According To Hoyt

Discussion here last week turned to the blog that shall not be named, at which a bunch of us used to hang out, before the owner began looking for creationists under his bed and white supremacists in his closet and was so terrified that he whipped so far left that, when last seen, he was a point of light disappearing up Stalin’s butt.

At the same time er… events precipitated a discussion of teh crazy in our own field both in this blog and over at Mad Genius Club, where my friend, Dave Freer, called it teh stupid and wondered how it affected the remaining readership in Science Fiction and fantasy when the crazy is so … inane and so in evidence.

I have a friend who has belonged to a Tea Party group in his area since its inception.  This Tea Party group is teh crazy.  He often emails me to vent, but he hasn’t quit.  Keep this in mind, it’s important.   I suspect a group of angels could go teh crazy given certain circumstances.  This is important too.

My friend’s group is in the middle of a very leftist part of the country.  This has two effects – it both makes it isolated and it makes the people who are willing to join it true outliers and ones who are either brave or crazy.  (And the two characteristics aren’t mutually exclusive.

That is the start of the pre-conditions for the setting up of the slide to the crazy: the group is not only isolated, but is perceived as so “out there” by those around that you need to be crazy brave to join.

You guys can see how science fiction – but PARTICULARLY fantasy – went down teh crazy path based on that right?  My MIL who tries to be so “normal” in everything that if your mental road had a yellow line she would be it (Hey, that’s the response of some outliers to their outlierness) not only wasn’t aware of the concept of Fantasy when I was first published (“Dear, do you realize you have sex in a book with elves?  What audience are you aiming this at?”) but she still isn’t.  The last of her parties we attended, she told everyone I should write children’s books because they’re the only ones who have minds as beautifully open as mine.  (I invite you to stand back and experience awe at the concept of a) my mind being what she calls open, which I’m sure involves my believing everything I hear.  b) the idea of my writing what I’m sure she thinks of as picture books, given the themes and points of view I’m prone to.)

Now my MIL is a reliable barometer of middle of the road for her generation, not because she is anywhere near average, but because she TRIES to be and is smart enough to have a feel for how “middle of the road” reacts.  The operative part in that is of course “her generation” since she was sixty when I first got published.

It’s changed, of course.  Or at least some part of it has changed.  Even Nora Roberts (very middle of the road.  MIL likes her) now has elves and fairies in her books.  (Weirdly, MIL doesn’t think she should write for children.)  Between movies and romance books, at this point the tropes of science fiction and fantasy are becoming mainstream.  This hasn’t translated into higher print runs.  Neither has the Great Recession.  Keep that in mind, too.

The other thing that causes a group to go crazy is how unique it is.  By this principle, science fiction and particularly fantasy writers went WAY crazier than readers, way faster, because, well… think on it, there are fewer of us.  BUT – and this is also important – there is a group even smaller and more insular than us.  Science fiction and fantasy writers, after all, live anywhere in the country and by their very nature, mingle with people who aren’t science fiction and fantasy writers. Well, I hear some people even have them in their own families.  It doesn’t apply in the Hoyt household, of course.  But editors don’t.  Yes, they work in publishing houses that have other departments, but they are/were looked down upon by the other departments (I’ve heard stories) and so socialize mostly with their peers at other houses.  (The exception being Baen which moved out of NYC and mingles with real people TM – keep that in mind too.)

You see, the other factor for teh crazy moving in and the group losing all contact with reality is to have, at its core a sub group that is completely far removed from reality and that operates internally without any checks and balances. (I suppose numbers and figures SHOULD rationally have operated as checks and balances on publishers but a) the slow instauration of a completely push model made sure that the books they favored sold more than others, no matter how inane.  B) any book that failed was ALWAYS the writer’s fault  c) the steady creep down of ALL sales in the field was shrugged off as “people don’t read anymore” – the same way that when classical music went un-listenable (totally a word) the drop in sales meant that “listeners are getting dumber.”)

So the next most important factor in whether or how fast a group goes down the crazy road is… well, crazies and how much sway they’re given.

In science fiction and fantasy publishing the crazies were driving the bus (actually I think it was a supersonic plane) until indie came in.  Heck, they’re still driving it, insofar as the bus is the official part of the field, even though sane authors have jumped out of the window long ago (or been thrown, for not being crazy enough.)  [Baen has sort of a motor scooter and has taken a side road, headed away from the precipice.  For this act, they have earned the crazies hooting and hollering at them, and pointing and calling them extreme, even as the crazies head off to lala land.]

Until recently there simply wasn’t a way to tell the crazies in publishing, “hey, guys, you’ve gone too far, and you do realize normal people will be repulsed by this story/book/what the heck is this even?”  If you did it, you got defenestrated with force, and if you didn’t chance to grab the handlebar of the Baen scooter, you weren’t going to be heard from ever again.

In the same way, the blog that shall not be named started wielding the ban hammer against anyone who so much as made a dissenting peep.  (This is easy, but it’s also why I tend to be slow on the ban hammer and let things get heated.  It is also why I think commenters need to exert a little restraint before killing with extreme prejudice.  Yes, it gets us rid of some of the hothouse plants, but any group can go down the crazy road.)

And that brings us the next factor – the crazy road.  Once you’re on the crazy road – ie. You’re different from most people around you and from most voiced opinions around you (for instance the blog that shall not be named was fiscally conservative, hawks, pro-gay and for a while at least tolerant of religion.  They didn’t fit any of the boxes.  We don’t either here, btw) letting a small minority (in the blog’s case, of one) hold sway and say who stays and who goes WITH NO FEEDBACK ALLOWED will lead to that minority’s going ever stranger on whatever road they were already set on.

What I mean by this is, while that particular blog was private, and going strange only had the effect of sending us off to start other hangouts.  HOWEVER for science fiction and fantasy going strange, i.e. further and further away from the people who would potentially buy their product just meant that they were producing more and more thing that the public was unlikely to buy, and things that were further and further out from what might appeal to the mainstream of culture.

The thing is, because group mechanics dictate that the people responsible are deaf to feedback, and that group rewards are set for those who VOCALLY AND LOUDLY endorse the small and crazy group in control, once a group has gone some way down the crazy road, the ONLY thing you can do is leave and form another group.

The mechanics that drive a group ever-more extreme are self reinforcing both due to material rewards – if they exist – or due to the human instinct to fit in.

This is how it is perfectly acceptable – normal even – and definitely career-enhancing in science fiction to declare yourself to be a communist, to wear Che shirts, or to rant about how terrible America is, in front of American audiences.  This is why it’s so radical – nay, shocking –t o write a female villain and a male hero.  (And why such work is not likely to be published.)

It is also why it is wise of Baen to publish people all across the spectrum of politics.  And why I try not to be crazily political here.  (Except for a devoted hatred of Communism.  I fail to see what’s extreme about hating a regime responsible for the death of a hundred million humans, and possibly more.)

Of course, in science fiction, the publisher community drove the writer community which in turn drove the fan community – at least that visible part of the fan community which organizes conventions and is active in reviews and prizes.

Which is what Dave Freer was despairing about in his post.  “Is there anyone left who is not of this crazy/out of the mainstream tilt?”  I.e. is there anyone who would read us.

I think there is.  I think they simply jumped out of the window three decades ago when “All heroes must be female.” And “Capitalism bad” became the default mode.  (It’s gone much worse since.)

How many times do you run across people who go “Oh, I used to read fantasy/science fiction but then I just stopped.  I’m not sure why.”

I know why.  I write the stuff, and I spent years – years! – when, except for Baen, I’d be lucky to find three books a year I wanted to even sample.  Discovering a favorite author became a rare and cherished thing and – because of the push model – nine times out of ten they had already vanished by the time I heard of them/found their books.

The thing is, it takes EFFORT to drive your audience away and keep it driven away.  People with the bend of mind to read science fiction or mystery or whatever will actively look for material to read.  (Yes, literacy has gone down somewhat, but the number of people who read for pleasure has stayed remarkably constant.  And the internet is forcing kids to at least read easily.  Writing is something different.  The whole myth of “people don’t read anymore” is just that, a myth.)

Since indie and particularly Amazon have allowed people to put things up there, and sample what they might want to read, people have started reading fields they’d given up on.  My husband, for instance, assiduously reads free samples, then buys all the books of that author that he likes, often in genres he hasn’t touched for years.  (I’ve been a little slower, because the last couple of years I haven’t had much time for reading.  Reminds me of Barbara Hambly saying “Writing made me illiterate.”)

And only that explains the way indie mil sci fi sells on Amazon.  (Like crazy it sells.  Better than Romance.)  Because for years now, the people driving the crazy bus have marginalized the genre.  But the readers remain there, and Baen alone isn’t producing enough to feed them.  So they go looking, and they talk to each other.

This gives me hope that the other fandoms are still there too: driven out of conventions; driven out of the mainstream of fandom; for years unable to find anything they want to read on the shelves; starving for good books.

I believe this is true, or at least is worth trying.  The reason my friend stays in his local tea party group btw is that if all the “not insane” people leave, then the crazy just becomes crazier, faster.  He’s trying to act as a counterbalance.

That wasn’t an option for writers or readers of science fiction and fantasy while the crazies controlled what got into print.  They don’t now.  So, don’t give up.  If you do, then you will be driving the field where the crazies wanted and making them feel they were always justified.

Instead, I say we administer shock therapy.

UPDATE: I put up a different post at Mad Genius Club, entitled Doctor Strange Writing, or How I learned to Stop Worrying And Love Pantsing.

Thomas Jefferson said that every generation needs a new revolution.  Since he was not a sociopath like Robespierre, I very much doubt what he meant was that a sort of terror should go on forever, with the heads of non-conforming lopped off.

Yes, Robespierre thought that was the ideal way to live.  This is a good example of a man’s sadism overcoming his at least reasonable intellect.  (Probably actually a brilliant intellect.  It is not necessary to be dumb to be crazy.  On the contrary.  Genius might help grease the path to insanity.)  Where did he think the population would come from the feed the blood-fountaining maw of the guillotine is beyond my guess.  Probably beyond yours too.  (Yes, I can conceive of a society of people created and force grown in labs so la revolution can be sustained.  What a grim idea.  And anyone want to bet it would find a market?)

In either case, neither Thomas Jefferson nor Robespierre could be right.  Real revolutions, the ones that are paid for in blood and take their toll in material loss, never go on forever.  They can’t.

Despite Marx’s confident proclamation that the working class had nothing to lose but its chains – like everything else that came out of his pie hole or his scribbling hand, it was the work of a man who had never been close enough to the working class to have the slightest notion what they actually had to lose or gain – most people aren’t willing to throw away what they do have (really?  Well, even the poor can have an ordered existence, fat babies, a cat or two they’re fond of) for some abstract gain and some possible enrichment.  (This is btw why no fictional revolution but Heinlein’s ever made the slightest bit of sense to me, and why in A Few Good Men I put the character in a position where he had to act or die, as well as giving those around him the inducement of near-fanatical faith.  All those science fiction novels in which the character decides it’s time to take down the evil overlords are entertaining, but not real.)

The human race – thank heavens, I don’t think enough of us would have survived, otherwise – has a profound tendency to inertia.  Even when their way of life is threatened, the impulse to do nothing and go on sort of as we are, in a decaying orbit, overcomes the desire to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them? (An attempt that nine out of ten times would be as suicidal as Hamlet was being.)

Even when nations or peoples would have done better to rise up against their wretched leadership, they usually prefer to go down with their wretched leadership.  Or, to quote a Portuguese proverb “A weak leader makes the whole nation feeble.”

This is because the fat babies win out, and the fat kittens with pink tummies, and the evenings by the fire, with spouse or friends.

So what kind of revolution goes on forever?  Oh, that is easy: a false one.  One that doesn’t exact its price in fighting or enact its cost in lives – at least not directly.

Revolution is a term often associated with the social changes of the last fifty years: sexual revolution, cultural revolution, a revolution in feeling.  Revolution, revolution, revolution.

