According To Hoyt

I’m sorry to be so late.  First of all this is all my younger son’s fault, as he was doing a guest post for my blog.  However, it seems to have morphed into a short story, so…

I have a guest post from Colonel Kratman, but my stupid computer won’t let me open it.  This leaves me stuck writing by myself.  I thought I’d go back to Copybook Headings by Kipling, because someone has to.   This is going to be a very short post because I have throat ache from heck.  This con-crud might not be.  My eye doctor said he had something similar but it just kept getting odder and odder and lasted about two months.  Let’s hope not.  I don’t mind the pain or the TB level cough that means I must medicate to sleep (which I hate—yes, even cough meds) but I DO mind the low-grade fever.

So, The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling…

What’s shocking about the poem is that it is so astonishingly modern.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

This is one of the most tiresome lies told to civilized man.  “if you disarm, the police/the authorities/the powerful will look after you.  Bad people can’t get you.  There will be peace.”

But the powerful have a really bad record of doing what’s good for anyone else, the authorities that are supposed to protect you always turn on you in the end, feudalism is a beautiful system but only for the feudal lord, and the peasants in their undefended huts are prey to all sorts of evil marauders.

And yet, we still get it, in this day and age we still hear it, “if you just give up your weapons, you’ll be safe.”  “If you just shut up, we won’t attack you.”  “If you are a good boy/girl, we’ll be kind to you.”

The Jews rounded up by Hitler went quietly, civilizedly, because they were appalled at what they were being accused of, afraid that they’d be called worse things, afraid of being thought a disturbing element.

And besides, what could happen?  The German people were SO civilized.

If you aren’t defending yourself, if you’re counting on someone else to defend you, realize that no one – no one – has the right or the duty to keep you alive.

And that “desert” is another name for “peace.”

Completely different post over at Mad Genius Club: Whirlpools.

 

Good government is sort of like unicorns and fairies.  We all know what it’s supposed to look like, we just have never seen any.

That said, though government is something that can go wrong very easily, due to the normal pressures of the human makeup (and even their rouge) there are degrees on how bad a government can get.

Arguably, the founders tried to create good government by surrounding it with internal pressures designed to keep it small.  What they counted without was semantic wizards capable of turning “interstate commerce” into laws over everything including what type of food you can grow and how much and what kind of cars you can drive.  They certainly didn’t count on the power to tax meaning that you’d have to submit your possible treatment to a panel of bureaucrats.  Or perhaps they knew it, and they thought if they could establish a government that worked for just a little while…

Most government is mildly bad – would that it were indifferent, but that would require the people who get into administration jobs to be sort of like me and believe that telling people what to do is too much work and they’ll figure it out, anyway.  Most people who do that are, in fact, the type of person who thrives on power and telling you what to do.  This is why in our modern fables, greed is the worst sin, but love of power isn’t even mentioned, even though most of the time wealth is just a means to power.

What this means is that most governments tend to wish to acquire (and mostly succeed) the most power possible over the most people possible.

Right now you’re squinting at it and thinking of a prison state, with people strictly regulated, with police taking you in for anything even mildly bad, with uniforms and goose stepping and you’re thinking “We’re rid of that at least.”

But you forget that the State has two means of force: one is force as we understand it, the blunt trauma of (increasingly militarized) police, of guards, of physical violence; the other is the power of the purse.

Once a government has the right to seize someone’s income (were you under the impression taxes were something else?) and redistribute it, or even the power to regulate contracts between individuals to where it can say they can happen or can’t, and if they happen it has to be on these terms, and your plant must be built this way, and you can or cannot use this fuel: once that happens, the government has power over you, even if you never see a soldier or policeman.  They can step in and stop you making a living by declaring your backyard a wetland, or by decreeing that the child’s toy that has made you rich is “dangerous” and can no longer be manufactured.

Worse, they can make it so the only rational choice is for you to take “government services” which means most people will then fight to keep those services, because they can’t imagine surviving without them.

One of the things people tended to yell at me about was “How come you don’t like government but send your kids to public school?”

I was talking to my publisher (at Baen) Toni Weisskopf at Liberty con and after three pieces of business (one of them was Basset’s antho, and yes, I will post an announcement on that by this weekend.  Sorry.  I’m still getting over the con crud and it seems to be mutating instead of getting better) we started talking about the “interesting times” we live in.  It started with stuff like how it seems to us all of our colleagues have taken a running jump off their rocker and the insanity is so universal that we sit and stare and go “surely, the money is coming in, I’m doing well, it can’t be that my model is wrong.  But then why is everyone else doing this other thing and screaming?”

Of course, us being us and insanity being mentioned, we had to talk government. Part of it came down to the type of thing like sending your kids to public school.

See, I would gladly have continued teaching the younger boy – at least – at home, until I could put him in his dual college/high school program, where he was at last at least semi-happy.  BUT teaching him cost me eleven thousand a year and that was without hiring a math tutor, which I’d need to do if I’d kept him at home, because he outstripped my math when he left Algebra II.  (Yes, I took pre-calc in 9^th grade, but even the notations are different here/now.)  (I’m not, by the way, saying these are the normal costs of homeschooling, but they were the normal costs for a child who “ate me out of home and curriculum.”)

Of course “it’s for your kid.  Why wouldn’t you make a sacrifice” etc.  Yes, indeed.  The problem is that we COULD’NT.  We couldn’t afford that 11k and pay our mortgage, and that was with me delivering six books (half of them were mystery, which is to say 5k books) that year.

How come?  Are we driving gold plated cars? While goldplating would be funny on my 20 year old SUV and Dan’s 35 year old mustang, no.

Periodically we decide we need to reduce our expenses and we sit down…  Other than the house – which in retrospect was a bad idea to buy, particularly since we did it for the schools, but which even now is well below what we qualify for (though that doesn’t count maintenance, natch) – our most onerous expense is… taxes.

That year that I could barely afford 11k to teach my kid, I paid 14k in taxes from my own income.  (And before you think I must have made a lot – I made around 28k.  Of course, it goes on top of Dan’s income, but Dan’s income is already depleted by taxes.  There’s also, of course, self-employment stuff, also known as “paying for the privilege of not having job security”.)

At that point Toni said, “Yeah, you know how progressives always say ‘you’re against big government but you take disability, or social security, or—’?  That is because the government forces immoral choices on people.”

I’ve been thinking about that.  It is immoral, of course, to take from other people for your own good.  I mean, if you do it you’re called a thief and put in jail, right?  Why is it legal for the government to do things you can’t?  And why would it be moral for you to take money from others, if you use government?  (Is it armed robbery if you use the army, instead of a snub nosed Saturday Night Special?)

Does the government force you to take money?  Does the government force you to take advantage of its regulations?  Well, of course not, but the incentives are very strongly towards making you take the immoral choice.

It uses your best instincts: you’re supposed to look after yourself and yours, right?  So, what kind of parent, what kind of person would you if you turned down that which made you or others that depend on you better off?  What kind of person would you be if you lost your house instead of taking unemployment?  And, at the same time, by taking from you the means to provide for yourself – through taxes, social security excise, unemployment insurance, the myriad bites out of your paycheck – the government makes that choice inevitable.

A system designed to seize and redistribute money is going to make the individual, rational actor take advantage of it, no matter what the person really wants to do.

This is why I don’t judge conservatives who are on disability or unemployment or supplemental income.  What their political choice means is that they see that government is buying their soul piecemeal and binding them up with velvet shackles, and they’re trying to change the system so that others (many of these people are now older or infirm and there’s no hope for them) won’t fall into that trap.

Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying “They’ll turn us into beggars because beggars are easy to please.”

I wish it were only that.  But as regulations on our health, on whom we’re allowed to hire, on what use we can make of our own property multiply, I think what the government is actually trying to do is turn us into children.  Adult children, in our parents’ basement, kept away from real choices and real freedom, and supposed to be grateful they let us live here.

This is something I worry about with my own kids.  We’re trying to do college on the cheap and either without debt or with as little debt as possible (without debt depends on my writing doing well.  There are two of them, after all.)  This means the kids are living at home.  They’re generally good kids, and they have chores and stuff.  But we feel guilty, because it’s not the same thing as their living on their own.

I remember with vivid tones the terror I felt the first time Dan and I came up short while on our own.  I’d been living semi-on-my-own for a few years: I lived in my parents’ house, but I kept independent finances.  HOWEVER it was not the same.  When I had an extended period of unemployment, I had to walk from the train to college (an hour on foot at a good clip) and I couldn’t buy books or food while I was out.  But I could raid mom’s fridge, my bed was still there, and no one was going to turn the lights off.  There is an amount of growing up that doesn’t happen until you come face to face with that “if you don’t work, you die.” (Or at least you’ll go without light, water or a roof.)  That is when you learn to make decisions like “We can’t go out to eat tonight, much as we want to, because that’s half our grocery money for the week.” Or “I’ll wait for that book from the library.”

