So it occurs to me I should give some sort of explanation — you see, I was so happy I could breathe that younger son brought home a different kind of bug, so by last night I was feeling okay but what’s technically known as dead.  Too dead even for book covers.

And lo and behold there was an Asterix near me.

A few notable Huns:

(And I didn’t do a lot of you because I either had no time/energy or because there was no suitable image for you.  You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find free clip art of female fighters.  As for Wayne Blackburn being nice — he is.  Why last month he only ate HALF of a troll’s liver.  AND he used a fork and knife.)

When I was little, I was routinely threatened with being sold to the gypsies.  By my loving parents, of course.  (Trust me, if you had raised me you too would think long and hard about selling me to… well, no.  GIVING me to the first willing taker.  The fact my parents resisted it goes to show you they were loving.)

This was all the more disconcerting since at the time, given the tight borders all over Europe, the only gypsies I knew of were in Enid Blyton’s books (yes, there were Portuguese gypsies, but not in that section of the country so much.) The threat went along with coming home and finding my suitcases packed and being told I was being sent to some boarding school with a name like “Ladies of punishment.”  (Shuddup you.) And no, I don’t know if it worked.  I know it worked on my kids. (World’s worst mother.  Trust me.)

But here’s the thing, for the longest time, it was said that gypsies kidnapped children.  (Though why they would, I have no clue.)

Of course, in the late twentieth century this was derided as racist.  And surely none of us can understand why they WOULD kidnap children.  All we know is that there are stories of children sold for adoption and children trained to rob, and that too is part of the gypsy legend.

Honestly, if 10 years days ago you’d told me that gypsies kidnapped children, I’d say you were nuts.  They are strangers in the lands they live in which makes them suspected and unlike the other minority culture known to stick out, they aren’t usually industrious or productive of much of anything.

So, they are resented.  (And sometimes with reason.  For one, they don’t recognize land property as such and will squat in formerly productive lands, which – NOW – the EU won’t let you evict them from.)

But the last week has rocked my certainty.  A blond little girl not of their stock has been found living in a Roma camp in Greece, and now another one in Ireland.

Does this prove that all Roma kidnap children – or traffic in drugs, or steal –?  No, of course not.  Again, remember we are the ones who do not engage in group guilt or group punishment.

This is not even race — even though “racism” has been invoked against anyone suspecting gypsies of anything – note they are DNA testing the second little girl, because she COULD have been born to those parents (even if not in the hospital they said.)

This is because though (at least this set) originating in Romania (and even there, perhaps being a culture that refused to assimilate into the settling cultures when we became agriculturalists) they have of course mixed with every population in Europe.  They’ve also absorbed wholesale some groups during upheavals.  In Elizabethan England, dispossessed farmers often became “counterfeit gypsies” and then joined real bands, over time.

I confess I’m not an expert on Roma, and I’m not even very well informed.  Part of this is because the information available on Gypsies is wildly contradictory. (And yes, I know they object to the word gypsies.  But if I don’t use it, half of you won’t know what I’m talking about.  At any rate, I’m tired of the war on words.)

One of the best books I’ve read on Roma (Bury Me Standing) traces their origins to a sect from India in pre-historic times.  But the article above seems fairly authoritative (as do other books) that they’re from Romania.

I’ve read books about the Roma that illustrate many of the admirable things about the culture.  Yes, there are some, among them the looking after your own part.  And honor and honoring tradition — both of which can be rendered bad or good in practice.

BUT I’ve also read an awful lot of books idealizing the Roma, too.  Until travel became more common, they were often all that the Europeans had to do the turn of the “Noble Savage” and they did.  They still do in one notable series of regency romances.

And as you can see in that article, the authorities refused to even CONSIDER that the Roma might have taken children.  I can see it.  These policemen went to the same European schools I did.  There is the “this can’t be true, because people are prejudiced in this exact way.”  There’s the “They’re reverting to their grandparents’ type.”

But look, just because people for years suspected the gypsies of stealing children, it doesn’t mean they don’t.

Yes, most of the time, historically, it was probably, again, just “the strangers in our midst.”  And perhaps parents really gave difficult (or simply children they couldn’t support) to the gypsies.  My parents had to have got the joke somewhere.

However, these days, any culture that’s international and peripatetic and extremely internally loyal is at risk for becoming involved in illegal stuff.  When you add in their rejection of such things as the right of property of other populations (not unusual in hunting-gathering cultures.  Or even early herding cultures.  Ancient Celts — and modern Maasai — believe all cattle belongs to their people and therefore no other populations can legally hold it.)… you have to wonder if your blinkered grandparents were right SOMETIMES.

No, this isn’t a call for widespread racism, or even culturalism.  One of the better politicians Portugal has seen had a body guard of gypsies.  (It didn’t save him from his plane being sabotaged, but there it is.)  They owed his family some favor way back.  I very much doubt they were stealing children and dealing drugs and robbing stuff in his entourage.  There have been notable athletes of Roma ancestry who are gallant and honest and whose idiosyncrasies amuse the public (the Portuguese star soccer player whose entire family camped on his lawn for his wedding – in a neighborhood filled with the equivalent of McMansions.) I don’t see any of them turning to drug dealing or child-stealing.

What I’m trying to grope for here is gypsies – and every other cultural and racial minority – are HUMANS.  That means you find every type good and bad among them.  Yes, culture can make them prone to some sins, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts some Arab fathers would rather cut off their own hands than honor-kill their teen daughters, and others use the culture/religion as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.

There is this sickening tendency in political correctness to dehumanize the victims of past prejudice and make them into painted saints.

No?

You try telling anyone in the US that some black person is lazy.  (This btw is a highly localized stereotype.  In Portugal black people are held to be MORE industrious.  Hence, in Portuguese you get “To work like a black” as an expression.  Yes, you do get “to work like a Jew” too.)  You’ll be lucky if you’re only accused of racism and aren’t forced to do the public apology dance.

Yet, undoubtedly some individuals who identify as black or have African features/coloration are lazy.  Black people are made of the same stuff we are.  (In fact, in the US most of them are what is technically known as “Caucasians” genetically speaking.  We’re a very mixed people.)  Some of them will be lazy, just as some of them will be industrious.

And yes – gives her Huns the beady eye – some Latinos and – particularly — Latinas are excitable.  (Get over it, okay?  I have a rolling pin.)

And, apparently, some bands of Roma go seriously to the bad and steal children.  WHY shouldn’t you be able to say that? And why shouldn’t the police investigate those suspicions to begin with?  (Saying they can’t hide a blond child is nonsense.  There is hair dye.)

Isn’t it turning your ancestors prejudices on their head to hold that now, of all people in the world, these people will be exempt of what they were so long accused of?  Isn’t it a form of prejudice, particularly when you attribute to some group the inability to sin?  (Or to be racist, or to be annoying, or to be…)

I mean, I hate to tell you this, but any group over say ten people you care to define contains examples of just about every virtue and every vice humanity has come up with.  Take science fiction writers for instance (no, really, take them.  I don’t want them.  For one they would eat me out of house and home, and that’s not an unmerited stereotype.)  You’ll find people who are decent, kind and well behaved.  And you’ll find the scum of the Earth.  And sometimes, depending on the day, they’re the same people.

Political correctness is in fact a form of prejudice.  It makes a group of humans into “other”.  Just because you’re putting your virtue rather than your sin into the other doesn’t mean you make them any more human or care any more for them.  You’re still treating a whole group of people as a) homogeneous and b) not human.  You’re treating humans as things.

Worse, when you come across the bad apples – and you will.  EVERY group has bad apples – you then either hysterically deny it, or, after a number of them, you turn and decide your ancestors were right after all.

Look, it won’t even take much.  Take the situation above with the children and the Roma camps.  Say that the second little girl also isn’t Roma.  Then have a few more show up.  It won’t take much.  Five or six along the length and breadth of Europe will do it.

The rest of the Roma camps could be as innocent as lambs.  Authorities might even continue to repeat “there is no such thing as gypsies who snatch children.”  In fact, it’s worse if the authorities continue repeating that.

Five or six cases in all of Europe is all it will take for the next time a child disappears somewhere, the rest of the population to go nuts and tear up a gypsy camp and destroy everything and kill the inhabitants.

And then the authorities will talk about prejudice and clamp down harder, which will make things even more explosive.

The mechanism is akin to when you’re a kid and you fall in love with someone for the first time.  If you’re like me, you don’t even know the guy.  He’s just someone you see in the train, or the coffee shop, but you invent a whole set of qualities for him.  In your eyes he can do no wrong, because he’s not a person but a sort of painted saint.

Then you see him do something bad.  It doesn’t take much.  Teasing someone.  Or perhaps acting like an ass, as teen boys do, with his friends.

Because your painted saint image didn’t have any give, didn’t allow for him to be human, it shatters.  You experience this as a personal betrayal, and now you attribute all bad things to him.

Integration from above, combined with a good dose of “noble savagism” to which European/Western culture has been prone since the Romantics (does any other culture in the world do this?) has left our society with entire groups of people treated like painted saints.  Which is as bad as treating them as painted devils.  And makes us vulnerable to the worst kind of racist/culturist outbreak.

Because one image shatters, you won’t go “Oh, they’re human after all.”  No, you’ll flip to the opposite.

And which group – which individual – can live up to complete sainthood?  The image will shatter.  Sooner or later.

Start now to amend your thoughts, because I bet some political correctness has penetrated them.  Impossible not to.  Start thinking and talking of people, even cultural and racial minorities as HUMANS.

No group is composed exclusively of saints.  We shouldn’t allow that dellusion to continue.  Nor should we allow demonization to occur.  We should think of and treat humans as humans, each different and each good or evil or yes.

Will that help?

I don’t know.  Political correctness is a blight brought on by perversion of language and corruption of ideas.  Language and ideas ought to correct it and hopefully save us from flipping into the opposite stereotype and into injustice and insanity.

If it’s not already too late.

 

 

 

Clifford Simak has at least one novel in which his character, being teleported, finds himself in a parallel world, which he, at first, doesn’t realize isn’t his.  This morning I woke up feeling rather the same.

I think I’ve confessed already that I created a future history mostly because I was terrified of not doing this science fiction thing right.  I mean, Heinlein had a future history and I was fairly sure that Heinlein had done Science Fiction as it was meant to be done.  All those other people since… well, some of them were all right, but..

But I really wasn’t sure they were as right as Heinlein, which meant, of course, I was going to follow his route.

This was shoved along by the fact that my writers’ group decided – around the time I really started trying to do short stories (this is probably one of those things I wouldn’t do if I knew what was coming down the pike.  I’d just have gone with novels, full strength ahead and d*mn the rejections) – that we were now going to do a short story a week, come rain, high water, colicky babies, or annoying four year olds who were reading their (his) way through my research library and asking the oddest questions.

While my invention is not … cramped (I was very shocked last month when Amanda Green told me that most people are afraid of writing because they’re afraid they can’t make up anything original.  Honestly, my science fiction isn’t (probably) as original as it could be, because I feel myself to be but an egg and am still leaning on the example of Heinlein, but my issue, at least in school was not usually being “original enough” but not being so original that my teachers and class stared at me open eyed and went “uh, what?”) it is also not infinite and it particularly wasn’t so fifteen years ago, when I was even more busy than I am today (assure you.  I was still refinishing/fixing most of our furniture, doing a lot of our sewing, cooking everything from scratch – how from scratch?  I never bought pasta.  Waste of money.  I bought flour – and juggling two active young kids – hard too, since Robert was as wide as he was tall.)

