?  That’s fair.  Same with engineers from all other countries.  Of course, it will depress younger son’s future wages, but you know, fair is fair and engineering graduates are too few by far to replace retiring engineers.

So what is my justification?  What do I do for the nation?

Ah.  I came in a different way (though at the same time I had an offer for teaching at an East Coast college while finishing my doctorate, and if I hadn’t fallen in love with Dan, I’d have come in that way for a while at least.)

But I am very conscious of gratitude to you for taking me in and letting me be one of you.  Portugal is not a shithole.  It just never fit me right, like a prickly garment that does its job, but is not quite comfortable.

I feel much better in America.  And I’m very grateful.  And I try to do what I can to justify taking me in.

So far?  I’m probably still at a deficit.  Sure, we pay taxes, and we haven’t taken public assistance, but that’s the bare minimum.  And I raised two boys who will probably be productive citizens.  And of course I write books which make at least some money/create some wealth.  And I try to fight the good fight in the culture war.

Are these remarkable achievements?  No.  They’re the bare minimum to pay my way.  I want to do more, and now that we’re dealing with some long-standing physical issues, I just might manage it.

The point of it though, is that I’m conscious of which way this relationship runs.  I owe the nation a debt, and I’ll do my best to pay it back.

It might never happen, but I will try my damnedest.

For I was a stranger, and you took me in.  And I owe you.

 

Telling the Hard Truth – by Dave Freer

Hello. My name is Dave and I came from a shit-hole.

My friend Sarah Hoyt pointed me to a self-righteous fury spewing from the South African ANC (the political party which has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid) about the idea of South Africa being a shit-hole and bad America was. I was born there, and eventually migrated to Australia, of which I am now a proud citizen, and which I love, and try my best to pay back for its enormous generosity in taking us in.  Now, South Africa is a beautiful country, with some fine people… but the ANC have presided over it now having one of the highest murder and rape stats of any country in the world not at war.  Corruption is endemic, and racial hatred – both white on black and black on white – if anything is worse than at the end of apartheid. Public Health is in a sad state, and education isn’t much to write home to mother about, principally because ‘writing’ might be challenge, and mother (adult education is a neglected disgrace) still can’t read. There are squatter camps, squalor, mud huts without toilets in the bush. Electrical grids are failing, potable water is a major problem. There are good patches of course. There are things which have improved. But it’s only not a shit-hole when compared to places like Zimbabwe. Any criticism from it is like a serial child rapist and murderer complaining about you saying ‘shut up’ to your kid.

Whether President Trump really said ‘Why are we having these people from a shit-hole come here’ or not… I would like say that I think it the most valuable statement about migration made in the last fifty years, and one that cried out to be said. What’s more I think saying it is not only refreshingly honest (because it is a common thought, but one no-one dared say it, and people need to hear it), but actually exceptionally good for both migrants and shit-hole countries. It’s a coarse, blunt statement, but it’s probably the only possible way to make the point effectively.

As I said, I am a migrant myself, and no, I don’t hate migrants.

But I do realize there is a problem that needs dealing with, if this is not to all end in tears. It is in fact VERY like alcoholism (which is why I used the opening line I did): you’re never going to solve the problem while you pretend it isn’t there.  Getting it out in the open, acknowledging the realities, both of how the people in the country migrants are wanting to go to feel about it, and of WHY the migrants move, is vital to the longer term happiness and well-being of migrants and the countries they move to.  It also is the only real chance that shit-hole countries will improve. It’s like ignoring a toddler’s tantrum in the toy aisle.  It’s not easy for a loving parent: but you’re no loving parent if you let the child have what they want. You’re just avoiding embarrassment and lots of noise – and possibly for that screwing your kid over for life.

Let us stop worrying about upsetting tender liccle feewings – which allow the situation to fester under a covering of ‘sensitivity’. Fifty years of trying that… have made matters a lot worse.

Reality: Almost no one migrates from a place to an unknown country if the place they’re in is not comparatively (at least in their minds) a shit-hole compared to the country they’re moving to. Anything else is like people pretending the alcoholic with the shakes and horrors doesn’t drink.  That doesn’t help the alcoholic or them.

The other vital point of ‘Why are we having these people from a shit-hole come here?’ that so many people getting affronted by the accurate ‘shit-hole’ part miss… is that this is first and foremost a question. WHY are we having them come here?

Let’s start with a basic premise. Your country and government’s first duty is to its own people. They, and their ancestors, for their descendants, paid – as the saying goes – in blood and treasure, for the shape the country is in now. It’s due to the people who live and lived there. I’ve heard various ridiculous arguments about wealth, security and comfort being due to almost anything else (from geography to mineral wealth to the legacy of colonial exploitation, etc.) None hold water, because there is a counter example for every one of them.  It comes down to the people and the culture of those people, which shapes that state. Sometimes it is put into form by a constitution, but that too derives from its people. The first duty any government owes – is to its own people.

So that ‘WHY’ is exactly what any country, what any citizen ought to ask.  And a good reason is not ‘because the migrant needs or wants it.’  If you’re going to include that reason at all, it has to come a long way down the list, well after ‘it will have no negative effects on my people’.

I’m going to stick my neck out here (for good reason, as I will explain) there are very few migrants from anywhere (particularly shit-holes, and remember I am speaking of myself) that are just a straight good bargain for any first world country to take, as is.  There are no jobs that Americans/Australians/Japanese just won’t do. They might not do them for the price you’re willing to pay, but that is a different matter. Working out if suppressing labor costs (and earnings) is a net good for a country as whole after the costs (in welfare, health, education and social cohesion just to name obvious ones, leaving out less obvious like ‘exporting money from the country to be spent elsewhere’) is a huge task, which depends mostly on the caliber of the migrants you let in. Here’s a clue: taking them from shit-holes has some big costs.

Taking skilled migrants… has some short term advantages. Your country gets years of training and experience for free. Whether it is really good for the doctors and nurses and the training of doctors and nurses born and bred there, is another argument, entirely.  Every country gets caught in short squeezes: but giving an easy out may be bad long term for its people.

That leaves a handful of those special, truly rare talents. Great sportsmen, mathematical geniuses… yep. They’re a win, no matter where they come from. But these are one in a million migrants. If they were all of the migrants… nobody would care or not welcome them.

