According To Hoyt

Ladies, gentlemen, aliens, dragons and life forms of uncertain existential definition — I was going to write a post tonight but we stayed up late talking (among other people) to the Correias.  (Yes, yes, collaboration was discussed — no, it won’t be SOON, but yes, it will happen.)  So, my mind isn’t on.  I promise a very nice — well, very silly — post tomorrow.

In the meantime, there’s  a all-Huns-present breakfast tomorrow at nine at City Cafe but “not the one downtown.”  However, if you want to make sure of getting there with us, meet us in the main lobby at around 9 am.  We have room for seven people, or maybe five, if our kids go (we don’t know yet.  Robert was alcoholic-beverage-crawling with flies, so he might not be up to it.  Marsh… who knows?)

So, tomorrow, nine lobby, be there or be … whatever shape you are.

I’ll post tomorrow, now I’m going to turn into a big, round pumpkin.

 -A Guest Post By Amanda Green

*For those who don’t know it, Amanda Green is Texan.  She also might or might be my twin.  For months my husband thought she was my pen name, and he still wavers, even after he met her.  “I can’t tell your writing apart” says the love of my life.  “That’s because we’re twins,” I say.  “Makes sense,” he says — even though he’s met her and she’s a head taller than I and read-headed.  Don’t ask me.  Mathematician logic.  They think in quantum leaps.  Anyway, Amanda is not me, but she’s very kind to write a post for me, while I’m busy at Liberty con.  Now ya’ll be nice or I tie your ears together behind your back when I get to my tablet.*

This week has been a roller coaster ride for those who watch what comes down from the Supreme Court. The week began with the cries of outrage ringing from the vaulted halls of media as SCOTUS struck down parts of the Voting Right Act. Those cries of outrage turned to cheers of joy as the SCOTUS roller coaster turned the corner and — WHEE — overruled parts of the Defense of Marriage Act as well as Prop 18 out of California.

While I have my own opinions about DoMA and Prop 18, that’s not what has me scratching my head. No, it is the howls of outrage over the scuttling of Section 4 and, as a result, much of Section 5 of the Voting Right Act. This act was initially passed in 1964 as a much needed safeguard for minority voting rights. Since then, it has been renewed several times by Congress. The last, if my memory serves correctly, in 2010. Each time it has been renewed, it was with very little change to the original legislation.

And that, according to the majority opinion handed down by SCOTUS, is the problem. Things have changed since 1964. All you have to do is look at the number of minorities who have been elected to office in that time to see it. If that isn’t enough, look at the number of objections the Justice Department has filed against the states that have been required to undergo federal monitoring, meaning they couldn’t do anything to change voting districts, etc., without first getting federal approval. The objections filed by the Justice Department over the last few years have been in the low single digits.

If that isn’t enough to justify doing away with federal monitoring, the let’s look at the fact the courts have already allowed municipal jurisdictions to file for exception to monitoring if they can prove they’ve gone ten years without problems. More and more jurisdictions over the years have proven they have met the requirements of the Act and such oversight is no longer necessary.

But let’s get back to the ruling. Unlike what those condemning are saying, it doesn’t say the federal government can’t continue to have oversight to insure equality at the polls. What it does say is fairly simple and, at least to me, logical. The conditions that existed in 1964 have changed. More than fifty years of oversight, of people becoming better educated and more aware of what is happening in their community, etc., have changed the status quo. That means you need to adapt the formula used to determine if a state or smaller jurisdiction needs to be monitored. In other words, use current world facts and needs to determine whether or not oversight is necessary.

In short, SCOTUS has left the door wide open for Congress to pass a new Voting Rights Act. Whether it does or not isn’t something the Court should have to worry about. The Court’s concern is if the law of the land, within the framework of the Constitution and justice, is being applied. Yes, that’s overly simplified, but you get my meaning. If you don’t like what SCOTUS did, then talk to your congressman or senator and let them know. Of course, these are the same congressmen and senators who have yet to pass a budget and haven’t in much too long. These are the same congressmen and senators who voted for Obamacare without reading the bill. These are the same congressmen and senators who continue to vote on bills that effect you and me and they rely on interns and clerks to tell them what is in the legislation.

But to get back to the point, after the SCOTUS ruling came down, Attorney General Greg Abbott quickly announced that Texas’ voters’ identification law would be put into effect. Oh the cries of outrage. Oh the people on facebook claiming they’d never move to Texas because of decisions like this. HuffPo, not to be outdone, published an article with the headline: Harsh Texas Voter ID Law ‘Immediately’ Takes Effect After Voting Rights Ruling.

Wow. Harsh Law. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Maybe to vote in Texas you’ll have to run the gauntlet to get into the polling place. Or maybe you have to sign over your first born. Or maybe you just have to prove you are eligible to vote.

Under the Texas law, in order to vote you have to present an approved form of identification. This ID can be in the form of your driver’s license, passport, concealed carry permit, military ID,  citizenship papers with photo attached or state issued ID. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? But now, those who condemn the law say it discriminates against the poor and elderly. They might not have a photo ID and they might not have the money to get one.

Well, that’s not a stumbling block. The state will immediately start issuing ID cards — at no cost — that will be good for six years. So, no economic hardship.

But that’s still not enough. After all, the homeless might not know about this and they won’t have a mailing address, etc., etc., etc. Again, there are procedures in place for such situations.

However, let’s look at this realistically, folks. Even those who are out of work and many who are homeless have to have ID in order to get their benefits or to be able to cash their checks. If you go to the doctor’s office or hospital, you have to show ID when you are checked in. It is difficult to live completely off the radar these days and those who do aren’t likely to be voting because, guess what, that puts you right back on the paper trail.

Voting is a right, yes. It is guaranteed to citizens of the United States and of the individual states. But that doesn’t mean the states can’t take action to prevent voter fraud. Just as the federal government can oversee the states to make sure they don’t gerrymander voting districts, states can take “reasonable” steps to prevent voter fraud. In fact, any state that doesn’t is not acting in the best interest of its citizens.

I can hear the cries of outrage now. They are saying votes can be checked after they’ve been cast. You can make sure no two people voted under the same name. After all, that’s what voter registration lists are for. Sorry, but when you look at the voter fraud and intimidation we saw in the last two presidential elections, when you consider how the media calls elections based on single digit percentages of electoral districts reporting in, you can’t. In today’s world when elections are usually called within hours of the polls closing, and when it costs candidates thousands of dollars to ask for a recount, why not have some reasonable safeguards in place at the time of the election?

Every party has poll watchers present in major precincts. The state and feds wills end overseers if there is the slightest suggestion of problems. The media will be zooming in with their cameras to make sure the Voter ID law isn’t abused. Remember, when SCOTUS overturned Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, it didn’t say there couldn’t be safeguards and oversights put into place. It simply said they had to be applied based on a formula applicable to this day and age.

Neither the SCOTUS ruling or the Voter ID law will allow Texas or any other jurisdiction to discriminate based on race, religion, sex, etc., etc. Elections can still be challenged and, believe me, they will be. But there has to come a time when we step into the modern age of voting and require the same sort of proof of eligibility that we require to drive a car or buy alcohol or get married.

Voting is a right and something we should take seriously, very seriously. It affects not only us but our children and grandchildren. If was want to exercise our right to vote, we should not only educate ourselves about the issues and the candidates but we should be willing to present not only our voter’s registration card but our photo ID. With the State allowing those who don’t currently have an approved form of photo ID to get one for free, there is no bar left. At least not a reasonable one.

So, for those who say they’ll never move to Texas because we are backward and full of hicks who don’t want to move beyond the Uncle Tom days, grow up. Quit drinking the red kool-aid and parroting the approved party line. Type into your search engines a few simple terms and actually read the court opinions or the laws you are condemning. Or is that too much work for your poor, atrophied brains to handle? After all, it really is so much easier to just follow the crowd as it yells condemnations even as it hurtles over the edge of the cliff like a bunch of nice little lemmings.

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

Neither Nor

 

Ginevra Elfborn

 

I should have been prepared when they came for me, and I should have arranged to receive them in style.  I didn’t.  I must be losing my edge.

Correction, I had lost my edge.  Why else had I written that soppy letter to Jonathan Blythe?  What had possessed me, pray?  Oh, he was a handsome rogue, all right, and rotten all through, and what business did I have thinking about him, much less being so stupid as to write to him before I left?

But I remembered the way he had fought on that awful night, and the sort hopeless courage in his eyes, that light that was neither enjoyment nor despair, but was both at th same time.  And I didn’t want him to think I’d simply vanished, without giving him another thought.

People like him have trouble enough in the world.  Well, in this world, at least.  They don’t fit too well, and their behavior is seen either as callous or as perverse.  It is neither of course, they’re just… different from their kind.

If I had time, if I’d been born in different times and in a different place, if there were no great work that called me, and no greater duty requiring me to attend to it, I’d have spent some time in some retired magical university studying whether people like Jonathan are what gave rise to my people, or perhaps if it is his elf blood that makes him slightly mad in a world not adapted to it.

But I didn’t have time, and this lifetime was not a good opportunity to get to know Jonathan better or to delve deeper into what made him tick.

Which is why that soppy letter was such a bad mistake.  And why I should have expected the Witchfinder to send for me shortly after.  I could feel him sniffing close and tracking my activities all along, ever since I’d arrived in Avalon.  Him and the other.  I should have known the moment I let the letter go – and with my tears, yet – one or the other would send for me.

Let’s be glad it wasn’t the other.  Though at first I wasn’t sure of that, not when the knocks sounded at the door to my cheap rented room bright and early that morning.  I was dressed and ready to go, my valise packed, my coat ready to put on.  In fact, I was adjusting my hat over my pile of red, curly hair – ginger, so ugly, as they would think it here – when the knock on the door came.

I did what any half-baked witch would do and sensed through the door, feeling the shape and zing of the king’s magic.  Which could be true, or a spoof, but was bad news in either case, so I backed away into the room and tried to cast a transport spell back home.  And found the path bricked.  And every path around it, equally blocked.  Whatever power had sent the men outside my door had taken care to block every magical path around me so that I could not leave.

Which meant I was trapped.  Caught like a magical mouse, in a trap.  There remained only acting innocent and opening the door, which I did, turning my limpid eyes to the two large men out there, and saying, “Yes?  How may I help you?”

They looked at me, and there was no diminution of the suspicion in their eyes, no hint that perhaps they didn’t suspect me of terrible crimes.  Of course, they couldn’t suspect me of a crime as bad as what I’d perpetrated on their world.  They were tall and dark, and had square jaws and the sort of look that said they’d seen it all and were not going to think me innocent and harmless, no, not even if I chanced to look it.