So I’d routinely come up on Saturday and find myself staring in mute horror at a blank screen, with not a thought in my head.  (This must serve by way of explanation for the bee story which I will never let see the light of day, for things like Tum at Eventide, and even for things such as Sugarbush Soul.)

Having a future history at least gave me a setting to throw my bad ideas at.  I need to copy this thing fair, but it started in 2030 – when I figured I’d either be too old to care, or too obscure to matter – with our discovery that Russia, upset at its impending demographic catastrophe, has been creating laborers in labs (mostly from ova and sperm donated for research or leftover from infertility) and gestated in large animals.  (I want you to keep in mind here, that the “demographic” thing was 15 years ago and a bit of a brainstorm, since no one was admitting Russia had/would have a problem with that back then.  At least no one I’d read.)

By then the rest of the European nations would be in demographic free-fall, and no bad idea goes uncopied.

Because most (but apparently not all, according to Angel in Flight.  Who knew) of the people gestated in that way will be subnormal (my science advisor tells me it has to do with enzymes and wrong timing of hormones) these people were not full citizens, but wards of the state, and truly slaves in all but name.  Also, because a lot of people recoil at the idea of people made in that way joining, as it were, the human genetic stream, these “made people” are all male, and at least theoretically sterile.  Hence the title of “Mules”.

At the same time, of course, parents would be bio-improving their kids, and well, there’s a lot of genetic keeping up with the Jones.

This is around the time that the seacities are being built.

It is also when they get the brilliant – nay, stunning – idea of creating “ideal” men to govern us.  Although the funny thing is that initially they don’t think of them as rulers, but people who will keep things running.  You know, the natural humans will have their brilliant ideas, etc, and the made humans will keep them from crashing (because, yep, that’s what’s wrong with top down control.)

These are made in two tiers, the very best ones as sort of super administrators and the others for various less “daylight” tasks, which is where we get people like Simon’s unlamented father who was trained as a spy/assassin.

These were still special works, and the reason most of them have a string of names, is that people got to name ‘the project.’

Of course, the superadministrators – who were never called mules THEN because they were gestated in surrogate mothers and clearly more than human – take over government during the war between the landstates and the Seacities.  (Neptune’s Orphans is the aftermath of that.)  This inaugurates the era of the bio-Lords as they call themselves, or the government by Mules as people start to call them, because frankly they’re not well liked.  (They weren’t raised as humans, and even though I have a soft spot for Jarl, this left them rather maimed when it comes to BEING human.)

This future history goes all the way to 3500 when Earth has become just one of the many human worlds.

I called this future history Forever Fighting – because it is – but my husband plain hates that name, so how about the Usaian future history.  In the far future there is a Usaian planet, though the human race is so hyper extended that in most places it is a legend about a world with a statue of a woman with a torch beside their spaceport.  Anyway…

I know The Brave And The Free fits in there about five hundred years after the DST World Revolution series  (Might be more than that.  I only see “dates” when I am working fully on the book, and even then I find it good to leave it as fuzzy as possible.  (I was told there would be NO math.)

BUT here’s the thing – I just realized alongside this one and without my noticing, another time line spontaneously generated.  I don’t see MUCH of it yet.  It’s foreshadowed by a rather horror/like story in Crawling, where humans are the diplomats of the stars and so far-flung that sometimes a world has only one.  It’s a future history filled with aliens, which I so far haven’t written except in that short and maybe a couple others.

The YA that will be written – yes, to those who said it, I’m starting to wake up with more energy, etc.  Good heavens.  Have the issues of the last ten years been “bad air”?  How Elizabethan – is also in that universe, though the ratio of human per world is usually higher… and the novel that insists on going by the working name Winter Prince (it can’t keep it.  It’s a fantasy title, and the novel definitely isn’t) seems to be in the far future of THAT time line.

I have this vague idea that that time line diverges sometime this century with first contact (which mean I should write it, right?)

Anyway, I thought I had a future history but I have two.  Did I take the wrong turn at time central?

How does stuff like this happen to a nice writer like me?  Whom did I offend in a past – or perhaps simultaneous life?  What have I done to deserve this?

I now have two unnamed history lines, and good heavens, do you know how hard it will be to keep them separated?  Like a cat with crochet yarn!

So “Woman, why are you complaining?  Now you have more stories to write!”

Those  of you who are writers know why I’m complaining.  Time, my dears, time!

On the other hand, I am feeling a ton more energetic.  So, wish me luck.  Right now I’m going to plunge back into Through Fire… and the rest will be taken one at a time. Imagine if you will, all these novels standing in line, holding tickets in their papery little hands :-P  “Come up and you’ll be served in the order you’re called.”

I think the line extends out the door.

And because I’m very weird even for me, today, if you want to read something saner, sashay on over to mad Genius Club and read Dave Freer’s post.

Or at least growing a second (maybe evil) head.

This is the day of the week in which I’m too lazy to do a proper blog, so I give you an updated report on where I am, what is happening, etc.

So, here’s where things stand: this is the week HVAC ate, so I haven’t finished Through Fire yet.  This must be done this week, come h*ll or high water.

On the HVAC – I got it fixed Thursday, after calls and stuff that consumed a good portion of the week.  To be specific the electrostactic cleaner and – more importantly – the filtration system are now working and the intake vent in the basement is closed.  (It’s NOT a finished basement, and it’s open to a Victorian crawlspace with who knows what in it.)  There remains to be done cutting a new vent to the living space (we are running the furnace at half power which is fine now, but will freeze us in winter) and getting the ducts cleaned.

At first I thought the “I wake up able to think” effect was psychosomatic, but since I get cough attacks when I go to the basement – like the ones I’ve been getting regularly in the main part of the house for ten years, since they cut that stupid intake – it’s probably not.  And I’m getting a little better on the congestion every day.  I expect better when the ducts are cleaned, which I’ll arrange for tomorrow.

I’ve published (re-published) via Goldport Press Death of a Musketeer and The Musketeer’s Seamstress.  Then I went and re-listened/watched to the cover workshop (WGM – aka Dean Smith’s outfit) and the lettering is all wrong.  It will be changed sometime today.  Then I need to change some Naked Reader stuff.  This learning while doing creates a lot of wear and tear on the pixels.

When the books are out in hard cover those of you subscribing … I think (I’ll check) above 100 will of course get signed physical copies, unless you tell me you don’t want it.  On that, I will be putting stuff up in the subscriber space today and HOPEFULLY make that more regular.  (At least once a month, but I’m shooting for twice.  Sorry.  Life has been VERY itself.)

Anyway – other than the fact that I really need to be twins…  No, forget that, let’s get back to the fact I need to be twins:

When I get done here, I’m going to go – nay, shashay–  on over to Mad Genius Club for the next chapter of Elf Blood.  Then I’m going to drink two litters of tea, give or take a teapot.  Then I’m going to work on Through Fire until head stops working, when I’ll do covers.  (No, I don’t want to be stupid for covers, but it’s a different type of “head working.”)

Somewhere there I must fit the – trying to be daily – 3 mile walk which seems to mitigate, if not stop, the bad signs of peri menopause.  I also need to remind younger boy to set up his counseling meeting (he wants to make sure he’s scheduling everything right so he can finish his double engineering [electrical and mechanical] major in two and a half years (meaning a total of four years) always supposing he hasn’t a sudden attack of the stupid in finals [He’s a genius, so sudden attacks of the stupid happen.  They haven’t happened in three or four years, knock on wood, but that’s no proof he won’t suddenly decide “this test is too easy.  The question must mean something completely different.” He’s done it before.  He has the capability… as did I in his day, and without the excuse of being a genius.])

Witchfinder has come back edited, and is approaching completion cover-wise.  I’ve – after reluctant, long thought, decided that Goldport is bringing it out as a “major release.”  I.e. there will be “page proof” paper covers, which will then be sent out as arcs to review mags, etc.  No, I don’t expect wonderful reviews, but just being listed in “books received” will help some.

So… When it’s done with changes entered and a cover, it shall go to the subscribers in whatever e format they wish. And it will be removed from the site.  The week before removal, I’ll do a final call.  Right now it’s looking like two weeks or so.

Also, when I have it in arc and know how much it will cost, I’ll offer people the chance to buy the ARC at a discount over what it will be sold for in the retail outlets.  But I can’t give you an estimate now, since I haven’t even looked at its size vs. Create Space prices.

Playing with Create Space with my non fic how to is on the slate for this week – in an attempt to understand Create Space.  May You Write Interesting Books is a short book, and should be easier.

Oh, yeah, also, I am doing a series of marketing posts over at PJM Lifestyle.  start here and then there’s this one, and this one.  I think in the last one I forgot to note that Baen is an exception to “traditional is scaring the bs out of me” but I think everyone here knows it.  I also am a little afraid of flooding Baen with newbies writing romance and true crime and too mother-dumb to know that Baen doesn’t publish those.

Sometime today I must do a few short articles for PJM because the Week That Hvac ate didn’t give me time to.

Also I owe a novella to a publisher, and one to submit to Liberty Island, because I promised.

And in my copious spare time, I must get Musketeer’s Apprentice ready to release next weekend.

I think that’s all I need to do next week.  It’s looking decidedly light, but I’m sure some crisis will happen to make it all “exciting.”

That’s about it for now.  Elf’s Blood in an hour or so, barring interesting distractions.  I’ll post update here when it’s ready.

And now I must go make more tea.

So, we had someone come in here the last few days and maintain – with a straight face yet – that civilization equals collectivism.  Listen all, the collective farms were the most advanced thing ever on this Earth.  No?  Not buying it?  Sigh.  You and your disbelieving ways.  What am I doing to do with you? Don’t you know our species has been evolving towards this sort of Earthly paradise, where everyone has everything in common, and nothing is ever made, stolen or even broken in an envious rage?

Well, if you don’t either your school was different from mine in the seventies, or, like me, you sat there and thought cooey.  And who is going to replace all humans with ants?

However, at least in my high school it was openly taught.  In the past, before agriculture, all societies were communitarian.  (Also, matriarchal, but that was the icing on the cake, though the feminists said that’s why they were communitarian because women are all shary and stuff.) Agriculture brought in the idea of private property, and then capitalism – which according to these people started with agriculture back in pre-history, because they define capitalism down to “you have stuff you sell”, brought with it pillage, war, and rape, because capitalism meant women were property and there was sexual jealousy.

Then as civilization came in, piece by piece it started to rebuild that lost, ancient communitarian past, only with more stuff.  And eventually in the future, we shall all be like angels, with tons of cool stuff.

I wish I were joking.  I also wish you regulars on this blog would stop laughing like hyenas.  If you must laugh at other people’s religion, do it politely.

Or not. After all they’re not aware it’s a religion.  They think it’s a fact and treat it as such, and teach it as such.

And if you’re sitting there going “It’s a fact” oh, my aching behind, where do I start?

