According To Hoyt

*Okay, this is very short and you can’t kill me.  Yes, I could do two, but that would totally pull me out of TF, and I can’t do that.  So, live with it  Eventually I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile Witchfinder is back and edited, but I must get Through Fire to Baen before I sit down to go over the edits, at which point it will come out.  So, I’m going to clean boxes and go back to work, okay.  Meanwhile, enjoy this which I admit is more of a teaser than a chapter.  (Though it moves the plot forward.  Oh, does it ever.)*

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Interlude with Monkeys

 

Wolfe Merritt, Manufactories and Properties Manager for the Right Honorable Earl of Savage.

 

I hit so hard that for a moment I wasn’t sure at all I had survived.

I’d let go of the rope inside the gut of a fantastical beast, as I said a spell to restore us to our right world.  Beneath me was a pool of acid.  If the spell didn’t work, I was going to die in a horrible way.

And for a moment I wasn’t sure I hadn’t.  I fell hard, and my brain rattled, and I might have lost consciousness for a little while.

At length I became aware of soft grass under me, of a smell of flowers, and therefore that I could not be in acid, in the gut of a monster.

But I can’t have been unconscious too long. Opening my eyes, I saw Lady Helen falling, just near me.  She fell, as I had, onto a cushiony grassy mound, and rolled down, and lifted her head, glaring at me, “You!” as though she were surprised to see me, or perhaps as though I’d engineered her fall.

I was vaguely aware of her maid, Betsy, falling near us, and then another man, I wasn’t sure whom, but I caught sight of a human form falling.

This was followed in short order by the sound of chattering monkeys, and a lot of noise like tree leaves being ruffled.  I turned over and saw that there were indeed trees.  We were in a clearing.  It was a good thing we hadn’t fallen through the trees.  I suspect while not as lethal as the acid, it would be just as bad.

Betsy was gathering herself, and Lady Helen was still glowering at me.  “You,” she said again.

I blinked at her, because it still felt like the tumble had made it impossible for me to think, and she said, “Where are we?”  She crossed her arms.  “Where did you bring us?”

I looked at her, then around me, then up at the trees, where Hannuman’s monkeys were chittering and swinging from branch to branch.  “Somewhere,” I said, “not inside the monster.”

A male chuckle answered that, and turning around I saw it was Hanuman, himself, in human form, and I had a moment to rejoice he was wearing clothes.  “Indeed, it’s not,” he said.  “And you should be grateful enough for that, milady.  An eternity I spent in that vile place.  This is not it.”

I got a feeling he knew where this was, and a strong pit-of the stomach clench of anxiety that it was nowhere I wanted to be, but I didn’t say it.  Instead I said, mock-cheerfully, “It could be somewhere pleasant,” I said.  “it could even be your country estate, and your brother somewhere nearby.”  As I said it I thought my mother and my son would be nearby too, and I longed for that with near painful need.  To walk into mother’s kitchen, to have—

“I think not,” the Monkey-king said, at the same time that Miss Blythe said, “The power aura is all wrong!”

“Where are we?” I said with nascent alarm.  The monkeys were approaching now, very quietly, walking like men, closing in.

“We’re in my world, Mr. Merrit,” the Monkey king said, and grinned ingratiatingly.  “The Myth World.”

 

 

So, today is Halloween.  My first introduction to it was through Disney comics.  It seemed like a great deal of fun, what with pumpkin carving and all that.

And we’ve tried to make Halloween fun for the kids.  I think mostly we made it sideways and backwards from normal.

Look, the only two years the kids had purchased costumes was when Dan had the traveling job and I was breaking into writing, 99/2000.  Because there just wasn’t time and – briefly – we had money to order costumes.

Other than that, normally, I had long discussions with them about what they wanted to be, then assembled materials.  On Halloween, as soon as they left for school, I sat down and made costumes for them.

The most memorable one required SOME purchased parts (I think from big lots, although it might have been the Oriental trading catalogue.)  The kids wanted to be dragon and knight, so I bought a plastic breast plate, and helmet and sword.

Then I set about making a dragon costume with fabric purchased at the thrift store (miles and miles of ugly polyester for I think $5.)  I used a sweat suit that fit Robert to cut the pants and “shirt from, made the head like an extended hood – he looked through the mouth – add in some spikes from metallic golden fabric, and bob is your uncle.

This is when we lived in Manitou Springs and the path for the kids was about three miles, up and down hills.  (Manitou is a mountain village.)

Our friend Charles and our cat Pixel walked the boys because I had to stay home to hand out candy and Dan was working late, which was normal in those days.

Charles says the sword quickly became the “righteous sword for smacking brother.”  Marshall was two or three?  Anyway, when they stopped at a house, Robert would make dragon sounds.  Marshall took this as a great offense and would whack him with the sword on top of the head.  Then Robert would squawk and flap his wings in protest.

They enacted this for me when they got back, and it was very funny.  They got enough candy to choke an elephant.  Although to this day Charles maintains that the MOST impressive thing wasn’t the dragon and knight act, but the fact that Pixel escorted them to the door and politely waited for them, before walking with them to the next.  Charles said people kept asking “How did you train your cat.”  This made him feel he was in a parallel universe because… who trains cats?

Other than that, though I still have some costumes in the basement (Found the crusader one the other day…  With the bunny of death attached) the one I remember vividly is the first one, when Robert was two and a half, and our friends invited us to trick or treat in their neighborhood.  I had no costume, so I dressed Robert as a prince and even sewed a sword (hey, he was two and a half.)

I’ll forever have this memory of him “getting it”.  Go to the first house, get candy, go to second get candy.  Eyes light up, and he gallops ahead of the group to the next house, and the next.  I still feel guilty over not teaching him to say “Thank you” more clearly that year, because he would yell “Fank you” as he ran away.  I still worry those people thought it was something else.

Of course, in Portugal, Halloween is serious business.  Oh, not day of the Muertos type of thing, though you can see where that came from (and I know that mostly through Bradbury stories.)

No, it’s if anything closer to the festival of the Hungry ghosts in Asian religions.

Halloween is the day you visit the cemetery and get acquainted with lost relatives.  You don’t talk to them (I hope, that would be REALLY creepy) but you talk about them, show their graves to the kids, tell them who they were.

You go early and wash the graves (the graves are almost all covered by marble slabs.  Pauper graves and children’s graves aren’t, but those you weed.)  Then as night falls you light candles.  EVERYONE is there – or at least in my day and in the village, everyone was.  And because the cemetery was shared between five or six villages, you usually ended up having a sort of visiting day with relatives who lived further off/friends you hadn’t seen in years.

All of it though was pervaded with this melancholy feel, because you talked of the people who’d gone before you.

I often say that my dad – 83 – now has a tendency to treat going to the cemetery as “old school week” and goes there all too often, and takes me through it, and talks about each person he knew (and some my generation) who is now there, and remembers them fondly.  This is perhaps logical when most of your generation is beneath the turf.

But Halloween, everyone treats the cemetery that way.

It is both disturbing and somewhat creepy, but also, in that type of place, with that type of continuity… I don’t know how to put this… comforting?

You know someday you’ll be gone to join the silent majority, but you know you won’t be forgotten for generations, and that your relatives will tell stories of you in November, as winter draws near.

Usually you adjourn home for roast chestnuts (you put chestnuts under a pile of pine needles. When the pine needles burn off, the chestnuts are perfectly done.) and red wine, and more talk of the old days.

I remember a feeling that the dead weren’t so much gone, that day, as a continuum with the living.

The highlight for me was visiting the grave of my cousin Dulce.  I remember that.  I don’t remember Dulce.  I guess I did, back then, because we were the same age, and according to the relatives still alive, we used to play together.  She died at three in what was either an unusually virulent form of chicken pox or the last small pox epidemic to sweep Europe (It escaped from a lab in Germany.  Okay.  No.  It was carried out by accident.  I’m now seeing it in daring do, breaking out of the lab.)  I don’t know which because in Portuguese they fall under a continuum of words and could mean either.  I don’t think anyone knew which, either.  But it killed about a third of the kids too young to be in school/vaccinated.

Funny thing, my cousin was the strong one of the two of us – I was born premature and my health now is perhaps a little better than it was then.  I always wonder if I hadn’t spent so much of my young years sick in bed, would I be a writer now?  My nature is more active and less introspective than it was molded to by those years of solitude and enforced inactivity – and she was the one who died.  I pulled through by the skin of my teeth.

But I remember wanting to see her grave, and being fascinated by all the little graves in the children’s cemetery.  I remember wondering if they came out, after we left, and played among the graves. The funny thing is that this didn’t seem creepy at all, more like eternal recess.

