According To Hoyt

Yesterday, in a moment of lightness I posted a facebook meme that said “Post this if you rode unsecured in the back of a pickup and survived.”

I’ll note that part of the reason I posted is that the only time I did that was when I was camping with my host family during my exchange student year. If we wanted to go to the grocery store with dad, my teen host sister and I rode in the back. It was fun and slow along country lanes.

I remember the warm summer afternoons, and riding in the back of the truck amid the corn fields.

The other part was of course more complex. I think we have been wrapping kids/teens and sometimes adults in bubblewrap. I have theories on why, but that was sort of a general “yeah, there was a risk, but it wasn’t a huge risk, and yeah.”

Even so it surprised me when I started getting comments from people who said they knew people who’d died by falling from the backs of pickups and lecturing me on the fact that those who didn’t survive couldn’t post the meme. (DUH.)

I’ll note at least in one case the person who didn’t survive had been standing in the back of the pickup and shooting out the back (rats, I think) which of course is much more dangerous than sitting in the back leaning against the cab, with the gate part closed.

Yes, if my host dad had hit something full on at sixty, we’d have been thrown. Probably. But he wasn’t doing sixty, he was doing 25 and the chances of his hitting anything head on on those roads was close to zero.

So, should it have been illegal, or should it have been left to his discretion?

Look, in theory I’m all for cracking down on people who have little kids unsecured in the back of the pickup. I don’t even like seeing dogs unsecured back there, not on the highway at least.

In practice, things are a great deal more complex.

Take spanking.

I’m going to confess right here that I spanked my kids. The older son more than the younger. Spanking consisted of open hand on behind, and most of it while behind was still wearing diapers. After that there were more effective methods of punishment because he was conscious/sentient enough to know what it meant when I said “the computer cord goes away for a day.”

Before that, sometimes you needed to swat him just to get his attention. (Ideally to get his attention we should have used a two by four. Still should. But we didn’t want to HURT him and the swat was enough to stop him.)

Time outs didn’t work on him. He would come out of them and resume whatever had got him put in time out.

Until he was conscious of time and consequences, the smack on the butt was the best way to get whatever it was to stop. (Whatever it was included stuff like running naked into a downtown area in the middle of the night; melting crayons on the radiator; trying to turn the gas stove on/playing with gas knobs; wanting to remove the cat’s eye with a screw driver [the cat was okay. He remembers the incident. He thought the cat was a robot]) I.e. we took no joy in it – I truly learned the principle of “it hurts me more than it hurts you” – and we only did it when we were unsuccessful by other means at stopping behavior that would endanger him or others.

Younger son I THINK got swatted twice in his entire childhood (Pretend-smacks on the back of the head don’t count. That’s now, and he’s bigger than I. Also they’re pretend.) because he responded to time outs, distractions, and taking away something he was playing with instead of spanking. His biggest sins were the sin of the younger child: scream like a banshee to get the adult’s attention. He didn’t ever throw chairs at us, bean us with toy trains or lock us out of the house. … or take off running naked through the middle of downtown. He did take off running through the middle of Orly airport but when he was too young to even think of smacking on the behind (a year old) and just bored.

Recently, over the thing with the football player beating his kid I became aware of two things: first, there are people who think that spanking is somehow always sexual and therefore think smacking a kid on the behind is kinky. (These people need therapy.) And second, people think the swat to the behind (more noise than anything else) should be illegal because they think normal, sane parents if they smack the kid once are at risk for beating the kid into the ground.

Or to turn that around: they think if they make it illegal to swat your son on his diapered behind then children won’t get beaten to the ground; burned with cigarettes; locked in closets, or whatever the extreme forms of child abuse they call to mind.

This is the same form of insanity we see with gun control.

Look, just because in extreme cases, to protect him and others I swatted the kid’s behind, it didn’t mean I was going to start beating him till he died. I didn’t want to beat him. And it was already illegal. Heck, it was illegal when I was young and when it was normal to beat kids with switches, wooden spoons and wooden rulers.

There is a vast amount of difference between a singular smack that surprises and stops and beating. There is even a difference between smacking a kid’s hand with a ruler (no, I never did it, but it was the accepted form of punishment in the school I attended. For some reason the smack was called a bolo which means cake in Portuguese. I rarely got it, though I did if asked to recite the multiplication tables aloud, because I knew if you missed three you got smacked, and suddenly I couldn’t remember anything. I don’t recommend beating with a ruler as an aid to learning, but it didn’t permanently damage me, either.)

(And no, you’re not teaching the kid violence. Kids know violence without learning it. Arguably they know more violence if they were never spanked, because they’re not aware of what it does. All mammals physically disciple their cubs. And while I agree we’re not animals, and we stopped as soon as other methods worked, sometimes it was the only thing that stopped a careening little boy.)

And here is the key: the people who would BEAT a child would do it whether it was illegal or not.

The people who buy guns to kill people, don’t care if buying the gun is illegal.

And the people who stand and shoot rats from the back of a moving pickup don’t care if it’s illegal.

Almost anything you can think of, making it illegal has a cost. In the case of older son, I REALLY don’t know if we’d have got through his childhood without major incident without the occasional smack. (I could tell you stories.) Curiously, once he got to be around five, and you could threaten/reward and he understood, he was one of the best kids to deal with. Before that… (And despite the “teach them violence” thing he still is one of the gentlest young men with the weak and defenseless.)

In the case of guns, when you make them illegal, you make it easier for those who don’t care it’s illegal to prey on a disarmed citizenry.

In the case of seat belt laws, etc, you have smaller trade offs, but trade offs, nonetheless. Oh, okay, so on a long camping weekend, I might have had to do without gum. Or pads, which was at least one reason for one of the trips. Not the end of the world. But there are all sorts of issues. For instance in Portugal the seat belt law discommodes my mother. (Mind you I have nightmares at the idea of riding there, on those roads, with those drivers WITHOUT a seat belt, even if I did it all the time as a kid.) You see, she’s very short and it goes right in front of her neck. I know in the US there are adapters for that, but not in Portugal.

My brother in law died in a motorcycle accident from a tire blow out because he wasn’t wearing a helmet. (He’d just removed it.) OTOH other motorcyclists hate the helmet laws because it cuts out on visibility or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t ride, and it’s not my life. The choice should be theirs.

What I mean is, yes, he died (mind you he would be liked to survive with severe impairment if he’d been wearing the helmet) but other people think they have valid reasons not to wear helmets. And, well, he might have been in a region when a helmet was required, but he’d removed it for a few minutes because he was hot.

To be fair, given the chance, he’d probably rather have died than be incapacitated. (He’d talked about it in the past.) I’d disagree with that choice, but it was HIS choice to make.

The point I’m trying to get at beyond the rightness of any of the actions mentioned is this: laws are not magical formulas. There are trade offs to every human action. Sane people know those trade offs and make a judgment on them without the need of a law to distort them. People who are either insane or outlaws will not care if you have a law.

I’m not going to discuss spanking, for instance. We did it briefly, in a mild form, in limited circumstances, with a child who didn’t respond to other methods of discipline. It might not have been the best thing ever, but at the time it was the trade off we felt we had to make, as rational and informed human beings to both keep our son safe and keep him from hurting others. We never had any wish to beat our child into the ground, and if we’d had it, the law would not have deterred us, because that was already illegal.

We don’t have any intention to go around shooting people, and if we did laws against gun ownership wouldn’t deter us. It’s already illegal to shoot people.

We don’t ride in the backs of pickups, but if we had to because it was the only way to get somewhere, then we’d probably ride with our back to the cab and the back closed and not on the highway. Because we’re willing to risk lower safety, but we’re not crazy. And if we HAD to we’d do it despite the law. If there was a way around we would rather be inconvenienced than break the law. But in either case, we’d not be seriously endangering ourselves.

OTOH the people who want to stand up and shoot rats from the back of a moving pickup aren’t going to be deterred by laws. They’d do it anyway.

Laws are not magical words of power. Passing a law doesn’t mean the extreme form of evil/mean/careless action is going to stop magically.

You might stop/inconvenience the responsible people from doing a mostly safe form of whatever you want to stop. I’m sure if it were today my host father would say “you can’t ride on the back of the pickup, the police might stop us.”

But if he were the kind of person who encouraged his kids to stand and hold on as he sped down the highway? Well, why would the law deter him if potential loss of the kids didn’t?

The law isn’t magic words of power. Saying them will not keep people who don’t care about the law anyway from doing the harsher forms of whatever you’re banning. They’re already doing things that risk life and limb of themselves and others. What is a little legal trouble on top of that?

Teach people the risks and let them make their own decisions.

Before passing a law remember that even the best laws have drawbacks. And that laws only stop the law-abiding.

 

 

When All Else Fails — David Pascoe

The door slams open of its own accord, drawing eyes from the assembled Huns, Hoydens and Dinerites. After an incomprehensible series of grunts between the figure outside it and the draconic door warden, the former staggers in. A long coat of deep green with a matching mantle broadens the figure into almost dwarven proportions. The brim of his chocolate brown hat covers most of his face, but for the reddish beard failing to hide his grimace of concentration. He weaves his way toward the bar and collapses – if one can collapse upward – onto a stool. Somehow he ends up half-reclined with his elbows on the bar. One hand tips the hat upward and you see the surprisingly grim visage of the Kilted Coffee Maker. His pale skin is even more so than usual, and there are dark circles under his eyes – eyes that stare through the wall.