So many revolutions, so many times the world turned upside down, we should all be getting quite dizzy and I for one am profoundly nauseous about now.

It was always a phony revolution.  The people who entrenched themselves in cultural institutions at home and proclaimed these various revolutions were the same people who called their brothers, fighting against the menace of communism “baby killers” – because what they actually meant was that they’d do anything, anything rather than fight for freedom.  “Better red than dead” was very much their motto.  (And why so many went red and never came back, not even when the craven lunacy of the move was made obvious.  Keep this in mind.  It will be important later.)

Had they met with the slightest physical resistance, they would have run home to hide under their blankie with the footprint of the American chicken.  In fact, that ridiculous symbol is the encapsulating of their modus operandi “We’re for peace, man.  Now let us shove you away and take over, or our tantrum will include physical attacks on you and yours.”

Why they didn’t meet with even token non-physical resistance is one of the puzzling things about the whole mess.  Or it should be.  Lately I’ve started suspecting it was a combination of at least three factors.

The first of them was that a lot of our intellectuals had some sympathy with Nazism which they sort of transferred to communism after WWII.  Heinlein thought – and he was a credible witness  – there were enough of these to take over the democratic party (or start the subterranean take over of the democratic party) in the thirties.  The intellectuals he writes for the time sound enough like ours – only less insane – too to make me wonder.  I wonder if the thought of the Frankfurt school had already rotted out intellectual establishment from the inside?

The second factor was that we had come off two world wars and a depression.  The “establishment” was tired.  They wanted their fat babies, now grown, to have a better life than theirs.  They surely didn’t want to start a war right here at home.  After all the kids were the best educated generation EVER in America at least.  For the first time, sons and daughters of farmers had gone to college.  Or at least they’d finished highschool.  They spoke so well. And there were so many of them.

That was the third factor: there were so many of them.  I got a hint of this in reading Heinlein’s juveniles, to which I came in my thirties.  (With rare exceptions, like Have Spacesuit and Between Planets, the juveniles were either not translated into Portuguese, or I didn’t find a copy – Portugal always having worked on print to the net.  Heck, I only knew some of the classics because a friend’s father gave me a box of old books.)  There is in his writing about the future, about children, about young people this suppressed panic that each generation will be larger than the last (silly Heinlein.  Depressing birth rate?  Why, we have socialism for that!) and therefore more powerful.  There is talk of young people in the future demanding stipends for existing (OWSers, he was playing your song!  And if your generation had been as larger as he thought it would be, you might have got it.) There is the certainty that the old ways and the old culture will pass because it will be submerged under an explosion of ever larger younger generations.  If you were middle aged or older, why fight them and end up losing?  Why not just give up your place quietly and be assured a quiet retirement?

So these revolutionaries who took over the commanding heights of culture, did so not just without firing a shot, but without any serious argument.  (Yes, I know, a few of you will bring up riots and rumpus – was it great and glorious fun, dears? – but from what I’ve seen even your police was fighting with hands tied behind their backs.  Shenanigans like Chicago in 68 in other nations in the world would have cost most of the “brave rioters” their lives.  Trust me on this.  I know.  The only real battle was civil rights and that, while taking place at that time was not exactly like the others, since it was a fight against government regulation, not INTRINSICALLY against the rules of culture or tradition, and since the seeds for it were already in our constitution.  Which makes it funny that it was the only one strenuously fought.)

To make things worse, they’ve built for themselves this entire mythology, where they fought bravely for their “progress.”  Scratch that myth and what you get is a few shout out matches with parents most of whom weren’t even exactly in disagreement, “but, dear, can you have your sexual revolution between classes and not flunk out so many courses.”

The mythology exists because they took over mass media and education, of course.  This is the same reason that feminists think they got their rights by marching arm in arm and not by technological improvement (had the pill not come about, the “women libbers” would have remained like the suffragettes a small and nutty minority, because biology militated against them.  They were, in fact, in a fight against reality.)  And because of this myth, they think they need to keep marching, arm in arm, or you know, suddenly, they won’t be allowed to have jobs and will be sent to the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.

Nuts.  And actually a good encapsulation of all the “permanent faux revolutions” of the sixties.  Because the myth tells the kiddies that came after them that all these things were done by brave marching and rioting and demonstrations against the old order, and because most kiddies believe them (except for a few terrible outliers who look at primary sources) the kids think that the shouting, the screaming and the finding of “injustices” must continue.

La revolution must go on, after all.

Which is why the feminists most prominently, but truly all the other movements, all out of things to fight – because this was always an easy battle – are now making up enemies.  You know, suggesting that most STEM courses having more women than men means the war is won is betrayal.  Or, as an email younger son got said “we now have 70% of female students in physics.  We’re almost at parity.”

It’s the same everywhere else.  These children are good children, see.  And they grew up with the myth that their parents’ generation won all these victories by being loud, rude and demanding and standing for the oppressed and stuff.  These good children want to make mommy and daddy happy and continue the permanent revolution.  (As opposed to my cohort, to whom both these posers and their far worthier contemporaries who did not get to shape the narrative, were older brothers and sisters.  To us Beardo the Weirdo always deserved an upraised middle finger.  It’s the ultimate irony that after years of calling us materialist and uncaring they’re now trying to co-opt us.)

So the poor good children, (squares, really, who want to impress mommy and daddy) stumble around trying to find injustices ALWAYS in our own society.  (For one, our society is the only thing they know, poor ignorant brats.  For another, well, mommy and daddy fought against injustice here, right?  Amerikkka and all that.)  Which is why they end up in such amazing acts of resistance as writing poems to muslim mass murderers, instead of the women mutilated by Islamists, or the young gay men hanged from cranes in Iran, or the very real horrible injustices that are not ours, but of those they wish to support and comfort.

They would be ridiculous – they are ridiculous – except that mommy and daddy still command the heights of culture.  (No fools they.  Having taken them, they were in no hurry to move off for the new generation.  Not until their indoctrinated ewe-lambs came of age.)  So these poor deluded idiots are speaking truth to the power of their grandparents and – maybe not so idiots, that’s their goal after all – earning an attaboy from aged-radical mommy and daddy.

Did I mention I’ve got quite nauseous lately?

The problem is that while the culture – the overculture – here protects them from ridicule, they still do harm.  Abroad their ranting and ravings are taken with dead seriousness.

I’m talking even of my relatives in Portugal, who look at the OWSers and think that misery in America must be terrible.  More and more they make me cackle in an unbecoming manner on the phone, as I tell them that armies of less than sane homeless and shiftless ne’er do wells were hired for this.  They think I’m the crazy one when I tell them the demonstration in our town was about half old CPA members with their hammers, sickles, walkers and oxygen tanks, and about half well-to-do rich kids being as nasty as they wanna be.

Now, if the Portuguese who ware (waggles hand) mostly Western and mostly at least second world, believe this stuff, imagine what it looks like amid the people in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, seeing this on TV or reading these squares’ drooling efforts to please mom and daddy.

They will believe that our system is so bad our own kids hate it.  They will then believe only their crazy-crackers religion can make the world good (because hey, at least their kids don’t hate their system.  And if they did, they’d button their lip or be stoned.  And not the way our kids are.)  They must be right.  Look, even the children of the great Satan speak in their defense.  This must be a miracle…

I’ll confess I feel vaguely sorry for the babies of the permanent revolution (particularly those now nearing fifty, because after all, some of the echo boomers are older than I.)  I feel sick to my stomach at the people who, controlling information and news, business and politics, keep claiming they’re fighting against “the man.”

But the sad truth is both of these are endangering the rest of us.

A dose of reality must be administered, as well as a dose of hearty laughter.

All we have to do this is our keyboards, but fortunately we no longer need to get our words past the gatekeepers.

So, here’s your keyboard.  Forward, type.  It’s time to end the senseless permanent phony revolution.

And THAT will be a real revolution.

*First an unrelated bit of business.  The subscriber space has been updated with new content such as it is.*

Yesterday I lost control.  Those who read my rants in the past might think this is a common occurrence.  After all you’re visiting the blog of someone who wrote an entire book because she was furious.

Actually, though I can get very, very angry, I don’t normally lose control.  Like other people who berserk, I learned early it is easier to keep tight control and make yourself ill than to lose control and have to glue back everything you broke.

The precipitating incident was neither that unusual nor that unexpected – it was simply when it came, both in the sense that it came after the Card attempted crucifixion and that it hit me after a weekend when I had run myself exhausted.

What happened was this, and while I’m not naming names, the names are named in the comment section of “Being Normal” and also in my FB diner, if you read the comment thread (I’m not naming names because I’m mid novel and do not have time to deal with the mess on this blog for the next month): the wife of one of my colleagues – one of the most recognizable names in this field – and herself a performer, chose to write a poem honoring the surviving Boston bomber, or at least glorifying him as a poor victim.

Is the young man – only a year older than my younger son, heaven help us – a victim?  Undoubtedly.  But not our victim.  He’s a victim of his upbringing and his poisonous beliefs.  To the extent the US influenced those it was with the left-America-hate, against which immigrants have less defense than those born here, and which the writer of the poem would heartily endorse.

To the extent those terrorists were homegrown it was because their family didn’t come over at the bottom, with dreams of making it in America.  Those two kids were not working night shifts to pay for community college.  They were wealthy, well-heeled and attended the best colleges: where they were told they were Victims and America something to hate.

This woman clearly agrees that they’re long-suffering victims, more pitiable than the innocents they killed.

Right now you’re going “So?”

In fact two of my Baen colleagues told me just that – one giving me the (possibly justifiable, since by then I was too angry to explain myself) “What is this to us?” answer, and the other lecturing me on how the field is full of such leftists and she, herself, still being cloaked, has witnessed instances of writers being kept back/snubbed by leftist colleagues, because they failed to pass a loyalty test.  That she thought this was news to me, when I was cloaked for ten years and when I’m more sensitive to Marxism than a cat to the smell of poo was almost tear-inducing.

But both reactions helped me home in on why, having read that “poem”, I went from zero to my muscles knotted with fury instantly.

First, let me go over the thesis to my post last week about “Being normal.”  Humans are social animals.  Whether you believe we were created or “just growed” the basis upon which we are built is that of a social ape.  That means most individuals, confronted with a group, will strive mightily to be normal.

This is the power that drove the melting pot.  This is what made blended societies (America is not the only.  I come from a country colonized by Romans, Greeks, Celts, Swabians, Vandals (you knew that) and Visigoths (though those were further South) and the North of which was a target of French crusaders and later the place where Englishmen sent their ne’er do well sons, before they had an empire.) work.

People tend towards the perceived median of their society.  The process of dropping someone in a new society and watching them integrate has a name: Acculturation.  This is where you drop your former culture and adopt the new one.

As someone who has gone through this – and then ran screaming and adopted what my new one should be – let me assure you humans have exquisitely fine-tuned sensors for what models to adopt, what postures will be rewarded, what will be punished.

It’s not a moral judgment, though you CAN apply morals and thoughts to it, which is why I’m not an extreme-left Latino-victimhood college professor, though that would be the most highly rewarded.  (Most people don’t, though.  Because we’re CLEVER monkeys we go with what’s most highly rewarded.)

Weirdly I’m not talking about the bombers, themselves, though I’d warrant a similar process went on there.  I’m talking about us: about America and specifically about any “artistic field” including my own, though I get a little squeamish when people tell me we’re “artists.”  I aspire to craftswoman.

I’m not stupid, though I can play dumb on TV.

Even before I tried to be published; before I attended my first convention and became aware of the politics in the field and among writers, I was aware of the … ah… hierarchy.  The hierarchy, denoted by those who got the big push (ie were on every shelf, were talked about and got awards) was as in every intellectual profession “the more left the better.”

There was little room to be mistaken. The stories talked about at this time, in the waning years of the cold war, were always the ones where somehow the USSR was better than us and won.