On that, until a few years ago I was convinced I’d killed Dulce.  I don’t think anyone told me so, but it went something like this: we were having tea and she finished her bread and butter and wanted mine.  I refused to share.  She cried.  The adults told me I was mean or something like that.  Then we both got sick.  (One of us probably gave it to the other at that play session.)  When I recovered, they told me she had died.  (They also burned all my toys/books that couldn’t be washed.  It was that virulent.)

Unexamined at the back of my head, until my mom mentioned that Dulce had died in that illness wave, was the certainty she had died because I wouldn’t give her my bread.

Now this doesn’t stand up rationally, of course, but it was never thought of or examined.  I knew it so firmly as a kid that finding out otherwise was a shock as an adult.  I realized that for most of my life I’d been carrying the guilt of “killing” my cousin.  Weird, uh?

Anyway, as I get older I draw comfort from those memories of childhood where life and death were a continuum and there was never any idea that the dead just vanished.  No, they were still there, and you could go to their graves, which were sort of receptors for communicating to them and assure them that you were thinking of them and would be along by the by.

It’s very hard to fear death or even to view death as anything much in those circumstances.

Halloween to me back then was also the beginning of an enchanted season.  Within weeks, lights would go up downtown Porto, and my dad would take me downtown to see them put up.  This was around the time of my birthday too.  And chestnuts would be sold on the streets (I love roast chestnuts.  Still.)  And my grandfather would light up the Franklin stove in their kitchen, and I could have “potatoes with a punch” – these were little potatoes, the ones ignored by the harvest but gleaned afterwards with a rake – and you’d put them in the ash pan of the stove, so the hot ash fell on them.  When they crumbled with a punch they were done.  They were eaten as a snack, and I loved them.  (Yes, we were weird.  Deal.)

So Halloween, even if slightly spooky and sort of mystical, was the beginning of winter fun.  It retains some of that aura, even now.

Now excuse me, I’m going to see if I can talk one of the young men into wearing a dragon costume.  For old time’s sake.

 

It is a truism from psychology classes that you can’t stand at the window and watch yourself go by.  You also can’t grow up in a country and see it as outsiders see it.  And outsiders can’t see it as insiders see it.

If you ever see me standing somewhere and shaking my head and saying “Americans!” it’s not that I suddenly see myself as separate from you.  Or rather, it is, but it’s more that I see myself from separate and part of, which means I don’t fit anywhere.  The part of me that feels separate from the rest of you, though, is the girl who grew up overseas with an idea of America that you don’t see and probably can’t share.  The part that then came here, and adapted her notions, and figured out how you guys see yourselves.

In metaphorical terms, I’m the American that stands at the window and watches America go by. The caveat is that I grew up in a very particular time and place, and though I did see a lot of Europe and had a lot of European and anglosphere friends, I know next to nothing about Asia (though I had Japanese friends too.)  Still as far as I know though we share one or two traits with other nations, we’re the only ones who have all of them.

And I don’t mean some individuals in other nations don’t have these traits, or that some here don’t lack them (boy, I could tell you!) but that in general our culture has these traits and theirs doesn’t.  And that makes all the difference.

So I thought I’d hold the mirror up to you, because you guys keep trying to fit yourselves into roles that just aren’t there. “We’re Rome!”  or “We’re Carthage” or even “We’re the British Empire!”  (Which – Francis is right – is the closest and yet not a perfect fit.  In nation terms, the British take their laws as seriously as we do, but they’re more flexible.  In schoolroom terms, the British might be “in the spectrum” but they’re not full on Aspergers.)

No, we’re none of those.  By the Grace of G-d or the amazing concatenation of chance and self-selection, we’re something quite new in the history of the world.  And if there was something like us before – pre-history perhaps? – it is long since vanished from memory.

I’m going to list in no particular order the things that still strike the me-that-grew-up-elsewhere as amazing and wonderful about our country.  And yet I’m sure I’ll forget a dozen or so of them.  Maybe perhaps just enough of this will explain my view that while I think collapse is inevitable, I don’t think we can predict how it will turn out or what comes next.  The future is unwritten and being the special nation we are, it’s up to us to write it.

[BTW, I’m too lazy to look for it right now, but there’s a Facebook meme that encapsulates what I am: I’m an Apocaliptimist.  I believe everything is going to sh*t but I still think we’ll be all right through it all and it might turn out for the best. (The difference between me and the Libertarians who, like communists, expect their system to emerge spontaneously from the chaos, is that I think we’ll need to work like heck through the dark times to make sure we’re all right at the end.)]

So, here it is what I see when I stand at the window and watch America go by:

-We’re playful.  No, I don’t mean just in the sense that we have a sense of humor.  That too – and I was fully appreciative of the British humor before I came here, but the British humor has a back bite and a bit of the dour irony that American humor might have or not – but that’s not all.  We’re playful even when not making an outright joke.  For instance, the first thing that hit me about the High School I attended in the States for 12^th grade was that someone had labeled the corridors in hand lettered signs.  For instance, the math/computer area was labeled Nerd Alley.  And the teachers let it stay up.  And no one thought this hurt the dignity of the school/education.  In fact, I’m almost sure they had the school’s unofficial approval.

Then there’s the senior prank I took part in, where we kidnapped the secretary’s stuffed bulldog collection, and asked for $5 in unmarked pennies.  My counselor called me and very seriously counseled me to give up my accomplices and talked about my making this an international incident.

Right now you’re going “Standard kid stuff.”  And shaking your head and going “and?” – And nothing.  Those are perfectly normal pranks.

Yeah, they are, in the states.  Don’t even try to do it anywhere else.

-We spontaneously organize in clubs and associations.  I think we’re losing this now, because everyone is so infernally busy.  (But the structure is still there.  It would take more than a generation to erase.) It’s impossible to have a club in America – even our writers’ group – without rules that everyone takes very seriously indeed.  In other countries – maybe excepting England – this is reserved for associations that are “official” and “important.”  Here, if you form a club to give crumbs to ducklings in the park, within three months it will be run according  to Robert’s rules of order, (Which I’ve told the older kid should be the name of his blog) with motions and chairs and who knows what.

This is absolutely needed because

-We don’t take orders well.  Any of us, really.  When I came to the US I kept seeing this sign in every work place “The problem in this place is all chiefs no Indians.”  I suppose it is politically incorrect now, so you no longer see it.  BUT it baffled me.  It wasn’t just that these people were saying that their workplace was unorganized, or that they had issues taking orders, but that they were BRAGGING about it in posters and cross stitch pictures. … and that they were right.

Portugal is famously unorganized.  My kids have various colorful expressions for the way things are done in Portugal.  Let’s just say they’re convinced that most people drive with a part of their anatomy no one should use. But it’s different.  The average Portuguese recognizes his “betters” and assumes that someone else has the right to lead them.  They just exhibit a sullen “make me” attitude.

In the States, we just don’t see why anyone else should be in charge.  We don’t recognize social superiors, and we barely recognize technical superiors.  The forlorn cries for us to respect “the office” of this and that when we can’t respect the current *sshat are a measure of how little inclined we are to do that.  In other countries the President or the Premier or whatever is “Important” and you DO respect the office and it rubs off on the person, no matter how much you hate the current clown.

The flip side of this is that we’re all of us forever looking at what we can do.  (There are exceptions, of course.  I’m not talking individuals, I’m talking the American character as opposed to other nations.)  If you face a mess, you don’t sit around waiting for orders to fix it.  You don’t even wait for other people to “buy in.”  You roll up your sleeves and start fixing what you can reach.

This is why that sign in the seventies was a brag.  It was was “We’re all trying to do the best we can, and we’re so good at that we can barely coordinate with which other.”  There is no other country where I can visualize “An army of one” making sense.

-This “We fix it” thing is why Americans open their purses and their hearts to help the less fortunate, whether it’s the person with too many kittens to feed down the block, or the victims of the tsunami across the world, in numbers the rest of the world doesn’t even come close to matching.

It’s not just that we’re well off or generous.  Yeah, we’re that, but we also feel that it’s our duty, dang it.  We don’t wait for the organization or the go-varmint or someone else to do.  We’re an army of one, moving in our own uncoordinated way, and moving mountains without even noticing.

And that’s also because most of us at some time were in need and got help, and know better than to wait for officialdom.

I was never more proud than when science fiction forgot its petty inanities and closed ranks to help Dave Wolverton’s kid.  Because that’s what we do.  We’re Americans.  We fix, we help, we move on, and we don’t keep score of who helped whom, and who didn’t.  You need help we’re there, a mob with a purpose.

– We are flexible.  No, this is important.  We change, and the society allows us to change.  The sense of humor, the organization, the initiative, all of it adds up to us saying “just because I’ve always been like that, doesn’t mean I’ll be like that tomorrow.  And society doesn’t try to keep us in our appointed pigeon hole.

And this is probably why you can become an American.  Most other nationalities, while you can naturalize, you’ll never “really” be whatever they are.