But our present government turns us into that sort of adult children, living in their parents’ house.  “Never mind having catastrophic health insurance; it will be there when you get very ill.  Meanwhile give us all your money, we need to buy candy for your siblings, because they’re crying.”

The government as constituted, what some have called The Blue Model turns our finances public and private into a tragedy of the commons.  That is – for those who never heard of it – they make all our wealth whether public or private a public resource, which you must use or someone else will.

As we continued our discussions in email Toni told me: If you undermine the institutions that foster virtue, do not be surprised when the people do not act virtuously.

I don’t know what she means by virtue.  I don’t think she means religious – it’s possible she does, but I don’t think so, since her religion is almost as complicated as mine – I think she means the civic bourgeois virtues: pay your own way, work to support yourself, look after your own, do the right thing.

Our government not only undermines them, in many cases it penalizes them.  It’s bad enough when people like us, who pay the mortgage we agreed to pay, who work even when we don’t feel like it, who raise our kids to be productive are forced to subsidize the lifestyle of people who do none of those things.  Worse, we’re attacked and belittled – you didn’t build that! – while the people receiving are considered saintly and victims, because they “are in need,” and never ask how they came to be in need.  And successful, productive companies subsidize corporate welfare for pipe dreams that will never pay off (Solyndra!)

The essence of a middle class life has become things, and the government seems incapable of believing that things do not make the lifestyle and the very virtues they undermine with redistribution and handouts are the ones that would make the “victims” free.  Or perhaps they know it and it’s intentional, of course.

But worse than that, there is the power it gives government to alter political discourse.  Take the Tea Parties and the IRS.  I keep getting people who say “why did the tea parties apply for tax exempt status?  If they’re anti-government, why apply to government for goods?”

Note that most – if not all, I don’t know – tea parties didn’t apply for TAX DEDUCTIBLE status (that was what was delayed for a couple – yes, only a couple – of progressive groups) which is the ability to have people deduct their contributions to you as charitable.  No, all that the tea parties wanted was for the person collecting the money for tea-party use not to be taxed on it as personal income.  Why did they want that?  Because otherwise it becomes a serious pain in the neck.  Take it from me.  I’ve never run anything as large as a tea-party, even a local one, but I dealt with finances for cons and local groups (long ago, before the kids) and if that money is falling into a bank account you control, it’s YOUR money, and you have to declare it.

So, to create a group that fights back the encroachment of government, you have to apply for tax exempt status, which means you give government the chance to curtail your activities.

Not only is government behaving like it’s the parent and we live in its basement – it’s an abusive parent who yells at us for not doing the dishes and makes us late for an interview, which means we can’t get a job and move out.

More than that, the government and the er… media industrial complex promote the idea that if you try to work for yourself and better yourself you are somehow doing something wrong: “You didn’t build that” and “We belong to government” and the whole thing about the role of government being to help the less fortunate (which in government parlance – no, not in reality – is often those who are UNWILLING to help themselves.)  If to be considered virtuous and worthy you have to stop exercising the bourgeois virtues that made this country great – restraint, foresight, self-care – and if those virtues are ridiculed, why would you even try to live a “decent, bourgeois” life?  (And note how bourgeois has become an insult, though what it really means is “not born to power and striving for self-sufficiency and decency.”)

As I was pondering this article, I came across this article from Powerline where Raoul Castro, younger member of the most notoriously and murderously rapacious family in Cuba, berates the Cubans for their lack of civic morality.  He yells about children born out of wedlock, and graffiti and public urination.

Well, Raoul, if your government extols – at least from the lips out – the virtues of those who have nothing; if you make business a sin and profit a bad thing; if you make everything bad that happens in the isle, and the fact that your economy has been below life support for years someone else’s fault: mostly the US embargo’s and “imperialists” – why would you expect your subjects to take action to better themselves?  Wouldn’t that make them “imperialists” and “greedy?”  While if they fail, it’s someone else’s fault.  (It might also not have been a good idea to become the USSR’s lap dog, provider of mercenaries and tit-sucker.  Just saying.  The USSR was not known as a bastion of morality for about the same reason you’re not.)

My father used to tell me that a weak leader makes a strong country weak.  Perhaps.  I’ll add that an immoral government makes a moral country immoral.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”- Robert A. Heinlein

And that bad luck is aided and abetted if government gives you incentive for all the wrong choices.  That’s a bad government.  It might even be evil.

So, what is good government?  I’ve never seen it in my life, since, since long before the sixties (when I was born) government has seized on charity as a good way to get more power to itself “for the children” and “for the poor” and thereby has been destroying civic virtue and that which allows civilization to exist.

But if I had to make a guess, good government would be something like this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Strangely this same document foresees (talks about – I mean they were facing one) governments that have strayed from this purpose, and advises a remedy: That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is not one to be undertaken lightly, and I’d rather we undermine and under-build government so when it collapses we’re ready for it.  It’s possible that technology and the complete mess government has become make undermining and underbuilding a reasonable choice.  But to manage that, we must remember what is our natural disposition and inclination and what are the immoral choices forced on us by government.  We might conform to those choices while they’re there, since it’s our duty to stay alive and look after ourselves and ours by any means possible.  But we should remember at all times this is not the government’s house.  This is our house.  We’re not children.  We did build that.  We can come out of the basement and into the light anytime we choose to.  And it is our duty to try.

 

 

 

I had planned on a different and far more complex post today, but I woke up at six, went back to bed and woke up at nine thirty.  This used to be a normal time to wake up in summer when I was a kid, but now it’s decadent and strange.  It threw everything off.  I’ve been running around getting caffeinated, etc.

Only I was reading your comments, and I thought there’s another aspect to “If you don’t work you die” which Kipling might or might not have thought about, but which to me and people like me is as important as the financial/productive side.

I don’t know how widespread this is, or whether it’s a human characteristic.  As I said, I have friends who would gladly not do anything the rest of their lives, given a modicum of money to live on.  BUT this seems to be true of me and a lot of other people.

I’d rather work scraping crap off shoes than sit still day after day, watching TV or whatever.  Part of this is that I like feeling like an adult, and it’s been dinned into me since an early age that adults take care of themselves (and their own.)  Forgive the crude image, but that’s the most offensive job I could think of.  I suppose you could also say cleaning septic tanks.

When I was very young and had no work history in the states, I worked as clerk at a store that was like a discount pier one.  The worst part of that job?  It was boring.  I mean, really rock bottom boring.  They wouldn’t let me write, either, which I thought was dumb.  I could stand behind the counter, writing on a composition book and put it away when the customer arrived. We were not allowed to read.  And we could only straighten/clean if there were more than two of us there.  If we had only two, one was supposed to stand behind the register, waiting, and the other was supposed to go walk around the store to … well, to prevent gay couples making out behind the baskets.  (No, I never understood the attraction, except that it was very private behind the basket shelves.  Eventually I became friends with a gay guy who lived behind the mall – and was the first other writer I ever met – and he’d cheerfully go and roust out “the people back there” a couple of times a day – he came in to talk writing, which made it easier – because it embarrassed me.)

As a result, I was tortured with boredom.  There’s only so much I can make up stories before writing them down.  BUT the money I made allowed us to buy groceries, so it was all good.

(I eventually got permission to polish the brass from the very tarnished brass shelf, while behind the register, and that allowed me to not go insane.)

My next job was as a multilingual secretary; after that I was a freelance translator, and I’ve been a writing bum ever since with brief intervals of teaching at college.  What this means in practicality is that if I come on hard times and I can’t find an opening to teach in a nearby college or community college, I will be “unskilled labor.”  The thing that scares me most about this is the boredom.  Which is why I’m working on my sewing skills, my carpentry skills and my cleaning skills.  If I need to, I can do stuff that will pay as much as minimum wage labor.  Because I don’t like being bored.

But I keep hearing people say things like “I’ll stay unemployed the rest of my life rather than work minimum wage.”  Well, minimum wage would seriously suck.  If both Dan and I worked minimum wage, we might JUST survive, just.  We’d need to take all sorts of assistance (and more on that later because it was the point I was going to write about today, in that longer, more complex post.)  We wouldn’t starve (when Dan was last unemployed we joined a food buying cooperative.  We’ve since left, because most of it carb intensive, but we know of other programs.  It reduced our food bill to about $50 a month.)  We might have to rent a studio apartment in a bad part of town.  None of these compare to doing nothing and JUST living off charity.  Why?