I decided early on I couldn’t go all the way in acculturating to the field.  I had seen too much of communists gone wild, and I KNEW history and how much wilder they could go.  After all, one must be able to look at oneself in the mirror in the morning.

But most people didn’t have my experiences or my internal stops.  Most people acculturated, either to enter the field (or before – those who came from excellent colleges) or afterwards.

The problem is this: any isolated group – and writers of science fiction and fantasy are isolated in their own way and by their own peculiarities – will go more and more extreme, because the people who acculturate, want to show how they are “more authentic” than the people already there.

Since the field of competition in sf/f was “weird leftism” (and I mean that.  We’re not talking the leftism of Card or Robert A. Heinlein who, yes, was a leftist most of his life.) that’s what started going more and more extreme over the last thirty years, PARTICULARLY since the fall of the USSR.

No longer having a “great champion” to lionize, they invented causes: feminism, western imperialism, etc etc etc.  They convinced themselves America was the worst possible country ever.  (Mostly because they’re either spectacularly ignorant of the history of all other countries, or they choose to see only the good parts.) They postured as more sensitive, more feeling, more—

Which leads us to where we are today.

And the reason that poem drove me over the edge was the full realization of where we are today.

Orson Scott Card was near-crucified for expressing an opinion one would EXPECT from someone with his religious beliefs.  (I disagree with his opinion but while religious I’m very odd.  Also, my religion is not his.) HOWEVER it is not only permissible, it is ENCOURAGED to publish a poem empathizing with a mass murderer, who murdered in the name of a religion that HANGS gay people, mutilates women, and aims at world-wide dominance.

Wait, what?

But see, the second religion a) has been identified as “of little brown people” which is why we keep getting told being anti-Islam is “racist” – even though most of them look about as dark as I am.  b) it aims to destroy America, and so it must be good, right?

(And before you tell me the repulsive terrorist-glorifying poem was written by one of my colleague’s wife, not himself.  Yes.  Indeed.  However, DO rest assured that in this field we have to watch what our spouses do too – or we had to.  I frankly can go indie and my give-a-d*mn is broken. – Imagine as a thought experiment that my husband wrote a poem about the Koch brothers, sweet Libertarian bachelors who have not in fact ever killed anyone.  How long do you imagine it would take before ANYONE refused to talk to me at conventions?)

So this is the way things are.  Why would they upset me, if I’ve always known they’re that way?

Because I suddenly realized, with a swimming sense of nausea and shame that this is as much our fault as theirs.

ANY field that’s isolated will tend more and more extreme.  The attitudes rewarded will go further and further off kilter.

In our field, they’re not isolated, but those of us among them keep very, very quiet.  We don’t name and shame.  We certainly don’t SHAME.  We do what my colleagues did yesterday, and shrug and go “This is normal for them.”  We even admire the more talented of them, despite their moral aberrations.

This is because for most of us politics is not religion.  We don’t punish apostates.  Instead, we are willing to go “Oh, yes, that’s what he was taught.  But he’s still a superb artist.”

The reverse is not true.  On the other side politics is religion.  Have the wrong opinions and you’ll “never work in this town again.”

The end result is that “the right” in the field (in almost any entertainment field) and by “right” here I mean even squishy libertarians like myself, moderates itself.  I can’t picture in any way shape or form anyone writing a poem glorifying someone who took a gun to IRS agents, say.  I certainly can’t imagining them thinking it would further their career, or make them “hip.”

But the left has no such checks.  They’ve long ago passed the boundaries of what is normal outside the field.  The all-scoundrel-males, all-saintly-abused-females-all-the-time crashed print runs enough.  Now we’re subsisting on a tenth of what our precursors sold.

And yet, none of us stands up in front of the crazy train and screams “you’re going too far and the bridge is out ahead.”

So they try to tune to the group, and they don’t know that the group is now an inch from a yawning chasm.

Think about it: in my professional group, in MOST artistic professions, the “normal” reaction (and yes, I’ve seen it from colleagues who didn’t write posts) to a heinous attack that kills innocents is to feel sorry for the criminal.

We should have stood up and shouted “fire” in this theater long ago.  Because there is a fire and it is threatening not just to disconnect our field from the rest of the country, but to set the country against itself and, ultimately, cost us our lives.

But, you’ll say, if we so much as say “boo” to them, they start a storm of poo flinging.  They accuse us of horrible crimes.  Some of it will stick because people don’t investigate.

Do you think I don’t know that?  Note I’m not naming names IN THE POST because I have a job and don’t have time to deal with this.  And they would surely start a witch hunt.

I’ve watched demonize Heinlein with a constant shrieking of “Sexist, racist, homophobe” even though for his time and place, Heinlein was almost pathologically NONE of those.

We cut them slack, we admire them where they’re right, we do not withhold anything due to their opinions, we do not accuse them of preposterous crimes.

Even the poor woman who wrote the poor poem (well, it is) is PROBABLY not a bad person.  She is, however, a Liberal Arts graduate, and clearly she was a good student.  And there are no cries to tell her “Bridge out ahead” – not in her circles.  She actually can write this, with no one frowning at it, and THINK she’s “speaking truth to power.”  (Because the side that has no say in any artistic field is the power, doncha know?)

And since yesterday I’ve been afflicted by a sense of guilt.  Because we should have screamed long ago.  Our forebears in the field should have screamed before I was even out of elementary.  They didn’t.

Now what?  I’m no more willing to be a martyr than the rest of you.  Some of the poo will stick, and even indie, I have to sell to the public.

I don’t think any of us can in conscience do to them what they do to us.  Politics is not religion with us.  We see the good in them despite the loony beliefs.

So, what?  I don’t know.

This wouldn’t bother me as much if I weren’t religious and if I didn’t believe in a terrible day of judgment when my soul will be weighed against what I’ve done, and what I’ve failed to do.

Or maybe I would.  A friend commented about how eventually, the cold civil war will turn hot, because we can’t talk to them anymore.  And then I was reminded of this passage, from Starship Troopers on house breaking a puppy:

“Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house… and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding, but soon let him back in the house with a warning not to do it again.  Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken – whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead….”

Our colleagues are not dogs.  But like dogs, they try to fit in the pack.  And in many ways we’ve been treating them as the stupid dog owner above treated his puppy.  “They’re just—“ this or that.  “It’s best to ignore their fits.”

Which means the group, as a whole is running around making a mess out of the culture.  Are vague threats to take up arms the right response?  Shouldn’t we try a rolled up newspaper first?

But, you say “poo flinging!”  Yep, indubitably.

And I – even I, even with indie – don’t have time for it.  But it might behoove us to start thinking of making time, and of making fun of the more ridiculous bits of their madness.

Because otherwise it will just get madder.   And because a culture that lionizes those who want to kill it is not long for this world.

UPDATE: BTW, when you’ve managed to get to both Dave Freer and I (given we’re the sort of bums who JUST want to tell fun stories and make a decent, non-spectacular living) you’re burning your good will with the general public.   And while this is not about the poem, it strikes close.

We had a friend from out of town visiting this weekend, which means we might as well have taken the weekend and flushed it whole.  Plus, I have page proofs for Noah’s boy which must get done today and tomorrow.

So I’ve been sitting here, squinting at the screen, trying to decide whether or not I have enough brain to write a coherent post and have realized I don’t.

Which means you’re getting brain sweepings…

First, I found a bunch of Nero Wolfe radio plays from the thirties in Audible, at three for one, and bought them out of curiosity.  If you guys remember I grew up without TV, you should also guess that I grew up with radio plays.  Radios were central in the Portuguese household at the time and, depending on what station you liked, at certain hours you could get everything from historical to great literature, to soap operas.  (One of my clearer memories is of being at the beach around lunch time.  You guys must understand that in Portugal the beach administration rents little tents (more like cabins with cloth sides) and because of the culture, moms lug hot meals to the beach and there’s these foldable tables that come with the tents.  Around lunch time all the kids got called in to come and eat a proper lunch.  (To be clear, we usually spent a month at the beach every summer.  It was considered the minimum necessary for proper health.  My dad didn’t have enough vacation, so he’d join us at lunch and then at the end of the afternoon, before we packed up and took the bus back home.  He and I usually took a long walk before that happened.) Anyway, walking in the little “alleys” between the backs of the tents, you’d hear all the different soaps, because women brought their transistor radios to the beach, and usually spent the hottest part of the day inside the tent, listening to the soaps and crocheting.)

Mom’s favorite channel ran to “boring guy lecturing on mythology or history” but it had some mystery radio plays and radio plays of “important books.”  I never told her this particular serial loosely based on the Crimean war was a soap opera in ALL but name.  She’d have been upset.

So, out of nostalgia, I thought “oh, that would be fun” and bought the Nero Wolfe radio plays.  Six of them.

I don’t think I’ll be listening to them again.  I have NO idea who wrote them.  I suspect Rex Stout did at least a first draft, but there’s a weird effect – perhaps something cultural I’m not quite getting? – in which Wolfe’s curmudgeon and sly attitude in the books becomes “Downright mean” in the radio plays.  He’s forever reminding Archie that he’s subordinate and gloating.  It’s disturbing.

On top of that, each little play ends with Wolfe laughing.  It’s the type of laughter we now associate with psychopaths.  We won’t go into the fact that the voice actor, named as if a good deal, sounds a few screws short of a full frame.

I do wonder how this played/was perceived at the time.  Could it have been well received if people perceived voice/mannerisms the way I do?  Or was it well received because “no alternative and it’s just those weirdos” as we put up with a lot of TV/movies in the nineties?

Also this week, had a discussion with a reviewer about why most Urban Fantasy leaves me cold, and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not the excess sex in most of them (except in romance, sex qua written sex doesn’t bother me, and in romance it ONLY bothers me when it’s the ONLY plot.  You think I’m joking – a romance skimmed recently starts with guy and gal who just met, in bed after a night together.  It’s so wonderful they’re scared and go off and sleep with all sorts of other people, separately and severally, before in the end realizing they were always meant for each other.  It didn’t offend me, it just left me cold.  “Emotional development failed to materialize and I iz disappoint.”) It’s the fact that sex is used to substitute for other tension.  Since written sex is something I can take or leave, I usually get bored because the other tension isn’t there.  And now you know why I held out on Kyrie and Tom so long.  I wanted to make sure the relationship stood on other grounds, so the series had a good foundation.

Because of crazy weekend – see above – I have failed to actually do most of the stuff that DOES need done this weekend like hopefully publish Spinning.  I’m going to try to make up for it as soon as I’ve had enough caffeine.

And then I’ll update the subscriber space.  I’m still debating what to do for subscriber’s t-shirts.  I think either the Muir portrait or a choice of the others now being uploaded onto zazzle.  (Sometime along the line here I also need to find an afternoon to update/fix my web page.  Right now it’s like a plotted novel.  It’s all in my head, but none of it exists in physical space.)

The Muir portrait is below. The background is that the year before Robert drew a portrait of me as Super Writer.  Muir found it and my pictures, and drew a more lively one.  So, there is is.

And now I’m going in search of caffeinated beverage (not picky.  Tea, coffee or diet coke will do) and then I’m going to shower and go for a walk, so maybe I can work today ;)

I’ve written before on the state of racism in America saying that of course it exists – it will exist so long as America is populated by human beings – but it’s not racism as defined by law (or news, or entertainment) nor even some kind of thing that can be identified and mitigated by law and/or social processes.  It is also, at any level it can be defined, less than in practically any other country.  (At least any country I’ve lived in/visited/have friends from – which covers most of the world.)

“Racism” in the sense of “he who doesn’t look like us will be kept out/killed/denied” is part of the makeup of the human brain.  It just is.  It is part of the brains of our fellow great apes, too.  And most other mammals.

Experiments have been made with not only getting a mother (of whatever species) to accept offspring of another species, but also with changing one of her own cubs – scent or look – to see if it’s still recognized.  Most of these experiments end with the death of the cub.