“Miss Ginevra Elfborne?” the near one said.

“Yes,” I said, and raised my eyebrows, in complete innocence.  I wasn’t, of course, but Elfborne was the closest this world could understand to what I was, so I wasn’t even lying.

“By order of his Majesty’s Witchfinder, Seraphim Ainsling, his Grace the Duke of Darkwater, we are taking you into the custody of the department of unauthorized magics.”

“Me?” I said, and aimed for innocence, but my voice fluted out of control all on its own.  Oh, I knew I was caught and it was a fair cop before that.  But I didn’t expect them to use the full name and titles of either the Witchfinder or the department.  In my opinion when people get all fancy with words, the news is bad.  It’s very bad.  “I mean, why could you wish to apprehend me?”

The one who hadn’t spoken – they looked like twins – shook his head.  “Pardon me, Miss, we’re not investigators and we’re not judges.  We’re not even judicial mages.  We’re just meant to take you to someone who can do what’s needed.  By the laws of Avalon, by the writ of Arthur, in the code of Merlin, you’ll get your hearing, and your chance at defense.  But now you must come with us.”

I started towards the door, then backed for my valise, picked it up, and, as I walked towards them tried a Cerberus spell, thus called because it had been used once – and only once, mind, before the shields were repaired – for a human to escape Hades.  It was the sort of spell that made someone fall into a sleep so you could walk past.  Sometimes the sleep lasted very long.  One of the worlds has a silly story about a princess and her court who slept for centuries.

Revision.  Maybe it’s not a silly story.  It’s not unlikely, if it was coupled or followed by a stasis spell so people didn’t eat or breathe in their magic sleep.  I don’t know for a fact the veracity of that story, so I can’t bet either way.  Betting is bad for the likes of me anyway.

I cast that Cerberus spell with all my might, flinging it at like a net at the magical guards.  It flowed around them and then through them, as though they weren’t there, and returned to me quite untouched.  I almost screamed with frustration, and more so when one of them smiled and said, “Miss, that will be no use.  We’ve been trained.”

This is when I started fearing it was the Other who had sent for me, and the thought so chilled me that I went quietly into a magically protected carriage, from which not even the Pater himself could have transported.

I couldn’t even tell where we were, as the carriage bowled along.  I couldn’t even tell – not with magic – where we were when we stopped.

The guards ushered me out and walked with me into a vast building, where men bowed to me – or to them – until we got to a large door, which was opened for us by two uniformed men, who stood aside to let us enter.

He stood behind his desk, a good mahogany desk of graceful design which barely hid the fact that it was in fact a massive piece of furniture, with a top large enough for three normal desks, all of it shockingly piled with papers and clutter.

For a moment, when he looked up, I was afraid it was really the Other and my breath caught in my throat, but then I saw his magic pattern, plain as day, and it wasn’t something he could disguise.  It wasn’t even something he was trying to disguise.

He was dark haired, beak nosed, green eyed, as all the Darkwaters, and his magic pattern was all Darkwater, too.  Powerful, doubtless.  Very powerful.  But human and clearly solid and –

Not, definitely not, something with any spark of fairyland in it.

It will tell you how badly I was rattled at that point that the relief made me feel as though my legs had turned to water.  It must have shown in my face, because as the man behind the desk rose and bowed to me there was a small smile on his lips.

“Miss Ginevra?” he said.  “Pardon me for not calling you Miss Elfborn, but that I know you’re not.”

And this after the relief was a punch in the stomach.  “You kn–  kn—know? I said, sounding like a low-grade nymph with no more brain than magic.

The smile grew.  “Certainly.  Or do you think I don’t speak with my brother?”

I closed my eyes.  I was hoping he didn’t speak with his brother.  Or rather, I was hoping his brother didn’t give him enough access to ascertain the falsehood of my magic’s signature and the tracing of it to a supposed elf mother.

Rats! I thought, which is unladylike, but there it is.  Rats!  Which is how I was caught, more or less.  Like a rat, in an unbreakable cage.  And now I would sing for my supper.  Or did rats sing?  I could never remember how things were supposed to work in this world.

I let myself drop into an armchair facing the desk.  When caught Pater always says, there’s two things you can do.  One of them is to seduce them.  I looked at the man still standing behind the desk, his green eyes full of humorous scrutiny as they rested on me.  He didn’t trust me an inch and he was concerned enough about what I was, or who I was, which showed he was no fool.  But he was amused by me, which might mean—

I smiled at him, and the echo back had not one drop of lust.  He might as well be the Other on that, only if the rumors was truth, this one was just truly bonded to his wife, Avalon’s insipid little found-again-princess.

I sighed.  The second path, Pater said, was to act helpless and lost and to appeal to the humans best instincts.  I wondered if this one had any.

So, if I’ve sounded somewhat distracted in comments, that’s because I’ve been.  I spent  yesterday installing a program I needed in the publishing computer, which of course didn’t go according to spec.  Could I have made a better use of my time?  Probably, but I felt more than ¾ dead.  I’m not sure I’m okay today (6/26) but I had so much to do I couldn’t pause to examine the question.  There were medical appointments, taking the cats to boarding, repairman appointments, and making sure the house-sitting/outdoor cat feeding was arranged.  (The other cats had to be boarded because they are all on meds, and that’s not something we can ask our friend Charles to deal with as well as the house and Greebo, particularly since his schedule is … erratic).  There was also putting up my columns for PJmedia in advance, and now I think I can’t put these up in advance – not far enough – since I will be leaving here in the wee hours to get our plane out of Denver.  Right now, I’m doing the last batch of young-guys pants, while all my electronics charge in front of me.  (This is like dancing before me,only not.)

And the reason you shouldn’t jump off the ledge while I’m gone is because ya’ll are a big bright spot in my life which contains entirely too much work.  You’ve become sort of a little, remote, imaginary family.  (Well, sort of imaginary.  I mean, I’m almost sure you’re not in my head.)  You guys and my real family sometimes keep me from jumping off the ledge.

I don’t wish to imagine a world in which we are facing the same economic/national security challenges (It seems the motto of this administration is “Millions for tribute, not a penny for defense.”  This will NOT end well) without having each other to at least make gallows humor about the situation with?

Are we going to crash?  Are we going to crash soon?

I was on a site today where someone was saying “America will be all right, because America will always be all right.  It is your racist, sexist America that is dying.”

I’d like to point that this person a) believes in magic b) doesn’t have the slightest clue what he’s talking about. c) knows no history d) is engaging in Olympic-grade projection e)is industrial-level stupid.

Will America always be all right?  Well, the fields and the streams, and the purple mountain majesty of the song that the progressives would like to be our anthem will always be there or at least for geologic ages, and since I don’t believe the hubris-laden notion that we do much to it, will be impervious to what we puny humans enjoy or suffer on its surface.

But as for “America” as we’ve known it, as constituted… there are days I think it’s only here anymore in our hearts.  It’s certainly not here in the hearts and minds of our public servants.

So it’s time to think good and hard about that consent of the governed, because that America should be here.  It’s what I signed up for.  It’s what you signed up for.  It’s what some of us (me too!) took an oath to protect and defend.  And it’s been going away since before we were born…

So it might take a while to bring back.

Will we crash before then?  Will a crash be needed to restore sanity?

I don’t know.  Did we find the horn of plenty somewhere that forever dispenses benes?  No?  then probably we’ll crash and crash hard.  Because what can’t go on won’t go on, and printing money doesn’t make wealth, it just makes representations of wealth.

But these people don’t understand that.  They’ve gone far down the rabbit hole and think the symbol is the thing.  (Anyone for picketing outside the various mints with signs saying “Stop the presses”?)

I’d rather take the crash – and honest, even a hard crash will NOT be Mad Max.  No, trust me.  This is the same reason that after 9/11 we didn’t enact Escape From New York.  Americans are about the most decent people in the world – and have it out of the way than have it blight my kids lives.  I think most of us would rather that.

The Huns will be all right, I think, even in a crash.  We have resources, we have knowledge, we know how to do things.  We might not be as fast or as lean as we once were (I’m working on it.  Smoke out of the air would help!) but we are full of ingenuity and we don’t play by Marquess the Queensbury rules.

However, our kids are varying grades of young, and I we have friends and acquaintances and people who hold dear who will suffer.

So part of us wants to hold back the crash.  And part wants to rush it.

It’s like when I was little, and I pulled my own teeth, because my mom doing it hurt more.  We want to control the manner and way of impact.

Racist?  Bah.  Would be very interesting for me to be racist, considering Portuguese are the original melting pot (not as peaceful as the US.)  I take people as they are and look to the content of their character.  It is the people who assume certain races and ethnic groups (including mine) need help forever who are racist.  And annoying.

Sexist?  Bah.  I even have friends who are women.  Not that I care.  I’m interested EXACTLY in one person when it comes to gender and orientation: my husband.  The rest of you, men or women, gay or straight, I’m interested in your minds only.  (Sorry, dahlings, I love you for your minds.)  It is those who assume women must be helped and treated like children forever and protected from facts (And words.  Don’t protect them from words, they become, you know, able to think, and then where would we be.)who are the sexists.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think “Marxism is a computer virus for taking civilization apart.”  It unleashes envy, hatred and all unkindness onto society and treats them as virtues.  It separates into opposing groups people who would otherwise be allies.

If we crash, will be defeat it?  Will it be eliminated?

I don’t think so.  What you have to understand is that like other viruses it might have become part of our DNA.  Fairness was a brilliant idea in a small hominid band.  Now?  Not so much.  Can’t be achieved.  But envy, going under the name of fairness, can destroy all.

But I think we’re going to be too poor to afford the madness of  Marxism.  I think the gods of the copybook headings are returning.

Good?  No.  But better the alternative.

So don’t jump off the ledge while I’m gone.  You’ll be needed for the rebuilding, and you can’t desert a post of honor.

 

Pardon the scattered post.  If you’re going to Chattanooga, the Huns are trying to meet for Breakfast at the city café at 9:30 on Saturday, though the time might move if I have a panel at that time.  (I can’t find the schedule.  I’m THAT with it.)

You’ll also see me in the suite, probably with a single malt, if I can convince Speaker to share.

And if you’re NOT going to Chattanooga, be good.  And don’t forget me while I’m gone, because I have a kindle fire, and I’ll be checking up on ya’ll.

I HOPE to have a chapter of Rogue Magic for you bright and early on Friday.  Stay tuned.