Well, first when you’re out there, no matter how menial the work you’re doing, you’re meeting people and sooner or later someone will say “Hey, you know, if you could do x” which either leads to another job or a supplementary contract type work.  My international secretary job came about because a secretary who was working with me, (she took a second job after hours to pay debt) said “Hey, you know, we’re looking for—”  Second because it’s not insanely boring.  You’re doing something, no matter how futile it might seem, like me polishing brass.  There is the possibility of something happening.  You’re still alive and still struggling.

I’m not putting down the plight of anyone who can’t find another job (these days if you’re over a certain age they don’t want to hire you for beginning jobs) or people who are disabled, or people who have to take assistance.  I’m fifty not fifteen.  I can imagine circumstances in which the best I can do is stay home and take public assistance and/or charity.

As far as that’s concerned, that’s a legitimate use of ‘aid’ though I still think it’s a function better not done by the government.

HOWEVER even if, G-d forbid, that happens to me, unless I’m seriously ill in a mind-or-mobility reducing sort of way, I’ll be doing something.  Why?  Because I have to.  Because otherwise it will be boring.  Now the something I do might be knitting baby shoes, but at least it won’t be nothing. Even if I give the shoes away.  (Of note, Robert volunteers at the hospital.  A lot of the other volunteers are young, single mothers on public assistance.  If that’s not a requirement in CO – x number of volunteer hours might be – at least these women are trying to do SOMEHING.)

What I’m trying to say here is what Jerry said in 08: learn another trade, learn another skill, take another job, do something.  If everything else is barred, start cleaning your house and make it really clean.  It will take your mind away from how much trouble we’re heading into, and it might give you another skill that helps you survive.

My other advice would be “don’t be proud.”  Yes, I felt terrible, coming from a Latin country with its ideas of honor, with the equivalent of an MA + in my pocket, going to work as a clerk.  I felt it was “demeaning.”  (One is a fool at 22, okay?)

I no longer feel that way.  Demeaning would have been sitting at home waiting for something magical to happen.  (Starvation is pretty magical.)

Working retail took nothing off me, and it helped me a side of the culture I would not normally run into.  It also helped me realize at an early age that intelligence, ability and employment are NOT covalent.  Some of my co-workers were dumb enough you wondered how they tied their shoes.  Some were brilliant.

You are not what you do.  If circumstances close it off (and we’re living in a time of catastrophic change, so it’s almost guaranteed)  you might have to pick up at a much lower/much weirder/much different job.  You do it, and you move on.  And you try to improve your lot every time.  Flipping burgers or drawing coffees will not reduce your “Status” because that’s internal, it’s who you are.  You do what you have to.  What will reduce your status is failing to look after yourself and yours.

We have this idea of people getting a job with a company and staying there fifty years.  Maybe this happened at one time, but probably not over most of the time, in history.  For most of history people had work collapse under them and move, and learned new skills. And the high-performers were always those who jumped from job to job, bettering their lot.  The ones who stayed in the same line assembly job for life might be secure.  They were also, usually, stuck.

Yes, I know, it’s preposterous to think of starting again at fifty or sixty.  But honestly, that’s a function of how long we’re living.  We can now pick up a new career at fifty and work at it twenty five years, easy.  This used to be impossible.  I’m glad to live now, not then.

It’s good not to be old at fifty, and if I have to start again, I will.

Now, keep in mind this applies to me only marginally.  Unless both traditional AND indie collapse, I should be able to write for money TM.  And if they both collapse, I’m in more trouble than having to start a new career.  BUT if my income falls below a certain level, I’ll have to find a way to supplement, so it also applies.  (It might require a tardis, of course.  I’m already full-up.)  In my old age (ah!) I am writing non fic at beginner prices.  And if you don’t think that’s a different art… let me tell you.

I hear so many people say “I was working, then my job went away, and I didn’t know how to do anything else” and I wonder if that’s true, if those people really exist.  I can’t imagine one of us doing that.  Because doing nothing is boring.  If you don’t work, you die – inside as well as for lack of sustenance.  And while there’s life, there’s hope.

We do, we try, we learn.  And if the rug gets yanked from under our feet, we dust ourselves off and we go on.  While there’s life, there’s hope.

 

By which I don’t mean death.  I mean, that happens too, and it’s of course important (for one, it’s fatal) but it’s not what I’m talking about.

I mean normally I’m doing 2100 things and a half, give or take the half all at the same time, with another dozen things at the back of my head clamoring for admittance.

But sometimes life stops.  It stops completely, as something more important than all the rest seems to rob my personal world of breath and focus.

This happened many years ago today when older son was born.

People talk of transformative events.  As writers we write a lot of them.  Mostly that’s poppycock.  It’s an artifice, a trick, us pulling a rabbit out of the hat, because there is no time in the fictional world to raise bunnies and watch them grow.

In real life, to quote the Eagles

But things in this life change very slowly,
if they ever change at all

I’ve seen humans change completely, just about, in their character, their interests, their ideals, but it’s usually not sudden, barring major physical trauma or consuming passion for someone on the other side (one of the reasons why good ol’ Charlie’s (not Martin) transformation so transfixes those of us who used to hang out at his blog.)  Even my transformation from fire eating to the extreme right? Left? Of libertarians to what I’ll call for lack of better words a Constitutionalist, came so slowly I didn’t see it happening.  It started on 9/11, but I wasn’t aware of how far I’d come till I wrote A Few Good Men, or till I tried to read the Magical British Empire books with a view to clean them up for publication (yes, that’s happening.  And Witchfinder.  See that 2100 things.  What I need, of course, is a secretary.  Someone local, who can mark physical pages.  Never mind.  I’m dreaming, okay?  That’s allowed.  Over all the problem is that if I don’t want to give up sleeping there’s simply too much to cram into one day.) And that’s a transformation that even from moderate left would appear to be a change without a difference.  Other people who have undertaken much larger political transformations have either realized, in a Damascus Road moment that they’d been ambling towards it for a long time so that the moment is more a realization of what had already changed, or the transformation, whatever the precipitating event, takes very long.

And that’s politics.  Other changes – breaking your habit of doing this or that – might never be fully completed.  There is a reason alcoholics try not to even smell liquor after they give it up.

Things in real life, in real people, in real society change very slowly, if they ever change at all.  Which is why command politics and economics usually end in mass graves.  People who think society is infinitely malleable and the human being not only perfectible but perfectly ductile rarely understand the resistance they meet with is not from political enemies but from reality itself.

There is however a couple of exceptions to that “no sudden changes” and I’m not even sure how to describe them except as the flipping of internal switches.

One of those changes is death.  Not your own, others.  Whether you learn anything from your own or not depends on whether you believe in the after-life and/or conscious zombiedom.  But something changes the first time you lose someone close to you.  To me, it came at 14, when my dad’s dad died.  It was … odd what it did to me, internally.

I am not stupid.  And I read Heinlein.  And Shakespeare.  I was/am aware that life is a fatal condition, blah blah blah.  Right.  But knowing intellectually that one day you too will die, even seeing beloved figures in the village die meant nothing really.  They were at the periphery of my life, not in it.  When my grandfather – someone in the inner circle, the person who taught me to appreciate stout beer, the person who told me stories of his world travel – died, a switch flipped in my head.  Before that I “knew” I was mortal, but after that I knew it in my bones.  “Remember you’re dust…”  No need.  It was there.  Weirdly other deaths, including that of my other grandfather and of my paternal grandmother, arguably as close to me as a mother, had less effect.  Other than the fact that now and then I stop and wonder if grandmother can see what I’m up to, which keeps me more honest and decent than anything else could.  The effect of going “Oh, yeah, this is real” had already happened.  The other deaths brought grief, and not a day has gone by in the last 23 that I don’t wish I could at least pick up the phone and tell grandma something cute the kids or cats did, or tell her how worried I am about something or—just babble at her, really, and hear her reassuring me.  And I’d give years of life to go back, just once, to the home of my childhood and sit and have tea with her.  But that’s missing her– not that first startling realization that I am mortal.

Giving birth was another such moment, a place where you could put a bright red line.  Before it I was one person, after that another and completely different.  It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there (and I will say right now I’m in no way discriminating against adoptive parents, I’m saying I don’t know if it happens for them, if holding the kid is the same as being wholly responsible for his/her existence.)

Yesterday we were talking to a friend who has two little kids (elementary age and toddler) and he kept being interrupted by the kids, and being really patient about it.  And my older son said “I don’t think I can ever have kids.  I don’t think I can ever be mature enough.”

