According To Hoyt

So I shared this on Facebook.  I’m not saying I agree with it 100%. Given that “Russian businessmen” is code for “Russian Mob” and that Putin is their man, you could say Trump is as compromised as Hillary.

That said, if Trump is as compromised as Hillary, BAH.  On that point, as my mom would say “may the devil come and choose.” AKA, there is no difference.

You know my opinions, and I also know those of the three gentlemen in the video.  They might be reluctant “will vote for Trump to avoid Hillary,” but they’re not in any way shape or form unthinking Trump supporters.  They’re not unthinking anything, to be fair.  So I thought their opinions warranted listening to.

And then one of my commenters on the thread, explained to me that he wasn’t going to listen to the gentlemen because of their skin color and gender.  To be fair what he said was “Like I’m going to listen to white males, LOL.”

Mark that LOL, it is sort of a signpost.

My first reaction was “WTF?” This too is a sign post.  I have WTF wrinkles on my forehead from trying to understand the crazy things people will say in politics.  I mean, what the heck did Trump’s possible involvement with Russia have to do with gender or skin color?

If the video were about Hillary, a stupid person might think the only reason to oppose her was sexism, in which case I could see “they’re male” at least making sideways sense.  For a very dim person that is. One who really believes all the hot air that emanates from the Clinton camp re: Clinton foundation monies, Benghazi, compromising national security, etc.  I understand there are such people and have seen them (in a kind of awe, as one watches the naked mole rats, at the zoo) on Facebook.

But this had NOTHING whatsoever to do with male/female issues.

If  the video had been about Black Lives Matter, again, I could see someone saying “they should at least have a black person for perspective about what it is like to be black in America.”  (To which my answer is, “have a black person from Arab countries, for real perspective.” Never mind.)

But this was a discussion of a white male candidate, by white males, about possible involvement with evil white (and mostly male) powers.

Even if you’re a dim person who thinks that people think with their sex organs and skin, (the right name for that is sexist and racist) SURELY this would be the equivalent of having an all-black panel discussing Black Lives Matter.  Right?

I’m me, and I’ve been in a semi-pissy mood. Well, not quite.  The head cold was followed by the mother of all depressions, so that yesterday I had trouble talking myself into drinking coffee and writing was out of the question.  If you saw my deadlines, you’d know how antsy I’m getting.  So I pointed out the above, that if he believed that then he really was a stone cold racist and sexist.

What emerged was this crazy comment about how he was sure the three gentlemen had all pledged different fraternities and belonged to different country clubs.

I don’t know the background of the commenter, but I understand he’s fairly well off.  So this is a “let them eat cake” moment.  I know the backgrounds of the three men in the video and none of them pledged a fraternity and if one belongs to a country club it’s not what this commenter imagines.

What I mean to say is that what he said is as nakedly stereotyping and idiotic as saying “I bet all them darkies were sitting on their porch, eating watermelon and singing spirituals.” (And the closest I know to that would be older son, who would totally do this, if he weren’t low carb.  Seriously.  None of my black friends can sing.  Well, maybe one.  I’ve never asked him.  Didn’t come up.)

NO ONE.  NO ONE who lives in the real world can believe this bullshit.  Most of my friends are white (Duh.  It is still the majority in the US.)  Mind you, most of them could probably claim another race, if they looked into it.  But they’re white-looking.  (I haven’t looked at their census forms, and we Americans are a mixed lot.)

I have not one white male friend who fits that stereotype the commenter invoked. Hell, I don’t have a MALE friend that fits that stereotype.  Not one.  This is possibly because, as Dave Freer calls it, most of my friends are strivers.    They are from that vast American middle class that seems undifferentiated only if you don’t want to differentiate it.  Because of my age, most of them are children of what Heinlein called “the neglected children of WWII”.  Most of them are also the result of the sexual revolution, the upheavals in society in the sixties, the e-revolution, the turning away from mass manufacture in this country.

What I mean to say is that I am racking my brain and I can’t think of a single friend who grew up without at least one of these handicaps: single parent; borderline poverty or extended periods of poverty; unemployment of one or both parents; a serious health/addiction/etc issue in the household.  I don’t have any friend who attended college (about half my friends) who didn’t have issues THERE, often graduating in debt and by the skin of his teeth.

I don’t think my friends are that strange for the majority of Americans of any color in the last 40 years.  Maybe they’re Odd, but in this, from overheard conversations and my contact with the “normal world” (I wear gloves) I think they’re dead center normal.

Then there’s my generation.  We graduated in 1980 when there were no jobs.  I had more friends working temp jobs than finding “real ones.” Then things stabilized till the early 2000s when…  Let’s say I know one man who works in computers and has been continuously employed since 2001.  My husband.  All the rest are working for six months, laid off six months…

And while computers (which seems to occupy most of my generation) is traditionally unstable, the other occupations don’t seem to be beds of roses. MOST of my friends go through cyclic periods of unemployment.  This is what happens in the middle of technology upheavals.

Note I didn’t say my white friends.  This happens to ALL my friends.

Unless my commenter on facebook is of a rarely privileged breed, surely the same happens to HIS friends. So why would he think that white males have no history, that they’re all alike, having pledged fraternities and joined country clubs?  How can any human being, alive in the 21st century think that?

They can’t.  Which is why I told you to notice that “LOL”.

None of the people who harp on “white privilege” or talk about “diversity” when they mean diversity of external characteristics CAN follow their own reasoning down the rabbit hole.

