According To Hoyt

Prepare to Be Assimilated – a 3 month old blast from the past

*I usually don’t do this recent a blast from the past but this is the other side of the coin from mine “I was born American” post.  And it serves to illustrate the case nativists are just another side of the coin of the crazy “culture is inherited genetically” SJWs who think it’s racist to ask you to drop your culture in favor of the country you’re now living in. Yeah, acculturation is hard.  Harder from some cultures than others. It is neither impossible nor undesirable.  The creed for immigrants should be what Dave Freer set out in a post months ago “Fit in or f*ck off.”  America tolerates a greater range of “oddity” unlike say European societies or — much worse — everyone else.  That’s fine.  It’s part of what makes it great.  It gives it greater range. Makes it more anti-fragile. But being odd or eccentric is not the same as being an embedded foreign-national who refuses to adapt and claims the right to have society adapt to them. And ultimately that’s what’s offensive, be it from the “disabled”, the “safe room requiring”, the nativists who hate not getting their way, or the don’t-intend-to-assimilate immigrants: the constant whining that society adapt to them and their path be eased.  Put down that rattle, put down the pacifier, and fit the world as is, and do your part, and don’t intentionally demand special accommodations.  Yeah, you can try to change society, but you can’t demand society fit your every demand.  It never does. Fit in or f*ck off, or at least STOP THE WHINING.*

Yesterday I was surprised when Dave Freer sent me a post that echoed almost exactly what I’ve been thinking.  In a late night (for me.  He has temporal privilege, living in Australia) conversation last night, I found that we agree in more than one thing, including how nasty things are going to get if we don’t get at least a partial course correction soon.  That is a post for another time — how the fact that the left’s eschatology and the belief history comes with an arrow and that they are the inevitable “end of history” (a belief that’s religious in nature because no rational principles lead to it) has caused them to be blind to the fact that silencing opposition is NOT winning — but for now it remains scary that both of us are worried about the same things.  Why scary?  Because I’ve known Dave for… twelve? thirteen? years and the man has a gut feel for the future. Even when you really wish he weren’t right, he tends to be.

But today I want to talk about assimilation, or, in sociological terms, acculturation.  I, and Kate Paulk, and Dave Freer, and a ton of the rest of us are immigrants who went to another country with the intention of living there the rest of our lives and who had incentives to fit in and be part of that country.  (In the case of two of us, husbands. And in my case a philosophical belief in the principles the nation was founded on.)

But even then, with the best will to fit in, it’s a HARD thing.  Really hard.

It’s not just in your head either, though it is there too.

Humans are tribal, and living in a multi-ethnic society doesn’t make you less tribal.  This is why people keep looking for racists under their bed, because you know, it’s baked in, and they know they’ve “discriminated” at some point.  Only this isn’t the racism of the progressives.  Minorities can be (often are) as racist or more racist than the majority.

But more importantly, in a multi-ethnic society that tries as hard as it can to eliminate racism, you get a different kind of “racism” that has nothing to do with race.  You get tribalism that fastens onto odd things.  It’s best expressed in “Ya’ll are not from around here.”

What you might not realize if you have never immigrated and acculturated is that the way you move, the way you speak (absent accent), the way you eat and the way you walk (not to even mention handwriting) are ALL culturally linked.  Most of it is not identifiable at a conscious level, either.  Most of it is so deep that all it does is trigger the “ya’ll are not from around here.”

I know I’m fitting in better because it’s been years since people stared at me while I went about my daily business and before I opened my mouth came up to me and asked “Where are you from?”

(And btw, the reason I stopped resisting identifying as Latin is because other people are making that identification for me, usually people who have a grudge (and who, bizarrely, manage to think I’m Mexican.)  My kids came to the same decision for the same reason.  It’s one of those “you say that I am” and it actuates even when my hair is colored light brown — it has no color of its own anymore — and I’m pale from a combination of lack of sun and illness. SOMETHING is triggering this response in people.  I don’t know what it is.)

Now, when you don’t fit in, for whatever reason, you’re going to find that some people — often not the sanest people in the world — are going to have issues with you and often be hostile.

Remember this as we go through the stages of assimilation.

It starts when you find yourself in a completely different land and you realize there’s no going back.  I came over after Dan and I discussed our options and decided where we were going to live.

The choices were here or there or between and wherever, a sort of multinational, above nationality existence.

We chose the US for several reasons. To begin with there was that philosophical belief set I had which conformed best to the founding documents of the US.  Then there was the fact that Dan could never be REALLY Portuguese, even if he moved there, learned the language and acculturated completely.  He’d still be a foreigner living there.  Being Portuguese means sharing ancestry.  Our kids would be considered mestizos.  Our grandkids would probably bear “the Americans” as a nickname.  Our great grandkids might too, and by the sixth or seventh generation, THEN they would be Portuguese (and might not remember why they had that nickname, and might think it was just some ancestor who liked American movies.)  Then there was HOW we wanted our kids to grow and the options we wanted them to have.  We decided the US was our best bet.  There were no doubts our kids would be Odd and the more free the society the more outliers thrive in it.

So I came over and set out to acculturate.  Part of this involved watching a lot of old TV because it gives you the catch-phrases, the “feel” of things.  I also read a lot and pretty much everything, which helps, though what helped most was reading auto-biographies and NOT by famous people, who are presenting an image, but the sort of “my grandma wrote an autobiography and we printed a hundred copies and donated one to the library” candid shots of normal people you can get in those.

Even with the best will of the world, even wanting more than anything to fit in, it’s very hard.  Not just in America.  America might be one of the easiest places in the world, because it is multi-ethnic and a country of immigrants.

But even so, people catch the subconcious signals of “something wrong about you.”  They stare.  They don’t trust you.  Sometimes they think you’re stupid, because “smart” in a society is not an IQ test but a series of signals a lot of them subconscious.

I muddled through, but sometimes there there were days I felt so homesick that I’d give anything to never have set out on this course.  And people treated me oddly, and it’s very easy to use that as an excuse for failure.  I learned not to do it because, through friends who did it constantly, I identified it as a trap.  I chose to ignore it.  But I still knew it was happening, and it made me long to go back to my tribe, to the place I belonged.

Some number of immigrants do this.  It gets to be too much for them.  They run back “home” where “things make sense.”  I might have done it but for that philosophical conviction.  That’s how hard it is.

At this stage many people make plans to retire in the “homeland” or at least to go back after death.  I guess it’s a comfort.

And I still had that option, six years in, because the hoped-for kids had failed to materialize, so if something happened to Dan, or simply if it got to be too much for me, we could always “go to Portugal.”

Only then I had Robert.  And the most important reason to live here and stay here came into being.  And if I was to raise this child American, I certainly wasn’t going back, even if a tragedy happened and something happened to Dan.

This is the point at which you’re most offensive to natives, btw.  You know just enough of your new society to see all the warts, but not enough to see the good side or necessary side of the warts.  And you’ve been far enough from your native society for a while so it creates this glow of nostalgia.  You know you’re “trapped” in the new place, which creates resentment.

This is when the words “In my country” — meaning in the old country — come out of the mouths of immigrants.  I was lucky to watch a Turkish immigrant in a group we belonged to alienate everyone with this behavior, so I didn’t do it.  I thought it, sometimes, but I didn’t DO it.

So then came the serious-fitting-in part, helped, btw, by dad.  We took Robert back to meet the family after he was born and dad who, btw, longs to see me every year, told me not to be running back for every important event in the kid’s life.  “Don’t be like those immigrants from France who raise the kid to be Portuguese, while in France.  You made your choice, now make sure your kid knows his place. Raise him American.  We’d love to know him, of course, but he’s American and that’s where he has to fit, and live and thrive.”  This was much like Dave Freer’s FIFO advice yesterday.

So… I made my choice.  And I really started trying to fit in.  This did not involve changing our diet so much, or my clothing choices (I’m odd, okay) but a closer observation of people.  I’d have got rid of my accent, if I could.  Though being a mother helps with this too, because unconsciously you start picking up speech patterns and gestures from your kids.  I might still strike people as somewhat odd, but it wasn’t as in your face anymore.

I also stopped reading in Portuguese, because when I do that a lot, it affects my word choices and rhythm of language in English, and I was trying to get published.

And at some point, I stopped being stared at when I was at the grocery store, and I stopped feeling I stuck out as a sore thumb.  I still couldn’t write people who grew up in America.  (I still can’t write people who grew up NORMAL in America, but that’s something else.)

I don’t know when that happened because I was busy just living.  Somewhere along the line I stopped thinking of Portugal as “home” and Portuguese as “we” and instead changed that to America.

Then came the shock of going to Portugal after a five year hiatus and being in a foreign land, rubbed wrong by the way these people moved, the way they talked, the way they prepared food, a myriad little things.

Now, be aware I’m not an “ugly American”.  I’ve been to other countries (neither America nor Portugal) and reveled in the differences particularly in food and dress but also architecture and just ‘different’.  That’s the point of traveling, I think.  But it’s also easy to enjoy the difference when you know in two weeks or whatever you’ll be back home and have things your way.

It’s harder when the back of your brain remembers doing things that way and — this is hard to phrase, but it’s something like — is afraid of relapsing and of getting “trapped” in the old place.  It’s a feeling of being in a foreign land that is nonetheless eerily familiar, and yet not familiar enough that you could survive in it on your own. Because of how familiar it is, you see the warts.  Because you’re now acculturated elsewhere, it’s easy to see the solutions too and you find yourself saying “Back home we do it this way” then stop, aghast, realizing what happened.  And it’s a relief to come back to your adopted homeland.  And you feel guilty it’s a relief, because you love the people you left behind, and they would be hurt if they knew how much your prefer your new place.

This is where I’ve been for at least 15 years.  It’s where I’ll be the rest of my life.  There will always be little things that aren’t “right” about America, things I learned so far back that they’re not conscious.  Nothing big or philosophical, but the little ways of doing things.  Sometimes I can’t explain to my husband why I hate an area he loves, or vice versa (this is important while house hunting) all I can do is wave my hands and say “No, just no.” And I know I give the “indicators” of class and intelligence all wrong.  (Not REAL class or intelligence but how those markers are perceived in the US.)  I KNOW that was part of my trouble in the field.  I also know that my “I’m getting really, really angry” is mistaken for shyness or fear here, which has led to some — in retrospect — funny situations.