A hush falls over the madhouse, an especially unnatural one as this place is never quiet. But, speaking of “unnatural,” nobody has ever seen the Kilted One out from behind the enormous (and enormously complicated) Espresso Device taking up one end of the bar. Taking up one end, and growing into the floor, through the wall, and extending what seem to be some kind of techno-organic tendrils up toward the ceiling. Mostly, you just don’t question it, as the coffee’s better than anywhere else in the multiverse.

“So that thing you’re told about parenthood? The one about the so-called Mommy Brain? How you can’t focus, and every sense seems tuned ” Even his voice is just a bit hoarse, as though he’d wandered in at the end of a five-day con. “I figured it was a matter of hormones, but it seems to be something a bit more metaphysical: turns out it’s not limited to mothers. This has been a hell of an experience, and I don’t recommend it for the faint of heart.”

He reaches into a pocket of his coat and pulls out a dark bottle with no label. He stares at it for a long moment, as though he doesn’t really recognize it. A man in the uniform of a Gunnery Sergeant of Marines slides a church-key down the bar. Without seeming to see it, the barista snatches it up as it bounces down the length of scarred, polished wood and pops the top off the bottle.

“Thanks, Gunny,” he tips the bottle in salute, a salute the Gunnery Sergeant mirrors, lifting his Dr. Pepper in reply. “So, yeah, focus has been … lacking. You may notice the recent automation in the Stuff of Life department down at the far end of the bar. I think the pipeline for the Black Blood of the Earth is flowing. The percolator and its feral offspring were finally corralled sometime last night. Those’ll be put out to pasture, as I won’t have that kind of coffee abuse here. You want to burn coffee, do it at home. Otherwise, the inter-dimensional drip – y’know, the one that crosses the eighth – should be solid for the foreseeable future. The Kilted Coon’s supply is guaranteed. Unless somebody lets the Cthulumari loose again. I won’t be held responsible for that kind of twisting of reality, nor the consequences thereof.”

He lifts his hand and stares at the bottle as though he’d forgotten he was holding it. He takes a long pull, and keeps pulling. When he’s finished it off, he kind of relaxes, muscles unknotting. He looks to melt into a puddle right there on the bar.

“Where was I? Right, parentdom, that glorious state of responsibility for something unable to care for itself. Y’know, I’ve been on call 24/7 before. I’ve spent hours and hours doing nothing but waiting for things of little interest to happen. What I haven’t done – until the last-” his eyes lose focus and the fingers of his free hand beat a rapid tattoo on the bar, “-is try to hold down more than one job at a time while making sure something small, weak, and unutterably adorable doesn’t bring my world crashing down around my ears.”

He absently pulls another bottle from his coat pocket and you know this one couldn’t have been there unless the pocket is as ankle-length as the coat itself. He retrieves the church-key and attempts to open the bottle. Upon repeated failure, he finally looks at it and you see his face shift from puzzled to complete befuddlement as he realizes he was trying to open single-malt as though it was a beer bottle. He closes his eyes.

“Right. Forgot I’m not supposed to do that. She’s gonna have my guts for garters if this is one of hers.” He opens his eyes and addresses the you and the rest of the rapt audience. “Let this be a lesson to you: don’t go traveling through Faerie and into any of the purely literary inspired splinter ‘verses. You never know what kind of ability you’ll come back with, and Herself can be murder on exposing our cozy, little arrangement here-” A roar briefly deafens the assembled and the barista grimaces as dust drifts down from the ceiling. “Yeah, she’s still working on Through Fire, so I might be safe, but don’t bet on it. Worse comes to worst, I’ll toss Wee Dave at her and jump into the Catacombs. The ‘Mari down there run wild until we need ’em. Strangely enough, crating ’em like veal just toughens them up. If the Grandsquirm and the ‘Mari aren’t enough distraction, I’ll just have to take my medicine, I suppose. Unless the EE Quantum Whatsit is actually working as designed. Usually it just spews really, really low energy particles, which is why we use it to chill the beer. No, I don’t understand how it works, and no, it shouldn’t be able to do what it does. EE products are … better than things designed by B.S. Johnson, that way.”

He flicks the cork out of the bottle with his thumb and takes a pull. Another grimace.

“Not how one treats a good single malt, but needs must. Where was I? Oh, right, parenthood. That question is Exhibit A. I can’t seem to focus on anything anymore. Not for longer than about a minute and a half. The writing has suffered. Herself suggested that she may or may not have experienced something similar with the Heinlein’s namesake. I’m just praying it doesn’t take me the same time to get back around to productive. Well, to get around to productive, as I remain unconvinced I’ve even seen that one from the right side.”

He scowls into the glass tumbler the gentlebeast down the bar has thoughtfully deposited near his right elbow.

“High intelligence is as often a curse as a blessing, and while I can see what needs to be done – in those rare moments of quasi-clarity – I have been as yet unable to affect such change. My Pint-Sized Tyrant’s needs come before mine, and after She Who Must Be Obeyed’s duty has been seen to. As I intimated, the writing is the worse. The writing and the perspective. Those are the worst. No, the writing, the perspective, and the lack of exercise. I’ll just come in again, shall I? It’s those days where I stare at the screen, write a sentence, stare at it, stare at it some more, write another sentence, repeat, then look up and realize I’ve written a matter of sixty or seventy words and it’s time to go wake the Boy-Creature, after which my time is not my own. Those days are dark, and most days are those days.”

His smile is weary, and he raises his now half-full glass to Foxfier.

“I salute you, Lady, for I don’t know how you do it. We’re discussing the timing for Working Title the Second, and a not minuscule portion of my soul cringes, I tell no lie. If I didn’t, already,” he jiggles the glass of amber liquid, “it could drive me to drink. I’ve thought about quitting, I’m willing to admit. Just give it up for a while. My lovely wife would call some of you for help moving my cooling corpse, as I’d become completely unlivable in near-record time, however. I’d really rather not push her that far. It would complicate so many of her plans, you see. Also, I expect my head might explode.”

He drains the glass and fills it halfway, muttering about optimists, pessimists and scientists. From his other pocket he draws a small brown bottle. Unscrewing the cap, he draws an eyedropper from the bottle and empties it into his glass. A sniff, a sip, and one corner of his mouth quirks upward.

“At the other end of the spectrum lies the suicide of the spirit, quick or slow. Doing all the things I used to enjoy doing, but which produce nothing, and eventually I’ll be just a shell of a man.” He finishes the glass, again. His words aren’t slurring, and he’s not weaving any more than he was when he staggered in the door, but his face has lost a little of the haggard look.

“For me – and for most of us, I’d posit – it’s going to come down to a third option. The one where we keep on as we intend. Compromises may be made, but they’ll be internal. For me, I may lose sleep. I understand that’s normal for parents. I may cut out large chunks of what I used to do for fun. I’m not really even sure how that word applies to my life right now, anyway. I’ll trade the wall in for a nice, heavy anvil. The wall has too many head-shaped holes, you understand. And the anvil can be used to make things, too. Or just prop one’s feet on. I’ll continue writing, as I can’t do otherwise. My father told me once of a shirt he saw, the caption of which said, “When all else fails, lower your expectations.” At the time, I found it vulgar. Now, I think I’m starting to see the wisdom in it. I’d like to maintain what little claim to sanity I can legitimately own, after all. Keeping the Heir Apparent alive at the end of the day is a hefty accomplishment. Perhaps everything else is just gravy. Or at least gravy for today.”

(Yes, I’m still in the dungeon with the fish for my company as I destroy Liberte seacity [oh, shut up, it deserves it] so I was thinking of the whole SHTF is never as complete as people think.  So… this.)

I really wanted to title this “How to pack for Armageddon” but that is not right, and not something I can do anyway.  There are tons of sites on that.  What to pack in the scaredy bag, what to have for “shelter in place.”

I’m not saying those won’t be needed.  As I said before, I don’t think anyone has taken into account – well, maybe someone has, but that’s not a comforting thought – that while this crew in power is playing at being “more sensitive than you” they’re giving signals to a lot of very bad actors.  The crew in power might be ill-intentioned (mostly I think they’re power-greedy and trying to cover it up by doing the things they’ve been told are “good”) but I suspect they honestly believe that if we unilaterally disarm we’ll be safe.  Don’t laugh.  A lot of my colleagues believed that all through the eighties.  It has nothing to do with intelligence, but with having lived quiet, sheltered prosperous lives where the wildest environment they knew was their kindergarten class.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen other sides of life, and I’ve studied history.

If we can do things like let all the sequester cuts fall on defense, and eventually start reducing our nuclear arsenal (more flexibility, remember?) and NOT get hit, we should just assume the USA is the Almighty’s favorite child and my made up USAians were right.  If we don’t lose a city or more to enemy attack in the next five/six years, I’ll assume this country is G-d’s personal project and that He’s zealously guarding us.

But alas, I think we’re human like other humans and our project of liberty and individual freedom is ours.

So, some regions of the country almost for sure will have to deal with Armageddon conditions to an extent or another.  Which depends who hits us and whether it’s a missile or a backpack nuke.