And I told him “It comes.  It comes when you become a parent.  It just happens.  I know for some people it happens WITHOUT kids, but for me, I matured only when I needed to.”

No, being pregnant didn’t give me a clue.  I’m actually one of those rare women who HATES being pregnant.  Both times, I tolerated it only because the reward was so large.  For men and those who’ve never experienced this, it’s exactly like having another person inside you all the time.  This might seem tautological “But Sarah, of course it is.” But no, you don’t understand.  At first it’s just flutterings, and it could be indigestion or something.  But at around, oh, 25 weeks? (I counted painfully to 24 weeks each time, because at that time there is a chance of survival even if you miscarry.  Considering that’s my particular form of infertility, I became a little less anxious once I had passed that mark.) you recognize the movements as those of a full human.  You can feel him (both of mine were) turn as though he were in a bed.  You can feel him stretch and yawn.  You see a handprint against your belly.  Yes, it’s endearing, but it’s also freaky for this reader of science fiction.

Despite my habit of hugging half of SF fandom and a quarter of the writers, I’m not otherwise “touchy”.  I don’t like perfect strangers touching me.  Unless I’m punch drunk – which I always get to towards the end of a con – I don’t hug anyone I don’t consider part of my ersatz fandom family.  H*ll, I think despite my having more or less adopted Kilted Dave as a third son at LC, I never hugged him.  I think.  (The punch drunk thing.)

Feeling someone LIVING in me, as though I were his living room just felt ODD, a total violation of my space.

But at the same time, he still wasn’t out, and I didn’t need to change things for HIM.  I mean, sure, I was on bed rest, but that could be any sickness.

However, after 3 days of labor, they did a caesarean, and then …  And then I slept for almost twenty four hours, and woke to find I was a mother.  I looked at him, and he looked suspiciously back like “Who are you, and what are you selling?” (Those who’ve met him are laughing now.)

And suddenly it hit me, at the bone level “this is mine, and I’m responsible for him.  He wouldn’t be in this world without me.  Not only is the easing of his path by teaching him how to get along in the world my privilege, but I’m responsible for what he does and what he fails to do.  Because he wouldn’t be here without me.”

And while I’m aware – more so after #2 son – that they come preloaded with programs, that they’re their own person as much as your son (and in #2’s case a reasonable facsimile of his maternal grandfather whom he’s spent maybe a month of his life total with – it’s all right.  I missed dad anyway.) the fact remains, they wouldn’t be here without you.

It’s a terrifying responsibility.  You find yourself both trying to protect the world from them (Yes, I hear the laughter.  Yes, some of you HAVE met my sons) and protect them from the world, or at least try to make the world better for them.

Over the last few months a lot of people have tried to persuade me that I should stop fighting, that I should accept the inevitably of history, etc.

First of all, I’m really bad at accepting “inevitability” – time and again in my life, doctors – good doctors – told me something was inevitable: my being sterile; my imminent death; the fact I’d be impaired my whole life.  And time and again I decided that was not acceptable and changed it.  No, I don’t think I can do that to everything and yes, I do realize one day the final call WILL come for me.  But when it does I intend to go kicking screaming and gouging eyes as I go.

Second, I can’t accept that I’m to be a mere “recorder of the apocalypse.”  I can’t because I have children.  I’m supposed to pass on to them a country in as good an order as I received it circa 1988 when I was naturalized.  Fortunately it was not pristine, we’d been on the road to heck for a while.  If possible, I’d like to pass onto them, say circa twenty five, a BETTER country, one on the way up towards life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for every individual.

Yes, sad to say, I’m a mother (duh) and I’m doing it for the children.  MY children, specifically, not some amorphous “do it for the children” mostly invoked by childless politicians.

Can we succeed?  Bah.  As Grandma would say “While there’s life, there’s hope.”  Well, I’m alive, and I’m not going quietly into that good night.  In my experience deciding to fight is half the battle.

And while the person I was on July 6^th 1991 might have just gone to ground somewhere isolated with her books and her music and waited for the collapse; the person I became the next day has something bigger than herself to fight for: she has two pledges to the future, two people who must continue living after she is gone and for whose life, liberty and – definitely – pursuit of happiness, she feels a strong responsibility.

So, while there’s life, there’s hope.  And while there’s life, I’ll fight.

I was reading a Nero Wolfe book the other day and there is a man we’re obviously supposed to dislike going on about how it’s stupid to try to feed all the hungry in the world.  It puzzled me how this could be even disputed, much less a bad opinion.  Given the different kleptocratic kakistocracies around the world, trying to feed all the poor is in fact to support dictators and evil men. Trying to feed individual, targeted poor is different, but then you can’t feed “all the poor in the world.”  Of course, this was a time when the power of governmental organization and “scientific governance” were considered forces for good. (This man is also referred to as a Nazi, even though he’s clearly against all forms of socialism, national and otherwise.  Never mind, Rex Stout is dead and his time is not our time. Perhaps he was referring to someone who actually existed and there was stuff about this man I can’t now know.)

My grandmother, who was normally very shrewd had a blind spot a mile wide.  When I was little, we got door-to-door beggars.  (One would like to believe that was stopped by greater prosperity and better programs to help the poor.  One would also like to believe that pigs can fly.  Actually downtown in the city has as many beggars as ever, but the crime rate is so much higher that anyone begging door to door is likely to starve.  People don’t open the door to strangers, anymore.)  Grandma had real trouble not giving to beggars.  Mind you, she rarely gave them money (she rarely had cash money on hand, other than needed to run the house.)  But she’d give them sandwiches, eggs, bread, lengths of fabric.

This drove my mother nuts.  I even understand why, since at the time in Portugal there was an (unofficial) beggars guild and families of hereditary beggars, many of whom mutilated their own children to make them deformed/blind so they could beg.

When we all lived in the same house, more or less (well, mom and dad’s home was a shotgun apartment built out of what used to warehouses along the east side of the house) mom would follow my grandmother to the door when the bell rang “to act as her spine” if the pitch was obviously stupid/false.  Though it will tell you the sort of household I grew up in when you consider that both women agreed you should too give a generous amount to the guy who told the most ingenious, if obviously false story – and also to the guy who could not lie and therefore begged with “Please give me something, for neither my mother nor my father are blind.”  Mom and grandma spent the morning giggling and dissecting his pitch.  “Maybe he means since his parents aren’t blind they see how ugly he is and have cast him out.”  And then people think I’m strange…

Sometime a few days ago, I was reading a book about dinosaurs and it referred to how a dinosaur “probably earned his living.”

Yes, there is a point to all of this.

The other day in this blog, a commenter asked me about the Gods of The Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling.

These are supposed to be the lessons of the fables in copybooks, and you write them at the top of the copy, in your fairest hand, to show you got it.  (I will note I was raised on Aesop’s fables.)

And they are – yes, all of them – true even those I wish weren’t.  Anyway, the Copybook headings are a great way of getting a spine when faced with reasonable begging pitches.

How reasonable?  Well, pitches about feeding all the hungry in the world.  Who wouldn’t want to do that.  As someone who did have times of hunger now and then (which is not the same as times of appetite) I very much would like it if it were possible for us to feed, clothe, house everyone in the world – if that were the base level to work from. It’s not possible.  It will never be possible no matter how much our science advances.  The flaw is not in our science but in ourselves.

Someone at the panel on transhumanism spoke out against extending life because “we already don’t have enough food to feed everyone.”  I couldn’t beat that one down, of course, because it went into politics and policy, into the governments people choose, into how redistribution is always redistribution of famine.  I couldn’t go into it because it had nothing to do with technology of life extension.  It had to do with Old Adam.  Or perhaps Old Cain.

There is no such a thing as a lack of food in the world.  And when there is in a particular region, at a particular time, it is usually the result of a truly craptastic government.  Anyone who looks at the two Koreas can’t but conclude that the fault is not with lack of food but with a government so constituted that it makes it impossible for people to “earn a living.”  (Anyone but our president, who, having been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxism likely thinks that SK steals from NK.)  Anyone who knows the history of Rhodesia can’t but realize that Zimbabwe is poor because its government chooses not to let its people earn a living.

In fact, it is normally the governments who ignore the gods of the copybook headings and decide everyone must eat, whether they work or not, who bring that sort of ruin and famine to their people.