 

 Because We’re The People Who DO

This is kind of the opposite of Galt – though I’m still advising you go mini-galt if you can and full galt if you can until push comes to shove – but I’d just like to remind you that most of us, here on the side of the constitution, on the side of the Odds, on the side of American exceptionalistm, are the people who do things.

I was chided today while getting my hair cut (not really, my hairstylist is a nice guy, but he said he’s learned to cut despite this) because I can’t stand still.  There’s always the little movements.  Attention deficit disorder is a way of life.

However, concomitant with that is an interest in just about everything, particularly how to DO things – both useless and useful.

For instance, when I got married, I had no clue how one went from the pasta in the package to cooked pasta.  My first day in the apartment alone was a “uh?”  and I read the instructions on the pasta.  Over the next three years, I accumulated more cookbooks than some small third world countries.  In fact some of them are on the cooking of small third world countries.  (I have a collection of cooking around the world.)  Dan says for five years I never served the same dish twice, and I’ll admit I only do now because sometimes I’m very busy with other stuff.  Because learning what you can do with food is interesting and if it stops being interesting, I stop being able to do it.

I’ve also learned how to reupholster sofas (by doing it disastrously wrong once, of course,) how to do carpentry, how to paint walls, how to do crochet, how to do various styles of embroidery, how to do some dress making – and if I can find the time/opportunity, I’ll take courses in knitting and dressmaking.

I do things.  I like to fix things.  I like to organize.  I like to build useful stuff.  Long ago, when he was unemployed for a while, and then got a job, Dan brought me home a gift: it was an antique dresser that had been kept in someone’s barn and had come apart piece by piece.  He got it for me as a toy.  It was our big celebration.  (If you’ve been to my house, you know it’s in the boys’ bathroom and falling apart again.  I MUST find time to fix it.)

I’ve removed and installed kitchen cabinets.  I’ve laid carpet and hardwood flooring.  I’ve planted gardens (except in this house, where nothing will grow) and despite brown thumb made them grow.

And you know what?  That’s part of the US exceptionalism, too.  It’s starting to percolate in other countries, but it’s not the same.  Here, there is a higher percentage that looks around and goes “well, it needs doing, and I might as well…”

I remember once, shortly after 9/11 I was very depressed, and went out for a walk.  It was a relatively warm day after a cold week, and people were out, fixing their houses, installing windows, repairing roofs, cleaning gutters.  It seemed like everyone was out doing stuff, and I thought “we will do.”

Of course, even in America the ones least likely to do it are the pampered flowers of privilege.  The ones most likely to do stuff – useful stuff – to learn and use useful stuff are people like us.

We’re the people who do.

At the bottom of everything, if salvation will come at all, it will come, as someone (sorry, I can’t remember who) said in the comments “from a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere.”

What this means is, that our elites are in many ways very stodgy people.  First, as I said, they most of them suffer from 3^rd generation blight.  They were eased through life.  They never met real challenge.  They’re not the most creative people around.

So… they’re carefully trying to close off every avenue of creativity and prosperity that individuals can create.  But they’re not us.  They don’t really “get” us.  They’re like the aristocrats of the ancient regime, very good at the life of Versailles, but ignorant of how the real world works.  I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them never MET a working class person in their lives.  Not to talk to.  They’ve perhaps had short conversations with working class people in the service professions when handing in dry cleaning or ordering an espresso.  That’s it.

And they’ve certainly never met people like us who are competent with our minds and our hands: and this is (I think) still most of America.  We are or can be competent in both realms.  And we don’t blush to use our hands.

So, they’ll miss stuff.

While you’re going mini-galt – cutting back on what you spend, making do or doing without, repurposing, reusing and reinventing —  if you’re going to spend time on entertainment, make the entertainment learning something new: whether it’s how to cook, how to clean really well with cheap products, how to knit, how to re-sole shoes, how to carve, how to do box-container gardening, or even how to play an instrument.  I highly recommend the teaching company’s great courses, too.  The history can be a little politically correct, but the hard sciences are usually okay.  Learn as much as you can.  Think of your mind as a compost heap to which you throw new material and new skills and allow them to ferment.  Encourage your kids to do the same.

First, because, if things get really, really, really bad – and if the immigration bill does make it through the house, they will and fast – the more skills you have, the more likely it is that you can find something you can do that will allow you to survive.

Second, because the more you know, the more you allow the fields of knowledge to cross-pollinate, the more likely you’ll come up with something startling that open new ways of life and totally circumvents what our would be Lords and Masters plan for us.

Look, they spent almost a century crawling their way through the institutions and then, just as they were in total control, the computer revolution – something they ignored as that thing geeks did for a long time – destroyed their monopoly in the arts and the media and will at least seriously dent their monopoly in education.

Where will the next breakthrough comes from, that changes the game?

Who knows?  I can’t quote from memory but there’s a passage in the beginning of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress where Heinlein explains that you can’t predict a breakthrough that requires genius, except that you can predict it will happen, just not when where or what it will be.

I have this theory that the more things you know, the more things you try, the more you are ready for every contingency, the more you become the contingency.  You put yourself in a knowledge and action rich environment and suddenly the discovery happens.  You flap your wings, you’re the butterfly, and the world changes in ways no one could have predicted or prevented.

We have this over the forces of Luddites and statists.  We can DO.  They can only try to control those who do.

I can hear you say “but what I can do is nothing.  All I can do is… tell stories, build a piece of furniture, cook a meal, rescue a cat—

Do it.  And extend from it, and become really good at what you do.  It’s not just the genius who breaks through who makes a difference.  The person who was there to cook the genius a meal or feed his cat counts too.  Or perhaps the person who cooked that person a meal or told that person a story.

We believe that individuals acting in their own best interest can improve things.  We have history on our side.

We also have insatiable curiosity and tireless interest.  Let’s use those.

Learn.  Learn widely and do fearlessly.  Heinlein said specialization is for insects.  And many people would like everyone to be insects so that they can easily be controlled.

Don’t jump from that ledge.  Instead make yourself as unpredictable as possible.  Learn so much that you’re the one who can come through in a pinch.

Learn to pull a rocketship out of a hat.

 

A post on Breakage and healing is over at Mad Genius club.  And I’m going to apologize to my subscribers.  I promise to update that page after Liberty Con.  Trying to cue the blog, write the non fiction columns for PJM and finish a short story is about all I can do before Thurs. early.  After I come back, I’ll have models of shirts to pick from, and other stuff.  Just bear with me a little while.  I can do almost everything.  Just not all at once.

Go!

Because We’re Still Americans

So, our self proclaimed elites (Despite their ivy league degrees, I’ve yet to see one of them who could make it into/through the lowest ranked community college without connections/special considerations/money/help.  And I doubt their ability to get through the day without minders.) have decided what they need is a more compliant populace and like the infernal racists they are, they think they can get that by importing people with a darker skin shade.

It worries me and others – and it should – not because of the skin shade of those being imported (bites back very strongly on pungent remark about other elites who thought it was okay to import dark skinned people to do what the elites wanted them to.  History repeats first as tragedy and then as farce.  We’re in the farce portion) but because of the reasons they’re being imported.  It’s bad enough when your government is importing people to do “what Americans aren’t willing to do” at a time when Americans are willing to take any job at all, if only the government will let them contract for work without interposing itself with regulations and demands for paperwork. It’s much worse when your government is advertising abroad all the benefits you can get at the expense of the US taxpayer, if you will just move here and refuse to or can’t work.

It worries us because quite bluntly, our society is having enough trouble looking after those who have fallen through the net.  The fact that the economic wounds are largely self-inflected doesn’t make them any less painful.  I don’t believe there are people who don’t have anything to offer society in the way of meaningful labor, but there are quite a few who can’t measure up when you weigh against their labor having to pay minimum wage.  Most people with some experience are worth minimum wage, but most kids – even smart kids – aren’t.  Sorry, it’s a fact of life.  They have to learn things like punctuality and that their wants that day count less than the job.  Until then, very few of them are worth minimum wage.  And frankly, none of them is when you count in stuff like the paperwork required to have an employee, the regulations that must be satisfied, and the matching Social Security contributions. (If you don’t have an employee you have no idea.  It’s almost a full time job complying with everything.  Frankly, even for a part time employee.  I could afford to pay someone, half time, to help with secretarial and management.  But then I’d have to hire them full time to do their own paperwork, and that I can’t afford.)

I favor, as I’ve said before, instead of minimum wage some type of assistance program where people working full time are given enough to make up what they’d get if they were working minimum wage.  (Favor in a manner of speaking.  I’m a libertarian who thinks all taxation is theft.  But of the things I CAN get, I think that would distort the market least.)

The other thing that worries us  – or at least worries me – is that culture isn’t plastic.  No, it is not hereditary.  No, you’re not stuck living with the culture of your ancestors because you wee born that way.  If I adopted a little girl from China tomorrow, she would be more Hoyt than anything else, by the time she got to be 18.  (And if I won the lottery tomorrow I would.  And… poor kid.  Maybe that’s why I never win the lottery/become a bestseller.)

Culture is acquired from your parents and your environment.  Most of it is acquired at pre verbal times.  (Yes, it might link in with certain hereditary characteristics, but the BS in biology down the hall tells me the human genome is too complex for us to determine that.  Are the kids slightly more unorganized than they should be because their mom is Portuguese-born, or because they were raised by a writer mom who is likely to forget stuff like meals while she’s working?  — I’ll note in passing that for Portuguese culture I’m almost unreal in my clock-work like organization, and that I was often accused of being German.  I’ll also note from what I see I’m about medium for the US, except that I’m trying to do six jobs at once.)  You can change how you react and how you interact with people VOLATIONALLY.  This is called acculturating.  I did it more or less on purpose, but it is more complex than it sounds, and it required things such as stopping reading in Portuguese (though part of that might have been needed only because I wanted to write in English, and sound American.  There is a different tempo to the Portuguese narration.  Never mind.)  Most people who come here, even the ones who want to become American, can’t or aren’t willing to do that.  They seek the comfort of their hometown newspaper, back home.  Or, now that there’s the internet, they stay linked to family via email on a daily basis.

I don’t know how that last will affect it, but I know that most people used to take three generations to integrate.  How that works now, particularly with the enshrining of victimhood, and particularly if you’re a darker shade of skin (even if it’s a very light brown like the boys) I can’t tell you, but I suspect it’s harder.

It is a human thing to use what excuse you have ready to hand to explain away your failures, even when the person you’re explaining them to is yourself.  It also gives you a bad incentive not to try as hard.

