According To Hoyt

I was raised in a village, so like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, I have one up on the rest of the world, since I know all kinds of evil and how evil works.

It’s not that there isn’t evil in cities, of course, but it’s more anonymous, less personal, and far more expected, so it doesn’t sucker punch you when you least expect it.

Which is why I prefer cities, preferably large cities, because it’s possible to be almost completely isolated there.  I suspect for extreme introverts there are only two choices of residence, out in the middle of nowhere, or the center of a large city.  In both cases, unless you’re ravishingly interesting to look at, or a celebrity, you’re like to meld with the landscape and matter to no one.

The most annoying evil of living in a village was the gossip.

I read enough regency and other fiction from historical eras to know it’s always been considered proper to take “a decent interest in your fellow man” by which they don’t mean that we should ogle good-looking guys (though by all means, good looking guys are a reason we know G-d loves women and wants them to be happy) but that it is important to be aware of those around you, their needs, their problems, or you know, if their younger son is listening to voices again and likely to try to kill you in the little alley that runs behind their garden, in which case you have no one to blame but yourself if you end up dead.  (You only think I’m joking.  It wasn’t death, but we did have a violent neighbor my age and it was totally my fault when I took the alley shortcut and got punched and bitten.  And I’m not even disagreeing on that.  I’d been told to be careful, but I was living in my own head as usual.)

But the thing I dreaded most about living in the village was rumor.  Not only rumor about me — I am reliably informed I married a baker from the next village, I just SAID he was American — but rumor about anyone.  Part of this was my living inside my head.  I didn’t know half the names grandma rained down on me when giving me her reports.  This was complicated all the more because grandma didn’t use the people’s names, or even their nicknames.  Nine times out of ten she used references for which you’d have to know the gossip from her mother’s time, “Remember the people in the fields by x? The ones whose grandfather was said to be a pirate, and whose great grandmother was said to be way too attached to a billy goat?  Well, SHE–”

However what truly appalled me was when someone — usually an old lady — made a reference to a village family of unexceptionable virtue and good behavior and said something like “Well, you know, their money comes from embezzling, so you know what they are.”

Often if you chased down that rumor, you’d find an ancestor in the late eighteenth century had made a fortune in the stock market and his fellows, either as a joke or because they really suspected him, SAID he’d embezzled the money. You might further find that not only hadn’t he embezzled, but he had, in his time, a reputation as a stickler for honesty.  But the rumor, coming down the generations, gave it as a sure thing, and his descendants were tainted, often without being aware of it.  (I did, without researching but by accident find this was the truth about a family whose ancestress was said to have got in the family way by a passing soldier — I think — and whose history was mentioned in a diary of the time which I read in another context, and the rumor was, of course, completely baseless, and known to people who had investigated it or were close to it at the time to be absurd.  BUT it had grown in the telling, and subsequent generations “knew”.

We are living in an age of rumors, and I’ll be honest, my field is a village, one in which the left has masterfully controlled the gossip for decades.

For instance, when I broke in, I was told not to be publicly friends with people who had been “frozen out” of publishing.  They might have been frozen out for reason (this could include things like threatening publishers, yes, but mostly it was “wrong and forbidden thoughts, or rumors of having such.”) Hanging out with them would tar me by association. Needless to say I’m too stupid to heed that advice, but most of the field does, with the odd result that if you were frozen out on suspicion of being persona non-grata, you then BECAME persona non-grata as your social circle made haste to be elsewhere.  I experienced this in 2003, after the Shakespeare series failed, and experienced a “come back and we didn’t mean anything by it” in 2005 when I was selling again.  By then I didn’t trust half of those people, because I’d seen their backsides as they ran away.

I was reminded of this as a fan — whom I’m not blaming — asked in a private group about one of the remaining legends of science fiction: was he racist?  She’d heard somewhere that he was racist.  Was that true?  She couldn’t remember the circumstances.

As people answered, the circumstances turned out to be the usual and only slightly less ludicrous than when a fellow writer accused me of using a “racist epithet” when I was actually using a state department abbreviation for citizens of a certain country who happened to embrace a communist philosophy.  This author, it seems, wrote an historical book in which racist characters use racist language.

The set that cannot think, but rather examines the entrails of language for signs of something other than what the text actually says, decided because he used the words, he was the racist.  (Yeah, this is why you end up with things such as “African-Americans” who have never left Africa, or who left Africa for Europe.  Because the left treats words as magical spells, not as significants for something real.  My favorite was found in an article, recently: “She wore an African-American coat.”  That better have been Kente cloth, or someone named Hannibal was involved.)

Yes, this is changing.  It is changing, because people not-in-the-bubble are paying less and less attention to the serial melt downs of the bien pensant.  OTOH I’m fairly sure there are people on the other side who think I’m fascist, racist, sexist and homophobic, as well as secretly Northern European (since that was one I actually caught.)  And also that there is the effect I observed in the village: People quite far away from the precipitating incident for the ridiculous rumor don’t know any better and will assume there was something there, at the back.  You know “No smoke without fire.”

So — when dealing in rumors, make sure you check.  Even if it’s about someone you dislike intensely.  Check what is actually happening, if you can with the person him/herself.  And then spread the truth as loudly as you can.

The times they are achanging, and by killing one of the tools of social disgrace and ostracism for conservatives in mostly left professions, you can give them a push in the right direction.

When someone says a colleague is “well, you know” say you don’t know and ask.  Nine times out of ten the “well, you know” will turn out to be conservative.  (BTW heard twice in recent series which I don’t watch but listen to, as Dan is watching them and I’m doing stuff like cooking or cleaning or drawing “it’s not like he’s conservative/republican” as a “well, it could be worse.”  Um…. they really thought they’d won.  So much ink drunk they must pee blue.)  In the remaining instance sometimes the rumor is just insane, like, you know “he once had a gay character as a villain in a story, so we know he’s homophobe.”

Deny rumor its power.  Refuse to repeat it, investigate it, tell the truth.

The reputation and professional life you save may be your own.  For the times, they are achanging.

 

Because I have guest posts but hate to give them low exposure by posting late, and because I’m either having massive autoimmune or the con crud returned in all its glory (either is possible.  It’s been a stressful month.)

So — the theme for this vignette (try to keep it to two paragraphs, under 500 words) — is “Almost the end of the world.”

I.e. how the world almost ended and how the end was averted.