Even a moderately intelligent person, with more than room temperature IQ would get that if you think putting someone of a different color/genitalia on a panel makes it more valid, you must assume everyone of the same color/genitalia thinks and works exactly the same.  In which case you have to admit you’re sexist and racist.  The worst kind, the kind who dehumanizes the “other.”

But what the commenter was doing was not thinking.

When I was very little I would pray a lot.  It wasn’t real prayer.  It was just a repetition of familiar words/rhythms to stop anxiety.  On occasion I also counted, or recited Shakespeare.  You see, I hated meeting new people or being in unfamiliar circumstances. This calmed me down and stopped me thinking whether people liked me, whether I’d done something wrong, wether–

This is all these “comments” are.  The commenter is stopping himself thinking.  The “LOL” is not an infallible clue but it’s close to it.  Whenever you hear a liberal shibboleth thrown in at random, it is almost always followed by “LOL” which is even more out of place, and definitely a mark of “I’m saying this to stop the bad thoughts, bad thoughts, bad thoughts.”

Now what in particular about the above video caused such a strong reaction, I don’t know.  If I had to guess I’d imagine that the commenter is so annoyed at Hillary as a candidate that he can’t allow himself to even hear something mildly non accusatory about Trump, without doing his own private exorcism.

Me?  I don’t care.  I don’t have a dog in this presidential race.  A pox on both their houses, etc.  BUT even I can see that yeah, on some fronts, if only because he’s not used to the GOVERNMENTAL kind of power Trump might be the least of two evils.  (Then there’s his unfathomablity.  That’s a discussion for another time, and one I don’t intend to have.)

The point is that normal, functional adults discuss things and are willing to take things into account and maybe even change their opinions somewhat.

Children, the indoctrinated and our so called intelligentsia, OTOH, cannot afford to think.  Thinking would reveal all the cracks in their self-contradictory philosophy

So they just scream things about race and gender and LOL.

Not realizing that here on the streets we are every day less and less amused at being told to eat cake.

Blame this on the head cold I’m almost over (truly) and the mild fever that accompanied it.  Blame it on the change of weather, that had me getting up in the middle of the night to close windows that had, sudden and inexplicably, become openings to the arctic.

Blame it on my dad giving me all the books of legends of the region that he could gather on short notice.  Yes, I also got books on the history of the City of Porto and surroundings, but when it comes to Fantasy it is easiest to dip into the legends.  And these legends are full of changing times and changing circumstances, of the tumultuous succession of Romans and Swabians, Moors and Christian crusaders, absolutist and parliamentary monarchists, republicans, French invaders and British liberators.

Most of the legends are just that, legends, though I suspect a lot of what the guys writing these books ignored is that that type of popular memory might be wrong in the particulars (So it wasn’t that particular Caliph, but something happened here, perhaps a hundred years before or since.  I know from my own experience it’s very easy to confuse stories your grandmother told you for things that happened in her life time and that you find, once you look into it, had to have happened in the time of her grandmother’s grandmother, and which she told me as had been told to her.  — Confusing how many grandmothers ago is particularly easy since her introduction was always “My grandmother told me that once upon a time, this street–“) but is often right in the details, particularly when various local legends chain on each other to form a coherent whole.  (A Moorish defeat in one place, leading to a Moorish route passing through the next village, leading to–)

Anyway, legends seem to cluster around times of great change, times in which lots of things were happening, times of turmoil and movement.  As did, I’ll admit, my grandmother’s stories.  Humans seem to have an innate predilection for stories in which stuff happens.  (I know.  It’s astounding, right?  It’s almost like there’s a difference between stories and sermons.)

My favorite — I’ve been crashing early, but having trouble sleeping, so chain-reading these little one to two page stories, until I physically can’t hold the book up — was the story of Wellington taking the city of Porto and eating the lunch originally cooked for Soult.  While Soult wasn’t waiting around to eat it, and had prepared to leave the city in the morning, it is easy to believe the servants of the house he was occupying went around preparing lunch, as they would have done, anyway.  And of course Wellington would have eaten it, and probably toasted his victory, as befits the gallant spirit of the age where being seen to do something with flare was even better than “just” doing it.

Then this morning, I woke up and caught up with Mad Genius Club, where Dave Freer has written a post about the changing state of our field. (Last Monday.) Changing Spots.

In it he notes many things I have myself realized, including that it’s d*mn hard to plan for the future in this time of turmoil we’re entering.

And it’s not just in publishing, of course.  If it were just in publishing it would be easy.  One could after all fall back on the rest of the “stable world.”

It’s not just in publishing.

It’s everywhere we look, and part of this is that we’re in the middle of one of those macro conceptual changes the human race goes through now and then.  You know, nomadic to agriculture, agriculture to cottage industry trade/cottage industry-trade to industrial/ industrial to mass production/mass production to personal-individual-small scale.

All of those are accompanied by equivalent turmoil: political, scientific (as the conceptual change spreads), territorial.

All of them.

So, things to remember:

-It is only beginning.  Someone on Facebook said we’re living through the period of history summarized under “causes leading to” before the map gets all arrowy and scary.  And they’re not wrong.  What I have a feeling though, is that we’re living through “Factors contributing to” the “causes leading to.”
Things are still working themselves out, and the economic fall out of what seemed like the relatively simple innovation of instant communication around the world and portability of data hasn’t fully worked itself through yet.  When will it work itself through?  When you see land in “states with no jobs” pick up on sales.  You’ll know we’re halfway through the transformation when pay scales start to balance between KS and NYC. (Not quite.  Very large cities will always have a pull of their own.  It’s the mid range cities that will balance and empty. But you know what I mean.)  You’ll now we’re almost done when telecommuting is the ASSUMPTION for any job that can be done this way.  I don’t expect it in my lifetime.