I will never fully belong either place again.  That’s okay.  It’s a choice I made. And of the two, I belong here the most.  Say I 90% belong here, opposed to 10% in Portugal.

But the process to get where I am was neither easy nor unintentional. And it involved consciously NOT romanticizing where I came from, which I find is a big temptation for immigrants of all types and colors.

So…  So this brings us to taking in refugees from a culture so different from ours as to be mind-boggling, (and you wouldn’t get HOW different unless you’d lived in one half way there), from a religion that considers itself at war (physical, not just spiritual) with us and modernity, from a place where tribe is primary above all…

Do I understand why they want to come here?  Sure.  Even if half the reason is probably wrong of the “streets paved with gold” variety.  They want a better life (or a life) for themselves and their children.

Will it be an easy road to acculturation?  No.  For one, our culture right now ACTIVELY DISCOURAGES acculturating.  It’s considered a “betrayal” of your “native” culture.  I was accidentally  in the room yesterday (I am ill, okay) while someone watched an episode of Dr. Ken, in which his wife accuses him (a second generation Korean) of being a lapsed Korean and brags about how she has passed on “her culture” (she’s second generation Japanese) to her kids.

The entire episode could serve as a cultural dissection of “the crazy years.”  These two people AND THEIR KIDS are AMERICAN.  That’s the only thing they are.  Yeah, okay, they come from elsewhere, as do most Americans.

BUT the message heard, loud and clear, is that you’re supposed to hold on to all this culture from an imaginary homeland, even when you marry someone from elsewhere, and pass this entire undigested baggage to your kids.  The message is that not only is there no escaping your roots, but it’s somehow bad to want to.

This is the message these new refugee-immigrants will get, though TV, through movies, through social workers.  How important it is they hold on to their all vital tribalism.  Not just in food and clothing, but in thought.  How it’s somehow “racism” to demand they fit in into their new homeland.

Remember I’m saying this as someone who’s been there.  Acculturation HURTS.  Even when you want it, it’s a very painful process.  Think of the worst days of your teenage years, and multiply them by five or ten years of consciously dragging yourself through this process.

It’s hard enough to do when you chose this, when you love it, when you were born with many American inclinations, love the way you fit here, and when your tradition doesn’t demand you hold yourself as an enemy of your new land’s ways.  (And btw, I think that’s why it’s considered “racist”: acculturation and pushing for people to assimilate hurts people.  Bleeding hearts don’t understand that sometimes hurt is part of the growth process.)

I can’t even imagine trying to do it when immigration was forced on me, when going back was never an option, when my habits, culture and religion all encouraged me to be suspicious of my new countrymen and caused them to suspect me.

Hard?  Rather say impossible, or close to.  And then add to that telling you that you’re NOT SUPPOSED to assimilate.  And you’re supposed to raise your kids in the old culture.

People who have never acculturated, people who are frankly quite ignorant of what “foreign” or “abroad” means, beyond their easy, lazy, fluffy headed vacations talking to other people like them abroad, call those scared of such an influx of people in that bind “ignorant.”  I guess because they lack a mirror.

Is it scary?  It is very scary.  Can it end well?  Of course it can.

But the way it ends well is where our society cheerfully smiles and says “fit in, or f*ck off.”  We’ll embrace little Achmed and little Fatima as our countrymen, but NOT if they go around demanding Sharia, telling us to stop eating pork, and that we can’t write/make stupid parodies of Allah, as we do of every other religion/belief in our culture.  Sure, they can roll their eyes at the stupid parodies, or write outraged blog posts about our disrespect.  But they don’t have the right to try to curtail us by law, or to bring their f*cked up culture, which caused their problems to begin with, here.

I don’t see it happening, at least not while our current multi-culti elites are in power.  Which means what we’re doing is importing trouble for later.

Further more, what we’re doing is being horrible to these people and ensuring they’ll never fit in, either place.  And not like me, not 90%/10%.  No, we’re talking they will fit about 30% either place.  And because they’re not self-selected immigrants, they’re probably not odd, not used to NOT belonging.

Of such discontent is strife and war born.

UNDERSTAND this is not what i want, not an expression of my desires.  It is what it is, and how the human animal works.

It is impossible to have this deranged belief that culture is genetic and that people can’t and shouldn’t change (a belief belied by history) and a multi-ethnic society.  At the end of that road is a war none of us wants to imagine and a far more restrictive society than any of us would like.

The only ways out of it are to either take no immigrants, certainly no immigrants in a large group (which makes it harder to leave the old country and its hates and loves behind) OR to hand to every refugee a little handbook.

The cover would say “Fit in or f*ck off.”  And the inside would explain “At home we did it–” is banned, that it’s gauche to try to pass the culture you left behind to your kids.  Oh, food and attire are fine, no one complains of that, but do not try to pass on “we hate x because in the 11th century, they”.  And the only way to stop passing that on is to be American as HARD as you can.

Which hurts.  It hurts like hell.  The generation that immigrated will never fully heal from it, and their kids will still bear scars. [Mine don’t.  I chose this.  They might be more patriotic than their generation, but I don’t resent acculturating.  I chose it.]

But it’s the only way to make good on your choice of America.  It’s that or go back.  There is no other choice.  Making your new country fit the old is the WRONG choice.  Else, why did you leave.

Fit in or f*ck off.  No, this doesn’t mean becoming the Borg.  America is the society on Earth with the greatest tolerance for oddities and outliers.  BUT you do need to fit in minimally to succeed.  And you need to start thinking of America as “we” and not holding yourself up above the rest of your countrymen.

This goes double and with bells on if you were born and raised here.  Stop imagining there is a perfect society elsewhere and that you somehow belong to it.

Life is in great part the art of adapting to the flaws in reality that don’t match your desired state.

Sometimes all you can do is Fit in or F*ck off.

 

*This is a good day to run this post of Christopher’s.  Normally I’d run it at Mad Genius Club, since it’s mostly about writing and how to constructively critique a work.  But it runs deeper than that.

Today is the 29th of February, aka blogger appreciation day.  This year I’m not doing badly or in financial trouble, unlike four years ago.  I do however put in at least three solid blogs and a bunch of hosting a week, and if you average it out with what I get from the blog it’s about $5 a blog.

Not complaining.  I’ve not kept up with subscriptions, and though health is coming back it’s really slow so I’ll try but no promises on the subscriber space.  (Today my publisher suggested someone upload me, and we replace me with a cyborg to get around the health issues.  It was at a party and I THINK she was joking.)  (I will btw ship stuff off before the next move which looms a month off, and that’s before the hopefully last move three months off (in case you wonder why I said I have a million troubles and a blog war is not one of them.) I certainly don’t want to move a ton of books and stuff twice.  I haven’t done it so far mostly due to time.  I’m not driving — car needs fixing and we haven’t had TIME — and coordinating with the guys to take me to the post office requires they have… yeah, time.   BUT it will happen.  One way or another.)
Anyway, it’s the 29th of February.  If you enjoy someone’s work from Instapundit down to the most obscure blog I can’t think of — because obscure — send them the price of a cup of coffee.  They and you will be glad.

AND if you like an indie writer, give them a good review.  If you got a free book, give them a review and/or a tip.  It’s a difficult world out there for anyone living from freelance.  You want more work from them in the future?  Keep them in the game.

Oh, and a PSA- I’m told (again I don’t have time for this, am away from home and net time is very limited and mostly on tablet) someone is claiming I tweeted offensive/blog-war stuff.  Look, even if someone annoys me, they just annoy me. I don’t have time for wars. If they REALLY annoy me, I GIF-post them but the last one was someone accusing me of being racist, in my professional circles. And even then I only answered because the someone had annoyed me before.

More importantly though, I don’t tweet.  I echo my posts, and instapundit echoes posts, automatically.  BUT I don’t tweet.  (I think maybe I retweeted someone’s post once or twice, and I tweeted at Milo once, because I’d gone to twitter due to a blog link.  BUT that’s the extent of it.  I don’t like the platform.)

And seriously, I don’t have time for cr*p like that. I’m finishing books, I’m moving, probably twice before summer, and right now — the next few days — I’m at a space conference.  I’ve got a million problems and none of them involves a poo-flinging contest over fundamental disagreements. People are allowed to believe whatever they want.  Unless they physically come after me and mine, I won’t do more than slap them down in my blog comments. Because it’s my blog.  In their own home they can do any crazy thing they want to.  I don’t care.

And now I’ll get out of the way and let you read Mr. Nuttall’s excellent post.*

Encouraging a Writer -Christopher Nuttall

Before I start, I should note that this is NOT a cry for help. This was provoked by a response to one of my earlier posts, which inspired me.

Being a writer requires, as Eric Flint said, to practice a form of double-think. On one hand, the writer must believe that his work is worthy of great awards; on the other, he must consider it a piece of garbage that needs heavy revision. Good writers strive hard to strike a balance between the two extremes. A writer who believes the first rapidly declines in quality (as he is convinced his work doesn’t require an editor) while a writer who believes the second tends to give up (as he is convinced he will never make it.)

The responses a writer gets tend to drive him (or her) towards either of the extremes. Praise can drive a writer towards the first extreme, particularly when it isn’t tempered with thoughtful comments and critical advice. Criticism, however, can push a writer in either direction; it’s easy to give up, but it’s also easy to believe that your critics are merely trolls. (You can probably guess who I’m thinking of here.)

Ok, you may ask. What’s the point?

My recent twin articles on piracy attracted a comment from a reader who complained about book series being left in limbo for years (David Weber’s Multiverse, for example) or simply abandoned altogether. In the case of the latter, two indie authors were mentioned, both of him had one or two books and then vanished from the scene. I took a look at one of the books and I noted that some of the critical comments were actually very savage; indeed, they were not useful critical comments. I have no way of knowing for sure, but what I think happened is that the author simply gave up. He didn’t see any value in continuing when he made no real headway.