Which brings me back to my statement that few migrants are just welcome, and why it is so vitally important for the migrants to hear the hard question: ‘Why are we having these people from a shit-hole come here?’ Because that does what we should always do: puts responsibility on the party who benefits. Being a migrant never can be ‘as is’ – because ‘as is’ migrants suck.

If – like me – you’re a migrant, then: ‘Why are we having these people from a shit-hole come here?’ asserts the most valuable lesson any migrant could possibly get to make that migration a happy, successful experience both for them and the country they move to. Migrants are migrating because their birth-country is, for some reason, a shit-hole to them.  They need the new country to accept them.  And that needs a two pronged approach that everyone has been too ‘sensitive’ and ‘kind’ to bluntly tell them. It’s like the alcoholic again. You’re not actually doing them any favors pretending they don’t stink and they haven’t fallen asleep in their own vomit. You can certainly help them by telling them if they give up the booze they can be a decent bloke. BUT they have to leave the booze behind and accept it was a problem.  The alcoholic that can’t do that, and the migrant that can’t do that… are never going to get any better. And just as not even the best effort in the world can do anything for an alcoholic who hasn’t decided themselves to give it up and change, not all the ‘kindness’ in the world will help a migrant who brings the shit-hole with themselves, telling themselves it is not a problem. All they’re doing is making a new shit-hole.

I still hold that migrants can add value and be welcome, no matter where they come from. But it’s a huge hill for them (not others, not their host country) to climb, a lot of blood and treasure to catch up on – and a shit-hole, and all that goes with it, to leave behind.  Anything else will end in tears.  Working hard on it, leaving your past –culture, country, language – behind, and embracing the new, will have the citizens meet you half way, help you along, and welcome you. Migrants need to know this, accept this.

Not saying this openly is not doing anyone a favor.

Dave Freer’s Amazon page is here.

So I was reading Margaret Atwood’s article.  Yes, I know. What can I say.  It’s a very specialized form of masochism.

I wrote a post about it for PJMedia, which hopefully will go live today.  It’s about one of the things that truly annoyed me about the article.  Just one.  Mostly the fact that she doesn’t see the link between her actions and present insanity.  It’s like Robespierre stopping at the top of the steps to the guillotine and going “how did things get like this?”

But that’s only a portion of it.  There is more.  I realized reading her article, as she brings up the obligatory reference to Salem and in general the plight of witches (why are feminists obsessed with witches?  I want to take each of these new age twits who think that witches were some kind of feminist heroes, and make them read about Athenais de Montespan and the affair of the poisons.  Of course they might approve.  Most of the sacrifices were babies) and other things that are as ritualistic to feminists as the rosary to Catholics, it occurred to me (not for the first time.  There is an article about it here somewhere) that the problem with current feminism is that these women have gone to battle against the wrong enemy and therefore their tactics and their justifications keep spinning out more and more insane each time: because there is no way to win the battle they set themselves, since it was won before they started off and by means they don’t understand; and because they don’t understand how the battle was won, they keep fearing to lose again.

You see, Margaret brings up again the whine about how women couldn’t own property/weren’t considered fully adults, etc.  She also, of course, says that American courts discount accusations of sexual abuse/rape, and that American corporations ignore female complaints of misbehavior by males.

I’m not sure where she’s getting the thing about how courts and corporations behave, but then a person who could think of New England in current day as a theocratic state needs her head examined, because most of her ideas are coming from a highly improbable parallel world, and she doesn’t even realize it.

Sure, of course, Hollywood and publishing might ignore female complaints (and male too, look you) but that’s because they’re oligopolies, with those in power being able to do pretty much anything to their subordinates.  They resemble nothing so much as Ancient Rome.  Most sane businesses who do you know, real stuff, and aren’t bottlenecks dealing with artists and other obsessives aren’t like that.

But yeah, sure, there was a time (a very long time) when women were treated as something not quite as human as males.  I know why too, because unlike the feminists I know more of history than the cant about “couldn’t own property.  Were property.  Ahhhh, so scary.”

It’s a good idea when looking at historical oppressed groups, particularly those like women, to realize that a) well, the oppression might not have been oppression in the opinion of anyone living at that time b) there must have been a reason for such treatment that was deeper than “all men are villains and want to enslave all women” since patently most men aren’t villains, and most women are their mothers/sisters/daughters, and only a very few men hate all of those.

The reason… is survival.

Life for most men and women, even upper class ones, up to about a hundred years ago sucked rotten goat tit.

Everyone died young.  Okay, fine, if you were very wealthy and had damn good genes, you might live to your sixties or seventies, or, improbably, eighties.  (I saw my first eighty year old at 14, and he was what we’d now associate with 100.  And he was wealthy and from a long lived family.  My parents are now older than he was, but they look more like seventies then.)  Let’s not forget, ladies and germs that Shakespeare was “very old” at fifty eight which is staring me in the face, and which I have hopes (perhaps foolish) of exceeding and working past for twenty years at least.

But the child mortality was the most shockingly different thing from our own society.  It wasn’t even unusual to birth ten children and rear one or or two.  High class women in the regency (think the character in Pride and Prejudice) made two infant shrouds as part of their trousseau, because that was the minimum of children they could expect to bury early on, before they had the time to make more. Children or shrouds, now I think about it.

The risks were different for women and men, of course.  For men most of the risk was working outside or in dangerous jobs (then as now, statistically, most females did indoor, safe, boring work (though often backbreaking) and most men did outside, strength intensive, dangerous work.  For the upper classes this often involved going to war.)  For women it was pregnancy and child birth.  Even in our days there are so many ways either of those can go seriously wrong and hurt a woman.  And in those days, they couldn’t cope with or even diagnose “seriously wrong.”

So…. Think through the implications of this, okay?  Most women spent most of their lives pregnant and died young.

The myth of women not working or not being able to work outside the home is just that.  I have no idea why the feminists concentrate on a small sliver of the population during a narrow band of time (the Victorian age) except that they’re starting to imitate so many of the Victorian women (fictional) quirks (I need a safe room.  That man leered at me.  I am scared for life.  Give me my smelling salts!) that I think like women reading regency romances, they always imagine themselves as upper class ladies. (Go figure.)

