According To Hoyt

A Modest Proposal – Kate Paulk

A Modest Proposal (With apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Given the appalling decision-making powers of the political elites, and the equally appalling spectacle displayed by the recent primary contests in this nation, it becomes essential to propose a simple solution to the destruction of our essential liberties by means of a simple proposal designed to respect the disabilities of those responsible for such poor choices while enabling those of us retaining the capacity for independent thought to continue to enjoy our freedom without doing harm to any other free person.
Whereas the Thirteenth Amendment forbids involuntary servitude of any form save as penalty for commission of a crime, it becomes us to enact involuntary servitude as the penalty for the following crimes:
The offering of; and acceptance of bribes, be they in the form of lobbyist ‘gifts’, financial remuneration, quid-pro-quo understandings, or any other action commonly understood as corrupt.
The use of blackmail; such that a person would reasonably fear for his reputation upon public knowledge of an act that is both legal and meets common understanding of ethics.

That the blackmail of an unconvicted guilty party should expose the guilt and enable prosecution may be considered a fortuitous event.

That the act of knowingly accumulating debt for which payment in full can never be made be considered an act of fraud, and as such, subject to penal servitude similar to that for corruption and blackmail seems only reasonable, and may, with judicious use of auction facilities, assist in the reclamation of this nation’s alarming foreign debt.

We understand that this may cause hardship to those unaccustomed to labor, yet we consider this to be advantageous; in that those most likely to find themselves sentenced to auction are those who, by their decisions and actions, have demonstrated that they are wholly in favor of slavery and desire nothing so much as a benevolent master to serve.
We wish them good fortune in finding such a paragon.

Because I’ve been busy with house (groan) matters and trying to write short stories in the cracks between (they’re due) I have been reading one of those interminable collections of traditional fairytales.  See, I need to read something while cooking or walking on the treadmill, or such, but it can’t be anything long or engaging, because otherwise I won’t get my work done.

One of the things that struck me about the fairytales is that people are born to be what they are.  Sure, sure, there are tests (usually three) sometimes (not always) but even then it’s never at doubt that the chosen one will manage all trials.

Some time ago I was talking to a friend about this (no longer remember whom) and he said yeah, in Heinlein books the kids/heroes had to work for it.  And were often very bad at it (Johnny Rico and math, for ex) but in modern fantasies (Harry Potter — though at least she put him through trials), and even most other YA, you are “the chosen one” and therefore it falls to you without being a “battler” as Dave Freer puts it.

Which brings me to the topic of this: it used to be America as a pioneer culture admired the battlers.  The from-rags-to-riches story was the American story and people at least pretended to it, even if not quite true.  People admired those who sometimes fell a lot of times in the effort to reach the summit (say, Abraham Lincoln.)

I don’t know when this started changing.  Look, the fairy tales are a reflection of the society they were created in, a society where though social mobility existed (particularly after the Black Death) it wasn’t supposed to.  The idea was that G-d placed you in the strata of society you were supposed to be in, and your qualities fit that place.  So the stories talked about the naturally brilliant son, the beautiful daughter, etc.  And though they were often born poor they were “blessed” and “Fated” to succeed.  (Which might also be a way to cope with sudden social mobility.)

The US not being that type of society had different stories.

But in the seventies, when I came here, after I’d read all the SF and the mysteries in the local library I branched out into popular psychology.  (At the time I had an interest in maybe taking psychology.)

I remember one of the books going on and on about how people were either “winners” or “losers” and the one you were was set early in infancy (they went on and on and on about potty training.) They believed that time set the tone for your life and after that you always won or always lost.

This entered the popular speech in the epithet “loser” applied to someone, as though losing were a permanent thing you were “fated” to.

To an extent the whole current mania with “alphas” and “betas” and “omegas” follows the same thing.  You are born in a place in a hierarchy.  You can’t fake it, but you can’t change it.

Does all of this have a basis in reality?  Well, the alpha and beta and such have a base in primate studies.  This is and isn’t somewhat applicable to man.  The loser thing only has a basis if people CHOOSE to be losers; i.e. if they’re convinced that they lost once so they’ll always lose.  It is a narrative thing.  If you internalize that narrative then you do indeed become a “loser” i.e. a permanent f*ck up and dependent on the charity of others.

But in a way neither of them apply very well to man.  Most of the characteristics that make a primate a “alpha” would make — to an extent do make — a man a criminal.  The largest population of alpha males is in prison or (in countries that go for it) killed.

In fact that’s sort of the whole point.  If humans still adhered to that ranking and followed it, we’d live in small bands, hand to mouth (literally.)  The whole process of civilization is  a process of breaking out those ranks.

This has nothing to do with the pick up artists or the games.  For them learning to emulate an alpha male works. Because human mating instinct hasn’t quite caught up with civilization and women more willing to go with irrational choices will prefer alpha males or those who can fake it.  That’s valid.  Of course you’re appealing mostly to women who prefer not to think, even if they can.  That’s fine.

My problem is with stretching it to everything from business to politics.  And judging people that way, mostly erroneously.

Human society is FAR more complex than any simian band. This means you might have the alpha characteristics of your group, but not of “primate alpha.”

Some people just have charisma.  They enter a room and fill it.  That is a quality.  Is it a quality that means they’re a “Winner?” Or should be?

Um… no.

While these people have an easier time getting on, particularly in the liberal arts and other fields that are mostly bullshit and spin, it doesn’t make them GOOD at what they do.

Our worship of charisma means that we often will hire the idiot manager who looks good, and talks a good game, but who has no freaking clue how a business runs. We believe they are “fated” to be great.  Anyone forgotten Obama’s pantleg?  How well did that work out?

But worse than that, and what I’ve noticed, is that from this idea some are winner and some are “losers” people started worshiping and responding to outward signs of success as though they were reality.  You know “Nothing succeeds like success” and all that bullsh*t.  Which led to Fake It Till You Make It, which ONLY works if people AREN’T looking at accomplishments, but at “signs of a winner.”

Humans and life are WAY more complicated than that.  I mentioned Lincoln above.  Love him or hate him (and I do both kind of in equal measures) he had a long history of losing, before he won.  (And then he died, because it was that kind of story.) Robert A. Heinlein had tried his hand at just about everything and failed, sometimes through no fault of his own, before going on to become one of the most influential SF writers of all time.

There are a million other examples, but it’s early morning for me (don’t judge me) and those are the only two that come to mind.

But the point is if you’re a battler, you battle.  You might end up not succeeding, but you might also succeed against all odds.

Once at a very BORING party, I found a book of “Arab horoscopes.”  I know it will shock you that instead of cute animals like the Chinese or mythological symbols like the west, they use weapons.  They also — if this book was accurate.  I never looked further — make more sense in casting your “horoscope.”  What size town were you born in, what status was your family, how much education do you have take the place of when were you born, and what planet influenced you?

In a society that’s still very traditional, the end result should be very accurate.

Of course I plugged my data in.  (DUH.  REALLY.)  What came up was “deep Sling Shot”.  “Someone whose life conditions have no reflection on the result.”  Most “deep sling shots” get nowhere, but it’s possible for some to make it from beggar to king — or something like that.  (Not sure.  It’s been 35 years and it was the once.)

At the time this impressed me, because it amused me.  Which is why I remember it.

However, remember these “horoscopes” were designed for people in a deeply traditional society.  Thinking about it, the mixed, confused “original conditions” are far more common in America, and what’s more more prone to change.