Yes, I feel crazy just typing that – it’s like ebooks, you know.  We expected ebooks to hit any minute now, and they didn’t, for almost twenty years.  I attended conferences in ninety four where they were talking about how ebooks were the coming thing.  But most people don’t like reading on the computer, and therefore it didn’t happen.  And then suddenly there was the second model of kindle (the first was too green and computer-like) and by that time anyone who’d been immersed in the business was SO convinced ebooks would amount to nothing, that they never, really, got their heads around the reverse.  They still haven’t.

To an extent we have the same relationship with nuclear attacks.  We expected them all through the cold war, which means most of our lives.  It never happened.  Now we tend to roll our eyes as we think of them.

But they are a heavy possibility.  There is a huge difference between attacking the US when you’re the USSR and you know you’ll get hit back, and attacking the US when you know it’s weakened and infighting, and you’re a small back water country and know if the US retaliates the world community will complain they’re picking on you.  (My brother after the Axis of Evil speech “Why is Bush picking on tiny, mad North Korea?” is what I expect to see.)

So, if you live in or near one of our major cities (unless it goes completely astray, which is possible since this is mostly “Russian Technology”, I expect it will be in one of the cities that everyone hears about on TV and shows: DC, NYC, Chicago, LA, San Francisco – with an outside chance of cities that have had TV shows set in them – Cincinnati, Dallas.  While it’s possible there will be one in Denver, for instance, that is an extremely outside chance unless there’s a sudden upswell of  documentaries about “Denver, the power of the west” that makes it abroad.) have a get away bag, just in case, and DO for the love of G-d know some funky, back-road route out of the city.  Make it a weekend project to scout those.  If you live in NYC and don’t have a car – Yes, you DO know who you are – make sure a friend-with-car includes you in his evacuation plans.

For what to put in the bag, and what to put in your basement/crawl space/armoire if you have to sit tight, there are survival blogs all over the net, and if you don’t know any, someone in this blog will link it on request.

My post – taking this long to get to the point is the hallmark of the fact I have had only one cup of tea – is about not the apocalypse, but the gentle slide into chaos and a (much) lower but still civilized lifestyle.

I’ve never been convinced by the “apocalypse” stories simply because American authors, never having experienced it, seem to think of something like a nuclear hit, or even several, crippling all our major cities and making our daily life a negotiated mess (and I want to stress that last one is – I think – highly unlikely in the situation right now.  We’re more likely to get the equivalent to “terrorism with nukes” than to get a planned, carefully carried out attack.  OTOH the attack might well unleash our own tensions and release Civil Unrest with a capital Mess – in which case, it won’t be much different from most cities taken out.)  will immediately send us back to some past age, ranging from the stone age to the nineteenth century.

Of course, most of those stories were written to convince us to unilaterally disarm, which, of course, meant exaggerating the awfulness.

Here is what is not going to happen:

Most people are not going to become looters overnight.  Yes, it will happen in some places, but let me remind you of when the lights went out in NYC for most of a day, and people just quietly walked home.  Whether you’ll have to shoot looters and keep vandals away depends on what region of the country you live in and how dangerous it is now.

You’re not going to need to grow your own wheat and mill your own flour overnight.  Yes, I know “on demand” supply, etc.  So, the local groceries will run out of ice-cream, Hersheys and the other stuff like that.  They might also – always depending on where you live.  We’re in the Khaki for vegetables out here, unless it’s summer, and even then – run out of steaks, or onions, or even (but unlikely.  I think the stuff spontaneously generates) cabbage.  BUT it’s unlikely to run completely out of flour or beans or rice.  (Of course, if you’re low carb you should be making your own preparations.)  Nor will it prevent local farmers from putting stalls by the side of the highway selling local produce ¾ of the year.

You’re not going to have to make your own clothes.  Look, I’m a writer, which means our income fluctuates, which is a polite term for “sometimes it’s non-existent.”  It always hits rock bottom at the most inconvenient times, too, like, when my husband is unemployed, (knock on wood, only happened twice in our entire married life.)  We’ve had to cut back on food, by going to the essentials and having me cook from scratch (but I do that, anyway, by preference) BUT we’ve never really had to cut back on clothes.  In fact, I think I have more than fit in my closet, and one of these days the hanging apparatus will crash.  (Partly because I treat them as disposable, since I hate aprons and all confining clothing, and so I tend to stain clothes while cleaning or cooking.)  — first, the clothes in your closet will not evaporate into the ether.  Second, and VERY important, society as a whole probably has a larger supply of clothes than we could consume (without throwing away) in a century.  I know this because we shop for our clothes at an ARC thrift store nearby.  A LOT of the clothes are brand new still with tags, usually because a store donated surplus.  And I have a rule never to pay more than $5 for a piece of clothing unless it’s designer. Then I’ll go up to $7.  If I go to $10 I get the frown of doom from my husband…

You’re not going to have to make your own furniture – see above.  We’ve gotten used to changing furniture at the drop of a hat because we stopped liking something, but if things get rough we stop throwing it away, and I bet you that what we have will last generations.  (Here I do have advice on what to choose. And what to have.)

This is not saying that things will be either comfortable or wonderful.

So – what do you watch for, and how do you prepare?

This post comes from the fact I was talking to my husband and said “the first thing is usually the post office going unreliable.”

Right now you’re looking at me like I’m a lunatic.  “But our post awful was always—”

No. There are differences.  Yes, in most countries the post office jobs are a sinecure for a politically favored majority (Or minority.  I might be wrong in this, but I have a vague idea most postal carriers in South Africa were Afrikaans speaking.)  and that they are a union shop in most countries, and that jokes about mis-delivered mail exist everywhere. That’s not what I mean.

Part of this is tricky when it comes to the post office, btw – because ours is suffering from catastrophic technological change, as well as everything else.  HOWEVER:

The slide goes like this – it begins with mail distribution twice a day six days a week, and the mail fairly reliable in the sense that yes, you do get human error and things delayed a bit.  Then it goes to once daily.  (I don’t know if the US started with twice daily.  By the time I came here, it was once daily. Part of this was tech change.  Used to be that before the telephone letters in-town were used to say “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon.”  Read a mystery of the early twentieth century for that.)

Then slowly the mail becomes more unreliable.  Then one day is cut out.  Then delivery is every other day.

BUT the most important thing is how unreliable it gets.  We’re already pretty unreliable, the reason they’re mostly used for spam.  (Though their tendency to misplace stuff doesn’t help.)

But along that slide comes the time when the mail is COMPLETELY unreliable.  Anything you entrust to them has a fifty/fifty chance of arriving, and anything even vaguely useful/valuable WILL get stolen, unless you’re very, very crafty.

This is a sign post on the way down.  When you start seeing outright unabashed theft by postal employees, and no attempt to track down your registered package, it’s time to have your preparations for the rest of the slide made.

Because that type of theft is a “societal strictures have broken down.”  It’s not “the neighbors will rape and pillage” but it is the “people will pilfer from strangers as a matter of course.”  A package, entrusted to strangers to carry across the country is, of course, at high risk.

This is highly unlikely and there are already signs we’re headed in that direction.  Whether and how much it will affect the private carrier companies, I don’t know.  Whether there will be Amazon Delivery vans that are more reliable, I don’t know.  I do know that the break down in trust needed to efficiently run mail in a continental-sized country is already well underway and getting markedly worse by the day.

The way to deal with the post office is to disguise the contents of whatever you’re sending.  Put an old coat over the new dress you’re sending aunt Emily.  Learn to make false bottoms on boxes.  Encase you check in several pages of blather.

Or, more likely, in this country, in the 21^st century, find ways to send ecash, email and different carriers (thank heavens.)

But even if we have more options – that break down in trust is a telling sign.

The other slide is what used to be called in Portugal “a zeal strike” which I understand is the opposite of what the words mean in OZ where they mean “be over-picky over everything and delay everything.”  In Portugal it means “show up for work, but do whatever.”

This, not as a strike but as a way of life ensues.

What I mean is, you don’t realize how much we, Americans, are used to getting what we want, when we want it.

This is likely to go by the way side.  People won’t be breaking their backs to get stuff done and also, sorry, but all businesses are likely to be understaffed for the foreseeable future, because it’s right now almost impossible to keep your margins up in this country unless you’re GE and the government is feeding you dough by the bucketful.

So, things to have:

Any staple you can’t do without, even if it’s not a “survival essential” thing.  Say you’re mighty fond of a brand of coffee, have three or four bags put by in your freezer.  Before you run through them, it will be on the shelves.  Restock when it’s on the shelves and you can afford it.  That way interruptions in supply don’t affect you.

In the same vein, this coming spring, can, pickle and dehydrate veggies.  I don’t think they’ll vanish forever, but supply can/might/almost certainly will (depending on where you live) get mighty irregular.

Any parts you need to keep your car and house running, and which you know are likely to breakdown or need replacing – have by.  And either know how to replace it yourself, or establish a relationship with someone who does.  Knowing how to rewire something in the house and/or how to deal with plumbing is important.  (My husband is okay with it.  But getting one of those comprehensive books from the hardware stores, you know “how to fix anything in the house” is NOT a bad idea.)

Also not a bad idea: if you have to buy furniture and CAN afford it, buy real wood and the best construction you can.  “Furniture you can will to your grandchildren” should be your goal.  Mostly because you might have to.

Also, if you have a young family, buy the biggest house you can afford.  Look, I’ll be blunt, the one slide I saw up close and personal ended up with three and four nuclear families per house.  I.e. kids married and had grandkids, but they were still living with the parents/grandparents.  This did not change till the economy got better.  (And yes, it SORTA is cultural in Portugal, but it was not the norm since the forties, and in fact, as soon as people could afford it, they went their own way, even if children normally live NEAR parents.)