Points given for originality.  (E.g. Bradbury, the end almost came because TV went out forever, it was averted by someone getting the idea of painting and cleaning.)

The top three — as pronounced by me — get a choice of signed copy of DST, signed copy of Through Fire or (when available, but I’m glacially slow at mailing, anyway.  I eventually do it, but it usually takes three months or so, because I HATE THE POST OFFICE) signed (by author, not artist) poster of Darkship Revenge. (See cover below.)

I hate to tell you guys this, but part of what made it easy for the vile progs to take over education and turn it into the sort of brainwashing hate-your-own-country fest that you’d expect of occupiers trying to change the very essence of the country they took over, is an essential component of the national character.

As far as I can tell, ever since the Puritans formed the Mayflower compact, Americans have been obsessed with self-help and self-improvement, not just as a people, but as a nation.

As a nation, we are forever obsessed with making ourselves better, more just, more welcoming, more prosperous, more…. everything.

“But doesn’t every nation do that?” you ask.  Uh… not really.  Not so you’d notice it.  Oh, sure, you hear a lot of blather about “restoring the great glory of the nostrilian people” and whatever, but mostly what that means is not an effort at internal transformation, but more a “get in our neighbors’ faces and saber rattle, so they acknowledge how we’ve always been superior to them and full of sparklies.”

(And no, “making America great again” is not of that order.  It mostly is — like every other program of self improvement America embarks on, about changing our own fundamentals and how we operate, but now with more of a return to “things Marxists hate” like border security and actual pride in who we are (no more apology tours is not the same as getting in the neighbors’ faces and saber rattling. Okay, the elites think it is, but I think we’ve established both here and in Europe that the elites are dangerously abroad, and I mean that in every possible sense.))

I think it’s because of who we are.  Who we are as a nation, in the sense that we were founded on an idea and documents that affix that idea.  Look, yeah, other countries have constitutions (it’s a thing.  We’re the cool kids they all want to imitate) but most of them were countries and peoples before the constitution, and they’re just trying to be cool.  (Though apparently one of my ancestresses was enthralled with the first Portuguese constitution, which, like the Magna Carta gave subjects some rights. The things I learn when I’m talking to my dad.)  Also, who we are as individuals, because most of us are descended from people who left everything behind to seek a new beginning, or did so ourselves.  This means as human beings (remember we’re social Great Apes) we’re fairly weird already, and genetically as well as culturally that “Seek a better life” probably remains part of us.

All of this is fine, of course.  No, it’s actually more than fine. It’s great and makes us who we are to a great extent, and a vexation and confusion onto all the other nations.

Though frankly we also don’t understand them at any sort of fundamental level.  Those of us like me who grew up elsewhere are like voices that preach in the desert saying things like “other nations are not like us” but most of the great mass of people has no clue.  I quote this incident a lot, because at the time it made me choke with laughter and tears, but one of the idiots going to serve as human shields for Saddam actually said on television that Iraq could not have weapons of mass destruction, since it couldn’t even provide clean water for its people.  Apparently the idea that other nations/peoples have different priorities is completely foreign to most people. They should read PJ O’Rourke’s description of traveling by train in Siberia, where not only were there not enough bathrooms for even half the passengers, but the floor was raised to keep in the effluvia should someone throw up (or piss) on the floor.  Because one of the characteristics of dictatorships is that they don’t give a good g*ddamn what the people they rule over think or want.

The problem with not understanding other countries is that we also don’t see where we are different.  Which means we don’t realize the dark side of our thirst for self improvement.

Frankly, for chest beating, self-blaming, screaming about our defects to all and sundry and generally giving people abroad the idea we’re much worse than the hell holes they inhabit, NO ONE can beat the US.  Oh, okay, fine, Israel comes close and ancient Israel was about as “good” at it as we are (EVERY defeat was blamed on their having fallen short of G-d’s expectations.  And maybe it was true, but it’s not how any other country then or now reacts.)  England can at times be very self blamey.  But that’s about it.

Even compared with our Western peers (not France, because la Belle France always knows it’s better and superior to any other form of human civilization.  I mean, really) we are like the bolemic girl damaging her health with self-blame, while her peers just, now and then, go on a diet.

This made it trivially easy for the progressives who were by and large taken over by Russian agit-prop by the middle twentieth century to take over our schools and the minds of our kids and by misdirection turn us into self-enemies convinced that the US is the worst nation on Earth.

Take slavery.  Please.  We certainly don’t want it, and we’re one of the nations on Earth that has eradicated it as thoroughly as it can be eradicated from human society.  We fought a war and died in great numbers to eradicate it.

It had, of course, been a point of self-blame from the beginning.  Our constitution, based on the Natural Rights of men leaves no space for it.  That it was allowed to subsist past the founding was a real politik decision forced on the founders, one without which we would not have existed as a nation.  Which doesn’t make it right, but makes it… understandable.

The other thing that makes it understandable is that slavery is an old sin of mankind.  It probably existed amid hominid groups.  (I’m not going to say it exists among great apes.  I have a vague memory of having read an article saying it did, but it’s too long ago, and I can’t remember where, besides the fact that this “animal observation” studies are often wrong.) It is, in the end, just an outgrowth of the “band” structure of great apes, in which the leader has the power of life and death over all around him.

Slavery both hooks into the really bad parts of humans, those that want to control others and treat them as things, and in pre-industrial societies where there is a lot more boring, unpleasant or outright dangerous work than anyone today can even imagine (I remember articles about the horrors of working assembly line.  Your ancestors would have LAUGHED at those), slavery is often the way this is solved, by having people who can’t refuse to do such work.

In industrial societies, such as in the parts of the middle East and Africa where slavery subsists, it’s just because humans can be twisted and horrible, at least if they don’t make an effort to be otherwise.

However, your children likely think that America invented slavery to oppress black people, which makes America uniquely racist and uniquely evil and a terrible place that needs to atone for sins in the world.

I don’t really have the time or the inclination to go look up the dates of the abolition of slavery, but not only wasn’t America the last, slavery subsists in some countries today.

Then there is the racism thing.  Oh, PLEASE.  Americans don’t even GET racism in other countries, where often different ethnic variants OF THE SAME PEOPLE are considered wholly different races.  And for Americans looking at them (including the country I came from) they all look like cousins to each other (and no, that’s not racism.  It’s just that America has greater genetic variety and we get used to it.  Watching the Portuguese gymnastics team while I was visiting my parents, I realized for the first time how much everyone there looks… related.  Even what I used to see as pale blonds aren’t blonds.  Really.)