It’s actually easier to take a cub of another species, rub the other cub’s scent on it and get the mother to adopt it (this produces some completely insane squirrels-raised-by-cats.  Look it up if you have an hour to spare) than to remove the identifying characteristics and get the mother’s own cub to be accepted.

It is of course a necessary mechanism.  Well, think about it.  Posit gradual enough evolution from our pre-human ancestors that the mothers didn’t kill the babies.  It still needs to be that our ancestors preferred each other (possibly their siblings) for a good long time, or speciation would never have happened.  And given our species proven ability to screw anything that moves, what is amazing is that we DID speciate.  The preference was marked enough for us to leave the old species behind.

The preference, of course, must have been for “more like us than not in a pinch” too, considering the humanoid species they keep finding in our ancestry.  (Actually my theory on the extinction of all these other human species is not one of the popular ones, like “we killed them” or “we ate them” [though doubtless there were instances of both.  There are instances of both within our own species and not that long ago.]  I think we genetically overwhelmed them.  I think for whatever reason we were more fertile [perhaps the having lost estrus or season] an idea immortalized in our legends, of other human species with trouble reproducing, and we just had more kiddies than they did, intermarried, had kids who looked more like us, and they sort of disappeared.  Only they’re still there in our  genetics.)  And of course at times and in certain places things like mountain ranges might have intervened to isolate our ancestors from the parent species.

But given how many human species emerged it can’t ALL have been great floods and sudden mountain range (!).  It MUST have been preference for “we like those like us more than those others.”

That seems to remain, by and large.  People pick companions who are more like them than not.  How many of us prefer to associate with other Odds on line, (even when we fight) than to hang out with our perfectly normal (and often polite) neighbors?

And that’s where the law and social correctives go wrong.  Because “racism” is both much “finer” than just skin-color, slicing a dozen different ways, and far less defined.  First, who do you think my kids have more in common with?  A geeky, black science fiction fan, or a white kid who was raised on a steady diet of TV and reality shows?  In that context “skin color” is the last thing on their minds and it counts for absolutely nothing.  (And btw, both of them of in circumstances where those were their choices not only formed lasting friendships with kids of other “races” but – and this is important – completely failed to see the race, to the extent of giving me descriptions of how to find this kid in a crowd to give them a message which included “He’s tall, and he’s wearing a red jacket.  I think his backpack is blue” but COMPLETELY ignored “this is one of the five black kids in the school.”  (No, it was not self-consciousness.  Not in family.  They just honestly completely forgot that part.  When I said “Oh, for the love of Bob, why didn’t you…” the answer was “Oh.  Duh.  I didn’t remember.”  — interestingly my husband pulled a similar one on me with someone who worked for him.  I was expecting a tall blond guy, because of his name.  Never mind.)

Second, the “racist” – let’s call it “exclusionary” impulse just means “if you stick out, we’ll exclude you.”  It could be you’re the only red head in a room full of brunettes.  But actually at least in America your exterior characteristics are likely to matter for far less than your internal characteristics or your behavior.  You’re far more likely to be shunned if you’re the guy who comes in for a baseball game wearing a tuxedo or who wears a t-shirt to a formal (though these days people will try to pretend they’re not shunning you in the latter case because you’re being “natural” and “unstudied” and those are supposed to be god things.  Never mind.  Talk for another time.)

In fairly uniform countries, if you stick out, you get it.  I’m not sure how much of my sense of discomfort in Portugal came from the fact I was 5’7” when I finished growing (I’m now 5’5” due mostly to issues during first pregnancy.  Long story) and that my hair was that shade of very dark red that lit up as flame in the sun, (now I’ll figure out what color it is if Clairol factories are ever shut down by government order.  I think it’s mostly white and has been since my twenties) but looked brown-black indoors.  People routinely assumed I was a tourist and addressed me in other languages, and though I was (till aforementioned first pregnancy and six months bed rest from which my figure never recovered) a size seven, I grew up with nicknames like “whale” and “mastodon”

Now, if you look at my school pictures, you’d think I look exactly (well, close enough that in the US it would be considered “family resemblance”) like my classmates, only in a bigger scale.  But to them I was definitely “weird” and “strange” enough in appearance for it to matter.  (My husband about choked when someone referred to me in public over there as “blondie” – I had to explain to him that “blond” is anything short of very dark brown or black.)

Does this account for my growing up weird?  Maybe.  I’ve looked at my ancestors, even the ones who presented physically normal and I’m not convinced.  A strong streak of “You may go to h*ll, I’m going Odd” seems to run through.  OTOH it certainly worked to convince me that I could never fit in, so why try?

This too is a form of racism that can neither be identified nor ameliorated by law.  I mean, okay, I can see our bureaucracy TRY “If someone is more than two inches above median and more than two shades lighter/darker than the group, he or she must…”  I can see them try because these are people who try to regulate how much salt you can eat.  I can also see them try because if we let them they would have paperclip inspectors, making sure the paperclips on every desk were properly stored.  Let’s face it – they don’t trust us to cross the street alone.

On the other hand it CAN’T be done.

And I’m not even going to say that there was never a racism problem in America – of course there is/was/would be.  “Racism” defined as the exclusionary impulse responds to “Shared background” as much as to “sufficiently big external characteristic” and when groups had been kept legally separate (first by slavery, then by legal separation laws) they wouldn’t have much in common and also the appearance would be a novelty.

So I can totally see where the government thought it had a reason to step in.  (Usually same reason as always – having caused the problem, they now claimed they had to step in to solve it.)  The problem was their assuming the problem would persist forever and ever and that they had to step in forever, because left to their own devices, people would care more about ONE characteristic – skin color – than about shared background or interests, or even proximity.

This is puzzling because at the same time they are creating quasi-racial groups out of cultures.  I don’t know who it was who said that if Irish and Italians had been treated as we’re treating those of Latin origin, not only would they never have assimilated but their criminality and other dysfunction would be through the roof.  They were, nonetheless, right.

I say this as someone who grew up thinking of herself as white (with whatever fell in the pot along the way) and who, upon entering this country found out she was “Latina” which some people seem to think is a separate race. (Or just confuse race with culture.  To the extent that Europeans used to talk of the French race or the Spanish Race, this has been going on a long time.)

Even before I was officially “Latina”, due to the fact that most people think that Portugal is somewhere in South America, I found myself being treated weirdly.  Complete strangers told me I’d come here to avoid starving (!  Mom would have been offended.  There were four in the family.  She always cooked for fifteen.  Honestly if I hadn’t made untoward efforts to slim, I’d have been 300 lbs by 12.)  Other complete strangers told me I came here so I could be liberated and not have to obey men in everything (I’d have liked to introduce these darlings to mom or grandma.)  Others told me my culture was of course more emotive/fun/colorful/just/interesting/diverse (!) in touch with nature (!!!!!) or rich (?????) than American culture.

I have said before that my first publishing house thought the interesting bit about me was not that I could write stories, but that I was born in Portugal and was “Latina” – hence the exhortation (yes, I spell extortion funny) to write my biography when I was less than forty (that it was assumed I was oppressed goes without saying, right?)

And that’s what you have to look at to figure out “white privilege” to the extent it exists.  If someone else named Sarah Hoyt (who didn’t go to cons, and get asked about how she got to have such a name/accent or) someone who grew up here, and possibly was born here, wrote science fiction, what would you care about?  How good the science fiction was, right?  Actually for this lot, that’s what you care about anyway.

BUT not to people who took the “we must always be inclusive” and “culture is race” thing to heart.  To them the most important thing about me is ALWAYS that I was born abroad/have an accent (yes, I know, but when I came through you HAD to go to cons.  It’s when I made most of my sales for anthologies, and some books, for the upcoming year.  Certainly where I made most of my “for hire” sales.)

It took me flat nothing to realize that because I was female, had a degree in literature, spoke with an accent and came from a Latin country not only were certain political and social views EXPECTED from me but I was supposed to have been oppressed…  And those expectations WERE oppression.  If I tried to be just myself, I’d get smacked in line or treated like that bird who leaves the flock.

Which brings us to the irony of white privilege in the US today.  The misnamed “White Privilege” which could simply be called “Normal Privilege” for whatever is normal for that area, is the ability to not have expectations and ideas pushed on you.  (The reason I say this is “normal privilege” is that you can be lily white, but if you’re a Southerner in NYC, you too will find that they’re trying very hard to put you in a specific box.)

No one who hasn’t experienced the attempt to make you be what other people THINK you are, can know how bothersome it is.  Of course the only people who’ve never experienced this are people in the least diverse (and culled to be that way) environment in the world: people who run in North Eastern intellectual circles.  The rest of you have probably at least experienced this briefly.

In the end you’re left with either living up (down) to the stereotype because it’s less trouble than fighting it and/or going completely against it, and having people resent it.  It takes a lot more effort, if you’ve been classed as a stereotyped category to be yourself, than it does if you’re not put in a category to begin with.

And again that’s the ironical part. The government’s definition of “protected race/culture” fixating on certain (largely irrelevant) characteristics and the armies of political correctness (like the armies of darkness, but more evil) led by the mass entertainment have created both classes of people who feel aggrieved and set aside (without realizing what aggrieves them and sets them aside is large the weird expression to being afraid of offending them or setting them aside) and an untold, never before found privilege: the ability to move through life with a minimum of stereotypes attached.

I sometimes envy those people greatly.  But then I realize that NO ONE is ever free of expectations.  (Most people just don’t have the honor of having them governmentally pre-defined.)  My small, youthful-looking husband, for instance, is not expected to have vast knowledge and experience in his field.

But I do resent the government’s attempt to solve a problem that no longer exists in the shape they think it does creating a bigger and odder problem.  I just hope they don’t try to solve this one too.  We all know how that would end up.

*In which the book acquired a cover.  Sometime this weekend, and the creek not rising, it will also acquire a tab, while its older brother (Witchfinder) will say up a couple more weeks, as I finish edits to go to professional editor/friend. Now the standard stuff:  This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to previous weeks.  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.  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.   Until I give this a tab, you can find older chapters by paging back to Friday (or the first, I think Sat/Sun or simply searching Rogue Magic.*

cover image credit © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Not Portsmouth

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage:

I didn’t know if this was Portsmouth, but I rather doubted it.

Betsy and I landed with a thud and a blast of light and – understandably – there was a time when I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think.

The problem came after the light vanished, and the sound of explosion had vanished from my head, there was still the feel of being unable to breathe.

The reason for this was clear enough, since we were, in fact, immersed in water.  The moment I realized this, I held my breath, containing my desire to open my mouth and gulp in what was available.  I didn’t think a lungfull of water would help.

Betsy started to open my mouth and I clapped my hand it, holding her with that arm sort of around her.  She was struggling and whimpering, and it was much like holding an oversized heel.

Fortunately I knew how to swim, something Mama says no well brought up girl will know, since it is impossible to swim with your petticoat on.  She’s not quite right.  You can swim with petticoats on.  But I’d much rather swim naked, which was how I’d taught myself on the lake on our property, summer nights.

Breeches were not as easy to swim in as naked, though they were far better than petticoats.  So, I kicked to the surface with all my might, pulling Betsy along.  I knew where the surface was – I thought – because there was a great light that way.

Wherever we were – it couldn’t be Portsmouth, not even off the coast – there were fish of ever color and shape and if my chest hadn’t felt like it would presently burst, I would certainly have admired them.

As was, I was only aware of my head bursting through somewhere into air, and I took big gulps of air, and moved my hand from Betsy’s mouth – and then had to grab her under the arms, because the silly git was trying to lose consciousness and go under.

After I’d breathed in and out several times, I became aware that this was definitely not Portsmouth.

Look, I haven’t travelled much, and I’m not even very aware of where Portsmouth is.  Yes, my governess tried to make me learn geography, but like almost everything she taught me, this was done by making me learn lists “the seven best kings of England”, “the ten most tragic queens” and such.  All I’d retained about Portsmouth was that it was a nautical location, with shipyards and that I could hire as a cabin boy there, and eventually make my way to captaining my own pirate ship.  I had no doubt I could do that, as I’d read plenty of sea stories and biographies, and I knew plenty of people more dull-witted than I had made such a trajectory.  So why shouldn’t I?