Here?  Despite the idiots running around hyphenating themselves, you can be an American no matter how funny you look or how strange you sound.  (Trust me.  I know whence I speak.)

And people will be offended at the idea that you wouldn’t be able to become a real American.

Part of the unappreciated thing by all – PARTICULARLY progressives – is that for all its flaws America is the least racist, homophobic, sexist and any other discriminatory thing you can think of.  If you’re an American you are an American, no questions asked.  (And all the Americans who think otherwise only think so because they’ve only seen the rest of the world on their best behavior.  Listen to them in unguarded moments, in their native language, and the picture is quite different.  I wish we could get our oikophobic co-citizens to understand that they really shouldn’t take what people say of their own country at face value.  This is why they think we are the worst in the world – because we engage in self-critique, even more than the Europeans.)

-And this is why we have a positive craze for self-improvement.  This can get outright silly with New Age stuff and cleansing your aura, but it also means that most of us aspire to being life long learners, even those who aren’t.

Yes, in other countries people go for adult education or learning this or that, but it’s usually very focused, very serious.  Here, it’s not unusual to find that someone is taking some very serious subject on the side, in their spare time, just for fun.

For years I belonged to the History Book Club, where my royalty checks should just be made over every month.  (My husband said.)  I don’t now, because I can poke around Amazon till I find things.  But that sort of thing, the History Book Club and the Science Book Club, and the Mathematics Book Club, and heaven knows what flourishes in America more than anywhere else in the world.

I remember when my brother rather condescendingly told me about a book on Chinese History he’d just discovered and offered to send it to me “since you won’t have that in America.”  Ah.  I’d read it five years before, through the History Book Club.

This is why despite the fact that our secondary education (and primary too, for that matter) suck rotten eggs, we continue to have an educated populace.  It’s also why finding out someone “only” has a high school education means nothing.  My plumber is an expert on the civil war and its weapons. One of my friends who is “only” a high school education and from a part of the country not known for the excellence of its teaching could give lessons to most of my literature professors.

In the same way that there are second acts in American lives, there are second and third and fourth careers, and a continuing education, and structures to support that, and the fact that no one finds it weird that a computer programmer is “really” a medieval sword expert and a weekend ironsmith.

This makes us uniquely adapted to this world of fast-changing technology, because none of us (okay, again, I’m talking the culture not individuals.  We won’t discuss Wisconsin teachers) regards a job as a sinecure or the education as the hoops to jump through for the sinecure.  No, we regard jobs as things you do for a while, and learning as the way to get another/different job.

Which is good, because

– The future comes from America.  Yes, yes, I know Verne, Wells and all that “invented” science fiction, but the only nation in which it was popularized as a genre, and not an entertainment of intellectuals bent on social critique – the only place it could be so – is America.

Some countries – most countries – are shackled to the past, either in embrace or in denial, and sometimes in both.

Portugal is a tiny country trying to swim through time against the pull of the huge cement sack of history tied to its middle.  They can’t do this and that because it’s never been done, or they have to do this because they did that before.  I get the same sense about all the other countries I know well enough.

But not America.  Oh, no.  Not us.

Americans seem to have come here to make things better, and therefore, the future is always better than the past (Yes I realize this makes the glitterati not really American.  What you thought they were?)

Americans are mad in love with the future.  We’re adult enough to know sometimes there are (d*mnably) rough patches, but by and large “every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.”  And just wait till we finish tinkering and cajoling and inventing tomorrow.

Come and give me a hand.  We’ll come out of this collapse thing better than ever, stronger than ever.  The future?  Man, is it going to be snazzy, and new, and completely unexpected.

Boy, are you going to love it!

You ain’t seen nothing like us yet!

UPDATE: Continuing the series on Writing With Found Objects, over at Mad Genius Club.

 

 

Okay, guys, pardon me as I interrupt your strumming up of cords and picking up a good spot on the hills, in preparation to watch Rome burn.

All of you who are waiting to be witnesses to the apocalypse – please stop saying we’re going to collapse like Rome.

Yes, it’s a thing everyone says.  Yes, it’s something that much more erudite people than I have said.  That is because it is a … “intellectual meme.”

Everyone has been comparing every power that rises… well, since Rome, to Rome.  And  EVERYONE has been comparing every time when life gets relatively easy and prosperous to the Rome of the decadence.

Sigh.  Roll of eyes.

Look, it’s been an awful long time since I studied Rome in detail.  The way I work, and the reason I can write historicals in various centuries is that I don’t have perma-memory for details.  I’m pretty good with general framework – and this is what my education strove for.  Yeah, we got some details too, but our history classes were less about names and dates (It shocked me very much that’s what American history classes were about when I moved here) and memorizing who said what, than about the movements.  For instance, until I had to read up on the French revolution (years ago, I had this idea bout a series of mysteries set in the French revolution.  It didn’t happen because the French revolution depresses me to an unbelievable degree.) I just had this idea of a few reasonable demands going off the rails due to both what we could call the “radicalization” of the populace (which was primed for it by the broadsheets, etc) coming up against a very incompetent (and reluctant, weirdly) king, the whole thing exacerbated by debt from helping the American revolution, which in turn was also a spark to the radicalism of the French populace.  (Yes, across the pond equal before the law became “equal” with horrible consequences.  Also, next time you look at a revolution full on, be suspicious of any which promises to bring fraternity.)

Yes, if you look at it close up it’s not quite like that, and there’s all sorts of other things.  BUT I have the framework, and can research the details and deepen it very rapidly.

(Practically the only era in which I have more detailed research is Tudor England, and even there I need to research the particular people/time for a couple of months before writing a book – which is why book four and five of the Shakespeare series, should there be enough interest, might be a kickstarter.  So far, not seeing enough sales to justify it, though.  I was putting up the first two books on Barnes and Noble yesterday – since the first rolled off Prime – and kept looking at the names of friends and neighbors and people in that era and going “good Lord.  I’d have to re-learn all this again.”  Of course, it’s been a dozen years.)

By nature, at any rate, I’m a generalist/synthesist.  I can glue on the details for a project but I don’t remember them unless I’m working on that project.  (And then they come back very quickly.  Same thing with languages.  I would probably take me six months to get Portuguese, French and Italian to the “doing scientific translation to and from” level again.  Probably a year for German and Swedish.  Of course, it would destroy the colloquial nature of my English, which is why I don’t do it.)

My peculiar brain aside, and explaining why I can sound abysmally ignorant on details, you don’t need details to see how different Rome was from the United States.

Yes, yes, it was a melting pot of sorts, but then every “lead civilization” of the world has been, just not acknowledged.  It was a melting pot because it was wealthy and people flocked to it.  And yeah, okay, in the beginning, people might even have flocked to it out of loyalty to an idea that was SOMEWHAT similar to America – the idea being that a Roman citizen had some rights, while in the more Eastern Style monarchies they had none.

This is of course where our founding fathers got the foundational ideas for our own republic… but…

But  you’ll admit the republic was of a different kind and order, and more concerned with families than with the individual.

And then there’s the fact that the Rome that fell not only wasn’t a republic, but hadn’t been a Republic in a long, long, long time.

We’re not going to argue on whether the conversion to Empire prolonged the existence of Rome.  And we’re most certainly not going to argue on whether the US is an empire.  It isn’t.  Not an empire on the framework of Rome.

Rome might have started as an agrarian and trading republic, (and no matter how much the founding fathers admired it, NOT a republic on our terms.  Don’t forget the founding fathers built in stuff to make us different.  But also, and beyond all that, despite the self-conscious imitation of Rome, the Rome these people admired had never existed.  It was an idealized, cleaned up thing, a Rome as it never was but should have been) but it took a sharp turn weird after the attack by Hannibal.  Mostly because the Punic wars exposed (if you forgive me mixed historical metaphors) the Achiles heel of the Republican system.  You can’t have a war when your leaders keep changing mid-stream.  (We’re discovering that same thing with our own war with the descendants of the Phoenicians.  Even if our stream is longer)

That was the beginning of the end for the Republic and the beginning of military leaders as rulers.  But that was the BEGINNING.  From there on, the system rapidly became one of those oriental monarchies, including a god-king.

Okay, I often call the president godemperor, because he is to his followers, but the majority of the country would rise up if he were to declare himself just that.

Even before that, the Roman Republic was of a different… kind than the US.  The US started as a colony.  (Oh, don’t argue that so did Rome.  Go back far enough every country did.  Yes, Rome started as a band that conquered the natives.  But they didn’t do so in the service of a compact of beliefs.  At least that we know.  And they didn’t win independence against a colonizing power – at least that we know – and they started off as a kingdom, that we do know.)

We went from colony to Republic.

Rome on the other hand started the way normal nations do, kingdom.  Then Republic.  Then Empire.  And all through it, it sent out colonists and created colonies.