There is a reason for this.  It is fashionable in the US to talk about people who are on welfare and don’t work.  That is not precisely true.  Yes, there are people on welfare who neither have a regular job nor look for one.  But what might not be understood is that these people are working: they are navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and making sure they meet all the guidelines to keep the money flowing.  That is work.  It is just not productive work.  It is a work that is the result of perverse incentives.  These people have become convinced that’s the only thing they can do to survive – so they do it.  And the government functionaries who derive power from their “service” want as many of them as possible under their sway.  So they teach more people how to work at getting money for “free”.  And they put more barriers in the way of those ever wanting to leave that condition.

Then there is minimum income.  We do have the ability to give every adult a certain minimum income, I think.  Or at least we did before we ran the presses at melting speed.  Heinlein in his Fabian socialist days envisioned this as a way to get the economy going.  If every adult has some tiny income, enough to live on if you have three roommates and live on Ramen noodles – say 10k a year – then everything you make above that is in a way disposable.  Not only is there no need, but there is more disposable income to stimulate the economy.  (To understand the appeal of this to Heinlein you have to understand that his most frequent contention with his sister was that they only had a pillow between the two of them.  It’s poverty we now can’t begin to imagine.)  Also, one presumes, since breathing and over eighteen was the criteria, we might spend less on that that on our current welfare system.

And maybe it would be.  Except we hit up on the snag of human nature.  A wise man said “The poor, you shall always have” and He seems likely to be right.  First of all, poverty is relative.  When that man walked in Galilee being poor was usually a fatal condition.  You simply didn’t make enough to eat, or to keep off the cold.  You might not be able to reproduce because you couldn’t support children.  It was a condition of terminal failure.  Unless you somehow clawed up, you’d die of it.

Nowadays, our poor are likely to live in air conditioned houses.  They often – if they’re on assistance particularly – have more children than the very wealthy, and the children have toys and clothes.

Nothing wrong with that, but they’re still considered “poor” – they’re poor in relation to people like me, who are not on assistance, and who live in larger houses and own more stuff and/or who can buy a book just because.  Just like I’m poor in relation to those people who can afford to take European vacations or even who own a mountain cabin to hole up and write in.  (Okay, most people don’t write in mountain cabins.  I don’t know why not.)

The point is that humans are not angels.  This is both good and bad. We’re built on a frame of the great apes, and the great apes are social creatures.  This means they’re also creatures of status.  What we consider poor is a matter of relative status, which means it keeps changing.  If our government doesn’t succeed in Zimbabweing us and we end up in a future where houses clean themselves, where you can have anything you can dream up and order t-d printed, there will still be the “poor”.  They might be those who lack the imagination to have their… replicator create really nifty things, but they’ll still be poor.  They’ll lack status.

The good and bad of the status seeking in humans is envy.  Good?  How can envy be good?  Envy is good when it makes you want what the others have, and instead of this leading to you organizing the community to steal it from them or – alternately – leading a communist revolution, it makes you work harder to “get there”.  Many an Horatio Alger worked so hard they forgot what they were working for and when they got there they couldn’t enjoy it.  BUT many more made it and enjoyed it, and all of them contributed to the wealth of society in general and building that.

There are, however, a group of humans with very low status envy.  Possibly a very large group.  In the seventies, Denver experimented with a minimum guaranteed income scheme.  So did other places.  The results were always the same.  No matter how low you set that income – even if it’s at a level like 10k where you really have to make a crazy effort to survive on it – the majority of people will live on it and stop trying to work or find work.

This might be an evolutionary trait.  The idiot hunter who went off and felled mammoth after mammoth was not only wasting food because his tribe of fifteen could barely eat a mammoth before it spoiled, much less ten – he was also depleting the mammoth herd and ensuring future starvation for his people.

So, the survival trait we inherit is “get enough to live on with minimal work, and don’t strive for more.”

Some of us are broken.  We were given both envy and high principles.  We can’t even contemplate bringing others down to level things, but instead we work madly to increase our status.  (No, it’s not how I think about it, but it’s probably what’s going on in the back of the monkey brain.)  Most of humanity however is functional.  Give them enough to eat, and a place to live, and no matter how unvaried the diet and how small/terrible the place, most people will stay put.

“But Sarah,” you say “Where are the gods of the copybook headings?  Even you say that it’s possible, if we arranged it that way, to feed most people so they don’t need to work.  Why shouldn’t we?”

We shouldn’t because the gods of the copybook headings in fire and terror return.

Government produces nothing.  It doesn’t build that. It doesn’t build anything.  It can’t.  Government is force.  It can, on threat of that force, seize enough of what someone produced to give to someone else.  Even when it “builds” roads or power plants, it does so with confiscated wealth and at the expense of what the owners might have done with that wealth.  (They wouldn’t have?  How do you know?  Remember status.  Throughout history humans have funded research – often in useless stuff – and paid for innovation.  How do you know left to its own devices private capital wouldn’t have created neighbordhood-sized nuclear plants?  Or who knows what?  The one thing we know is that nothing done by government has ever come in on time or under budget.)

When governments start thinking in terms of “feeding the hungry” which in our day becomes “giving things to the continuously redefined poor” what it is actually doing is reducing the number of people working in the productive sector.  Between the bureaucrats working to redistribute wealth and the people working to keep getting the handouts, a huge contingent of people is removed from the productive sector.

When that number reaches the point where the productive sector can’t keep up, a crash ensues.  An Earth-shaking Kaboom, you might say. The “you” in the poem is collective in this case.  “You” individual might survive for a time, without working, given a very wealthy society.  But no society can remain wealthy when it doesn’t “work” – ie. When it produces nothing.  And eventually the gods of the copybook headings, in fire and terror return.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers, and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link!

For previous chapters, click here

*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 (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  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.  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

Irregular

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage,

 

I let myself go boneless on the seat for a moment, at the thought of another world, another magical threat.  It had been bad enough to be caught in what we’ll call for lack of a better word the elvenland wars of succession.

To be caught in something else, something having to do with myth…  I sat up suddenly and narrowed my eyes at the King of Elves.  “Your majesty will forgive me, but—”

He grinned “That bad?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You started with Your Majesty, not Penn, and certainly not Gabriel.  That bad?”

I waved a hand away.  “Bad enough.  Your Majesty will forgive me my presumption, but would you tell me, perhaps how different such a world can be from yours?  Isn’t your world considered a myth by mankind in most of the worlds in which magic is forbidden?”

For a moment, he looked genuinely shocked.  It is always bad to guess whether an elf is showing his true face but this one looked to be doing just that and to be genuinely shocked.  He took a deep breath.  “Too far, my dear Jon,” he said, though his tone was not dangerous and he didn’t seem to be threatening me.  “I am not responsible for what humans do when they make up stories to themselves of what is real and what isn’t.”  He sighed.  “No.  I beg your pardon.  I am human too or at least.”  He rubbed the middle of his forehead with two fingers, as though he had a headache.  I remembered the same gesture from Seraphim.  “Or at least I remember being human, remember it vividly enough I didn’t mean “human” as an insult.  No.  In some ways I wish I had the luxury of being human still.  But it is true that you – we – in our ignorance of deeper magic—“  He puffed out his cheeks and let himself fall back upon his chair, as though despondent.  “When I ascended,” he sounded like a corpse describing his own death day.  “When I ascended to my current… dignities I found that there were many things that not only do humans not know, but humans can’t know.  The way my mind is now… I see in places you cannot see.  It’s like having a wholly different sense that is magic and senses magic.  You know how you can see magic patterns and the traces of magic, being a magic-user.  My people, we… I, now, can see with magic, all the time, like an extra sense.  To be honest I always could.  Like the language of elves, which is inborn, so that our day-old babes can speak it, so is magic like that, existent, all the time.  But I chose not to use it while on Earth.  I voluntarily blinded myself to it.”

“But becoming king of elves,” he said, “forced me to open my eyes and forced me also to see things I didn’t wish to see, to know things—

“There are worlds, there are divisions in magic, there are flavors I can’t describe to you.  Suffice it to say that fairyland is a whole integral land, that now and then interacts with human worlds.  The mythworld is … I won’t say it was created by human minds and human magic.  I was, at least in my human form, a Christian, raised as such in the Darkwater household.”  He furrowed his brow.  “I wonder what the good Reverend Dickson would think of me now, should I show up for the services.  But whatever he may think there is no inherent war between my people and Christianity.  There is a dispute over whether salvation applies to us, whether pure elves have a soul.  I don’t know.  I don’t see why it shouldn’t.  We’re… close enough to humans.  But the myth worlds are different.  It might have been created through human belief, through human need for powerful entities in which to believe.  It might have been created – Marlon thinks so, at least – through the fall of Adam.  He thinks so but can’t prove it with math and I prefer not to follow where he goes just because I trust him.”  He grinned at my expression.  “My love does not blind me, Jon.  He’s a man and therefore fallible.  I’m an elf and therefore also fallible.  Our fallibility is just of a different order.  I don’t allow him here, by the way,” he gestured in such a way, that it might mean this office or his whole realm.  “I can’t.  He’s too much of fairyland that it would start colonizing his mind, and make it hard for him to live where he has chosen.  I visit him, when I can.  That is good.  It helps me remember being human.  And right now, my memory of being human tells me he’s guessing.  But in either case, the mythworld is… subservient to humans.  I told you it was a parasite.  It might not be able to be anything else.”