I suspect a lot of people will glump through life, demanding all the special perks because they’re “victims” and refusing to accept that they might not be working as hard as others, because after all “systemic racism” and “white male privilege.”  (These same people, in a more traditional system, like, say, Islam, would accuse genii of cursing them.  Do genii exist?  Probably not, but in that society people believe them, and it provides an excuse.  The same with “Systemic racism” and “white male privilege.”)

This makes the importation of a large contingent into our society at best problematic and at worst dangerous.  The Tsarnaev brothers were after all just such immigrants, nurtured by us on social security and resentment.  (And they are, btw, whiter than I.  Religion is culture but culture is not race.)

I don’t know why the elites want this.  Oh, some of them, definitely want a new electorate and have illusions of bringing in a contingent used to quasi-feudal rule because  they fancy themselves as the new rulers of the new peons.  Others of course feel guilty.  They know that if they’d been thrown into an inner city high school with no connections, no help, not only would they not have survived, but they would never have managed to learn enough to graduate.  They also know that by the standards of thirty years ago, they have a ninth grade education if that.  In other words, like everyone whose success wasn’t earned, they want to atone.  Frankly, I wish like medieval rulers they just build Cathedrals.  It would be both more aesthetically pleasing and, ultimately, better for society.  (All societies.  Mexico thinks it’s unloading its lowest levels of society on us, and getting money back to boot, but they’ll find in time that when you export your “lower class” you also export those more likely to innovate.  Or maybe for them that’s a plus. They’ve been stagnant how long?)

However the China-lust of our ruling class (“We should be more like China.  They know how to get things done”) leads me to believe the main idea is that them little brown peoples are more subservient, and if we had more of them we could do things more like China, by main force and command.  (I did say that our elites are racist, right?)

…  And they’re going to fail.

I want you to step back from that ledge, I want you to take a deep breath, and I want you to know, to the bottom of your heart, to the tip of their toes that the “New Electorate Project” is going to flop.

I’ve given you some of the reasons, two days ago.  First, the self-deportation process is well under way.  You can see it in what’s stocked in your area.  You can see it just walking around the street.  (It might not be as complete in some areas, and some areas were more taken over when it started and it will take longer to SEE the difference.  Also, of course, in rural areas it will linger longer, because I know for a fact most farms simply cannot survive without illegal labor (see minimum wage/regulations/paperwork.  The margin the farms operate on is not that wide.)  However, most people have noticed a difference, even if it’s unreported.

Yes, the “legalization” will be huge on paper, but I doubt most of those people intend to live here – they just want to file for social security/disability.

This of course means those systems crash fast.  (They’re already on the verge of crashing.)  Part of the “importing a new electorate” project assumes that the blue model goes on forever, and that payments are secure and unlimited.  It ain’t so.  My generation came of age knowing we’d never see a cent from social security.  It’s gotten worse.  It’s gotten bad enough that those getting money from social security might not be able to much longer.  I think that at some point we do triage and give minimum only to those who need it absolutely to survive.  No, I don’t WANT this – it’s just inevitable, with a falling birth rate.  And no, importing illiterate workers doesn’t help.  This is not the twenties.  There are no great factories waiting for them to walk in and work on.

And that’s a good thing, of course.  By and large this country has dispensed with dangerous, labor-intensive work – except in farms, though even then it’s been lessened.

But it’s also a hint of things to come.  When I was born, mid-twentieth century we had some innovations and things had gotten cheaper, but the world would have made perfect sense to someone born a century earlier.  (Particularly where I lived.)  You could take someone from the nineteenth century and plunk them down in the middle of the twentieth, and after some adjustment, they’d go “oh, right, motors are different, carriages have motors, blah blah” but the structure of life would make perfect sense.  There would be homes, families, hospitals, schools, factories, office buildings.  Once they adapted to the minor tech innovation (and humans are very adaptable.) they’d “get” what was going on well enough.

Now… not so sure.  We’re only at the beginning, so they’d still identify a lot of things, of course, and they’d fail to see the significance of the fact that you can communicate instantly, in real time around the world.  They’d think it was just a “neat” thing.  A lot of people today think that too.

Part of that is because we’re just at the beginning of the revolution.  It’s hitting my business first, so I can tell you it’s dispensing with factories, with warehouses, with centralized distribution.  It’s a HUGE change.

The change is coming to other fields.  Schools are dead, but still walking.  Most factories, too, once three-d printing gets going.

Am I saying technology will save us?

Oh, my Lord NO!

Rapid change brings on upheaval.  The last change almost (but not) this fast gave us… the French Revolution and its sisters around the world.

It’s going to get rough.  It’s going to get really rough.  At the end of this where you live will mean far less than where you work, and the two might be half a world apart.

Does this mean territorial location and territorial nations will mean nothing?  Well, no.  It means stuff we can’t even imagine yet, but not that.  After all, my friends are around the world, my publisher is in North Carolina, but I am still affected by a disaster in my area, and how my neighbors live still matters.

What it means, though, is that people will be increasingly more free.  The territorial government will mean something, but not as much as it used to: labor regulations/welfare/laws about what you can’t and can’t do for a living – all of this means much less when you can live one place and work the other.  The same for what you can do for play.  The same for the interest rate that controls what home you can buy.  Regional jurisdictions, like NYC who rely on a highly paid work force are going to be upended, because people can work there and live elsewhere.  The same, writ large goes for national governments.

I have no idea, none, what the world will look like at the end of this.  And neither do you.  And neither does anyone else.  So called “futurists” are usually missing ten or twenty little points that could be all that determines the future.

But I do know one thing: where you live will still matter, as a locus of culture, law enforcement and neighborliness.

And I know another thing: we’re likely to come out on top.  We’re likely to come out on top for the same reason that our elites want a new electorate – because we’re not a normal nation.

We’re the descendants of those who left everything, who acculturated to become something new united not by blood, not by tribe, but by the words of the constitution.

The constitution is more flexible than tribe or blood. The constitution was forged to meet circumstances no one could have foreseen, a new world, new ways of doing things.  It was a document supposed to underlie a nation as tough as granite, as flexible as steel. A creature the world had never seen.

There is a reason that for the last hundred years, the future has come from America.  Even when inventions are made elsewhere, they are applied and popularized here.

We Americans are more flexible than those who chose to stay behind.

The cowards never left, the weak died on the way and the pusillanimous went back, tail between their legs.  (As will many of the new ones, when the teat goes dry.)

Those who became American are crazy people, ready for any challenge.

We are a people of the future.  The future can’t scare us because it’s where we come from.  We are impatient for it to arrive, curious about what it will bring, excited about our opportunities in it.

Let the elites rule and mandate.  You concentrate on what you can do that they never thought of.  You create a future they can’t comprehend, much less affect.

Step back from that ledge.  You’re an American and you belong to the future.

 

NOTE: If you’re interested in the future of SF, you should also read Amanda Green’s post at Mad Genius Club: Why?

*Yes, I do realize this post is relatively lightweight, and that a lot of the points can be debated.  I woke up late, nauseated and dizzy.  I’m hoping I’m not coming down with “what’s going around” because we have to fly out soon.*

At Least It’s Not The Seventies

Those of you too young to remember the seventies – looks towards the kiddy table – might not realize why this is a good thing.  Yes, I do agree with the Professor that at this point Carter is an (unattainable) best case scenario.  However, that’s politics, and politics is always several decades behind life.

Yes, I know tons of scientific advances and amazing stuff were being one in the seventies, but – either because the mass media controlled the dissemination of what it wanted to show – or (and having lived through that time I incline to the second) people really believed this bizarre stuff, a lot of odd ideas got credence in the seventies that right now only apply in highly specialized areas… like in colleges, or among the very young and the very stoned.

–          This is the dawning of the age of aquarius was semi-respectable.  No, the religious and the older people didn’t really buy into this, but “what’s your sign?” WAS a normal gambit for opening conversations.

I’m not going to discuss the relative merits of astrology, but I’m going to say when an entire civilization formed on the enlightenment principles chases after it, things have gone seriously wrong.

–          Psi power is the future.

It might be – but if it is it needs to be tamed and brought within the realm of the “studyable” (totally a word, shut up.)  It wouldn’t be the first odd knowledge to become mainstream and studied, HOWEVER – and this has been discussed ad nauseum on these pages before, both by me and the commenters when they were intent (for reasons known only to their psychiatrists) on creating a brand new magical world – the way we’ve gone about it is clearly wrong, and event he “best scientific efforts” of places like the USSR have failed to do anything.  “But Sarah,” you say.  “All the scientific advances from the USSR proved to be the ones they’d stolen, pretty much.  So their process was wrong.”  Oh, sure, as Solyndra proves top-down scientific research doesn’t work.  Also, note I’m not saying there are no psi-phenomena.  I couldn’t.  And any writer who can uses a different process.  BUT as discussed here, right now it seems to be powered by something that’s notoriously observation-shy.  This causes it to be a hot bed of trickster activity (some of it psi – read The Trickster and The Paranormal.)  But in the seventies, any number of otherwise educated people (Heinlein!) believed that a lot of our science could be profitably replaced with psi-stuff.  Even scientists believed that.  Again, maybe this is possible in the far distant future, when we tame the unobtanium that powers psi, but they thought they were in the process of doing that, and it was just around the corner.  Again, when a lot of people believe that, at our current level of knowledge of it, something has gone seriously wrong.

–          Communism is the future.

Yes, even a lot of people on the right believed this.  No, seriously, they really did.  You see, there were all those figures coming out of the USSR (like the ones coming out of China now – snort!) that said how much more efficient a controlled economy was, so of course, in the end they won.  A lot of the race on the right was to create a parallel, equally controlled but more humane system, so that in the end our system would win.  This was essentially social democracy (and sometimes Christian democracy.)  A lot of the GOP cut their teeth in this era (those older than me by a few years.)  This is why they act the way they do.  (Juan McCain, say.)  This is why their whole attitude is “the same, only slower.”

The fact they were wrong wrong wrong takes a while to percolate and might necessitate their death.  Whether we collapse before that, who knows, but at least we’re no longer there and the new generation doesn’t assume controlled is better.  Which is good because:

–          All tech is mass tech.

Even though things like Future Shock talked of micro manufacturing, no one believed it.  Now it looks likely to be the thing of the future.  Also things they didn’t know were in the future include blogs, information transfer, the ability for the individual to do more and have more power than ever before.

This makes the future horrifying, upside-down, and very much OURS.  “Ours?”  Yep, the odds, because dahlings, when the going gets weird, the weird get pro.