For those people with three kids in a one bedroom apartment it could get tough.

If you’re renting, try to get in a place where the rent won’t go crazy and where you can hunker down if you need to.  Establish a good relationship with your landlord.

Have a deep freezer, so you can buy meat when it’s available/relatively cheap.  (This is a good idea at any time, but it might be vital in a slide down.)

Acquire some knowledge of folk medicine and lay some supplies by.  I’ve recently found that Manuka wound honey (available from Amazon) is the awesome, and will definitely stock it.)  This is obviously part of the slide down at least for this country.  Finding a doctor might become an issue.  DO try to make friends with a doctor or a trained nurse.  It might save your life.

Other things that are probably sort of kind of less vital but that you REALLY don’t want to do without.  One thing I’ve never seen in a slide down is a country sliding into the gutter without significant, pervasive disruptions in the electrical supply.  I don’t mean electricity goes bye bye and never comes back. I don’t even mean LONG black outs.  For those you should have a generator/whole house battery (we can’t afford either) but I expect most of the time you won’t get that.  I mean brown outs and black outs become a fact of life to the point they affect your daily life/ability to work. Not enough to get you to crisis point, not even enough to spoil food in freezer, if you keep it closed.  But enough to annoy you and make things a daily slog.

First – have something you can use for light.  I used to love candles when I was a kid, but of course there are better options.  If you are using flashlights, keep your battery supply up.  I’ve also laid by some of those solar garden lights.  The light is not wonderful, but it is enough to read by.

Speaking of which, since it’s almost impossible to have extra batteries for the kindle (I don’t know about other e-readers) have a car charger, so that if your electrical crashes, you can charge the kindle enough to finish reading that novel.  Also, keep the vital stuff like “how to” manuals in paper.

In the same vein, if you get your living by using the computer, have extra batteries for your laptop.  Keep three of them or so by.

And have an alternate means of cooking, if you rely on electrical.  A grill will do, though I have an entirely coal fired hibachi as well, but that’s because I’m a nut.

Have an alternate means of heating (IF we’re going to stay in this house, I want a soapstone stove.  Sigh.  Maybe Witchfinder will buy me one.)

These things will seem frivolous.  They’re not “how to survive apocalypse” – but having lived through the slide-down, trust me, it makes your life immeasurably better to know that you can still finish that chapter, or write that report, or whatever, even if electricity just went down, and/or you can cook that dish even if the store is out of peppers.

One disruption or interruption is piddly stuff.  An unpredictable succession of them saps the soul and kills the spirit.

Now, the thing is, in the low slide down and counterintuitively, things can do very well you’d never think about.

Look, let me put it bluntly: babies are still born, birthdays still happen, girls still want to buy something pretty for a pick me up.

The people who did well in my brother’s generation (the most affected in Portugal by the slide-down) learned to do something crafty to sell.  Usually bead jewelry, which they sold (literally) on street corners, but also stuffed animals which you could sell to friends of friends of friends.  Paintings, if you were good.  That sort of thing.

Yes, we have walmart and jewelry for a song.  How long it will be cheap is something else, with the dollar plummeting, BUT

But people will pay the same/a little more for something that’s unique/looks better.  And people will still buy toys, baby clothes, (giving stuff to babies is a deeply-rooted tradition.) pretty things that make them smile, unique bits of apparel/accessories that make a tired outfit look new.

Cultivate some crafty skill – first it will keep you from going nuts while you’re worrying about jobs or what not.  Second, it might bring in enough money to survive between jobs/if permanently sidelined by this atrocious economy

Crafts to pick, if you don’t have a favorite should be things that are useful/don’t need proprietary materials.  Scrapbooking would be right out on the first count, and stamped cross-stitch on the second.

But say learning to make clothes out of scraps of material might be in, ditto with braiding rugs.  (Clue zero, but I know people in the village did it.  They bought/got rags off other people and made these gorgeous rugs.)  In a cold climate quilting is a good one.  Altering clothes is too.  Even with the surplus we have, people will grow up, grow wider, or lose weight.  If you know how to alter clothes to make them look GOOD you have something you can trade on/get money for.

I’m decent at refinishing furniture, and I’ve picked up on fillet crochet again.  I used to do this obsessively, then I hit my head and lost the ability to keep track of where I was on the pattern (wonder if that affected writing too?) which is slowly coming back.  Right now – by way of warm up – I’m working on a massive (bedspread size) curtain for our outsized front window.  But I’ve recently come across normal sized patterns for pillows and hangings (and maybe clothes inserts) from the turn of the century, which I think fall under “beautiful and unique” and would probably sell well at SF cons.  And the little ones I can do in an evening, the bigger ones in a week of evenings.

Though I expect ebooks will continue to sell and I even expect Baen to survive.  (The other houses… They’re houses of the living dead right now.  They look alive, but…)  It’s just that you might have to time your publishing/buying for the times the net is up.  And yep, I expect those will actually sell better, because if the net is down there’s less gaming, etc. available.

In that vein, don’t get rid of ALL your obsolete stuff.  Keep DVDs by, even if you have Amazon streaming.  Keep CDs by, even if you buy a lot of music electronic.  I’m clueless about game systems because I don’t use them, but if there’s a way to keep games by, and have power for the systems, do so.

CDs, DVDs and other forms of entertainment not depending on connectivity (if the electricity goes down in your area, so will the net service, most of the time) might make good trade-goods, as well.  So if you see them at the thrift store, buy and store, just in case.  Don’t spend an enormous amount and don’t fill your house with them, but having a few around to trade for others you want is not a bad idea.  Burn you MP3 to CD as backup and keep one of the old stereos around.

Also, because in the long slide down things like the over-restrictive “must cook this in a sterilized kitchen with no one else in the house” health laws tend to slide, even baking and cooking might not be a bad thing, particularly because I suspect a lot of people can’t cook beyond pre-prepared and will be looking for alternatives.  Having the house where the working couple can pick up the pot of pot roast and give you something in return because they’re that kind, might not be a bad idea if the stores are having trouble stocking tv dinners.  (In Portugal it was bread.  Very few people knew how to make bread, but the bakers’ union got bumptious and started not delivering when expected.  Suddenly the people who could bake bread were very popular.)

These are not survival skills, but they’re “keep the world spinning” skills and “make people feel they’re not living in the end times” skills.  They will stand you in good stead.

Most of them are a matter of degree from the Armagedon skills.  So if you believe Armageddon is more likely, by all means, learn to make soap.  BUT learn to make scented, interestingly shaped soap, and you have a skill in case it’s a slide-down.  Learn to make beer, but if you make it micro-brewery specialty beer you can also do well in the slide-down.  Learn to make clothes – but also learn to fix/alter clothes.  That way you’re okay either way.

The only difference is stuff like laptop batteries which are vital in a slide-down and useless in the end of the world.  BUT having them won’t cost you too much.

And it might save your sanity… and allow you to make money off ebooks or whatever it is you do.  If it’s just a slide down.

We’re already in a slide-down, even if not critical yet.  There’s a good chance of a crash, but there’s a chance, also, the slide-down will continue.

In your packing for the crash, don’t neglect preparation for the tumble down the stairs.  It’s usually just a little more effort/expense.  But it can make all the difference.

My eyes on twitter, yesterday, pinged me with an interesting retweet from one of the usual suspects. You know, those people in science fiction who have been so oppressed and downtrodden and kept at arms length because we don’t like their ancestors or their color or their orientation or yes, that they’ve been living hand-to-mouth existences, oppressed by white male privilege and barely able to scrape up a few crumbs of stale bread for their dinner.

This was retweeted in fact by one of those people who continuously try to stop discussion with “Check your privilege.”

I’m just going to quote this magnificent retweet and let you stand back, take a deep breath and admire it splendid madness.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce, but to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

Stop – drop and roll – and take a deep breath.

Does anyone here remember why education was instituted among humans? I mean, I know some of you are that ancient, old enough to have fallen from the trees back in the glory days when we went from shrew to ape.

No?

Me neither, but I’ve observed training and education among all mammal species for most of my life. I was raised on what could not be considered a farm except by fiat, but we did grow most of our own food, and what we didn’t grow the neighbors did. And at least some mammals (and birds) I paid attention to because they were cute. I’ve seen mother cats train kittens to hunt, I’ve seen mother rabbits teach bunnies what is best to eat. I’ve seen chickens keep watch on their broods.

“Education” at that level has two basic functions: how to survive as an adult animal and how not to get killed (which is also survival, of course, but less proactive.)

If you go back as far as we can go on first hand accounts, human education had the same purpose, be it learning to hunt, or keep animals, or even pull your forelock to the lord, depending on where you were in the time and place.

For humans it was a little more complex, of course. One of the funniest things is to hear modern people deplore the fact that even most medieval noblemen were illiterate. But the fact is in their own complex world they had much to learn: How to manage places with almost no extra income so you could have enough to support you and not inspire assassination, for instance. Also hunting. Also a complex set of social cues that would make modern heads explode. Writing was no part of their métier. They didn’t need it to survive.

It wasn’t, in fact, until noblemen became a little richer and there was a little more disposable capital in their domains that they felt a need to read and write so they could keep an eye on the churchmen doing the accounting for them.