So what we need to do is stop fawning over the rich and the successful at the moment and look at the person themselves (at any rate that success is often “Fake it till you make it.”)  We need to stop “respecting the office” when the person in it is a total f*ckup.  (This now extends to teachers and policemen, btw.  People continually tell me about those, “You have to respect the office.”  No, I really, really don’t.  This is not the military.  I don’t owe even external honor to anyone.  They can earn it or not. If THEY don’t show any respect for the office, why should I OWE them any.)

Our tax records, even in these diminished times show that Americans move from top to bottom percentile with amazing rapidity and frequency.  And back again.

We are Americans.  We’re the nation that beat the odds to exist.  We’re all deep sling shots.  How deep and how far we go is not totally under our control, but it is to a great extent.

The greatest determinants of success are application and perseverance.  Even if you lost every time till now, there is no fate dictating that next time you won’t win and win so spectacularly that it erases all former losses.

Battle on.  Illegitimi non carborundum!  We are not winners.  We’re not losers.  We’re battlers.  Win some, lose some.  The important thing is not to give up the fight.

 

I’m going to be a spoil sport.  Fortunately that’s easy.  You see, I raised two children, and boys at that.  Once you get the mom knack, you never go back.

This is the third post I wrote.  In the other two I got impolite and unseemly.  I had decided to take time away from all social media, but while having coffee — the stuff to make me sleep yesterday made my head ache this morning, though it had the advantage of amusing younger son who’d never seen me tipsy — it came to me that getting impolite and unseemly was all wrong.

This morning I was faced with the expected gloat from those to the alt.right (not the right, right, you know?) of me, and those to the left of me (because now they can get Hillary) and from those stuck in the middle (hey, when did unrepentant libertarian/classical liberal become the middle?) with me, I met with various flavors of defeatism and “burn it all down.”

I’ll be honest, the last ones are the ones who annoy me the most.

Do let’s suppose there’s nothing we can do.  Hillary or Trump there isn’t an ‘aporth of difference between them.  (Yes, I know respected people on the right say Trump will be fine.  I respectfully disagree.  His entire life he’s been a spoiled rich boy with only one interest: onanism.  Sometimes he uses others for his sport, but the world is a vast canvas in which only Donald Trump exists.  No, the type of business he does, in our current business climate requires neither intelligence nor common sense, only that one be born rich and with the right connections — there’s a whole post on that and the pernicious concept of “winners” and “losers” who are born so — and even then he’s not half as successful as he portrays himself.  Now, is it possible that someone like that can turn on a dime and be a great president?  Sure.  If you believe in miracles.  And no one would be more grateful for one than I would.  Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening and find the firm belief that it will akin to that of the child who closes his eyes and wishes for a pony in the firm belief it will appear.)  So, one of them wins and–

What precisely?

Yeah, there is a good chance it will precipitate us into civil war. Because frankly they’re both paranoiacs who will try to crack down on those who dislike them: i.e. most of the country.  Yeah, there’s a good chance of an economic crash.  Yeah…

So let’s suppose all those happen.  They don’t happen the way you think they do.  We’ve talked about that before.  Even Lebanon at its worst did not revert to the stone age.  It’s just slow immiseration and life becoming massively more difficult.

So, life becomes more difficult and the US keeps electing dumb asses.  And you’ve given up, because you know they’re dumb asses.

Now what?

Please understand that unless you’re very very very lucky you’re not going to get a glorious martyr’s death.  You’re not going to set yourself on fire in front of tank.  That’s not how these things work.  You might die in a reeducation camp.  You might get shot while resisting arrest.  Even those are unlikely.  The most likely thing to happen is that you live in a world that is increasingly grayer and more despairing, and in which you have less and less of a say.  That’s the way Europe has gone, and this election is turning out very European.

So, what are you going to do?

Give up?  Giving up is for a long time.

Shoot them up?

And then what?  There’s a million insurgences around the country every day that you never hear of.  You won’t even be a statistic.

So — I’m looking at you — what are you going to do?

Put away the bottle and the defeatism.  Give me the Kalishnakov.  Yes, siree, running around the hills with an AK-47 is way more fun than what I’m going to propose.  It’s also how you get Cuba.  So, put the machine gun down.  Take a deep breath and listen to the mom-voice, the voice that tells you that you must do unpalatable things like wash behind your ears, and eat broccoli, not because I’m forcing you to do them, but because you know in the long run you have to.

The country didn’t get where it is in a day.  Or a year.  Or ten years.  Or twenty years. The take over that destroyed our youth’s ability to read, our government’s ability to leave us alone, and our populace’s ability to reason took at least a hundred years.  And it was so slow that until about thirty years ago most people were in denial of it.

Yeah, things are pretty bad, sure, but none of the works of Man are permanent, and what others did we can undo.

What it will take is a lot like eating broccoli, but it’s the only thing we can do.  The alternatives are death in one form or another.  So, here it is a modest program to take back our country. Note I not only don’t expect to see the fruits of it, but my grandchildren might not see them.  On the other hand, our great grandchildren might get to live in freedom and prosperity.  It’s worth a try.  What do you have to lose?  (Other than the AK-47, and I’m keeping that safe till you cool down a little.):

1-  If you’re out politically, enjoin people not to give up.  Provide encouragement and support for those who can’t be out, and who will often be discouraged.  Be aware in either case your career is going to take a hit.  It’s going to happen.

2- If you’re not out, take a dramamine and infiltrate.  Infiltrate the alt.right.  Infiltrate the left.  Seek positions of power and influence, and start subverting.  Remember to take it slowly.

3 – If you’re an artist, create.  Particularly if you’re subtle enough to get under people’s shields.  Remember Heinlein had thousands of children, some of them overseas, where we read him in translation and his words were so STRANGE.  But we kept reading, because the stories were good, and little by little our minds change.

4- If you’re a teacher, teach.  Teach as much of the truth as you can.  I realize you’re hemmed in, but there are ways.

5- Anywhere else, gird your loins and educate others.  Around the coffee machine at work, or in the park, watching the kids — cast doubt on the narrative, and be prepared with facts.

6- Whatever you are and whoever you are, take care of yourself and those you can “carry.”  Times are about to get very, very (very) rough.  We’ll have to step in and keep things going as well as we can.  Sure, monetary help, if you can, but also knowledge and emotional support and… all of it.  Find out what you can do and do it.  Immiseration from the top down only works if you let it.  Find ways to get around destructive regulations and crazy enforcement, and build/create/make it work.

7- If you’re a parent, homeschool if you can, but if you can’t, consider what I did “homeschooling and deprogramming” after school.  It can save your child’s sanity, it can save your child’s life, but more importantly, it will assure the work keeps going another generation or three or ten.  As long as it’s needed.

This is not the end.  This is not even the end of the beginning.  We survived Woodrow Wilson, we’ll survive Trumplinton or Clinrump.

Our flag is still there.  Teach your children well.

Now go and work.

This seems appropriate just now:

BUILDING UNDER – A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM 2013

So, we’ve established that revolutions don’t do much except make things worse, unless revolutions are the blessing of an order already in place and already functioning, in which case, the overpower vanishes and there it is.

This works best, of course, in Colonial situations, though for the record, most of the anti-colonial revolutions ended disastrously.  Even when the colonial power was as unorganized, hapless and… well, devil-may-care as Portugal, the result… oh, just read the recent history of Mozambique and Angola, or, better, talk to someone who was there.  As for Zimbabwe, its fall from the breadbasket of Africa is… well…

Of course there are other factors for that, including but not limited to the fact that the colonial powers had infected – via their intellectuals – these poor people with Marxism, and also that the Soviet Union used them as cat’s paws to keep the US occupied, to keep its people in goods (it’s curious that while capitalism is accused of this, the communist powers are always the ones who work like ancient empires.  They have to keep invading and stealing, because they simply can’t produce, having long since killed or scared away their producers.) and to kill off a lot of the young males who might otherwise cause trouble.