–          All Children Must Go Through State Indoctrination School

Yes, I know the homeschooling movement began in the seventies.  It was also mostly “unschooling” which only works if your kid is self-motivated and driven.  (I suppose in the end what I did with younger son came close to that.  He would spend the morning sprawled on my bed – it’s largest and my office is across from it – reading golden age SF, then write me essays about how the science and tech have changed, and that was a school day.  Or he lectured me on Greek Myth while we gardened, and that was a “test”.)  But now it is respectable, it’s becoming the default in some places, and there are so many resources.

-If You Don’t Want To Have Sex With Everyone, You’re Repressed &

In The Future There Is No Marriage.

Turned out those were only true in France.  Okay, only the second one.  Despite the statistics, etc, and despite the spectacular damage that the economy and the crazy fems have done on our kids’ chances of marriage, I believe we might have turned the corner.  At least there are fewer movies pushing general, forced promiscuity as the only way to be sane.

Mind you, now the feminists believe having sex with a man at all is a betrayal of the cause, but that’s something else, isn’t it?  When the most idiotic thing around is political neo- Victorianism it’s not good, but it’s considerably better than the Brave New World Assumption that you must have sex with everyone, all the time.  When THE gay cause is the securing of the benefits of marriage to same sex couples… We’ve won.  No, I know some of you don’t feel that way, but compare it to the “marriage is just a piece of paper” cause.  We’ve won.  In the future, we’re all married.  (But not to each other, en masse, because that would be icky.  Some of you don’t wear pants.)

–           UFOS

I leave it as a class exercise whether there are UFOs.  I mean, some of Puppet Masters’ is right on it, there could be real ones, in the mass of insanity.  But by the late seventies, we were getting the “UFOs are a spiritual phenomenon and these aliens tell us how to save the Earth” BS and no, really, no. Even Marxism is more rational or at least “integrated” as a religion.

–          Things Just Get Worse

I know that this is hard to believe, but it was expected then that double digit employment rates would last forever, that the economy would just get worse.  We had too many people, see, and the future was grey, starving and awful.  Again, they’re trying to resurrect that.  Don’t buy it.  It’s a lie.  (Though in most of Europe, which never had a Reagan, the 70s now look like a high point for stuff like savings and employment – not in the PIIGS though, they got tons of money from EU and…  Okay, those indicators still suck, but they do have more consumer goods.)

–          Bell bottoms, that particularly horrible brown that was everywhere.  That particularly

horrible orange that was everywhere, too.  Afro perms, even for guys.  Psychedelic wall paper. Yoko Ono.  No, this is not a “tastes cannot be disputed.”  It’s a “EWWWWW”

–          We’ve Learned

We’ve learned.  At least those of us not in the political class.  Most of these ideas bring out a half-laugh, sometimes embarrassed because we bought into them when we were very young.  Reading some of middle Heinlein does the same.  “Oh, sensitives, RAH, really?”  It’s hard to remember this was “respectable” at the time.  And though our kids are indoctrinated into Marxism, now they’re told it didn’t go right before, not that it’s the way of the bright and shiny future.  And the kids have a reckoning coming (poor things.  Unfortunately those of our kids who have been brought to reality have to go through it with them) and they will learn.  Some already are.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that communism is not our inevitable future.  And that’s enough.

Don’t jump off the ledge.  It’s not the seventies.  We’ve learned some, and the years between have proved us right and opened new tech options that are on our side.

In the end, we win, they lose.  Whoever tells you otherwise, just wants you to stop fighting.

How to learn to stop worrying and shrug off Amnesty.

Or Part I of This Is No Time To Go Wobbly

I’m baffled about the reactions to the amnesty bill around the web.  One side thinks it will be a good thing and that it will erase, at the stroke of a legislative pen, thousands of years of history and learned culture and make the people living in our midst and not integrating as American as Apple Pie.  They’re wrong, of course – and I’ll explain.

The other side thinks it’s the end of the US as we know it.  They are also wrong (though the end of the US as we know it right now is sort of in the cards, anyway, but that’s not the end of the US as constituted) though for reasons that are not as immediately obvious and that will take a little while to explain because the misconceptions in this case are shared by both sides (and a little funny for someone who has been alive and aware the last few years, but I guess those centuries of culture and ingrained history are hard to shrug off too, even when they’re not working as expected.)

I will concede that the amnesty bill passing, (and our betters DO seem to be determined to shove it down our throats) will hasten a collapse but it says nothing on what will come after.  And the collapse I’ve known is coming for at least two years, the only question being now or later, hard or soft landing.  Passing the amnesty will prejudice it towards near term and hard landing.  Is that worse than long term and soft?  I don’t know.  My friend Bill Reader thinks it would be best short term and hard – that the disruption will be shorter and what’s coming better – but I’m a wussy.  On the other hand, his arguments have long sounded convincing to me.  I just prefer long and soft because I’ve experienced it before and know coping strategies.

I’ll add that long term and soft might be impossible in any case, because the whole world is crashing and it all feeds on each other (and part of the reason is that the US has been propping up the tent a long time.  Our president misunderstood the resentment abroad.  He thought the prosperity of the US was holding other people down.  This is Marxism, which is a mystical religion with zero contact points with the real world.  In fact, the rest of the world resented us because we were enabling them to be semi-prosperous and not giving them the kick in the fundament they so sorely needed, and also because they knew they depended on us.  They were in fact like forty year olds (still) living in their father’s basement, and resenting the father with every fiber of their being.  Worse, I think the US is more of a mother, since we tend to be all soft and cooing and supporting.  Part of the resentment he encountered in Europe on this tour is that people are starting to realize he’s removed the pole from the tent of world economy.  They’re still not admitting to it, consciously, but subconsciously they know it.)  The hard landing might hit us anyway.

Again, erase ideas of running around cooking neighbors au gratin.  Even a hard landing is not that bad.  And even during a hard landing, some people do very well indeed, both those with the hard skills to do things that need done (maintain infrastructure, build needed stuff, even cook and clean – skills we’ve almost forgotten in our hyper-prosperous times) and people who can provide escapism: musicians, story tellers, writers, even artists, if they can pull you away from the dreary circumstances for a moment.  (I’ve mentioned before that at the hardest point of our economic life, a kid, an income that fell short a few hundred a month, no friends in town – Columbia SC – and 20k in debt, we spent what amounted to a week’s worth of grocery money to buy an illustrated book of DaVinci’s art.  The reason we did that was that leafing through it didn’t quite give me hope, but it lifted me out of the awful circumstances we were living in and improved my mood for hours.)

A collapse is bad, but it’s not Mad Max.  Envision a somewhat worse Great Depression where the government isn’t able to give you make work (which might be better in the long run.)  We’ll still have the net.  We’ll still have what infrastructure we have.  Many regions will be perfectly functional, but some will go under spectacularly.  Mostly the regions you expect:  I wouldn’t give a groat for the chances of either Detroit or New Orleans and Chicago will get “interesting.”  There you might get a sort of poor man’s Mad Max.

Yes, some people will starve.  Unfortunately a lot of those will be those who have trouble treading water in the world as is right now.  And I don’t mean just the homeless.  You live in fandom, many of you.  Look to your friends and less plugged-in-to-reality acquaintances.  Help where you can.  The water will get very choppy.  Note I’m not saying we should let them starve – those of us who can afford to help, should.  We’re trying to ensure we can survive AND help others – I think that’s everyone’s duty.

Because the crash is coming whether amnesty comes or not.  To that it’s irrelevant, save for maybe hurrying it.

Now, amnesty proper – what those (yes, even Libertarians) pushing the bill forget is double edged: first, culture is persistent.  You cannot decide to change the culture on a whim.  (That’s a progressive experiment and look how their experiments always end, because the human isn’t that plastic.)  Unlike a lot of people both on the left and right I vehemently oppose the idea that culture is genetic, but I KNOW how they got the idea. Culture is persistent.  You absorbed it from your parents, and you pass some of it on to your kids whether you mean to or not.  Culture is also community.  This means that Second, to acculturate is to die a little.  I’ve mentioned before my regrets, my soul-ache at the idea that I had to leave behind my family in Portugal and everything I shared with them.  You might not understand that this means more than just “I can’t spend much time with them.”  In a way I had to die a little.  I had to disconnect myself from the person I was, back there.  It’s now visible to me only through a veil.  I can sort of remember why I did things, but I can’t always understand them.  When I go back, the body language, the interactions, everything is strange to me, and it hurts with the duality of knowing I was once of them – I once belonged there.

When you renounce all allegiances foreign and domestic and really undertake to become American, it’s more than a legal thing.  You’re renouncing part of yourself.

I’m not lamenting.  I wanted it that badly, and always felt a little foreign in Portugal.

But there are two requirements – you have to want it badly.  You have to want to be American, and be willing to lop off parts of you that don’t fit.  This is my some number of immigrants either go back, or they come to resent the host country.  They want to do this and can’t, and blame the host country for “requiring” it.  This is a fallacy.  America doesn’t require it.  It requires it less than any other country.

And that’s problem one of the idea that legalizing illegal aliens will make them American.

Let’s start with who they are and why they’re here.  Most them are here through dire economic need (which is why I don’t hold breaking the law against them.)  And most of them came here by land, and can go home in less than a day.  Most of them have been living at the edges, viewing the US as an alien body on which they feed.

They bring their culture with them.  They come here in big groups, speak their language, behave in the ways that were appropriate back in the home country.  Have to.  Attempts at integrating and “acting American” will be punished by their community (trust me on this, this was true even among exchange students.)

“Oh, you are just saying that.  You realize that Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, all of those also came here in big groups; many came in illegally; they lived at the margins and held the old line, but they all have integrated.”

Yes, of course.  I also realize high crime in those communities remained high for a generation or two, as the integration was taking place.  Because those people had come here not for a great love of our laws but to find streets paved with gold, it took two to three generations to integrate.

The difference is this: back then we expected immigrants to integrate.  There was no “Push one for Spanish, push two for Serb-Croat, push fifty for Cantonese.”  Because it was assumed culture was not genetic (look, it isn’t.  Truly.  If it were, you’d all be living like people in the fertile crescent.  Okay, even accounting for evolution and genetic drift, not very far off) it was not cruel to require people to learn English to transact official business.  Nor was it considered evil to say you should leave your public/political culture behind, or that frankly we don’t much care what race you think you are, you should become American now.

Also, most of those immigrants couldn’t live here and keep in complete contact with the people back home.  I have to tell you even with the best will to acculturate, I might not be able to do it now – it required a distance, an inability to keep in touch with the people at home for no cost every day.  The internet would have made that very difficult.  As I said, you have to die a little.