Most women, even middle class women, worked.  For the middle class managing a house was at least as important as going out and earning money for such house.  Men looked for skilled housekeepers, because otherwise their wealth would be squandered.  And often — in my own family’s case — women helped with the business and the business management.

Lower class women often took work they could do in the house, and piecemeal.  You know, low paid, repetitive, but safe.

This was not because men didn’t want competition from women stevedores or stone masons.  (There were always some, though often they pretended to be men to avoid trouble.  Also they were the very extreme of body types for females, obviously.)  It was because they were PROTECTING and LOOKING AFTER women, trying to keep them SAFE.  Not because they looked down on women, or thought women were “lesser” but because women could do a very important thing that men STILL can’t do (and won’t be able to barring some truly strange science advances): give birth.

Because giving birth was such a high-risk enterprise, and because so many of the products of that enterprise died before pay back of the ah labor involved in bringing them to the world, it was THE most important work of society.  Those members able to do it had to be kept in such a situation that it allowed them to maximize that one thing they could do.

As for “the property of their husbands, etc, etc, blah blah blah” work was so brutal and hard, and providing for a family so difficult, that yes, a man wanted to make sure the children he supported were his own.

Also, because of very early (many women married before even 18) death in childbirth, etc, most women skewed younger than men as a population, which would encourage a certain degree of paternalism.  On top of that, hate to tell you, but women while hormonal are often not fully rational.  We can sort of compensate for it, but one of the pregnancy hormones is SUPPOSED to make you fat, dumb and happy.

I don’t know if most women need a minder while pregnant, but from both personal experience and watching friends go through it, I imagine many women do.

It is therefore only natural that in a society where most women are pregnant most of the time, men would view it was their duty to look after the puir confused things.

When feminists assume that back in a time with no contraceptive, high child mortality and an horrendous death toll of pregnancy, women should have been recognized as the equals of men, and that men were being evil villains for not doing that, they are demonstrating an astonishingly blind and ideological view of history.

In fact, even back in the middle ages and before SOME women were considered the intellectual equals of men.  (And sometimes the military equals.)  There are very few of them, again, not because The Man was keeping them down, but because the women attracted to intellectual or military pursuits are (like men) a minority and on top of that they tended to be either unmarried, childless, or the percentage of women not much affected by pregnancy.  I.e. a minority of minorities.

Women started making advances in what was considered, traditionally, male realms, like science or scholarship, (the others…. well…. there is a problem with upper body strength.  Sure.  Some women.  Again a minority of a minority) or being able to vote when two twin advances occurred: the first was the curbing of infant mortality.  When it became obvious (after a generation or so) that most of your babies would survive, it was possible for women to spend only a tiny minority of their lives pregnant.

The second was contraception that was cheap, easily available, and safe.  Yeah, okay, I have certain issues with the pill, because the medical issues of using it long term are only now showing up in the population at large.  That’s fine.

It remains that even the early “horse-dose” pill was safer than anything else anyone else had ever come up with for women to avoid getting pregnant all the time.

I allow and am amused by the handwavium of “some herbs” in fantasy novels, but most herbs were not contraceptives, but abortificients with the associated risks.  There was a berry that worked much like the pill, but it went extinct in Roman times.  (eh.)

Not having to spend the majority of their lives pregnant and not dying in disproportionate numbers in child birth gave women “equality” to the extent it can be had in this fallen world.

Because many reflexes remain from the aeons when women were so important they must be protected, in many ways it gave women the upper hand, particularly in social situations.

Which brings us to where we are now.

The “feminists” blind certainty that men oppressed women historically for no reason and “just evil I guess” is partly derived from idiot Marx who thought various parts of society were at odds for “no reason, except evil.”  But part of it is caused by both pig blindness and pride.  The pig blindness comes from ignoring historical fact.  The pride is in imagining themselves as virtuous victims, because their ancestresses were oppressed, and also in being sure that their present equality (to the extent they recognize they have it) comes from their virtuous “struggle” and shoulder to shoulder clamoring.

Because virtue feels so good, they refuse to admit the battle is largely won.  And because they think men oppressed women because “evil I guess” they are ever vigilant against a vast conspiracy of men turning around and dragging them back to the bad old times.  (Stupid I gu– No, wait, willfully stupid, for sure.)  Which leads them into misandry and revenge games.

That this more than anything might bring about a reversal (not likely since physical conditions have changed) as women are judged too petty and infantile to trust with serious business, never occurs to them.

They continue attacking the windmill, unaware of how it looks to sane people, or how society at large might need those windmills to survive.

And, as with most crazy of the left, those of us who are rational and female, are being dragged down along with them.

All because of blindness and pride.  If it weren’t likely to involve me and my female descendants, it would be funny.  As is, it’s more of a tragedy.

 

 

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: helpless

Today I went into the bowels of the blog comments, to find a comment a friend said she had left, but which did not show as a comment.

Apparently WordPress has decided, randomly, to just start protecting me from comments by some of you by trashing them directly, putting you in the same bin as the troll that shall not be named.

Some old denizens of hundom like Mary Catteli, or TXR get put there randomly for a few comments, some which are something like “yeah, exactly.”

The ways of the wordpress are so inscrutable that I BET you we could make it into a devination instrument.  You know, like tea leaves.  “If the comment spammed by wordpress are about kittens, there is a chance a tall stranger from over the sea will arrive bringing money.”  Eh.  WordPressmancy.  It’s an idea.

But in the bowels of the blog there are in fact a bunch of comments by what appear to be robots.  This is the type of comment that’s left so that they can leave a link to something.  Perhaps they’re only fascinating as an example of mechanical translation, but they are certainly an endorsement of the idea that mechanical translation alone will never work.  I imagine the reason people in Star Trek got in so much trouble is that they went around saying things like “Thank you for auspicious posting of information sharing.”

Take this post, for example:

Thanks a lot for sharing this with all people you actually recognize what you are speaking approximately! Bookmarked. Kindly also visit my site =). We can have a link exchange contract among us!