Do I start with the fact that we do know of tribes that were never in fact settled or agricultural, or in any way touched unless we swooped down to do studies, and they’re not living in some sort of earthly paradise with no fighting or jealousy or private property.  They are in fact fully human and have all the characteristics of humans – and other apes – who have fighting and jealousy.  A lot of them have some private property as well. Oh, yes, sure, some things might be in common, like, since these are usually family groups, the one who hunts distributes his kill to everyone (though even there there are ranks who get the meat first, or the best part, or whatever.)  But if you have a particular stone knife you made, it’s yours.

We see this in grave goods, including the women who were buried with special pots that they were good at making.  And the men buried with war maces (and sometimes skulls.  Yes, some women too, but less frequently.)

Do I start with the oldest epics of mankind?  Gilgamesh has violence aplenty and contains nothing that could be described as a functioning communitarian society.  The corpses and possessions of  ancient hunter-gatherers we’ve found do not in fact seem to imply anything of the sort.  The Bible which in some of its stories preserves the oldest stories of mankind does make reference to a garden of Eden, but it only contained two people, and even there things went astray

As for the lost paradise of woman rule, where everything was perfect until men rebelled because, you know, they’re men, and perfect wasn’t good for them (so, it wasn’t perfect?) let’s just say that the fact that Gimbutas confused bull’s heads with uteri cannot be pointed at and mocked enough.

Of course, my distinguished visitor was caught between this belief, and the belief that all ancient humans were “individualistic” and that the progress of civilization can be judged by how communitarian we’ve become.  (Rolls eyes so hard they fall off.)

This is why at least twice he seemed to be arguing against himself.  These schisms in messianic religions always leave me baffled.  Maybe they’re in the middle of a reformation and he’s not thought it through yet?

Anyway, that theory is even more farcical.  A single man, with no claws, no fangs, no fur, stands as much chance individually against the elements as a… as a single man standing against the elements.  This is why Man Versus Wild is a thing.

Ahah, the distinguished visitor (supposing his reading comprehension will hold up this far) will say.  “Then you admit civilization is communism!”

I admit nothing of the sort.  I admit that civilization applies only to groups – duh – as does culture, btw, so stop telling me I need to respect the “culture” of someone adopted into another culture at birth.  Culture is transmitted by learning not by genes.  To maintain otherwise is stupid and racist.

However, how the communities are organized – whether with common property or not (actually was any ancient society – any lasting society—ever organized with communal property?  Other than monastic orders, that is?  Because to my knowledge in most of these societies, what belonged to “all” actually belonged to the ruler, who was the only one who got to use it.) Whether with private property or not, whether with rape or marriage or sexual jealousy or not, in fact makes no difference to the fact that they’re communities.

So, let me lay it out right here – risky, I know – that according to what we know of today’s hunting gathering societies; the traces of the past; the workings of the human mind; the lives of our closest ape-relatives, there was never a perfect communitarian society of more than three non-related people, unless they were bound by strong religious conviction. (And even those had a designated leader who laid down the law and weren’t PERFECTLY equalitarian.)

In fact, everything we know from the past is that it was red in tooth and flint knife.  Yes, family groups (which most human bands were, far back enough in history) could also startlingly show the quality of mercy and look after the crippled and the old and throw massive funerals for deformed babies.

That means only that they were human.  Neither the innocents in the garden, nor the horrors of Desmond Morris The Naked Ape. He was wrong at any rate.  Other apes kill too. We just figured out how not to kill others every time we want something they have: territory, women or cool possessions.

Maybe that is at the root of what makes us different from out ape brothers.  There’s no way to know, of course, because this would be so far back in time that we weren’t even fully human.  However, it makes more sense than their story of mythical communism past and senseless fall.  And it could have happened this way.  It certainly is a story our species has repeated throughout the millennia, and it could be called the very engine of civilization.

We know that chimps and others use tools, but they never seem to progress up the scale of civilization.

Perhaps the difference is that in the dim distant past one of our not quite human ancestors had found a really sharp piece of flint, but hadn’t managed to hunt for it.  On the way home, he comes across a member of the same species, not of the same band, who is carrying two rabbits, but who doesn’t seem to have any implement to skin them with.

Instead of using the knife to kill the man and make off with both rabbits, he shows the man the knife, shows him how to use it to skin the rabbits and then, by gestures or sounds (depending on how human they were) he trades the flint shard for a rabbit.

There, my friends, civilization began, allowing men to accumulate wealth without having it stolen until it was destroyed, giving men incentive to work for something (“I must look for more pieces of flint,” proto Og would think “in case I don’t catch anything tomorrow.”) It even in a way started division of labor.

It allowed men to band in communities larger than the band, and not kill everyone not of their blood, and work together and accumulate generational wealth.

Oh, sure, not all was peaceful trade.  In those towns there was plenty of the old way of “knock on head, take what you want.”

But by and large – with some truly disgusting back sliding intervals – the movement has been from theft to trade.

There is always the tension between the savage envy (even if cloaked in “that’s not fair” and the brutal force of the state) and the civilized trading between humans.

To the extent trading prevails, there is civilization.

Okay, a slight update.  First, sorry this is so late.  While we did get the HVAC fixed, last night was the first full night of heating, and we hadn’t turned on the humidifier.  In CO that means it was very dry and I didn’t sleep particularly well.  But this is done now, and I can go clean litter boxes.  (Oh, frabujous day, calloo callay.)

Second, an update on Witchfinder — it’s getting nigh to the time when I take it down.  As soon as I ship out Through Fire (I guess this week, with luck and no major issues) I’ll go back through the copyedited/edited manuscript I got back last week.  The cover is also near delivery.

But since it’s been decided Goldport will do a conventional “release” this book won’t come out till sometime probably February.  Goldport is having arcs printed and sending them out to the trade places for review.  Now, before the advance purchasers scream — you’ll get your e-copy at the same time the arcs are printed.  So, not only do you get it cheaper, you get it about five months early or so.  No worries.

Okay.  Now I go clean litter boxes and vaccuum.  YAY.

*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

Into Peril and Darkness

Lady Caroline Ainsling, sister of the Duke of Darkwater

It would have to be Maryanne who opened the window of course.  Nine times out of ten, if someone had thrown pebbles at our window – a distinct possibility since Maryanne had the morals of a cat.  A bad behaving cat – I’d be the one to answer, as I was usually up later and actually studied and prepared for my lessons, long after she was sleeping the sleep of the pampered, the pretty and the rich.

Not that we were exactly poor.  Well, not since my half-brother Gabriel, the king of fairyland, had handed my brother Seraphim a chest of ancient gold.  And that was before Seraphim had married the princess Royale.  I had to assume the king wouldn’t allow his son in law to be rolled up into debtor’s prison.  He certainly wouldn’t if Nell had any say in it.

But Seraphim believed that we shouldn’t spend the ready just to make ourselves comfortable and happy.  He believed in noblesse oblige and also that the patrimony of the Darwaters was a sacred trust to be passed on to his children and their children, world without end.  While he didn’t evade his duties to his non-inheriting siblings, he treated us with the same parsimony he treated himself.

Why, except for the year when he was pretending to be a dandy, mostly to hide the fact that he and Gabriel were up to something very illegal indeed, he didn’t even much care how he dressed.  These days you were likely to see the prince consort and king’s witchfinder, rolled into one unassuming person wearing dark suits more likely to be worn by servants, and forgetting to eat most of his meals, unless Nell made sure he had food taken to him.  And he preferred walking form our house in town to his office, rather than sending for the carriage.

Generally, Seraphim was a very un-duke like duke, which meant I was a very unladylike lady, I suppose.  I’d been sent to the boarding school – St. Ursula of the Fields – with the minimum troseau and equipment.  So many underclothes, so many walking dresses, so many uniforms.  Seraphim had told me, from his own experience at Eton, that if I’d brought more than that I’d be ridiculed and called a pampered princess.  He was wrong.

What he’d missed is that, unlike Eton, this was a school for well born girls.  And that all sorts of exceptions were made.

Cher Maryanne, for instance, whose parents were newly ascended to the nobility, but quite rich, had brought her weight in jewelry.  She was fond of acting all sorry for me, and telling me what a pity it was I hadn’t brought so much as a pearl necklace.

I had to keep telling myself that no, I couldn’t strangle her with her diamond rope.

And then this being a school for young ladies, the academic subjects were treated oddly.  Take history for instance.  It had been my favorite subject, both under my governess and on my own.  But I’d liked to know why things happened and how.  In this school it was all memorization of names, dates, and things that were irrelevant, like funny stories about a queen’s hair style.  Things that I suppose were good to teach you to make small talk, but not good for anything else.

The only good parts were the money management courses, and the management of estates, and even those were taught stilted, as though girls would never need to do the full job.  If I asked a probing question, I got told my husband would guide me in the difficult places.  My husband.  Poor Akakios who was to feel the role was a stranger in this world, far more than I was.

Not to say I was discontented with my fate.  Akakios —  I think I fell in love with him when first I saw him, and rescued him from an iron cage in fairyland.  I didn’t know it, because I hadn’t known what love was.  It’s not the slightest thing like in books, where it’s all heart flutterings and things.  It was more a feeling of belonging.  We were meant to be together, and were happy when we were together.

I was sure when Akakios and I were married and in our own house we’d be fine, but it was so long till then. My weekly or so meetings with Akakios when the two schools met to go on walks or for teas or such were the only fun part of this waiting time.  I could always tell him anything.

So I wasn’t in the least angry when he came to me.  I was only upset Maryanne – who’d been brushing some strange potion into her hair, and therefore awake – was the one to open the window.

“Ainsling,” She said.  “There’s a centaur asking for you.”

I got up from my desk, turning on the magelight and thinking, of course, that it was just Akakios and that he would be, of course, in human form, but that news of what he was must have spread.  I sighed.  We’d kept it silent long enough.  Most girls believed he was half-Greek.  But it was inevibitable it would come out.

Imagine my surprise when I looked out the window to see him standing there, just like he had in fairyland.  Well, not just like.  He was wearing a jacket.  And a shirt.  And a cravat.  For some reason, the fact he’d gone through the trouble of tying a high, snowy linen cravat around his neck made my eyes tear up.

And then I realized that for him to be in centaur form…

“Caroline,” he said, urgently.  “Caroline.  I need your help.”

“What do you need?” I said.

“Please?  I must talk to you.”

“Sure.  Hold on.”

I wasn’t sure what I was about to do, as I turned around to face Maryanne’s grin.  “A centaur, isn’t he?  Your fiancé?  I know that you—”

I shook my head at her.  “You don’t even know what’s wrong, do you?”

“What?”  She had beautiful blue eyes, large and round, and all the young men from the boy’s school swooned over them.  Well, all besides Akakios.

“He shouldn’t have shifted into a centaur in our world.  There isn’t enough magic.”

“But… but… but…” she said.  “We have shifters!”

My mind must have made some sort of decision, because I was opening the little cupboard where I kept my clothes, and taking out my riding clothes, putting them on, binding my hair.  “Yes,” I said.  “But centaurs aren’t normal shifters.  Like … naiads or dryads they don’t exist in our world.  Their … internals don’t work without enough magic.  A centaur, no matter how carnivorous, can’t eat enough to keep both bodies alive.  And the lungs aren’t enough for both bodies, either.  Think, woman!  That’s why when magical creatures are brought to our world they have to be kept under magical conditions, and they usually die anyway, after a short time.  He shouldn’t have been able to even shift, much less stay conscious while shifted.”