Yes, you could compare the taking over the Italian peninsula to our own conquest of most of the continent.  You could but you shouldn’t.  It might look the same if you squint and shake up the snow globe, but it isn’t.  European colonists came from a densely populated land to one not only sparsely populated, but populated by natives who lived in a completely different way.  (Some of them.  Yes, I know it’s not all.  But the ones who remained hunter gatherers simply didn’t hold the land in a way Europeans understood.)  Rome was a power of that time and region doing what powers of that time and region did.

And by the time Rome became an Empire, it had more in common with the USSR than with us.

What exactly do I mean by that?

Well, first, while Rome had in common with us a genius for synthesis – for taking bits from everywhere and making it into something different – it was not, that I know, at any time the driving innovator of anything.  Greece, if anything, deserved that title.  I was thinking the other day that our relationship with Japan is similar to Greece and Rome, except for THAT. Rome conquered Greece but took Greek culture.  However, Greece also had more innovation than Rome.  This is not true between us and Japan, except perhaps in entertainment (and I’m not sure that’s innovation so much as their mixing in their traditional forms which, of course, are quite new to us.)

Perhaps in the early Republic people came from all over bringing their skills.  By late republic, let alone the Empire, people came to Rome for the bread and circus.  And Rome had colonies.  No, not economic colonies.  Real colonies, which required real legions to keep them in check.  Protect them against the barbarians?  Sure.  But also protect against uprising.

Before you bring up stuff like American troops abroad… Guys it is doubtful we could protect anywhere against real determined barbarians.  I’ve heard our troops in South Korea called “the trip wire.”  Their function is to go down fighting and give us an excuse to send our REAL forces in.  And that’s in Korea, where the danger is greater.  Say that Germany, of one mind, decided to become a Russian Satellite and toss us out (it might very well, btw, these days.)  Do you think we’d do anything other than politely apologize and leave?

We were invited in and stayed not as a force of occupation but as defense against Russian aggression.

The people who came in and occupied were the USSR.  The people who treated lands they “protected” as colonies and occupied land were the USSR.  The people using foreign, “colonials” as their shock troops were.. the USSR. (What is Cuba and Africa?)

More importantly, like the later day Rome, Moscow because sort of a central bureaucratic hold, with the “provinces” producing anything that was useful or new, or…

Rome of its kind was less abusive and in the end less oppressive than the USSR only because it was an agrarian empire with slower transportation and communication.  The USSR was trying to be a Roman empire on a foundation of industrial might.  Apparently, it doesn’t translate well.

It translates even less to us, because we don’t take lands and hold them.  We don’t make conquered peoples citizens.  We don’t take their natural (and unnatural ;)) resources to feed a huge central bureaucracy.

As bloated as our bureaucracy is – and guys, I’m not arguing that – it’s only bloated for US, not in comparison to the USSR, and not even in comparison to the rest of Europe which operates on the French model.  (Aka “we  will generate as much paperwork as possible.”)  I grew up with an ID card, without which it was impossible to operate.  It is normal in Europe.  Here we use a patchwork of driver’s license and social security, but at least it’s not ONE centralized number you’ll wear through life and which is used for EVERYTHING.  (Yes, okay, our SS# is close enough to that, but at least it’s being used for that illegally, and we can claim that and use that to fight it.)

And we’re certainly not plundering the resources of everywhere else in the Empire to feed the central, restive population.

Yes, I know, Marxists say that we’re an economic empire, and we’re plundering our economic colonies to feed our prosperity, but that’s poppycock.  If we were that, we’d take all the oil from the Arab countries we’ve been fighting in, instead of letting them do their own deals (with FRANCE!)

The Marxists believe that because they’re working outward from the “finite pie” model, and can’t figure out how the US got so rich, so it must be taking from other countries which are poor in comparison. They fail to explain how every country in the US sphere also got richer.  Maybe they don’t know it.  Or maybe they REFUSE to know it because it conflicts with their religion.

(We used to dream of being invaded by the US back in the seventies.  And no, I’m not joking.)

Curiously, in the seventies, the USSR and its satellites promoted the idea of The-US-As-Decadent-Rome.  I still have clue zero why or how they could think that, except of course that by that time they’d given up on their model being as prosperous as ours, so they had to hold themselves as being “virtuous/Spartan” against our decadent “too well off” ways which were corrupting the moral fiber, etc.

In fact, by signs of decadence as such, they were in far more trouble.  As it proved.  Real signs of decadence: failure to reproduce.  Failure to marry. Failure to take up useful work.  Disengagement from the ideological frame work of the empire, failure to look after one’s own kids already born…. Etc. (And no, again, yep, we have some of that, every society does, and now our leaders are doing their best to drive us to a crash, so some of that shows, but that is nothing compared to how bad it was in the USSR at that time, or in Rome before the collapse.)

We tend to confuse the “signs of the decadence” with “excesses of wealth” partly because our view of the late Rome is tainted by the early church fathers.  Let’s remember the church started as a slave religion. Talking about how “pure” they were in opposition to the people better well off and how this would win them heaven was a great part of the selling pitch.  (Yes, yes, moderation of physical appetites is Christian praxis too, but that’s not why they spent so much time describing the decadent Romans eating sandwiches made of skylarks’ tongues.)

The excesses seen in “the Rome of the decadence” are seen in any society that becomes affluent enough.  It’s just human.  Make enough money and get everyone well off enough, and soon you’ll see people wanting to eat chocolates modeled on some “anus model’s” relevant part.  (You think I’m joking.  David Burkhead posted this on Facebook.)  It’s the way humans are.  Only our “decadent waste” (waste according to whom, Tovarish? Did you buy Marxist lies?) is – particularly in Roman terms – spread throughout every class and all through our sphere of influence.  When a “poor” person has a choice between more than one kind of food, it’s sybaritic “decadent waste” in Roman terms.

And if you look at it, the USSR’s collapse modeled Rome’s pretty closely.  It was just faster because well, they started truly from an Empire, even if not called that, and because I would guess that empire frame work translates badly to an industrial model which requires skilled workers, not slaves.

But the USSR was HATED by all its satellites, and they were gleefully waiting its fall (so was Rome) but when it fell, they still looked for orders from Moscow, and many of them, even the ones that proclaim themselves free, are working on a modified communist/socialist system.  If they fall out of it, it will be slowly, as people fell out of the Roman system.

We?  Heaven knows.  Again, despite the self-conscious classical influence, it was given a twist and a change by our founding fathers.  And then the technology spun it up more.

For one we’re not hated in Europe – not really.  Mostly we’re despised, which neither the USSR nor Rome were.  We’re not taken seriously.  (And part is our rotating leader thing, and complete change of policy.)  We’re seen as a little mad, and not just in our sybaritic excesses.

As I said before, the other nations can’t make heads or tails of us, because we’re the Aspergers kids of the international community.  Depending on what is being taught over here, we actually try to do things no other nation ever did.  Like declare a war over without thoroughly reducing the other country to rubble.  (And it’s not working in the Middle East, but that’s a problem with what is being taught/believed by our leaders.  Honestly anyone asking about an “exit strategy” at the beginning of a war should be kicked fifty times around the room, and then told “we break everything first, then they beg us to stop and promise to do what we’re told, then we exit.”  What?  These people never fought in pre-school?  Well, maybe not.  Our idiot educators stop that because “violence never solved anything.”  We’ll pay for that nonsense.)

So, we’re going to crash.  But will our crash be like Rome’s/the USSR’s?

Oh, please.  Pull the other one.  It plays Hail to the Emperor.

Look, first, Europe NEVER used our system.  Their system is closer – though not the same – to the USSR.  And part of that perhaps is because they feared the USSR and USSR infiltration more than they feared us, and they trusted neither our numbers of troops nor our resolve to keep us safe.

They’re not going to be holding on for centuries, trying to imitate a lost system and looking to us for direction that never comes.

As for our states doing that?

Oh, PLEASE.  Do think of different technologies.  We might hold more land area than the Roman empire at its apex, but you can travel from one end to the other of it in less than a week – which you couldn’t.  And you can communicate across it instantly, which the Roman Empire never could, unless you’re counting an alternate Roman empire where they had magic.

If you think that makes no difference in a collapse, we need to talk.  I mean, seriously talk.

That’s leaving aside all the rest, including that we’re not holding the country together by force.  Yes, there IS the civil war, but that was more than 100 years ago, and do tell me where our troops had to be sent in to pacify a state recently.

It’s leaving aside too the fact that until very recently people came here to work, and because they believed in Freedom.  It’s leaving aside the inherent American “ungovernability” or the tendency to hold up a middle finger skyward when the people in Washington get TOO funny.

Rome to an extent was a creature of its legions.  This is like the USSR was a creature of its armies.  When it could no longer support its armies, it fell.