This is a particular problem for indie authors that is just coming into the light. Traditional publishing (say what you like about it) did a reasonably good job of grooming authors, ensuring that new writers were edited before their works saw the light of day. Obviously, a few howlers were published, but by and large the quality was reasonably high. Indies, however, have neither the encouragement of a contract nor the support of an editor. It results in authors either putting up books that are not ready for online sales or simply losing heart and vanishing from the scene.

Looking at the author in question, that may seem a little odd. A four-star overall rating isn’t bad, is it? But negative comments impact writers far more than positive comments. (We’re like that teenage girl who obsesses because some jerk called her fat, even though everyone else says she’s pretty.) It’s easy to fall into despondency when our work gets a bad review. I know, that makes us sound like prima donnas. And yes, that’s exactly what we are. No one starts writing without a very high opinion of themselves.

So, how best to encourage a writer?

First, write good reviews.

I’m not talking about merely ‘great book – five stars’ although such comments are warmly welcomed by all writers. I’m talking about detailed reviews, a paragraph or two, that prove that the reader actually paid attention to the book. Writers love hearing specifics, if only so they know what to focus on next time.

Second, if you must be critical, be constructive.

It is a regrettable fact that books, particularly ones without a proper editor, tend to have everything from plot holes to spelling errors. But it is also true that indie books can be edited on the fly. (I edit the documents of every indie book of mine, when someone emails to say they’ve spotted an error, and re-upload the document.) A decent critic is the writer’s best friend.

For example, a reader of Harry Potter might take issue with Harry being entered into the competition in Book 4 against his will. He might write “I have problems accepting Harry being forced to compete, as we know he didn’t enter his name. This opens up a whole series of questions – if Harry can be forced to compete, why can’t the Dark Lord be forced to stop being evil? It might be better to make it clear that Dumbledore was forced, by the terms of the contract, to force Harry to compete, as the original agreement didn’t make any provisions for a fourth competitor. A line or two would close this loophole and give Harry a better reason for taking part.”

Don’t engage in personal attacks, of any kind. Writers – particularly new writers – are learning their trade as they go along. Calling them ignorant idiots will merely turn the writers against you, leaving them unwilling or unable to deal with your comments.   Maybe you know better than them about [whatever] but treating them with contempt for basic ignorance isn’t helpful.

(And if you meet a writer who isn’t inclined to listen to gentle critical advice, just don’t bother.)

Third, help to promote their books.

Most writers, particularly new ones, don’t start out with a huge fan base. They certainly don’t have vast amounts of money to spend on publicity campaigns. If you like a writer, please tell your friends about him; join their Facebook page, share their posts/tweets/whatever as far as possible. It does help, both to convince the author to keep going (because they’re selling more books) and to encourage more people to read his books.

Fourth, join their forums/blogs/etc.

Authors love attention. People writing comments on their blog posts boosts their morale, which keeps them going. (There’s nothing more annoying for a writer than putting a blog post online that garners no comments at all.) If you enjoy something they write, say so; if you want to take issue with it, do so gently (see point two). And while you’re at it, you can ask them when the next book is coming out. <grin>.

Fifth, don’t blame the author for something beyond their control.

This really applies to both traditional publishing and indie, although in different ways. It isn’t fair to blame a traditionally-published author for the price of his eBooks because there’s a very good chance he isn’t setting the price. Writing a bad review on the grounds the eBook costs more than the hardback will merely frustrate the author. For indies, making fun of their covers is rarely productive. A new author will probably not have the money to make something really spectacular – covers like the Ark Royal books cost $300 each – and it isn’t fair to complain about them using a stock image, even though you’ve seen it before.

Any others? What do you suggest?

I Was Born American – A Blast From The Past 7-4-2014

Yes, I was born in another country of foreign parents who would no more become American than fly unassisted, (and who desire it less than they wish to have have their heads shaved by a warthog) but I figure that was an accident of circumstance.  What really matters is that I was an American in my heart.  I just had to get here and become one in truth. (And that, by itself, is an American attitude.)

This week while talking to a friend about his foreign SO, I found myself explaining that other people, in other countries, have a hierarchy in their heads all the time — who is powerful, who isn’t, what attitude is proper.  You can find it (if you know where to look) even when reading British novels.

We’re not like that.  Whether we were born elsewhere or here, Americans — those of us who are proud of the name —  are rebels, revolutionaries, something new under the sun: a people who believe people should be equal in their right to life, the right to liberty, the right to pursue their happiness undisturbed by either inimical neighbors or oppressive “betters.”

We have no betters.  We are American.  When I got citizenship I had to swear never to accept foreign titles of nobility.  I thought it was silly.  What title of nobility could compare to being an American?

I’m not saying that Americans are for absolute equality.  We’re not.  We’re however for equality before the law (and we want it back, thank you very much. Yes, IRS, NSA, the rest of the alphabet soup and Mr. “I got a pen and a phone” I AM talking to you.  Who are you to arrogate to yourself the authority of the people?)  And that notion, alone, has permeated the country and even in the breach it makes the humblest man feel like he’s able to stand up to the most powerful.  Because they’re equal before the law, and even when our law is corrupt, that equality of free citizens lives on in our hearts.  We can each of us stand tall, American citizens, unbowed.

In the same way, though I was born very far away, in a very (trust me) strange land, I never fit in there.  The hierarchy seemed wrong and contrived.  I evaluated people for what they did, not their clothes or their last name.  And though years later it would take me conscious effort to fully acculturate, the seeds were there.  I had a congenital inability to bow or obey; a tendency to roll up my sleeves and try to fix whatever was wrong, instead of just moaning about it; and a need to look after those people who were “my group”.  All I wanted to do was to shoulder my own life and do the best I could to the best of my ability and to call every battler striving along with me a brother or a sister.

I bought Stranger in a Strange Land, based on the title, because that’s how I felt.  Then I came here and found I belonged here, all along.  The day of my citizenship ceremony, after we came home, I walked out to the mailbox and on the way there it hit me “I am an American now.  I belong, in law as I always did in my heart.”  Then as now the thought is enough to bring tears to my eyes.  Thank you, guys, for accepting me as one of your own.  (And that total acceptance regardless of national origin is nowhere else as complete as in the US.  (Though some other ex-British-colonies come close.))

In Portugal I felt strange because I believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believed in this, in fact:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Still do.  Those beliefs make me American.

To their defense, I pledge my life, my liberty and my sacred honor, in the full knowledge that, like those long ago signers, I might be required to give them up for the cause.

I have my scrap of flag.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Long may she wave over the land.  Long may she wave in our hearts.  The price is required of every generation, to keep this radical idea we call America going.  Our price might turn out heavier than we bargained for, but great things cost much, and what is greater than liberty?

The baton has been passed onto us, and it’s up to us to run with it, even if it means dying on the way.

We are a radical experiment, a nation not of blood and genes, but a nation of heart, of mind, of belief.

Don’t let it perish from this Earth!

A Presumption of Innocence – Amanda S. Green

One of the most fundamental premises of criminal law in this nation is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. This one idea – or ideal, if you prefer – places the burden of proof on the State to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of an offense. What that means is the State simply can’t accuse someone of committing an offense, jail them, smear their name and hold them unless and until the accused manages to prove their innocence.

It is, in short, a right we should hold as one of the most dear and most important ever granted.

Unfortunately, that right is being trampled on, willingly and happily, by some in our society. Why? Because they believe (or at least profess to believe) that the male of the species in inherently bad and should be made to pay for the patriarchy that has held women down for most of history. They ignore history and historical precedence in pushing for a system, within the legal system and on our college campuses and in our military, that shoves us back centuries of jurisprudence and assumes that every male accused of sexual assault is guilty.

I don’t know about you, but that is one step back I don’t want us to take because of the precedent it sets for so much more.

A recent panel at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) points to part of the problem. In the panel “Confronting Campus Rape”, the discussion quickly devolved into an agenda that should have been anticipated simply by looking at the description of the panel: “reframe the debate, discussing university culture and policy, pedagogy, and student experience through the lens of feminist philosophy, legal theory, and studies of sexuality and power.”

The result of the discussion – if you can call it that – was to push for a denial of rights to those accused of rape, up to and including denying them the right to council during the disciplinary hearing, denying the right to confront the accuser and more. According to these forward thinking individuals, the chance of a woman accusing a man of rape was so slim, he should be presumed guilty and punished and to hell with his rights.

This isn’t an isolated incident. According to a report by Fox News, similar approaches are being advocated at Brown, Amhurst and Columbia. Students at that bastion of liberal thought, Berkley, have protested due process for their fellow students accused of rape. Protesters at a lecture at Ohio University about the college tribunals and their lack of due process for the accused wore tee shirts that read “Rape is Real” on the front and “This is bullshit” on the back.

Time has an insightful article about this troubling trend that lays at least some of the blame directly at the door of the White House. I’ll leave you to read it but, as with so many initiatives, it is based upon data that is, at best, questionable. In this instance, the study the White House relied upon stated that 1 in 5 female students were sexually assaulted while in college. That is a horrifying number. However, from what the article says, that number came from a study based on only two schools and with a very low response rate. Not exactly scientifically accurate by a long shot – not that it stopped the White House from moving forward.

Thus, since 2011, the Department of Education has recommended that colleges use the lowest burden of proof—“preponderance of the evidence,” which means a finding of guilt if one feels the evidence tips even slightly toward the complainant—in disciplinary proceedings on sexual assault. (Traditionally, charges of student misconduct have been judged by the higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”) The new guidelines make this a requirement; they also encourage “juries” with no student participation and even a shift to a single-investigator process.

If that isn’t bad enough, keep reading.

Missing is virtually any recognition of the need for fairness to the accused. The recent White House Council on Women and Girls report on sexual assault dismisses false accusations as a “myth,” citing a 2010 article by University of Massachusetts Boston psychologist David Lisak that concluded that “only 2-10% of reported rapes are false.” Yet a 10% error rate is hardly trivial. This estimate also refers only to proven fabrications; no one knows how many unresolved charges, nearly half of Lisak’s university sample, may be false.

