According To Hoyt

The other day Dan and I found ourselves in a buffet line behind two college students who each outweighed me by double – and I need to lose sixty pounds or so.  They were talking about how no matter what, they couldn’t seem to lose weight.

Being born-again-thin my husband had to share what worked for him, of course.  (It’s the Gary Taubes method.  I hasten to point out it doesn’t work for EVERYONE.  It’s possible in the future, if we don’t destroy our medical industry, we could get our diet prescribed according to our genetics.  I once had a friend who ate only carbs and at a prodigious rate [and we’re talking fries and nachos, not healthy stuff] and was incredibly svelte.  But for a lot of us that’s the kiss of death.)

These two young women looked at him, not as if they resented the intrusion, but as though they had no clue what he was saying.  And then they nodded sagely and said “We must avoid processed foods.”  From then on, no matter what he said, that’s what they heard.

I shouldn’t laugh, truly.  I was once like them, and bought my sugar “in the raw” and my rice brown and…

To our purpose nothing.  If you don’t process carbs well, then eating honey or eating white sugar (or eating some of the fruits that have more sugar, like bananas) comes to exactly the same.  Your body does not have your prejudices.  It has not clue if it’s “natural.”  If it can use it, it does and it doesn’t much care how it came in.  (Now fiber might be an admirable thing, but it turns out we don’t need nearly as much of it as people used to think, and besides whatever else it does it does NOT slow down the absorption of calories or what have you.  At most it makes you feel full longer.)

But to these girls, “not processed” had become sort of a magical quality.  Their body was supposed to know that they bought it from the expensive organic grocery store and not their corner store.  Which probably explained their weight.  When you think “virtuous calories” don’t make you fat, you are bound to expand.

It’s the same thing as people who buy all their meds from the “natural” or “herb” store, and know they’re fine, because “it’s natural.”

The sad thing, of course, is that there is enough “natural” stuff that can kill you.  I mean, apple seeds contain cyanide, if you take them in enough quantity.  And as Friar Lawrence goes on at length in Romeo and Juliet, almost every “natural” fruit or flower has components that can cure in one concentration and kill in another?

So, whence this fetish made of “natural?”

As far as I can tell it started with the Romantics.  (I shall be beating up on the Romantics and their myths at MGC too.   And I might be doing it for the next several days. At least when it comes to writing.)

Round about the eighteenth century, society had advanced enough that most people thought they were losing something.  Now, I want you to take in account that, unlike shown in the wretched Pride and Prejudice movie, most manor houses might not have chickens living in the house  (Actually during the peninsular war, the strange closeness between Portuguese and their livestock was one of the permanent complaints of English soldiers) but they had a home farm.  And while the daughter of the house wouldn’t go barefoot (what were the filmmakers thinking?  That England in the Regency was the middle ages?  Heck, the daughter of well-to-do merchants or even middling ones wouldn’t go barefoot and the daughter of a prosperous farmer probably wore something like clogs.  Going barefoot was a sign of extreme destitution) she probably was acquainted, at least to walk by, with beast and fowl and their ways.

Some of the more sheltered and really wealthy girls might not know that oh, dear little lambs grew into ill-tempered rams, and that all creation puts out massive quantities of manure.  But the average person was close enough to nature to smell it, every day of their lives.

Which makes us chuckle at the idea that they considered themselves so far removed from nature that nature became something magical and almost sacred.

But then look at it the other way.  Turn it around.  Compared to how people lived just a couple hundred years before their time, they were removed from nature in the most important sense of all: for the first time society had a significant surplus, so that there were no famines.  For the first time, it was possible for a farm to produce more than it needed to provide a bare livelihood.  For the first time, even poor people could have two suits (though probably both bought very used.)  For the first time things like the Black Plague didn’t rage through killing massive numbers.  And while their child mortality seems appalling to us, if you birthed 10 children, you had a good chance of raising five.  More if you were relatively wealthy.  (This led to a population explosion.)

So from their point of view they were getting dangerously refined, and needed a little nature.

All of which would be fine, if the leaders of this movement weren’t also the sort of people who ARE far from nature and who romanticized everything in nature.

I don’t fully understand this, unless they had excuses like “but that’s not really nature because the chickens are penned and that’s why their sh*t stinks” or whatever.  They probably did.  The communists are convinced the only reason for sin is “capitalism,” and not just “human nature” and blame capitalism even in times when there was none.

But anyway, they imagined what it must have been like to live in harmony with nature, and put all the virtues in the past.  They rejected Christianity (except when they decided there had been a “primitive” Christianity which suited their tastes – by which we mean was sort of like paganism with crosses) and embraced the ancient religions, but of course without what really went with paganism: the fear of the quasi-understood gods and the constant “bribery” of said gods.  They embraced “natural” diets, which mostly consisted of eating stuff they imagined had “just growed”, they liked ruins because they spoke of an older, more natural time.  They preferred the affectation of poverty over the ostentatiousness that signified wealth in their society.

It’s very easy to laugh at the romantics.  What’s really hard is to see they are still with us.  Yeah, yeah, okay, very few people these days build ruins.  At least on purpose.  However, in my region, people build “authentic adobe houses” – with all the modern conveniences, of course.  And they haven’t given up on the idea that “closer to nature” is better.

I will confess I’m one of the world’s born non-campers.  No, seriously.  I can see it as part of military or survival training, where it serves a purpose, but having lived a significant portion of my life without an indoor bathroom (grandma wouldn’t have the bathroom indoors.  It was a BATHROOM mind, not an outhouse – mom’s family had an outhouse and I have myself urinary track infections holding it in rather than use the thing when we visited every Sunday afternoon – with shower and everything, but to her mind it was “dirty” having it indoors.) I will not voluntarily subject myself to it again.  As with roller coasters, where I find my ears giving me issues and halfway through the ride I go “I’m paying for THIS?” I don’t see any point leaving my house and going somewhere to be uncomfortable.