Leaving all that aside and since space colonies don’t seem to be forthcoming in the next 20 years or so – though I wouldn’t count them out.  Like with ebooks which were talked about forever and finally dismissed as “never gonna happen” I suspect if it does happen it will be suddenly, over about five years, and probably involving some new technology or a will to use the old ones. – what do we do, those of us who don’t wish to live under the boot of a progressively (eh!) more authoritarian regime?

We dig under.

I’d like to point out the regime we are currently living out is the result of just that strategy.  They occupied all the positions of power that lead to government control over about three to four generations.  (It’s what “the long march” is all about.)  Those of us who grew up in unstable countries know what the nexus of power a new regime absolutely must conquer to maintain its grip on the population: radio, TV, Newspapers, as much of the bureaucracy as possible, from your local DMV to whatever passes for a deliberative body – and then you can take the president, and then you’re home free.

The genius of the current take over is that they knew they couldn’t do it South American style and come in with tanks and machine guns, take over all these places by force and get away with it.  That can’t be managed in the country with the best military in the world.

Instead, they went exactly for the same centers, but one by one, and with replacement strategies.  In this they were helped by two of their characteristics and the characteristics of those they view as domestic enemies (No?  Listen to them sometime.) and who are anyone who isn’t to the left of Lenin.  For our purposes we’ll call them “conservatives” though a lot of us aren’t EXACTLY that and though at this point in time “conservative” is a misnomer for people who want to change the current form of governance.

They took over by stealthing it – that is by pretending to be “establishment” until they were secure.  I actually tried to stealth it for years in publishing, and I have friends who are still trying to do it now (All the best boys and girls, you’re better than I.)  I couldn’t do it for reasons that lots of other conservatives can’t do it.  First, I couldn’t STEALTH well enough.  We, liberty lovers tend to prize truth and it bothered me greatly to fake it, so I was never vocal about supporting stuff I, in fact, abhorred.  Second, (vile) progs once in control which was well before I broke in, started demanding VOCAL adherence to their nonsense.  So if you weren’t screaming about the patriarchal, capitalist regime every other line, you simply wouldn’t get the push and the promo.  Or, as a friend of mine said “they watch what you laugh at, and they watch for how you respond in conversation”  and since even professional meetings turn into extended political rants with quite unimaginably offensive things said about everyone not extreme left, keeping an impassive face is difficult enough, let alone faking enthusiasm.

The reverse of this is that liberty lovers have this habit of fairness (which is why it’s so hard for me to wield the troll hammer) so even if we took over, the take over would never be absolute, and it would never, ever, ever be permanent.  We tend to go “Yes, he’s a communist, but that’s a stupid quirk.  He’s a good worker.  Look at what he did with this or that – give him the promotion.  It is by this process that most conservative institutions become far left.  The reverse doesn’t happen.  It’s not that the left is much better at stealthing (though they are) it’s that the right is much worse at excluding ideological opponents and/or viewing them as “the enemy.”  At least quase-ante, before the last few years, we tended to view them more as poor fools.

And this is how they took over all the media, all entertainment and most corporations and boards and anything that was a group of people, that needed “leadership” and that could be manipulated.  It also helps they’re the side who want power over others, while we mostly want to be left alone.

So to propose that we start our own crawl through the institutions is misguided – it’s not something we can do, something we’re good at or something even particularly productive in the current state of affairs.

However, the power-lovers, no matter what the regime have one fatal flaw.  They love to seize power.  They’re very good at wielding it – as in pounding down all opposition – what they suck at, because their temperament makes them not empathetic at all, is figuring out how people work.  And trying to rule (which is what they do) or worse, govern, without understanding people leads to disaster.  It is worse if they are communists, because communism is a religion at odds with reality.  They continue believing it, even as it fails, like those poor cult members whose end of the world is forever postponed one more month, and they continue doing more of what fails, which is why their utopias turn rapidly to hell on earth.

This leaves the rest of us stuck in a situation where EVEN if we could do the reverse of their strategy, even if we decided to crawl through the institutions for seventy years, we don’t have that kind of time.  The people who were so hot on getting into the cockpit, are flying the plane right into the ground because their little (red) religious book tells that that’s the way to gain altitude.

We don’t have seventy years before gravity asserts itself explosively.  We don’t have seventy months.  Sometimes I think we’ll be lucky if we have seventy weeks, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if we crashed in seventy days.  Sometimes I feel as if I’m locked in the painting “the scream” shrieking soundless and I can’t do anything.

Wait.  Before you head out to the bathroom to slit your wrists in a warm bath – listen.  I didn’t say there’s nothing we can do.

Like the left we have our own strengths and our own abilities.  And they are things they not only don’t have, but they can’t fully understand.

To wit, the reason we tend to be really bad at politics is that there are things that are more important to us.  A lot of people have complained that people aren’t focusing on the politics because they’re busy making a living, raising a family, figuring out how to survive.

But, listen, that’s a strength, too.

See, the reason that they’re self-devouring is that they see politics before merit.  It’s never “we’ll promote him even though he’s a political idiot because OMG, he can write.”  It’s always “She can write all right, but she’s not “one of the good people” so we’ll not only do nothing but thwart her if we can.”

Over time this allows them to take over ideologically.  And it makes them REALLY dumb about anything else.

Here we have to go back to the publishing industry.  Because ideology was more important than anything else (though they promoted some books with no overt ideological tinge, because the author – they were satisfied – was one of them.  They tolerated these books more anywhere else rather than sf, which is why sf crashed harder and faster, except obviously at Baen.  Because SF is the projection of the present into the future, no “incorrect” politics would be allowed.) they needed to control not just what got published, but what got distributed and what got push.  This meant not only taking over the bookstores, (ideologically, not the publishers) but setting up a system which was determined by pull, not push.  By the end of their reign and just before ebooks hit, they could “publish” a book and make sure it sold nothing (it was never on shelves.  EVEN if people asked for it) and thereby end the career of anyone whom they’d found out was ideologically different – or suspect.  At the same time, of course, someone on the “right” (left) side got push, even if the work was otherwise undistinguished.

This worked to an extent – the reading public simply assumed ALL authors were leftist, and read the least offensive ones.  However, as the houses lost feedback (because this was all push, no pull) they lost track of “what the market will bear.”  Printruns were shrinking every year (the excuse being “people don’t read anymore.”) and they were starting to feel the pinch.  The bookstores, in particular (their fault for buying into “to the net” and the publishers’ push model) were caught in the middle and imploding.

All it took was the emergence of a free market in electronic books to send the whole thing into a tail spin.  (Most of the houses are dead, just still – somehow – walking.)

The houses reaction to ebooks was classic too – they reacted just like cultists whose UFO/prophet failed to bring about the end of the world on the appointed date: cover up, ignore, and hope the whole thing goes away.

Well – this is basically what we’re seeing in government, in finance, and anywhere that the left has got its big foot in, including “big science.”

They have been promoting people on the basis of faith, not intelligence for years.  And that’s no way to run a civilization (the problem goes beyond the USA, though I suppose, as usual, it will be left for us to solve.)