We’re a country that reluctantly engages in war to protect our right to be left alone (though the foreign adventurism of the left side of our politics can’t be erased.  And don’t tell me that’s not the left side.  Go look at ALL our major wars.)  Or, in the apropos phrase of Dave Freer “Americans are horrible imperialists.  All they want to do is go home.”

Do we have similarities to Rome?  Well, we’re the most prosperous land of our time; we sometimes get a bit funny with our chocolates and our sexual behavior in a way that no doubt would shock the goat herders of Afghanistan or the slaves of Rome (but then, dears, their behavior would shock us too) and have a kickass military.

But we don’t use the kickass military the same way.  We not only don’t take over and integrate the lands we conquer, we don’t even demand they mirror our model.  Most of them end up mirroring the European model.

And our sybaritic excesses are distributed in a completely different way.  In the US, butthole chocolates are NOT “too good for the common people” provided the common people are out of their minds and pay for them.

As for leading the world, mostly we do it not through our legions expropriating other countries and forcing them to wash behind their ears, but through shopping.  “Stop acting like idiots, or we send over legions of grannies with American express” might be a terrible threat (have you met some of these women?) but it’s not on the same order as “we’ll crush you flat beneath our heel.”

Will there be a crash?  The magic 8 ball says “the probability is high.” I mean a miracle could occur.  The thin air we’re running on could become solid rock.  Or in other words, there could be some breakthrough in energy production or otherwise, that fixes everything.  To an extent computers saved us from the sure crash we were headed to in the seventies.  It could happen.  Who was it who said G-d protects children, drunkards and the United States of America?

But the chances are high there will be a crash. Will it mirror Rome/the USSR’s?  Um… not a chance.  We’re a different sort of animal altogether.

Will the rebuilding be fast and will we keep the Republic?

Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.  BUT look, guys, those who are disengaged from the Republic are mostly our Eureopanized leaders. (Totally a word) Yes, its fashionable to make sounds like we are.  But when the excrement hits the rotating object, like, say, 9/11, suddenly the fashionable lefties go around complaining they’re being oppressed by all these yahoos with American flags.  And when the people who despise our model take DC, the populace arise in untold numbers for working people who have to earn their keep, and in a model expressly harking back to our founding.

So, after the collapse, will the “elites” and the “intellectuals” want to keep the Republic?  Chances are no.  Chances are they’ll offer themselves as nobility.  But this surprises you because?  I just hope we retain the sense not to chase them out of town by hitting them over the head with their “no blood for oil” signs.

The rest of us?  My guess is we’ll spit on our hands and get back to rebuilding.

Is that guaranteed?  No.  See above where making predictions is hard, particularly about the future.  Also, my crystal ball is out of batteries.

BUT from the movements of history and the trend of our culture, I’d say it was the most likely.

What turns likely into history?  The way people act when the crunch comes.

That means you.  And you.  And you.  Your input might be fractional, but your aggregate isn’t.

It all depends on your preparation, your fortitude, your strength, your dedication to the principles we were founded on.

Do you think it’s ever been otherwise, since our founding?  This oddity of a nation can only subsist as is because of the devotion of its citizens.

Same as it ever was.

A republic, if you can keep it.

As some of you know, I’ve been reading about the Argentinian collapse.  To be plain, what I’ve been reading is Surviving The Economic Collapse by Fernando Aguirre.

Someone had mentioned it here years ago, in connection with my posts on the collapse.

So far the collapse he documented is what I saw in Portugal.  Only Portugal never got that far, at least while I lived there.  It seems to be straggling that way now.  In the middle there the EU took over, which changed things and even made them seem better for a while.  My brother told me that Europe injected billions into Portugal and that the amazing thing is that it didn’t do more.  Perhaps.  I don’t know.  I left thirty years ago, when things were iffy but nowhere near as bad as they are in Argentina and were in fact on a slight.

My visits back don’t count. The country feels dirtier and more dangerous than it did when I lived there, but I suspect it would anyway.  It’s sort of like I can no longer drink unboiled water there.  I might have been a kid there, and played in the dirt by the irrigation ditches, but I’ve been in the US for 30 years, and my body doesn’t recognize the local pathogens anymore.  On the other hand there are fairly impartial witnesses to rising disorder – including bars on windows and taller walls around the yards in the village.  And the fact that keeping your back door open all day is no longer normal.

At any rate, as I said, the “collapse” Ferfal describes is exactly the same I experienced, only harder and faster. Like me, he’s bemused by Americans who think when the economy collapses we go back to either the stone age or frontier days.  That’s not what either of us has experienced.  Things just get dirtier, shabbier, and more unreliable. The niceties of civilization peel away.  But we are not suddenly living in a Mad Max world.  We’re just living in our old houses with bars in the windows, three different kind of alarms and a way of shutting out doors so that burglars have to break in through three levels which gives you time to get the gun from the closet.  (Yes, guns are restricted in Portugal, but it seems like everyone has one anymore.  Look, radios used to be licensed and OFFICIALLY even in the seventies there were only two in the whole village.  Yet everyone had one.  Some people had two.  Any radio inspector (yes, that was a thing) sighted up at the entrance to the village, and all radios went to the attic or the priest’s hole, and everyone prepared their best poor face, “I wish we had a radio.  Best we can do is hold a wire to grandpa’s fillings and then crowd around with our ears to his mouth, to hear the soap opera.”)

But as I read his book and nod sagely along with things like “buy used jewelry now, because that’s easiest to trade with.  Gold coins advertise you have a hoard” and as I remember the massive flea markets of the late seventies in Portugal, and how my brother and his generation ransacked attics for things to sell because no one their generation had a job, I keep getting a feeling that things are also not right, things are… slightly askew.

Look, Ferfal is an educated man, and clearly he’s been on line and knows Americans.  BUT he’s not an American, and we are different.  We are the Aspergers kid of the international community.  Every country has a constitution, for instance, but we’re the only one who takes it seriously.  Every country has an history, but Americans, by and large (and yes, I know whence I speak) know more about their history and are more exact about it than anywhere else.

The first thing that impressed me about Americans was how seriously we took things – no, you took things.  I was not one of you yet, at least officially.  There were clubs for HOBBIES like sewing and hosting foreign students.  They were run according to Robert’s rules.  I couldn’t imagine that anywhere else.

Again, if you visualize the international community as a bunch of people, America is the Aspergers kid in the corner saying “You can’t do that, because the charter says—”

I don’t mean this as a criticism.  I am one of us, after all.  And by choice.  This taking things too seriously and too literally and not doing the wink and nod thing other nations do is both the cause of our glory and a lot of our problems.

It is the cause of our glory because we believe in the Pax Americana, and we view it as our duty, and like no other country since the history of ever, we do not take over and create an empire, while dressing it up in charity and civic duty.  We really do keep the peace of the seas and international commerce and we really do believe countries shouldn’t invade our allies out of what the heck, and…

The downside of it is that we often fail to understand – even our politicians – how other countries act.  We don’t get that no, throughout history, England felt no guilt at all for doing down France, just to keep France from getting too uppity and vice versa.  We fail to understand the basic chauvinism of other countries, even when being a patriot is a “bad” thing in most of them.  If you listen to conversations in the pub or in the home, they’re still sure their “race” (by which they mean nationality) is way better than all others, and they wouldn’t even consider this might be a stupid thing to think.

Americans don’t get those mechanisms.  We’re genuinely not that way.

At the same time, the fact that we don’t get other countries means we don’t get history, either.  The only place in the world who could come up with “Americans are guilty of everything bad” is right here. We take an ideal constitution seriously, and the principals of individual freedom, worldwide, so of course, we’re going to feel guilty when Real Politick causes us to support dictators or arm less than sane/pure insurgents.  And this, internalized through our academics, pollutes the mind of our young with self hatred.  Then the other countries go along with it, because, h*ll yeah, it gives them an excuse for why they fail.

All of which comes back to the crash.  I agree with Ferfal that the Argentine type crash is probably the closest to what America will be but… um… there are different factors.

There is the crazy American character which might make things much better – and in some places possibly much much better.  Remember the power outage on the Eastern seaboard? Remember hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people quietly walking miles and miles back home?  With no crime, no looting, no vandalism?

I can’t imagine that happening in any other country at any other time, unless in very small towns in mono-cultural countries like Sweden or Finland.

THAT is the measure of how perfectly weird we are.  Yes, not all locations could do that.  There’s New Orleans.  And Detroit.  But those stick out in the American landscape.

So – what if they gave an economic crash and no one noticed?

In many locations I bet you that’s just what will happen.

In others… Mad Max might be a best case scenario.

That’s one of the ways we’re different.  Yes, Ferfal talks about disparities of that kind, but no one who hasn’t lived in America can understand or see the sheer difference in culture even between adjacent cities.

I can’t tell you how our character will affect an economic crash (and if you don’t think an economic crash is coming, kindly do wake up) – because we’re different, and we haven’t fallen yet.  We can guess how it will affect it, but not  KNOW — all I can say is it will be interesting.