And now Maryanne was quiet and I’d worried myself into a fret.  What if Akakios suddenly lost whatever magic was keeping this going and—

No, he’d just shift.  It was a built in safety mechanism.

Maryanne seemed to realize I was fully dressed, and gasped.  “You can’t mean to go out now.  You know the porter will stop you!”

True.  Which was why I pulled the sheets from my bed, tied one to the other and to the leg of my bed, before throwing it out the window.

Maryanne’s “I should give the alarm,” was met by me with a stern face.  “I’ll tell them about the gardener boy if you do.”

“But I’ll be punished if you don’t come back before morning call.”

I didn’t tell her I’d be back before morning call.  It was rather like lying.  I had a feeling that this trouble was much too big for that.  Instead I said, “No.  Tell them you were asleep and saw nothing.  Then cry.  They let you get away with anything when you cry.”

Which was true, and puzzled me, since I could never cry on command.

She dithered at the window as I climbed down the rope ladder, but didn’t untie it, as I half feared she would.

At the bottom, Akakios put out his arms to receive me.  He smelled of sweat and fear, and he looked pale, but he hugged me close, for just a moment.  We’d never really had much physical contact, of course, because of chaperonage.

“Thank you for coming down,” he said.  “I had a dream-message from my father.”

He told me about Gabriel being maybe kidnapped, maybe killed.  I refused to admit he could be killed.  “I’d know if one of my brother’s was dead!”

“Caroline, Night Arrow is—”

“No, I’d know.” I said.  He calls Gabriel Night Arrow, which is the closest translation of his elf name.  I didn’t know, of course, Gabriel was alive.  I couldn’t know.  But I was trying to keep my fear at bay with words.

Akakios must have sensed that and didn’t argue.  He pulled back my hair gently and said, “I’m glad you put on your riding habit, because we must go to the duke your brother and see what he can do.”

“And if he can’t—”

“Then we will somehow cross over to fairyland and go to my people.”

One of the enduring and nonsensical elements of human myth is the “paradise lost.”

Enduring?  Yep.  It is everywhere from Eden (no, no, the original one) to the rebellion of the angels in heaven, to the academic feminist myth of the great-rule-of-women-in-a-pre-history-no-one-can-prove [Or disprove, you tool of the patriarchy.  Right, sorry. I must have an academic feminist character somewhere in the backbrain.  That’s going to be … interesting.  I think that story will need a dragon.  Yes.  A dragon.  Anyway, moving right on.]

The story goes something like this “the world was perfect, and then people rebelled against it” (shuddup my story and angels are people) “and everything went to hell.”

This makes perfect sense in a purely mythological/theological concept, like the first two stories.  The fall in Eden was inherent in the contradictions inside woman and in the existence of the serpent.  (The first of you to snigger stays after school to clean the blackboards.)

If you’re a believer (I am, by the way) you sort of go along with RES and assume that what we don’t get about the first two instances – like, aren’t angels sort of ineffable automata?  How can they rebel, as such – is the result of describing a multi-dimensional event in human terms.

On the other hand if you’re a believer in the third you sort of assume that men are all evil and oppressy (totally a word, shut up) and willing to wreck paradise to oppress like oppressors because oppressive.

It is harder to do this sort of thing when it comes to history, and yet we get it over and over and over again, too “this time of history was paradise and then—“

The most inexplicable believers in this, btw, are female fantasy fans who seem to think we should all go back to the middle ages, because that was paradise.  (Not all female fantasy fans but a significant number of them.  This usually coincides with the Green Madness that says that “of course we’ll have to lose 9/10ths of the population.  They never seem to think that yay and verily in a catastrophe of those proportions airy dreamers who think of the middle ages as sort of an Earthly paradise would be the first to go.  You know, I often think that everyone would be vastly improved by knowing where their food comes from and working the land for a year.  Then I realize that Mao thought so too, and I let it go.)

There was always this bliss and perfect place from which we came tumbling down.

Hegel (stopped clock all that) came up with a mechanism to explain the continuous paradise lost.  (The idea was not originally his, not that he gave credit, but I write these blogs for free, have a novel to finish, and will be d*mned if I’m about to run off and try to find references  after only one cup of tea.  Deal.)

Any system while running accumulated contradictions, and it was those contradictions that brought it down.  What does that mean?  Oh, say a system is supposed to feed all the poor, but this is impossible, so it feeds some poor very well and others not at all.  For the very well fed poor it’s paradise, but then the others rebel.  (This is a made up and oversimplified example, but if you apply it to say the change between feudalism and the renaissance, you’ll see it work out.)

There are two things this system doesn’t take into account, flaws that were made worse by Marx borrowing his friend (and patron) Hegel’s theory and making it into ersatz theology.

A)    It was a closed loop system.  The contradictions that accumulated were those inherent in the system, without outside influence.  Nothing on Earth runs that way, not even the Earth itself.  (No?  You do realize we get water from space, right? In the form of ice meteorites.  Go look it up, I’ll still be here.)

B)    There is no perfect system without contradictions.  (This is the part that makes Marxism theology.  It aims to a perfect system that will end history.  And before idiots tell me I’m wrong because that’s not precisely what Marx said – it’s what every socialist state believes.  That they’re the end of history and the perfect, non-contradictory state.)

 

These two flaws mean that Hegelian analysis as performed by Marxists is perfect nonsense, even without adding in the concept of (flawed) class theory, which was being broken even in the industrial revolution, let alone now.  Any analysis performed by any theological system (including the one I believe in) upon the real world is nonsense to those who don’t belong to the church, because theology doesn’t make sense in practical terms.  Or if you prefer “One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh.” As Robert A. Heinlein said.  (The only problem with Marxism is that the poor dahlings don’t think they’re a religion.  The whole thing about “scientific Marxism” see.  Ah, the illusions of the early industrial age, how quaint, how precious.)

 

However, if you include those two factors, you get a pretty good explanation for Paradise Lost and Lost and Lost and also for the lurching history of mankind.  You also get a clearer view of where we are.

First, let’s dispose of weird uncle Karl’s idea of perfection and of nothing bad ever happening to anyone under the perfect state.  To achieve that humans would need to become either angels or automatons, something that has proven impossible for all systems that depended on turning men into such, no matter how many people they killed or how many they tortured or scared.

Second, let’s add in the external change.  This change often is not “external” as such, as it is (quite often) the result of things humans in that society do.  BUT it is external in the sense of philosophy.  When new types of plow made the cultivation of different fields possible in the eleventh (or is it thirteenth?  I have Medieval historians among my readers, and they WILL tell me) and villains started leaving the enclosed cities to settle in the new land, they weren’t going “hey, now, let’s start an agricultural revolution that will give us a surplus of food beyond bare subsistence and incidentally increase the population.”  Oh, and the man who invented the plow wasn’t going “Let’s do this.”  They certainly weren’t doing it for philosophical reasons. So, they are external to the philosophical framework of society.

One of the problems with philosophers is that to a philosopher everything looks like an idea problem.  But humans live – yes, even we – closer to nature than that.  We don’t eat ontological states and excrete paradoxes.

Looking at it from the point of view of philosophy also dislocates where the real external influence comes in.  The French Revolution might have seemed to come out of nowhere to most people, and its proximate cause was the bad harvest and the lack of bread and the surging bourgeoisie, but if you go to the physical cause that influenced all of that, you go back to that plow and the surplus of bread, that allowed for the creation of machines, that allowed for greater surplus and more people, which in turn–  In the middle there is a France with a young and restless population supporting the American revolution and that not going well for them in financial terms.

It all becomes the old woman who swallowed a fly.  Which of course is what history is.  One thing driving the other, driving the other.

But here’s the point: It is said every society has the governance it deserves.  (This leaves me wondering just how naughty the poor average North Korean, born after the idiots took over can be to deserve that.  Never mind.  It’s a comforting saying not an accurate one.)

What is more accurate is to say that any society has the governance its technology will tolerate.

Technology too follows a sort Hegelian pattern, if you will, of accumulating contradictions which are then resolved. Only, it’s more complex than that, because Technology too is not a closed system, neat as the philosophers would have it, but it’s enmeshed with science.  Science will come up with something new, (real science, guys, no one HAS invented political SCIENCE yet.  Possibly because the laboratory is massive and the observations flawed, and the subjects keep changing) which some bright tech chappie will run with and make an improvement in some machine with, and then–  Suddenly the old system is out and the new system is in.  (And then you’re on the phone to tech support wondering why it won’t boot, but that’s another story.)

Then you throw in government as a distorting factor, both pushing money into and taking money away from some branches of science, and those things that – really – humans can’t predict, like human genius.  (They are born, sometimes, only you never know when one will be born.  And if you tell me that’s because it depends on the untidy mating practices of humans and that we should create geniuses in labs, we can’t be friends anymore.)

At this point the neat cog and wheel of contradiction-and-resolution that Hegel designed looks like something out of a steampunk cartoon, with four weels, a pseudopod, and a horn stuck in an amusing place, and it moves by crisscrossing its on path.

Now, if there WERE such a thing as the “perfect government” – a creature that, like the perfect man has failed to materialize – we could totally simplify this buggy and make it fit the present technology perfectly, etc.

BUT since there isn’t what we can do is observe how tech and governance go together, and how the governance comes to pieces when the tech changes ENOUGH (tech and science change are an incremental thing.)

Each society has the governance its TECH deserves.

Start with feudalism (yes, we could go further, to roving bands, but we won’t.)  A society of people producing barely enough to keep body and soul together could manage, if a lot of them contributed to the upkeep of a few, keep a group whose sole job was to defend them.  The system worked.  Or at least, the system allowed people to survive when it worked.  Yes, some of the lords were worse than the raiders he was supposed to defend people from.  Yes, some lords taxed too much.  BUT when that happened they either died or lost all their villains.  Which means that those places didn’t survive.  Others did.

It worked, as did the pyramid of fealty upwards.  Supported by the contributions of all their Lords the kings of countries generally large enough to swing a cat in without needing a passport could live in about as much comfort as our poorest citizens.  (The people under them could advantageously have traded up for a sleeping bag over a vent in the streets of New York City.)

Then along came improved agricultural technology, which burst the bounds of the walled cities, made the wilderness into habited areas (yes, I am simplifying brutally.  This is already three pages) and allowed peasants to raise a lot more kids.  (As the amusing horn stuck in the middle of this juggernaut’s body, consider either the fact that the Moors got kicked out of Europe and their raiding and the raiding of those they displaced by raiding subsided OR that the world went through a warming period, though off the top of my head I can’t tell when.  I know it wasn’t the fourteenth century.  There are, I’m sure, other factors I don’t have the time to cover nor the disposition to look up right now.)

This in turn gave time for people to start thinking how to improve things further.  Shake a bit, add a bit of personal genius and voila, you have the machines that started the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution started with family enterprises and small factories.  By its very nature, it was a tech of small communities… at the beginning.  It fed into the entire ethos of the enlightenment.  Which in turn fed the revolutions.  BUT as it went on and became bigger and better, the industrial revolution became a thing of proletariat as a displaced mass, away from its community (the theory that this is because they were kicked out of their fields applies in some places, but is insufficient to explain what we see in the now-industrializing countries like India and China.  It’s entirely possible peasants voluntarily became proletarians, by walking of the land, because endless shifts tending a machine are better and more productive than looking at the southward end of a northbound mule.)