-The very beginning is enough for craziness and dislocation, war and rumors of war.  Trust me.  So, we’re living through that.

-The Future won’t look anything like those people who think history comes with an arrow think it will look.  It also won’t look like the dreams of those who wish to hurtle back intot he beginning of the 20th century.  (No, seriously.  They’re the romantics of the present day, wearing their retro chic opinions like people who built “ruins” on their estates.)  It’s an hysterical reaction of scared children in either case.

-It is entirely possible that the future won’t look like anything any of us CAN conceptualize.  Start working through the consequences of a truly decentralized, not-space-attached workforce.  Real estate? Dating? Family structure? Education?  If you really think it through it will make your head spin, particularly as you get into the consequences of the consequences.

So, what to do?  Try not to get too excited.  Stay flexible.  Be able and ready to jump.  Don’t try to define the present based on the past: it’s likely not to work too well.

In practical terms: take care of yourself.  Make connections. Teach your children well.  Don’t let yourself be gaslighted. Learn.  The more options you have the better.  And stay awake. Falling asleep is to fall behind and lose touch with what’s happening.

Most of all don’t give up.  There is a good chance the future will be better than the past (though some disgusting interludes do occur.) and if we don’t live to see it, other humans will.

May you thrive in interesting times.

 

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about a project where it all is going wrong.  Look, guys, when you’re brought in to finish a project that has had at least two other teams on it, and which isn’t in any way started, you really shouldn’t be surprised when it is a cluster… bunny.

But my friend was.  Being an hyper-competent and hyper-responsible person, he was blaming himself.  I had to point out that sometimes I think half of the work done in the world is done between incompetence and accidental f*ck up, and we should be grateful when ANYTHING gets done, no matter how picayune.

Part of this is that humans seem to come mostly in two flavors, neither of which is “reasonable.”  You have the ones who blame themselves for everything and the ones who admit responsibility for nothing.  Neither is perfect to work with, as the ones who self-blame heap more and more responsibility onto themselves, and in the end either crack, become unable to focus, or end up carrying the work that other people won’t do, and thereby getting other people used to doing less and less work.

Then there is sheer chance.  It’s not that I decided to take a break from work the last four years, really, it’s that first I was very ill and then I was moving.  I imagine I’ve been no end of fun to work with for this time, as things seem to drop off my head as though it had sieve-like holes.

Yeah, sure, sometimes chance works the other way, and everything aligns perfectly.  Then we call it luck, and it’s much rarer.

One of those instances of luck seems to have been “the miracle at Philladelphia” and we’ve been dealing with chance ever since, and has Murphy been having fun.

All this is relevant, as most people who hang here, if I read them right, are the type to self blame.  So I’m going to say it once and for all “this horrible election season is not your fault.”

Sure there are things you could have/should have/might have done, including (as I remind myself) being a lot ruder to liberals in the eighties, and not letting them control public spaces.  However, remember back down the “shut down” techniques were still very effective, their controlling most of the media, and at least in some fields, it would have ended your ability to support yourself.

But most of what you could’a, should’a, might’a done is marginal and around the edges and probably wouldn’t have changed anything but your personal life.  The leftist dominance we’re fighting started long before we — any of us — were born.  Even in the US it started at least 100 years ago.

Seen another way, it is a new battle in an eternal war, that war for individual will and dignity against the forces of the “lords” (aristos, government, etc) who would make us all widgets and control us, the better to impose their vision (or simply to enjoy power over us.)

Old wars are not won quickly, or really ever truly won.  Yeah, this battle, this year is going very badly, but there are signs of hope.  Keep fighting and we’ll enjoy dominance, for a while.  But never relax, because liberty is antithetical to the social ape, and in the end half the people at least will try to crawl back under the boot of the oppressor.

But you can always fight.  And no one can make you give up.

Don’t give up.

• Under the clurterf*ck, mostly caused by chance, you know that Through Fire was one of those, with its release delayed twice, and then e-stealth released before being released in paper.  I’m sure this will do wonders for those numbers in computers, in bookstores.
  Remember if you’d pre-ordered before the delays, it won’t be shipped to you and you have to re-buy.  This is the end of the extremely awkward promo.  Buy if you can, and re-order if you pre-ordered early.
  

 

 

1- The most effective way to kill a baby is to leave the window near his crib open at night.  He’ll be stiff and dead by morning.  (Sorry Robert and Marsh.  I keel you a lot.)

2- If you work too hard you’ll get a “drained brain.”

This will cause you to sing New York New York at your important meeting, then pass out.

3- You can kill any number of people on your way to success, and no one will notice, not even enough to have rumors about you.

4- Memory loss is WAY common.  I mean, you walk out your door and forget your name every other morning.

5- While suffering from memory loss you’ll fall in love with someone you hate.  EVERY TIME.  Preferably someone you hate who is married to one of your best friends.

6- The best way to avenge yourself on someone for anything ranging from trivial to heinous, is to create a really complicated plan that will eventually bring about their downfall.  Or yours.  Or… nothing, really.  But you have to try it.  Holy Plot Dictates so.

7- If a priest shows up in any role but villain, you’re watching a Portuguese soap opera.