With people from north, central and south America, people on the same continent it’s harder.  What you get is what I saw when I was a kid in Portugal: people would go off and work in France, or Germany, or England, but they’d come “home” for every holiday, their kids would be baptized at “home”, they’d get married at “home” (and if you could at all arrange it to someone of Portuguese stock, if not someone in the mother country.)  And then the kids would either settle in Portugal or resume their back and forth ways.  Because these weren’t permanent migrants.  They worked until they could build a house back home.   Then if they found they ran into financial trouble, they went back.  In the host countries, they never integrated (though a lot became citizens, for the benefits.)  They just lived in their communities, and went back home when needed.

Getting French or German citizenship was an aim, not because they wanted to become part of those countries, whom they always viewed as alien, but because they wanted to collect pensions (being able to claim disability was a big coup) and retirement, which allowed them to live like kings at home, where life was cheaper.

Those who stayed and integrated did it because places like France have an unapologetic integrationist policy (or did.  If they still have it, it’s not working for the Muslims.)  You went to kindergarten at three, you were taught to be FRENCH.  No other languages allowed in the school (I know this because one of my little cousins grew up in France) and no nonsense about wherever you came from.  You got the history of glorious France, you were taught to sing the Marseillese, and you got told that you should WANT to be French.  Some of those kids still returned to Portugal, but about half, I’d judge, became French.

Now add to that the poisonous mix of our education– our universities and the culture-in-the-genes, race and grievance theorists in those.  Heck, even in our high schools.  Oh, forget that, even elementary, where they tried to shame me into “passing on your children’s culture” as though, you know, it were their culture when they’d spent a total of maybe a month in touch with it.  Also, of course, it was their “culture” even though his father’s family has been in the US since the first English immigrants arrived in New England.  Because foreign cultures are magic, and one drop and all that.

The second generation of these legalized illegals will not be taught that they are to be AMERICAN.  Instead, they’ll be given every incentive to identify with a mother country they don’t even know that well, to romanticize it, and, in the west, to think they have a “racial” right to these lands.

This will not end well.  There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.  The only way those people assimilate is if they get put through the grinder and go through h*ll with the rest of us and have to pick sides.

Fortunately the gods of the copybook headings look about ready to administer that correction, amnesty or not.

The people who support the amnesty are either starry eyed idealists or – the majority – crooks who think they can import a new electorate.

This might have worked fine twenty years ago.  Now it won’t.  The problem is that they’re drinking their own ink.  And so is the right, for different reasons.

First – 46 million? … does anyone believe that number?  I don’t.  It might very well have been that, at the beginning of this mess, but look here, La Gran Salida is REAL.  You might not see it in your area, but I see it in mine.  Look, our local neighborhood grocery store, so small I have trouble finding anything not routine, was starting to stock magazines in Spanish in 2007.  In fact, the majority of magazines were in Spanish.  And the Walmart in the not so good part of town (yes, I shop there, deal) might as well be in Mexico.  Products, signs, magazines, people shopping.  It was easier to find stuff for quincenera parties than for prom.

Now?  Well, first the Spanish magazines receded from the local grocery, then from the larger grocery, and now Walmart is… not Spanish.  I mean, the big signs are bilingual, I think that’s company policy, but not the products or the stuff that’s pushed, and certainly not the magazines, the music or the movies.  As for the people shopping, you see the occasional Hispanic family, but more often than not the kids and I are the only ones who look it.  (The kids more than I, frankly.)

More importantly, even in the craiglist for Denver you rarely see an ad in Spanish anymore.

Yes, there was a massive tide into the US, but the tide has receded.  Look, these people come here for opportunities they don’t have in their own lands.  If the opportunities aren’t there, they go away.

The same applies to our government’s insane idea (and yes, they’re doing this.  No, I can no longer find the link) of courting people in Mexico to come here for the benefits.  Yes, this is treasonous.  Yes, this is crazy.  No, this doesn’t mean they’re winning.  When they’re courting immigrants because “we’ll give you cash and you won’t have to work” they’re admitting we’re no longer attracting immigrants for the usual reasons.

The amnesty bill and its idea they can just get a new electorate hinges on the idea the US is infinitely attractive.  Marxists believe this, because they believe that the wealth inheres on the locale and “natural resources” which is why they ruin places like Venezuela because they THINK it can’t be ruined.  And they think the US will remain “rich” no matter how they redistribute.  So they think it will always be attractive.  The rest of us think of the US as infinitely attractive because we’re mad in love with the IDEA of the US.  But it’s time to wake up.  A poor place is NOT going to attract immigrants in droves, particularly immigrants from a warmer climate, where the living is easier in pure food/residence terms.

So, the pushers of amnesty can’t get what they want, and those on the right shouldn’t think all is lost.  The wave that comes in won’t be very big.  Now, the financial drain WILL be massive.  Why?  Everyone who can afford to will come back, claim citizenship (on paper it will be a horde) then take benefits back to Mexico.

This will speed the financial crash, but it was coming anyway. I think Obamacare will do to the economy what pouring cement into an engine will do.  It could stop a healthy economy and no matter how much they lie, this one isn’t even half healthy.  To be blunt, it’s already on life support.

That means at some point there will be no mo’ benefits, not for half-baked citizens and not for others either.  As I said, prepare your landing pad, and prepare to help others whom you care for.

The other assumptions baked into this amnesty bill are that:

 

Things will go on as they are, more or less forever, boom or bust, the US will come through and remain the house that FDR built, giving benefits to everyone who comes in.  Built into this amnesty is the expectation of another and another and another – none of them creating citizens, but bringing in a people who are used to having an “overclass” over them.  These people who want this fancy themselves that “overclass.”

 

Third world immigration is infinite because their population is exploding.  Again, I can’t prove this, but I’ve been in some of these countries (I grew up in one at the edge of it) and more, I have friends who have worked in others.  Yes, on paper third world population is exploding.  In reality this doesn’t seem to be true.  Most third world countries have built in assumptions of both racial virility “look how many children we produce” and of getting money per-capita from international charities and other civic bodies.  Yes, we see a lot of immigration from Arab countries, but it’s not that their population is exploding, so much, as that they’re so extremely bad at providing for the population they have.  Look, Russians are immigrating to Portugal, and no one can claim Russians have an exploding population.  Usually buried in all of this is the statistical fact that immigrant populations behave like the native population in terms of births from the second generation on.  (Latins?  The US?  Well, Mexicans DO come over the border to give birth.  Why not?  Double the benefits.  And our law keeps accreting people to the category – takes a bow – yours truly, for instance.  And there’s benefit in claiming the exotic side of your ancestry, so children of mixed marriage are “Hispanic.”  I’m not surprised the majority of births in the US are Hispanic.  I’m surprised, given incentives to the contrary, anyone is still officially “white.”)

 

One third to one half of the world population is now forever unemployable and will have to be cared for by a governmental apparatus that must make sure they survive, as a sort of forever-underclass.

This is nonsense.  They came up with the same under Carter.  It’s bokum.  Until 07 our unemployment rate was miniscule.  Europe’s was massive.  Are Europeans that much dumber?  No.  Just regulated out the hair roots.  You pay for security in lack of opportunity.

But:

 

They also assume tech will remain about the same.  Or at least that it won’t affect things much.  They’re insane.  They’re still in denial about what computers are doing.  It is possible there would be a big crash coming even without political shenanigans, which don’t help.  Why?  Because the changes in the way at least half (more like two thirds) of the people work that are already in the process of happening, would in the end have hit national economies hard.  I’ll explain this in other parts, but honestly, our government apparatus belongs to the early twentieth century and it works well enough for big industry, big media, big cities.  It can’t survive in a time of individual operators.  It can make everything crash.  But then the rebuilding will come.  Perhaps it’s ironical that the stripped-down principles of government laid down at our founding would work best as far as I can see.  They might force ourselves on the new world – which would prove our founders were truly ahead of their time.

What you have to think about is that in a world where you can work remote practically anywhere, the place you live in matters less; there will be movement from expensive to cheap places; we’ll also lose a lot of commercial real estate value (it’s already happening.)  You can change some of those to residential, but note that that is also not blooming.  The 2008 crash is nothing to it.  Then think of food, transportation, schooling.  All of that will change radically in ten years.

Will there be a crash?  Of course there will.  Though whether it looks like a crash or frantic rebuilding, it’s up to you to guess.

In the middle of all this trying to get a lot of third world peasants to come live in a country that is often inhospitable climate wise, for the sake of benefits soon to go away is forlorn.  You can for a while import a virtual army of citizens, who don’t really live here, pay no taxes, but collect benefits and vote the way you want them to.  It might see you through one or two election cycles.

But then things crash, as they become more and more divorced from reality and the gods of the copy book headings descend.

ALL amnesty can do is speed the crash.  Well… it’s not my favorite way to deal with the inevitable, and I’d like more time to prepare.  But we’ll have to prepare faster.

Don’t jump off the ledge, guys.  There’s work to be done.

 

 

I come neither to praise boomers nor to bury them.  My intent is to both explain what I love and what I hate about the generation’s effect on American society, and also the one thing I DO hate about almost all boomers (it’s a tic, I swear) and which, IM(NS)HO is what causes most of the boomer hatred from the reasonable members of my generation – the unreasonable ones are like everyone else – and the generations after.

I’ll start with a clarification – I’m not sure when in heck the media started defining boomers as going from 46 to 64, but they can stop it already.  I was born in 62 and until the nineties no one ever referred to me as a boomer.  This was when boomer was a proud designation, all the good people in movies and sitcoms were boomers.  We were… something else.  We never joined communes, the ones of our generation who smoked A LOT of pot were usually troubled (not just part of what everyone was doing.)  We – as PJ O’Rourke says at one point and I wish I could remember where – were dragged to the sit ins and didn’t sit down.  We were lectured about the age of aquarium and kind of nodded.  Then we cut our hair, put on our suits (in girls’ case skirt suits.  Remember the shoulder pads?  Yeah, I never needed them.  I have shoulders like a line backer, which was pretty funny when I was young and dainty.  Thank G-d the fashion hid it) and went to work.

To be honest, my brother, born in fifty four, was in the very last, straggling end of the boomers.  Technically two years before it should be called so.  Think about it.  The boomers are defined as being the post war generation, conceived in the great effervescence of relief after the end of the European long war.  (The latest European long war, I should say.  Europe is good at those.)  The generation was marked by one of the greatest waves of prosperity to hit worldwide and trickle down to the common people.  (Because their parents had benefitted from the GI bill?) They were the most educated generation – en masse – the world had ever seen.  (There are things that went wrong just because of that.  Anytime an industry is booming, you get con artists, and in the boomers’ case the con artists often went into education.)  They came of age in the sixties, in a great mass, straining the seams of every institution and focusing the attention of every marketer.  Everything was directed at them.  When they were very young, all the focus was on baby stuff, then toys, then…  You get the point, right.