As all of you know it is a goal with me to share my posts with people who KNOW I’m speaking APPROXIMATELY.  I’m not sure how one speaks approximately, but I approximate like nobody’s business. :D

Or this one, left, on, of all possible posts, the one that is entitled “I Am Alive” and which explains why there was no blog post earlier:

There are undoubtedly a good deal of particulars like that to take into consideration. That is a fantastic point to bring up. I provide the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most vital thing will likely be working in honest great faith. I don?t know if finest practices have emerged about things like that, but I’m positive that your job is clearly identified as a fair game. Both boys and girls feel the impact of just a moment’s pleasure, for the rest of their lives.

the only question I brought up was whether I was still alive.  I’m obviously working in honest grate faith.  As for finest practices and my job being identified as a fair game, it’s full of idiocy.  As the master (RAH) said “Surely the game is rigged, but don’t let that discourage you.  If you don’t bet, you can’t win.”

On the fill in post by Havelock:

Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It in fact
was a amusement account it. Look advanced to more added agreeable from you!
However, how could we communicate?

I don’t know, buster.  Can you meow?  I warn you, this cat aspirates his meows.  He’s high class.  (And not I’m not joking, he aspirates his meows.  Which should NOT be possible.

This on the post announcing I can’t write because I have the flu:

whoah this blog is magnificent i love studying your posts. Keep up the good paintings! You understand, many individuals are hunting around for this information, you can help them greatly.

So…. individuals are hunting for information that I convey through paintings to help them greatly?  Dude, there’s an entire story in that.

Anyway, I’ve now rescued my friend’s comment, and as you can tell got completely derailed for the day.  Also, wordpress is as silly as ever.  If you notice a comment disappearing, please tell me, as it’s clearly more unaccountable than normal

Meanwhile wordpressmancy predicts a day of heavy coffee and decongestants, with a high probability of three non fic articles and hopefully an incidence of fiction.

November 7, 2016, in the wee hours of the morning with apologies to the late Terry Pratchett:

“The first interesting thing about angels, [Mr. Trump], is that sometimes, very rarely, at a point in a man’s career where he has made such a foul and tangled mess of his life that death appears to be the only sensible option, an angel appears to him, or, 1 should say, unto him, and offers him a chance to go back to the moment when it all went wrong, and this time do it right. Mr. Lipwig, I should like you to think of me as … an angel.”- all Terry Pratchett in Going Postal, save for the insertion.

Come on, tell me you haven’t thought of it.  The conman who gets one last chance.  The man who takes a dying institution and tries to turn it around (I think in this analogy Paul Ryan is Stanley.  I wonder who puts sulfur in his socks?)  The man who gets told it’s impossible and takes it one step higher. And the golden…. erm…. hat.

We were right to distrust him.  Everything in his past would lead us to distrust him.  Hell, I still distrust him, and every time he pulls his grand show man routine, I hold my breath, and I think “Is this the time he reverts to his roots?”

So, far… so far he hasn’t. But you know that’s the danger, right, that he’ll go back to his ways.  And it’s hair-raising never to be sure what part of this is Trump, and what part is showmanship.

And every time he’s told something is impossible he compulsively raises the stakes.  “I will ride to Genoa before a clacks gets there.”

EVERY time.

Are we to the “post office gets burned to the ground” o’clock, yet?  At what point does he get his temptation?  Is it now?  Will he succumb?

Did he get an angel just before the election?  And in this case I can’t even imagine who the angel would be.  (No, Putin doesn’t actually want the US to be more prosperous or stronger, guys.  Get a grip. That’s a lie so stupid only intellectuals would believe it.)  Perhaps his own inner self, someone he’d almost forgotten.  Did it say “I have a job for you.”

And will he remember that job?

It is only because I know the secret service aren’t likely to be Pratchett fans that I’m not sending him a gift basket of pineapples.

 

Intro to State And Revolution – by Amanda S. Green

After a couple of months reviewing HRC’s book, What Happened, I needed a break. I’d promised Sarah I’d continue posting on Thursdays for her (I’m a fan of her fiction and will do just about anything to give her a little extra time to feed my reading habit). But that left me with the question of what to blog about next. I’d initially considered doing Donna Brazile’s book but, to be honest, I simply couldn’t look at another book related to the 2016 election. So that leaves out the latest book blasting Trump and his administration. So, what to do? What to do?

It turned out the question wasn’t all that difficult to answer. It also turned on the 2016 election cycle, not to mention some of our current headlines. I’ll be honest. I’m not sure the results of the election would have been the same if the fix hadn’t been in. If Bernie Sanders had been the candidate or if Clinton had been smart enough to share a ticket with him against Trump, we might have seen a very different result and that scares the crap out of me. Why? Because all those who fall to their knees at Sanders’ feet don’t understand the reality of what he’s preaching. They don’t understand that socialism doesn’t work. They fail to recognize it quickly becomes a society of more equal among equals.

And that, my friends, is what set me down the path of the next few posts.

No, I’m not reviewing the new book today. Instead, I want to explain why I’ve chosen a book I doubt few of you would have guessed would be in the running. That book is State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin. Yes, that Lenin. I first read it in the original Russian years ago. My Russian’s not that good any longer, so I spent time finding an older translation that hasn’t been updated to reflect modern “sensibilities”. I chose it so that the words of one of the founders of modern socialism and communism can be considered and discussed.

But those words need to be put into context. Russia in 1917 was rife for revolution. Tsar Nicholas II was anything but a strong, much less wise, leader. His wife, Alexandra, would do anything to save their son who suffered from hemophilia. The family fell under the sway of the “Mad Monk” Rasputin. At the same time, the country was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket and had been for some time. That is all historical fact and I won’t bore you with all the nitty gritty detail.

Where our understanding of Russia and Soviet communism and socialism fail is in how it manifested over the years and the kind of force that was required to keep it alive. No one disputes the fact that Josef Stalin was a tyrant. Yet, to listen to many, you would think the Soviet Union was a social and economic paradise. There are claims of no unemployment. The state provided medical coverage to one and all. You got your education. It was wonderful.

This is the portrait of Soviet society so many of our young people have swallowed. It is the basic portrait of a society that we could have here according to Bernie and his followers.

And it scares me to death.

A friend of mine was born in the Soviet Union. She spent much of her formative years there before her parents managed to escape. A man I respected more than most anyone and who I would trust with the lives of my loved ones spent much of World War II posing as a Muscovite peasant – without the Soviets knowing. I’ve been behind the Iron Curtain and talked with men and women who had to watch as their countries were turned over to Stalin and his friends as part of the Pottsdam Conference.