But this terrifying trend – and it is terrifying. If we allow the government to encourage this sort of behavior in our education system, how long until it starts trying to use this inverted standard of proof in criminal trials – isn’t limited to our college campuses. The military is also taking steps that make is almost impossible to defend against such an accusation.

I don’t know if Major Michael Turpiano was guilty or not of the charges brought against him. However, if any of the facts put forth in this article on JQP are true, the case against him is troubling at best. It also appears to be another situation where the man was presumed guilty and denied the ability to mount an effective defense.

As the mother of a son, I’m not surprised by this. When my son was old enough to start showing an interest in girls, I sat him down and had a long talk with him. We discussed all the things you would expect: how to tell if a girl was interested, respecting her and listening to her, if she said “no” not to push, etc. But I also talked with him about making sure he took precautions and not to trust the girl when she said she was on the Pill, etc.

You see, I’ve listened to women of my acquaintance, both when I was still in school and since then, talking about what they have done or threatened to do to guys who didn’t “fall in line”. Some of the jealous ones threatened to accuse him of anything from giving them the clap to rape if the guy broke up with them. Others laughed about how they told a guy they were on the Pill when they weren’t. If they got pregnant, they’d either get an abortion or have the kid, sue the guy for child support, and live pretty on his dime.

I’m also a rape survivor. I know what it means to have my choice taken from me and to be violated in the most personal and emotionally traumatizing way you can be. So believe me, I have no sympathy for a man (or woman) who rapes another person.

But here’s the thing. Whatever that somewhat questionable study says, women do make false accusations of rape and other forms of sexual assault. Sometimes it is because the girl in question is underage and gets caught by her family doing what she shouldn’t be doing. In order to keep from getting into trouble, she claims things got out of hand and she really hadn’t agreed to go “all the way”. Sometimes it happens because the woman is just a bitch or evil.

The question we have to answer is multi-fold. First, do we dare start down a slope where we choose one form of offense to change the burden of proof, placing it on the accused? Second, is it worth ruining the life of a single innocent person just to “reframe” the issue “through the lens of feminist philosophy”? Third, when did it become acceptable to blame someone for the so-called crimes of their ancestors? Fourth, when did it become the vogue to condemn someone simply because of their sex?

I don’t care that a campus investigation into an allegation of sexual assault isn’t a criminal trial. The truth of the matter is that investigation will determine whether the college refers the case to the criminal authorities of the jurisdiction where the college is located. The so-called evidence the university gathered will be turned over. In the meantime, while the university administration is protecting the identity of the accuser, the accused is identified, suspended from class and other activities on campus and, in short, in danger of having his life ruined. He has little recourse, thanks to the Department of Education and the current Administration, simply because he is male.

We don’t judge – or at least shouldn’t – a person based on the color of their skin, the religion they follow or the creed they embrace. Why are we being asked to judge in this case simply because the accused is male?

 

*This post is unusually typo-ey and has missing words.  Sorry.  Written between one and two am.  Those of you who program, this is like midnight code.  Sorry.  We’re headed out for TVIW and will be gone till Wednesday.  And I’ve been getting things ready.*

I’m not a Freudian, though I spent a lot of time studying Freudian theory when I was young and stupid.  My sympathies were always closer to Carl Jung, until of course I realized that both Freudianism and Jungism were just-so-stories to explain how people worked, and I moved on to writing outright fiction which has the advantage of being more fun. (Okay, I’m eliding several years as a multilingual translator and other jobs, but this makes a better story.)

However, both of them made way more sense than Behaviorism, that bastard child of Pavlov’s experiments and the reason I incapacitated myself with laughter when I stumbled on the Heinlein quote (I remember it in translation, as I first read it, so it might not be exact.  The Heinleins the boys didn’t steal are packed for the move) “Every time a dog drools, a Pavlovian has to ring a bell.”

The same thing that made me rolls my eyes at the whole stimulus/reaction nonsense also made me raise my eyebrow at Asimov’s contention that he didn’t believe in the subconscious.  And explained to me what I’d always felt about his characters, that they were convenient plot devices but unmemorable.

While both he and Heinlein would often go for the nutty soft science theories of the day, Heinlein is still eminently readable.  You might not like the plot and disagree with the message, but his characters move right in, sit beside you and nudge you for a drink.

Asimov wrote some great (or entertaining) stories.  I used to love his sf mysteries.  But I read the Foundation trilogy three times and not only fail to remember most of it, but none of the characters made an impression. They were there.  They did what they did, and then they were gone, like the taste of Californian wine.  One moment on the tongue and gone.

There is a point to this.

Heinlein was many things, in his life, starting arguably as a socialist, back int he innocent days when people didn’t fully realize socialism is always the primrose path to communism (or fascism) and when the twentieth century hadn’t been filled with the graves of the victims of socialist experimentation. He ended, if I can believe what his widow told me (and I think I can) by voting for Reagan, having moved in a libertarianish direction.  (Even if he had problems with the Libertarian Party itself.)  In the middle there, he helped Ginny campaign for Goldwater.  And no one can read his books without getting that most of all he put his face in the individual over the collective.  No one can read his books, either, without being fairly sure that he didn’t believe humans were infinitely perfectible.  Mostly his humans were humans. They smoked and spit, they cursed and sweated.  Humans, like us.

Asimov was a progressive in the current mold.  He didn’t believe in the subconscious.  I don’t know if he believed humans were infinitely perfectible.  I doubt it, because he wasn’t a complete fool.  But he might have.  It seems to be an article of faith among the progressives.

Yesterday I found myself in a comment section, reading comment after comment justifying things like Trump saying that he wants single payer care, because “well, he has to do something, and why not that.”

This in a conservative site, by so called “conservatives” who think that, oh, Cruz and Rubio are insufficiently conservative.

This is bad enough, because it’s a manifestation of the irrationality I keep meeting with in his supporters, even those whom I KNOW aren’t usually irrational.  I’ve heard everything from “I know he probably is as bad as the rest, but whom else can I vote for?” to “But Cruz is in league with banksters” (while Trump is Simon pure) to other pieces of insanity that boil down to: he could eat a live baby on camera and I’d still vote for him.

And the reason for that is always the same “He tells it like it is.”

Um… yeah, to an extent.  I mean.  He tells feminists to STFU, and he talks back.  But he also tells it like it isn’t, calling a “loser” to anyone who dares defy him, and generally acting like a crazy drunken uncle at a wedding.  And those aren’t usually that popular.

In the end, like Ross Perot, he’s doing something, though.

It is not what his supporters think it is or the reason they tell us they like him.  It’s something deeper, something I doubt he himself knows he’s tapping.  And I hope to heaven he has no idea what he’s unleashing.

I’ve spoken here before of talking to my boys when they were very little, and having them be puzzled at cartoons, and how in cartoons all the girls are brave and have adventures, while in real life girls just wanted to be pretty and do quiet stuff.

In the same way, my first year in the Us, as an exchange student, I was a little puzzled at commercials, which always showed a kid of each race, or an adult of each race.  In my experience of life, it was always self-segregated along racial lines.

And that’s what is driving the insanity.  You see, the progressives think there is no such thing as the subconscious.  So they think humans are infinitely perfectible, clay for the social engineer’s moldings.

But humans aren’t that.  Humans are built on an ape-frame.  That means that humans tend to resist attempts to make them over.

Only life is good and we have things to do, so we just make the right noises and exhibit surface compliance and after a while even the races mix more, and even guys make obligatory comments about how women are so much better and “strong” women and “empowering” women.  And society lurches on.

But there is a tension that builds in the human animal between what they are told is the truth and their lying eyes.

It is that tension Trump is tapping and its power is so great that it’s MOSTLY sweeping under the carpet the fact he’s as much a socialist as Hillary and probably as corrupt if one judges by his lifetime of “business” which is done the way it is in crony capitalism, by taking advantage of everyone else.  (But he’s a national socialist, so we have that, right?)

Reading the comments about not minding that he is crooked, not caring if he wants to institute single payer, and being okay with his support of planned parenthood, I just kept shaking my head.

But then there were the other comments, and you’ve seen them, and I’ve seen them.  I remember the days when Storm Fronters got kicked out of every even semi-decent arena, and got told to take their ideas of racial supremacy and their anti-scientific belief in their racial purity and fold it all in corners and put it where the sun don’t shine.

But people are so confused that they think they have to permit anything.  And so monsters of the id come out and strut about.  The repressed and its lunacy, the subconscious where infantile ideas compost explodes from otherwise rational people, which is why we had precious snowflakes here trying to maintain that you have to have anglo-saxon blood to understand the Constitution.  (I guess they don’t have any.) and other absurd ideas even the vile progs would disdain. (Btw being from the North of Portugal if I don’t have at least 50% anglo-saxon blood, it’s a miracle.)

And it goes back.  It goes back a long time.  Societies endure traumas and take damage that remains hidden, just like individuals do.  It probably wasn’t the best thing to react to the trauma of WWI and WWII with the prog project of reforming Man.  They interpreted it all wrong, took all the wrong lessons, and proceeded to fill more graves trying to mold us into shape.

And it spilled to the victors of those wars, too.  America took damage from — not civil rights, as such, not the legislated EQUALITY of opportunity  BUT  EQUALITY OF RESULTS — from enforced stupidity.  I mean, equal rights before the law and the right to compete equally, sure, but the only way the government knows to do that is to enforce quotas, which rob the exceptional of achievement and which distort what should be a meritocracy.  Then it set about enforcing non-sexism, the exact same way.  And it enforced non-monopoly and non-exploitation of workers (all of this in the name of remaking society) in such a way that only big corporations can run through all the gauntlets the government creates.  The small businessman can’t.  Innovation becomes more difficult.