This was the stage that Marx analyzed and where he decided that left to its own devices, it would just become this massive exploitation-of-peasants machine.  So, the proletariat must rise up…  And make sure it became that way.

No, that’s not what he said, but that’s what happened in the places where the intellectuals rose up and convinced the proletariat that this entirely bourgeois “revolution” was in their best interests.  The tech froze, the intellectuals (and the brutal sadists) stepped into the place of the mill owners or what the mill owners would have been if they were intellectuals and brutal sadists.  The end stage of that state as observed in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in North Korea, is sort of like feudalism with the addition of enough technology to keep the peasants down forever.  (Only it doesn’t because like feudalism, eventually the peasants starve enough that the Lord crashes too.)  This is why those countries seem like they’re stuck in a decaying version of former times.

But in the rest of the world, the industrial revolution went on.  Yes, the tech induced a top-down governance everywhere even where there was no ideological straight jacket dictating it be so.  BUT where there was enough room for human creativity, it went on, and tech cycled back around to personal/small/driven by creativity and innovation.

Oh, we’re not completely there yet.  But we’re most of the way there.  My field is careening head first into “there” right now.  Every man his own boss, etc.

The people whose mind is still stuck in the “big/manufacturing/top down” are looking around and treating this like the end of the world.  “Oh, no.  People will now be unemployed like FOREVER.  We must take things back to where top-down forces people to work together, to work in the old style factories, where everyone can earn a living, because—”

Because they think the industrial age was paradise and they want to keep it going forever.  (This has the additional problem that the people who had the top-down power want to retain it.)  This is a lot of what our government (right and left) is flaylingly (totally a word) trying to do.  They have this idea that if they make us broke enough he heyday of the fifties will be back.  (Okay, the left would like its fifties with more social freedom.  Maybe.  If you scratch deep down they’d treat integration and women’s lib as nothing, if they could just have their unity and shoulder to shoulder.)

In the early stages of the turning, humans can’t visualize what comes next and always always treat it as chaos and dissolution, which then goes to feed the myth of paradise lost.

Depending on how much government tries to apply the brakes or take us back to paradise, the transition can become a thing of horror and blood.  (See, French Revolution.  Also, the various English upheavals.  In fact, the only place transitions haven’t been horror and blood is here, where the government has been too disperse and powerless to make it so.  Uh… in former times.)

But no government yet has succeeded in completely STOPPING the change.  (North Korea?  It’s not over, is it? If they keep up, it’s likely to kill them)  And no one on Earth can completely undo technology once the genii is out of the bottle.

The way the technology is going is not the way Uncle Karl expected, towards bigger and bigger and more and more concentrated (which necessitated his “revolution.”)  Don’t hold that against the despicable mooch, though.  A lot of better men than him envisioned the future like that.  No?  Read Brave New World and 1984.

The transition will come, and the way tech is going it will be towards smaller, more fragmented, more PERSONAL.

This means two things – we have to stop already with the even vague equality of outcomes.  It can’t be managed.  And – again from the way things are going – this doesn’t mean anyone will starve, because the new tech seems to produce far more with less labor.

What I mean by equality can’t be managed is that I suspect in 50 years (or more or less, depending on how we manage the transition) their poor will have the material goods our rich have now, and the material comforts.  But since it will be a highly personal tech, they might not have the acclaim or the … improvements.  For instance, there’s a world of difference, now, between someone who scrounges used furniture, throws it in his apartment and never so much as dusts it, and someone who refinishes it, arranges it tastefully and keeps it clean.

Now multiply that by someone who improve what his 3-d printer creates to be unique AND more functional and someone who just takes it, half made, and uses it that way.

These are crude examples, but what I mean is in a future where how well you live is entirely in the individual hands – above subsistence, which will be higher than we have – the discrepancies will make your head spin.

But, you say, if more will be done with less labor, won’t masses be unemployed and have to be looked after?

I don’t think so.  That’s sort of like saying back in the fourteenth century “But if one day only 2% of the people will be farmers, what will the rest of the people do?  Starve or be pensioners?”

That’s not the way humans work.  They’ll find things to do and ways to improve their lot even in the new world.  No, it won’t be things anyone expects.

Which is why no government can manage it.

The government can flail around and honk (maybe it’s the amusing horn in the middle) and desperately try to bring back the fifties.  Or the thirties.  Or that idealized Middle Ages with shampoo and deodorizer.

All they can do is make this very hard and very bloody.  They can’t stop the change, though.

In the end, we win they lose.

Because we’re not mourning a paradise lost.

And the future is ours.

Yesterday on Facebook, someone took exception to my saying that Marxist ideas are ascendant in the world.  This shocked me so much I didn’t know how to react, and before I had time to explain – I was trying to finish the novel.  No, it’s not done yet.  Long story, but hey HVAC people this afternoon – people were in a big argument over whether or not we’re living in a police state.

I have opinions on that too (duh) but it has nothing to do with the incontrovertible fact that we’re soaked in Marxist philosophy on all sides.

It’s entirely possible, in fact, that my commenter isn’t aware of that, because fish aren’t particularly aware of water.  It takes an effort to become aware of the Marxist premises underlying everything because they’re taken for granted.  No one studies Marx himself, because we assume his theories as proven, and the stuff we live in, all over the world, is dictated by his premises.

This would be a little less damaging if the Hairy Grifter (he was once described as an angry, hairy inkspot) weren’t wrong about … everything, really.

You want to look at the decay of Western civilization?  It’s mostly the unexamined absorption of Marxist ideas.

Now, I’m one of those people who live too much in books and theories, and, as such, I can tell you why they’re absorbed and treated as gospel: it’s because they make internal sense.  This is not the same as having even a glimmer of real world application, of course, but they satisfy the minds of intellectuals by dividing everything into categories and presenting a (false but deceptively smooth) system for historical change and, in general, sounding REALLY plausible.

Take the Marxist theory of value.  It is utter nonsense of course. The idea is that what gives value to something is the labor put into it.  You can see how this would appeal to Marx, or, indeed, to any intellectual.  Laboring forever over a book that sells one copy is now a genuine, bonafide “injustice”.  The book is valuable.  Just look how much work you put into it.

The REAL theory of value, is much messier and doesn’t fit nicely within the pages of a book, even if you beat it with a hammer, because then the blood oozes out all over the theory.  The REAL theory of value goes something like this: something is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

This means if caveman Grog just was LUCKY to be near where the thunderbolt struck dry wood, the caveman could then sell the flaming branches for a year’s worth of hunt.  No work involved.  He just was there.

Our monkey brains want things to be “fair” (Dave Freer tells me fairness is wired into simians, part of being a social species that lives in small bands.  It helps survival.)

The fact that the Marxist theory of labor has buggerall to do with real life – you can spend seventy years polishing a dog turd.  It still won’t be worth a million – doesn’t matter.  It has such BEAUTIFUL internal logic.  (By which you should read no logic at all but an appeal to our back brains.)  It allows serious people behind desks to make decisions on what everything is worth.

No?

Well, let’s say that we’ve got out of mandatory prices in every day goods – the crash was that big when we tried that – but what do you think Obamacare will do but set prices for highly specialized knowledge and services.  And what do they set them based on?  Well, they set them based on how much effort they think is involved.  This is where we get that doctors should be paid like teachers.

It’s also part of the trite, ridiculous idea that professional athletes should make less than teachers, because teachers “work harder” or are “More important to society” or whatever.

It’s all bokum, but it’s penetrated through the society to such an extent that people – with a  serious air of much learning – will tell you that books will be better (of course) if they take longer to produce.  They will say the same about any art work, or discovery REGARDLESS OF WHAT HISTORY TELLS THEM ABOUT REAL BOOKS OR ART.

That last about teachers being more important to society than professional athletes?  Marx again.  We’re supposed to prioritize the good of the collective over the good of the individual.

You want to see a good basketball game or a good wrestling match and are willing to pay for it?  Why you selfish capitalist pig.  Don’t you know the children need better teachers?  We should pay more to the teachers, so they’ll be better.  It’s for the good of society.

This has penetrated everything, too, including literary criticism.  It’s now all “is this book socially relevant?”

What in living daylight this has to do with being a good book (or poem or play) is beyond me.  No, seriously. Look, Shakespeare wrote his “socially relevant” works.  They’re the historical plays and by and large we ignore them.  They’re certainly not among the most watched/read.  Those are the ones where he touched humanity on the raw and took us, despite ourselves, on an emotional ride: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, yes, even Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Scottish Play.

I’m fairly sure if asked about relevance, Jane Austen would think Mansfield Park, having to do with raising kids and the behavior of young women, and the division between classes was the most relevant of her works.  To us it reads turgid and infused with a totally alien morality (unless we belong to particularly strict sects.)  Pride and Prejudice, though, which, again captures humanity in a nutshell?  THAT we have read and watched and dreamed ragged.

BUT publishing is being run according to “relevant” works, which of course means agreeing with the social vision of those in power which is – largely – Marxist.

This is because it is the vision being promoted in college, where they actually DO Marxist literary analysis.  (Even if Marxism had any point of contact with reality, using a political theory to analyze why a book is good or enduring is sort of like using an ax to comb your hair.)

Then we get into sociology/politics/moral/religion, where the idea of collective guilt and collective punishment has taken hold.  And it’s insane.  (It’s particularly insane in Christianity where for the sake of ten righteous men G-d would have spared an entire corrupt city. [He probably would have gone to one, except he could tell the one to skeedadle with his family.])

It’s not just that they assign guilt to people on the basis of what group they belong to.  It’s that they throw people into groups based on characteristics that don’t mean anything.  Take White Males (not mine. Okay, the boys are technically Latin and look it.  But they’re still mine.  You can’t take them.)  I live with three of them, and they’re all very different people.  I have a multitude of male friends, gay and straight (I always got along better with men than with women.  Probably the result of growing up with an older brother and HIS friend group.  In fact, right now I have more women in my inner circle than ever before, and it startles me a little, but I still have more men.) None of them is guilty of slavery, sexism, exploitation.  If  any of them enjoys white male privilege they haven’t done it where I could see it.  Most of them work really hard and don’t get any breaks that they didn’t fight for for years.  In fact, particularly in federal jobs, women are likely to be promoted ahead of them.

Mostly what they get is blamed for the “historical oppression of women” and slavery and stuff that wasn’t happening when they were born, wasn’t happening when their fathers were born, and into which they had absolutely no say.

Now take white women.  Look, do you really think their ancestors didn’t participate in any oppression going among white men?  Why, of course they did.  Good heavens, we had white female queens.  But they’re “victims” because women are in the victim class of Marxism.  And so women now are born without sin and OWED.  No, it doesn’t matter what they’re owed.  Whatever their little heart desires, I guess.  They also always get to claim discrimination when things don’t go their way.

(Were women oppressed?  Some of them, undoubtedly.  Some still are.  Look at Islam and some of the more traditional cultures.  Mostly it has to do with the horrors of biology and the fact women couldn’t control their own reproduction until we had the pill.  But that doesn’t fit in Marxists’ pointy heads, see.)

Entire tribes in Africa subsisted from hunting other tribes and putting them on boats headed for slavery.  But these days anyone born of those slave-selling tribes is considered as much of a victim as the rest, because he’s black and he’s from Africa and therefore he’s a “victim.”  He’s a “victim” even if he was born to one of the Kleptocrats of Africa and his pampered feet never left the limo to touch the ground.