8- Priests, Doctors, lawyers, anyone in an advisory capacity will come to your house to discuss your current problem, even if objectively he/she can do nothing about it.

9- Your priest will come to your house and tell you to be strong when you’re attracted to someone-not-your-husband.  It’s amazing they have time to do anything else, including breathing.

10- the most menial occupations pay enough for palatial digs.  This is shared with American sitcoms, I guess.

• Sorry to fob you off with a quick post.  Third supplemental son (we had him by adoption), practice daughter in law and grandkids have just left, and I’m still having trouble breathing.  Older son has suggested we go to the zoo and take a slow walk,to stop me opening dusty boxes and worsening my cold.

The head cold I’ve been fending off since we landed caught up with me.  Since we still have older, adopted son and wife and grandkids here, I spent my energy on being sociable.

Sorry.  Post tomorrow.

WHAT ROUGH PROMO, ITS TIME COME AROUND AT LAST by Free Range Oyster

Alma Boykin

Ivan the Purrable and the Twelfth Dancing Princess

An Alexi’s Tale Novella

In Russian tales, the third son is the clever one, the hard-working one, the one who gets the victory, the girl, and usually a kingdom. And then there’s Steve…

Stavros George doesn’t believe in Baba Yaga or Chernobog. Steve believes in structural engineering, materials science, and that people need to tip their pizza delivery guys more. Too bad for Steve that Baba Yaga and Koschai the Deathless believe in him.

It will take all three of Alexi’s children’s bravery, strength, and wits, and Ivan the Purrable, to get out of this mess. And Steve had better hope his siblings reach him before Ivan does. Because there’s no tuna in Chernobog’s realm and Ivan’s seriously ticked.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Perilous Chance

If only Mama were well. If only Papa were… not like this.

Clary needs a miracle, but wonders rarely step forth to solve life’s problems. While her mama lies wearily abed and her papa spends the day… elsewhere, Clary struggles to look after her younger sister and their baby brother. And longs for more than making do. If only.

Then, one spring morning, Clary and Elspeth visit the old bramble-grown quarry to pick wild cabbage leaves. Hidden within the rock’s cleft, Clary’s miracle awaits. But this miracle sports razor-sharp talons, world-shaking power, ravenous hunger, and a troll-witch to guard its sleep. When it cracks the egg, will Clary survive?

Something wondrous this way comes!

Michael A. Hooten

We Are All Enlisted

Peter Wright joined the Navy thinking that he could do his time in a nice, quiet billet somewhere on Earth. The Navy had other ideas. When the asteroid miners claimed their independence, Peter finds himself getting sent to space on a warship headed straight into the combat zone. He has to get used to everything: zero gravity, standing watch, and being the only Earth-born in his crew. And he has to be ready for the biggest battle the solar system has ever seen.

Cedar Sanderson

Jade Star

Tanager Book 1

Jade is determined to die. She is old, and useless, when she points her tiny subspace craft at the cold stars. She wakes up in the care of others who refuse to grant her death, and instead give her a new mission in life.

Jade isn’t happy, and she only gets angrier when she learns that her mysterious new home hides a horrible secret. It’s time for this old lady to kick butt and take names. Aliens, death, destruction… nothing trumps the fierce old woman who is protecting her family.

I don’t remember how or when my brother taught me the saying “distance and death dress everyone in his best smile.”  I know that I’ve known it, seemingly all my life.

As you guys know I’ve been reading about Islam.  I’ve also been meditating on the glamour that Europe has always exerted over a certain number of Americans, a glamour all out of proportion to what it actually is and how people actually live there.  And of course on many people’s (particularly leftists’) view of cultures that are completely different from ours, like China, or even Islam, as being inherently superior, BECAUSE they’re different.

The funny thing about that sort of effect is that it rarely holds up on close acquaintance.

Send an Europhile to Europe for two or three weeks, and they’ll come back raving about the wonders and beauties of the old country.  Send them for three months, and they’ll come back complaining about such things as restricted access to electricity, inability to turn on a hotel’s air-conditioning if you don’t have the key in the right slot (that’s right, so that you can’t cool the room while you’re absent) and all sorts of “the elites know best” measures that in general make life in Europe less comfortable, less easy, and more fraught. Mind you, this might, or might not, make him recant his previous expressions of love for Europe and disdain for the US.  Most people hate saying they were wrong, so instead they’ll come back talking about the good (or at least unverifiable) points of Europe, while admitting they have “some issues.”  But they will never again say they want to live there, and they might find good reasons not to have another extended visit.

And then there’s the view from the other side.  We never get dressed in our best smile.  Partly because the US is never fully absent.  Our specific cultural gravity makes a hole in the consciousness of everyone in the world.

But because of the gushing and crazy of our europhiles, genuine Europeans believe, quite logically, that they have it way better.  This is fostered by their kleptocratic elites who don’t want them throwing off socialist-fostered death panels and therefore convince them of nonsense such that poor people die in the streets here.  But wait, there’s more: because they know us only through our movies, which tend to ignore the stable and boring parts of the country, and through our europhile media, they genuinely believe that everyone here gets raped and mugged once a week.  And then there’s funnier stuff: they actually do believe we have only one type of cheese, that there’s no access to say specialized books, that all Americans are semi-literate (yes, I know, but by that standard so are Europeans) and that oh… we live under a military dictatorship with curfew (I kid you not) or — my favorite — that pokeyman Go was banned in the first week, because it was causing deaths (wait, what?)