But more importantly, the common man felt forced more and more to ignore what he saw and his own instincts.  I mean, really, low flush toilets?  So that you have to flush them four times, use more water and lose time too?  Or perhaps our lightbulbs, which were taken from us so we could be given poisonous twists of gas which didn’t work very well?  Or should we talk about California desertifying itself so that it can save the delta smelt?  (Which I understand makes a good fish fry.)

The absurdities multiply and the vile progs, convinced that what they see on the surface of humans is all there is, push and push and push.

If they’d stopped pushing it would be one thing, but the latest push into every single human endeavor, from science to comic books, trying to enshrine a “the more victimy the better” ethos has driven a lot of people nuts.

And then there was Trump.  No.  He’s not a great savior.  He’s a conventional democrat, so insulated and wealthy that he just blurts out whatever.  And the media build him up.  Of course they do. He’s one of them.  A reality TV star.  And the establishment, if they can’t have Jeb, will be happy with him.  He can deal.  Why, even Carter says so.  He’s flexible.

But the monsters of the ID don’t care for any of that.  They just care that they can dance naked in the sun after years of people not letting them out.

There aren’t that many raw racists in this country.  We’re too mixed for that.  But there is a fringe of every race that absolutely believes theirs is superior.

The problem is after years of lying to them and telling them that only whites are racists, you can’t put them back in the closet again.  You can’t shame them.

It would be one thing if the crazy White Supremacists only went after Black Lives Matter, but they won’t.  They’ll go after normal people, just like the crazy Black Supremacists do.

And it would be fine if every man who has ever made me cringe by going on about how women are smarter than men just said, “No, I’m sorry.   Women have some great qualities, but for most of them spatial reasoning sucks.”

But this is not what’s happening.  What’s happening is that we’re seeing men running around absolutely convinced that having a penis makes them better than any woman no matter how accomplished.  Yeah, they’re a minority.  But the common decency that would cause other guys to hold them in check is not there anymore (except here.  Thanks guys) because after all the lies, who knows how to stop the crazy without using more lies anymore?  And no one is sure where the truth is.  Even when it’s rather obvious.

The repressed looms much larger than simple reality and blinds people.  The unspeakable can be shouted and people are paralyzed, unsure where the boundaries are and why.

This is the result of twisting people and trying to change them beyond what human nature permits.

It will settle down.  But until it does it’s going to be ugly.  And dangerous.  And it’s going to foist creatures like Trump on us, whose only saving grace is stroking the monsters and flattering them.  And it will cause fights where no fight should be.  We might even get the prog’s hope for a race war.

When the dust settles, though, where will we be?  Will we have reset to pre WWII and a society of conformity which leads inevitably to 1984?

I hope not and I think our technology is pulling us the other way.

But the Monsters from the Id are as much as anything else an infantile safety mechanism, trying to drag us back to what is safe.

And in bringing our internal clock in line with reality, it’s very easy to also run back to that safe place in childhood where technology is predictable and where the “important men” (mostly women, but never mind) look after us and keep us fed and happy.

Which is why the Trump followers are okay with him mooting single payer.  (I wonder if they realize that there will be no doctors and substandard care.  I doubt it. And if I asked, they’d say that doctors will be FORCED to serve for salaries similar to teachers.  Because you know, daddy is going to make everything work, never mind if someone has to be enslaved.)

Whether he wins or not, things are going to get very dangerous.

Prepare and be ready.  And however many monsters of the ID stomp around you, remember you’re an adult and have responsibility for your actions.

In the crazy years, the best you can do is keep yourself sane.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre….

 

I know almost everyone here — this blog being full of people who know history and how societies work — has been frozen in horror watching as a deep field of liberty-loving candidates is getting reduced to one old narcissist who frankly has always, for sixty eight years, supported the most big-government, socialist ideas he could find.

I’m here to tell you this is not the end.  It’s not the end because of what America is and who Americans are.

Unfortunately yes, it is a type of American that is rendering us vulnerable to Trump: the celebrity loving, reality-show-watching type.  I have to shrug my shoulders because I know celebrities exist only because now and then I’m trapped on a checkout line and read the headlines of magazines.  (Other things I read include the back of products I don’t intend to buy, and in desperation, when nothing else is available, instruction manuals for machines I don’t own.  It’s an addiction.)

However they’re not the only ones, or even the primary type of American.  They are by and large the type that still relies on the mass communications/mass entertainment.

And the times they are achanging.  And they’re coming to be more the times that are tilted towards people like us: the goats, the outliers, those who don’t fit, the odds.

America — trust me on this — has a higher proportion of odds than just about anywhere else on Earth. I’d say for sure than anywhere else on Earth, but I know there are back of beyond places in Australia — Hello Flinders Island! — that are about like that too.  We’re the people whose ancestors were thrown out of or left every decent place on the face of the Earth.  We don’t listen well, we don’t sit still, and we’re always thinking of something that destroys the pretty narratives of our betters.  We have caused Barrack Obama to retreat into a fantasy world.  We are called ungovernable by every leftist president ever.

And we have created a technology that is going that way.  If I were just a few miles North of where I am, I wouldn’t need to stand in line and read about celebrities and go “Who? What?” because groceries deliver there.  And I already order most other things on line.  this doesn’t lead to anomy or isolation.  For one I now have “office mates” who happen to live all over the world, but with whom I trade “good morning.  Never enough coffee, he?  How is the project coming?” just like normal persons in normal offices.  For another because of course I still choose to go out, to museums, classes, restaurants.  It’s just that I’m not forced to spend so much time in things that are not fun for me.  (I shop like a guy.  No, seriously.  Shopping is a mission to find what is the right size and vaguely the right color and run out with it in victory.)

More importantly, we’re creating a technology that is eliminating the “mass” element from a lot of intellectual property/communication: news, books, music.  Because producers can sell directly to customers, we can have a small fan base and still make a great deal of money.

And that change is coming for other things too, from education to movies.  It’s already to some extent in manufacturing, and it will get more so.

To an extent socialism grew as “Mass” industrialization grew.  It was a response to a world in which anything worth doing was worth doing in vast, organized enterprises.

Technology is bringing back individual effort, individual taste, individual opportunity.

Unfortunately culture always lags the physical world.  Because humans are not created to adapt instantly and painlessly.  It didn’t use to be that the world changed so much that we must change in less than a few generations.  In other words, the world we’ve created is too fast for us old apes to keep up.

Usually a change of technology of the magnitude we’re experiencing, demands revolution and blood before it stabilizes again and better.  The last big one was the French revolution, though echoes of it still go on around the world today.

I’m not saying this won’t happen.  I sense… things I don’t like ahead.

And yet, this is not the end.

It’s much harder to end a civilization than most people imagine.  Yes, Rome fell, but in a way it didn’t, and bits of it limped on for centuries.  Remember, those monkey brains?

And we’re still American.  We’re still ungovernable.  Trump might ruin the idea of a conservative movement in America.  Certainly if he can get elected, the GOP establishment could be forgiven for thinking they needed to run to the left MORE and find even more outrageously leftist candidates, indistinguishable from the dems except for about a quarter of their utterances.

But he can’t eliminate us.  And he can’t make the electorate exactly the same as in Europe, where socialism is a given.  Yeah, yeah, importing a new electorate.  Look, that 12 million number was always grossly exaggerated and if my neighborhood is representative (and the news form Mexico don’t lie) a good 2/3 have gone back.  Even the Children’s Crusade amounted to a few hundred thousand.  A drop in the American bucket. I’m not saying they don’t matter, mind.  I’m not even cruising for an amnesty.  I think Reagan’s was a mistake (though he couldn’t have known it.  We know it.)  I think we need to enforce our laws.  (I also think a wall along that large a border is unlikely if not impossible, in engineering and cost terms.  Just patrols would be cheaper.)

We’re still us.  Trump can’t make us not-us.  And Hillary and Bernie certainly can’t make us not us.  I’m laying a bet right now that if either of them gets elected we’ll hear the “ungovernable.  Too big to be governed” whine within three months.

We are the people who will not sit down, won’t put up with crap.

In a way the choices we’re being presented this election are the result of people not wanting their world to change too much, and wanting to take us back to some imaginary safe place. They think this place is the fifties, but I think even the inconveniences of the eighties would freak them out.

And this is where we come to the nub of the matter.

We’ve lived very well, very long.  Yeah, that means we’ve bred a whole lot of morons who think the ceiling will stay up when you remove the walls.  But those same morons are very sensitive to discomfort and hardship.  And will tantrum like nobody’s business and demand their metaphorical MTV the minute we’re dragged even slightly away from the technological forefront.

Some people want to drag us back, to stop technology.  They’re scared.

I understand this in the vile progs, a regressive movement whose golden age was circa 1930.  But that’s not us.  Certainly not the majority of Americans, and never the liberty lovers among us.

We believed in freedom and individualism back in the dark days of collective action and mass technology.  How much more should we believe in it now that the tech and the way things go work is going our way?

Be the change.  Dance in the stream of chaos.

If they think they can stop the technology and the freedom, the individuality and the belief in American ideals, they have another thing coming.

We must as of now work as hard as we can for that change, for that individuality, for that freedom.

It’s going to get hard enough because we don’t live in a vacuum and the rest of the world is hurting more than we are, because when our engine stalls, they slide back. We might yet lose a city.  And wars will break out, that might present us with a butcher’s bill.

It is for them and for us that we must not give up, we must not despair, and we must NEVER endorse these creatures who want to drag us back to a century that never existed.

Yeah, yeah, the Donald will try to silence blogs (well, he doesn’t like being criticized and is quite terribly thin skinned.  He’ll try to control the net.  He’ll try to make us a mass nation again, with a mass megaphone leading us all.)

We will not do it.  We will not endure it.  The day after they install curtails on our electronic freedom, three guys with circuits will come up with something better.  We will not stop.

The world needs us, and the future comes from America.

Illegitimi non carborundum!  Be free and give them hell.

 

 

The Time is Now to be an Adult – Amanda Green

 

Yesterday, during a break from work, I hit Facebook like so many others do and came across a couple of articles that not only had me shaking my head but I have no doubt had my father spinning in his grave. There were any number of things he and I disagreed about, not the least of which was politics. One thing we did agree upon, however, was our love of books. He, even more than my mother, believed that the best way to educate yourself wasn’t to go to school. Books, to him, were the gateway to all knowledge. They gave you the foundation and then practical application gave you the mastery.