So – you want your second American revolution and your second American republic?  Fine.  Start building a structure that works, behind, beside and beneath the official one.

In some cases this will be very very difficult.  For us writers, for instance, it’s almost impossible to work for anything but US dollars.  (Though, who knows, that might change.  Will for sure if the crash comes.  I will of course work for gold, if anyone wants to cover me in a pile of it!)

On the other hand, we’re going around the publishing establishment, more and more so, yay us.  I’d advise every liberty-minded writer, even the traditionally published ones, to look into indie.  At best you can use it to support and promote your published work (I have brought a lot of people to the Darkship Thieves universe through the short stories.)  At worst, if something happens to your publisher (No, I don’t expect anything to happen to Baen, but a lot of it rests on ONE WOMAN’s shoulders, and while she’s younger than I and I hope she outlives me, sh*t happens.  To everyone.) you have a fallback and something to build from.

At the same time, I urge artists to find other ways to market their art.  Both of these will take stepping outside your “validation” comfort zone, but a lot of us had to do that with politics anyway, and it’s not that different.

If you’re not there – I urge you, urge you – to use your skills to advance the building of a parallel structure.  If you’re a computer maven, build a game engine that will allow indie game writers to compete with the big houses.  If you’re a computer maven, again, think about animation tools and others that allow indie movies to do what the big guys do for one percent of the price.  If you’re a teacher or interested in teaching, study how to do it on line.

We have it worse than they did.  We can’t just take over a few strategic points and hope the whole thing keeps running but now under us.  They’re destroying everything because of their anti-reality beliefs.  We have to take over everything just to prevent a terminal collapse.

Fortunately, most of us are “people who do things.”  I urge you to do things.  I have a friend who is studying brewing and welding, in case that’s all he can contribute.  In fact, I’d urge all of us to do that if we can.  Even if you’re a writer an artist or a scientist, if you have a hobby that can be turned into a part time job – growing vegetables, refinishing furniture, cooking, cleaning, sewing, brewing, etc – and bring in some money, do so.

I knew a family in Portugal who were educated and well to do, but when everything went upside down, they arranged with a textile firm to get the scraps of material that would (otherwise) have been burned at the end of the day.  The wife and daughters then fired up the sewing machines and started making pot holders, placemats and aprons (fewer aprons, most pieces were tiny.)  They sold these at the fairs which are at best gray market (the stalls require a license, so you have to declare some income.  But most of the business is done in cash.  You do the math.)  By the time things stabilized, they were living better than ever.

I don’t think that in most places the system will collapse that completely.  I DO think that things like making a living on line – provided you’re either selling something useful or something people find entertaining – will work for most of us.  But if your area goes bad, that second skill will help.

And meanwhile – hat tip to Dave Freer – network.  Network with those in your area, and network with those out of it who can help you on line.  Build connections with like minded people.

Yes, this means we will ALL have to work our tails off for the next – if we’re lucky – seventy weeks.  But work is what we do.  Building is what we do.

You see the current society is like a beautiful building that has termites in the support beams.  We’re working very fast to put up new support beams along side them and to encase the current support beams in strong concrete.

The goal is that when they give out and turn to powder, there is a shhh sound and then, nothing, because our support structures step in place and keep things going.

And THEN we can argue whether the bit on the roof should be round or square and – hopefully – termite-proof the new structure.

But first, it has to be in place.  So go forth and build.

 

Okay, the lasers are just for show.  I’m in the middle of multiple crisscrossing crisis(es?) and can’t even think straight, much less write a post.

The short version and for public consumption is that both houses (short sale and other) under some tenuous contract to us are likely to fall through/have to be rejected which puts us back to square one.

The long version is ARRRRRRRGH.

That’s all.  Back when sane.  It could be a long time.

Tudors Tales and Turpitude – James Schardt

Greetings everyone. Normally, Sarah would either be posting here, herself, or would have someone who, at least, has a blog of their own post here. However, in the interests of keeping her writing the stories we all want to read instead of the unprofitable columns or gif posts she sometimes feels obligated to write, I am stepping in. Sarah, go write. We gots this. *cracks neck*

 

Brad Torgersen reposted a link to his “Nutty Nuggets” column Sunday. To summarize it, Brad felt that sales of Science Fiction books had gone down because the stories published had drifted away from the themes that had attracted people to Science Fiction in the first place. I am going to expand on this and point out that the same themes that attracted people to Science Fiction are the same themes that attract people to stories in general. And blatantly inserting current issues into a story stands a good chance of marring that story and rendering it preachy and forgettable.

An anecdote was posted last year by an author who had personally delivered a story to an editor, I think it was John Campbell, hoping for it to be published. For his trouble, the editor took him out to lunch. During that lunch, the editor asked him if he could name one story written by a man in a mud hut 4000 years ago that is still sold in airport book stores today. The author looked confused. The editor told him he was talking about “The Iliad” written by the blind poet, Homer. His point was that people wanted to read stories about heroes striving to overcome things. Brad feels that the striving has been lost in a sea of messages that will have difficulty resonating five years after they are written.

This year, the big issue in the news, besides the election, seems to be whether to allow non-op transsexual persons to use the restrooms of the sex they feel they are as opposed to the restrooms and locker rooms they physically are. Three years ago, this wasn’t even on the radar. I would have to look up opinion columns and news stories to be able to tell you what issues were big even five years ago. Time passes and people move on. Laws will be written and passed or rejected. What is controversial today may not be controversial tomorrow. While I cannot tell you how society will eventually deal with this, I can guarantee this will not be a big issue two years from now. This means basing a story on a current issue is probably unwise.

Does this mean you should leave out these issues entirely? No! Look to authors who have remained in the public eye for years, even centuries, after they have died. There are several of Shakespeare’s plays that are, to put it bluntly, nothing more than Tudor propaganda. He set up a whole series of historical plays just to lead up to showing how bad Richard III was and show how justified Henry VII was to take the throne from him.

In his time, one of the major issues was the legitimacy of Queen Elizabeth and the House of Tudor. England had a woman on the throne (scandal!) Her father had broken from the Catholic Church (scandal!) Her grandfather’s claim to the throne was tenuous at best (scandal!). Needless to say, her political enemies, both inside and outside of her kingdom, were happy to use these issues to weaken her power and possibly take her throne from her. But, unless the reader is a serious student of history, nobody remembers this.

We remember the strained relationship between Henry the IV and his son Harry in “Henry IV part I”. We remember King Henry V inspiring his soldiers to overcome the odds against them at Agincourt in “Henry V”. We remember how Richard III’s quest for power and hubris brought about his downfall in “Richard III”. Nobody remembers the politics behind these stories. But that doesn’t mean it was not there. The story came first. The issues were woven in with subtlety. People’s minds were changed. And Elizabeth I is still remembered as one of the greatest monarchs England has ever had.

The legitimacy of the English throne was a topic for discussion, but it didn’t effect that many people outside of the nobility. People eating and not being robbed in the street were what mattered on a day to day basis. It wasn’t that people didn’t care about who their rightful monarch was, they did. It was simply a lower priority. So Shakespeare slipped the message he wanted to put out into his plays. He barely mentioned the Tudors in Richard III. The focus was on how rotten a person Richard Plantagenet was. At the end, his audience was saying “Thank goodness Henry Tudor got rid of THAT guy.” The message, the Tudors are legitimate because the Plantagenets were bad, worked. He didn’t have to beat people over the head with his message. They came to that conclusion themselves.