Other things they believe include that our media is controlled and that if you say anything bad about the US (other than the patently truthful, like people dying in the street, natch) the government will put you in some sort of Bastille.

I’d find all this funny if it weren’t in fact tragic.

The assumption of superiority from Europe only reinforces the star-struck on our side, leading them to wish to live in that paradise they hear described as so wonderful.

Mind you, there are (several) worse places to live than Europe.  And it is probably my tendency not to LISTEN well that causes me to want to say “you and whose army” when I see them controlling energy consumption, fat intake, salt, etc.  (Yeah, I know, NYC — rolls eyes) because the elites CLEARLY know better than the people.

They have a patrimony we just lack, a lot of beautiful old things, from architecture to various art artifacts.  Mind you, those are things from their ancestors, and when they were produced new were derided by the truly cognoscenti, just like our stuff is.  The entire Romantic movement was designed to sneer at modernity of their time, which to us right now seems quite romantic itself.

Also Art in Europe seems to amount to a large tizzy-fit throwing, something along the lines of “we’re surrounded by such beautiful stuff we can’t match it, so let us, instead, make simplistic crude things that tweak the tradition.”  Like our own intellectuals they seem unable to understand that those who would get upset at crassness or rudeness died about a century ago, and that the current intellectual establishment in Europe is exactly people like them, striking a pose and doing their best to speak power to truth, while acting daring.

That’s fine.  They’re not the first or the last wave of cultural decadence to sweep the continent and there’s a good chance that they’ll recover.  Eventually.

But there is a difference between countries run for the comfort and convenience of the elites and countries run for the comfort and convenience of the buying public.  It means that the buying public has more choice and more ability to decide what they want to spend their geld on in the second, which leads to a life that’s more comfortable, more innovative, and overall just NICER in the day to day sense than what obtains in countries run by “those who know best” for “your own good.”

Yeah, I know, I am an ugly American, willing to trade massive Cathedrals (Hey, that’s why Himself in His infinite wisdom gave us Google Earth and 3-d tours on the computer) beautiful palaces and rare objects d’art (not to mention exquisite little bistros) for a store that’s open 24/7, so I can shop whenever, and which has a greater selection of left hand screwdrivers than I could buy in a month of Sundays.

But in the end, when you want that left hand screw driver, or breakfast at three in the morning, it is more comfortable to know you can get it.  Sure, you could go look at a Botticelli in the day, but how will that fix your unscrewed toilet seat?

And I have enough Roman ancestry never to have understood why we can’t have both: art, and comfort, style and commerce.  Doesn’t one feed the other?

The dichotomy between the two is something that can only be maintained at a distance, by people who have never experienced Europe (if they’re Americans) or America (if they’re Europeans.)

Yeah, distance doesn’t dress us in our best smile, but I don’t care.  I’ll take the joys and little conveniences of life here, and be grateful everyday.  L’amour de l’art can wait.

 

We have company.  To be exact, our child-by-late-adoption (as in he was grown and married.  Also, he has parents, but he acts so much like our kids we decided he was 3rd son,) his wife and practice-grandchildren are spending time with us.  This means I spent the last six hours in the kitchen, talking, which is why this is so late.

I also didn’t feel like writing a post.  So I thought I’d put up from pictures from the visit to Portugal’s military museum.  Keep in mind most of the pictures didn’t come out very … clearly, and though I have notes, we don’t always have the sign with the thing, so it’s not as informative (and it’s more challenging) than intended.  However, I thought it might amuse you if I posted some of them.
Unfortunately NONE of the miniature pictures came out :/

UPDATE: Okay, I am an idiot. As I was lamenting that I hadn’t got most pictures, including the Lewis Gun, I realized that I was looking in the wrong folder. Mwahahahahahahahha!
Also, btw, the Portuguese originals were made at the Fabrica do braco de prata. (Factory of the silver arm.” THERE will be some supernatural explanation for this. (Oh, and dad got me 3 books called “legends of Porto.” (Actually “weird Porto” but…) Yes, there will be snippets of Grant goes to Portugal as soon as I’m marginally more organized. I figure house won’t be DONE till December, but I need it to the point I can CLEAN.)  The first Lewis is the one I got to fondle. :)
The miniatures are just a few to see the extent of it.  One of the miniature displays are one of the fictional battles of Conan the Barbarian.  I mean, I’m sure Larry Correia could spend three days at the museum JUST looking at the miniatures ;)

First of all, sorry this is so late, but my husband was updating my machine to Windows 10 so it was not reachable/useable by me, and I occupied myself with unpacking suitcases (one to go.  Since we spent yesterday out of the house dealing with pets/house/and such I only could do it today.) On windows ten, rest assured this was done over my kicking and screaming.  Mostly because not only do I hate having my work space disrupted, but because it did some really weird stuff to my travel computer, including making it impossible to connect to my phone as a hotspot.  So connecting from Portugal had to be done over a VM in windows seven, which I could not write on, as it didn’t have access to Word.  And it wouldn’t let me switch back and forth easily.

Anyway…

Because I’m that kind of a cheerful person, and because (I think I’ve mentioned it here once or twice that in stressful situations I read non-fiction because it needs less emotional involvement than fiction.  And though the trip back — economy premium on Lufthansa is more like what we think of as first class, except for the chair not FULLY reclining — was quite pleasant, I was sleep deprived and generally depressed/exhausted.)

What I’ve been reading a debunking of the myths of the “Convivencia” paradise that Al Andalus and generally Islamic Hispania is supposed to have been.