And if you go back and examine every place that there was a racial minority, I believe the normal reaction of the majority is to kill them (eating them is optional, though it happened in a lot of places.)

But because Americans still feel guilty over compromising their own principles over slavery, people from countries with far-worse histories can feel superior to us.  Well, if we weren’t that bad, why would we be beating our chests so hard?  And people who hate us (some of them our very own indoctrinated brethren) can use our guilt to brow beat us and turn our children’s loyalties away from us.

Take that “our founding fathers owned slaves”.  To anyone who knows any history that is “So they were men of their time and fairly wealthy?  Okay then.”  Sure, it went against their own stated principles, but in a society in which slavery is actually part and parcel of the fabric of society, freeing your own slaves might not be practical or even really possible, due to contracts, obligations, and other such constraints.

The fact that such men could DREAM of a society without classes and without slavery is what is a miracle, not that they were flawed human beings and men of their time.  Judged by that standard, I’m afraid the future will see us as vastly inferior to those 18th century men.

So — what to do?

I’m not saying America should stop trying to improve.  I do not think that is even possible, given the makeup, genetic and constitutional, of this country.

But we must always remember the past is another country (and other countries are other countries, too, and not just America with cooler food and interesting clothes.)  Declaring a moratorium on judging our own past, and taking it as writ that the founders and everyone else who made us were men (and women) of their time (it is, for instance, probably inappropriate to judge people like FDR on their eugenics beliefs or the belief that a command economy was best.  It was what was in the air at the time. It hadn’t been proven otherwise, as it has now.)  Perhaps it is a good time to think of it as “judge not, lest you be judged” and we just need to stride forward doing the best we can.

Beating our chest is not what is important.  Building a better future is.

Teach your children well.

Then get out there and build.  The funny image in the mirror is just that, projected there by neurotics and the enemies who manipulate them.

We are, flaws and all, the last best hope of mankind.  Keep it so.

 

 

Ask the Mad Scientist! – by Sabrina Chase

Welcome to another episode of Ask the Mad Scientist, coming to you *live* from the underwater submarine base of Raison d’Ethray! Brought to you by the fine folks at Blue Glow, purveyors of fusion reactors, Cherenkov radiation sources, and other petawatt power supplies for every kind of lair. Remember, look for the Blue Glow!

First, the winner of last week’s Research Funding Proposal Obfuscation contest is “I.M.A. Tank”, for “Method for Rapid Tissue Sampling by Means of High-Density, High-Velocity Discrete Metal Devices of Uniform Size and Weight.” Enjoy the crate of lovely Penrose tiling for your lab, and remember to correct for windage!

Now, on to the mailbag. Our first communication comes via long-range gravitational pulses from the galactic core…

“Dear Mad Scientist and other Earthlings: Long time reader, first time invader. I am a big fan of your column, and I have decided I simply *must* invade your buccolic little blue-green planet on my next trip! I understand Tokyo is a popular destination for rampant destruction, but do you have any other recommendations that might be off the beaten track?

With respectful tentacle-wavings in your general direction, Cketpakgh”

Always nice to hear from a fan, especially out in the Galactic Core! I don’t want to rain on your invasion, but Tokyo is an example of what you will have to deal with. No matter how flat it gets pummelled, you may have noticed it gets built right back up very quickly. Even Godzilla is defenseless against the construction unions. There’s a reaon Earth is listed as a Class 12 Hazardous Planet, you know. Even our single-celled organisms are quite dangerous, and a wise Mad Scientist treats them with respect. Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most dangerous life-form here! There are certain planets in the Sol system, Cketpakgh, I would not advise you to invade–especially if this is your first. But *do* let us know when you decide to visit! The Death Ray and Orbital Cannon Club gets very excited when visitors come and always extends a very warm–if slightly radioactive–welcome.

And now from that hotbed of agricultural Mad Science, Kansas!

“Dear Mad Scientist. I want to keep my spherical cows healthy but I am afraid the inoculation shots will cause them to deflate. What should I do?”

Good question! And kudos for considering the welfare of your cows. Happy specimens make for reproducible experimental results! As long as you avoid the flotation bladder, injections are perfectly safe. Have your lab assistant grasp the tail firmly in one hand and tickle the very top of the head with the other. When the cow starts giggling, inject at the line between the shoulder blades to either side of the spine.

So, what other Mad Science issues are troubling your brains? (Including the brains in jars).  Remember, there are no stupid questions in Mad Science!

*Sorry guys, still somewhat under the weather and made myself ill by doing a blitz clean yesterday (it’s double edged, as I’m allergic to household dust too so if I don’t clean I get sick.) I’m not bad, just about where I was three days ago.  Well enough to write, but not well enough to come up with an idea for a blog that doesn’t take me all morning to write.*

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with Dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less differentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Beelzebub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seemed to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistance.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost preternaturally laid back man. We told him that the squirrel was holed up in the file drawer, that he’d been singing protest songs and that we were fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front before.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrels have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas. For years, I trained with lidocaine powder sleeping gas!

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, Super Squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturnal?) is an elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……

A few days ago, I was on the book of faces, on a thread started by Brad Torgersen, in which we’d already had at least three progressives come by and scream at us that Hillary had won the popular vote and why weren’t we making her president, when progressive #4 came by to announce that it just wasn’t fair we weren’t giving the presidency to Hillary Clinton, despite her popular vote in.  By that time I’d grown a little testy (who, me? Nevah) and my answer was “Another constitutional scholar!” after which I gave a cursory answer about the electoral college protecting us from being dictated to by California, and, in the long run, from ending up in a civil war.

The lady (!) arguing with me came back with one of the most bizarre answers I’ve heard in a long time.  She said since I’d first resorted to ad hominem, she won.  A few of the other people on the thread asked her WHAT she’d won, and that’s, indeed, the material question.  Never mind that, to my knowledge so far “constitutional scholar” is not yet a recognized insult, she seemed to think she could win an argument about FACTS (i.e. does the electoral college exist?  Can it be said to have a beneficial purpose?) because an opponent used a logical fallacy.