You see, my dad was an Okie who grew up during the Great Depression. (Of course, growing up in Ardmore, OK would be, in my opinion, the Great Depression but that’s another tale.) Unlike so many during that time, his father was able to make sure the family had a roof over its head. It wasn’t always the same roof. My father and one of his sisters were parceled out to their grandmother for several years because the family couldn’t afford all the kids. That left scars but, as adults, they learned that was probably the best thing the family could have done.

There was another benefit to spending those years with their grandmother. Neither my dad nor my aunt were in the best of health. They spent a lot of their time in bed, getting over the latest bout of illness. To pass the time, they read. The one treasure their grandmother had were her books. She had been born on the Trail of Tears. She had grown up dirt poor in Oklahoma before marrying their grandfather. Together they had farmed and raised their own family and he had taught her to read and she learned to love not only the escape fiction gave her but the knowledge non-fiction did.

That love for books was passed on to my aunt and especially to my father. It is a love he passed on to me. I was doubly fortunate because my mother also loves to read and together, she and my father made sure there were always books to read. More than that, they taught me the importance of reading books and stories that were written in times long past. They explained that the subject might make me uncomfortable and I certainly wasn’t supposed to embrace those uncomfortable or controversial ideas – unless I fully investigated them and believed in then and then I had better be prepared to accept the consequences. However, as they pointed out, reading about those times and idea was the only way to learn from them and make sure those mistakes weren’t repeated.

Unfortunately, in this day and age of political correctness and delicate flower egos, that is something that has been forgotten. That was brought home to me again yesterday.

The New York Post has reported on a school making the decision to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This isn’t the first time the book by Mark Twain has been the center of controversy, either by being banned or being sanitized (the offending language being cleaned up and modernized). But, in many of those situations, the students involved were middle grade students. In this particular instance, the students were 11^th graders.

“We have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits,” principal Art Hall said in a letter to parents.

What? Wait, it gets better.

Hall said students were challenged by the use of the racial slur, and felt the school was not being inclusive enough. . . “I do not believe that we’re censoring. I really do believe that this is an opportunity for the school to step forward and listen to the students,” Hall said.

The one redeeming fact from all this is that the book isn’t being removed from the school library. But what troubles me is that the administration is bending to the will of students about what should be taught. I get that they are uncomfortable with the use of the N-word. Hell, so am I. I was brought up with the knowledge that it was a derogatory word and shouldn’t be used. If either of my parents had heard me use it, they would have impressed upon me the error of my ways.

However, the word was used back when Twain wrote the book. The world was a different place than it is now and we need to learn from that world. Learn the history and society so we don’t repeat them.

But there is something else regarding this particular instance that bothers me, something I’m seeing more and more of. Instead of using Twain’s book as a learning experience, the school gave in to the “feelings” of the students. The administration didn’t want to make the students uncomfortable. Instead of teaching them that life will sometimes be uncomfortable, the lesson being given is that your feelings are more important than anything or anyone else.

This is very similar to what is happening in Dallas with regard to the name of one of the schools. In the 1950’s, around the time that the Supreme Court decided Brown v. the Board of Education, the Dallas Independent School District opened a new school. That school was named for John Bell Hood. For those unfamiliar with the name, Hood is best known for his military service to the Confederacy. Prior to that, he graduated from the United States Military Academy. He then served in the Army in California as well as Texas. But he will forever be tainted in the eyes of so many because of his loyalty to the Confederacy.

Earlier this year, students at Hood Middle School were given the opportunity to vote on whether or not they wanted to keep the name or have their school renamed. The reason? Quite simply it boiled down to whether or not they should commemorate the name of a man who served the Confederacy. Nothing else about his life was considered. Only those few years where he fought for a nation (legitimate or not) he felt loyalty to.

I don’t blame the kids in this. One of the current trends in this nation has been to erase not only the Confederacy but to shame everyone because of what happened so long ago. Yes, there was slavery in parts of what now comprises the United States. Yes, slavery is horrible. But let’s be real. It neither started in the US nor end here. Nor should those of us living now be held responsible for what our ancestors may or may not have done. But that’s not the point of this post.

Now, while I object to removing memorials to men and women simply because they took part in the losing end of the Civil War, I have no issue with Hood Middle School being renamed. Not because he was a general in the Confederacy but because he had no real ties to Dallas. From the best I can tell, the only connection Hood had with Dallas was he served with one of the then trustees’ grandfathers before the Civil War. That’s all. So yeah, let’s find someone with strong Dallas ties that can be used as a role model for our kids.

My issue with removing books like Huck Finn from the curriculum boils down to willingly blinding students to history. They need to see what they are taught in their history classes in the context of the time and learn from it. Will it always be easy and comfortable? No. But it shouldn’t be. We need that discomfort to help us remember the lessons.

More than that, where do we draw the line? Will we soon be saying, “Kids, we let you decide that you don’t want to read this book because it used a word you are uncomfortable with. Now there’s another group of kids who are uncomfortable with the language in this book. So we aren’t going to let that book be taught either. Oh and there are some of our students who aren’t comfortable learning algebra because they can’t catch on as quickly as others, so we won’t be teaching it any longer.”?

Yes, it seems far-fetched but is it really? We are reinforcing this idea in our kids that if they are uncomfortable with something, they need a safe place. Or they don’t have to read the item in question. Schools have actually quit assigning and/or grading homework because it makes those who don’t do it or don’t understand it feel bad. You don’t grade papers in class (remember those days when you would finish an assignment, hand it to the person in front or behind you and then everyone would grade the assignment right there?) because someone might be embarrassed by their grade.

When do we, as the so-called adults step up and start adulting? When do we tell our schools that their job is really simple: they are to educate our kids and prepare them for the real world, not the world of cotton batting and good feelz? When do we take the responsibility of making sure our kids know history and understand that the world today is different from the world of yesterday and why? When do we make sure they know about those times we never want to see repeated: slavery here and elsewhere, the Holocaust, etc?

I challenge you to talk to the average student attending public (or even private) school and ask them the cause for the Civil War. See if any of them can name, much less discuss, anything other than slavery. Then ask them to name the parties that made up the Axis and the Allies and ask about things like The Final Solution. Ask them about Korea and Vietnam. Or, even more telling in some ways, ask about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

I fear for this nation, not because of the current crop of politicians (although they are an issue in themselves) but because of the younger generation that believes their feelings are more important than anything else. How in the hell are they going to function in the real world where they won’t be the best at everything they do, where people will disagree with them and – gasp – might use language that makes them uncomfortable?

Look at what your local schools are doing and if, like the school mentioned in the article linked above, books are being banned because they might make kids feel uncomfortable because of the use of a word thought bad now but that was common at the time the book was written, demand a more adequate explanation than “they might be uncomfortable”. This is an election year. It is easy to forget that there are local elections as well as national ones. Most school boards are elected. Demand accountability from them and if they aren’t making sure the schools are teaching your children the way you think they should, replace them.

It is time for the adults to start adulting and that means teaching our kids that they aren’t special flowers all the time and that the world isn’t always going to coddle them.

I find it bizarre — way beyond astonishing — that no one has done a study into how soaked in narrative our age is, well beyond any other age before us.  And how much that narrative is fictional.

I’m not talking here of politics, though it will tie in, eventually. I’m talking our daily life and “narrative” — aka story.

It wasn’t so long ago that fiction by itself was considered a weird and possibly pernicious form of entertainment.  A couple of centuries, AT MOST.  Which in evolutionary terms is an eye blink.

Before that, while fiction has always been with us, it used to be in small quantities, and disguise itself as non-fiction.

Very few people reading about King Arthur or the various other fictional exploits of knights and fighters in the middle ages thought of them as made up out of whole cloth. Yes, to us the absurd turns of plot are obvious, but remember they had a pre-scientific mentality.  For all they knew there were vegetable lambs just over the rise.

However, often, the story structure mimicked true accounts, biographies and rambling adventures.

It took centuries for fiction to evolve its own and have its own structure, though we are now fully surrounded by it. Just yesterday, my husband watched 4? 5? shows.  I read a couple of fiction books.  Our kids imbibe fiction through all those means plus games.  It’s the form of entertainment that pervades everything.

Some of the more stringent sects still consider it a sin to write and read fiction, even without the fantasy element.

Obviously I don’t believe that.  But I do believe we’re not taking in account how soaked we are in it.

Perhaps people don’t think it matters. Perhaps you need to be a producer of fiction to be acutely aware of how it’s NOT reality.  (And some of the producers, even, don’t seem aware of that.)

Satisfying stories have a clear line of responsibility, preferably the character reaps the consequences of his own informed actions.  (The informed part is debatable.  In some story structures it’s not possible, such as say mystery.  But I give them enough for an informed decision, which is not the same as a full knowledge.)  They have a satisfying and clear climax.  They have a satisfying and clear “morality” too, by which I don’t mean moral, but a self-consistent universe that is predictable.

Unfortunately, reality doesn’t have any of those.  Which is why humans crave fiction.

The problem is that while snickers really satisfies, fiction only provides a so-so guide to real life.  (I’m joking about snickers satisfying, before you jump on me.  AFAICT that’s based on the fact they have minimal protein, aka peanuts.)

Sure, I used fiction to teach my kids to see how other people thought, and I often say it’s how we experience being in someone else’s mind.  But when it comes to action-consequence, and particularly in the quantities we absorb fiction, it vitiates our thinking in peculiar ways.