Much of what happened is on us and on Great Britain. Our leaders sat down with Stalin and drew a line on the map, giving him what we called Eastern Europe – and East Germany. It didn’t matter what the people living in countries like Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and others wanted. We gave Uncle Josef what he wanted. Whether as a means of thanking him for taking our side against Hitler or to appease him and protect our Western European allies, it doesn’t matter. It is up to us to learn from what happened to those countries and their citizens after 1945 and learn from it.

No matter what anyone tries to say, those countries weren’t willing partners in the Soviet bloc. When Hungary rebelled in 1956, the USSR acted swiftly and decisively. By the time the revolution was quashed on November 10, 1956, more than 2,500 Hungarians had been killed and more than 200,000 had fled. The new government, the Soviet backed government, made sure there would be no other such rebellions.

Czechoslovakia waited until 1968 to try to fight for its freedom. They failed. Overnight, troops from the Warsaw Pact (USSR, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany) rolled in. 137 Czechs were killed. More than 500 were wounded and the Soviet Union once more tightened its noose around the country’s neck.

Think about that. Think about having the boot of Communism bearing down on your neck, cutting off your pride, your freedom, your sense of individuality.

Let’s look at some of the misconceptions about life under Soviet communism/socialism. No unemployment. Pardon me while I call bullshit. What that meant was they had people sitting in chairs in museums sleeping. Or walking up and down the trolley lines with a stick. Sometimes those stooped old men and women might dig some dirt out of the tracks but mainly they trudged back and forth, a glassy look to their eyes. You had a job, but that didn’t mean you were “employed”. It just meant you were out of the house – maybe. And since all you had to do was show up and get paid, the USSR wasn’t producing much, so where did the money come from to pay all those “workers?” Well, sometimes they didn’t’ get paid at all, but salaries and resources were largely appropriated (read: stolen) from those considered “rich” who weren’t part of the “more equal among equals”.

Alcohol abuse ran rampant. Hell, you could buy vodka out of machines on the sidewalk, just as you could water. There is a problem when a country has the level of alcoholism the USSR did. The people used liquor to escape their miserable lives, and when they couldn’t buy vodka, they used whatever drugs they could get their hands on to forget where they were and how awful their existences were. By the time glasnost came about under Gorbachev, the USSR had one of the highest substance abuse rates in the world.

Medical care there was archaic compared to what we had here. The hospital I visited while there was one of the country’s best. Yet it reminded me of what our hospitals looked like 50 years earlier. Use of anesthesia for many surgeries was unheard of. My friend had both adenoids and tonsils removed as a child while she was awake and fully conscious. Think about that and tell me socialized medicine is something you really want.

But it didn’t stop there. Sanitization was a myth. I watched doctors and nurses performing procedures like changing dressings without gloving up. Heck, they didn’t even wash their hands after entering the room, touching the door, shaking hands, etc. I prayed I didn’t get sick while there because I did not want to risk Soviet medicine.

Of course, as with many nations with socialized medicine, there was another level, a higher level of treatment, available if you were high enough in the Party or had enough money (which meant being high enough in the Party). That medical care included things like anesthesia, better facilities, drugs appropriate to your symptoms and not having to wait until you risked death for treatment. It was another instance of being the more equal among equals.

Your quality of life in the Soviet Union, especially if you lived in the city, depended on your role in the Party. And, yes, Party membership was pretty much mandatory. But there was a Catch-22. Even though party membership was basically mandatory, it wasn’t automatic. If you were considered too bourgeois, or if your family had a history of being trouble for the Party, membership could and would be denied. That meant finding a job could be next to impossible. Want better housing? Forget about it. The Party had you by the short ones and there was little, if anything, you could do about it.

But even if you were “lucky” enough to be a member of the Party, that didn’t mean life was much easier. If you weren’t high enough in the Party, you got to join all your neighbors standing in line for bread or other things we take for granted. You couldn’t practice the religion of your choice. The only recognized religion was devotion to the State. Everything you owned was the State’s. Protests weren’t tolerated, and it wasn’t unusual for people to disappear from their homes at night, never to be heard from again.

This is the sort of world the Left wants us to move toward. Oh, they try to make it sound enticing by talking about all the “equality” and “freedom” we’d have. After all, who wouldn’t like to be worry-free when it comes to medical care, etc.? But reality is often very different from theory and that is especially true when it comes to socialism and communism. Why? Because people are people. Some of us have ambitions and want to do our best. Others want power and will do anything to gain it. Others are spiritual and want to be able to believe what they want and worship when and where they want without government interference. All of which means true socialism can never exist.

So, starting next week, I’ll do a couple of posts on Lenin’s State and Revolution. I have no doubt, I’ll be comparing what he wrote with what Bernie and his followers preach.

Until later.

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  Send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here -SAH]

There is something that all writers are cautioned against (if they are lucky) is “drinking your own ink”, that is start to believe your own fantasies.

Look, when your stock in trade is making up lies so convincing that people will suspend disbelief at least for the extent of a novel, you’re going to be good at telling yourself lies, too.

I’m probably less at risk than most writers, just given the nature of what I write.  If I suddenly start believing that Darkship Thieves is prophecy, it doesn’t really affect my day to day life.  It might drive my family nuts (insert question of how we could tell) but beyond that, it’s no big deal, right?

And if I really believed the Musketeers investigated mysteries, how would you even know, unless of course, like Dan brown proclaiming the “truth” of his “history” I gave interviews to every cat dog and pony show?

For the record I don’t believe either of those, mostly because I’m aware of the danger of drinking your own ink.

But the problem is that normal people don’t get that warning.  Theirs is not to tell compelling lies, so compelling that they might be believed.  And when they hear something a lot, particularly from respected institutions and channels, they don’t always realize it’s fantasy.  And they don’t always ask the questions I always ask “Uh?  Why?  And what sense does that make?”

Which brings us to the fact that right now, not just in this country, but world wide, some portion of the population (impossible to know how many, given that the media kind of amplifies their voices) is drinking the ink of their own fantasies and spinning further and further from reality.

Which brings us to the derp of the day.  You thought that women accusing gay men of misogyny because they won’t sleep with women was crazy?  Ah.  There’s someone who wants you to hold their beer and watch this.