That is not how the world works.  If we’re both arguing over whether the sky is blue or bright red, and I call you the corrugated son of a whorish slug, it doesn’t make the sky bright red.  That she thought it did alarmed me more than her belief that the electoral college was somehow unfair.  But that doesn’t mean her ignorance of our fundamental structures as a nation and the reason for them was any less alarming.

And then a friend on the book of faces posted this video.  If you have time to see it, the gentleman who calls himself Big Joe, schooled the derpapotomi in style, but in the middle of this, one of the shrieking ignorami who presumes to tell him that he needs to “educate” himself, also tells him he’s so “ignorant” because Trump wasn’t elected, he was “selected” by the electoral college.

At that point, the hair was standing up at the back of my head, and I immediately went to the phone and called my two millenials to ask them if they knew what the electoral college was, and  what its function was.

Older son said he knew but only because his last History Teacher in High School was a retired Navy Commander who, upon discovering that they knew nothing about how the republic was constituted, and after he was done blowing a gasket, took them through an accelerated course on what the founding fathers had wrought.  Before that all they really knew was that the founding fathers had owned slaves and therefore all their opinions were tainted.

Younger son said he learned about the structure of government from PJM and from the books I flung at his head when he said something particularly stupid.  (Sometimes literally flung at his head.)  In school he learned only that the founding fathers owned slaves and were rich, and therefore all their work was tainted.

I’m not going to pretend my sons are representative of their generation.  I’m not even going to pretend the derpapotamus who thought Constitutional Scholar was an insult is representative of the generation between mine and my sons’.

I’m just going to say that while a lot of people are taught about our system, they are taught about it wrapped in a lot of scolding about the founding fathers owning slaves (and there will be a post about slavery next week, because Americans have SOMEHOW got the bizarre idea it’s uniquely American, and this is a stick the Liberals use to discredit the whole American experiment.  A stick that must be wrenched out of their hands and used on their own backs.  I don’t despise Barrack Obama because he’s descended from slavers on both sides or his family — no, truly, research it — but because he’s chockfull of socialist ideas which are a re-institution of slavery and just as offensive to the human spirit as the original.)

Experimental questions to less politically involved young people got me answers about our system that ranged from its being a democracy (which is about as accurate as saying it is a monarchy) or — and this is a doozy — that we live in “capitalism” which is not a political system, it’s not even, really, an economic system, more what emerges when government doesn’t screw with the economy.

Look, this is the problem we’re up against.  Back in the nineties, I found Rush Limbaugh’s habit of referring to America under Clinton as occupied America, annoying and thought of it as a schtick.  (Even though I hated what Clinton did on most fronts, starting with Motor Voter.)

But in the last ten years, I’ve come to realize he was right.  America was and largely still is an occupied country.  Foreign agents (natural born, but recruited early by Soviet Agit Prop) control our media, our education, our entertainment.  And most of what the occupiers have done is try to destroy that which is uniquely American: our individualism, and our system of government.  They also try to inoculate against people finding about our system on their own and thinking it’s brilliant, by tainting the character of the founding fathers and the idea of America as a nation AT LEAST as good as any other, if not better.

It is important, as we face the difficult task of rebuilding, to look towards the countries that came out of occupation by the enemy for examples.

As in France after World War II it might be convenient, as the tide turns and people pretend they were always in the resistance to the occupation, to let them pretend, and to not forget but turn a blind eye to their acts while under enemy influence.

But most of all, and above all, it is important to storm the bastions of the enemy, and to start teaching facts to young and old; it is important to start a great work of teaching citizens about our system.

This is more important in America than anywhere else, since our polity depends on at least a decent percentage of informed citizens.  (It will never be all of them.)

Now I don’t see any point in storming the schools or the bastions of current culture.  Due to what Iowa Hawk defined as the process of the vile progs taking over an institution, gutting it, skinning it, then wearing its skin demanding respect, all those institutions are in great trouble, and thanks to technology all the gatekeepers in such institutions will be taken down in the next ten years or so.

So, build under, build around, build over, and make sure you teach and explain as we go.

A lot of the people behaving very badly aren’t stupid.  They just know a lot of things that just ain’t so.  And a lot of them aren’t evil: they were intentionally corrupted by enemy agents, and turned into weapons against their own country and their own form of government.

Not all will be reachable, but a lot of them will be.  Yeah, this will call for you to be patient, when it’s the last thing you want to be.

But we’ve already started the most important part of this work: we’re talking back, and letting them know we’re here.

Yeah, this is sending a lot of them into a blind panic.  This happens when the foundations of your world shift under you.

But once they calm down some percentage will be reclaimable.  And we need to reclaim them, because our country needs them.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and work and teach as you go. In the end, we win they lose.  But it doesn’t absolve you from doing everything you can.  Go and do it.

But I’m really not feeling very well.  Our room at Cosine didn’t have heat for the first twenty four hours we were there and we both caught SOMETHING.  I had been TRYING not to catch something for two weeks, to be fair, and the cold weakened me enough it whomped me.  Dan is sick too.

On the good side, I finished Darkship Revenge and it is in.  I wrote two chapters yesterday (because I’d changed the thrust of the ending, different people died, and I had to adjust things.  I know the action chapter was good and I was there, because I was covered in sweat as I finished (eh.)

Anyway, today I feel ick.  I just want to sleep, and my ear is killing me.  There might be doctorage for the ear, as it’s not supposed to hurt that bad.

I’m going to take it easy, maybe do some art or house cleaning, and have a lot of chicken soup.  See you tomorrow.

Okay, so I need to send this book in today.  And I mean, NEED to, and I am still recovering from con crud from h*ll and had some worrying news from my parents.

Which means, I really am not functioning very well.

I know that there is such a thing as “It came from Imgur” but seriously, this one is cute.  On Friday we had dinner with the Greens, and Steve infected us with these “real animal names” including doing the the National Geographic voice on the narration for the Majestic Sea Flap Flap.

The full thing is here, but I’m going to put some of my favorites below, then add a couple Robert and I thought of.

This page has more.

My favorite is:

And now for Robert’s and my creations:

On a recent trip to the zoo we watched secretary birds trying to scare/kill an emu and decided they’re the most psychotic thing ever.  SO…  For context video of murder riverdance bird.

And yeah, it honestly tried to kill an emu.

Sixteen years ago, when I was first on the blogs (under deep cover, with mustache and sunglasses) there was a lot of talk about the cold civil war.