Mama would say that piracy was a sin, but of course mama would say that.  Mama said all manner of pious and not very significant things, and besides look at how papa had preached morality all the time.  But I’d heard Jonathan and Seraphim Ainsling speak once, when they didn’t think I could hear, and what papa had done was no better than piracy and might be worse.

So, those were my reasons for choosing Portsmouth.  And I was willing to concede that the streets in Portsmouth might be made of wet cobblestone.  They probably were.  But I’d seen pictures in books, and those same streets were surrounded by tall buildings, and filled with people

The place we’d emerged…

A few steps from where we’d come up, there was a set of wet cobblestoned steps, leading up to…  It could be a cobblestoned street, only it wasn’t.  More like a cobblestoned plaza.  Only when you blinked and looked again, you realized it wasn’t cobblestones, really, but polished grey granite.

But it was what surrounded that … plaza?  Room? That made it unbelievable.  I was aware of Betsy first gasping and moaning, then making a startled little cry, as she doubtless also paid attention to what happened around us.  But I was too busy with my own wonder.

You see, above the plaza, above us, above this entire space, there was something like the gigantic inverted keel of a very old boat.  It shone with a diffuse light, which is what made me think I was swimming towards daylight.

Hanging from the keel – cavernous and black, and just barely recognizeable as wood – hung … strings of pearls.  Masses of them.

When we were little, nursie would let us make daisy chains, in spring, and sometimes I would festoon the space over my bed in loops and loops of them.  This was like that, but more so, with loops and loops and long ropes of pearls.  All manner of pearls, from the small and rosy to the huge and white to the ivory tones in between.  They all shone, perfectly visible by the deflected light.  And I thought if I could get even a yard of those and go back home, I could set up as an independent lady of means, and no one – No one – would be able to make me marry anyone I didn’t want to, nor die in child birth, as Honoria had.

It was because I was looking up that I missed them.  I didn’t hear their steps, which is odd, and I wasn’t aware of their approach until one of them said, “Swim towards the steps, and come up.  You are under arrest.”

Then I did look in the direction of the voice and my first thought was that the two men standing on the granite plaza, right in the center, were Roman.  This is because they were mostly naked, save for a white loincloth, and carried tridents and a net.

After the first shock I realized that I was confusing with the pictures of Roman Gladiators in the naughty book that Papa kept on the very top shelf of the library, which had all sorts of other Roman things.

But they couldn’t be Roman because… things were wrong.  For one, I was fairly sure that Romans didn’t have green hair.  And they certainly didn’t have little fins along their arms.

“Don’t make me fetch you with magic, land-heel,” the taller of the two barked.  “Come up the steps.  You are under arrest.”

I had no idea what he meant by fetching me by magic, though from the feel of him, I suspected he could.  But since this was not Portsmouth, it behooved me to find out what it was, before I made him use magic on me.

Though I could tell right away I was going to dislike him excessively.

I was thinking back on what I said about how mom would have been in real trouble raising kids in a country with no extended family, and that’s probably true.  (Though I’ll point out raising kids with no extended family around is a trial of the “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy” kind.  It was nine years before I could go to the bathroom with the door closed.  Fortunately the cats had trained me for that.)

And then it occurred to me she might have been okay with that (I’m not sure any of us are more than okay) but she couldn’t raise a kid the way laws are now in the US.  I’m sure of this because mom’s biggest thing was to yell at us.  She has an operatic voice and she could go on FOREVER.  I know for a fact this would have got her in trouble.

I have a friend who is one of the sweetest men alive, but whose method of blowing off steam so he didn’t get too mad at one of his five children was to yell at them at the top of his lungs, usually in the “moral sermon” vein.  You know “What did you think was going to happen?  Are you an idiot?”

Well, once he did it in the backyard.  (I’m going to guess the sermon was about the dog.)  A neighbor called the police that he was “abusing” his child – who was then, I think, 17 and as tall or taller than his father.

We’d not have lasted with my mom ten days.  When she was mad the entire village could hear it and she said things that the busybodies would hate, like “I swear, I don’t know why I don’t boil you in oil.”  (This must be hereditary.  If I had a dime for every time I’ve told the kids or cats “Butter, and onions, you’d be much better with butter and onions,” usually while I’m cleaning some mess.  Alternate is “I’d cook you, but there are no pots large enough.”)

Keep in mind that, whatever her opinions about my existence, pre-birth, she was the person who spent years of nights awake willing me to take the next breath (asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis) and that she brought me alive through what was either the last small pox epidemic to sweep Europe (from a strain escaped from a lab in Germany) or an unusually virulent chicken pox (the word in Portuguese is the same for both and no one seems sure) which took 2/3 of my generation in the village (the mortality seems unusually high for chicken pox, and also they didn’t vaccinate my cohort for small pox when we hit school.)  Okay, she did it partly through incredibly close-in nursing; partly through folk medicine (everything covered in red, including the lamp shade); and partly by pointing out in no uncertain terms that if I died I wouldn’t get to go to space and by giving me a bit of old clockwork and telling me it had fallen from the Sputnik.

But she yelled a lot and therefore the busy bodies would intervene.

Now, was she a perfect mother?  Oh hell no. Particularly not for me.  Mom has problems – the reason she decided she should not have children – and I have a temperament that, as she puts it “would rather break than bend.”  From about the age of eight on, we had epic fights, sometimes lasting for weeks and pointing dad to draw the Chinese symbol for War (two women under one roof) on the edge of his newspaper.

But what other mother would aid and abet me (and go out with me, and hold the paint bucket) when I had an absolute necessity to go out at night and change the names of newly renamed streets.  (Silly?  Well, imagine that the cross streets near you had just got renamed Che Guevara and Lenin.  See how it was an absolute necessity?)  What other mother would get me a weighted umbrella, so when I got into street fights, I could hold it by the end and use the handle like a mace.  (Tactical combat umbrella.  It was nice.  Lost it in one of the moves.)  And what other mother would take me to the best deli in town and order me “The Viking” , which was a dish of ice-cream bigger than my head, then sip tea while I ate, with occasional amused comments of “I feel ill just looking.”

What I mean is that I could give you accounts of my childhood that would make you go “Poor thing” and others that would make you go “Oh, wow, I wish I’d had that.”  They’re both true.  It’s the same childhood.

I suspect my kids have the same thing.  I suspect all of us have the same thing.

Yes, I’ve been known to be rash and harsh with the boys, though the only really bad one I can think of is when the school accused Marsh of horrible stuff and it took us almost a month to figure out it was made up out of whole cloth.  (And we only finally figured it out because they accused him of stuff on a day he was home sick – I mean, who would expect a group of girls to make up stuff, and the administrators to believe it if there was no proof?  Yeah, I know.  Okay, we were stupid.  We know better now.)

But did I sometimes punish them for things they hadn’t done?  Oh, heck yes.  I can’t read minds.  I’m still fairly sure that the person who drew all over the wall and signed his name to it was Robert, no matter how much he says it was the (then one year old) Marshall.  He STILL says it was and that Marshall DEVIOUSLY signed Robert’s name to it.  Marshall says he doesn’t remember.  Is it possible?  Barely.  I doubt it, because Marsh was just starting to talk.  I don’t think he could write.  But his intelligence is visual, and he MIGHT have seen Robert’s signature and remembered the shape.

Did I yell cruel and unusual stuff at them?  Oh, heck, yes.  I even (gasp) spanked their bottom (mostly while they were still in diapers.  After that we could take the computer cord away, though the 10 year old oldest won himself an epic, chase-him-out-of-the-kitchen by smacking his behind twice, because he came in and tried to tell me how to cook.  (I wish I were joking.  He actually knew nothing back then.  And that’s when he started learning because if I was going to be lectured, at least he’d make sense.  But not that day.  We had a dinner party and I was sooooo late.)  Is it cruel spanking someone who can’t think ahead or plan yet?  Well, yes.  It was also the only thing that stopped older son doing things like melting his crayons on the heater, eating the cat’s food (though I didn’t watch so closely that I’m not SURE he ate a lot of it,) running out the door naked, etc.  Our younger son had a different temperament and with him “distract him with something else” worked.   BUT for the older one it didn’t.  The people who say “never hurt a child, ever, ever, ever” fail to realize that sometimes you hurt them to prevent greater hurt.  I don’t know any properly-sane parent who enjoys even the butt-smack.  All the great apes spank – and there’s a reason for that.  Yes, of course, after the age when they’re more than little monkeys, there are other methods.  (I think if consulted Marsh would much rather I’d continued spanking him after three, rather than taking his computer cord away for periods of days or weeks, depending on the severity of the crime, which is what we did from the age of three on.)

But on the whole the boys turned out all right.  The cats didn’t, but cats never do.  (And they don’t get spanked, either, only bottle sprayed.  Which goes to show you.)

What I’m trying to say is that we’ve let so many things fall under the aegis of regulation that there is now this idea that to raise children you must be “perfect” and you must always do things “perfectly.”  Because they have these regulations, see?  You’re not supposed to spank the kid, even if you have one of those kids who can’t be stopped in any other way.  And you’re not supposed to leave them alone — even when your six year old is as mature and clear-thinking as most 18 year olds – not even for two hours.  And you’re not supposed—

It has made parenting a strange burden.  It makes  adopting a child the equivalent of inviting a bureaucrat into your home which is like inviting a vampire but not nearly so pleasant.

And it condemns most unwanted or semi-wanted children to the h*ll of foster care forever, because either more responsible people don’t dare adopting, or they get moved out of the foster home they start getting attached to, due to something stupid.

Like all the other regulations, these get applied according to someone’s idea of “perfect” so that someone who is considered “perfect” by race or culture or whatever for the child gets a pass or not watched at all; meanwhile someone middle class (because all our movies have taught us that’s a pool of inequity) gets watched very closely indeed and can have the kids pulled away on stupid stuff.  Meanwhile, there is the Rousseauvian idea of the “perfect” vitiating the cycle and mandating that kids stay even with markedly dangerous natural parents rather than saner adoptive parents.  Because that’s “natural” and therefore “better.”  (Contemplates the fact that this very morning she saw an ad for “organic cotton sheets” and wondered if they were supposed to be eaten.)

There is a tendency when writing rules and regulations to think of what would be “perfect” –No child shall ever be spanked! No child will ever have to eat something he doesn’t like!  No child shall ever hear harsh words!

What people tend to forget is the old saw “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”  If you concentrate on making things absolutely perfect, this being an imperfect world, it will just put the onus elsewhere.

The onus is now on parents, both real and adopted, and a great part of the reason we’re failing to produce the next generation is that we’re afraid of the bureaucrat and his clipboard.  We’re also contemplating not having a life till the younger kid is ten or so and no one can blame us for leaving them alone for more than 2 hours.  (I mean, a friend and I started a writers’ group that allowed you to bring kids to it, because we couldn’t afford the – then six dollars an hour – babysitter for the meeting or the coffee klatch this group considered mandatory afterwards.  We couldn’t afford $50 per week for a writers’ meeting.  BUT if our husbands hadn’t been okay with having the house invaded on alternate weeks, we’d have been stuck.)  We’re contemplating child-proofing the house, and/or being brought up on child neglect if we don’t and the kid has to go to the hospital.  And if you’re the parent of normal boys, you’re contemplating being treated like a criminal whenever you have to take him to emergency.  (Marshall.  Dancing in socks on the edge of the bathtub.  TWO MINUTES.  I was vacuuming the floor.)

What I mean is that raising children (and many other things in life) are the sort of unpredictable endeavor no one can be perfect at.  My mom had reasons for her imperfections, but she fought them too, and all I can say is that compared to her childhood, mine was a dream come true.  And hers was considerably better than her father’s.  And sometimes that’s ALL you can aim for.