So, if you don’t want to follow the link, this is the gist of it:

From BET:

Singer Ginuwine has sparked a heated debate on Twitter after a recent episode of Celebrity Big Brother UK. In the latest episode, Ginuwine seemingly rejected fellow housemate India Willoughby.

The controversy stems from a conversation between Willoughby and the “Pony” singer, in which she asked whether he would date a trans woman. “You would date me, yeah,” Willoughby, who is a trans woman herself, asked. “Not if you were trans,” Ginuwine replied. After Ginuwine replied that he would not date a trans woman, Willoughby attempted to plant a kiss on the singer. When her advance was rejected, Willoughby stormed off.

Let’s leave aside the fact that someone tried to “plant a kiss” on someone who didn’t want it, which less I checked is sexual assault.  And that this then went public and incited hatred against the victim of sexual assault, which, last I checked, is sexual harassment.

Let’s talk sexual orientation. I don’t want a fight against this in the comments, and will shut it down if it starts, so let’s just establish that right now we down’t know what “causes” sexual orientation.

I don’t suppose it’s a simple matter of choice (though it might be, for some people) because homosexuality existed throughout the ages, even in places where it was forbidden, and it exists in fact, in all species where sexes are not radically visually different (No, I mean like peacocks and peahens, for instance.)

It used to be believed to be a matter of raising, now it’s believed to be genetic.  I believe like most persistent, complex traits we share with a bunch of the animal kingdom “it’s not that simple.”

But the left is full on, invested, all in on “it’s just genetic, it’s always genetic.”

And yet….

And yet, in one of those stunning contradictions only the left is capable of, they just believe there are no innate differences between the sexes, just different “social constructs” on how the sexes — oh, pardon me, genders — behave.  That is, your “gender” is what you learned to be, and there are up to — what was it? — 50 of them?

What this does in effect is deny sexual orientation.  I mean, you can’t say you’re gay — or straight — if there is no real difference between the sexes, except behavior which is learned.  No, not even genitalia, because as we’ve learned over the past several years, it’s what you feel “inside” that counts.  So, even if you still have the genitalia of one sex, you can dress as the other, do cosmetic stuff, and claim to be the other sex.

I UNDERSTAND body dysmorphism, and I always assume those who have surgery should be called by their new “sex” and treated as such.  No, it’s not right, and there are limitations to it, mostly because our sex change operations aren’t.  They’re more like sex-pretend operations, cosmetics and hand wavium.  And of course there are limitations, like in sports, otherwise “transwomen” will sweep all the women’s sports, because one of the differences that “don’t exist” between the sexes is that men are stronger and faster.  (And women endure pain better.  But there’s no sport for that.)

However over the last few years we’ve been told people are what they say they are — and dress as — so that we have people who are “gender fluid” and their gender varies depending on what they choose to wear that morning.  I would call that “clothing obsessed” but whatever.

Now, if you drink that ink, and put yourself in that reality, straight men should be attracted to anything in female clothing, right?  And gay men…. oh, man, they must be having such a hard time, now that women wear pantsuits too…   It’s okay, sweeties, you really don’t have to be attracted to Hillary.

If you’re inside that logic and drinking the ink till you’re poisoned, then yep, Ginuwine is transphobic, because he’s attracted to women, so he should be attracted to anything wearing women clothing.

But you say, how do we know that the transwoman hasn’t gone the whole way and had the operation?

Remember the thing I said above?  Right now all we can do are cosmetics.  And the perfection of the cosmetics varies, for that matter.  For instance, one of the ways to construct a vagina is with tissue from the colon, which brings with it issues of smell and others.

Also, there are a million ways of things not being “quite right.”  Even if the physical stuff is done flawlessly and everything looks right, there’s a ton of ways you’ll ring the wrong bell with the other sex. Including the fact that someone who grew up as a member of the other sex, with mannerisms and ways of moving, might not ring quite right to the back brain.  And back brain is where sexual attraction resides.  You really can’t argue with that part of the brain.  It is what it is.

There are mannish women, and men that acquired mannerisms from their mothers, who are straight and have a heck of a time attracting mates, because they have the hook baited wrong for the kind of fishing they’re doing.

Then there is the fact that someone might exclude all trans from the dating pool, not because they’re bothered, precisely, but because they don’t want to have to explain to family and friends, over and over again.  It’s a valid thing.  If you’re going to choose your life with someone, you’re allowed to choose the “least strife” route, particularly if your life is complex enough as is.

Or it could be a man wants biological children with his potential wife, something transwomen can’t provide.  This too is valid.

In the end, what people are attracted to is their own business.  You can’t really say if you’re not attracted to something you’re “phobic.”  I have yet to manage to see breasts as anything but bags of fat on the chest, or to think of vaginas with any kind of interest.  And yet, you know, I manage not to run screaming when I see myself in the mirror, and to take care of basic hygiene tasks without recoiling.  I’m not afraid of vaginas.  I just don’t want to sleep with people who have one.  (Well, I don’t want to sleep with anyone but my husband, but supposing I did.)  And if the person who has a vagina can grow a beard, this doesn’t make it anymore attractive.

Maybe it does for some people.  Maybe it’s all about the secondary characteristics.  There are even people who fall in love with a certain type of mind, and forget the wrapping.

But for the vast majority of people, sexual attraction is something very specific and in a very narrow band.  I’m not even attracted to everyone who has a penis.  Not even to everyone who has a penis in the right age group.  Not even everyone who has a penis and is a geek in the right age group.

If you now start demanding I also be attracted to transmen, or be shamed and reviled, you are out of your frigging mind and have been drinking your own ink too long.

If you claim there is absolutely no difference between the sexes, and we can all take on random characteristics of either sex or none, and then demand that everyone put up with us sexually assaulting them, or worse, show enthusiasm for it, you might be straight up insane.

And just because the insane are running the asylum, it doesn’t make them sane.

Sanity is that which accords mostly closely with and works best in reality.

And this ain’t it.

 

*Sorry, but I’m just coming up — I hope — from bronchitis, and I’m so far behind work it’s not even funny.  Also, this post has a lot of food for thought and it’s something I often struggle to explain to people- SAH*

Betraying A Little – A Blast From The Past From June 2011

This post will seem to be about translation. It’s not. This is a metaphor. The post is a continuation of yesterday’s on writing minority view points: who should do it, how it should be done, and why the establishment gets it wrong, of course. (Also on whether there is some special virtue in doing it. And on who wants to read this.)