It’s not exactly a shock to me.  First of all, my preferred reading, as soon as I could read, was history, most of it written in the early 20th century, and a lot of it local histories or histories of regions of Portugal and Spain. I won’t say that the authors universally rejected the myth of Islam as a civilizing/science-bearing force.  I will say that when they applied it (in elementary school we were forced to memorize the improvements the Arabs brought to the peninsula — we did that with each invader, and boy did the area get invaded — almonds, pillows (al-mofadas), the sort of fountains that spout by themselves (you build them by making the water gravity fed from above where you want it to spout.  I’m explaining very badly, but I am still not fully sleep recovered, and there’s a hole where the name for the fountains should be, orange trees.  There might be something about the way oxen were yoked, but I doubt it. Oh, yeah, the way we write our numbers.) it left me curiously unconvinced.

It was little things, you see, having actually been born/grown up in one of the areas/near the area where this supposed paradise existed.  yeah, sure, the North of Portugal got off lightly.  We were freed fairly early on (we were a crusade land and were freed mostly by French crusaders, one of whom, having married a daughter of the king of Castille became father to our first king.)

More specifically, though there are no specific histories of the village (duh) I heard more than once from people I trusted, that we were the sort of place that got by with one or two Berber supervisors, and local toadies… er, I mean functionaries.

But Portugal is a small place, and I went to other places.  And there are things…

In a truly multicultural society, with REAL religious tolerance, the local church wouldn’t have been commandeered as a mosque (apparently this was a standard humiliation technique for captive populations.)  It was returned to use as a church, and has been such for centuries now, the interior having been ALMOST completely scrubbed clean of arabesque decorations.  ALMOST.  Why almost, you ask?  The wall near the door, around the door, where you can’t avoid seeing them as you leave, was left “decorated.”  It was left so that people would never forget.

Then there are churches that were pulled down by the Muslim invaders, and into which people were buried through all the years of occupation.  It was the only consecrated ground around, you see.  The poor bastards weren’t allowed to have their own religious cemeteries/bury their dead in peace.  Oh, and this was often in areas that were considered solid Muslim (this ties in to something else later on, so stay tuned.)

But there is more than that.  I never BOUGHT the idea that Muslims were kind and gentle overlords for a more bone-deep reason.

Look, people with ancient cultures all in the same place REMEMBER.  They remember in ways that no academic gaslighting, no professorial assurances to the contrary can erase.  For instance, do you know how you can tell which Roman emperors were considered decent by the local people?  they give their names to their kids.  Still.  Trajan, for instance.  And then there are the bad ones, that are also still remembered, but whose names are given to dogs (Nero.)  And then there are the unspeakable ones.  Neither child nor dog is named Caligula.

Well, in the local area, you find some kids named Ibrahim (though that is a bit confusing since local custom does weird things to spelling) but NONE named Mohammed.  (This might be different now, since the Conquista II — this time we pretend to be innofensive — is in progress.)  But back then there were no Moes around.

And that is plain weird in a place that has forgotten nothing.  (Seriously, there are still people around named after Roman gods, because the name runs in the family.  And Greek Heroes.  And Carthaginian heroes, too. My brother went to school with Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and a bunch of Roman historical names — I want to say Cipius, but I’m probably wrong.)

So I never bought it.  There were also very old writings with casual throw-away lines that made you go “Uh.”

None of the authors I read was trying to sell the Islamic occupation as a paradise, mind, though one of them did his best to try to convince us it was better than the Romans (maybe better than the falling apart Roman empire, but even then I doubt it.  Look, there simply weren’t enough people, at the end of 500 years of occupation, (roughly, though I REMEMBER hearing a linguist say the village was settled in the 4th century BC.  I HAVE to be wrong — or he was — since I know the village was on the wrong side of the punic wars) Roman citizenship and intermarrying who didn’t CONSIDER themselves Romans, so trying to portray the locals as impatiently waiting for someone to free them from the Romans and turning gratefully to Islam is coming it on rather too strongly. Even if there had been Carthaginian sentiment still around.  (More on that later.)  OTOH more importantly if the locals wanted to be freed from Rome that had already happened since the region had been invaded by the Suebians.  Anyway.  His thesis didn’t pass muster.

I didn’t meet the “Andalusia and more broadly Islamic Hispania was a paradise” thesis until the late eighties in, of all things, a Romance novel.

I wasn’t/still am not a romance reader, but the local Sunday supplement promoted this woman as a local writer, and I thought I might run into her somewhere (heaven knows where, since I never went anywhere writers gathered, back then) and might as well read her book.  Also it was historical and set in the peninsula, which peaked my curiosity.

The book was … very odd.  It starts with a Christian girl watching a Muslim man being burned (circa the 11th? century, dating by the royalty involved) and he throws her a little, beautiful miniature koran he wears at his neck (?) She goes on to (while hiding this) marry a (of course) brutal and abusive Lord, from whom she’s saved one night, when she’s kidnapped to become a Moorish sex slave.

Muslim culture and Al Andalus is portrayed throughout as having near modern sensibilities, hygiene, etc.  Think NYC but it raids for slaves, and there is polygamy — both of these things danced around so fast if you weren’t paying attention you might think they weren’t there.

Anyway, our kidnapped noblewoman becomes a wife of a Muslim Lord who is in all effects a sweet, gentle modern man, and she falls in love with him and converts, and it ends with a little thing about their grandchildren running to the North of Africa from the onslaught of the reconquista.