Nowadays reading is considered an important skill for everyone, not because we’re more enlightened or brighter or better, but simply because navigating the modern world is often a function of being able to quickly read and absorb information.

Note this might be easily superseded in the future by virtual targeted spoken messages, something that in fact already happens at some levels and probably why people at that level in society (mostly supported) have very little interest in learning to read.

The learning to read might have brought with it the ability to read for fun and happiness and to improve your morals, but that (unless you were studying to be a churchmen the later) was not the purpose.

So mostly the purpose of education in humans is to make useful and well adjusted adult humans.

It is, of course, failing at both across a vast spectrum. In the later especially, the part of the quote that goes on about:

to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

The progressive comrades of the lady retweeting this piece of cluelessness have stopped us doing that. Because we can’t teach any type of morals, not even “do onto others” which is what creates empathetic humans. And we certainly can’t teach humans to be happy. “Happy” by definition is “fits well within the structures of society and follows accepted modes and morals.” Or at least that’s as close as a public institution can come to making anyone happy. (To make you INTERNALLY happy would involve a lot of soma, if you’re not disposed that way. We’re trying to do that too, of course, but apparently the chemical happy is not the same as happy-happy.) As for making humans more imaginative, we have no idea if that can be done at all, but if it could it would probably counter the “happy” and it would certainly counter most politically correct strictures on our schools. Imaginative humans can think of anything. Even the unthinkable. They might not do it, but they can think it.

The person who originated this quote (who I presume was not our SJW) seems to think of imaginative in the childish sense of “imagination is a wonderful and sunny place” but an imaginative person can think of anything. When it’s Kate’s turn maybe she’ll grace us with a post on how sometimes your imagination definitely goes where you don’t want it, and how to cope with it.

But let’s leave aside for a moment the internal contradictions in that quote. It’s difficult to do, because there are rifts between its well-meaning prescriptions that are broad enough to let entire civilizations slip through unnoticed.

Let’s instead concentrate on the beginning:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce

Oh, yes, of course. Other things that would be nice: if ice cream grew on trees. If designer dresses grew on wild bushes. If we all had a perfect body. If there were no disease and suffering and we studied war no more.

I mean, what exactly is the point of wishing for something like that?

People, in this work-a-day (eh) world still have to make a living, right? Last I checked, just looking around, this desk I’m sitting at did not sprout fully formed from a particularly blessed acorn. The computer I’m typing at was not only designed, not only ideated but built by human beings who devoted considerable time to bringing it into existence and were paid for it, enough money to live in turn.

My fridge is full of food I did not grow, but I’m not under the impression it is created by blessed pixies. I know there’s a lot of unrelenting, unpleasant, often uninteresting work behind that food. Trust me, I know this: I grew up in a rural village.

The world and all it contains is not a sort of fairy bauble where the things we want and need just appear and where even making us pay for them is an injustice, much less making us work for them.

The world is REAL – an unforgiving place that doesn’t care anymore about your imagination and empathy and happiness than it cares about whether that storm just destroyed your crops; that hurricane just leveled your house; or that sparrow just fell.

Those of us who are religious believe there is someone behind the scenes who does care, but even He does not violate the rules of the reality He created just to be mawkish at you, much less to spoil you. (At least the He I believe in doesn’t. I realize some religious people believe in a sort of rub-the-lamp G-d which is a survival from primitive religious mentality (if you sacrifice to the tree spirit, she’ll give you oranges) and which is epitomized in an episode of my childhood which my son describes as “the miracle of the socks.” A friend I was vacationing with, who was a ah vending machine religious person was trying to go to church of a Sunday and couldn’t find her socks. She immediately became convinced the devil had hidden them. So she said the requisite prayer and the socks showed up. Perhaps, for all I know, the world really works like that. I doubt it though. And it would distract me from thinking about real cause and effect trying to figure out which lamp to rub.)

It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish whether you want it to or not, and whether you’ve told yourself some just-so story about how it would be so much better if it didn’t.

This is why the left’s just-so story that once you stop capitalism or patriarchy or whatever their bugaboo is, humans will be perfect and loving and innocent never comes about. And also why they thereby deduce we’re still steeped in unfettered capitalism (I wish!) and patriarchy and racism and sexism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. (Okay, okay, I made up the last one. It’s actually psoriasitism.) They do this because their black and white view of the world requires they believe in a pseudo-secular version of the miracle of the socks.

Reality doesn’t care any more for their delusions than it did for my friend’s (who, should the miracle of the socks have failed to materialize would then have come up with some reason, like that she’d forgotten to say the requisite prayer before sleep or for all I knew had forgotten to bless her shoes.)

So for an adult human being (my friend, in her defense wasn’t) to believe that it would not just be lovely, but that it’s somehow possible and DESIRABLE if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce betrays where this human being stands.

This person is so unimaginably comfortable and cossetted that she believes that work is an icky necessity and that learning the skills of workaday laboring is not just unnecessary but somehow undesirable. She believes it would be best instead if schools tried to fix all sorts of metaphysical things that as far as I can tell have always been wrong with humans.

She believes, in fact, that paradise has arrived – whatever she says – and that we no longer need to spin nor sow.

She’s so far removed from every day necessities, that she thinks that learning a profession is a strange twisting of the purpose of education.

The mind boggles. There are legends of mandarins in towers, long ago, who were as insulated as this. I always assumed they were just legends, but perhaps I was wrong.

No wonder this person goes around worrying obsessively about what happened to ancestors with whom she has almost no genetic and certainly no cultural connection. (Sorry, the idea that you understand your ancestors even a century ago, even without conquest by an alien culture, is … well, an indication you haven’t read many autobiographies more than fifty years old. The idea you understand cultures that were rightly or wrongly subsumed is… a fairy dream.) No wonder she sees all sorts of micro-aggressions due to her skin tone and the fact she possesses a vagina.

Humans must, after all, worry about something. It’s an evolutionary necessity built into us. And in her mandarin-tower there is nothing else to worry about.

Downtrodden? Oppressed? Mistreated?

Is this the statement of a person who is any of those?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce, but to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

Oh, honey, check your privilege.

 

 

UPDATE: WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS! And thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

Yesterday I forgot to tell you that Tom Simon’s post on being Superversive is up at Jagi’s blog.

Also, this year my family and I have somehow forgotten to book panels at milehi, which means, ultimately, there’s not much point in going. If any of the huns and/or our friends up there want to make it a breakfast or dinner during the weekend of Milehicon I’m up for that.

We decided we had to go to the Tennessee Valley Interstellar workshop. Part of it is the seminars on terraforming and propulsion. I have so many novels upcoming that must be science fiction that I thought I’d best bolster my week remembrance of my studies of the matter. For one things have changed. When I last dwelled on the subject, everyone thought Ganymede would be an easy terraforming project, but it turns out to have too much radiation for such things. So, under professional development, I need to go there, and before I go I need to get two books delivered to Baen.

Through Fire is clearly one of those stumbling block books that almost break one to write. I think I know why, psychologically, as well as circumstances, but it means that since it’s a series, it must be done. If it were a stand alone, I’ll confess I’d probably have passed on it and gone on to something else.

Anyway, Through Fire, because it requires unusual concentration is part of the reason that I’m forgetting and losing everything, but the other part of it is that…

Well, I listed all the titles I’m working on (as in started/actively outlined/being written) in the diner on FB and scared myself. And that’s not listing things like the Magical British Empire which will take extensive line by line.

Again, I’m more convinced than ever that Ayn Rand was wrong. Atlas didn’t shrug. He juggles.

But this ties in with the whole idea of superversive again.

The word is good, but we’re not the only ones to come up with the concept. There is a time for tearing down and a time for rebuilding. Part of the ah… conformity of mid-century needed tearing down.

What people who moon over the America of FDR and how safe, clean, etc it was miss is that well… it might have been all that, but it was also more uniform. There is a dark side to chaos and a light side too, and the light side is where it allows creation.

(Perhaps my experience is not representative, but I know that I can’t work if put into a too clean, too ordered environment.

I like to be comfortable, which means there’s a little mat on my desk, for my tea cup. There’s piles of projects and notes that make sense only to me, and right now there’s the planner I still haven’t figured out how to use.)

It’s hard to know what was the real late forties and early fifties because more and more as I read an historical or watch a recreation I think “How much of this is true and how much is informed by Marxist narratives?” Like… watching a show about a hospital in Victorian London where in the very first episode of course there is someone who botched a self-abortion. (Did it happen? Sure. But if the village is any example, abortion was a skilled trade, practiced in open secret by an “angel maker”. And women trying to abort themselves were more likely to use irrigation and/or herbal or other semi-poisoning. Knitting needles? Perhaps, but I have trouble believing anywhere where there isn’t mental or other impairment involved, in which case, it could have been anything else she was trying to do.) Packed in the same episode there is also, (of course) an anarchist under arrest and also, (of course) a woman who chooses a glorious career in nursing over marriage.

Did all these things happen? Oh, sure. Just like legitimately repressive religious families happen (we know a couple) and just like legitimately abusive husbands happen (I know a couple, too.) BUT they don’t happen with nowhere near the frequency we see in our fiction, and I’ve started wondering if the frequency we see these things in historical fiction is the same type of “narrative” we’re inflicted upon our own times.

I know that anything touching on Victorian England attributes all its ills not just to poverty but to the disparity between rich and poor, as though that very inequality were such a sin that it caused all these ills.