Take Trump for instance.  No small part of his rise is people’s conviction even before it that we’d get a new Reagan.  “We suffered through Carter 2.0, we deserve our reward.”  Only reality is not like that.  You don’t deserve anything and there’s no such thing as foreshadowing.  But of course, the fact he was a dem, and the fact the media “hates” him (Not really.  Note they don’t report the stuff that would cost him his conservative base, such as Planned Parenthood support, or wanting to put his liberal sister in the Supreme court) triggers the foreshadowing reflex and people go “he’ll be just like Reagan.”  And even I have to fight that, because I remember having doubts of Reagan.  Not enough NOT to work for him.  But I find my brain squirming that way and have to remind myself not only is the situation far more dire, but Trump is no Reagan (history, opinions, depth of thinking.  Heck, the criticisms leveled at Reagan — war monger, excessive religiosity — are more like the ones leveled at Cruz, not Trump.)

But even more importantly, because our political opponents tend to come from wealthier backgrounds and have therefore been more insulated from reality, we get the strange vile prog idea that if they silence us long enough we’ll disappear or die out.  This is based on the Marxist messianic promise that they are the future.  Since they swallowed the whole package, this must be true.  And their fiction promises them that the hero who fights for the oppressed, etc (i.e. the one imbued with Marxist ideas.  The media and entertainment were taken over decades ago) always wins. And their opposition is OLD and set in its ways.

This is how they manage to completely ignore things like the barely walking zombies who are candidates for the democratic party nomination, or the fact that most of the prog rallies I pass are half and half college kids and really OLD people.  Because fiction assures them all young/strong/vibrant people believe as they do.

This is how they missed the fact that over the last thirty years they became the side of money and privilege (And yep, the truly poor and dysfunctional, but those are the sheep, not the leaders.)  This is how they can accept their president using “pen and phone” (“It’s a Kirk trick, so the good guys win”) while if W had done half of it, it would be terrible.  Because if the villain uses trick,s then it’s pure evil.  The hero can do it, though, because fiction.

This is why people like myself or the other Furies are NOT real women.  Because women as they see in fiction are always on the “progressive” side.  And  all the “reality” they know is fiction.

We’re not immune from it either.  See above example, but also how many people keep thinking collapse will be very fast and result in Mad Max.  This wasn’t even true of truly collapsed places like say Beirut.  And South America has been collapsing for centuries and it’s still not like that.

Post apocalyptic fiction is glorious and heroic (Unless done by our current lord and masters, in which case it’s dreary and boring.)  Real collapse is slow and dreary, mostly damned inconvenient and unsafe.  Real collapse is getting your car broken into twice a week, even in a nice part of town.  Real collapse is getting the electricity turned off, not permanently but randomly, a few hours a day, so you never know what to count on.  Real collapse is stocking up on oil and powdered milk because you never know when milk won’t show up, or will be spoiled on the shelf because of electrical black outs.  (The oil thing might be Portuguese.  People fry a lot, so oil disappears from shelves.)

And yeah, we tend to go for that.  Just like both sides tend to think if the current system collapses, THEIR utopia ensues.

These are DANGEROUS ways for narrative to get into the brain, and if you fall into them you will most assuredly be hurt.  If you live by the narrative you might not die by the narrative, but you won’t be happy, either.

Remember that.  Remember you’re soaked in ink, surrounded by it, but it’s no reason to swallow it.  Always be aware of the reality you live in, a reality that doesn’t foreshadow or repeat, or give clear indications of heroes and villains, or even link clear action with clear consequence.  Turn off the fiction brain when you examine reality.  It’s hard.  And it’s not nearly as much fun.

But, alas, reality doesn’t match our fictions, and it is reality we have to live in.

Moral Majority 2.0 – Brad Torgersen

Let’s talk about original sin, shall we?

In the beginning, there was Adam, and there was Eve. And they partook of the forbidden fruit, and were cast out of the Garden. Thus becoming mortal, and knowing the difference between good and evil. Their lives became short, and painful. And so too were the lives of their children made short, and painful. The sin of the father (Adam) was passed to all of his descendants. None were clean, because all were born into a fallen state — never knowing a day without the stain of sin.

It’s interesting to me that our (increasingly secular) society — averse to fables from monotheistic scripture — has nevertheless re-invented this particular thing. Something about original sin obviously grabs our collective attention, deep down in our psychological bones. We may declare God to be a myth, and renounce all traditional commandments, but original sin . . . we apparently love that idea just a little too much.

So, instead of having Adam’s transgressions laid on our heads, we have the transgressions of our ancestors, and our society as a whole, or even the transgressions of people who just happen to look similar to us, or who share the same gender, laid on our heads. We are sinful simply for existing. Denial of the sin is merely proof that we’re even more sinful than we thought. To deny is to be blind. To deny is to exhibit privilege.

And of course, the way to repent of the sin, is to do three things:

1) Use social media to “own” your sin, and decry yourself. It’s the digital era’s version of the Maoist self-renunciation: go into the public square, rip your shirt, beat your own breast in a confession of your Wrongthink. This is Step 1 on the road to rehabilitation, and being accepted into the fold of Goodthinkers.

2) Make sure the priest class (in this case: militant trans, militant gay, militant gender, or militant racial activists) see you doing Step 1. Do it often enough that the priest class doesn’t begin to suspect you of relapse. Once is not enough. You have to convince the priest class that you’re not straying off the reservation. So: repeat as necessary. Your original sin never goes away. You’re just hanging a sign on yourself that says, “I know I am a sinner, but I am one of the good guys.”

3) Go on the offensive against everyone else in the universe who is “asleep” and not presently carrying out Step1 and Step 2. And as noted in the beginning, denial of original sin is merely double-plus ungood proof that you are, in fact, a sinner. The bigger the denial, the more “obvious” it is that you’re soaked red with guilt. Because the militants have already stamped an asterisk on you that says, “Bad Person.” Denial makes them use a sharpie to embolden the asterisk, and then they append the words, “. . . who is a stupid fucking asshole, and doesn’t get it!”

TAKE NOTE: anyone can fall from grace at any moment. Even if they believe they’re actively engaged in all three steps. Any militant (from the priest class) can point to your asterisk, and call you out. For not being energetic enough in your efforts. Or for committing any number of slips that merely demonstrate you are not, in fact, reformed, and are merely hiding your true terribleness. Because your asterisk is permanent. Forever. You were born with it. You can never get rid of the asterisk.

And if one of the priest class feels like pointing to your asterisk and diming you out — especially if they can get numerous other priests involved in the effort — you’re fucked. No matter how much time and trouble you devote to steps 1 through 3. The militants have the final say. You can apologize your ass off, and mewl at their feet like the second-class human being that they’ve deemed you to be, and you still won’t ever wipe the stink of that asterisk off yourself.

Because it’s not about equality. Equality’s got nothing to do with it.

It’s about one group of individuals — always self-appointed, and using the safety and volume of social media – who are concluding that they are inherently better than us ordinary chumps; and conning us into collaborating in our own debasement. They’re not interested in making the world a better place. Certainly not for you and me, whom they regard as a lower form of life. They’re not even interested in making the world a better place for themselves, since admitting that the world is improving (by quantifiable, measurable criteria) would undermine their narrative of endless victimization.

It’s about the priest class doing what the priest class has always done — pat itself on the back for being superior.

Remember Saturday Night Live’s hilarious Church Lady skits?

Imagine the Church Lady, but in her late twenties to early thirties, and covered in de rigueur tattoos, facial piercings, multi-colored hair that’s deliberately styled unconventionally, or not styled at all, plus sexually androgynous clothing and choice of makeup, and sporting a trilby, plus boa, while flipping off the camera with two fingers — snapping a frowny-selfie.

That’s the 2016 Church Lady — the face of Moral Majority 2.0

And no, it’s not any more fun now, than it was in the eighties.

Satan? P’shaw! This Church Lady shouts, ”Misogyny! Racism! Transphobia!”

Don’t bother denying it, gentle friend. Church Lady has read the tea leaves of your soul, and knows the darkness that lurks there. You’re a seething froth-pot of barely-contained hatred and oppressor-think, just waiting to explode in a firestorm of microaggression. Got gay friends? Interracially married? Have a trans nephew? Fuck you and your weak-ass shields! No facts will get in the way of the narrative of the Church Lady! She’s got the goods. She’s calling you out. She’s airing all of your dirty laundry. And if you don’t have any dirty laundry – because, like almost all of us, you’re a decent human being — Church Lady is going to invent some dirty laundry for you. Church Lady knows. Oh yes, Church Lady knows

Yup, Moral Majority 2.0 — this time with even moar self-righteousness and shrill finger-pointing!

Terrific.

What does an ordinary American do?

Some of us have figured out that Moral Majority 2.0 is a colossal mindfuck and shell game, and have given the priest class (and their groveling lackeys) a middle finger. But this is not business for the timid. Oh no. You have to have your heat shield ready for radical reentry, because the Church Lady don’t play that. Church Lady — glowering at you through your monitor, with her mauve bangs and thick glasses, and an overly-plump, anemic profile — has had enough of your cishet fuckery. You will bend your knee to the new moral order, or you’re going to get your digital ass handed to you by a squadron of social justice spetznaz.

Unlike you, they don’t have jobs. They have all damned day to hang out in your twitter space, your Facebook page, your blog comments, haranguing you into the wee hours. And if they think you present a juicy enough target, they will reach out for larger media megaphones — already germane to the topics and themes of the secular world’s version of holy war — to ensure that you’re duly tried, convicted, and sentenced in the Banana Republic Court of Public Opinion.

Given this bleak picture, most good folk will tuck and run, spraying a 30% extra-tall can of industrial-strength NOPE in their wake. Hiding from the Inquisition is a time-honored response. And it often works, provided you’re in no way trying to operate in the public sphere.

Otherwise — trying to do the right thing — many more will attempt to play the game. They will engage in the three steps (written above) and imbibe the doctrine of self-loathing. It’s only fair, after all. How can anyone be productive and joyful, when reality is crushing and miserable for Church Lady, and all others like her? Sensitive, caring folk will rub their faces with soot, put on the rainbow hair shirt, and walk bare-foot through the field of ideological broken glass.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can simply flip down your welding visor, and endure the glare of their outrage — shining brighter than the sun. They can’t touch you unless you let them touch you. And since these are individuals with a severe emotional IQ deficit, it won’t be long before your quiet refusal to cooperate, flummoxes them, and they get bored, and move on to other, softer targets.