But laws and rules and bureaucracy don’t recognize that.  They want us to be PERFECT and that’s why the more they invade places in life where the light and dark twine, the more IMperfect – and often downright hellish – things become.

Because the law deals with black and white, and life isn’t.

 

Pardon the scattered post, for reasons unknown to me I was awake from 3 am to 5 am.  Dan was too.  I put it to good use (!) and edited another chunk of Musketeer’s seamstress.  I’m going off my last page-proof copy and let me tell you, I’ve compared, these people introduced more errors than they removed.   (Though they got the punctuation, which is why I’m going off that.)  Why didn’t any of you who’ve read these tell me how bad they were?  One example: they turned all the sought into thought – which means several sentences become word salad.

On purpose?  Probably not.  But honestly, I’m surprised at still getting fan mail on these, as many sentences as I get to and go “uh?”  I guess the “book preparation services” for the NY publishers are up there with “layers and layers of fact checkers” for the media.

The only reason I can imagine for the wakefulness was a phone call from mom yesterday, and her conviction Portugal is headed to bankruptcy or collapse.  It truly doesn’t help being this far away.  And I wish we were in a more stable position (and economy) that I could tell them to just come here if things get too bad.

I finally fell asleep after five am, and I dreamed I was interviewing to teach languages at a huge private school, only the interview was at three am, and the boys and Dan had gone to see a movie called Father Malachi’s Baby (!) and I had to walk home (can’t drive at night) all alone.  Fortunately one of the students at the school lent me her GPS.

My take on this is that it was (clearly) a school for the undead.  I have nothing on the movie.  If I’m now invoking horror movies that never existed, there is no hope.

Anyway, as you can imagine this left me a little uh-ish.

RES  yesterday made a comment that came darn near that sort of simple profundity that touches a fundamental truth of humanity.  I’m not going to page down to find it verbatim – sorry, guys, while I slept well, I literally spent all night working in my back brain.  I now have the next four writing columns for PJM, as well as figured out the hole in my plotting for Through Fire.  OTOH I woke up late and have only had one cup of tea – but it was something about how mass entertainment creates an impression of “normal.”

What he didn’t say – but was implied – is that all human beings want to be normal.  Yes – probably – even us.  At least I remember a time – before at 14 I decided (I almost typed I remembered – I’m not assuming responsibility for that.  More mystical people than I can figure it out) my real name was Sarah – when, beyond feeling that the name “Alice” – pronounced Uh-Lease – didn’t belong to me, I also wished my parents had named me what a good half of my classmates were named: Paula, or Ana, or Cristina, or one of those “normal” names.  I also remember in middle school being profoundly vexed that I couldn’t play the elastic game.  I simply lacked the coordination (likely the result of being born too premature, but maybe not.  My kids suck at that kind of thing, too, though their dad doesn’t.  Maybe we simply are descended from very uncoordinated Neanderthals.  They went extinct because it’s hard to hunt when tripping on your feet.)  This excluded me from all the fun games and talk, and made me sit in a corner with my SF book.  (Of course, then I got to liking the SF book…)

That wish for normality, that desire to belong to a group is what causes the whole concept of “normal.”  I don’t know anymore who I was reading the other day, when a character says “What if nobody really is normal?  What if everyone is just pretending?”

I’d say it makes no difference, really.  Partly because the concept of normal and people acting externally normal makes it easier for rulers to control you and particularly to hold over you the threat of exclusion form the group; and partly because eventually you internalize what you pretend to be.

The first threat was worse, of course, in more primitive days.  Lacking mass media to control the people, rulers had to be very black and white about it.  “If you don’t eat your peas the way we do, you’re one of THEM and we’ll kill you/throw you out.”

In the modern age, this has become less harsh – in most places.  Communist regimes, like all theocracies, are still very harsh.  On the other hand Mass media – even mass dissemination of books, has made it easier to make people fall into line of themselves.

You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts.  We are social apes.  And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.

Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well.  A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw.  Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion.  If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject.  Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth.  To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man.  To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.)  But they are.  They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now.  After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.

(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control.  Which takes us right back to feudalism.  But let that pass.  And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not.  I was taught by true believers.  It just didn’t take.)

In the same way, they’ve been quite good at looking at how Christianity permeated and changed culture, and then how modernity did.  Which is why they took control of the means of disseminating stories, both supposedly factual stories (news) and imaginary stories (fiction.)

It is my authorial mind that hopes that they managed their full control just a little too late, and that the distributed media will take them down, but I’m not the Author of this story.

At any rate, a lot of what we now consider “normal” is exactly a creation of that complex of story telling.  To an extent, it might always have been, from the sagas retold by the camp fire to Shakespeare’s plays which got such wide audience, in so many languages that in many ways they might have greatly contributed to the idea individuals and their personal choices mattered; then there’s novels.  The reason that good mothers in the eighteenth century didn’t want their children reading such trash is that girls would try to model themselves on heroines who would do anything for love – when it was far more convenient for the daughter to take the sensible idea of learning to love the man the family chose for her.

In modern age…  Until we take the TV outright, we won’t fully be there, because – insert thing about schools producing illiterates and, worse, smart people who can’t read well enough to read for pleasure and don’t know what they lack —  a lot of people still get their entertainment from it.

I stopped watching  Married With Children, which seemed intent on making sure people thought of marriage as H*ll on Earth.  And because I could see my friends modeling it.  (I couldn’t get them to see it, though.)

While I’m glad the treatment of homosexuals on TV has been softened compared to what it was before, I wouldn’t mind if it became realistic.  One doesn’t become a saint because one is gay.  One doesn’t become a devil here (As Card said, homosexuality does not destroy the good or brilliant in a person.)  In the fifties and before (I read a lot of stuff from that period) saying someone was “an homosexual” or “invert” was a cue to hate them.  Now it’s a cue to regard them as victims.  Inevitably the pendulum will swing again.  I will know real progress has been made when they’re treated as people – just people.

At the same time, I’m really tired of the “White male did it” or “Christian did it” or “Father did it” or “business owner did it.”

And what appalls me most is when I see people in those categories modeling those stereotypes they see on TV.  This baffles me.  I keep seeing Christians in public act like the caricatures presented on TV (please don’t tell me where I’m going after death because of what I write.  I am doing the best I can, and I think He’s far more understanding and encompassing than that.)  Particularly when I know these people in private, and they’re not like that at all.

So why do they act that way in public?  And do they even know they’re doing it?  Probably not.  It’s “normal.”

In the same way the slow, trickle, trickle, trickle distorts our impression of normal too.  It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance.  The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it.  At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” – though it is true of the vast majority of them.

Because that’s not how the stories present those groups.  And people want to belong to the majority – to the “normal.”

Even outliers, people who step out, can break and fall back into the norm.  A great example is that blog that shall never be mentioned, but which has turned completely around in the last 5 years or so.  I was talking to a friend about that and wondered if it was always a false flag operation, designed to turn before 08 and confuse the issue.  He said maybe but – and he’s a right outlier, by virtue of what he is, the same I am – he thought what it actually was just pressure.  Because the owner of that blog is an artist in a leftist community.  The pressure to “return to normal” just broke him at last.

In my case, of course, the more pressure to return to normal the more I explode in weird directions, but growing up when and where I did with non-pierced ears and wearing pants (for the UK visitors that means trousers) I was sort of like the boy named Sue and learned to fight before I could walk.  The shock is not that I won’t return to “normal”; the shock is that I managed to semi-pretend for ten years.

Of course, the most effective strategy would be to pretend to be of them and change it from the inside, but I’m not sure it’s possible.  Religions take time to subvert and cultures take time to change, and we’re nearing the end of that time.  (No?  Look at our economy.  Or our feral children.)

Christianity, while it was replacing the old culture, at least was aware of how the world works.  The culture the Marxists seek to impose doesn’t fit ANY real world with real people, not even the places where they won.  To be “normal” people are going around pretending to believe things that simply aren’t so, like that anyone wanting to look after himself and his is “greedy” and must have stolen what he has; that women are physically stronger than men, and more independent in spirit; that children are wiser than their parents; that everyone must have sex all the time, or they’ll go mad; that every culture in the world is superior to ours.

No one sane can believe any of these even for a minute, if they examine it.  But people don’t.  They just try to “act normal” – which is bringing down Western civilization.  That part might be a feature not a bug, except that communist regimes in the end are like all the old empires: they must feed off healthy societies near them.  If they destroy the healthy societies, the world will go down to a long darkness, until the culture changes.

This is why I keep saying “I wouldn’t mind their winning, if their model could work in any way.  It doesn’t.”

We have to at least try to stop their final victory.

Write.  Write stories.  Write news.  Write.  Even if only a few people see it, it has a ripple effect.

And if you have any talent at all in that direction, look at the tech and the possibility to start video-stories: blogs, discussions, panels and most of all fictional stories.  (I haven’t yet watched Courage, New Hampshire, though I have the first season waiting a bout of ironing – that’s when I watch TV – but I understand it is done very professionally on a shoe string budget.  Something to emulate, perhaps.  I wish I could convince my nephew with the film degree to move here and join the effort.)  There’s also animation, and if I had more time, that’s what I’d be learning.

The solution to the narrowing of “normal” to “What the Marxists think is proper” is to fight back.  To present better stories.  Ours have the advantage of being more plausible.  Also we’re more creative than the people now resorting to an endless stream of remakes.  (Fanatical religions always squash creativity.)

Go.  Create.  Be Free.  Be not afraid.  (Not even of not being normal.)

UPDATE: There will be another post at MGC on writing in about an hour or so. I must get caffeine first.  Post up and tangentially related to this.

It occurred to me during the night that the problem is that we live in an age permeated by story and that all that story has a uniform voice.

“Is this another of your Human Wave rants Sarah?”  “Sort of but not really.”

I’d actually like to talk about the problems of a society in which the mass media goes through the same set of gatekeepers – like a camel through the eye of the needle – with roughly the same opinions and who went through the same colleges and to whom the others’ opinion of each of them is far more important than the opinion of the public.  Because they never see the public, the public doesn’t invite them to cocktail parties, and in general – grosso modo – the public won’t put out for them.  (Or perhaps will, bedazzled by the fame and the er… glory.)

You know, I think that is one situation that the Founders genuinely didn’t anticipate.  I think they knew, as do that most people were toadies, ready to abase themselves to appear to belong to the “in group.”  They had to, because they knew human nature and it hasn’t changed that much.

But the time they lived in – if I have it right (it’s entirely possible I have it wrong.  My interest in the founding of the country is less than ten years old, and most of you have been studying it your entire adult lives) – they lived in a time that was much like our own.

The press composed of newspapers, broadsheets and such was just coming into being and there were a million voices.  The official publications of the official organs might still have more imposing pedigree, but they were drowned out in the babble of voices.

It is now widely believed that the French Revolution turned into what it turned in, and the executions went on because of the broadsheet equivalent of  Thinkprogress.  (Or not, since that’s more or less co-opted by our authorities.  Oh, dear.  What a tangled web.  Because I can’t imagine anyone else, on the other side making up crazy lies about “let them eat cake.”  OTOH though the sovereigns were a bit gauche and perhaps mostly innocent, there is every reason to believe the court was every bit as debauched as the most lurid broadsheets.  Or at least had been a generation before.  Which brings me to highly recommend The Black Count – though I haven’t finished it yet.  I’m about halfway through, having got interrupted by work.

What they failed to imagine, and who can blame them, given the size of the country and the transportation available in their time, is that a free press, with no government interference, would choose to debase itself for …  the sake of a foreign and discredited ideal.

Partly they – at the dawning of the industrial age – failed to realize where it would take us, in terms of transportation, in terms of broadcast, in terms of communication.  They failed to understand that a few newspapers in decisive regions could control all the other newspapers both because those who failed to make the cut for them fanned out across the country, and because the other journalists aspired to working for the big coastal newspapers, which meant that they would have to fit well in the newsroom – i.e. speak with a single voice.