In real fact, the disparity came from the fact that for the first time in human history at least a portion of the population had disposable wealth. Which allowed it to invest. Which allowed more prosperity that raised all boats.

The idea that the disparity would remain and increase, with us all turning into morlocks and eloi was the idea of Marx, who, as we’ve pointed out before never really created any wealth. (Or ideas. He stole broadly from all and sundry. His was the wrapping it up in an envy-justifying package, which I suppose makes perfect sense for an “intellectual” who thought himself superior and proved again and again that he failed at real life.

In fact the only place disparities increase to that point is in communist/socialist countries, where the confiscation of created wealth brings the engine of creation to a halt and leaves an effective finite pie, of which the kommissars , being human, take the best slice.

Anyway, I’ve recently started to wonder about all shows and books depicting the Victorian age. So many of the writers who became classics had a leftist agenda. And that too makes you wonder, and makes me want to go trolling Gutenberg for forgotten writers of the Victorian age to see whether we, indeed, preserved the best, or whether the same selection bias is in effect as for contemporary “push” on books.

Okay, that was a long digression, but in the same way even as close as the forties and fifties, it’s hard to know what was really true. One reads biographies (particularly the candid self-published biographies of people of no importance) and the picture is quite different.

But to an extent, we do know the fifties had more… ah… bonding between company and employee and that in theory at least, one was supposed to work for the same company for decades and retire with thanks, etc.

In fact, I grew up in a system very much like that.

I had to explain to my kids a pervasive feature of the fifties/sixties sitcoms, where “the boss is coming for dinner.”

The idea completely baffles them, and I had to explain that when women stayed home, the career really involved both and that scoping out an employee’s spouse was normal before a promotion, to see if she was up to her support role, etc.

At least that’s the world I grew up in. When I moved here, in the eighties, I was suddenly catapulted into a less “personal” world when it came to employment. In fact, many people here experienced that, in the eighties for the first time, too.

The rise of temporary labor, at which my entire generation seemed to be working, was particularly baffling for older generations.

But in my case, because I came from elsewhere, I could see both the wrenching instability and the benefits.

The old way of doing things had to be torn down, to give new flexibility to do things. And in a world in which computers were revolutionizing the way of doing business, it was important to have the ability to “try” an employee on before offering a more permanent contract, and also, even, to try positions on you weren’t sure of needing. (It was 90 before the interviews stopped holding it against me that I didn’t know short hand, even when I could demonstrate that I could take down text at normal speaking speeds, something I’d had to learn to do in college. And it was 90 the first time I was allowed to take a typing test on a computer keyboard.)

In the same way, I suppose, the rigidity of mind of a world of “company men” and “support women” had to be torn down, to allow new forms to even be thought about.

No, that’s not why they did it, of course. By and large, the authors who were “subversive’ were tearing down assumptions, norms and values as held by society in the hope that as it all came crashing down, socialism would emerge. (That too has never happened. Anarchy, sure. Strong man rule, sure. Socialism is something else.)

But it could be argued that some norms and values need to be torn down or at least pointed at and have duck noises made at them.

Societies like people get in habits of mind that must be poked, now and then, to see if they are functional or just, you know, things we fell into. Like my putting the tea cup on the right instead of the left of my desk. Maybe it would be better on the left, except there are a bunch of electrical cords there, and if we put it there, it will be a problem. So that habit has been examined and found to have a reason. Also I’m right handed, and it’s easier to lift my mammoth tea cup with my right hand.

OTOH my habit of leaving books that scare me and finding much more pressing stuff to do, like iron clothes, must be torn down and something better erected.

What I mean is that there is/was a place for “subversive” particularly as society was changing relatively fast. But subversive like everything else, has become ossified.

There might have been a point to Heinlein wondering if, in a society that controls the genome, and in which we live practically forever, incest taboos will persist.

There is hardly a point to most stories where such norms are violated simply because they’re norms, and then everyone dies and wallows in misery.

I see superversive as a society-wide movement, not just literary. Human Wave is more specifically literary, a “life affirming” and “Human affirming” movement. Superversive, on the other hand would encompass everything.

It would be a search for the paradigms that work, for history that is real, beyond the narrative, for ways of living that fit both our changed technology and our immutable human needs. It would not seek to break man to mold him to a dream, but to create human dreams, within which humans can exist the best way possible.

I’m putting it very badly, because this post is sort of a catch all for thoughts that will be developed (hopefully) at length over the next few weeks.

But it is part of the reason that Atlas isn’t shrugging or going off to Galt’s Gulch. In our connected, linked world, in our changed technology, that was never very likely.

Instead, Atlas has turned superversive.

Building up is always much more work than tearing down, and there are very few workers, yet, in this vineyard. And it’s not a simple thing. We can’t simply “restore” a time as depicted in literature or movies, because those are tainted. Besides, even the real historical times wouldn’t fit, since our technology is so different.

So we have to research, retool, adapt, cast out the poisonous bits of Marx’s barbed illusions, and forge on.

There is an immense work to do, and I doubt our generation will finish it. Like Moses, we’ll probably die before we see more than the outlines of the new “land.”

But it must be done. So Atlas juggles.

And this particular Atlas is, clearly, going in about 100 directions at once this morning, and must stop babbling and go write fiction.

I have a city to burn, executions to arrange, a Good Man to kill, a redemption to arrange, a character to humble.

I’m swamped.

You too go forth and erect those scaffolds. It is becoming clear that you can’t tear down a civilization and have some parts miraculously standing. And at any rate, the parts they want to stand involve paternalism and telling other people what to do, and truly those are parts that need to go.

So we need to start from the bottom and build up. And we need to make sure we have good foundations, because they will be tested.

Roll up your sleeves. Go to work.

In the end we win, they lose – but it’s going to take will and work to get there.

More and more organized posts anon.

                       The Naming of Places -Alma Boykin

(With profound apologies to T. S. Elliott)

The Naming of places is a difficult matter

It isn’t just one of your holiday games.

And you may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter

When I tell you a place may have three different names (or four, or five, or six, or eight).

 

We humans often mark our turf with names. Descriptive, possessive, mysterious, religious, rude, or yes (Killpecker Creek in Wyoming), place names and the stories that associate with them often show traces of the people who lived there before, either in the etymology or the language, and of the intentions of the people who renamed them. Central Europe provides interesting examples of the problem of place names, especially for the span of 1850-2000. Names changed, rechanged, reverted, were left, and vanished off the map with nary a trace. This greatly oversimplified little list barely scratches the surface of a touchy and tricky subject, one I suspect politicians, nationalists, and others will be fighting over until [deity] or [legendary king] comes/returns or the sun burns out.

Take Galicia, for example. The region arced along the northeastern rim of the Carpathian Mountains and, among other things, held most of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s oil in the 1800s-1918. The largest city, Lemburg (Lviv or Lvov), had a thriving Jewish community, while Polish nobles held most of the rural areas on estates inhabited by Ruthenian peasants. Today it is part of Poland and Ukraine, and Galicia (and Ruthenia, and Lemberg) are artifacts of a past some wish others would forget.

Karlstejn, (Karlstein) in the Czech Republic, remains Karlstejn even though the name is quite obviously not Slavic in origin. Tucked into the forest about eighteen miles from Prague, the castle came into being as a “small” hunting retreat for Emperor Charles IV (of the House of Luxemburg) between 1348 and 1357. Charles’s reign is recalled fondly by Czechs as part of Bohemia’s golden era, when the region’s mineral wealth and culture, and the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, gave it great international respect and prestige. The castle, perched on a cliff above a steep, tree-covered ravine, includes the Chapel of the Holy Cross where the crown and regalia of Bohemia were kept, and still forms one of the spiritual hearts of Bohemia today (Rip Hill is the other.) Although Hussites renamed the small town nearby, the fortress retained its original German-based name to this day, in part because of the positive “national memories” associated with it. Every five years, during the national elections, the crown makes a pilgrimage from Prague to the castle and back. An interesting ritual for a democratic nation, yes?

Karlsbad, however, became Karlovy Vary after WWI. The names have the same meaning, Charles’s springs, and derive from the thermal springs that occur there. Karlsbad was one of the places to go to take the waters for medical (or social) reasons in the 18^th and 19^th century. After the creation of Czechoslovakia, and even more after the promulgation of the Potsdam Accords and the erasure of the Suddetenland, the Czechs wanted to sever the region’s linguistic connection to German. During the Communist era Karlovy Vary remained a place to go soak off your ills, although as a member of a trades union and not of the gentry.

Pannonhalma is another location that gained a new, more national name, this time in the Nineteenth Century. The Benedictine monastery, founded by Prince Geza of Hungary in 996, perches on a prominent hill above the floodplains of a branch of the Danube and its tributary, the Rab. You can see the creamy yellow mass of the monastery for several kilometers around, including from the edge of the regional center of Györ (German Raab, Slovak Ráb, Celtic Arrabona), one of the hotspots in the Turkish wars. The monastery itself suffered attacks from the Mongols in the 1220s and later the Turks, as well as burning down by accident in between, but was rebuilt each time, returned to life in 1802 as a center for teaching after Joseph II’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1700s, and endured the Communist era. However, its name changed. Originally it was the Benedictine Abby of the Hill of St. Martin. As part of the Magyarization and language reforms that went along with the growing Hungarian nationalism in the late 1800s, the area was rechristened Pannonhalma, from the Roman name Pannonia. Pannonia referred to the area west of the Danube limes and in turn derived from an earlier tribal name based on Indo-European roots meaning “swampy area.” The town at the foot of the abbey’s hill changed to Pannonhalma as well in 1965, although the 252 meter tall hill remains St. Martin’s Hill. The new name was thought to be more patriotic and Magyar.