It is only now that I understand the name wasn’t EXACTLY right.  Sure, there were two camps sharply divided, and the fact that we were geographically enmeshed meant that it couldn’t go hot in the traditional way.  But there were other factors too.

In the cold war, what prevented it going hot was Mutual Assured Destruction.  Sure, the Soviets were fanatics, but they weren’t the sort of fanatics who want to make sure they die TOO.  They wanted to win.  They wanted for various and complicated reasons, among them that the only way a communist society can be prosperous is through theft, to own the Earth.  We weren’t about to allow that and we had the nukes to enforce it.

Oh, they grabbed what they could, mostly because the left here were very susceptible to Soviet propaganda, and the idea MAD was wrong, and we should disarm first.  (Honestly, sometimes I think they’re aliens.  That’s not how the world works, that’s not how humans work.  That’s not how any of this works.  The one who disarms first is known as “victim” or perhaps “dead.”)

But in the Civil War we fought, they commanded all the positions of power.  It wasn’t just the arts, or publishing, just the press or universities.  If you were fairly wealthy, even back in the eighties, you made “left noises” because being leftist was aspirational and a positional good.  Their control of the rest of the culture had a hard lock on the idea that leftist ideas were not just right and good but “Smart”.  Opening your mouth in public and revealing right-wing (and right wing was anything non-left, like supporting Ronald Reagan) opinions was the equivalent of committing social suicide.  If you said you supported Ronald Reagan, all your acquaintances would SAY you were dumb, and whisper you were racist, sexist, anti-Semitic. (In fact I was reading a mystery by a very liberal writer, set in the eighties and the MOST unbelievable thing she has is high-class white people in the South being openly racist.  Oh, my, no, that wasn’t done. I know, I lived there at the time.  Forget saying racist things in public.  They wouldn’t even voice a support for free markets in public.  It just wasn’t DONE.)

This is not a Cold Civil War.  We were occupied.  The Vichy had full control of society, and we were the plucky resistance.  We didn’t even have a flight helmet, or an egg beater, but we were doing what we could, in the shadows.  Those of us in the arts ported seemingly incongruous bits into our stuff, at great risk of discovery or at least suspicion.  Local journalists sometimes broke with the narrative.  But none of this had a great deal of effect.  We were mostly sidelined, and when someone managed to break through, he or she was immediately demonized.  Even a hero of the gonzo right like P. J. O’Rourke had to refer to Reagan as “his dumbness” to prove he was cool and hip enough.  (No one referred to Carter as his dumbness, and having heard the man, this is a miracle of the controlled press.)

It is no longer like that.  Things have changed.  Now we are in a cold civil war with occasional flare ups.

There are two problems.  I’ve never condoned the wholesale condemnation of GOP stalwarts, partly because the press still had a bunchaton of power until … they didn’t.

What I’m saying is that if they could demonize a squishy left and frankly morally impeccable man like Romney as an uber-fascist, they could demonize anyone and anything.  Which meant for a long time, when the right got pressured, they buckled.  They had to.  It wasn’t a cold civil war.  It was a guerilla war.  If you’re caught running with a bunch of dynamite to bring down a bridge before the Nazis bring in reinforcements, you don’t die bravely.  That just neutralizes you.  Instead, you invent a story and heil Hitler with all your might.  Which is what the US right — btw, as far from fascists as it’s possible to be, while the left often uses fascist tactics — did.  They buckled and lived to fight another day.

I thought that’s where we were.  I thought that’s where we’d be for another hundred years.

Yeah, I’d heard of the power of online communication, but I didn’t buy it.  I thought it would be very gradual.

You see, I did this with ebooks too.  when I started writing in 1985, every conference and every writing magazine had a thing on ebooks.  And it made no earthly sense to me.  Who in actual hell wants to take a computer to the bathroom with them, or bring the computer to the kitchen while washing dishes, or…  No one.

For twenty years they talked about ebooks, and I thought it would never happen.  And then Amazon…

I don’t know what happened with this election cycle.  Perhaps it was that the economy is really, stupendously, bad.  We don’t know for sure, because the press would rather die than report on it until a year from now, when they can blame it all on Trump, and also because Obama played tiddly winks with our number gathering, making things mean not what they say they mean. But the signs on the ground, they suck.  I belong to a highly educated/trained/hard working set, and the best of us have been holding on for the last ten years (since the Dems swept the legislature in 06) without a raise, in face of growing, unacknowledged inflation.

Then there is the fact that the internet reporting MIGHT have achieved just enough penetration to start getting to people through the rumor mill.  People saying that Obama was the most ethical president ever were met with open laughter from friends and relatives who read the blogs, and who brought out chapter and verse on what really happened in Benghazi and the horror that was Fast and Furious.  The indication of this is the approval rating of the MSM.

Then there is the fact that so many of the left’s theories are self-exploding.  I’ve been telling lefties since Trump was elected that he can’t put gays in camps, because Bush has already done that, and in fact, Bush couldn’t even do it, because we all died in the war Reagan started by talking tough to the Russians.

Sure, we all know people who buy each one of these self-panics afresh, as if they never heard it before, but it has to peel off those on the margins.  It does, in fact.  Even in science fiction cons, the audience looks vaguely embarrassed when the idiotic boogeyman of global warming is trotted out.  I mean, you can only have eminent DOOOOOOOM and the urgency of socialist measures now for so long before people stop going “aren’t we supposed to already have baked to death?”

And there was the fact that during Obama’s presidency, the left thought it had ALREADY won (their fault.  By silencing opposition on threat to jobs or even lives, they lost sight of how big it was and wishfully convinced themselves there were only a few dead enders left) and acted at their most repulsive, from “I have a pen and a phone” to the outbreaks of SJWs trying to squish life out of the things people did for fun and demanding it all be “meaningful” and in aid of progressivism and by the numbers.

Then there is the situation with terrorism and Islam.  By shouting Religion of Peace and reclassifying every incident as workplace violence or disgruntled soldiers or need for gun control, they tried to convince people not to see what their lying eyes told them.  And they didn’t have that kind of power.  And there was the internet.

Because they’d made it impossible for people to speak openly and keep working, or keep their social position, people didn’t.  Not even to pollsters on the phone.  Trump’s election was not only a shock to the left, it was a shock to most of the right.  Metaphorically, I’m still jaw-dropped, sitting in Stephen Green’s living room, un-drunk cocktail in hand.