And let’s not get into social classes.  That will make your head hurt.  Is a small businessman, owner of his own business, a worker?  No? Because Marx said the workers didn’t own the means of production?  BUT what if this poor guy paints houses for a living and spends his time schlepping paint and ladder around and working REALLY HARD.  Nope, he’s still not a worker, because you see, Marx’s vision was limited to industrial revolution England and limited is the point.  He wasn’t even very up to date on his reading.

AND if that small business man hires an employee to help schlep the paint cans, he’s suddenly a guilty part and an exploiter.  Even though most small businessmen will make payroll before they pay themselves, and work into the night, while the employee keeps regular hours.

But, you say, Sarah, no one takes the Marxist theory of classes seriously anymore!

Really?  No?  That is why we have people talking about the “one percent” as though they were an homogeneous group?  That’s why we have taxes on people who “make too much.”  (Too much for what?) That’s why our entire tax system is based on redistribution.  Because for a long time it was believed that extreme redistribution was the way to stop communist revolution, which the scientific theory of history said would come otherwise.  This is how the Scandinavian countries got in the trap they’re in, and we too, just later and slower.

And that’s why people can’t be IQ tested the old way, because IQ tests are “inherently racist” – let alone that this theory is based on the idea that every race is alike within itself, and therefore is a racist claim in itself.  That’s why women are given breaks to get into STEM degrees, because even if their performance is inferior to keep them out would be sexist.  Their under performance is because their group are traditional victims!

ALL our society is run according to the theory of classes and designated historical victims.  And our churches.  Don’t get me started on our churches.

There was, circulating on Facebook, the story of this minister, hired by a mainstream congregation, who decided to try a stunt and come to his first service dirty, disheveled and looking like a homeless man.  He then “discovered” that his congregation didn’t “behave like Christians.”  They didn’t eject the man, mind you, but they gave him a seat in the back, and clearly kept an eye on him.

They didn’t ask him to sit up front and treat him as an honored guest, therefore they weren’t Christ-like, and when the minister did his big reveal, he excoriated them, and this got written about and distributed with approval.

Had I had hiring power in that congregation, I’d have called him aside after that stunt, told him that sorry, but the holy book in this church isn’t bound in red, given him his paycheck and a handshake.

But, SARAH, you’ll say. Christ got beggars and…

Yes, indeed.  And Christ’s world was very different.  It was very easy – in fact it was the norm – for hard working people to find themselves starving and destitute.  Without help, without any form of social services, MOST PEOPLE WERE POOR.  Helping the poor, and yes, even the prostitutes (I still wonder what He was up to with tax collectors. Never mind) most people starved or worse.

BUT we don’t live in Christ’s world.  There are layers of government services and private charities.  Most of our homeless are in fact mentally ill, drug addicted or both.

How many of us have NEVER seen a homeless man expose himself/been threatened by a homeless person/been pursued by a beggar yelling curses?  If you haven’t, you must either be very lucky or live in a very small place.

I’m sorry, but people go to church with their families, including small and vulnerable children.  When a dirty, disheveled homeless person shows up, you’re going to wonder what he’s going to do next.  Putting him at the back and watching him isn’t lack of charity.  It’s lack of death wish.  (Not too many years ago, a man shot himself in the bathroom of a church in town.  A homeless, mentally disturbed man.  If they’d watched him and kept an eye, perhaps that wouldn’t have happened.  Before the elections in 2008, two naked men showed up outside the church door of a church in town, supposedly to protest priestly abuse but in fact they were both mentally ill.)

These days, in the world we live in, keeping the homeless at a distance is called “self preservation instinct.”  It doesn’t mean we don’t help them, but we can’t treat any homeless person who shows up, particularly a dirty disheveled one, as an innocent victim who IS NOT going to do something awful suddenly and for no reason.  (Look, the sane homeless aren’t usually dirty and disheveled and you won’t know they’re homeless unless they tell you.  Yes, I’ve seen someone wash AND PUT ON FULL MAKE UP in a public bathroom.  People do that when they care and are trying to find help.)

A priest/minister who doesn’t see that is in fact drinking Marx by the cupful and thinks in terms of classes.  And in the world of classes the homeless are just “victims” and thus entitled to the best treatment REGARLESS of personal safety or the facts of life about most of the homeless today.

I suspect Christ might tell the man a thing or two about causing scandal, in fact.  It was, if nothing else, a piece of self-aggrandizing, showing a lack of respect and priory condemnation of his future congregation based on class.  “They’re comfortable, therefore they must be afflicted.”

SOCIAL justice was never part of the gospel or of any Western religion.  Justice, guilt and sin are individual and expiated as such.  (Yes, ancient Judaism, but it’s different when you’re in a land RULED by G-d.  And even there… ten men would spare a city.)

Only Marx thinks that on the terrible day of judgment in which he doesn’t believe, people will come before their Lord in classes and ranks of standing, and be condemned or forgiven according to things they could do nothing about.

In fact making the homeless into a Marxist victim-class precludes helping them as individuals.  You can’t say they need to be clean or moderate their behavior, even if you offer them help towards that.  Because they’re discriminated against, see?  And heaven forbid you try to help the mentally ill, because then you’re the Soviet Union, incarcerating “dissenters.”  Yay and verily, ask a college sociology professor and he’ll tell you that by standing on the corner and peeing himself, a homeless man is protesting heartless capitalism.  (The same heartless capitalism that allows him to eat at a soup kitchen and gives him clothes and sundries, no questions asked.  You got it.)

And don’t get me into the Marxist view of history.  Faced with the fact that the proletariat has not risen up as the great master predicted, they keep finding surrogates, mostly in third world countries, and treating THOSE as the international equivalent of homeless people.

You know, Somalia is starving because you’re rich, you bastard!

The fact that the aid western countries sent is pilfered or left to rot, the fact that their – Marxist, most of them educated at the Patrice Lumumba university in Moscow – are kleptocrats who line their pockets over those of their citizens, the fact that our surplus of donated goods destroy local industry has nothing to do with it.

You see, Marx thought that wealth was a finite pie.  That meant that for you to be rich someone else had to be poor.  And colleges still teach it that way.  No, seriously.

Apparently knowing that what kept a tenth of the population in bare subsistence in medieval times now keeps ten times as many beyond the dreams of medieval kings means NOTHING to them.  There’s finite wealth in the world, and if you take more than you “need” (from each according… yeah) then someone else will starve.

And those countries are by the way, always victims, because the “colonialists” took their “raw materials.”

No, I kid you not.  Seriously.  They are poor because people in the eighteenth century got gold or iron or cotton or something from them.  That makes them poor forever.  It’s the evil of Colonialism.  The kid’s college Geography book tried to sell that one.  I pointed out to the kid that Portugal was colony and colonizer and if it were a matter of stealing raw materials, then Portugal should be the richest country on Earth.  (And we won’t go into how fair trade isn’t stealing, even if fair trade for the time was something else.)

I’m sorry, Portuguese culture and the made infatuation with various forms of socialism probably has more to do with the mess the country is in then the fact that the Romans took all our gold.  (Which is why the area beneath the village looks like swiss cheese and sometimes vast portions cave after a heavy rain.)  Or is it Portugal is comfortable (relatively) for reasons having nothing to do with the fact it stole piles of gold from South America.  Which one is it?  It makes my head hurt.

None of Marx’s theories stands up to real world examination or real world scrutiny.  And yet you have people running around declaring themselves Marxist and neo-Marxist.  And, inexplicably, people don’t point and laugh.

His ideas have penetrated how things are done UNEXAMINED.  Which is the only way they could penetrate because if you examine them they crumble into incoherence.

The last time I pounded on Marx some twit informed me that it was very useful for literary analysis by which he (she? I don’t remember) meant that it’s a handy self-contained system that you can apply to books and decide what is good and what isn’t by what conforms and what doesn’t.

It makes me think of that mythical king who cut off the parts of men who didn’t fit into his box.

It might be easy to apply, but it doesn’t touch reality at ANY point.

And this is where Western civilization is.  Admitted (and a lot of is admitted on college campus) or not, we’re bound in fifty shades of Marx.

And no one has given us a safe word.

*By which we mean Karl and not one of the three geniuses of comedy.  If we’d arranged the world according to NHUK NHUK NHUK it would be less of a mess. UPDATE: I’m reliably informed I confused my pop culture references.  Never mind.  Any three comedians are interchangeable.  I still say Nhuk Nhuk Nhuk is a better organizing principle!

I realized yesterday I would need to write this post.  I didn’t want to, because I’ll have to change details to protect the guilty and even so, there are people who, if they read this, will be very upset.  However…

My friend Patrick Richardson pinged me yesterday and pointed me to a post on Facebook, where the most brazen racist stuff was being posted in broad daylight.  As in “this race is better at this, and this race will never do that.”

Other people – a lot of you who read here – were piping in with “no, it’s not the race, it’s the culture.”

And I had to tell Pat, “No, it’s not even the culture, unless Marxism is the culture. These are self-forged chains.”

Then I explained how I KNOW so, how I know a lot of the recent results in the US are because it’s very hard for human beings to overcome… well… their natural inclinations (which are common to all humans) when they’re given a ready made excuse and when all their failures will count as sort of laurels of glory on the heads of martyrs.

First, let’s start by admitting that yes, different races – AS A WHOLE, ON AVERAGE – have different characteristics. But in this case we have to chop races very fine, and it becomes really hard to tell race from culture.

I’m the first to make jokes about my organization skills and point out I’m Latin and some stereotypes exist because they are true.  But the fact is I grew up in Portugal, and the CULTURE there discourages exactitude.  There is this sort of pride in “we do it haphazardly.”  In fact, because I’ve always been hyper-busy I had to develop some organization skills, which often resulted in my being called “Teutonic” and not in an approving manner. Now there might – or might not – be a genetic component.  Both my kids have had to work really hard at organization, but how much of that is from being raised with a devil-may-care-artistic (Ugh, I hate admitting that) – mother who was likely to forget lunch time, or to put them down for a nap on time, because she got caught up in a novel?

For that matter, how much of the chaos that tends to envelope my life has to do with my genetic origin and how much with the fact that I work for multiple bosses and have more duties than time to fit them in?

Which bring us to the whole “but certain races have lower IQs and certain races have lower organizational skills and certain races are naturally—”

Oy.  Under the microscope, and without looking at melanin it’s REALLY hard to tell what race anyone is.  My son did a cartoon image of me for my birthday 2 years ago.  He likes to give me gifts, and he was broke.  As he was coloring it, he got a shock.  He used a little darker pen, and came back to me and said, “Mom, did you know that your features are African?”  I laughed and told him that when I got a tan and wore an afro perm in the seventies, people IN PORTUGAL (who have a much finer range for what they consider “African”.  I.e. the (I)reverend Wright is “normal white.”) called me “the young lady of color” in stores.  As in “Go help the young lady of color next.”

Now, my hair is poke-straight (as in it’s hard to style it so it doesn’t look like a witch’s broom, my eyes are hazel and when my hair had color – shuddup wretches.  Color I didn’t BUY – it was a deep dark mahogany red/brown, almost black inside, but turning fiery when it caught the sun.  [My kids, finding a picture of me in full sun in the eighties, “Mom, why did you dye your hair to look like Ronald McDonald’s?”  Me “I didn’t dye my hair back then.”  Them “Oh.”  Yep, they’re both off my will.]) Most people seeing me don’t even think “Hispanic” or “Latin.”  They do think that of my sons who are both darker than I, and whose features have just a little of the Amerindian about the eyes.  But not of me.