By contrast, his play “Henry VIII”, is mostly remembered for accidentally burning The Globe Theater to the ground. It is a blunt message play that is simply there to remind people that Queen Elizabeth is, indeed, King Henry’s daughter. It did not resonate at the time and it is largely forgotten now. This is the sort of fiction Brad was talking about when he was saying it wasn’t “Nutty Nuggets” and what others talk about when they say “message fiction”. Making the message the story is simply preaching. If your reader wants preaching they’ll either go to church or listen to the shaggy guy with the sandwich board ranting in the park. Readers want a story. If there is a message, fine, but the reader wants a story first.

Take a timeless theme. A story that would be recognizable to both your grandparents and your children. Put it in a future or fantasy world. Weave your message in with subtlety so it is barely seems to be there. Your story will be memorable and it will plant the seeds you want to grow. The story wins over the message. Always.

As you guys know yesterday I came across mention of an IO9 article that said that we’re already living in a science fiction world, and so all that was left now to justify science fiction’s existence was social critique.

I didn’t read the article, partly because it was IO9 and who the heck wants to wade in that, but the concepts struck me as worthy of “unpacking.”  Frankly, they need to be unpacked, as it’s impossible to deal with that fermenting load of insanity  in a single post. “Wrong too great to fit in a few words” would be a good description.

Yesterday I dealt with the idea that we’re leaving in a future world, as though the future were a destination, at which the train of time arrived and, having disembarked, we now have nothing to do but mill around and criticize each other, like school girls on a field trip.

I am being unkind, but only partly.  There is a deeper truth behind that image of school girls ripping into each other: the idea that criticizing others is a deeper virtue and that it is not only useful, but good and necessary.

First, let me start by saying, because some idiots (and they are idiots) are going to say I’m talking about an article I haven’t read: this is not about the article.  It’s about the concepts, which I’ve come across in panels and talks over years of attending science fiction conventions.

One common presentation of “the end of science fiction” is that we are now living in the future which is why kids aren’t interested in science fiction.  This is of course mind-bogglingly stupid, because for the kids the time we live in is not THEIR future and it certainly isn’t science fiction. It could be the reason the kids aren’t into science fiction is that twin idea that “since this is now a science fiction world we should turn to critiquing the injustices in it.”  The kids get quite enough victimhood whining and guilt in their normal curriculum, which leaves them quite uninterested in more of it in their entertainment.

In fact I don’t know ANYONE who is interested in their entertainment being a bunch of whining and critiquing the flaws of society.

Look, I went through middle school at a time when “revolutionary juntas” took over SCHOOLS and changed the curriculum.  I wrote my fill of “social critique” then.  You sort of had to, because your parents didn’t understand that education had stopped being about knowing stuff and started being about signaling virtue.  Well, mine didn’t.  And they had an attitude of “if you have a problem deal with it”.  So I dealt.

It wasn’t general whining, mind, or real social critique.  I mean, none of us wrote about the injustice of coming to school and finding your curriculum had changed over night and you were studying Marx in five courses gain; or how upset you were about their abolishing Latin, because you’d been hoping to finally read Virgil in the original.  OR even how you thought Mao’s poems, which were being pushed at you in literature, sounded like they’d been written by a boastful kindergartner on speed.

No.  It was critique-of-that-which-the-teacher-wants-critiqued.  I remember one occasion where she read a bunch of things about the injustices cleaning women suffered, and how their work was demeaning, then asked us to write a story about it.

I wrote a story that could make you weep, all about this poor woman’s aching knees, and how her husband oppressed her by not doing housework.

In point of fact, in the village, cleaning women — particularly those who worked for the wealthier families — were often among the upper social strata and almost for sure made more than my dad did.  Their kids often went to private schools with their employer’s kids, and since they worked for the “better” (not us, though we were in a way, but only among true natives of the village, which these people weren’t) families, they had all the conveniences and their cleaning the house once a week and touching up in between was probably less work than my mom did in our house, in addition to her more than full time for-pay work.

Never mind.  The teacher wanted the injustice critiqued.  I critiqued it and I got an A.

And that’s sort of what we’re talking about here too.  The injustices that the left wants critiqued never have anything to do with the REAL injustices, in the real society.  They have to do with Marxist theory, viewing people as widgets, and their permanent illusion that we live in a 1950s-that-never-existed, with victimhood classes frozen forever in place, and those “deserving of help” always in need of help till the last syllable of recorded time.

Most of the authors who have pivoted to this form of writing aren’t bad craftsmen, but their stories ring hollow.

It is the duty of every writer to put the reader through the wringer, and this often involves picking a character in an invidious situation and then making his/her life WAY worse.

In a normal story, then the character starts fighting back and finds his way out of the bind, taking the reader alone, which leaves the reader feeling released and powerful and maybe even able to tackle his problems.

The issue with “critiquing society” is that it’s not that type of story.  Rather you start with the oppressed and end with the oppressed, and along the way you show how mean and evil society is.

There is a reason for this (DUH) in dialectical Marxism.  You see, Marxists believe the only reason that men are: greedy, murderous, evil, envious, etc. is that they live under capitalism, which in their heads (and their heads only) is an artificial system which Man (note capital m) wasn’t meant to live in, and which twists humanity into what Christianity would call sin.  (This is not the first, nor the last instance of Marxists stealing Christian theology, and the idea that the offense of the first sin stained humanity’s tendencies and ways.)

The only way to overcome capitalism, and incidentally to make socialism work is to reform man. We know how well that goes.  That belief has two prongs, both wrong.  One is the idea capitalism is unnatural, instead of arising wherever allowed, and often where not allowed: an inherent part of how humanity functions.  The Second is that humanity can be changed completely and made like onto the angels.  this idea is responsible for filling AT LEAST 100 million graves.

But armed with this belief, the academics and pretentious pseudo-glitterati who are trying to submerge science fiction in the same morass that consumes every genre they touch, have decided the way to reform man is to harangue them.

Look, I know that preaching is considered good in Christian practice.  I also know that a famous saint so gave up on its having any effect on his flock, that he went off to preach to the fish.

While Christianity changed the face of Europe there is very good reason to argue it was done less with “critique” and more with the way they lived, and the way they did care for the poor and downtrodden in a very material and personal way, which in turn gave the new religion an edge into society.  (Recall it started largely as a slave’s religion.)  Yeah, there are twists in there, including converting the leader and having him order the conversion of his people, BUT none of this was simply by telling him how wrong he was, over and over again.  Much less was it by criticizing a society that didn’t exist and probably never had.

If a Christian missionary had marched in hot foot into a primitive German tribe and started haranguing them on micro aggression he’d probably have escaped execution.  For one, those primitive tribes had a great fear of the insane.  For another, people who are asleep can’t kill you.

Note I’m not saying — I know you know.  I also know teh stupid will dissect this looking for poo to fling — that science fiction should be all about adventure and shouldn’t deal with weighty subjects.  I loved SF when I was very young because it dealt with weighty subjects.  BUT what allows us to do that is not that “we live in a science fiction world” or that we’re “speaking truth to no longer existent power, just like everyone else.”

No, what allows us to do that is the fact that we take the weighty moral questions out of context and can examine them more clearly.  Take colonialism.  All of us — every human — is descended from colonialists and colonized.  (I was explaining to son some peculiarities of Portuguese that create homophones which have CLEAR nothing to do with each other, and I had to explain Portugal probably started as a Celtic colony — though some new genetic studies claim it might have been a colonizing center, rather — then Carthaginian, then Greek, then Latin, and all of those left linguistic debris behind.)