The problem with this is not that the cold war has gone hot.  It hasn’t.  I think instinctively that’s what the left fears.  They’ve been doing all this stuff to keep us down with the understanding there were few of us and most very old, and now a preference cascade has revealed we were just lying to them.  They’re afraid we’re going to, at the very least, do to them what they’ve been doing to us.  And they might be right on that.  But of course they can’t say that.  They can’t say “I’m afraid I won’t get job perks for mouthing the right opinions” or “I’m afraid that my job won’t promote me because of my aggressive SJW blackmail.”  Instead, they have to exaggerate their fears into extermination camps and women losing their right to vote, and other insanity that everyone (probably in their hearts of hearts even they) knows is insanity.

Hence the insurgence of the pussy hatters.  (BTW they’re calling it three million — rolls eyes — yeah, there MIGHT have been three million all over the country, many of them elderly women who don’t seem to be quite sure what they were protesting or why, or old progressives recreating sixty eight out of sheer nostalgia, but that’s counting the not-women not-march on not-Washington (since it had to take all self identified women, it was more of a stroll, and most of them never went near DC) )  They think if they make a big display of force, we’ll be scared to do to them as they’ve been doing onto us.

They don’t realize it’s having the other effect.  Because they are protesting, essentially, against election results, they have NO moral high ground.  People watching can only think they’ve lost their minds.

Sure the media is inflating them, like they did with the Occupy Wall Street astroturf.  Sure, leftist politicians will lend them credence and treat them as heroes.  BUT the media and the lefty politicians CANNOT make them sound sane and justified.  Nothing can.  What the heck are they protesting, with their symbolic genitalia hats, anyway? All they can do is make themselves sound crazy by associating themselves with the crazy.

In other words, the people calling them the Trump 2020 dancers are more right than not.

Also, btw, three million?  In a country of three hundred million, where we probably have fifty million aging hippies who long to recreate sixty eight?  And countless vile prog teachers who dragged their classes to this thing?  Three million?  We laugh at your puny numbers, your vile smugness, your crazy assumption of moral rightness.  And the vast majority who won’t answer polls or play your games anymore, laughs with us.

The fury of the left is the fury of someone playing by the rules, who has done everything that has ever worked before and yet finds themselves getting the opposite results of what they wanted.  It often happens in societal change.

We are now, actually, and openly in a situation of Civil Cold War.  The right has its own power to punish those who offend them, and who thought they were insulated by taking the command positions in the culture (often by skulduggery and by paying more attention to politics than competency, which is why every field the left takes over gets cacked.)  Are you going to boycott us?  We’ll counter boycott and take you down.  Or worse, we’ll buycott.  Remember Chick Fil A?  It should have been a warning sign to the left.  But it wasn’t.

They’re going to blow past all the warning signs, because people do.  People’s minds aren’t that elastic.  The situation they grew up with is the “right and just” one to which we’ll return.  Note all the publishers waiting for ebooks to disappear.

Only the left’s displays are going to get more frantic and even aggressive.  And I’m seeing signs, particularly among the young, that no one really cares about their sensitivities anymore.  Which will only make them more frantic.

What can we do? How can we prevent the cold civil war going hot?  And yes, as angry as we are, we really want to do that.  Because if it goes hot what emerges at the other end won’t be the republic we love.

I don’t know.

So you must prepare.  Prepare for disruptions.  Prepare for attacks.  Prepare for them to take our institutions down in a final attempt to destroy us.

Prepare.  Be aware.  Build under, build over, build around.

In the end we win, they lose, and we might get lucky and avoid the worst on the way.  But the water will get very rough, so you have to make sure to have life preservers.

And be not afraid, for the times, they are achanging.

It’s been three days since Trump’s inauguration and I haven’t lost it and bitchslapped anyone in public, but it’s a difficult thing, I’m always ten seconds from a righteous bitchslapping, and I must take it a day at a time.

It’s not his fervent supporters who are driving me to the screaming mimmies.  Sure, a lot of the more fervent ones are absolutely convinced he sits astride a white horse (with a golden saddle) and is coming to cure the world all their ills, but frankly, they don’t bother me, the same way that Obama’s supporters who thought he was the Light Bringer and sort of like a G-d, standing above the world and fixing all its problems.  (Oh, child of the morning, how art thou fallen.) It is a common human failing, and even our form of government isn’t going to erase that.  I deal with that the way I dealt with Obama supporters — by staying out of their drum circles — and roll my eyes so hard they almost fall off (but I’ve had little clips installed, so they can’t fall off.)  So, I’m cool.

Rather it’s his unhinged opponents.

I’ll level — and you don’t need to go very far to find out — and say I was scared when Obama was elected.  I’d seen other college room Marxists, and I knew the havoc they could wreak.  But I didn’t get seriously alarmed, or get involved in politics, or even speak out, until they passed Health Care Screwing Up Act with a procedural trick, until not only did we learn of Fast and Furious but the media swept it under the rug, until Benghazi happened, the administration lied in public and progressives were satisfied with the explanation that it “wasn’t a thing.”

I must say however that even in my extreme of losing my cool, I never even THOUGHT of marching on Washington wearing knit representations of genitalia on my head.  I considered running for regional office, something that’s still on the books, if writing stops paying or doesn’t pay enough to justify the effort, only I’d make a very bad politician because “Are you out of your frickin’ minds” is a terrible campaign slogan.

I certainly didn’t start demonstrating against Obama the day he was elected.  In fact, even in 2012, I talked back from the ledge friends who thought his election would destroy the future they had planned.  You can’t live through several revolutions or in a seriously corrupt country without knowing “there is always a way around the rules” and “Most political changes are undone.  Some just take longer than others.”  (Yes, even Venezuela shall be free-er and prosperous again, but that’s a different case as their culture really lends itself to Caudillo regimes.)

But I confess that the behavior of the left, since November, has me breathless.