More, except in families like mine, they normally came from very different family structures.  Most boomers I know have more than one sibling.  In my generation more than one is rare, and if you go over more than two, that’s really rare.

(In my family we had two only – mom didn’t want kids.  For reason.)

My generation – those born, say 57 on to 67 – had no name.  We still don’t.  The ones the media has tried to put on us, when not claiming we’re boomers, are repulsive.  “Jones generation” because they said we had a “jones” for what the boomers had is just silly.

I don’t remember envying the boomers.  Oh, yeah, okay, when I was young I tried to ape them – till about 17 or so – but that’s just what kids do, and besides my brother was my hero, as much older brothers are to little girls.  But envy?  No.  They were just diferent.

They came of age in the sixties prosperity and got stuff thrown at them.  We came of age with disco and the idea that we were running out of oil.  By my birth year, in my area – I don’t know here – they were starting to close schools and consolidate, aware, as it were, that the boom wouldn’t last forever.  There is a different perspective there.

If you go back and read Heinlein’s juveniles, you’ll catch the certainty that each generation will be bigger than the last and that each one of them will therefore have more power in societal activities.  My generation was safely ignored.  The marketers were marketing to boomers.  We were left to do our thing.  And that was difficult, let me tell you, because the boomers had this idea of themselves as being a different generation (we’ll go on about this, later) and therefore they had ‘generation consciousness’ (there is a story relating to science fiction, which I’ll tell later) and believed that people before – and by the time I came along – after were somehow different and inferior.  If I had a dime for every interview where I was asked about my “social consciousness” or various other boomer-generation markers, (as defined by the media) I wouldn’t have needed a job.

There was a series of comic books – Mafalda – from an Argentine, which talked about my generation.  The title of one of them was “We came afterward.”  I think if we had a title it should be “the Worriers.”  We came of age being told there just wasn’t enough for us.  We came of age to worries about overpopulation and the horrors it would bring, we came of age afterwards, forgotten, as an afterthought.

Which is why most of us resent NOW being lumped in to the boomers.  My standard answer is “Sure I remember sixty eight.  I entered elementary then.”

Many in my generation developed a knee jerk reaction “If the boomers do it/believe it, I’m for the opposite.”  This is the reaction to being lectured to from a very early age, and from having every societal signal blare at you that the people ten years older than you are all that, and you just rained on the parade.  Frankly, I’m surprised we’re not more p*ssy than that.

Trying to swallow us up just p*ssed us off more.  Go and look at the magazines of the seventies.  We weren’t considered fellow boomers.  No, the marketing industry just kept creeping that forward, partly, I think to cater to this idea they’d created of the boomers as “forever young.”

Of course the generation that came of age in the late sixties is not uniform.  It is not so anymore than any other generation is.  And it is a mistake to think of it as defined by age. The president, mind you, is one year older than I, but he is an echo -boom baby, born of a (very young) boomer mother.  His generation markers are closer to those of my older son’s (born in the last year of the echo boom): Robert’s classmates tend to be “more boomers than boomers” and talk about their parents with near worship.

However, the boomers were hit by some of the same influences, the same marking experiences: First it had to do with being the first generation born after the long war.  I’m sure at some point, even the more detached, had at the back of their heads the certainty they were the next batch of cannon fodder being reared and the war would continue.  Can you blame them for their (public, media fueled.  I’m aware a lot of boomers served with valor) reaction to Vietnam?

Second, they were a prosperous generation.  Larger numbers than ever were educated. This created a disconnect between a lot of them and their parents, particularly since (I told you I’d pick it up later) a lot of the colleges hired teachers/professors in a hurry to meet the boom, and a lot of crazy theories and marginal academics of the past generation got given credence and became mainstream.

Third, they were “homogenized” and propagandized by the media like no other generation before.  Part of this was that the USSR (don’t bitch, we have papers) spent untold amounts of money to do so, to create a sixth column in our midst (they succeeded, but not with the ones they’d expect) and part of it was simply the ENORMOUS marketing wedge to be gained from catering to these young, relatively wealthy and NUMEROUS people who all were hitting the same stages at roughly the same time.  (Bitter joke from someone my age around the eighties “Have you noticed how it’s never been cool to have babies, till the boomers are doing it?  I wonder if fifty years from now, it will be cool to die?”)

It’s impossible to be on the receiving end of that sort of thing and not buy some of the ethos.  A lot of the people from that time still think there was something… unifying about the generation, aside from the sort of influences I named.  I think that’s where the odd defensiveness “Hey, you can’t trash talk about my generation” – even when someone isn’t! – comes from.  It, of course, reinforces the stereotypes.

Fourth: a generation that large can’t HELP being a lobbying group.  As I said, boomers focused the attention of marketeers.  Now, I don’t know if they still do (I rarely watch commercial tv) but they do focus the attention of politicians.  Stuff like Obamacare was with the idea of attracting them “Hey, get someone else to pay your last-years’ health bills.  Because you can.”  Of course it’s going to hurt them most of all, but that’s only reality, not what was marketed.

Now these influences hit people differently.  I’m going to admit right here I have and have always had a massive weakness for brainy boomer guys.  The sort who are so smart they’ve never made it at anything.  The sort that took everything thrown at them and retained only one thing: new stuff is opening up, do/learn/try new stuff.  Yeah, they often went to peace demonstrations (though they probably did it for the hippie chicks) and they probably did drugs.  A surprising number of them kept the hair and the ‘tude but turned right when they aged.  O’Rourke is sort of kind of one of those, Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati is the same type halfway through maturing.

I liked guys like that so much, when I was young, that I was shocked I married someone not at all like them.  I still like them and have several friends who are like that – though they’re usually from the younger trail of the boom, born 53 to 57.  There is something incredibly charming about the way they face the world: the willingness to try stuff and the refusal to condemn those who take different paths (but aren’t doing anything wrong.)

I even like the variety of them who were too “square” to do drugs or be promiscuous but who display towards the intellectual life that same curiosity.  I’ve come across guys and girls (eh, they’re only ten years older than I) who have not only read more than I have, but more than I could read, and who have thought deeply about things I couldn’t begin to even be interested in.  Those of them that went in academia are a blessing and usually a “burdensome stone” in the midst of their unthinking colleagues (and a lot of them turned away from Academia because they hated the group think.)

Their influence in general has been good for society.  It’s hard for people to remember this – the schools (argh) have worked hard at fostering the idea that the thirties-through-fifties were normal “before the boom” times, but they weren’t.  Increased industrial production and marketing made society a lot more uniform than it had ever been.  Let’s put it this way, in the fifties, 1984 was credible.  By the seventies, not so much.  (I don’t mean the future had changed.  1984 is an exaggerated fable and was never possible.  People are not that uniform.  BUT in the fifties it was possible to imagine them becoming so.)

But other people were hit very seriously: they took the idea that they were supposed to transform the world to heart.  They took the very bad economics and redistributionist bull hockey to heart.  They took the idea that all capitalism was corrupt to heart (remember, millions spent by the USSR.)  They thought Castro was doing a good thing.  They had Che posters.

Weirdly, these are the ones who early eighties cut their hair and went into corporations.  They were by and large “daddy’s sons and mommy’s daughters,” i.e. fairly affluent and had connections.  What they’ve done to our economic life doesn’t bear examining.  Part of this was that they believed what they were taught.  (If you think of our president as an exaggerated, cartoonish version of this, you’ll see what I mean.)  The USSR was the way of the future.  Oh, without the prison camps and icky stuff, but you just couldn’t deny communism was more efficient and besides they had no unemployment and no hunger.  (Ah!)  They were bringing these wonders to America, under the third-way.

What they’ve actually done is create an unprecedented level of crony capitalism.  (which, yes, always existed.  It’s part of how humans function.) They also – or at least a substantial number of them – took cold when the USSR fell, and since then have been intent on one thing only: feathering their nest.

Then there’s what I call the Rancid Hippies.  They annoy me because at first glance you might confuse them for my favorite type of boomers.  They’re not.  They might have been hippies when they were young, they might have believed in trying new things and letting others try their own path.  But somewhere along the line they hardened into twin convictions: other people are too stupid to do what they think is RIGHT, and they KNOW what is right.

Rancid Hippies mostly inhabit the education establishment, but also the media, the arts, and oh, yeah, publishing.  This explains how well all these institutions are doing.  These people are best exemplified by “Question Authority – except mine!  You WILL obey me.”

Then come the vast number of boomers: they kind of heard the propaganda, and often have an untoward pride in “my generation” but they bought neither the snake oil of the USSR nor the “do your own thing” openness of the early hippies.  They might have a bit of both, but they were just people, trying to do the best they could.

Of course, they aped the “ooh, having babies is cool” and all that, because it was shoved down their throats by the media.

But they don’t usually go around saying “Yeah, I’m a boomer” even if they come out and defend boomers when they suspect they’re under attack – even if they’re not.  I suspect a lot of this is because anger has been directed at them because of their birth year, and they don’t realize to people my age and younger what they’re “defending”, what we identify on sight as “boomer” is the media image of boomers, not the people who were born those years.

Some of it stuck, of course, stuff like “build community” and “give back to the community” and “make a difference” were slogans thrown at them so uniformly that it would be amazing if most of them had ever examined them.  Only the smarter and more conflicted have.  The others just seem to think this is like some sort of memorized response.  It drives people like me nuts, but my generation does it too, and my older kid’s even more so.  (Your older kids? You say.  But your kids are not that far apart.  Uh, no.  But there you can see the generational waves by year.  Yes, there’s people like us, who had kids too late or too early – I always thought it was late – but Robert’s year most of the parents were ten to fifteen years older than us.  Four years later, Marshall’s classmates all had parents ten years younger than us, and we were the “old” parents.  Consider one was born when I was 28 and the other when I was 32.  It makes no sense, unless you take in account Robert about hit the last year of boomer fertility without extraordinary aid, like Hollywood stars get.)