However recent history makes the idea of colonist and colonial a hot point.  Also, you really can’t discuss things such as “what is human” without people getting very upset (as they should be.  The recent history of people who would do this is not good) but you can do it in an SF sense.  Suppose we go out to space and find a much dumber, but obviously sentient alien race.  What are our duties/obligations/rights in relation to them?  Morally HOW should we treat them? What if we go to space and we find we’re the slightly impaired aliens in relation to everyone else?  How do we cope?  How should be be treated?  I don’t know, and if I continue not knowing, I can write an interesting story that explores the possibilities.  H*ll, there’s novel series in that (some already written.)

If I go in with the idea of “critiquing current society” though, I’ll use the downtrodden aliens as a vessel to blame/hate on humanity and rage at our “history of injustice.”  (Compared to WHAT?  The history of angels?)  This just falls into the “approved” paths and it’s boring because it’s obvious the story is a device to hector the reader in the same old way that those who speak power to truth (in order to keep power) use.

There have been societies that have been completely changed by a new idea, a new revelation, a new way of looking at things.  This is usually because the person or persons who bring it in show the new idea/way/revelation to be a vast improvement over the way they live.  Also this change always comes from outside and not the current structures of power.

In the whole history of humanity there isn’t a single instance of a society being changed by prim scolds, hectoring people about sins they know d*mn well they didn’t commit, and promoting a way of life that — no matter how the scolds try to hide it — leads only to misery and mass death.

The only change such prim scolds bring about is a sudden onset of a desire to be anywhere we can avoid them.  Which when it comes to their scolding being a supposed for-profit enterprise means avoiding it like the plague, and finding alternate channels to get our entertainment.

Which is exactly what is happening.  And which only causes them to scold us harder and tell us we need our medicine more.

I suggest we leave them mumbling to themselves and others like them, and go read a good book or ten.  Because they can no longer keep us from publishing.  They certainly can’t — never could — force us to buy them.

The gatekeepers are bravely guarding the gate, while around them the walls have crumbled.  Step over the fallen stones and come on out.

There’s good reading out here.

*Sorry about lateness.  I should know better than NOT to blog on Friday night.  Saturday morning we always have errands which ends up making the blog very late.  I’m not done either, I’m going to need to clean the cat boxes.  I’m being glared at by Greebo as we speak, I’ll have you know.*

Yesterday in one of the groups I belong to and check irregularly, someone posted an article from IO9.  Full disclosure, I didn’t read the article.  Life is too short to hang out at IO9.  But this is not about the article, not really.  It’s about the concepts which were summarized in the lead, and confirmed by those of my fans/friends brave enough to put on waders and climb down into IO9.

The concept of the article was this: with our communications technology and gene splicing and other goodies, we’re living in a science fiction world.  There is no point to science fiction anymore, except to “critique the world.”

This is a point of view I’ve often seen defined in panels too.  I call it the “we had to kill science fiction in order to save it” point of view. There was more to that, like there should be no “retro” science fiction.  There’s fodder for a post there, and there will be a post, about what is “retro” science fiction and whether there’s a use for it or not.

We will, possibly in a later post get into the whole concept and potential value or lack thereof of critiquing society; what it actually means and what it actually does.

Right now I want to concentrate on WHAT is science fiction after all.

I’m fairly sure I know.  I’m also fairly sure these people are spectacularly confused.  They seem to hold on to how science fiction was explained to me when I was eleven and stumbled onto it.  (I’d already read Have Space Suit Will Travel, at around 9, but it didn’t strike me as science fiction, just as a slightly fantastic present day adventure.  Look, guys, what did I know about what America was really like?  Remember I thought Denver was by the sea [I think I confused it with Dover. And now I have a story title that’s going to bug me till I write a short story.  The White Cliffs of Denver.])

I stumbled onto science fiction with Out of Their Minds, by Simak, which was and wasn’t a problem, because, you know, while it took place in the future, sort of, it was the near future and I could call it “fantastic adventure.”  But my second science fiction book was A Canticle for Leibowitz and that I could not just write off as “they made up some stuff, but it’s essentially the world as we know it.”  So I asked my brother what weird-*ss books he was reading (my early sf reading was standing up by Alvarim’s bedside, ready to toss the book in the drawer and run into my room at the sound of a footstep on the stairs.  you see, he’d told me not to read them, showing both a remarkable care for my innocence [SF in the seventies.  Yeshhhh] and a complete lack of knowledge of my character.  Yes, I also read Masters and Johnson standing up by his bedside table.  Did wonders for my English, it did.]

His explanation was “Science fiction are stories set in a future world.”

While this is, technically, true, of course, it neglects that little fact that making predictions is hard.  Particularly about the future.  And also that now that we have almost a hundred years of science fiction behind us, it makes a lot of the futures depicted in those books the future of the past.  Or in Sir Pratchett’s fantastically appropriate description “the future of another leg of the pants of time.”

I mean, the “The future is now” people are very funny.  Yes, we do have a lot of technological marvels (like, when haven’t we?  Even if it was just a better plow) and it’s affecting society (like, when hasn’t it?) BUT is it the future depicted in science fiction novels?  Pfui?  Do I have a flying car?  WHERE are my moon colonies, my weekends on Mars?

Second, “the future is now”?  Really?  I’m no longer surprised at their lack of understanding of gender.  I’m somewhat puzzled that they ALSO don’t get verb tenses.  I’m told that some very primitive societies have no concept of past or future.  Everything is an eternal now. (I don’t know.  I never did linguistics field work.)  For my money they’re more advanced than people who think there used to be a future, but now we’re living in it and time stopped.  (MAYBE that’s what’s actually wrong.  Maybe there’s a whole group of people we should never have taught to talk.  How much damage could they do by rhythmic blinking, after all.  Never mind.)

Do we have things that our parents didn’t have?  Bother.  We have things that were unimaginable when I was a little kid.  More so than your childhood, mine was temporally dislocated from the normal time.  I mean, I still remember my mother ridiculing the idea I’d ever afford a house with running hot and cold water.  (She built one herself 3 years later.  Never mind.)  I remember trimming oil lamps (partly because we had electricity — sort of — but it was really unreliable.  I am daily humbled by living among marvels of human ingenuity.

What I don’t imagine is that this is the end of the human ingenuity or the human story.  I don’t presume to say “we won’t go any further.”  And I CERTAINLY don’t presume to say “we should go no further.”

To say “we’re living in a science fiction future, there is no reason to write science fiction anymore” is wrong on EVERY front.

First, yeah, sure we’re living on  science fiction future.  Just like people in the 1930s were compared to their parents.  Your point is, precisely?  That’s a tautology on the order of “the black horse is black.”  Yeah, and so what, Captain Obvious?

Second, I don’t think science fiction is what you think it is.  We don’t each have a crystal ball and write about “the future as she will be.” See part about making predictions and how that’s hard, PARTICULARLY about the future.

So if you think the point of science fiction was to predict the future, then there was never a point to science fiction.  It’s sort of like saying the purpose of pigs is to fly because you saw a drawing of a pig with wings.  The only answer to that is “You’re not from around here” and by around here I mean reality.