Remember this is me talking.  I lived briefly (I think six months, but I could be wrong?  I try not to think of that time and the ages between 11 and 18 sort of run together in my mind) under a Maoist regime run by rich boys whose hobbies included painting exquisite socialist realism murals and shooting their AK47s randomly at people they thought were insufficiently enthusiastic supporters.  I’ve been in situations (weirdly not during that time) when machine guns were pointed at me by both amateurs and professionals.  I’ve been in public assemblies in which people were randomly shot from above, and it was luck of the draw it wasn’t me.  I’ve seen cars set on fire.  I’ve had to live with the awareness of what was going on nationally at any moment, because it might impinge on my little world.  And yes, I did things that got other people “disappeared” (though no one knew that for years, and the assumption was that they’d run abroad) and because I was an idiot teen who was going to live forever, got in the face of very dangerous people.  It wasn’t till years later, that I realized why my parents and brother were scared for me, and why my brother thought my parents should control me.  (Keep in mind that he didn’t know HOW they could do that, and the response was exactly that.  “You tell us how.”)

And now I’m more scared than I’ve ever been.  It started out as funny, but I’m now terrified.

It’s not just that I’m older.  It’s not that I have children and (for now) adopted grandchildren, and I’ve always been more scared for others than for myself.  (Some of those “Student Leaders” I outraged could even have got my lip service if they’d threatened my brother.  But they were stupid and threatened me.)

It’s more that I do not know if the country, as a representative republic, governed by the people can survive when substantial numbers of its people — and a vast number of them in positions of power in industry and culture — know so many things that just ain’t so and are willing to act on them without thinking.  In fact, it could be said that they’ve been trained not to think.  And that, particularly for people in intellectual professions, is a terrifying thing to behold.

My adopted brother, Charlie Martin, says his problem is that Trump has opened the bag of idiots.  My real problem is that any republican winning would have done so — yes, even Romney.  Even Kasich — the only difference being that instead of pussy hats, the women-against-objectification would have worn whole body vulva suits.  With Trump it’s genitalia head gear, because he used the word “pussy.”  This is so much worse than Clinton being a serial rapist and his wife enabling him for… reasons. Don’t ask them the reasons, because that would force them to think, and they’ll just scream things at you like “my body my choice” and “you are afraid of vaginas.”  I demonstrably am not, as I haven’t done anything drastic to mine, but those are the things they say to avoid thinking. Mantras.

Which brings us to cults.

I should have known something was up as I started reading about cults and cults deprogramming, and what happens to cults when disconfirmation of their beliefs happens.

My subconscious is the smart part of me.  When I start reading about something, it’s either for a book, or there’s a reason.

Cults are a fascinating thing.  Most of the people who join don’t join for the beliefs, which is what you’d think (right?) but for the sense of community, for belonging, or even for the benefits of it (house, food, money, a job.)

It’s kind of up in the air whether they believe in the tenets of the cult AT ANY TIME in the traditional sense.  Instead, they build blocks in their heads so they can’t think or do or even hear anything that challenges the cult.

The cult’s revelations usually include “and we’ll conquer the world” or some great event will happen that will give them control of the Earth.  When those are “disconfirmed” they scare the members because it makes the entire structure totter.  What they actually joined for: money or prestige, or even community, is at risk, but more importantly, the things going on around them threaten the careful habits of not thinking that they’ve built up.

And it’s much, much worse for the children raised in the cult.  It often takes them decades to escape the habits of non-thought or the vague paranoid fear that they’re going to be punished for doing what the cult disapproved of.

It is even worse if the cult (as most do) demonized everyone not of the cult.  Because then the kids can spend decades mired in the idea everyone is out to get them.

Which brings us to what is going on about us.

Some have compared the American progressivism implosion to how the Soviet Union fell, and they’re more right than not.

Yes, the Soviet union had secret police and a state apparatus, and yes, people were afraid of being arrested and thrown in jail, at least if they were people who had any sort of political awareness.

But most of the people didn’t.  Most of the people (talk to people who grew up there) just wanted to survive another day and get more food, and live a little better.  And for that they needed to mouth the beliefs of the Soviet cult, even if their lying eyes told them otherwise.  So, as in a cult you taught yourself not to think.

The interesting thing, when the Soviet Union fell, was the reaction of the cult members in the Soviet union, and the converts abroad. (And before you tell me that the progressives abroad were not Soviet converts, yes, I’ll explain.)

There was a brief period when everyone who could walk, crawl, or even drive a crappy soviet car away, did so.  But it didn’t empty the country.  And the ones who stayed behind eventually crawled back into the womb of authoritarian government.  Because it was the only way they could function.  (This too, as with Venezuela, might be their culture.  At least it’s what I told myself.)

The ones abroad, many of whom aren’t even aware of being Marxist converts — despite their belief that people are widgets inside their group (aka soviet) and that characteristics such as skin color, or genitalia, or profession dictate your thoughts; despite using terms like “consciousness raising”; despite not only narratives of victimhood, but the great and insane stealing of the Garden of Eden myth with the narrative of a primitive feminist paradise which not only left no archeological traces but also makes no sense with the realities of humans and life; despite their increased support for a centralized government that controls every facet of life — had a few wobbles, before they convinced themselves that the Soviet union wasn’t REALLY socialist (despite name) or communist, and that with the right people in charge, we could do it right.

This is typical cult behavior. The “progressive” narrative has a myth of the past (oh, that great communitarian past that also never existed) and a myth of the future, where the state they’ve been feeding magically withers away and we all sing in perfect harmony (but don’t drink coke, which is a capitalist invention.)  It comes through even when they’re not aware of it in their belief in the arrow of history; in their belief that you can be a race or gender traitor if you don’t believe in them; in their belief that the only reason you could disagree with them is that you’re evil.

If you posit they’re a cult, it all falls in place.  They’re just a very large cult who has done what cults have done throughout history and got control of the structures of power.  (I said that Heinlein was right about the First Prophet, he just didn’t realize what the “religion” would be.)

Having control of the structures of power, they could at least force people to PRETEND to believe in their nonsense.  They’ve managed this rather effectively across the media, entertainment, education, and a lot of other professions.

This week a young fan who works in music found out his beliefs and his blog cost him a lucrative career opportunity.  Us, old veterans of this war, could do nothing but nod and go “We know” and give instances in which we know the same happened to us. It’s everywhere.  Even in technical professions, the corporate culture, to appease the controlling cult, has enforced rigid adherence to things that contradict your lying eyes.

Having seized that control, the leaders of the cult could now proclaim anything they wanted, no matter how absurd, and be sure people would echo.  Some of them because they want to avoid loss of position and power; some because they were raised this way and have to believe, because otherwise they lose everything they’d been taught.