Things that affect almost all boomers and which I find completely understandable: their refusal to have kids in the number their parents did.  If you grew up thinking you were the next wave of cannon fodder, wouldn’t you?  Also, you were being told so much was expected of you.  You were going to change the world.  Left d*mn little time for kids;  the mass demonstrations against the war (yes, I know most of you never did, but the ones who did were still a higher percentage than at any other time) – well, between the propaganda over the air waves and the suspicion the battlefields of Europe were waiting for you your whole life… what do you expect?); their unwillingness to grow up till late in life – when you’re told you’ll be forever young, why bother?  The way they treated older and newer generations, too, had to do with gaps in education and with mass propaganda.  (Let’s be glad the days of mass anything are passing.  No generation should have done to them what was done to boomers.)

That part, though, is also part of the resentment, particularly for those of us in the media, in the arts, in education.  My generation was DELIBERATELY kept away because we weren’t “idealist’ enough (i.e. didn’t agree with leftist boomers) and then we were told we were too old, and the way was opened for the echo boomers.

Don’t tell me I’m imagining things.  I would bet you if you do a head count, my generation accounts for most of the midlisters and the shattered writers.  It hit me in the face as more than a suspicion when I read an interview in Locus with one of the major magazine editors – one I admired – who said that no one under 45 had enough life experience to write.  This was around 98, I think.  I was in my mid-thirties.  Ten years later, it was breathtaking to hear the same editor talk about how there was no market for writers in their forties, because the future and the interest was in the twenty somethings, whom they were buying in droves.  Because those were their sons and daughters and aping their opinions.

I realize that’s mostly in art and writing, but I’ve heard similar stories from corporate life.  People being treated as the “bratty kid” well into their thirties and then within a few years being agglutinated to the boomers, who were ten years older, and being told there was no future for them, and they would never make it far.

Why this is important – it’s important for those born in the boomer years to realize they were sold a bill of goods and that institutions they trust are still selling them a bill of goods.  That is the only way they’re going to realize the health-care-law backed by AARP will not in fact pay for all their needs in their late years.  No, they mortgaged MY kids, and instead they’re going to get killed.  Most of them don’t know the number of slots in medschools were cut by Obamacare, even as supposed universal access was granted (and don’t get me started on how we’ll all pay the penalty and  no one can have insurance, because we can’t afford it, and how the penalty will go into the general fund, of course) and therefore what they’re going to get is “death panels.”

It’s important for them to realize they have less in common with the conmen of their generation and with the rancid hippies than with people like me who are trying to save the nation.

Those people are not your friends; the image they sold you was beautiful, but it was a fairy glamor.  It never existed.  Behind that image are the con men who take advantage of the image and the rancid hippies that are destroying art and entertainment and making education an authoritarian nightmare (yes, I know, on the framework that was there, but the command to “Question authority” bellowed from above is a special refinement.)  The free spirits never subscribed to the image – or much of anything else – and the normal people shouldn’t be defending it.  Nor should they buy the sappy adds and propaganda aimed at them.

I know it’s hard to change your mind after forty five, but I’ve seen some of you do it.  Do try. The “third way” was a lie, your generation was not particularly blessed, just large (everything else came by accretion) and you don’t have to defend the crazed rancid hippy beardo the weirdos in education.  You also don’t have to die for the Hillary Clintons of the world, corrupting the polity from within.  You can trust people under fifty five.  (Over fifty five, it’s mostly you guys and some of mine, now.)

The circumstances of your birth are not your fault, the time at which it was, and the fact the USSR propagandized you is not your fault.  My circumstances are not my fault either, and truly we’re trying very hard to forgive what the boomer gatekeepers did to us, and to remember they’re not representative of all boomers.  Most of us try to do more good than harm.  None of us are cartoon characters.  It’s time to reexamine assumptions, and it’s time to help those who came after slog our way out of a mess that started years before any of us were born, in the trenches of WWI.

We didn’t start the fire.  But we have firehoses.

The other reason it’s important is that the more you push that image at us, the more you create people who will throw the baby out with the bath water.  The more you insist on the authoritarian-non authoritarian model, the more you tell us “Resist authority except ours” and the more you talk about fighting against the man when you ARE the man, the more people younger than I will go “Everything the boomers ever thought was a lie. I’ll do the opposite.”  And the pendulum swings towards 1984.

 

*Sorry to be late and for the somewhat short chapter.  It’s been an odd day.*

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

Jonas Was Not An Instruction Manual

Lady Helen Blythe, sister of the Earl of Savage:

 

He said we were inside something – inside a living creature.  I didn’t shriek.  I pride myself on not shrieking.  Betsy didn’t shriek, either, but I think that’s because she hadn’t quite understood what he said.  Instead, she clung to my arm and looked all around with big, worried eyes.

Part of my mind was misgiving me, because I should never have brought the poor child into this adventure, and the other part of me wondered at my misgiving.  The servants had just always been there, and it was their job to do what I wished, was it not?

I looked at the big rough man in the dark suit, with his bad haircut and his blunt features.  I had a sudden feeling he would in no way agree with my assessment, since, in a way, he could be considered a servant, could he not?

Laughter bubbled up my throat, and I coughed to disguise it, and when Mr. Wolfe looked at me, I said, very seriously, “It truly is an awful smell, is it not?”

His eyes were grave, and narrowed, as he nodded.  “I suspect,” he said.  “That we’ve been… swallowed.”

I tried to imagine something large enough to have swallowed us whole, and to contain this immense chamber as well as… surely more?  I looked upward, towards the place he’d pointed, the place from which light came.  I remembered nanny reading to us about Jonas.  That was something I’d never thought would happen to me.  Sure, piracy and running away to sea…  All right, perhaps my understanding of such things hadn’t been – still wasn’t – perfect, but was it not probable that I could have managed to learn it?  Surely, even the pirate world couldn’t be more complex and baffling than the world of the ton.

But this…

Mr. Wolfe was walking, decidedly.  I said, “Where are you going?”  He turned around and looked at me blankly for a moment, then said the one word, “out.”

I hate men like that, who will answer things as though they were obvious when they clearly can’t be.  “What do you mean out?” I asked.  “You can’t know which way is out.”

He frowned a little.  “I think we’re in the alimentary canal of some large creature,” he said.  “I think one way or the other we will go out, but we must perforce go one way.”

I thought of the “one way or the other” and shuddered and almost said “you can’t mean it, which was stupid, for it was plain as his square, undemonstrative face that he did mean it.

I bit my lower lip and refused to act like a gabby.  After all, if we needed that I’d explain to Betsy exactly where we were.  I looked at her glazed looking eyes and felt bad again I’d dragged her into this.  No.  I was not a monster of cruelty.

I couldn’t however just go meekly so I said, “Why don’t we use magic?”

He clamped his hand on my upper arm and said, “Listen … lady,” the pause led me to believe he’d almost said something quite different.  “Listen, look up.”

I looked, to where the pink ceiling that was all too obviously flesh moved.  And then I saw it, the almost too subtle sparkle.  “It’s a magical animal,” I said.

“I think so,” he said.  “Indeed, I do think so.  And you will realize with the magic going bad, it would be a very bad idea to use it inside a magical being.”

“I think—” I said, then stopped, because I couldn’t explain to him that I thought we were inside the thing that shook and rattled and tried to break through beneath the fish-men city.  But he looked quizzically at me.  He hadn’t let go of my arm, and I didn’t make him.  He wasn’t holding too tightly, and his human warmth was strangely comforting in this place.  “What do you think?” he asked.  “You said you were trying to get out before, trying to transport home.  Were you two always inside this, since you disappeared?”

“No,” Betsy wailed.  It was sudden and decisive.  “Noooo.  We were in the city of the mermen, and their king wanted to marry Miss.”  She paused a moment.  “At least I think it was Miss he wanted to marry, as he kissed her.”

Now Mr. Wolfe’s eyes were concerned indeed, as he turned on me.  He moved all the while, walking close to a moving, vertical pink wall, on a little ledge that was probably tissue, although I was choosing to think of it as a path.  To the right of us, as we followed this ledge, there was a foaming… I’d have thought it was an ocean, except it smelled sulfurous, and was a deep glowing green.  I was afraid if we fell in it, we’d dissolve, but I was none too sure that the path would continue.  What animal was this?  Even when I’d heard it – if that was what it was – beneath the city of the fishmen, I couldn’t tell what it was. An aquatic animal?  The idea of the whale flashed again, but I had an idea that whales swallowed a lot of sea water, and surely it would be cleaner inside a whale.

“Tell me,” Mr. Wolfe said.

And to avoid thinking of the foaming green liquid, to avoid thinking the path might run out, I told him everything since we’d got out of my room.  For a moment I thought he was amused, when I told him how it couldn’t be any harder to be a pirate than to be a debutant in the ton, particularly given the rumors about my family.  But then his face grew grave, and when I told him about the fish place, he said, “This world is not known.”

“Well, it’s not my fault,” I said.

Strange amusement danced in his eyes.  “You know, my lady,” he said.  “You are, in many ways very young.  You remind me of my son.”

“Your son!” I said.  And then because I’d rather think of anything than actually where we were, I said.  “How old is he?”

He shrugged.  “Jimmy,” he said.  “Is six.”

“Is he very smart?” I asked.  It’s been my experience that high born or low born every parent loves to speak of his child, and I needed Mr. Wolfe to like me and want to help me.  But he only gave me an odd look.  “He is… very odd,” he said, which made  me think that Mr. Wolfe himself was very odd, but I didn’t know what to say.

“The pearls,” he said.  “Do you still have them?”

I nodded and prepared to do battle if he told me I had to toss them into the acid bath, or whatever it was on our right.  But my tense muscles relaxed, when he said, “I think they might protect us.  I think–  There is a structure…  Can you wind them around your waist, though, under your clothes, so you don’t risk losing them or their being immediately visible?  We might met with malefactors.”

I stared at him, “Inside a whale?”

He looked above us.  “I don’t think this is a whale.”

“Inside whatever it is?”

“Well, we are here, are we not?  And it looks very large.”

I didn’t like the idea.  But I shut up, extracted the pearls from my soggy pocket and did as I was told, tying them firmly in a knot.  They wouldn’t have been very well concealed, except my clothes were now such a mess that a few bulges would never be noticed.

Mr. Wolfe stopped.  “Ah,” he said.

“Ah?” I said.

“Ah.  We can’t go any further. “ He showed me pink ledge enlarged into a sort of protuberance, and then ended.

“Oh,” I said.

“Fortunately,” he said.  “It looks like I was right about there being people in here.”  He pointed with a trembling finger.  On the… green liquid, there was a very odd looking ship, with sails that seemed inflated by an unfelt wind.  It looked somewhat like the Spanish ships at the time of the armada.

“They can’t be people,” I said, my mind rebelling.

Mr. Wolfe sighed.  “Let’s hope they are.”

“And let us hope they have food,” Betsy said, with a small sigh.