Yes, yes, science fiction dresses itself in future tropes, gives dates, etc, but it’s actual and point of fact purpose, as a branch of fantastic literature, is to give the artist (or the craftswoman, in my case) a broad canvas on which to tell stories that can’t be told in our present-day, limited-to-reality universe.  Sure, it makes it interesting, and it’s one of the constraints of the genre (sort of, before you get into alternates and counterfactuals) that you at least do some hand waving at “how we get there from here.  The readers of the genre expect it, and it’s polite, kind of like it’s polite not to mention lucrative to meet your readers’ expectations.  BUT it’s handwavium for the paying patrons, not a fact of life.  Every science fiction universe, even the most grounded in reality is always “what might be” not “what will be.”  Because the future and reality are way more complex than you can cram in a book.

So there is a point to science fiction.  The same point there always was.  The future is by definition not here yet.  It never will be.  Because that’s the quality of the future.  It hasn’t happened yet.  (These people probably eagerly believe signs that say “Free beer tomorrow.”)

And I bet you that it surprises you.  I bet you there are wonders we can’t even dream of (though we try) waiting just around the corner.  And I’ll dream them until I get to see them.  And I’ll take as many of you as I can along for the ride.

These people belong to the future of the past.  The future that belongs to them (eh) is the future imagined circa 1930s.  A future of central control and exact distribution of limited resources.

They’re both disappointed they don’t have it — hence the reason that they think SF should “critique” things — and bewildered by the advances that have really happened, hence the almost forlorn lament that “we’re living in a science fiction future already.”

If you can’t imagine anything more than what we have, I suggest you’re in the wrong field of writing.  I hear there is a lot of demand for technical manual writers. It demands no imagination.  (Though it does demand a mastery of verbs, of course, which might be a negating condition.  On the other hand you can call machinery xyr and no one, not even the machines care.)

If this REALLY is the wildest future you can imagine, that’s fine.  Sit down,  stay here.  Rest (or bitch) a while.

The rest of us?  We can imagine a million interesting futures.  And we’re going to dream of them until we get there.

 

Sorry.  I don’t like taking days off from the blog, and I’ve taken too many, but I woke up at six am with all the symptoms of stomach flu.  I’m fairly sure that’s not actually it, and suspect it’s just stress, but right now is the first I made it to the computer and way from the bathroom.

I have four short stories to write and deliver, and as you imagine those have precedence.  So, I shall now work on those. Then I shall start the final going over of Darkship Revenge, hopefully to be done by Monday.

 

Blog to resume tomorrow.

So, I hear Donald Trump is now promising free college.  Don’t bother explaining that that wasn’t really what he said, or why it is the best idea possible.  I’m not interested in the Donald.  What I’m interested in is this idea of free college.

Free education was an idea of the liberals, back when liberals stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  They had the idea — which was amiably passed on to me by my parents and grandparents — that you could educate anyone into … well…  what they would have called a person of worth.

To an extent they were right.  Remember the people who came up with this idea were at the very cusp of the industrial revolution.  The first jobs in that were dirty, ceaseless and deadly, so about on a par with agricultural jobs (the idea that agricultural jobs were paradisaical is an invention of the romantics, all of whom had never seen a shovel and if they did wouldn’t know which end to use.) The difference is they weren’t learned by watching and starting to participate as soon as you could walk, which allowed a break up of large familial structure, of the bonds of tradition on any given individual, and allowed individuals more freedom of action.  To put it another way, just because your dad, your grandad, your great grandad and everyone else you could trace were farmers, it didn’t mean you couldn’t go to the big city and be a carder or a machinist.  Which freed you also to marry whomever you wanted from a much larger pool of candidates and, yes, if you so wished, to go to hell your own way with beer and blue ruin.

On the whole the industrial revolution represented freedom and the toppling of oppressive societal structures (yes, there was something to be said for those structures, to wit that you were less likely to go to hell with beer and blue ruin, because the people around you would interfere.  This is what the romantics noticed, and what turned their heads to mush longing for the good old days.  They confused “freedom to do it” with “necessity to do it” and concluded industrial production and capitalism were bad for humanity.  Their heirs, the greens, suffer from the same illusions. They think there’s something soul-satisfying about agricultural work, close to the land, etc.  Because the only part of it they’ve experienced is hobby gardening, they’ll continue thinking so.  Also, they don’t look at what’s happening in places like India and Chine as they, too, undergo their industrial revolution.  People are voting with their feet.)

But after the initial impetus, machines grew more refined.  It has been observed the first thing industrialization teaches a country is to keep time.  People become conscious of punctuality.  You can follow how important punctuality is in a culture by running an inverse proportion of how recently a country was industrialized.

Then other things happen.  You start to need people who can memorize schedules and sequences of actions.  The cities themselves lead to a need for people who can read instructions and information.  (Mostly pre-radio and pre-tv, for western countries.)

This means for the first time in human history, reading writing and ciphering become a real asset, and not just “prestige and for the rich.”  Those who read, write and calculate have a demonstrably better life, as they become supervisors.

At this stage, it is easy to confuse “better life” with “reading, writing and arithmetic.”  It is also easy to conflate such bourgeois virtues with the ability to read morally improving works.

This is how free public education gains impetus, with the best intentions in the world.

But that was about 200 years ago, most places, and what we’ve learned in between is this:

1. It’s easier to indoctrinate people than to teach them, and for regulation and governing purposes, indoctrinating is more effective at control than teaching.
2. The average person only needs to know so much.  For instance, through 9th grade I got up to pre-calc, which I’ve used … never in my subsequent life.  (Though trig comes in handy, now and then.)
3. There is no practical correlation between education and morality.  Some of the earliest educated classes in the world were responsible for most of the massacres of the 20th century.

This hasn’t stopped the public drive for more and more free education (or education) for various reasons.  a) it’s easier to indoctrinate people more the longer they stay in school, so various governing bodies love the idea  b) there seems to be a correlation, at least in the cases we hear of (many more we don’t hear) between more advanced education and a better life.  Even where that doesn’t apply, there’s the recent memory of a time when it was so.  c) there is an entire apparatus in place to push us into believing that more education equals a “betterment” of the individual in the moral sense.  Mostly because those in power consider “good morals” to agree with them, and look up there at point a.

It’s gotten to the point now, where we have people with phds working as baristas, and the fact our educational costs have gone straight up (having two kids who wanted stem degrees there was no option for “apprentice” for them, or as older son put it “if you cut people without being a doctor, they arrest you.” I’m acutely aware of this.  In my time it was difficult but possible to put yourself through school in a timely fashion by having a job.  Now you can still do it, if you’re willing to take ten or fifteen years to get through a bachelor’s.)  Also, in most fields of study, a bachelor’s now means as much as a high school diploma meant in previous years.  I thought  this was merely due to glut and inflation of credentials (and it is due to that too, I think, but) some years ago I fell into this pattern where various friends with college age kids asked me to tutor their kids in foreign languages and/or literature.  And I found out that these kids’ were less proficient than the high school kids I’d tutored twenty years before.  I hadn’t realized it because I discovered when older son was in 3rd grade that they weren’t teaching him … well… anything… and started teaching him on the side, when he was home from school while using the school merely as a babysitting system so I could write.  I thought, at the time, it was because we were in a tiny town, with a backwater school, but some of the people I worked with ten years ago went to PRIVATE schools with an excellent reputation, so I don’t believe that’s the case.

Now, when your bachelor’s degree doesn’t get you much of anything and you start life in deep debt (which in turn means a population crash among many, many other bad things) I understand why people think “free college” will solve their issues, and why politicians on the make promise it.

Let me tell you, ladies and gents: it won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

I remember being very shocked there was no free college in the US. When I first came here in 12th grade, I fully intended to go through free college in Portugal.  And I did.  So it might seem a little hypocritical of me to ding it…

Except that back then (things have changed, and how) the same percentage of people went through free college in the US as in Portugal (yes, I know what I said.)  The same type of people too.