Other name changes came from the desire to erase the past entirely, leaving no trace of unwanted history. When the first member of the Eszterházy family attained fame, fortune, and good position in the court of the Habsburg emperors in the 1700s, he promptly went out and began building an estate. He renamed the village and lands around it Eszterháza. After the revolution in 1948, the Communists erased the name and the village became Fertöd, after small lake. Why leave any trace of the feudal parasites that had gained wealth by exploiting the peasants and supporting foreign overlords (and paying for some of the greatest classical music written [if you like Hayden])? The glorious workers’ future demands the removal of the dead past. After the next revolution, the residents later voted to keep Fertöd for the town but the estate is once more Eszterháza.

Now, Central Europe does not hold a monopoly on renaming. Istanbul is no longer “Constantine’s city,” London has long ago lost the name the Bronze Age residents gave to the area, and Leningrad is St. Petersburg once more. North America has dozens of formerly Spanish or Indian locations, and New Amsterdam long ago vanished under the streets of New York City.

Interestingly, I have yet to read many science fiction or many fantasy stories that use this idea. Lost civilizations, yes, conquests, but not names and renaming. I’ve considered it for the Colplatschki stories, because the Turkowi renamed places as the captured and resettled them, but on the other hand, my characters look on the Turkowi conquests as temporary disasters to be undone as soon as possible, and refuse to acknowledge the changes. Fantasy in particular might be a place to use the ideas of names and their power: if a location’s name provides access to magic, and the newcomers shun such things, then what does it mean if someone insists on recording the old, abandoned toponym? Or if rebels against an evil king suddenly adopt the place names from the long-vanished earlier kingdom?

 

Years ago, in a science fiction short story, I came across this expression that just fit my feelings. “Born owing money.”

I think from the way it was employed in the story that it was supposed to mean “from a poor family” but that’s not how I felt it. For me, from as far back as I can remember, I had this feeling I must justify my existence.

As the half (one half the family) unwanted child who then proceeded to near-bankrupt her family because she had every-possible-illness and some that technically, logically, should be impossible, this is perhaps understandable.

I was if not born broken, born to be broken. From the moment I remember I’ve been running so hard because I know what’s behind me: me. I know all my tendency to sloth and to malingering. I know the crazy depressive spins. And I know the malice and spitefulness of the cornered small creature.

My mission in life is to keep those down as much as possible and to do as well as I can. To be as good as I can be. I can never be perfect. And the struggle resumes every day. But most of the time I do pretty well at keeping me under control.

Is that where the broad streak of darkness comes? I don’t know. I know that Kate Paulk and I have discussed it. For women from – relatively – pampered backgrounds (hey, I won’t say I never went a day hungry in my life, but they weren’t many. And I always had adequate, if not always slightly, clothes to cover my body. By historical standards, I’m rich.) we manage to imagine and to feel the full panoply of dark.

Wherever it comes from – there is an evolutionary value to it. People who have too little darkness (husband is one of them) don’t imagine it in others. They are the people who believe always and only in the goodness of others. In another time and place they would go to their doom thinking “If only Stalin knew” – I also have that. And I also watch for that. A certain amount of darkness can be exorcised (exercised) in the books, and I fight to remember, every day, that real people are real and not character in books for me to play with.

What is the point of this exercise in true confessions?

Here it goes: I think most people have less of the darkness and much less of the sense of obligation, and almost no sense of watching themselves ALL THE TIME.

They have to, because otherwise the left would never have managed to sell their favorite lie: that goodness is somehow innate and trouble free. That people who achieve things, people who work and run like crazy to make, to build, to create, are somehow “privileged.”

This only makes sense if you think everyone is innately not just good but industrious and gifted in every art/craft/habits of diligence.

I said most people don’t have the broad streak of darkness I had – this is probably true, or at least it’s true from my interaction with them – but let me put this way: I know remarkably few Disney heros/princesses. As in, I don’t know any of them.

Most people have something they have to fight against to achieve even a modicum of good or of decency. It might be something that even they know it’s not their fault, like an illness, or it might be some tendency – say sloth – they were born with.

The book that shall not be mentioned (well, not in the text, though you can answer questions in the comments) is distinguished by its author repeating over and over his character is special because she is a “good girl” — she doesn’t have any of the flaws that these strange authors give their characters.

I don’t know if that is what makes the book that shall not be mentioned unreadable, because the lack of basic narrative techniques means I can’t go that far into it.

What I’m going to say if that if he’d succeed in creating a character without flaw, she would be absolutely unbearable.

The problem with the left in the arts is the problem with the left in so many things. They suffer from a sort of aspergers of the soul that demands they view the world in stark black and white (which is hilarious, since they accuse US of seeing the world in black and white.) In their case, because they imagine that goodness is a privilege that you’re given at birth: they imagine those who achieve are not made of common clay.

And then they imagine they don’t exist.

It starts like this: they believe, in this as in sexual identity and in so many other things that the label MUST perfectly match the contents (maybe that’s their obsession with labeling laws?)

So if you’re the good guy and the guy who achieved something, then you must be GOOD all through, right? If you’re not that way, then you’re doomed.

And then they notice the people who achieve things are not, in fact, perfect good. Even those on their side. Al Gore might be their environmental champion, but he also wants his chakras played with by anonymous women in hotels.

This brings with it a bizarre dissonance, in which they accuse any religious person, anyone who claims a moral code, for that matter, of “hypocrisy.” Note that no religious person nor even my atheist and rigidly moral friends ever claimed to be perfect. They just claim to be trying to be good.

But if the label must match the contents, then if you say you’re trying to be good you should have no flaws. Any flaw – lust, anger, even lack of taste – then becomes “hypocrisy.”

And if the successful person is on their side, this results in a frantic sweeping of flaws under the rug.

But for most of them, the mass of the left who buy into this curious myopia, it results in their thinking they’re “fated” not to succeed and in their hating everyone who does, because clearly they were “given more.”

This reflects itself in the people they create in books, too. And this is why they create flawed heroes who then CAN’T be allowed to win. (Note not all leftists do this. The really good ones are good despite believing this. Meaning they’re artists and the art is larger than them. Which is what art is.) And therefore we end up with the books where everyone, hero and villain is flawed and where the action is just a playing out “flawed people can’t win.” They create anti-heroes because they imagine heroes get everything “handed” to them, and then they destroy the world because in their minds unless you’re good all through good can’t triumph.

Jagi Lamplighter talked about superversive here yesterday and some people – most not regulars – made comments about how heroes without flaws aren’t interesting.

Yeah, they wouldn’t be. But if you are a real writer – if you understand people even enough to write books someone might want to read – then you won’t write anyone without flaws.

Because you will know from yourself that the only way to achieve anything is to control your baser self, to superglue the places you’re broken, and to lurch forward on broken and bleeding feet.

In small things and large, I watch myself all the time. You wouldn’t want to know me if I didn’t.

It’s like one of the hardest things to explain to beginning writers is that you can’t have characters without the plot. Telling me “my strength is characters” is great. But unless you can show me the characters in action and pitted against circumstances that bring them forth, you don’t have anything. And sometimes it is throwing the most inadequate character up against the biggest challenge and SOMEHOW finding a way for him to push himself to victory that makes a book great. Just because you write the underdog, it doesn’t mean he has to bleed and die. In fact, he shouldn’t, because that denies every inadequate person out there still fighting to win. (me! Me!)

I know the depths of darkness in my own soul – but weirdly, that’s the places against which the light shines brightest. I know my flaws in ability – and those are the ones I work at the hardest.

We’re all walking wounded. That doesn’t mean we can’t win.

And a well done hero is flawed and has a broad streak of darkness. It is that which allows him to see the darkness in the enemy.

And it is bleeding and broken, walking long after we wore through our feet, standing when we’d rather lie down, shouting when we’d rather whisper, that we can have any hope of winning this culture war.

And we must, because the alternative is for everyone to be told if they’re flawed there’s not hope for them, and it’s nothing but grey goo everlasting and life has no meaning.

No culture, no civilization can survive having all its stories say that.

Which is why we must make sure there are other narratives, other stories, other inspirations.  That we are so inadequate to the task only makes our glory greater when we achieve.

Now go.

 

Storming the Moral High Ground – L. Jagi Lamplighter

 

“Why can’t we have more stories that don’t involve poop?

 

“You know, good stories? No anti-heroes. No dour nihilism. No descriptions of gross stuff for no particular reason except to produce a mood we didn’t want to read anyway. Just…action, adventure, heroism, even perhaps a few…I realize this is going way out on a limb and no one else wants to read this but me but…good Christians, or something really outrageous like that.

 

“But not pious stories mind you. I’ve never found those entertaining. No stories where good guys are squeaky clean, and only very, very obviously evil people who cackle and have warts are allowed to use magic.

 

“Why can’t we have good stories and good messages. The dreary, depressed literary crowd have held the moral high ground for far too long, I think some people have forgotten that good stories can get there, too.”