“Yes, but why would it attack our world now?  And why our world in particular.  Is it simply our turn?”

The creature who’d been Gabriel Penn shook his head.  “Oh no.  It is in dire crisis.  One of their own, older than rational man, has awakened and it is … making demands.  I think they built a prison for it, but I’m not sure how it works.  This is disturbing as I think they have taken part of my realm, and are preventing me from seeing it.  But their own is… cannibalizing them.  Taking all their energy for what it thinks will be an attack on human worlds.

“However, part of what caused him to wake… part of what…  Your father, Jon, what do you know about your father’s activities?”

I felt color drain from my face, leaving me blanched and cold.  “Good God,” I said.  “Not Papa’s activities.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I know he used magic to trade with and swindle humans.  I know he unscrupulously arranged to have travel forbidden to non-magic worlds so only he could do it and his fraud could not be detected.  He might have traded in objects of power.  I know he was behind the kidnapping of the princess.  How can there be more?”

He gave me an odd smile, lopsided.  “It is good to know I’m not the only one who has to blush for his relatives.”

“I’m glad to give you pleasure, your majesty,” I said, in my most caustic tone.

He laughed, suddenly.  “No, Jon, but leaving that aside.  Your father seems to have found a way into mythworld and to have taken part of it.”

“Part of… what?”

He sighed.  “I’m not sure.  Valkyries.  Maenads.  What you call them.  Warrior women full of vengeance.  He found a way to bend some of them to his will, to make them do his bidding.  I’ve not found out why yet.  But it was those women, dislocated to Avalon who caused the elder god to wake up.  It seems they were part of his guard.  I’m not sure why your father would do that, or what benefit redounded to him.”

“Some, you can be sure,” I said acidly.  “That much is guaranteed..”

“Yes, but I haven’t pinned down what yet, and I’m not sure it matters.  When the elder woke, it steered the world towards Avalon, and there it connected to its lost members and… Since it was in dire need of magic due to the awakened elder, its members got a new mission – to take Avalon’s magic.  As much of it as possible.  This in turn corrupted Avalon’s magic, and the world as we know it will disintegrate without it.”

I opened my mouth to ask him what he cared.

“Don’t,” he said.  “I know it’s not my world, anymore, but there’s Seraphim, and Nell, and Caroline and Michael, and yes, there is also Marlon.  If I lost them I’d lose most of me.  All that remains human in me.”  He sighed.  “And also, through them they can get to me, and through me Fairyland.  Since their need is great because everytime they grow their irrational elders grow, this means they can devour all the worlds.  Jon, think.  Surely it is worth fighting?”

I stared at him for a moment, my eyes unfocused.  “But… why would I be able to do anything?”

He sighed again.  “Your mind,” he said.  “tastes the same as theirs.  Your magic is more similar to theirs than any I can see.  Jon, no,” this was in answer to my half rising, offended.  “I don’t say it to wound you, and I don’t even say you have anything of them, though surely you know gods copulated indiscriminately.  But Jon, my friend, I’m using the only weapon I can.  They are an irregular world.  Only an irregular man can defeat them. Seraphim is too honor bound.  I am not fully human, and… I can think of no one else to call upon.”

I almost asked if his own lover, once a necromancer might not be a better choice, but truth, I knew the man and except for one characteristic he was more conventional than Mama.

“Irregular,” I said, as I pondered it.

When I was very little, my mom sang a song to put me to sleep.  You’ll see from one particular word what must be the vintage of that song: “Soldier out on the trenches, if you see the flag bearer fall with it in his hands; lift that flag, soldier, in a bit of green/red rag, you have the country* in your hands.”

There is smoke in the air, this fourth of July.  Yesterday the air was clear, but when we opened our balcony door last night, the smoke was choking, as though our neighborhood were grilling right on the porch.  Since I’ve not heard sirens, I assume it’s one of the weather weird things and we’re getting smoke from somewhere far away, maybe even Arizona.  But in a way it’s fitting that the flag is flying against a background of smoke and ashes.

Yesterday a friend and I tried to remember any other country that was ever governed by an elite which hated everything the country stood for/everything that made it stand as a nation and wished to dismantle it from within.  We couldn’t think of any.  Certainly not any that hadn’t been governed by an occupying elite.  Maybe there’s a reason the movement our elites approved of was called “Occupy” (and largely financed by the elites.)  [Or maybe the elites should tell Occupy as the Church of Satan told the pro-abortion protesters “Whoa, dude, you’re giving us a bad name.]  Even then, the political elites would be less worrisome if they weren’t supported by a crazy train of academics, artists, press, all of them indoctrinated in the same hatred of the land that allows them to exist.  (And brainwashing has got really good.  These are people who presumably can read and write, but they seem incapable of studying up and really seeing how bad the rest of the world is.)

Our money printing presses are running overtime, and our elites, like Morsi in Egypt, seem to have only one idea of how to run the economy “keep borrowing” – in our case from the future.  Da Tech guy says it sounds familiar, and he’s absolutely right.

Our internal agencies, which are supposed to protect us are being used as a bludgeon against one political side (apparently the thing about “progressive” also being on an IRS BOLO was a thin and unconvincing narrative.  I.e. if it was the IRS is more inefficient than we thought, since no progressive group was delayed in non-profit status.)  And the lady running Truethevote, a group that tries to remove dead and duplicate registrations from the books was harassed by the IRS, the NSA, the ATF and Homeland Security.  No word on whether the EPA got in on the act, but I suspect they’re even now designating her kiddie pool a wetland.  And I’m sure the Department of State that left four of our own to die alone in Benghazi is very interested in stopping TrueTheVote.  After all, it’s very important to maintain the APPEARANCE of consent of the governed.

And while the crazy train leads the parade, foreign powers are looking for a moment to strike the wounded eagle.

Countries have fallen from less than this.  They’ve gone down in smoke and ashes and risen no more.

So, there is smoke in the air, and things look bleak.  Fortunately this is not the first time things have looked bleak for us.  And fortunately other countries are not the USA.

I got from Audible and am listening to – at CACS’s instigation – a series of lectures called Brotherhood of the Revolution.  I already knew our founding was done by the skin of our teeth and through a series of lucky incidents.

I bet things looked bleaker than now that winter at Valley Forge.  But they succeeded.  They succeeded in no small measure because individuals took up the cause.  How many actually fought?  I have the figure at 3% from various places.  My husband’s 14 year old direct ancestor – after whom he’s named – joined the Connecticut contingent as a drummer boy.

But in small towns and in far away places ordinary people held the flag aloft.  The thing about American women fighting as well as their men was likely true.  America proved too expensive, too much trouble to hold.

We’re a miracle nation, born not of blood brotherhood, not of territorial disputes, but of a belief in securing Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness to the largest possible number of individuals.

Have we stumbled in this?  Often enough, we have.  The founders themselves allowed slavery to survive to be resolved by another generation, and the resolving of that crisis gave a central government far too much power compared to the individual and the states.

But the thing is we’re trying.

During the Iraq war, a trucker, one of the “human shields” volunteering to go help Saddam, I mean “preserve peace” said on television he didn’t believe Saddam had any evil intentions.  Why would a nation that couldn’t even secure clean water for its citizens even consider making war on anyone?

The trucker was I THINK British, but his opinion (besides betraying a jaw-dropping lack of knowledge of history) was very American.

It is in America that we assume that the government exists by consent of the governed; that their first duty is to secure the comfort and safety of the people, and other than that leave people alone to pursue Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Other countries have now included similar language in their constitutions, but the belief and mind set is not in their DNA.  It doesn’t course through their veins and form their thoughts.

And then they always try to go one better and guarantee other things, things that in the end deny those three rights, positive rights, like a right to wealth, a right to sustenance, a right to – this is the most vicious – equality.  Equality not just before the law, but of results.  And then the horrors of collectivism tumble forth because it’s impossible for a government to give anyone anything that was NOT stolen.  Governments produce nothing.  At their best, they protect those who do produce things.  At their worst…

So – there is smoke in the air the flag flies in, this fourth of July.  But the flag hasn’t fallen.  Someone I respect greatly told me it’s inevitable it will fall; that we’re headed for a hard crash.