Again, we’re all more mixed than you think.  Ancient statues in South America show people with African features.  Remains found here from way before Amerindian arrival (Sorry, but Native American is a politically correct abomination.  NO race of humans evolved here, that we know.  Calling Amerindians Native Americans is buying into their prevailing myths.  Kind of like calling all westerns Sons of Eve.  Even if you believe in it, you know there’s a difference between religion and proven fact.  Oh, wait, no you don’t.  Which is why it’s not taught that the oldest remains found in North America are Caucasian and why the tribes were allowed to claim them for burial because “Our legends say we were created here.”  PFUI.  I treat them like normal human beings.  And give them the same credence I give anyone else.  I no more believe their legends than I believe some of my ancestors were suckled by a wolf.  Deal.  And as for “they were named in error because Columbus was an ignoramus” – again, deal.  So were most people.  Look at the Pensylvannia Dutch, descended from GERMANS.  Look at the poor Germans whom the Portuguese call Alemoes (after the Alans, only ONE tribe.)  Look at any Portuguese from the North, called Luso even though the Lusitans only occupied from the middle of the country down.  The fact they’re called Amerindians because they were “named in error” just makes them like the rest of the human race.  Throughout history the name for other tribes was “those weirdos over there” however pronounced.  And the name for every mountain in a foreign language is as Pratchett pointed out “your finger, you fool.”)

Even in Europe, where every country has this mania for thinking they’re a separate race (and coming from a country with tons of tourism, I’ll tell you I could distinguish French tourists from Germans at a glance 90% of the time) they’re really all mixed.  For instance, I found while reading a book on 18^th century England that after the Peninsular war a LOT of Portuguese went to England as servants to the point it was hard to find a servant who wasn’t at least half Portuguese.  Their descendants, by the late 19^th century were as English as John Bull and probably talked in scathing tones of all those Portuguese who were undisciplined and unorganized.

On the subject of organization, what it seems to correlate to is how early the country was industrialized.  The same for most of the bourgeois virtues, which don’t really pay off in a rural society.  Now, there isn’t enough time for that to be evolution, so it must be acquired through the culture.

I’ll say my son, the biologist, says that genes flick off and on and that certain characteristics show up in humans depending on what the instinctive back of the brain perceives as advantageous.  (Which might have bloody nothing to do with what IS rationally advantageous.)  Say you’re in a family where an artistic temperament is viewed as a mark of genius.  You’re going to develop very differently than if you’re in a family where order and performing rote tasks are valued. Since most of these “decisions” are made before you can talk, chances are that you’ll end up thinking you’re that way naturally.  (Not that there AREN’T situations in which parents are complete mysteries to the kids and vice versa.  Genetic inclination for this or that is a sliding scale.)

So, what I’m saying is that all humans are portions of this and that, and most humans have talents and abilities they’ve never developed.  I, for instance, have no talent for languages.  And I’ve produced two sons who have no talent for languages.  Foreign language learning, that is.

However, I took to English like a duck to water, right?  Um… sort of.  I studied English as I never studied any other language (and do keep in mind at one time I was fluent in six.)  Why?  Because my favorite writers wrote in English and I wanted to get at them in the original.  I studied far more than the people who were naturally gifted (drop my brother naked in an Amazonian jungle and two weeks later he’ll emerge speaking the tribal language without an accent.  Also, likely, with three wives.  Never mind.)  I studied more than should be possible.  But by my third year, I was coasting, and the acquisition of more English was easy, because I scrounged hotel lobbies for books discarded by American tourists.  Reading added vocabulary and colloquial constructions, and no one meeting me would think I don’t have a talent for languages.

Now, that said, yes, some populations consistently test lower for this and that, or do better at this and that.  Part of it might be culture.  (Do you know how hard it is to tell the effects of say nutrition on the brain as it develops? Or how the effect of not using the brain in a certain way from VERY early on show up later on?)  And part, yes, is hereditary.

But just like when you talk about men and women, when you talk of racial characteristics, you’re talking “mean” – no, I don’t mean you’re making people cry – I mean you’re talking about a statistical creation that might or might not apply to anyone in particular.

For instance, most men are better than most women at mechanical/math tasks.  But when I was taking those courses, I rarely found a man who could beat me.  (And this again brings up culture, or at least a different wiring.  A lot of the smarter – yes, I said that – girls didn’t even compete.  They wanted to get married and be looked after.  Since the “be looked after” doesn’t compute and I’m competitive as heck, I never pulled back. However, pushing girls to do what they don’t want to/aren’t by instinct inclined to do is a mug’s game and no one has ever explained why this is a conclusion devoutly to be hoped for.  Sure you can use your coffeepot to dig a trench and you can brew coffee in your shovel, but WHY would you want to do it?)

What I mean is, no one should, at any time, look at a person’s skin color or listen to a person’s accent and go “He will be a great basketball star” or “he should be a mathematician.”  Because people don’t come in neat packages.  And people CAN if they want to overcome all their natural “advantages” or “disadvantages.”

Which brings me to self-forged chains.

When I got married, we knew another couple, exactly like us.  They got married a week before us, and the woman was Portuguese, same degree I had.  She was from slightly better families (think regency.  While Dad’s family was probably older and “better” we were from the poorest branch and – this is my guess – from a long line of Odds, so we didn’t have the CONNECTIONS, let alone the money that came with being “of good families.”)  Her family had a vacation home in Spain (this is important later.)  My family went on vacation for the first time when I was 14 and stayed with friends for two weeks.  Oh, she is also blue eyed.

Anyway, when we came to the states, I had a year to go on my degree, and since Dan had just started work at a beginner programmer’s salary, and since my parents weren’t willing to pay for me to enter college here (and might not have been able to afford it, anyway.  I didn’t ask.  I put myself through college, including buying books) my only choice was to go back and take the exams for my degree at the end of the year (they didn’t take attendance.)  Which is in fact how I got my degree, and which has served me for about two years total employment in the US, but never mind that.

My friend’s family was better off, or perhaps more hands on.  They paid for her to go to graduate school in the US.  Because she had been in a slightly different track (Portuguese/English, I think) and they didn’t offer Portuguese here, she went with Spanish, in which she was also fluent.

Next I heard of her she was involved in all these Latin “causes” and student unions and attributed anything that didn’t go right to “discrimination.”

Meanwhile I got my first job in the US as a retail clerk, and yes, I can tell you there was discrimination.  Every one of my co-workers (including the one with a record) were taught to open the store safe, except myself and the black woman. However, when money was missing, we were the first asked about it.  At which point I walked and found a much better job as a multilingual secretary.  (The other woman walked some weeks later.)

Are there stupid *ssholes in the world?  Sure there are.  And some of them are racist.  (And not all of those are white.)  However, all that idiot’s actions did was propel me to a much better job.  Because I thought “I can do better than this.” And then forgot about him.

So, after working as an international secretary for a while, I worked as a free lance translator, and then I got pregnant and we moved, and I decided to try to become a writer.

We won’t go into (often reverse) racist *sses in publishing, shall we?  Asking me to write my biography and emphasize how Portuguese were oppressed by the US (this was implied, since it was supposed to be like “Rigoberta Menchu”) so they “could promote” me was nothing if not a piece of racism, or at least culturism.

However, — this is not a brag – I always have the greatest distaste to conforming to what people in authority want me to do.  So I continued my own path, often sideways.

Do I still meet with “discrimination” – oh, sure, but so does my husband, whose family has been here since the revolution.  So do you.  Yes, every one of you.  People will make assumptions about you based on how you look, how you dress, your weight…

I read that people are being turned away from grad school because “if you don’t have the discipline to stay away from carbs, you can’t make it.”  Well, take older son.  He’s been carb free (more than low carb) for 4 years.  He’s still overweight.  He’s just not morbidly obese.  He’s also the most self-disciplined person I know and takes a huge load of classes as well as starting two businesses on the side.  But he’s a pre-eclampsia baby and some studies indicate this creates a permanent metabolic problem.

So, every one of you, be you ever so lily white, will meet with *sses of another or the same race who will discriminate against you.  Because we’re human and distinguishing our tribe from “those weirdos over there” is the first thing humans do.

What is the best way to deal with it?

Sigh and go on.  Not associate with those people, if you can help it.  Go around, go under, go through.

BUT unfortunately Marxism, taught not just at our universities but on a grand scale across the world, teaches people that it is impossible to succeed in the face of discrimination.

EVERY minority in the US is taught this. EVERY nation that’s poorer than the US (all of them, pretty much) is told that they are poor BECAUSE the US is rich and “discriminates” against them.

Add in political correctness and teachers who’ll demand less from certain kids because of… well, the “soft racism of lowered expectations.”  (Like, my younger kid managing to get to sixth grade without learning anything and with massive sensory issues.  One idiot told me she thought his speech impediment was because “you have an accent.” And “you speak Portuguese at home.”  The second is not and never was true, and the first means every American would have a severe speech impediment [You British readers want to hold your tongues.  No, really.])

Do minorities test lower because there’s something genetic?  Even if there is something genetic, is it because certain genes got flipped very early?  We don’t know.  No one does.

What we do know is this – if you go through life adhering to Marxism, believing victimhood is a sort of glorious condition, and excusing all your failures by someone else holding you down, you WILL FAIL.  And anything you try to administer will be a completely mess.  And any country where everyone believes this will fail gloriously and from on high (so to put it.)

I haven’t studied the history well enough to pronounce, but superficially Argentina pre and post Marxism would seem to be a case study.  Marxism is also largely why Brazil is the nation of the future…. And always will be.  The characteristic of the future is that it never arrives.

Which brings us to…

It’s impossible to assume someone is failing because of their race, when their race is likely – through indoctrination in our schools – endow them with the certainty everyone is doing them down.

And it’s impossible to assume a nation is failing because of this or that genetic characteristic because in fact it’s more likely to fail because of its Marxist beliefs.

Take Portugal (I’m not using it!) – once the leader of the world.  Now perpetually broke (to be fair it was that even while leader of the world, but that’s something else) and begging on the international street corner.  Years ago some member of a racist organization posted here the link to a site that claimed this was because Portugal had got so much darker.  They used as “proof” the fact that Portugal’s last kings looked German.  I almost hurt myself laughing.  The Portuguese kings were always – like every other king in Europe – related to NO ONE BUT OTHER ROYAL FAMILIES.  And to those they were VERY intimately related, if you know what I mean.

Now there are reasons for that spiral, having to do with too much money foolishly spent, and with certain cultural idiosyncrasies.  Race would be a hard one to swallow, since Portuguese are a mixed lot with a lot of English in the North (three of my grandparents were blue eyed and two were blond.)  And to be fair Marxism is a late comer to the mess, though it hasn’t helped anyone.

So about those startlingly racist comments – they should remain out of bounds, not because all humans are equal – which is a piece of nonsense – but because we have absolutely no clue what part of a human’s performance (if any) is influenced by his/her race and in fact, it’s far more likely to be influenced by his/her Marxism (acknowledged or not.)