It was like reading about a parallel universe.  Oh, sure, there were some fulminating things written against bathing by less than sane hermits (and some Church fathers) but the middle ages were not nearly as dirty as we tend to think, and Christians still averaged about a bath a week, which is what populations today, who have no running hot water/central heating do, with washing of hands, face, and other crucial parts every day.  (What mom called a cat-bath.  No it doesn’t leave you feeling as clean as a full body shower, but it keeps you decently socially acceptable.)

Oh, sure, some Medieval Lords abused their wives, but so did the Muslim men of the time (and still, in mostly Muslim countries) since wife-beating is enshrined in the religion and culture.

And no, polygamy is never better for women, WTF?

Also, the historic personages I KNEW were not precisely portrayed recognizably.

Oh, also, they didn’t at that time burn Muslims for being Muslims.  The area she set the thing in (and I can’t remember where exactly, sorry, but it was in Portugal — which btw, made her ending up in Al Andalus semi-implausible — was at the time a frontier between the two civilizations.  Think of it as the old west.  There were some Muslims on the Christian side, under their parole (it was a couple of centuries before they became suspicious-persons and were forced to convert, deported, whatever) and there were some Christians on the other side (as dhimmis by that time, mostly) and there were starcrossed romances and what not, but what there wasn’t that early on was an inquisition, which crazy writer chick thought there had been. (And the inquisition didn’t burn Muslims for being Muslims, but for breaking a supposed conversion– Never mind.)

I thought this was an isolated case of insane writer (I never did meet her) and shrugged it off.

It wasn’t until the late nineties that I started running into this versoin of “but it was a paradise” everywhere.  And I started getting seriously disturbed.  I suspected (apparently rightly) that Saudi-Arabian money was softening the West to the idea that Islam was benevolent and civilized.

(By the way, no invaders at the time were benevolent and civilized, but Islam brought with it some of the dysfunctions only an invading desert-culture could bring in.  Like a tendency to cut down all trees and turn entire areas into deserts.  Or a disdain for work, and a preference for plunder and baksheesh.  Or–)

If this book — The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandes Morera — is right, then the pattern of invasion was much like we’re seeing, a lot of it having to do with the West being considered a soft target, while the West considered Islam either not that much of a threat (at the beginning, when treaties were attempted) or being softened by continuous acts of terror (like killing entire villages) so that some surrendered preemptively (not that we’ve seen anything about that.)

And the counter-offensive only got going when half the lands were destroyed and the aggression couldn’t be hidden/ignored any more.  (Part of it being that life standards in the Islamic areas steadily declined, since the dhimmis are supposed to be the ones working/paying for the Muslims to live in style, but over time dhimmis either “convert” truly or not, or run away, leaving the terminal Muslim state rather like the terminal socialist state.)

So, what can we do?

The only way we can get out of this semi-peacefully is to have Islam reform.  This won’t stop crazy acts of terror, but if Muslims can be convinced they can’t win this, and that it’s in their best interests to be decent human beings who don’t bomb and don’t support bombing (or killing, or sexually assaulting, or) other people of different religions, and there is an alternative that’s loud and open and isn’t afraid of communal backlash (the reason most decent Muslims don’t talk against acts of terror is that they are also afraid of the crazies) eventually it will become the predominant form in the west and community pressure will go the other way.

What are the chances of that? Less than zero, I’d guess.

First of all, our genuinely pluralistic society CAN’T demand forcible conversions.  (And to what would we convert them, anyway, given we are a pluralistic society.)

Second, forcible conversions SORT OF work.  Given enough time families and even regions forget they were ever anything else.  But only sort of.  See above where I said the defeat of Carthage in the punic war might have meant local sympathy with Islam (from same general region) and doors open when they arrived as invaders.  And then there is Algarve, the last province of Portugal to be freed, and a rather pleasant/touristic sea side enclave.  People there still listened to Arabic radio stations, when I vacationed there in more innocent times.  I overheard a weird remark about people down there more or less mumbling about supporting Jihad.  I hope the person was joking.  BUT they might not have been. I find it interesting that suddenly the North of Portugal, which has yes, historical charm and depth, but also has the climate of Scotland in Winter and California without air conditioning in summer is now a touristic hub, more so than the South.  I wonder if hearing Arabic singing worries tourists.  (It would worry me.)

And short of a really hard ass position, the sort of thing a civilized and decent people don’t do — like killing everyone from the same area as a terrorist, or everyone who might have known, or… — we are on a train that has only one stop.

Eventually — it took centuries before, I don’t think it will take as long now, but it might take another decade or two.  Less if the attacks keep coming closer together — the West will lose patience.  And this time we do have weapons that mean predominantly Muslim areas simply stop existing.

We are in fact, trying to convince Muslims to allow us to let them live.

And it’s not going well.

And the last thing we need — the very last thing — about this as about communism or socialism, we can afford is to be gaslighted by an industrial/media/entertainment/educational complex who is on no one’s side but theirs.

Because if we are, then when we lose patience we’re going to lose patience harder and more thoroughly and the world that emerges will be remarkably short on “convivencia” not just for Muslims (who might have all but stopped existing) but for everyone non-standard or who sticks out.

And that’s not a world I wish for my descendants.

So its time to start seeing past the lies, even when they’re so thick around us we see nothing else.  And start plotting our course with open eyes.

Even when it’s unpleasant.

 

So, the Hoyts are back in town.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I wrote at most 1k words while out of town.  Mostly because of heat.  We were clocking in the eighties and nineties.  Okay, nothing weird for CO at this time, but 50% humidity or better, and local culture hates fans.