But there are other factors that make it even more complex.  In answer to someone ranting about the crash (on a thread about baby shower cakes.  No, seriously) Eric Scheie said he doesn’t think our crash will come that fast/abrupt, simply because of our position in the world.  We are THE economic/innovation leader of the world.  If other countries admit we’re bankrupt, then they’ll collapse.  (And please, do spare me Chinese triumphalism.  Chinese prosperity is dependent on us, like a suburb’s on a big city.  Sorry.  There is no there there.  Yes, I know the numbers.  And what in h*ll’s own name are doing believing the numbers a totalitarian regime puts out?  Didn’t the population statistics of the USSR teach you a lesson?)

That’s one factor.  As much as they hate us, we’ve been pulling the engine of civilization a long time and there simply isn’t anyone credible to take our place.  (No, this is not American triumphalism, either.  The reason we are the engine of this train is that the other countries swallowed the spider of socialism earlier, and faster.  Even in the “best case scenario” – the Scandinavian countries – the socialist model kills small business and individual experimentation and reduces the incentives for success.  Which in turn kills innovation.)  They don’t dare admit we’re running on thin air Merry Melodies fashion.  They are, rather, holding their breath, and hoping we don’t look down.

But sooner or later either it becomes obvious we’re no longer pulling the train, or we realize it ourselves.  And then—

What?

We don’t know.  I don’t know, and you don’t know, and no one knows.

Things to take in account: when those erstwhile kept quiet out of interest or fear realize the hen house is unguarded, will we be attacked?  I’d bet on it.  I’ve for years now been sure we’re going to lose a city, maybe two.  But what happens after?  I’d have said the US will rise in outrage and defend ourselves, but will we?  The number of bots running around insisting “Benghazi isn’t a thing” scares me a bit.  How many of these are live and how many paid?  And how many simply stupid?

Part of this, of course, is that we’ve been so comfortable so long a lot of people are utterly stupid and divorced from reality.  And their courting of the inevitable punishment for stupidity touches us too.

Other things – this happened in other industrialized countries that crashed, too, but here we have more of everything – like, the fact that we have a lot of people whose ONLY education is Marxism, (No, really?  Various ethnic studies, social justice majors, you name it.  Even English and literature and history of recent vintage.) Not only don’t these people have any useful skills but a lot of the ones they have will be counterproductive in the real world.  Already are, really, but when things turn sour it matters more.

Will we get attacked?  Almost for sure.  Will be get invaded?  I doubt it, though I dare say some of the left radicals might want it.  (They did in the seventies, at least.)  Thank heavens, we are armed to the teeth as a nation and would prove a very tough chestnut for any foreign power.

Any country invading us would quickly realize we’re ungovernable (as our own statists keep finding out.)  You can break things and stop our prosperity, but you can’t control us.

Which brings us to another point – in many ways we’re … Odd.  We’re the most law abiding of people, but we can also say “to heck with that” and exist beside the law/behind it/around it.

I’m SURELY not the only one who remembers that in 1980, with taxes through the roof, everyone who got paid in cash had two prices, the cash price and the “official” price.

I think we’ll take to the grey economy with a gusto and verve that will scare even Russians, and invent new forms of it very quickly.  To an extent we already are.  Online trading services – I plan to do most of my Christmas shopping in those.  Used “like new” books for used “like new” games.  This year, that’s the best we can hope for – craigslist.  The list goes on and these are all American inventions.

And in the end, in the very end, that’s what I mean to say in this column.

First, don’t count us out.  We’re Americans.  Rising Phoenix-like from the ashes is what we DO.  It’s our individual story.  Most of us who came here came to build a new life because the old one had crashed badly – economically, emotionally or otherwise.  It’s our collective story.  Even those of us whose ancestors weren’t here at the time, are descended from the stock market crash and the Depression on our mother’s side, to paraphrase O’Rourke.  It’s also our character.  Mentioning O’Rourke reminds me that he talks about a restaurant (Russia? Poland?) where an American would set everything straight with a bottle of windex and a rag.  That is also to a large extent true.  Americans – self selected, having come here to start again or descended from people who did – look at messes and go “How do I fix this?”

This can be bad, but post collapse, it’s also good.

Second, stop assuming progressives have some amazing “planning foo.”  I refuse to approve comments that say “this Health care thing is all a plan.  We’re all doomed.  All of this is planned.”  Is it planned?  Oh, sure.  Is it working as planned?  Snort, giggle.  Seriously guy, if socialist plans worked here now it would be for the first time ever.  Remember the five year plans in Russia and China?  Yeah, that’s why Russia fed the wor… Oh, wait.  No it isn’t.  Yes our “progressives” believe that they have everything planned and can even lie to themselves that the plan is working PERFECTLY.

You’re not required to believe them.  In fact, if you feel inclined to, you should take an aspirin and a strong cup of tea.  This is the statist illusion – that things can be planned from above and will work perfectly, as delineated.  Real life is not like that, even in small, homogeneous countries, much less in our glorious mess of a homeland.

Their plans are both going forward and falling apart, and the fact that they’re blind to their falling apart side makes the whole situation very dangers, but it doesn’t mean they’ll reign in glory forever and ever amen.  Stop drinking their koolaid.  It’s probably laced with acid.

Third, coming from a country with an enormous depth of history (we keep trailing it on our our clogs) – badly studied and imperfectly known by the people in the country.  I found better books on Medieval Portugal in the US than in Portugal.  More of them too.  BUT just growing up in a village (yes, I am Miss Marple.  Deal) gave me insight into that history – I have to tell you that even if the progressives “win” it not only won’t be forever, it won’t even be as they expect.  Also, even if we enter in severe decline it won’t be forever.  Or probably for very long.

Look, when I was growing up in the village – at a time when EVERYONE kept their backdoor open unless it was the bitterest cold.  And sometimes even then, they just put a brazier under the kitchen table.  The common way to find out someone wasn’t home, was to open the garden gate, go around back, get into the kitchen and BELLOW their name – I was puzzled by broken glass on top of the garden walls.  And the fact that all the older – a hundred years or – walls were VERY tall (unlike the new ones, which were waist-high.) And I was puzzled by my grandmother’s insistence that the huge window in the kitchen MUST be covered by a thick board (with a bar across it) every night.

It was explained to me that when grandma was a little girl things had been utterly lawless and no one was safe in their own homes from home invaders and thieves.

Yet by my time, you were perfectly safe.  Yes, that was strong man rule.  Yes, because the strong man had the economic understanding of a small fluffy duck, it also made us poor as Job.  But we were safe, and literate, and the mechanisms of civilization operated.  Then came lawlessness, worsening again.  Perhaps ahead lies civilization without strong man rule?

Why not?  It could happen.  The English war of the Roses with the country riven and torn came before Victorian England.  Yes, many centuries.  But still.  It means we’re not witnesses to the apocalypse.  We only live in interesting times.

And besides, look, it’s not written anywhere that we must decline.  Yeah,the people at the top believe it and are trying to bring it about.  But even they are having a hell of a time getting us to crash.  How it must baffle them.

And come on – After fifty years of the socialists controlling education, they still have about half the votes (Less, if the fraud I saw is anything to go on, and the way they fight fraud indicates it is.)

EVEN in the fields they’re strongest in, things elude their plans.  Because… we’re Americans.  We don’t take direction well.

I am sick and tired of the whole “Witness to the Apocalypse” mode half of my libertarian/conservative friends are in.  I am sick onto death of their buying into the infallibility of the “progressives” plans and integrating all features into “they meant to do that.”

Please!  These people couldn’t tip piss out of a boot with instructions written on the sole.

Yes, they’re dangerous.  Their certainty and their incompetence makes them dangerous.  But they’re not a majority, they’re not half as smart as they think they are, and I’m going to predict right now reality is going to shock them even more than it’s already doing.

A crash might be inevitable.  Staying down after a crash ISN’T.

The future is not written anywhere.  It’s up to you to create.  We must be prepared.  We must be ready to pick up.  We must be ready to rise from those ashes and go forward.  We must — metaphorically speaking — make sure we have the windex and the rag at hand.

We have work to do, and none of it involves playing the lyre while Rome burns, no matter how pretty the flames and how romantic the prospect.

This is no time to go wobbly.

 

 

 

So, yesterday I stayed up really late, because after writing I decided it was absolutely imperative for me to figure out how to do covers – I mean to put the learning of the cover workshop in place.

As is normal around here, when I get absorbed in something, particularly when I’m learning a skill, I completely forget the time.  Normally Dan reminds me but unfortunately he was doing the books for NRP, which also absorbs him completely.

Next thing you know, we had dinner at 10 pm, and at two am the kids told us to go to bed.