Like we used to say in Basic Combat Training, you can’t smoke a rock. Which means: you can’t truly break someone who knows the “game” is being played, and summarily laughs it off — for the game that it is.

I fully expect the pendulum to swing back. It may already be swinging. Too many people have been burned by Moral Majority 2.0, and too many genuine liberals — indeed, too many minorities — are tired of seeing their good works derailed for the sake of egotistical and psychotic closet-cases, who will simply keep moving the goal posts so as to ensure that a) they are never not oppressed, and b) they are forever in the moral driver’s seat.

Again, this whole thing . . . it ‘aint about equality. Church Lady doesn’t give a fuck about equality.

Church Lady gives a fuck about Church Lady. End of story.

You? Take care of your own business. Conduct yourself according to your own principles. Keep your own counsel. And don’t let the fuggheads grind you down.

UPDATE: What a fine day I picked to stop sniffing glue.  One of the devotees of the blog that shall not be named linked us.  Having skimmed through our comments, he decided our problem with Trump was that we were afraid he was too far to the RIGHT, instead of being afraid he’ll be Obama under a GOP flag.

(Update to the update: Special cupcake didn’t even skim here.  He got it from a post at the blog that shall not be named — which is also wrong but only because the blogger has never understood the difference between European right and American right.  Not stupid but strangely culturally blind — and COMPLETELY misunderstood it. I mean, amazingly, bizarrely misunderstood it.  Since cupcake set his link not to show, it’s Here.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t name the blog.  Not because it’s uniquely evil, but because many of its devotees read what’s inside their heads, instead.)

This is the second time this month someone read something plainly written and came up with an interpretation that leads me to believe their first language is Martian. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a widespread illness that makes it impossible to understand your native language.
There will be incoming.

I have a book I need to finish, which was interrupted over the weekend by “stupid house follies.”  I.e. our landlord wants us to move at the end of next month which is two weeks to two months (depending on stuff) before we can move into the house we’re buying. (He’s within his rights.  We’re month by month.  It’s just spectacularly short sighted and annoying)  Since lodging with four cats isn’t easy, we spent the weekend dealing with this (a friend has offered us room.  Well, two friends, one offered room to son.) and trying to figure out how to get all our other stuff moved and stored.  This means I’m WAY behind, and won’t have time to deal with incoming.  It’s up to you guys.

*And so it looks like it’s going to be Trump — a conventional democrat, which is to say a socialist — which is to say we’re not going to be given a choice at all, and that the chances of this country escaping moderately free, moderately intact and without a massive butcher’s bill are slim.  All I can tell you is not to give up.  Keep ringing the bells.  The minute we give up, we have lost.*

There is a scene in one of Giovanni Guareschi’s books (I think The Little World Of Don Camillo) in which the communists set up a rally in front of the church complete with amplifiers. Then there is a big wig from the city who comes to give the big rally speech and it’s all about the evils of capitalism, the imperialism of America and clerical reactionaries who exploit the people and other such chestnuts.

In the book, Don Camillo paces up and down, each sentence making him feel like he has a live cat in his stomach (I understand Don Camillo at a gut level, you could say.) And then he loses it and remembers that the bell tower is constructed in three (four?) levels and that at each level the bell puller can pull the ladder up into the next level. Which means, when he’s at the top there’s no way to get at him.

So Don Camillo goes to the top of the tower, and starts ringing the bell at/over the most offensive passages. (I can imagine that as Americans you’re all recoiling instinctively at this, because the idea of freedom of speech is so strong, but let it rest that in the context of the book this is a battle in a war between communists and “righties” – which in the post war era meant “sides with America” – for the hearts and minds of the people, and that the communists had violated the rules of the game by putting the amplifiers in front of the church.)

The communists rapidly come to the conclusion there’s no way to get at him, but since the bells only peal on the most outrageous pieces of cant, about American imperialism, retrograde clericalism and the like, the speaker quickly learns he has to moderate what he says – and, to paraphrase the story “ends the speech on a pathetic and patriotic note that the bells wouldn’t deign contest.”

(I later repeated this incident – sort of – by getting caught in the middle of a communist rally and singing patriotic songs at the top of my lungs whenever they went over the acceptable partisan bullsh*t. This while I was on the phone with Dan, who still married me, despite it. [I was in a phone booth the rally formed around.] Only I didn’t have a bell tower, but that was all right, because I had the weighted weaponized umbrella. [ You only think I am joking. Mom had it built for me.])

Most of us don’t have a bell tower – or an umbrella – not even metaphorically. I keep coming up again and again to the thought that we should have started talking back in the eighties, instead of letting friends, colleagues and people in public life construct this myth that if only Carter had had a second term, we would be living in paradise. We should not have gone along with their myth that Reagan’s cutting (a bare pruning) of government was iniquitous.

And we should never, ever, have let them get off easy over communism and the horror that communism really was. We should have pointed again and again, when they tried to weasel that “but it’s not real communism” that “real communism can’t exist with real humans.”

We should have pealed our bells so loudly that they couldn’t tell themselves their comforting fairytales and pull their collectivist dreams over their wooly little heads.

We didn’t, partly because we had no blogs, and partly because we had no metaphorical bell tower. For those of us in creative professions – but even for the ones in tech ones – there was no alternate route, no ladder we could pull up. They could get us where we lived. And they would. Since they confuse morals with politics, they have no qualms about punishing political opinion with professional disgrace and ostracism.

So we couldn’t talk. And because the media, entertainment and the news, or what the fabulous Ms. Chase calls the media/entertainment/industrial complex all reinforced their delusions and assured them there was real gold and promise in trying again all these old, bankrupt, vile ideas of forcing everyone to live the way the “enlightened” ones at the top decided, we’re now in the position we’re in.

I mean, you hear about echo chambers but for the last fifty years we’ve had an enormous echo-chamber of what is now called “progressive” (progressing rapidly back to the thirties. The NINETEEN thirties) ideas.

Even for me, talking before I had an alternate route to feed my family fell under unacceptable risk.

And then of course, the question is if by then it was already too late. As I said this madness, worldwide, started before any of us (or most of us) were born, certainly before any of us were old enough to do anything about it. It was all “scientific governance” and therefore a small cadre of “geniuses” were supposed to steer us past the rough spots that the common man couldn’t navigate. It was the spirit of the age, and as inevitable then as it is out of step with reality now.

Mind you, it didn’t work well, even then, but the illusion it could work could be maintained in the era when everything was “mass” – mass transportation (though that never took well in America) and mass manufacturing, and mass marketing, and mass entertainment, and mass—

The likely future of that world was 1984, where things were run tightly from above, not well but inevitably. Heinlein predicted something like that, too. See the beginning of the Door Into Summer and how forlorn it was for the character’s father to hold on to individualism.

We didn’t go there. We went the other way, towards a million different alternatives, towards niche marketing, An Army of Davids, the ability for someone with a bell tower and a ladder to make a lot of noise indeed.

Because the last time I posted about something touching on this, one of you got the idea I was saying mass manufacturing of heavy industry stuff shall go away soon, I would clarify that’s not what I meant. (I’m not saying that it will be with us forever, either. I never cut short human invention. But I think that for the remainder of the lives of everyone who is alive today there will remain some mass manufacturing and some heavy manufacturing.) What I mean is that each age has a “prototypical” way of doing things. In Elizabethan England, for instance, the nascent industry was cottage industry, labor intensive, and most people still worked mostly at growing food, because their methods of cultivation required THAT much work.

In say the forties and fifties, our factories required – still – a lot of human labor and human supervision. To create the goods needed for civilized life, you need to make them all in one pattern, and as many as possible for economies of cost, and the making of them involved a lot of people in work that was done for a few, massive employers.

Now we’re at the beginning of that trend going the other way: towards distributed employers, and small-scale and customized goods for the people, all of it taking less human labor to produce. The trend is maybe forty years young, so very young indeed in sociological terms, where things change very slowly, if they ever change at all.

So maybe my dream that we should have started talking back back in the eighties is just that. Maybe it was impossible.

But the panic and lashing out we see on the other side now, comes from just a few towers, spread throughout the landscape and ringing in tiny voices over their speakers and amplifiers.

So, two things:

First, never think that we are defeated. Yeah, they finally captured all the high ground, and they have all the amplifiers, and sometimes it seems our little bells mean nothing, even when we’re ringing the pure truth. But just by ringing, by being the dissenting voice, we’re causing a reaction and we might in time even – who knows—cause moderation and common sense in those amplified speakers. Don’t lose heart. Don’t let that ladder you pulled up behind you make you believe you’re in a world of your own, and that nothing you do affects anything out there. It’s very early, and they’re still angry and trying to find a way to silence the bells. Once they realize that’s impossible, that’s when sanity can be expected. Will it be in our time? I don’t know. Shut up and keep ringing.

Two: My friend Bill Reader reminded me that October is coming out month, though as he put it “I don’t think they meant it for conservatives.”

I’m not in your position. I don’t know how secure your tower is, or if you can pull the ladder up after yourself. I’m not advising anyone to do anything that will cost them family support or employment, or the material things they need to survive. But I’m asking you to take a step back and access where you are, because things are changing very fast. And if you come to the conclusion that you can come out, do so. As someone who did – it makes you far less conflicted. There’s something soul-corroding about pretending – even through silence – to be something you’re not. My grandmother used to say “Quem cala consente” which for those less fluent in Portuguese means “Those who remain silent are taken to give permission.”

If you can, consider taking up that rope and ringing that bell. It might seem to you – it often seems to me – the sound gets lost as soon as it echoes, but little by little you start realizing people are listening. And those in the crowd who do not dare come out yet, are taking comfort from it. And the other side starts to realize that no, this is not what all right thinking people agree on.

And we take a step back from the cliff we’ve been careening towards.

It’s entirely possible that the future really is a boot stepping on a human face forever – but that future is only possible if we let it happen. You’re not responsible for the past and you can’t change it. And the present is the direct result of that past. But the future is what we let it be.

Shut up and ring your bell.