Now, if we could set up this experiment, where every human being is equal under the law (you can’t stop racist *ssholes, but you can make them irrelevant.  Most people, in my experience, are decent) then maybe we could actually eventually determine if there are genetic differences and discuss how to help those who need help.  BUT a country where everyone is equal under the law is, as we all know, a pipe dream.

Oh, and my friend?  Yeah.  She doesn’t talk to me anymore.  You see, the professors discriminated against her, so she never finished her degree.  And her bosses discriminate against her too, so she’s  retail clerk.  And I am stuck up because I’m a published author (this was the reason given for hanging up on me when I called her.  Okay, I hadn’t called her in a year or so, because I’d lost the number.  But neither had SHE called me.  Also, btw, at that time was right after my first series tanked.  “Stuck up” had very little to do with my state at the time.)

Also, I’m just lucky, because people have never discriminated against me.

I guess I am.

 

 

 

I hesitated very long at writing this post, partly because a friend told me it might feed hothead talk and nothing else.  But I think I know how to explain it.

The title of the post is from an episode of Robin Hood.  I thought from the costumes/look that it was from the eighties, but it’s apparently from 2006, BBC America.  This explains its overtones of anti-government rage.  (Notice to those who write political-message stories.  When the administration changes, the other side might REALLY like them. :-P  Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

I had no clue when it was made, because I watch TV primarily while I iron clothes.  (Shud up.  Ironing clothes is my Zen practice.  It calms the wandering mind.)  And when I watch it, I turn on Amazon Prime free streaming and browse till something catches my eye.

Robin Hood was a childhood hero. I always understood him as anti-government, not redistribution, since the series I read he was always stealing the TAX money to give back to the people. (Okay, yes, I guess I was myself even at six.)  This series has the same thrust, so I decided to watch it.  (BTW, if you decide to, the visuals are unappetizing.  I have trouble buying a metrosexual, hipster Robin.  He simply doesn’t look up to it.  And the love interest bears a disturbing resemblance to Ms. Lewinski. There’s also much insanity on the subject of the crusades and, I SWEAR TO BOG, casting by the numbers, which results in a black woman as a con artist in one of the books – in 13^th century England.  If there had been a black – non Moorish woman – in England at the time, I should hope to shout she’d be known to history.  Never mind.)

The first episode is called Will You Tolerate This? from the pivotal scene in which Robin Hood, returned from the crusades, finds his people oppressed and overtaxed, his land badly treated, and all the local barons going along with the Sheriff’s/Prince John’s rule.

In council he turns to them and says “Will you tolerate this?” They clearly would.  So he takes to the Green Wood and the life of the outlaw.

This scene struck me particularly since it was a revolt of the barons against John Lackland which secured the basics of the English common law, and, eventually, started Anglophone nations on a different path than the rest of the world, for good and ill.  Much of the fundamentals of the “classical liberal” way hark back to the Magna Carta, imperfect, blinkered and of course feudalist as it was.

And this brings us to where I’ve been this last week – having trouble writing blog posts.  Yes, part of this is the book I’m in the middle of and a recrudescence of whatever the heck is wrong with me in the upper respiratory.  But part of it – a big part – that I’ve been too incandescent with rage to function.

What has me incandescent with rage?  The walling off of monuments, the blocking of views like at Mount Rushmore (and old faithful), the closing of farms that are run at a profit and at no cost to the government – the thuggish behavior of government employees which is COSTING money during the shutdown.  All this, as a means of “spanking” the American public for not falling into line.

What makes me even crazier are their apologists on Facebook and elsewhere.  No, really.  I KNOW my colleagues are by and large to the left of Lenin, but REALLY.  Shouldn’t they think, you know, now and then?

Telling us that these things are closed because “what if someone were to hurt himself” doesn’t cut it.  Because those things are open normally without government support, and if someone were to hurt himself, he’d have the recourse of civil society.  As always.  It’s not – no, it’s not, not yet – as though the Federal government runs the hospitals or the ambulances.  (And, btw, the very fact that they’re doing the shut down this way is proof that  they should never be trusted with hospitals or ambulances.)

This is, of course, an old tactic from local governments.  Refuse to raise the tax that they want to setup a choo choo train, and suddenly they’re turning off the lights downtown, or telling you they don’t have money for something needed, even while they keep buying Crappy Sculpture ™ for downtown and starting to build the choo choo train, so when you give in they can finish it.

It’s bad enough from the regional governments.  It’s also, I note, working less and less.  BUT from the Federal government it is intolerable.

Years ago – bear with me – there was a lice epidemic in schools in Portugal.  A new regulation went out country wide.  Students in public schools could only have hair ye long and ALL of them had to shower with disinfectant shampoo/soap before starting school.  Many schools only had cold water, but people obeyed this, quietly.

My husband asked why, and I tried to explain.  Portugal, you see, at least until recently, had built into its law assumptions (It might still.) that the country belonged to the State.  People were allowed to “Hold” land and houses, but they weren’t the real, ultimate owners.

When that’s true, then the people belong to the State too.  They’re SUBJECTS of the state.

This is not true in America.  It might seem a difference without a distinction, but it isn’t. In America the people OWN the country.  They’re citizens.  The government are our servants, hired to serve our purpose.

They do not have the right to “spank” us because they didn’t get their way.

Watching the Barry-Cades erected by minions of President Stompyfoot, I keep thinking “Will you tolerate this?”

Apparently not.  Apparently we are not dead yet.  The veterans are doing what should be done – moving the barricades in front of the White House and mocking the man who would wall us off from OUR OWN PROPERTY.  And treating his minions as beneath contempt, which they are.

Look, we have suffered outrages to our individual rights – a local libertarian group is setting up an individual rights cemetery for Halloween.  I’m tempted to go help, but they’re all kids – not just these past five years, but starting in the thirties under FDR.  In fact, the current insanity is because they got away with the erosion of the constitution for so long.  It’s what allows constitutional scholar™ Nancy Pelosi to say, when asked if Obamacare violates the Constitution “Are you kidding me.”

It is that long history that lets them think they own us and that we’re subjects.  That we will in fact “Tolerate this.”

Now, yesterday we had some talk on this blog about when it’s appropriate to take up arms.  Let me be very clear™ on why I don’t like that talk.  First, it’s because it plays into the stereotype that the left keeps trying to hang around the neck of anyone who opposes them.  For the love of Bob, when an argument over CONVENTIONS on MGC results in this guy going sniveling off that “They’re all wingnuts, armed to the teeth” you know this is a talking point.  It’s also not believed, and you talking about it won’t be taken seriously.  How do I know that?  Because if it were believed, they wouldn’t do this stupid stuff.  If they thought we were really dangerous, they wouldn’t push us and call us names.  So, it’s useless and it plays into their whining points.  On top of that, mark my words, it provides an excuse.  Should they wish to put us away and make us a bad example, they can always claim we’re “dangerous and armed to the teeth, and look what they write, in public.”

Look, remember Clinton.  Come on it wasn’t that long ago.  For a while the Militia movement flourished.  BUT they managed to hang the Oklahoma bombing around the Militia necks (the links were much fewer and more tenuous than you might think, if you haven’t studied it deeply.  In fact, the links point out of the country, but never mind that.)  Suddenly, the Militia deserved all that could be done to them, and the common people, faced with the image of dead children went along with it.  (And every movie even today has “racist” militias as the villains.)

Does this mean we’re helpless?  No.  I’m not Gandhi.  I’m not going to tell you – as The Most Overrated Sage In History told the Jews – to go singing into the ovens.  Yes, there’s a place for martyrdom, and the early Christians won by losing.  But that’s a faith not a system of governance.

They are overreaching.  If they attack, we will defend.  And it’s almost certain they’ll attack, particularly if we will not tolerate this.

Look, they’re looking for a crystal nacht.  Loose talk will give them that without the danger of actually facing armed opposition.

Heinlein came to believe FDR provoked Pearl Harbor to have an excuse to go into the war.  Some historians say this isn’t true.  I don’t know.

BUT if it’s true, note that he waited for the attack before attacking, thereby securing moral high ground.

It’s much easier to start hunting dangerous subversives when there’s a crime to hang around their necks.

No, we shouldn’t put the idea of armed defense out of reach.  The people who do that are wrong.  We were never lambs, we Americans.  HOWEVER neither should we initiate it.

Is it a likelihood.  I don’t know.  My writer sense is very good at picking these things out of the air, and lately as I’ve told you I’ve been feeling “I stand before the gates of hell, and death is at my side.”

However, do not let yourself believe that if we have an armed conflict it will be easily won OR that what comes after is what we want.  I don’t believe it will be another Cuba, but it might be for parts of the US.  For other parts… Guys we remain the wealthiest land in the world.  Our enemies – foreign – are not going to stand by while our enemies – domestic – slug it out with us.  An occupied US is not out of the cards.  Foreign occupied.

Forgive me, I’m an American, the prospect makes me shudder.

So, do I resign myself to letting America die for fear a violent intervention will kill her deader?

By no means.  The epitaph writers and the would be insurrectionists are two sides of the same coin.  Both give the enemy an unwarranted victory already.  The epitaph writers assume it’s all over and the enemies domestic won.  And the insurrectionists assume the enemies domestic won hearts and minds and we need to rule our country like occupied land.

I think they’re both full of it.  The schools have been preaching the joys of state control, of European style statism since FDR at least.  And yet, most people, if they get what is going on, don’t buy it.  This is why the health care monstrosity had to be passed by a trick.  This is why they have to lie and spin in the news and refuse to mention some things.

Because we’re still Americans.  We’re still a sovereign people.  Granted we’re suffering under the yoke of the oppressor, but at heart we remember this is OUR country, not theirs.

And besides, just like in the 30s industry was running towards greater centralization and less individual importance, now tech is running the other way, making each of us more self-sufficient than we’ve been when our ancestors were starving in the grasslands.  (They mostly needed the group to hunt.)

The future is ours.

Does this mean you should tolerate this?  Oh, by no means.  No you shouldn’t.  You should disrespect, subvert, mock – particularly mock.  Most of these people are swollen with self importance and very susceptible to mockery – at every possible opportunity.

Remember, this is our land not – by their behavior – theirs.  They have no right to do that.  If your servant told you that you could no longer come in the house, because you didn’t let her have the new apron, you’d push her aside and go on in, right?

That – civil disobedience.  And mockery.  Don’t forget the mockery.

Will this avoid the shooting war?  I don’t know.  I rather hope it does than trust it will.

However, it is the appropriate thing to do right now.  Over and over again “You don’t have the right to stop me seeing/enjoying/having fun with that.  I am an American citizen.  I own this nation and I pay you.”

And meanwhile, just in case we can’t avoid the bad stuff, prepare, build under, build your network, prepare for the long haul.

In the end, we win, they lose.  But we have to make sure we win as quickly as possible and with as little time as possible lost to the dark ages.  I have children.  I’d like to secure liberty THIS generation.

Point, laugh, mock, explain to the stooges of a prepotent, runaway state that has nothing to do with the Constitutional authority they’re supposed to have, that they’re out of line and out of their minds.  Ignore them as much as possible. Go around, go under, go over.  Just like Mark Twain never let school interfere with his education, don’t let government interfere with your living your life and going about your (should be) lawful business.

And keep your powder dry.

UPDATE: And some of you are excellent at mocking.