I have a friend who went almost all the way to employment with the Chicago Tribune and then, naively (how could he be that stupid? Well, better that than be fired a week in) sent them clippings from his work at PJM.  The offer was withdrawn because “you wouldn’t fit well in our newsroom.)

And of course J schools taught Marxism and Marxist analysis, because it was what all the cool kids believed.  Only those dumb people who didn’t go to J school believed in capitalism and all that crud.  You don’t want to be like them, do you?

No government on Earth ever could hold the leash that tightly, so tightly that otherwise intelligent people never examined the premises of what they learned, or – if they did – never spoke against it.

BUT that’s only half the problem.  Even though most people still keep an eye on the news, there is the growing feeling that they’re not particularly reliable.  Not reporting the Kermit Gosnell case, for instance, while giving the impression that roving gangs of maniacs are roving the countryside shooting down school kids with high capacity clips/magazines/rifles/whatever in hell they’re called, not that our representatives know, is one of the trickles, lodging somewhere in the back of people’s brain. They don’t QUITE distrust, but there’s that feeling that perhaps you should trust but verify.

No, the real problem is story.  Stories told for fun, most of them on TV, though the books too, until the advent of indie (and even now most of what’s being published) give a uniform view of society, for much the same reason newspapers and tv news give a uniform view of society.

Oh, no, writers didn’t all go to the same Marxism-spewing schools (though a good number of them did) but editors did.  To be an editor, you mostly live in New York City and your particular genre (and “literary” is a genre in publishing) tends to be sort of like an inbred village.  You’re likely to work down the hall from someone you went to college with, live across the street from the guy you first dated in college (and his new boyfriend – never mind.) Your boss got references on you from the person you did a summer internship with, who is her BFF, and that’s how you got hired.  A lot of the authors you really put push behind are either the children of fellow publishing professionals/were your roommates in college/slept with you.

You’re overworked, you’re underpaid, you live in substandard housing, and your only hope of advancing is to ape the manners and beliefs of your “betters” as quickly as possible.

This means you buy the “right” (left) kind of authors, and as vocal as possible.  Even if they fail, your boss will nod and say “it’s the ignorant people in fly over country.”  Take a chance on a dissenting voice, though and what you get is  “What were you thinking?” even if the book is a moderate success (perhaps particularly if the book is a moderate success.)  Because your “betters” confuse politics with religion, they’re likely to react as if you’d preached Satanism.

From the other side of the table, the writers also get the impression any non standard opinions they have better be kept VERY quite, and they’d better tout the standard opinions they have (opinions, I have a few!) as loudly as possible.

This means that, to quote Reiner Kunze, “to the wind they all speak the same.”

The viewing/reading/listening public on the other side – I’ve been there – starts thinking that if all these people, many of them highly gifted and artistic, believe this stuff, then it must be true.  It MUST.  There’s not other choice.  These people who tell these wonderful (some people have a low threshold for wonderful, m’kay) stories, must know something the receiver of story doesn’t.  The receivers countervailing experiences must be wrong.

I was stuck there for many many years, until the trickle of counter experiences pushed me out of that comfort zone and, alas, made me stop reading some of my favorite authors and reduced my movie/tv watching to maybe two hours a month.

But I’m not typical.  I’m an Odd.  I poke and prod behind the veil of seeming reality for who is cranking the show.  It is what it is.

Most people aren’t like that.  They have other interests.

I was reminded of this by one of the “patients” at Gosnell’s saying she first tried a Planned Parenthood but was afraid to go in because of all the protesters and what they might do to her.

The article I read (sorry, I can’t remember where now) pointed out that no user of abortion services has been attacked; that the number of abortion doctors killed is so vanishingly small that they might have better statistics than the rest of the population, and he thought this woman was afraid to go in past the messages that told her she would, in fact, be taking a human life.

I think he was wildly optimistic.  While he’s right about statistics, I’d bet you this woman never looked at statistics in her life.  What I bet she looked at was a never ending stream of chick-talk-shows and movies and soap operas, and sitcoms, where again and again, the crazed anti-abortionist who kills people comes up, as the murderer and central villain, or simply as inference.

You’d have to sit this woman down and talk to her for hours to pierce the veil of what she “just knows”.

And she does.  She saw it with her own eyes.  On TV.

This is what we face, not just electorally (and the way a war on women was conjured out of nowhere in the last election is itself immensely amusing.  If your taste in humor runs to the very sardonic and three steps from tears. The race war they tried to start flopped – which tells you who the most gullible media consumers are and puts paid to any ideas of racial superiority, doesn’t it?)   This is what we face as a culture.

The problem is not that our media and our entertainment were passing through a very tight ring of gatekeepers who had mostly echoing opinions.  The problem is that those opinions were in large part formed by our opponent in the (mostly) cold war.  The problem is that though their regime has proven completely unworkable and reprehensible, there was no shaming and no naming afterwards – partly because our intelligentsia wouldn’t let that happen.

And this is why this battle had to finally be fought here, on our soil, and the way it’s being fought.  Either we win or civilization goes down forever, for having allowed a central diffusion point for opinions and never having vetted the opinions that were in positions of power – not even in the name of the much vaunted diversity.

We never did that because of course, we believe in freedom of opinion, and once you start, where do you stop?

They say viruses can be highly targeted to the patient.

And like blogs are the anti virus for news, we – indie authors, those who refuse to bow to platitudes – are the anti-virus for entertainment.  We are small yet, and not very visual, but we’re here.  And once the tech goes a little further, we’ll be in visual too.  (Oh the screams, they shall be like smoke in the nostrils of the gods, shan’t they?)

Is it too late?  I don’t know.  I tend to believe in a G-d that won’t let freedom perish from this Earth.  But I could be wrong.  And it’s not like He’s going to do it without us.

Perhaps like the old Norse, we’re doomed to fight against evil and perish in the end.  Or perhaps we’ll win.  We’ll never know until we try!

(I just hope the writers’ bar in the afterlife has something other than mead.  I shall hope for single malt.)

I’m a Usaian (read A Few Good Men if this term confuses you) – I believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  For humans, of course.

But what is a human?

The feeling that we need to answer this question and answer it definitely has been growing on me since before I wrote Darkship Thieves.

Actually, the question – if you also read my shifter series you’ll see what I mean – seems to be central to my writing.  It’s one of those things I can’t help letting drop into the “soup” of a novel, whether I intend to or not.

The reason for this is probably that, according to the current means of determining what and who is “human” I’m not.  And yes, I’ll explain this, but let’s leave this angle till later.  It’s personal and I think this is bigger than that.

As I said this has been growing for a long time, and I think advances in science – manufactured humans; enhanced humans; the possibility of growing anencephalic human bodies for brain transplant – none of it is here yet, but none of it is so far that we can’t see the place they exist.

And then the question becomes “where is that line?” Because see, when you’re drawing that kind of line, it moves.  If you say manufactured humans aren’t human because they were created outside the woman’s body by an artificial process, what does that make IVF babies?

And the problem with such lines is that whatever you use can rebound and include far more than you expect – or it can give people license to act according to their basest instincts, which is what all of civilization is designed to stop.

Right now, that line is blurry and moves.  Different people have different opinions.  And that gives the opportunity for incidents like the Kermit Gosnell mass murder spree to occur AND FOR NO ONE TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT for years.

If you know nothing about it, you should click on that link.  If you are a wussy and don’t want to, then let me tell you the general outlines.  In PA abortion is illegal after 24 weeks (I think) but for years, this creep was giving women “abortions” almost up to the date of delivery, or not asking how far along they were.  “Abortions” is in parenthesis because this unspeakable monster was delivering the baby and then cutting the spinal cord… of a fully viable baby.

There were other horrors, horrors that we’ve come to expect in this sort of thing, the same sort of horrors on any mass murderer’s den, or as a side effect of the camps in Nazi Germany.  It seems to be fairly common of the human mind to slide into things like body parts held for souvenirs, grisly jokes about the murdered and ultimately a devaluing of everyone else – Kermit Gosnell also used unsterilized instruments, perforated women’s uteri, left patients to die lying on filthy tables, covered with filthy blankets.

This type of devolution seems to be common to the human mind.  Yes, I know, you stand there and you tell me “Not me, I’d never do that.” But in fact, while it takes a special kind of evil (I almost typed “or insanity” but I won’t.  That’s me flinching from the truth.  I don’t think he’s insane at all.  He’s just evil.) to be Kermit Gosnell, it takes simply being normal to go along with it.

The thing that shocked me more than Kermit Gosnell’s actions, even his keeping of body parts in various containers, was his assistants.  These were mostly young, untrained, and their answers to why they did this were eerily familiar, “I was following orders.”

Look, let’s forget Hitler for a moment.  Mao.  The cultural revolution.  Millions dead, millions starved.  Yes, Mao was a mad man who will rot in hell (and to my atheist readers, rest assured if there ISN’T a hell I’ll make sure there is one just for him and Stalin.)  But Mao didn’t fan out to the countryside following his deranged orders, turning on his fellow man, forcing people to stop doing what they’d always done to grow food, reducing them to feral behavior and even cannibalism.

No, those were mostly “normal” people who’d lost their mooring on what they were and what their victims were and what made what they were doing monstrous.

Terry Pratchett says the only sin is treating people like things.  (Terry Pratchett is a secular humanist and therefore is clearly not properly trained in the ways of shame and guilt.  I could list a lot more sins just sitting here. Yes, this is said tongue in cheek.)  Robert A. Heinlein said that sin was hurting others.  Hurting yourself was just stupid.

They’re both right if not fully right.  Pratchett is right that in ultimate analysis, the last sin, the one that will rob you – yes you – of your own humanity is to get used to treating beings like you as things.  Heinlein is right on the hurt thing, which is another distillation of the Pratchett thing.  He is wrong that hurting yourself is just stupid.  Because when you treat others like things, it rebounds on you.  You start thinking of yourself as a thing.  And then you become… what humans become when they’re not trying to hold themselves up to any sort of ideal.  At the end of it the most normal human will end up snipping baby cords.

Christian,  Atheist, Agnostic Animist or  confused human beings who stop respecting humanity end up recreating the more lurid nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch.  It just happens.  It’s horrible and it’s human.

Which is why it’s important not just for us to decide where the line between human and non-human is, but to decide and to make it stick fast and bright.

Right now, it’s an individual line.

For instance, what Kermit Gosnell did was already against the law in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania doesn’t allow abortion after  what is considered a viable age.  (And they’re out of date.  It’s been 20 weeks for at least twenty two years because I counted that very carefully in my first pregnancy.  Yes, explanation of that will come later.)

It is not however against the law everywhere in the country.  There are states, where it is legal to do what he did (except for the filth, etc.)  with one minor change – the baby can’t be DELIVERED when you cut through his spinal cord.  So doctors will turn the baby so it will come out feet first, so they can snip the cord while the head is still in the birth canal and therefore the baby isn’t LEGALLY born.  Yes, women have this done.  Yes, doctors – presumably psychologically normal human beings do this.

And this is why Gosnell’s associates didn’t know there was anything wrong going on.  And this is why the authorities turned a blind eye.  Yes, it was illegal in PA – but I mean, it’s a minor thing and it can’t be intrinsically WRONG because it is LEGAL elsewhere.

In essence, any baby – in practical treatment in the US – until its head emerges from the birth canal is only a human if the mother says so.

Hospitals will go through untold effort to save a pregnancy at sixteen weeks because the mother wants that baby very much.  The same hospitals will go through untold effort to make sure another one ends, because the mother says so.

Yes, I’ve heard the justifications.  One of my friends who was horribly abused as a child is very pro-abortion because (she told me) “if my parents had aborted me, they wouldn’t have abused me.”  This is insane in more ways than one.  I shocked her and surprised her by telling her “They’d never have aborted you.  They wanted you very much.  They needed a scapegoat in the family.”  I shocked her and made her think, but as with any such deep-set convictions, it wore off.