 

“So you want good stories? Heroism? Christian values? What we need is a literary movement.”

 

There was a pause in the moving car.

 

“Why don’t we start one. Let’s storm the moral high ground!”

 

This conversation happened a bit over a year ago. Well, all right, it didn’t really happen quite like this, but this is the spirit of what occurred.

 

John and I were driving home from Balticon 2013. We had just had a great time at the convention and were fired up with new ideas for stories. And we talked for a long time about the state of stories today. What we liked. What we missed.
Both of us were impressed with a story a friend had invented that was clearly heroic and Christian but had not even the slightest whiff of Sunday Morning piousness about it.

We wanted to write stuff like that.

 

“If we are going to have a literary movement,” John stated. “It needs a name. All the best ones have names. We could call it the Space Princess Movement…but that already exists and had to do with Space Princesses.”

 

“Nah, that won’t work,” I said.

 

So we discussed names for some time.

 

“What about the Superversive Movement?” asked John.

 

“You mean like Superversive on LiveJournal? That gentleman who writes those excellent essays?” I asked. “What does it mean?”

 

“You know how subversive means to change something by undermining from below? Superversive is change by inspiration from above.”

 

“Perfect! When we get home, let’s invite Dan Lawlis*. We know he’ll be onboard.”

 

*Dan Lawlis—my cover artist and the author of a Christian allegorical comic called Orange Peel 3.

 

And so, the Superversive Literary Movement was born.

 

It took over a year, but as of next week, the Superversive Literary Movement will have its own web post. Once a week, on my website and Glipho account.

 

Our opening post will be, God willing, an essay by Tom Simon, Mr. Superversive (from LJ) himself, on the nature of what Superversive means.

 

After that, the sky’s the limit.

Come on by and see what we’re up to!

 

(And let me know if you’d like to participate!)
We’ll be the ones storming the castle.

 

 

 

UPDATE: There is fodder in the subscriber space.

First of all and before I forget — memory of two seconds — I’m going to put out a BOLO for the Free Range Oyster.  I really have no idea what happened.  Last week he said he’d send the list on Sunday, then he didn’t, and I realize there is nothing on his Facebook page since then.  I’m going to pray nothing disastrous has befallen them.  He could use a break.  (So could we all.)

If any of you is crazy enough to offer to assemble the links for the promo post till he returns, I’d be grateful.  Yes, I can do it, but it takes 2 or three hours and it’s a big mind-numbing.  Maybe I should ask Charlie if he can do a program for my site, like he did for PJM.

Second, I heard from Cyn.  She’s moving to Las Vegas and will be back online as she feels able.  I told her we’d keep her seat warm and dusted.

Third, it is all Dave Freer’s fault that I’m this late with the post.  You see, he sent me an ARC of his cozy.  I didn’t actually read it all the way to the end, because I’m running on lingering effects of whatever-that-virus-was and get very tired, but I read about half of it and stayed awake far too long.  All I can say is as much as I enjoy Dave’s fantasy, he might have been born to write cozy mystery.  Also, this better be the first of a series, and also, I get to read it first and you don’t nah nah nah nah nah.

I then fell asleep to the most easy to interpret dream I’ve ever had.  I dreamed the boys had both left though I wasn’t sure if for jobs or whatever, and I’d gone shopping.  Only at the store I realized I’d not brought either my money or my ID.  Weirdly, what hurt most was the lack of ID, as I was afraid police would stop me on my way home and arrest me for not having ID on me.

Which meant I could never go home again, because I’d lost my identity.

This was absolutely bizarre, since I don’t think I’ve ever identified myself as only (or even primarily) “mommy.”  While I was never unhappy raising the kids, I confess I like them BEST once you can discuss things with them.  And even while they were toddlers, my mind was focused on writing.

Does some piece of my mind feel I’ll lose who I am when the kids go?  How am I to know, precisely.  Other than the oddly symbolic dream?

I think I’d like a chance to try this empty nest syndrome thing.  Ah well.  Younger one is still in college and older one is applying to medschool.  If he doesn’t get in, he has… plans.  And in the meanwhile I shouldn’t worry.  I think I worry because their cousins (six and eleven years older than they) still live with their parents.  But Portugal is a different place and has always been.

At any rate, if I get antsy when they move out, you guys can remind me who I am, right?

And speaking of parenthood, Peter Grant has sent me a link to some people he knows in the gun blogger community, who have been having a very bad time of it. Note this is not an invitation to discuss abortion, not even in extreme circumstances.  I can’t even imagine being in their place, and my mind skitters away from the thought.  I’m blessed I never had to make such a decision.  Donate or not, as you wish, but no discussion of abortion in the comments.  I donated more than I should, mostly because husband got involved in the decision and decided the amount.  It’s okay.  We’ll be fine.  I just need to finish Through Fire and write a sequel to Witchfinder (yes, rogue Magic, but Haunted Air before that) fast.  I am owning up to the donation because apparently the anonimizer failed or I got confused and forgot to click it.  At any rate, it’s Dan’s fault.

Which brings us to donations.  I’m leaving the subscriber button up, but it’s having some issues.  I know it told some people I’d no longer accept their donations, and it told me they’d cancelled, which is a problem as neither of us had done anything.  This is not a big deal money wise (if I can get the books done) but it is a huge deal relationship wise, as some of these people were/are friends and think I’m mad at them.  The ones who contacted me I’ve reassured it’s paypal weirdness.  If it happened to you, no, I’m not mad at you.

The system has other flaws.  For instance, it messes up on telling me what level ya’ll gave at.  If you’re wondering why promised swag is so slow (some of them two years) it’s because I’m having a hell of a time compiling lists.  Dan promised me a program, but then work went feral.  So the only way to do it is go case by case on email, and that will take a couple of days and you know what my time is.

I’m instead of going to say if you’re at a certain swag level (even if you only subscribed for a year and it was last year) ping me on the subscription email and tell me what you want.

I’ve been very bad with the subscriber space, but I’m better (yes, there will be dragons by tonight.  Sorry.  I’ve been using the inhaler to breathe, and I get VERY tired around nine pm, which is usually when I play with it) and hopefully there will be three novels up there soon.  I’m not cancelling anyone’s access to the subscriber page, so hopefully it will be worthwhile.

I am intending to move to Patreon which I understand is easier to manage and not as buggy.  As I said, I’m not removing the subscriber button, but at some point, when I’ve transferred, I’ll give you a chance to transfer as well.

The… financial crisis isn’t exactly over, but it’s not as dire as it was in April, much less last year.  The publication of Witchfinder made a big difference.  It seems almost wrong: write what you want, throw it up there, get money.

Now I need everyone, all together, to say “Dan put your book up.”  His has been ready for … 3? months, including (if I say so myself) a great cover I made, but he’s not putting it up.  First time jitters, you know.  (And for those who were betas — he fixed the chopped-up first chapter.  It was something he did in revision, and it seemed good, until he read it out loud.)

Other news: I’m writing a YA with first son by birth.  It’s called Star Student and we’re hoping it’s reminiscent of Heinlein YA.  It’s been somewhat delayed since he got asked to submit secondary aps and also he thought it was a good time to read Heinlein juvies which he read for the first time at six or seven.  As ya’ll know this “I’m going to re-read my Heinlein” can take a long time.

With older son by adoption (late adoption.  We adopted him a year and a half ago for the grandkids.  Worked too!) Dave Pascoe, I’m writing what can only be described as mil fantasy with a touch of historical.  You’ll like it when we’re done. (And I hope Baen likes it too!)  We will post a sample when we have it finished.

And Not To Yield, a novella (around 30k words, if I recall precisely) set in the world of A Few Good Men, ten years later is in the process of being processed and it will come out in the next Wordfire Five by Five (an anthology of mil novellas.)  While it’s about ten years from Through Fire (which has Zen Sienna, not Nat and Luce.  Well, Luce appears once and it was quite interesting, because I have never thought of him as a son of a b*tch.  I guess we’re all different viewed from outside?) it’s part of the continuum.  It is in Luce’s head, and it sets up for what will be book six of the Earth Revolution.  It starts with Luce facing a court Martial.  So…  Sample here.

I’m still battling Through Fire.  The character is now talking to me, but I think the story itself scares me.

Scares you? You say.

Scares me.  Not in the sense that it is horror, though some parts of it are horrific, and that’s part of the problem, but in the sense that I keep getting terrified I’m botching it, or that the theme gets too intense for me.

This is manageable in a short story.  You find yourself suddenly in the kitchen making low carb brownies, and you force yourself back up the stairs to write.  For a novel it makes everything very slow.  I was looking for a BFTP on Friday and looked back at a post exactly a year ago.  It feels like I’ve been spinning my wheels for a year.  I’m hoping it’s just this book and that I’ve not BECOME a slow writer, because the ideas still come fast and I HAVE to get them out of my head.

As part of this I’m trying to limit myself to three real posts here a week.  We’ll see, right?

Speaking of, I think I figured out the SJWs.  They’re MISSIONAIRIES, seeking to enlighten us.  I’ve blogged about it at Book Plug Friday.

I will continue Rogue Magic and Elf Blood as soon as I shoot Through Fire through the head, which G-d willing will be soon, because I can’t force myself to not run away much longer.  Both Rogue Magic and Elf Blood need a thorough go-over so I can finish them, anyway.

And I think for now that’s all folks. Thank you for being patient with the rambling writer.