When I chose to go back to Portugal — mostly dad’s letters begging me to come back — I turned down a full ride scholarship to college, that two of my high school teachers had been at pains to arrange for me.  (Sorry, guys, if you read this.)  My husband was accepted to an ivy league peripheral college, with a full ride.  (He didn’t finish there by reasons of clinical depression for reasons that weren’t related to school and which, at the time, the schools weren’t alert are likely to strike people in a certain IQ.  Ah well.  Another leg of the pants of time.)

These pure-merit scholarships by and large no longer exist.  Now you must have merit AND be an interesting minority.  But that’s something else and a discussion for another time.

Meanwhile, while here I realized that the American college system was very different from the Portuguese one, too.  The Portuguese system is rooted in medieval traditions, which is great if you want to attend a non-magical Hogwarts for grown ups (complete with robes) but sucks goat teat if what you want to do is get a job in the real world.

This wasn’t as obvious to most of my family, the family afflictions being medicine and engineering, which have eminently practical applications.

But I had issues with transposing digits, which I couldn’t even talk about since it wasn’t a recognized disorder and I thought I was going crazy or was stupid.  (Ironically both my kids inherited the issue and I learned tricks to overcome it while teaching them. I’m still a menace with phone numbers and addresses, particularly when I’m tired.)  And the idea of cutting dead people, let alone living ones that I intended to keep alive, made me queasy.  I gave psychology a try by auditing while my transfer from the US was being dragged very slowly through bureaucracy, and dear BOB, it was all meringue, no cake.  Particularly since at the time they were in the throes of behaviorism.

There were things I genuinely WANTED to do: agricultural engineering, nixed because at the time it only made sense if you had family lands to work on; and archeology, nixed after I figured out it didn’t pay much and what it paid necessitated grants from the government.

Which took me to the “hardest” of the humanities.  I.e. if you take language and literature, it at least teaches you SOMETHING real.  The language part. Within that, I picked the hardest disciplines, English and German (because furthest from Portuguese.)  This was the path to teaching in school — as were most other humanities and even pure science degrees — which I had no intention of doing, so I started taking about a million (okay four to five) courses on the side in other languages, at consulates, embassies and institutes.  I paid for these courses by working, and I was glad to do it, because it meant I could learn languages that, had I stayed in Portugal, would have made me a sought-after translator.

I’m often asked why for the love of heaven I chose to learn Swedish, for instance.  Well, because textile factories were then (might still be) the main industry in the North of Portugal.  And because my dad worked for one, I KNEW that the machines were imported from Sweden, and that the most legible/accurate assembly instructions were in Swedish.

My idea was to become a free lance interpreter/translator, and what I’d realized up front is I couldn’t do it with my free education alone.  Our curriculum hadn’t changed from the nineteenth century where its main aim was to create young ladies who could speak various languages and be an ornament to society with erudite talk, or teach other young ladies to do the same.  I had more training in translation in high school, whose curriculum had been modernized, than in college.  Yes, the diplomatic corps mined our school (particularly the best students) for its ranks, but really they preferred those people who for whatever reason knew more than two languages, and knew them better than they were taught in college.  Hence, you know, jobs abroad, and paying for courses on the side, and well… everything else.  (Though knowing myself I was never interested in the diplomatic corps.)

However, look above, unless pursuing some thing  that has a clear definition and clear goals “free education” is worth what you pay for it.  Not being consumer driven, it tends to become fossilized in whatever worked back when some do-gooder founded it.  Or to become subverted for the purposes of government.

BUT, you’ll say, so does paid education.  Look at what is happening with people taking degrees in puppetry and basket weaving.

Well… there will always be a number of those when value is put on “a diploma” more than on what you can do with it, and when a piece of paper is your credential to entry in an “educated class” who might not be able to do anything, and therefore holds to the credential as a positional good with more fervor than ever.

Also “paid” is …. debatable, as the government is funneling money to schools via the students.  What I mean is there is no effort made by anyone along the line on establishing whether all that “education” is good for anything.  What I mean is, as in the insurance system, where the third-party payer for health care doesn’t care if the patient lives or dies, the scam of passing money from government to professors doesn’t care if the patsies in the middle get anything useful out of the deal.

Hence the fact that even in the hard sciences students are required to take courses in gender studies and micro-aggression sensitivity, keeping those otherwise utterly useless departments alive.  Also a reason there are no more Western history courses or Latin in most schools.  Because the consumer has less and less say in it every year.

It wasn’t that way thirty years ago, when most courses still taught SOMETHING you could use in the employment world, but that is neither here nor there.

Also, in America, the paper — as in Europe — has come to mean more than knowing the stuff.  And this is stupid as knowing the stuff is easier in the US than in Europe.  Not that we’re smarter, but we have lending libraries, massive bookstores and even before the internet, ways to order out of print books.  What this means is that self-education doesn’t have the issues it has in Europe.

I figured this out when I was writing the Shakespeare books.  This was almost 20 years ago, and I have since forgotten what the issue was, but I had a question about Shakespeare biography and called the library, who called the local college, who got me in touch with a professor, who got me in touch with another professor at a much better university.  As I explained my problem and asked my question, the gentleman asked me other questions.  In the end instead of answering me he laughed and said I might now be (after 15 years of reading everything I could find) the foremost expert on Shakespeare biography in the US.  Which amused him.

Of course I didn’t have a degree, so I couldn’t teach in college (or anywhere else.)

Which brings us to what they’re promising when they promise free college.  Look, guys nonsense aside, there’s a reason courses in line-fishing and popular music lyrics exist.

Countries that have free education MIGHT by and large have lost all touch with the economic realities, but they do still have a fairly demanding course of studies (even if it’s for being a well educated nineteenth century lady.)  Because they only have free education for the top 5% or so of students, if that much.

The mass of students — you guys went through school, right — not only can’t, but don’t want to engage in rigorous courses of study.  They want the credential, because they’ve been told it does all sorts of nifty things (as far as mine is concerned, though I never tried, I’m told I could make a nifty paper plane out of it, though the lacquer seals might make it hard to fly.)  BUT they don’t have any particular intellectual passion, and aren’t even interested in any work that requires extensive intellectual training.

So if you institute free college here, what you’ll have is a) more degrees in ant-watching.  b) more time to teach students what they actually need to know.  We’re now at the point where college graduates are less literate than my classmates at the village school were, and know far less useful stuff about the real world.  (By fourth grade, we learned about useful plants, how to buy and sell at a profit, and the geography of the region, among other things.)

I look forward to the time when you’ll need a doctorate before you can be sure the person knows how to read, write and count to twenty without taking off their shoes.  Because a system designed to accommodate those who have no interest in learning necessarily descends to the lowest common denominator.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if it’s free, right?  I mean, who does it hurt?

It diverts a substantial portion of the GDP to an idle and otherwise useless class as well as giving politicians more chance to indoctrinate the young.  It creates a false sense of entitlement in said young.  It dulls even the brightest minds as “education” becomes more and more a matter of dotting the is and crossing the ts with no thought involved.

Most importantly though, it costs the young their most productive and mentally alert years.  It means careers — and marriages, and kids — are postponed until the complexities of Marxist analysis of line fishing are mastered to perfection.

In the end, it means we’re poorer, older and dumber.

TANSTAAFL.

You get what you pay for.  And what the politicians give you for free is always bought by you.  At a higher price than it’s worth.