That’s essentially the justification for believing that those the mother wants (BTW this is very similar to the Spartan culling system, where the father chose which babies would be exposed and therefore weren’t human) are human and the others aren’t.  It is believed wanted babies are happier or better cared for.  In this it’s forgotten that mothers can want babies for all sorts of reasons, and that “wanting” is transitory, if all the ads to give away 1 year old, 4 year old, 7 year old dogs on Craigslist are any indication.

When I was eight years old, my mother – and no, she’s not a naturally cruel woman, but you’d have to have known me at eight.  I’m sure I tried the patience of a saint – in the middle of a screaming argument, told me that I was only there because my father had found her appointment for her SECOND attempt at aborting me.  He’d told her if she succeeded he would walk out. (Yes, there was a first.  Yes, it might or might not have killed a twin, depending on what hint and mumble you believe.  Unless pushed beyond endurance, mom will not discuss such things.)

So, you see, as far as “mother’s choice” goes, I am not human.  Or does the choice change because when I was born extremely premature and riddled with the normal issues of such babies who are not given the most up to date assistance, she fought and spent a small fortune to keep me alive? (Because she doesn’t believe humanity is mother’s choice.  And for the curious, there are extenuating circumstances.  Mom believed – justifiably – that she should not have children.  She also lived in a place and time where there was no contraception.  It might have been technically available – I’m almost sure that condoms were – but if anyone bought them in the village, the ENTIRE VILLAGE WOULD KNOW.  In a Catholic – it’s in the constitution – country like Portugal, back in the sixties, this could lead to ostracism or worse.  So mom had an excuse for desperate measures.  I don’t have to like it, but I admit it was there.)

Does it do something to you to know you were not wanted?  Well, yes.  It’s not helped by hearing things like asthma, which I had until I was 12, called “the illness of the unwanted child” which they did when I was small – apparently believing it mostly psychological.  Thank heavens they don’t do that now.  (And I can assure you it’s wrong.  My second son was desperately wanted.)

However, even if the relationship with mom was always fraught until recent years, I LIKE being alive.  I think even mom would agree that it would be a pity for her to have succeeded.  (Well, she would agree now, I’m not a teen.  But that’s sort of normal, right?  I spent most of the boys’ teen years going “I should have stuck with cats.  They can’t be mass murderers.  No thumbs.”)

So, there’s my bias.  I think I’m human.  My mother would not have chosen me.  Am I human?  If you cut me, do I bleed?

It is of course, ritually required, at this point to say “of course I’m pro choice.”  As with other ritual observances, I’m not going to that church.

“Pro-choice” is a nice, bland affirmation, avoiding all sharp jagged questions of the “who is human?” debate.  Who isn’t pro-choice?  I like choosing my clothes, and how I do my hair, and I like choosing what I eat and drink.  But when it comes to choosing who is human, who chooses?  And why? And does it make any sense?  Does it make a bright, bright light so we know “this is like me.  This I must not devalue, lest I devalue me”?  Or is it hidden under the bed, and secretive, and case by case?

Mother’s choice of course evolved out of “women’s rights” because, well, doesn’t a woman have a right to her own body?

She most assuredly does.  What she does not indeed have the right to is someone else’s body.  I don’t particularly care where that body is.  You can’t say “but it isn’t right to have a woman enslaved for months to bear some child” unless you have some other way for humans to come into the world.  You want women not to be “enslaved” bearing children, you invent an external bio-womb.  What you’re raging at is nature.  It is inescapable.   And please for the love of BOB don’t tell me “What if it’s a rapist’s child?” – we will go into that, but for now just rest assured (I’d bet you money) that you’re descended from hundreds of rapists.  I guarantee it.  Does that make you less human?  No?  Then why is a child less human because he or she was fathered by a scumbag?  Let me assure you the tendency to rape is not hereditary, unless you believe the worst feminist claptrap where all penetration is violation.  Every man alive is descended from rapists.  And yet rape is a relatively rare occurrence.  (Anyone bringing statistics from NOW which consider “I changed my mind” rape, will get hit but hard.)

Part of this is looking at pregnancies with the hysteria of adolescence.  We all become crazy teeny boppers when we talk about it.  “I don’t want this child in me foooooooorever”.

Yes, I’m fairly sure my first pregnancy (I HATE being pregnant.  Yes, I love babies.  Shut up.  Are you always consistent?) lasted a geological age, give or take.  But now, twenty one years later?  It was a quick thing.  I mean, you hear people say stuff like “We’ll have to live in this place till our house is built.  Doesn’t matter much what.  It’s a few months.”  That’s all a pregnancy is to the mother.  A few months.  To the baby it’s life and a chance at liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say “What about when the life of the mother is at stake?”

Well, that is different, isn’t it.  These are the dilemmas that try men’s souls.  There the decision would have to go to the mother, being sound of mind, or the nearest relative if not.  THAT is a case where it’s case by case.  And for the record, with #1 son I made that decision.  I had pre-eclampsia.  BAD pre-eclampsia for which I spent much time in the hospital and the rest of the time flat on my back.  I was told – argued at, cajoled – to have an abortion.  I chose not to.  I chose not to even though my husband would probably have chosen otherwise faced with losing me (The funny thing here is that every medical professional assumed he was the one not “letting” me have an abortion.  Apparently abortion is such an unalloyed good that women will NATURALLY want one, if the husband doesn’t stop it.)  It was not rational.  I risked both our lives, for nine months (PLUS THREE DAYS. – yes, I resent that) in order to chance that he’d come through all right.  It was what I had to do, because I wouldn’t be able to live knowing I’d killed him to go on.

Because that is the thing, see?  I couldn’t fool myself what I was killing wasn’t a human being.  We had worked too hard for that pregnancy, had ultrasounds from eight weeks in, KNEW he was there and was human.

So – am I saying all human life is human and therefore inviolable from the moment of conception?

I am and I’m not.  My friend Kate is very afraid that if abortion is made illegal there will be a period police making sure that if you missed a period, you don’t abort.  She says there are already laws criminalizing “bad behavior” while pregnant.  Well, all right.  There are laws criminalizing big gulps too (or were, in NYC) but there was no police measuring the cups.  There wasn’t because it’s physically impossible.  Even in a dystopian future, where a probe is inserted in each woman to notify you if she has bled, it would be impossible to correlate all the data and for human agents to take notice.  (Now if law enforcement is all done by robots it can be done.)  And the “mother’s bad behavior” thing is sort of like “hate crime” – persecutors will do that.

There is a time in every pregnancy where you can’t tell if it’s there.  I don’t know what the timing is NOW, but in my day it was “before the second missed period” you’re not officially pregnant.  I know that, because I miscarry early, and the only time I could get a doctor to intervene when it started, I had older son.  BUT the doctor intervened because I was at a specialized infertility clinic.  If I’d been at a regular hospital they’d have laughed at me.

I’d even go so far as to say that before the third missed period, a woman who wishes to fool herself (my mom, for instance who is, btw, anti-abortion) can say “I wasn’t really pregnant.”

And there are ways to stop a pregnancy WAY before that.  Yes, contraceptives fail, but there’s the morning after pill.  And if that fails, after the first missed period there are other interventions.

So, do I believe abortion should be illegal?  All the time?

I believe we have enough laws in the books.  I also believe murder is already illegal.  Whether it should be illegal or not is something else.  I can see reasons not to make it illegal.  BUT legal or not, (yes, there’s legal murder — self-defense) when murder happens, we know the person killed was a human.  That’s the important thing.  It’s not done lightly even when justified, the person killed is not robbed of his humanity.

Should we do the same with abortion?  Yes, there are justifiable causes (if the father decides to keep his wife and not the baby, say) but is the baby human? Until a woman gives birth to a litter of kittens, what a woman carries is a human being.  After that penumbra of the first two months (when most miscarriages occur, many of them unknown) if a woman aborts a child, yes it is murder.  It might be justified, but it is STILL killing a human. (It is the same in the first three months, but it is possible for people to fool themselves, and illusion is necessary for functioning human societies.)  What did you think she was killing?  A cabbage?  It’s a human, made of the same stuff you are – and don’t give me brain function or not being able to survive on his own.  By that definition, depending on who moves the line, you end up including everyone up to two years old.  The Chinese do.  Google China and dying rooms – to devalue him or her is to devalue yourself.

“Mother’s choice” is not working because it’s internally contradictory and nonsensical.  How can a woman be pregnant five months, and then suddenly the baby in her stops being wanted and therefore stops being human?

What makes you human?  Are you human?  What if your mother changed her mind?  Oh, you’re out of the womb?  Why should that matter?

Science is forever pushing back that line at which the baby is viable.  It’s also making other nightmares possible.  I’m not linking it here, but a commenter sent me a link to a blog talking about how it’s either already being done, or it can be done, that the ovaries of aborted babies can be grown to maturity in a few months, outside the body, and then the eggs can be used for “infertility therapies” – yep, egg donors.

So, are the babies born of those eggs human? Why?  Because their adoptive mother wants them?  Their real mother never got to be human.  How is that possible?

On the other side of that lies a chamber of unspeakable horrors.

We don’t need more laws.  I grew up in a country where abortion was illegal.  Page up to where mom tried to abort me once and had an appointment to do it again.  It was illegal. I have reason to think mom had several others.  I went to school with a girl who – at 17 – had had ten. (BTW, stories of coat hangers are mostly that.  Oh, it might have happened once or twice.  There are always the stupid and the isolated.  Most abortions were administered by doctors, quietly, and they were very careful because they didn’t want to get caught.  Most of them were also before the three month mark, for the same reason.  If people already knew you were pregnant, no doctor would do it.)

Laws against abortion won’t stop it, until the culture changes.  (Though at this point to stop the horrendous abortion mill-lobby, it’s almost worth it.  Almost but not quite.)

Abortions will still happen if we teach people what makes you human is your mother’s choice to have you or not.

Humans are funny animals.  RES said in comments “Oh, it’s easy to know what humans are.  They are people like me.  Not humans are those other people.”

This is at the basis of every human society.  “We’re human.  Those so and sos over there aren’t.”

The problem is, we’ve gone past tribes and we’re now looking at all of humanity.  You don’t have a dividing line between “human and non-human” that hinges on facial features or how they eat or where they live doesn’t apply.  And so the line has receded to “those who can’t fight back; those who can’t defend themselves.”

It’s a bad line.  If you can’t tell why let me explain.  As assuredly as I stand here, you too, no matter how vital, how strong, how full of assurance you’re human, had a time when others made decisions for you.  And as sure as I stand here, unless you’re very lucky, there will be a time they will again.

Who is human?  Make a decision that doesn’t hinge on case by case choice.  Decide whether it’s “before ten weeks there’s a high likelihood it won’t stick, anyway” or “We can kill them till they’re eighteen if they don’t park the car right.”  Make a decision and stick to it.

But before you do beware that people – normal people – will commit unspeakable crimes against those declared non human.  Be sure it’s something you can endure and that seeing their remains won’t break your heart and twist that which IS human in you.

I’m a libertarian.  It’s no part of my métier to tell you WHAT to choose.  I’m not pro-choice because when I DID have to choose, there was no choice.  It was “I can’t continue living with myself if I have him killed.” – that is me.  When I have to choose I will choose life. And not even (just) human life.  I’m not such a chowder head that I believe we must respect meat animals, (well, I wouldn’t be unnecessarily cruel.) The why of that is a discussion for another time.  BUT until then, I am the woman who will drive hours away in a snow storm to pick up a litter of orphaned kittens who probably won’t survive even with the best care I can provide.

That’s my bias.  I will choose life for humans and those animals which (living with us) partake a little of our humanity.

Your bias might be different.  But don’t fool yourself that it’s obvious, that we have the only system that makes sense, or that “of course” it’s this way.

Choose carefully between human and non human.  The wrong choice will leave you on the wrong side of it.  And no one will help.