We honestly have this notion that when the boys leave, if Dan is working from home (which is our long term plan.  If it will come to fruition, who knows?) we’ll totally lose touch with normal human scheduling and hours, and our days will be “whenever one of us is done and reminds the other it’s time to go to bed.”

Anyway, so I woke up ridiculously late, and then of course, I forgot that I had to do blog posts.  (Just sue me, okay?)

So I figured I’ll do one of my “status” posts here, and yes, and I’m sorry, forego MGC chapter.  I just can’t.  I was hoping to wake up enough, but it ain’t happening.  I need to write on Through Fire.

I’ll also put up the next story I’m going to release (and which I’m editing) in the subscriber space.  And we’re working on a series of Huns T-shirts so those who subscribed at that level can have a choice.

Meanwhile, if you’ve donated more than $30 for this year and I haven’t sent your password, send me a ping on goldportpress at gmail dot com.

And I’m sorry I haven’t kept up the subscriber space.  Things are getting better, but there’s an awful lot of catch up to do.

Okay, first the cover workshop – if you’re doing indie publishing and you can afford to take it with WGM DO SO.  I can’t tell you the difference it has made, though I’ll do an article about it for PJM lifestyle, complete with before and after samples, and link it here.  I don’t want to do it here, yet, because I need to upload the covers first, so I can link them all and I haven’t done that yet (usually do it late at night, because otherwise I lose sales, particularly on the weekend.)

Anyway – let’s say before this I was “talented amateur” (at least on the better covers) and I’m now “beginning professional” (at least I think so.)  Unfortunately this means a lot of covers to re-do, and I’ll learn when I do them, of course, so in a year I’ll think these are trash, but I think this time they’re good enough to leave.  At least I hope so, because I plan to have them printed.  And good thing I hadn’t, before I took this workshop.  Again, it applies that I get nothing from this endorsement, etc, except that I want to promote people helping the indie community.

I am now taking the interior text one, and I will not bring anything out in paper till I do, because if it’s the same thing, I’ll just have to redo it afterwards.

On sales – at least those are picking up.  Nothing spectacular, but I’m hitting the same point I was at at the end of last year.  Short stories are still not doing massively well.  Not sure why, or whether I need to take the price up or down.  We’ll see.

I hope to bring The Musketeer’s Apprentice out this next week, and once the new covers are up and all, I’ll send ebooks to those subscribing (I THINK, I’ll have to check) for 100 or more.

I also hope to finish Through Fire this week.  Yes, it should have been this last week, but my mind has been divided between graphic-thought and writing-thought which is WAY distracting.  I’ll have to figure out times and different locations for those, which is how keep one thing from invading the other.

BUT Through Fire must be finished.  I now can see the end, which is good.  (I hate to write blind.)

I find it funny/odd that at fifty I have to learn a new profession.  This is not unusual these days, of course, and I always enjoy learning and have three or four hobbies (all sadly neglected this year because of my health) including carpentry and sewing, and art, and… you know?  BUT what’s different about this, is that I have to learn a new job in order to continue doing my old job.

Okay, this is not strictly true.  I could continue JUST writing for Baen.  But it seems such a waste to have the books that came out with the other houses doing nothing in a drawer, when they could be making their upkeep money.  (Strutting the streets in their skimpy new covers.  Doing the novel slut walk.  Yes, I am a bad woman.)

Also frankly, I’m paranoid, and what if my next book didn’t sell enough for Baen to continue publishing me?  I like to have a backup plan.

Anyway, so I’m learning all this stuff and I keep thinking “my lord, why am I doing this?  I’m FIFTY.  I should be getting set in a rut, or something.”

But apparently that’s not my destiny.  I’m supposed to keep up with the young whipper snappers for the rest of my life.  Or something.

Okay, I think that’s it.  I’ll now sashay off to get more coffee so I can write.

Before you go, don’t forget to vote for Heinlein.

(No, this is not the beginning of the Zombie Heinlein 2016 campaign.  You only wish it were.)  And I’m truly sorry not to do a more substantive post and not to do Elf Blood today, but really, I’m not up to it.  I’m just accumulating make-up chapters, aren’t I?

*I’m frankly between flabbergasted at this type of fan letter and somewhat tired of having people tell me they would pay for my grocery list.  I think they’re insane and quite mistake the matter.  My grocery list is like every one else’s grocery list, but as an experiment, here it is.”

1 tube Crest cinnamon

1 bottle shampoo

Burt’s bees soap, one bar

Scale polish, one can

Furniture polish, lemon one bottle

One bottle bleach

A corn bristle broom with aerodynamic properties

One container laundry pellets

Ironing starch

2 cans leather polish

40 cans iams cat food – no poultry flavors

50 lb container dragon chow

Two heads of lettuce

One chicken

2 lbs stew beef

3 lbs of onions

5 lbs carrots

2 lbs zucchini

3 lbs frozen spinach

3 pounds cheddar cheese

2 dozen eggs

1 pint sour cream

1 container of quick lime

Outdoor windex 2 bottles

Weather stripping for back door

20 cans Nine lives cat food (for Greebo)

Now, tell me – what is so fascinating about that?

The truth is, some days you can do non fiction but fiction just won’t come, some days it feels like you’re pushing every single word uphill to do non fiction, while fiction flows fine.  I don’t know why that is.  Today’s post is the result of my going “What on Earth can I write about?”  And my husband saying “They said they would pay you for your grocery list.  Try them.”

I don’t of course expect any of you to pay for it, but I expect the analysis of the grocery list will make for very fun comments.  (Not that I know why.  It’s a perfectly normal list.)  In any case, in the immortal words of a former president, “Have at it.”

I’ll be in the corner, working on Through Fire.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Belle Dame Sans Merci

The Right Honorable Jonathan Blythe, the Earl of Savage

 

The lovely Ginevra, sitting incongruously amidst a welter of pillows, in a consciously prim little-girl position, widened her quite distractingly silvery gray eyes at me, and said in that pat tone that she had set a blight on my world to save fairyland.

It wouldn’t fadge.  I let the rasper fly over my head, and smiled at her, my best unnerving smile, the one I used to grace dad with when I was trying to hide something from him, and he had no idea what – besides knowing it was, as he would put it “monstrous.”

“How fascinating,” I told her, my voice even.

The lovely grey eyes widened again, this time with surprise.  “What?” she said.  “What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing.  Only I didn’t know someone so magical and so lovely could be so foolish.”

There was a beat of confusion, and I’d swear it was genuine.  “I’m not—“ she said, then sighed.  “But it’s true.”

“You had to set a blight on the Earth of men to save… fairyland?  And what was fairyland in danger of?”

She squinted her eyes at me.  “You stupid man,” she said, with a force that showed that she meant this at least.  “Don’t you understand anything?  All of those lies that floated for years, about fairyland being a parasite upon the worlds are true of the myth world.  My guess is they got confused because some types of creatures – centaurs and mermaids, for instance – live in both.  But in the end, milord, myth is a parasite.  It needs human belief and human emotions to keep going.  And it is a wholly separated world supported only by the world of humans.  Except what your father did—” She paused.  “Your father and the dragon thought they were so clever, setting spells to confuse the succession here, the oldest of all worlds, and then getting this world and fairyland enmeshed.  They thought of course that your Earth would acquire much magic from fairyland, an alliance of sorts.  They didn’t realize that magical worlds are not like the nations of this world and able to ally or break alliance.  It’s not a political thing.  It’s a magical thing.

“When their spell broke, the worlds became entangled, and fairyland bled onto your world.  And then my world saw it, and spilled demons onto fairyland.  The king was mad and unable to defend it.  I had to… I had to call their attention elsewhere, so that they would feed on another world, not fairyland.  You don’t understand, nor does the All-Father either, that if they suck fairyland dry they’ll kill all the other worlds.  My–  The All Father said that he would keep it to a minimum.

“But just the initial infusion of magic from fairyland woke the old ones.  The old, old ones.  The unreasoning ones.  They will feed without limit.  There is nothing we can do to that.  So I had to attach the magic elsewhere.  And I’d grown up here.”

I rubbed my hand from top to bottom across my face and caught myself up half way through the gesture.  I was trying to remove a magical veil, but damnme I had no idea that the veil was there.  All I knew is that none of this could be true, even if it had the ring of truth.

Careful now, Jonahtan, I told myself.  Whatever she is, you know she is a siren, and her type of magic is likely to be one that you can neither detect nor fight.

But she had said that I had fought it without trying before.  Yes, and likely that’s a lie too. I felt very impatient, suddenly, and it occurred to me that it was likely this was how normal people felt about me, never sure if they had me by the head or by the heels.  My.  I must be a thoroughly ramshackle fellow.  No wonder so many people hated me so heartily.