Maybe that’s right.  Maybe it will fall.  I hope not.  We’re fandom.  A lot of us know people who can barely hold it together – health, mind, economics – in the world as is.  If we crash we’re each going to lose friends and neighbors and people who make life worth living.

But even if we crash, it’s not the end.  It will never be the end while one of us stands; one of us who believes in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness, one of us who believes the consent of the governed means more than being able to count the votes, one of us who believes that in the proper order of things the government exists to serve the people, the government belongs to the people and not the other way around.

If that flag falls in the muck and mire towards which it’s sagging, it is the solemn duty, the very great privilege of each and every one of us still standing to lift it up high and continue the fight.

They pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor.  I pledge mine.  And no, I don’t think those are just words, or that it’s all a game.  All of us who believe in the principles of our founding pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, implicitly or explicitly.

May we never be required to pay even as we stand ready to.

May we escape the crash we so richly deserve and may my grandchildren celebrate the fourth of July on clear days when their government works to secure their liberties, not take them away.

*(Country is given as Patria which literally would be fatherland, but obviously can’t be translated that way because of what has happened to that word. Motherland which would be permissible since Patria in Portuguese is feminine, still holds same echoes and homeland makes you want to say “security.”)

I’d like to interrupt the current insanity with some helpful definitions.

By this I don’t mean just the SFWA incident, about which I can’t pronounce because they haven’t actually revealed what the horrible horrible incident was, and without that I can’t comment.  I can also add I’ve heard rumors about this editor for years, but rumors aren’t proof.  So I won’t pronounce on that one way or another.

HOWEVER there has been a lot of screeching and finger pointing and crying of harassment everywhere else too, and frankly, ladies, I’ve had enough.

So this is the part of the blog in which we define.

What is harassment?

Harassment: sexual, political or social has two necessary components – you can’t avoid it, and it’s being perpetrated by someone with power over someone without power who is either an underling or in some other way needs this person to continue working/doing what he/she must to survive.

Take for example the charming habit of just about every Portuguese male over the age of twelve of standing outside café doors and shouting suggestions on what they’d like to do to me/have me do to them (I think some of the things were anatomically impossible.)  They were annoying, they often made it very unpleasant for me to go buy an ice cream.  They certainly often made me want to unleash the fist of doom.  Were they harassment?  No.  I think they might be a very stupid approach to courting and judging from some women who would shout back at them, it might even have worked.

However, those women – and I – didn’t need those men to survive/earn a living.  So at the very worst, the men were incredibly rude and yeah, I wanted to unleash fist of doom, but that would be dignifying their nonsense.  Ignoring them OTOH baffled them.

In fact, a month ago I was subjected to the international version of same as road workers called out helpful suggestions in Spanish.  Solved by pretending not to understand a word of Spanish.

Was it harassment?  No.  It was uncomfortable, and unpleasant, but that doesn’t make it harassment.

Mind my words: NO ONE is entitled to go through life without being made uncomfortable.  A) it’s impossible B) in some times and places discomfort can be useful. C) It’s impossible to play your whole life at kindergarten level.  NO ONE CAN MAKE LIFE SAFE FOR YOU.  NOR SHOULD THEY.

Some years ago, at a con, I entered the backroom of the barfly suite, where there were only a dozen guys.  They were watching a racy movie and started to turn the channel, then said, “Oh, thank G-d, it’s Sarah” and kept it on.  Was I disrespected?  Were they objectifying me by watching nudie females?

Ladies, gents and dragons: Watching nudie other sex (or same, depending) is what humans do, and often one of the only pleasures when you live in interesting times.    For me to make the leap from what the guys were watching to an insult to me personally would require me to assume that I was one with the skinny little things pretending to have sex on the screen.  The only reason for commonality there would be we have similar genitals.  PFUI.  It takes more than that to make me the soul sister of say Hillary Clinton or – gag – Nancy Pelosi.  (Both of which would be very bad subjects for nudie movies.)  Besides, seriously.  The guys were taking some time off and having fun.

Was I made uncomfortable?  Actually no.  It would be like being afraid of Night Of The Living Dead.  I made some comments on the action, including the “that’s anatomically impossible” and left because it was boring.

But suppose I’d been made uncomfortable.  Was that harassment?  Well, no.  Yeah, those guys were fans.  But the only way to make it that they had power over me is to assume every person of penis TM has power over every person of vagina TM.  That’s Marxist social theory, and why would he be right about that, when he’s wrong on everything else?  Marx can suck my middle finger.

But Sarah, you say, then you’re subjecting women to being made uncomfortable everywhere they go.  That might not legally be harassment, but surely it creates an hostile work or play environment.  Would you want to live being made uncomfortable everywhere you go?

Sure.  I did.  I do.  The degrees of discomfort vary, and if a place is so bad I can’t take it, I stop going there.  This happened with the Nebulas when for two years it became the high palace of leftist twaddle and that’s all people talked about everywhere, and I couldn’t say anything, because, well, it WOULD have meant my career.   But the best cons were – some still are (Liberty con excepted) – places where I’m made very uncomfortable by not being able to shout “You lie” and get in fights.  That’s life, isn’t it?

But Sarah, what if the hostile environment is at work?  What if these people DO have power over you?

Two suggestions – there are two types of work environment that will try you.  I only experienced one, but I read a lot about the other, which is “environments dominated mostly by males, who will make terrible jokes, etc in front of the women.”  (BTW the reverse occurs too.  No?  How many times do you ladies discuss your periods where guys can hear it?  Isn’t it amusing to see them turn purple?)  From what I read in police women and others biographies, the nonsense stops once you become ‘one of the guys’ – this involves not shrieking and giving back as good as you got in the way of jokes.

But Sarah, it should not be needed.  They should immediately auto-censure when a woman is near.

First of all that’s not how humans work.  Some form of hazing ritual applies to guys too, particularly in dangerous professions.  You need to test the newby before you depend on him/her for your life.  Second, if they censor their thoughts, they’ll end up missing stuff they NEED to think.

The second type is the (often international; mine was) company where women are viewed as combination servants and eye candy.  My response to that, and it worked like a charm, to the point of having my male boss reproach a passing-by engineer who had made a lewd comment, was to draw the line.

Few women are taught to do this these days.  But it is coded deep in the male brain and it works.  If you know a Southern Lady over fifty ask for lessons.  It involves looking neither shocked nor disgusted but inexpressibly remote, like they just put themselves beneath your notice.  The term is “freezing” for a reason.  Practice in front of the mirror if needed.  It works.  You will actually be treated above your work position – it works that well.  You need to know how to do this, because the world can only be made safe for you by YOU.

Now, let’s talk about conventions.  Conventions are tricky places.  They both are necessary for work, and they are ultimately parties.  You can’t make it totally safe as a work environment because it isn’t.

At one World Fantasy I was propositioned by SIX guys, three of them editors (well, junior editors) including the gentleman who wanted me to “dominate” him.  No, I wasn’t wearing black leather.  I was wearing a frilly green dress.

Did it make me uncomfortable?  Well, it made me worry about what they thought was so dominating about me (It was the theme.)  They might have planned it but I doubt it, since I know some of them don’t talk.  Mostly it made me laugh and look for my husband to tell him.

See, cons are supposed to be fun.  I don’t want to have to stand around minding my every word, and I don’t want my male friends to have to do the same.  Getting a little boozed up – or in my case just high on having people around – and flirting or joking with friends is what parties are about.  (Flirting is not sexual.  It’s a mind game that uses sex as a basis.  I enjoy it, even though as far as I’m concerned there is ONE man in the whole world I’m interested in.)

If the screaming delicate flowers ruin my conventions, by making men stop attending, I swear to the memory of Robert A. Heinlein that they’ll live to regret it.

Now, let’s talk about what IS harassment.  Harassment is when people use shaming and innuendo and exploit other people’s harmless behavior.  Harassment is giving liars the ability – unexamined – to render someone a pariah.  ( Yes, women lie.  If you’re over 18 you should know this, regardless of your gender, even if younger boy has trouble wrapping his head around it.  If your entire program assumes women never lie, you’re making an assumption not supported by all of human history and you should perhaps consider what you’re thinking of is angels, not women) Harassment is what was done to Malzberg and Resnick – trying to destroy their careers, their reputation, and their chances of making a living.

That’s harassment.  And that’s wrong.

 

So, one of the things I like about Liberty con is that every year is different.  See, it’s like a family reunion and that changes, as the time goes on, and the people change.  Kids grow up, people pass on the torch of this or that, but the family reunion goes on.  It changes, is all.