We actually don’t have air conditioning in the new house.  This will be fixed once I finish Revenge and get paid.  It will go to that, mostly.  BUT even without air conditioning, we’re a mile high, which means we can open all the windows at night.  And we have frigging airplane-sized fans moving the air, so even in the heat of day it’s not that bad.

With nineties, high humidity and no air movement, I was sweating like being in a shower CONSTANTLY and at night, I just couldn’t sleep.  My own skin touching my skin HURT.  I was in a constant state of sleep deprival.

Maybe that’s why this trip was sort of a midlife crisis rolled into two weeks.

I know this will sound daft, but I didn’t realize that when I moved away to pursue… well, my life, I was cutting drastically down on the amount of help and support I could give my parents as they aged.  They don’t really need it yet — not really — rather they’ve felt stymied by not being able to help me, at least to the extent of taking the kids so I could work on my career when I was younger.

You see, Portugal is … tribal?  Clannish is more like.  Tribal too, but not as much as other societies.  It was part of my parents’ duties to further my progress in my chosen career and they really couldn’t do that, except by sending us gifts which sometimes kept their grandkids fed, but which to them is neither enough nor the form they would have chosen.

I’ll confess part of me wishes I could have sent the kids over in Summer when they were late elementary through high school.  I probably would have done it, if it weren’t for 9/11.  9/11 meant I’d have kitten fits putting the kids on a plane without me.  I’m also not sure how either of my independent-minded not great at reading different cultures kids would have done.  I think my older son would have got it, but the younger would have spent a lot of time speaking the unspeakable, so to put it.

Anyway, what’s done is done, and can’t be undone, and regrets won’t mend anything.

Weirder and more revealing was my realizing — now I’m about the age she was when I left — that my mom does love me.  She just has issues of her own, which makes expressing that very hard.  She spends a lot of time talking through forcing me to accept gifts and buying me inadvisable food.  If you’re sitting there saying “Duh, of course your mother loves you” you don’t understand.  I spent most of my life there fighting mom, and absolutely convinced she loathed me.  There’s reasons for that and issues I will not go into in a public blog.  BUT … yeah, she loves me.

And we still can’t live together.  Give me another week there, and we’d be at each other’s throats just like when I was a teen.  Part of it is that mom lives within certain parameters and that I was born with fists clenched and disposed to ask “You and whose army?” even at sensible solutions, much less at weird, culturally dictated ones.  Just an example, before the big family party, I was cautioned not to talk to anyone about my work.  Now, look, mom has done this before, where she threw herself across a big room when someone asked “so what do you do for a living?” and yelled “she’s a housewife” before I could open my mouth.  This time — I’m 53, and I have very little space for nonsense in my life anymore — I said “WHY?”  And she looked confused and blinked and said, “They’ll say your husband doesn’t make enough to support you.”  I appreciate her attempts at protecting my husband’s honor, and hell, she might even be right for the village grapevine, but gods above, she’ll never get that “we won a million dollars in the lottery” would be followed by “cool, more time to write.”

So, my internal parameters have shifted (it’s nice to know she loves me) but it doesn’t change anything.

The whole mid-life crisis bottomed out on the plane home, probably because I hadn’t slept in 20 hours and had slept no more than 4 hours a night for two weeks before that.  I went into this big depression because I felt like I had — to put it in a  weird but the only way I can — “lost me.”

I don’t know how to explain this.  I didn’t regret moving.  I didn’t regret my marriage, and I’ll never regret the boys, but I felt like I was holding two halves of me, and I couldn’t make them meet in the middle.

Part of this is that I met a lot of me in airports.  Slim Portuguese girls with adidas bags on their shoulders, rushing along.

But understand 99.9% of them will go back and live quietly wherever they came from, in the expected path.

Portuguese immigrate, sure, but usually as couples.  And there the big thing is “don’t let the kids marry abroad or you can never return.”  And if single males immigrate, they usually come back, marry a local girl, settle down.  Or at least (like a cousin of mine who married an Englishwoman) they send their kids back.

It’s not a normal thing for Portuguese Women to go away and not return, and it’s even less normal to BECOME something else.

And on the plane, in the midst of a depressive crisis I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the two halves.  It took older son noticing I was crying and starting with twenty questions, until he elicited that I could FAKE fitting in Portugal when I was young, not now, but I always felt like an exile.

He says the way to reconcile it is simple.  I just was an American born tragically abroad.  If that requires pre-existence of the soul, so be it.  If it requires my being a genetic freak, so be it.

He says I am what I am and shouldn’t feel the need to justify it.  And perhaps he’s right, even if I still feel guilty I couldn’t be what family and tribe wanted of me.

As for the more material regret: My parents are well, but I can see the bend in the road.  I’d like to be able to visit them every year for the next ten years.

Yes, you know it, that means I must make a lot more money.

So, I’ll go unpack bags, then unpack boxes.  And then work.

I guess this midlife crisis ends where they all do: I am what I am.  I don’t regret my major decisions (Oh, some of the details, but who doesn’t?)  Now I’ll make the best of what I have.

It is perhaps symbolic that we returned home on the day of my civil ceremony anniversary, when Dan and I got legally married in York County Courthouse in South Carolina, so it would make getting religiously married back in Portugal six months later, easier.

Those promises I made?  Best thing I ever did, even if it send me careening down a path my younger self would not be able to understand.

All is as it should be.