She was looking at me as though trying to get a reaction, and it occurred to me the last words she said, and I said before I thought, “Well, that I understand.  Having grown up here, also, I have often wished to destroy it.  But none of this makes any sense, milady.  If you think I’m going to believe that somehow what you describe caused Gabriel Penn to wish to blow his brother and his brother’s office up to kingdom come, you’re fair and far out.  And I’d wager good money what received me on that side was Gabriel.”  I warmed to my theme as I spoke.  “You see, I have known Gabriel since we were boys, and I know his expressions, his gestures, the tone of his voice.  There is nothing, nothing that could imitate him that perfectly.”

She made a sound deep in her throat.  It might have been laughter or a sob.  “Of course it was Gabriel,” She said.  “But it wasn’t Night Arrow the king of fairyland.  You don’t understand.”

“Clearly,” I said.  “I must be very dumb. How disheartening this all is.  I must be as hen-brained as mama.  And I always used to think myself needle witted.”

She shook her head.  The sound came again, half sob and half laugh.  “I wish you were.  It would be easier to explain this to you.  Instead you keep thinking you know the rules.  Son of Adam, you don’t.”

“I’ll have you know my Papa’s name wasn’t Adam.”  It was a weak gest and it got not even a courtesy laugh.  She glared.

“You don’t understand anything.  Our people don’t play by the rules of fairyland.  In a way we could call us the anti-fairyland, only that our world isn’t too organized and strict.  It’s more chaotic than fairyland, more dependent on belief and ideas.”  She frowned at me.  “Part of the reason fairyland is at danger, oh foolish one, is that the king isn’t whole.”

“I’ve seen him.  He looks whole to me.”

She shook her head.  “Inside.  It is a horrible thing for a land to be ruled by someone who hates it.  It is far worse for a magical kingdom to fall to that.  Only fairyland can’t, because the king is the land.  Except this king hates fairyland and that portion of himself that rules it.  And he’s split himself neatly in two.”

“You’re telling me Gabriel Penn has become two people?”

“If it were that easy,” she said.  “Then we could send the mortal Gabriel back to Earth, and Night Arrow could rule fairyland.  He’s supposed to, you know.  It is his destiny.  In Fairyland, you can’t fight destiny.”

“None of this,” I told her.  “Makes any sense.”

“It wouldn’t,” she said.  “We are older and deeper than sense and so is fairyland.  Look, Night Arrow wants to save fairyland.  And Gabriel Penn wants to destroy it.  Even if it would take himself with it.  Perhaps particularly if it would take himself with it.  His mind does not do well – it is to human for the magical confines the … the inhuman aspects of fairyland.”

“Again, I say, if you think that Gabriel in any circumstance would be willing to kill his brother to destroy fairyland–  And why should he, since his brother is on Earth?”

“Because he knows Seraphim would find that I’d got the Mythworld to attach here, instead of to Fairyland.  And he knows – or suspects – that Seraphim could fix it.  And he can’t allow that.  I don’t know if he realized it would kill his brother – a magical bomb is different, and I don’t think he thought through the logistics of exploding buildings and masonry.  I think he’s desperate enough he just thought of the ah—non physical effects of a magic bomb, which don’t kill anyone.”

“What do they do then?”

“They render you deaf and mute to magic for a year or so. Time enough for Penn to consign Fairyland to the maw of Mythworld and kill it and himself.”

“But … but Seraphim would be trying to solve the blight on this world,” I said.  “Once he figured out that it was set here.”

“Oh no,” she said, and her voice sounded horrified at my stupidity.  “Oh, no.  You don’t rightly perceive it at all.  Once the Witchfinder figured out that Fairyland would be eaten if the mythworld were detached from this world, then he would try to find a way to save that too.  He knows whence magic comes.”

My head was reeling.  “But then,” I said.  “Why didn’t you find it?”

“Because I don’t think there is a way.  The king of fairy might think there is, but there isn’t.  Better to let the mythworld devour your world, and then for both to wither out of contact with the other worlds, than for it to devour fairyland, and unspool the other worlds with it.”

Her face grew all hard lines, her eyes stern.  “We must sacrifice your world and do it quickly.  We must let mythworld devour all that—Well, fortunately neither you nor I love anything in this world, do we? – because we must let mythworld eat this world.  To save fairyland.  Only we have the king of fairy and… and the All Father working against us.”  Her face broke down and she was suddenly all little girl again.  She sniffled, and tears shone in her eyes.  “And I don’t know how to do it.”

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shut up and ring your bell.

Yesterday while reading Instapundit, I came across a mention that beyond all the rest, it was almost impossible for Obamacare to be useful to the people it claimed to most want to be useful to: the uninsured who live at the margins of society, unable to take advantage of any other mechanism for getting medical treatment.

In fact, a doctor who is an Instapundit reader, wrote in to point out that his uninsured patients lived unorganized, confused lives and were definitely not self motivated.  They were certainly not driven enough to stick with it through a highly complex process involving complicated information.

Look, it’s not just that there are people who… well… look, guys, we’ve been very wealthy (as a country and by historical norms) for very long.  We’ve allowed people to survive and thrive who could not have made it at any other time in history.

And no, I’m not talking stupid people.  Heaven help us.  A lot of them are very smart people.  In fact, a lot of them are “our” people – odds all.

It’s just that they’re not really interested in the stuff of everyday life.  I bet you anything if Leonardo DaVinci were alive today he would be one of those people who aren’t very organized, certainly not organized enough to fill in all the papers in the way the bureaucracy thinks he should.

Look, guys, I’ll be blunt – between the writing, the job, and the other stuff we did, sometimes we had trouble enough doing things like fill in the paperwork for the kids’ field trips.  In fact we had so much trouble with that – those of you who have small kids know what it’s like for the family to go three separate directions at once, and a fourth direction to keep up with school, and then…– that as soon as the kids could be trusted, I taught them to forge my signature, so that when they found themselves stranded and I’d forgotten to sign the form, or they’d forgotten to give it to me, they wouldn’t be the only kids left out of the field trip or the movie, or whatever.  (Yes, I trusted them.  When they were eight or so.)

Our taxes get done every year, but every year it’s a major effort, what with three businesses (soon to be four) flying under the family flagship and income from odd sources (well, comics, you know, and books, and bookkeeping, and…)

And we’re relatively well organized for Odds, and we discipline ourselves to do things.

Most of our kind, let’s face it, is just not very good at this organization thing.  And then there are people who are genuinely not good at paperwork, and people who aren’t that literate, and people who just… well… aren’t all there.  This is before you get to the not-very-smart.

This is not about Obamacare, specifically, though it is part of the problem – the problem is this – we seem to be living in a society where those who would control our movements and our activities expect all of us to be as fond of filling up paperwork as they are of coming up with paperwork to be filled.

We are living in a society where you can get fined – and worse – because you failed to dot every I and cross every T.

Perhaps the greatest failure of imagination on the part of those who would be our betters is their failure to imagine that the rest of us don’t live for rules, regulations or the filing of the appropriate paperwork.

Schools are guilty of this, and I remember when they started penalizing the boys – in elementary – for not remembering to turn in something.  The teacher didn’t remind them, because the six and seven year old boys were supposed to remember.  It was part of their training, the teachers said.

And it’s true.  It was training in fulfilling irrational orders.

The problem – the bureaurcats’ and ours – is that I think they’re headed for massive non-compliance.

We weren’t the only parents who had trouble getting the kids’ paperwork filled for school.  And we aren’t the only small business owners struggling to find time to do our taxes properly.  And we’re not – not even close to – the busiest or most unorganized of our acquaintance.

I know, I know, the multiplication of bureaucracy and penalties for non-compliance is a way to have something on EVERYONE and to enforce the law arbitrarily.  I know this.

The thing is, each level of bureaucracy added – and taking over health care is a massive level – adds more complexity and more difficulty in complying.

I think if we’re not there, we’re nearing the point at which NO ONE can even pretend to comply – certainly not with everything and probably not with most of it.

This is the point at which compliance goes nominal, or not even that.

A lot of the people these laws supposedly would help, simply cannot fulfill the paperwork requirements.  They can’t.  That’s all.

I have an image in mind of a massive bureaucratic machine demanding to be fed more and more information, even as it gets caught in the gears and tears them apart.

I understand the DDR towards the end was collecting more information than anyone could process, and I suspect the same was true for the other Eastern block countries.

It’s a fact little appreciated that to achieve the sort of control in 1984, you’d need one on one bureaucrats to citizens.  And even then, the citizen might not be able to comply.  Not if he has another job beyond bureaucracy.

In the future we’re free because demands of the statists outstrip their ability to enforce them.

Talk about a system collapsing under its own weight.

Maybe, like those detailed cities in the jungle that one day were left behind and abandoned for no reason we can understand, one day the edifice of bureaucracy, having outstripped its ability to function due to ravenous overreach into our lives, will be left standing and empty, while we, free men, simply walk away.

UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.  Writing with Found Objects, first installment