This year the theme was : fans.  I already knew I had the best fans in the world, but you guys clean up nice in person too.  We saw/talked to a lot of you (I couldn’t go ten steps without someone saying “Loved Darkship Renegades” or “Loved A Few Good Men” which, let me tell you, does more for my confidence than… anything else just about.  And confidence is very important, it boosts a writer’s voice, which makes the books better.  So thank you to everyone who did that.

Mostly, among the fans, we hung out with Dot and Peter and Cedar and Sanford.  We also spent a lot of time with Speaker, but as Science Advisor To Baen Authors I’m not sure he counts as just a fan.  I got to meet Stephen Simmons, Evil Penguin who is neither a Penguin nor Evil brought me a stuffed penguin who will be added to the Hoyt menagerie (yes, your worst suspicions are true.  I do sleep clutching a stuffed doll of a bald eagle.  Dan bought it for me years ago.  We will not discuss my stars and stripes pajamas.  You THINK I’m joking) and I think Kilted Dave is now my third son.

We also spent a lot of time with Kevin (some with Rebecca, but her health doesn’t let her stay up that late) and I’m not sure what it means when writers from Colorado go to Tennessee to hang out.  But he seemed to “get” Liberty con like we got it the first time we went: “this is fun” and “oh, wow, it’s like family.”  So maybe we can tempt him back sometime despite his hectic schedule.

We spent even more time with Larry and Bridget Correia, whom we hadn’t seen for … four years?  But they’re family (possibly literally.  No, we’re not taking a DNA test!) so it was like we’d seen them just yesterday, except for the catchup on what the kids were doing, etc.

I wasn’t IN the mad scientist panel room because it was SO hot (and I LIKE hot weather) that I hung outside the door with Kilted Dave and Richard Evans and other barflies, so I missed whatever it was, but my husband assures me that if you upset the Correias Larry is NOT the Correia you should be scared of.  Make a note of it.

I’m sure I’m forgetting about a dozen people I had long conversations with.  I know I saw a lot of old friends only in passing.  I wish we’d had (a lot) more time with Kelly and Star, for instance, but they’ve promised to visit soon.

The first Hoyt’s Huns breakfast was a rousing success for 9 am the day after the party night.  Let’s think this through for other cons and have it on Saturday morning, as the con is starting.  I mean, my own younger son (who came in at five am the night before) didn’t make it.  Robert made it despite having made of rousing tour of the world in alcoholic beverages.  (The Portuguese bred through in that one.  In Portugal, those who couldn’t hold their liquor died young and without children.

I also loved seeing and talking to Toni Weisskopf.  First because we’re always doing a million things at one time, so it was good to sit and talk.  Second because there are a couple of projects maybe coming down the pike (things need to be done/fixed/etc) that we’ve been discussing fragmentarily, and, as always, it’s much easier to get stuff solved in half an hour talking than a year of emails.

Oh, the Basset antho will be a Baen fan antho (though I’ll write for it, as will my family) mostly because every other pro I know is going nuts.  We already have some stories banked, but will also open for submission.  No pay – it’s a charity antho, but if you write give it a thought.  I’ll explain the purpose, etc, later.  It will come out Baen Webscriptions and in NRP for the other outlets, electronic/paper.

Anyway, my husband is thinking of coming down for Fencon, money permitting, particularly if he has Ninth Euclid out by then.  So maybe we should have  Hoyt’s Huns Breakfast then?  I don’t know how many of you there are in Dallas, but I know there are a lot in TX.

Oh, yeah, and on Friday I wrote the short story for Raygun chronicles.  The edits are even now waiting in my mailbox.

This all was a little marred by Dan coming home sick.  The going-around which seems to be a form of norovirus might have caught up with him.  Or it might be food poisoning.  Hopefully it’s the second, but from the fact I’m starting to get the same symptoms I suspect the first.

I meant to do a real post but after a weekend of shortened nights and a long trip back (not bad, but we drove to Atlanta and then had a wait time, and finally dragged home at midnight.) the will is there, but not the strength.  Older son dragged self off to volunteer at hospital (HE’s not sick, but I think he might have slept eight hours – over the last five days) but as we know he’s not human.

I’m going to do a quick clean on litter boxes and house and go get the cats back.  Then look at edits on short and (if the scattered symptoms haven’t crashed into me by then) settle down to work.  The fact that I’m considering a nap before I do ANY of those tells you either I’m ill or very, very tired.  I’m hoping the last.  I think that’s all it is.  In the car from Denver (not driving) I kept drifting off and waking up saying the oddest things, including “We have to put on duck suits.”  No, I have no idea why.  Yes, it was quite literally fun for the whole family.

(BTW younger son said there was a dancing guy in a bear costume at the con.  Was there?  I think he dreamed it.)

There will be subscriber content later.  Now I might take a nap before tackling the boxes.

 

 

Transcripts concerning the information feeds on Sarah A. Hoyt, found behind some dirty brown shirts and a toothbrush moustache in the NSA office closet.The pages are torn and obviously incomplete, but profoundly worrying for obvious reasons.

Capture Feed From Internet Pigeon Carrier Program, Jan. 28 1011

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  OMG.  It just happened.  I just killed John Ringo.

SubVert [Amanda Green]: LOL.  How?

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  I Red Kilted him in Darkship Renegades.

SubVert [Amanda Green]:Did you ask him first?

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  Of course, I asked him first.  He shouts “Live Free or Die!” before being shot through the heart.

SubVert [Amanda Green]: I have to see this.  Sounds hilarious.

Note from agent P. K. File aka Snoopy Poptart agent extraordinary for the NSA: Is Sarah Hoyt involved in killing for hire?  Knowing her proclivities why would she shoot JR after he shouted Live Free Or Die?  Does She hate New Hampshire?  And HOW did she get his permission first?  Please check vital status of NSA subject 458908796389, code file Baenbadboys, John Ringo.  Note Amanda Green’s handle.  Who is she subverting?  Consider adding to Baenbadgirls file.

Capture feed from Internet Pigeon Carrier, June15 2011

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  I was standing on the corner, minding my own business.

SubVert [Amanda Green]: SOCMOB?  You were SOCMOB?  For the love of heaven woman, don’t you know what happens?

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  Yeah.  It happened.  Suddenly this bad dude—

SubVert [Amanda Green]: OMG

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  Suddenly this bad dude was in my head, dictating a story.

As if I didn’t already have enough people in my head!  It’s getting crowded in there.

SubVert [Amanda Green]: Well, you’re going to have to let some out, and if this one is a dictator, let him out first.

RelentlessAuthor [Sarah A. Hoyt]:  I suppose so.

Note from agent P. K. File aka Snoopy Poptart agent extraordinary for the NSA: Note that the two writers appear to be speaking in some sort of private code, including SOCMOB.  What does some bad dude have to do with SOCMOB?  And what does it mean to have people in her head?  Is she keeping people locked up in her bathroom?  And which dictator is she speaking about.  Check for Kim Jung Un in her bathroom?  Perhaps a special feed in her shower?

Capture from email message from Sarah A. Hoyt to Toni Weisskopf

Hi Toni,

Attached find A Few Good Men.  I’m calling this the sister series to Darkship Thieves, Earth Revolution.  On the er… unusual nature of the protagonists, I know there might be some issues with relating to it from some of the barflies, but rest assured that if there are more in this series of revolutions they will be from different perspectives.

Capture from email message from Toni Weisskof to Sarah A. Hoyt

Hi Sarah,

As you know, I agreed that the Good Men needed to go down hard, but I’m not sure I meant the double entendre.  It’s good though.  Let’s plot a lot of other revolutions to follow.  BTW, when do we see Noah’s Boy.  It’s overdue, and I think it’s time to let the dragon fly.

Note from agent P. K. File aka Snoopy Poptart agent extraordinary for the NSA:  Note that SAH appears to be sending people attached to her file.  Find out if she has access to technology to reduce a few good men to bits and bytes [I told you guys that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy was dangerous.  Stop telling me she went on a diet and is less vast. She’s still vast.]  What is the unusual nature of the protagonists, and why is she working on revolutions from other perspectives.  Also, note that TW is encouraging revolutions.  (Check on Good Men Going Down Hard?  GMGDH – code?)  What is Noah’s Boy.  “Dragon fly”? Is it a code?  Check dragonflies for implanted listening devices.  [I told you guys the VRWC had gone high tech!  Do you Ever listen to me?  Nooooo.  When you find microphones on dragonflies I want my promotion, you bastages!]