And then the fact that everyone, particularly anyone with any power (even though getting power is a function of mouthing the cult’s platitudes) “agrees” with them is brought out against dissidents, to call them stupid or mentally ill (they’re not that different from the soviet union, no.)

My younger son, shortly after the election, told me his colleagues were losing their minds.  I asked — sarcastically. I am STILL me — why the election of the most socially liberal Republican in decades was scaring them so much, and why they thought immigrants, women or gays would be sent to camps, and he said it wasn’t even that “they were taught, and believed it, that no Republican, ever would win again.”

Which is why they wanted to accrue ever more power to the government.  Because they thought it would always be their instrument.

They had reason to think so, not just because of the massive machinery of fraud (Dear hearts, only ONE party disapproves of measures to make our elections secure, and also your president lied to you.  Voter ID is NOT a function of America’s “racist past” EVERY COUNTRY THAT’S not a dictatorship has some for of assuring that the person voting is entitled to.  EVERY COUNTRY.  Even tiny, unorganized Portugal which is by and large mono-racial save for immigrants.)  No, they had reason to think this, because in every field they conquer the “enemy” disappears and never gets control again.  (More on this later.)  Look to the media, or publishing, or the arts.  They had a reason to believe their narrative of eternal victory.

This is why the election of someone who doesn’t agree with them, and who is not wholly committed to moving us towards the utopian future they envision is making them come unglued.

Women are protesting in the streets against a man whose wives and daughters are business women, with careers and independent lives.  They’re screaming about losing their right to abortion (and having been sold on this as a right is something else) when in fact he rather approves of abortion.  Like most men who sleep around, he likes not having to support any accidental products.  (What?  Did I say he wasn’t an asshole?)

Immigrants are convinced they’ll be deported tomorrow, even if he’s only talked of deporting ILLEGAL or CRIMINAL immigrants.

Gays are convinced they’ll be put in camps, because “he held the rainbow flag upside down and it was a dog whistle” even though my gay friends tell me there REALLY isn’t a formal up or down to the flag, it being a sort of ersatz symbol.  OTOH I’m becoming convinced a lot of gay people have fantasies about being put in camps with hot guards, or something, and feel guilty about it and must turn it into “fear” of being put in camps.  To my knowledge leftist gays have feared this since Reagan and it reached a peak under Bush who, also to my knowledge, never even mentioned anything about gays and whose vice president has a gay daughter whom he doesn’t shun.  (And for the one of you reading this who has my phone, yes, yes, I KNOW exactly the texts you’re going to send me about brawny camp guards in snazzy uniforms.  Just not in the middle of the night, okay, no matter how funny they are. I love you like a brother.  I don’t want to kill you.)

Keep in mind these same women said absolutely nothing when Clinton was credibly accused of multiple RAPES and in fact went all out to support his wife, who aided and abetted this behavior.

Keep in mind that gay students didn’t force the university to stop the speech of Iran’s Imamadjihad at universities, even though he’s known to hang gays or force them into sex change operations.

This is not rational behavior.  This is a cult.

I avoided most of the insanity this weekend, by being at a con (yes, think about that) and yes, I have con crud mostly because our room had no heating for over 24 hours.  (So much for getting a room and writing.)

While at the con, I found myself in the obligatory fairytale and myth panel which obligatorily attempted to go in the direction of “telling the old myths for the new society” — only it’s never for the real “new society” it’s rather to conform to this narrative where a character has to be feminist, one has to be gay, etc.

I confess to playing chaotic neutral in that panel.  Everytime the ball started towards the gutter of feminism, I punted it in another direction.

I did it not because it was offensive (though it annoys me) but because it would be boring.   I’ve been in these panels dozens of times, and could mutter the responses in my sleep.  I get bored with the services of my own religion (more and more rarely.  I must be getting old) much less the rites of a cult.

Then there was the panel where three people averred with perfect seriousness that we’re halfway through killing the planet.  Even if you get all your news from the mass media, how can you think that?  Unless of course you have no idea how big the planet is, or weren’t educated in science (which some of them were.)  And if you think that, why aren’t you putting every push possible towards space colonization?  And why do the measures you want to take to prevent global warming default to “mo’e socialism and less industry” just as it did to stop global cooling in the seventies?  And why are all of them profoundly unserious?  Years ago Greg Benford outlined ways you could cool the planet, if you really thing that’s needed, by positive change, like dumping iron fillings in the North sea.
The fact people like this never even consider such measures means that they’re not thinking about this; they don’t believe what they mouth.  They’re just mouthing it to stay on top, in good positions with the cult.  To the extent they “believe” in this bs, it’s as mantras to stop thinking.

At the same time, while I was at the con, a colleague of mine (probably between bouts of tears) posted that the way to avert any Republican getting elected ever again was to move to the benighted small towns and “educate” the locals.  This too is cult behavior.  “If only they saw the light.  We’ll go and preach.”

What do we do with this?  Civilizations have lost cults who controlled them, and reorganized, but I’m at a loss to think of any in which this happened peacefully.

I don’t think there’s that many of them, but they control the media and use it to inflate their numbers and their power.

They can’t hold on to us.  The people who called the demonstrators the Trump 2020 dancers are right.  Most of the country is looking at them like they looked at the insanity at the DNC (in sixty eight?  I was a kid) and going “Oh, hell no.”  And it’s clear from the polls that their suppression of people’s speech has simply insulated them from how mad people are at them.

They think their display of fervent belief will somehow scare us or convince us.  It does scare us, but not the way they expect.

What I don’t know is how to deprogram so many people who grew up in the progressivist cult.  I don’t know how to stop them from p*ssing off the people they demonize so much that they end up killed.

It’s not Trump they should be afraid of.  He’s in the end a rather conventional soft-left man.

But they should be wary of pushing the rest of us.  And instead they’re blissfully unaware that we exist as anything but what their cult leaders told them: backward, uneducated and evil people, who want to destroy everything they hold sacred.  Even when we were for some of those things, on principle, long before the darlings of the left were.

I’m sitting here wondering how we get the cult members to think.  It must be done, for the sake of our sanity, for the sake of our polity, for the sake of western civilization.

But I don’t know how to reach them.  I particularly don’t know how to reach them before people of less principle and more anger take the matter in their own hands.

And I’m scared.

Who ARE all these zombies?