The discussion here and at Mad Genius Club yesterday reminded me of when I was sixteen and embarked on a class called “Techniques of Translation.”

Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.

I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and – most of all – professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:

There is no such thing as translation.

The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” – or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.

The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will – of course – live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” – except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” – but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.

So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.

Okay – now, what does that have to do with yesterday’s topic?

I am, as I tried to point out, a woman who grew up in a different culture. I am American – please don’t dispute it – because one of the wonders about America is that it doesn’t matter where you came from, you can be one of us. However, my past is Portuguese.

Portugal is one of those odd countries, about which most people know nothing while thinking they know a lot. Nine out of ten people think it’s in South America. Heck, a Yale liberal arts graduate once ARGUED with me about this. An international operator once informed me that it was a city in Spain.

People tell me we have ancient wisdom; that we’re standard white westerners; that we’re Hispanic (closer, at least when it comes to our experience in America because most of us ON SIGHT look Hispanic); that we’re passionate and hot blooded; that we’re (at least women) repressed and obedient, and a lot of other things I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know because it’s impossible for me to know, because a) everyone seems to have a different stereotype of what “Portuguese” means and b) because people assume I am this, without telling me.

Portugal is, in fact, obscure enough to be used for “hot strange minority” in comedies or “exotic place” in TV dramas. The way it’s used (a “swinger” couple in Friends, really?) usually makes me laugh my head off.

So right now, those of you who think that literature needs more minority view points or whatever are going “but, that’s exactly what we mean. Why don’t you write your amazingly different culture and enlighten us?” Oh, you’re so lucky you’re faraway enough I can’t hit you with a dictionary.

I’ve been taken to task on this blog before for not writing “about Portugal’s 900 years of history” instead of stuff set in Tudor England. (Portugal is very proud of 900 years of history, which reminds me of Heinlein’s dictum on people who are proud of their ancestry. Never mind.)

So, Chilluns, gather around and let me tell you a story. Imagine a Sarah newly deplaned from Portugal. I knew next to nothing about the US. I’d come here to do my 12^th grade, so I sort of kind of knew what it was like to be a senior in high school. Sort of and kind of, because of course exchange students are a species apart. Even that was four years in the past, as I left after my exchange student year, went back, finished my degree, then married the nice boy who’d lived down the road from me in Ohio, thereby managing the feat of marrying the boy next door across the ocean, which is par for the course for my weirdness.

I wanted to write, of course. I particularly wanted to write because for the first time in my life I was living with someone – my husband – who not only didn’t disapprove of it, but encouraged it. On novelty alone, I wanted to write.

The problem is you can’t always write aliens. You can’t always write fairies. And I didn’t feel qualified to write Americans. And there’s only so many people without a past you can write. (I was hit over the head, I swear. I remember nothing but two minutes in the past.)

I decided to do the sensible thing and write stories set in Portugal and/or with Portuguese characters. It did not go WELL.

The BEST response I got (it was personal!) was a rejection informing me I was a narrowminded pain, who clearly had never been outside the US (this, btw, for a story I didn’t think was in ANY WAY critical of Portugal. Yeah, there are things that drive me nuts about the place, but I also love many of those things. Kind of like you’ll love the way your kid always looks scruffy. I thought that was clear in the story. The thing this person objected to? The fact that no one refrigerated anything and the fact that TO THEM the place sounded icky.)

It was that rejection that opened my eyes. I realized I was up against the “betraying a little” dilemma again. It wasn’t going to be as easy as writing WELL about Portugal. If I wanted to write about Portugal, I had to choose my lies carefully, but I was going to HAVE to lie. Or write non-fiction, dry as dust and twice as boring.

That is, to write about Portugal, I had to know enough about the US to know at least what was LIKELY to be in the editor’s head when the word Portugal was said. I had to know what they expected. This wasn’t as easy as say your picture of Australia (Crocs and big knives) because Portugal is not that well (mis)known. More importantly, I needed to know what people wanted to get out of reading about Portugal. Did they want to experience the exotic, in which case I should emphasize that? Did they want a sense of history, in which case I should push that? Or did they want the feeling that they were enlightened and kind for reading about this small, barely second world country, in which case I should emphasize the victimhood and struggle? What did they want?

It was a hopeless case. I realized I couldn’t cram the whole organic culture as I’d known it in there. I couldn’t even put in the warts (because Portugal is a small country, even if I come from there, if I put in the warts, publishers will perceive it as bullying and myself as a “narrow minded pain.”) Worse, I didn’t know what they thought were warts (what? Really? Lack of refrigeration? Mankind lived for millennia without it, you know?)

Worse, at best anything I wrote about Portugal to be halfway accurate would need to be between whatever Americans could accept (exotic, Latin, etc.) and the truth and I didn’t know America enough to get there. It was like trying to translate when all you know is classroom language on one side. You can’t do it.

So I gave up on that and wrote historical (mostly Rome and England because there the stereotypes I had weren’t that far off) and eventually became comfortable enough to write American characters.

I think at this point I could write Portuguese set/Portuguese characters. I’m accultured enough to reach Americans I THINK.

The problem is, I don’t really want to. We come up against those moral and ethical dilemmas again and it makes writing SUCH a pain.

First, we come up on the reason I moved here at all: I always felt like a stranger in a strange land. Part of this was me. Part of it, though, is that my family – I’m reminded of this every time I go back – is odd. Oh, not in any bad way, but I continuously meet other Portuguese who assume they know how… my family interacts; what I was taught at home; what we ate; what we believed. They’re wrong on almost every count. And the weird thing is they’d be right for ALMOST every Portuguese of my class, age, and upbringing at least as far as I can tell. I’ve come to the conclusion my family (and to an extent the village I grew up in) is just a bunch of outliers. Which explains why going to friends’ houses for vacation was like being an exchange student. No, I don’t know why or how this happened, but I know if I portray “real Portuguese” it will feel profoundly weird to me.

Second: Most Portuguese in the US – for the few people who actually KNOW Portuguese people – come from the Islands (Azores and Madeira) which makes them about as much like me (from the North of the continent) as a native of NYC is like a native of the deep south. No. Less so. In the states, you’re more likely to have had schooling rituals (prom/homecoming, etc) and chain stores in common.

Third: I have been away from Portugal for twenty five years, save for brief visits. In that time everything has changed, perhaps more so than in most places, due to integration into EEC, huge immigration from Eastern Europe, etc. I SIMPLY don’t know how things work now. Even the schooling system seems to have been reinvented from the ground up. There are a LOT of private universities, for instance, while in my day there were two and they weren’t taken seriously. There are also more grades and arranged differently. People’s shopping has rearranged with the introduction of supermarkets and not always in ways I understand. And NONE of it makes sense to me. For instance, my parents’ house was near a train stop. Not a station. Usually not listed in anything, just a place on the line where the train stopped. You could get in and get your ticket onboard from the conductor. Over the last twenty five years, the “stop” has acquired shelters, clocks and announcements. Also graffiti and loiterers. Okay fine. But this time, when I went back, I found out you now have automated machines where… you get a ticket to get a ticket on the train. Yes, that’s right. You buy a ticket from the machine, which allows you to buy a ticket on the train. Why? I don’t know. My mother couldn’t explain it, and the stuff on the machine made no sense. Even HOW to do it made no sense. My parents have started using the bus, which is more uncomfortable and takes longer, simply because they don’t get HOW to do it. I’m sure there’s a reason for this double-blind ticket purchase other than the Portuguese love for bureaucracy. Or maybe there isn’t. BUT I don’t know. And that’s a minor example.

I realized I knew nothing of Portugal when my husband, my kids and I found ourselves in a sizeable village at lunch time, starving, and I couldn’t figure out WHERE to buy food. (In villages it’s not necessarily marked, and besides you can buy food at any of the following: grocery stores; restaurants; taverns; coffee shops; improvised for-the-season cafes. Or all of those might NOT serve food. The ones I found I couldn’t determine if they did, and had no idea how to ask.)

I know you don’t believe that last, and that’s an example of why it’s hard for me to write about Portugal – because I don’t know what’s in your head and now half the time I don’t know what’s in Portugal, either.

So, to pull it all back – insistence that minorities only must be allowed to write minorities MIGHT seem like it makes sense. Kind of like translating “I got my son’s pen” makes sense. They know how their culture/lifestyle works, so of course they’d write it better.

But it’s NOT like writing it. It’s not an account. Because novels are – at least supposed to be – entertaining, it’s more like translating. What you write must not only be accurate. It must sound accurate to the reader. The two are antithetical. So at best it’s a compromise and a small betrayal.

Are minorities/foreigners/etc. capable of doing this? Of course. As I said, I think at this point I am at least for short stories (not sure about trying a novel.) But can they do it better than a non-native/non minority who studies it really well and writes about it?

Well… yes. No. Maybe. It depends on the individual writing and how willing they are to take out their own experiences, unpack them, and then betray them a little to match what’s in the reader’s head, so they can make sense of it all.

Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from the US – great regional variation, for instance (coming from the fact that it’s only in the last twenty years that they’ve started defeating tribalism, and that not well. Not real tribes, but the different regions ARE different ethnicities.) Also no one has written a “Daily Life In Portugal” – though there is a “Daily Life in Medieval Portugal” which I haven’t read, though I’ve bought it. Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from Portugal, too. I had trouble finding a good, comprehensive history when I visited. And because their distribution of books is insane (the concept of back list was alien when I was growing up at least) and there’s no amazon.pt, it’s very difficult to get history (or other) books on specific narrow topics. You might go to the story looking for an history of Roman Portugal, but what’s on the shelves right then is an history of Port Wine; an history of Celtic Portugal; and an history of shoe laces.

However, I think I’d at least consider reading the book if someone were dedicated enough to wade in and read all the books (many of them in Portuguese) you can read to get the complete-enough picture to write about Portugal and did it without either condescension or too much clean up (Portugal… well, dears, let’s just say when I was growing up there we considered Italians and Greeks organized. And Ireland has almost Germanic precision as far as we were concerned. And we were PROUD of this. We should be. Looking from the outside it’s a minor miracle anything works enough to keep up a technological society to the extent it exists. BUT I understand this – it must be genetic because not only do I fight it every day, but so do my kids. HOWEVER most people would, I think, clean most of it away) and without implying Portuguese are victims because they live in less materially comfortable circumstances (and have a guaranteed month of vacation in Summer, a week at Easter and Christmas, plus the most holidays of any country in Europe.)

Do I hunger for such a book? To be blunt, no. I worry that the betrayals made would spin the book even further away from my admittedly odd experience. I worry I would for the rest of my life be meeting people who go “Oh, you’re Portuguese, so you’re exactly like…” (I wonder if Greeks feel that way about “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”)

I prefer to read about interesting people, no matter where they come from. Oh, I’ll give a try to the exotic, if simply because it’s a change of pace. Stuff set in rural South Africa for instance. And I absolutely ADORED Paul Mann’s Indian mysteries, one of those series I don’t think lasted long enough.

HOWEVER if I start a book set somewhere and it’s all about “victimhood” it goes against the wall so hard it leaves marks. Oh, sure, some people have it really tough (Paul Mann’s description of the underclass in India was responsible for my donating more than I should to various charities) but for books to be entertaining they can’t just be about oppression and misery and taking it. Good authors get over plotting by dropping walls on character. And most readers don’t view fiction reading as an exercise in self flagellation where you must suffer to understand how bad other people’s circumstances are.

And when I say I’d read about exotic locales, those can be in Europe, too. Small town England in the present day would be fascinating. (The latest I’ve read set there was Agatha Christie.) It has nothing to do with stealing victimhood, only with me being an SF geek, forever looking for the alien – even when I’m aware it’s “translated” and “betrayed.”

So, that is the ultimate conclusion: I’d be willing to read anything, written by anyone, as long as it’s interesting. I don’t want to read about people “like me” and I’m not angry there aren’t more of us as characters. (One of my characters has a series about a woman with my background. I don’t want to know. No, seriously. I’d have to kill him in a horrible way. And don’t say “what do you mean one of your characters has…” Any explanation would land one of us in the loony bin.) I don’t object to reading about people like me, though, if done in a way I find entertaining. And I don’t care about the background of the author, provided he/she can write the story convincingly.

Exciting, uh? Aren’t you amazed? I know I am. That this is shocking to the establishment explains why they’re in trouble.