Your mileage may vary.  And yes, there’s a lot to be said for going some place quiet now and then (most camping sites don’t qualify.)  But the craze for camping relies on the idea that even if you are in a bunch, being close to nature has its own peculiar virtue.

Camping, though, annoys me (particularly when people try to convince me I’d really, really like it if I just look at it another way) but not markedly.  Like drugs and roller coasters it falls under “uh… you’re odd, but carry on and be your crazy self.  Just don’t drag me into it.”

HOWEVER… the… ah… ethos of camping (not the Athos of camping, which involves sharp pointy things) has invaded how we think of life.  The idea that all you need is a tent – or cabin – a bottle of wine and your true love has become sort of what to aim for in society.

Only not really, because, well, we’re humans and even the people who camp for fun would rather not do it in the dead of winter, under a blizzard.  (Or under a lizard, if you’re camping in the Jurassic.  – yes, I AM very silly.)

So what we have is this schizophrenic mentality where the most conspicuous consumption aims to make things look simple and unadorned.  And don’t go and tell me that’s just “good taste” – according to whom?  This sort of thing used to change every so often until the Romantics.

And you know, people who are advocates for nature, and who think that the human race should leave no mark on the Earth live in 5000 square feet homes.

We are divorced from nature, in the sense that even my kids – whom I take time to shove into the hardships of life now and then – except for Portugal have never seen a chicken outside a petting zoo (and even in Portugal, Marshall was so taken with a baby duck that a vendor offered to give it to him.  I had to explain to the then 14 year old the mess it would be to bring a pet duck to the US.)

So people take a lot of things for granted that just ain’t so, and have made nature sort of a goddess and the Earth a sentient thing that must be “served” and “preserved” and who knows what else.  And they think their bodies react differently to “natural” things.  And they think that even if they eliminated all those factories, that terribly unaesthetic work thing, the world would go on humming.

This is how we get to the wonderful point that an intrusive and counterproductive healthcare bill can be sold as “giving you the freedom to pursue your art or craft” – because in the future, food (unprocessed of course) just magically appears, while we’re all happily writing novels, creating sculpture, or simply painting seashells.  (With Recuerdo de Espana, of course.  Because by that time it will be ironic and … never mind.)

Worse is projecting this fetishization (I’m sure using that word a lot) backward and outward.  This leads to the idea that other humans, who live in ways different – and often more brutal and primitive – than ours, must have some virtue, because they’re “closer to nature.”

This is what accounts for both the love affair with brutal tyrants (the natural man!), wanting distant places to remain poor and quaint (as much as I like Bollywood’s Bride and Prejudice, their entire idea that India should stay poor and unsullied is gag-worthy) and PREFERING the most dysfunctional cultures (like most forms of Islam) to our own – because they’re poorer, they’re closer to nature and therefore “better.”  It also accounts for a good deal of not just human hatred but Western hatred.

And all the time these poseurs are shamming it.  Not just to us, no, to themselves.  However, take one of these “the little brown people have the right way” and dump them in Portugal, outside touristic areas, in an unheated stone farmhouse in the mountains in the middle of January (and Portugal has a temperate climate) and see how fast they start ranting and raving and longing for central heating, and hating everyone and everything around them.

Or watch them try to grow and harvest their own food and see how quickly they give it up (like most of the back-to-the-earth people in the sixties.)

Do you know when I’ll believe their sincere about their “natural” and “voluntary poverty” fetish?  Not when they’re living in 300 sq feet, perfectly designed to maximize utility houses, set in scenic regions where they can live outside a great part of the time, no.

I’ll know they’re serious when they do what Dave Freer does and move to a rural/more primitive (by which I mean early twentieth century not tenth) community and live as a member, not lording it over people.  (I know why Dave did it, and respect his choice, but I’m sure he also wouldn’t mind a few more creature comforts.  I also know most eco-fluffs in this area would have a nervous breakdown after a month living as he does.)

Or easier – I’ll know they’re serious when they move to a rural community here in the US (which is still miles more comfortable than anywhere in the world) and integrate without patronizing the locals (who, from those I met, are just smart as anyone else, even if they don’t read the stuff I do – but then not many people do that.  They usually go higher brow…)

Until then, I wish they’d leave me alone and stop shoving their “unprocessed”, their “natural” and their “unspoiled” in my face.

I’m the product of five thousand years of civilization.  I’ve EARNED the right not to go back to nature.

Related post on nature vs. nurture — “I’m a Genius” at Mad Genius club.  (And yes, that declaration implies tongue is pressing so hard against cheek it will eventually perforate.)

Also, if you are inclined to do so, consider Raygun Chronicles fundraiser.  It would be good to see a totally indie anthology with pro writers, etc.  And trust me, they’re doing it on shoe string as is.  This model pays pro rates while avoiding big publishers.  Give it a try.

The time has come, in the light of the tragedy that IS our schools to consider teacher control.  In this case, the sort of control that forces teachers to think like rational human beings before going off half cocked and doing stupid things.

It might also be time to think of administrator control.  A good first measure would be to say that no one not in possession of a brain that functions AT LEAST at cat level can be a school administrator.  Above all, they will NOT be allowed to make any type of safety policies.

I live in Colorado, so I have been in doubt that my school system could or would protect my kids in the event of someone wishing to massacre school kids wholesale.

The problem, you see, was Columbine, followed by what has to be the most stupid set of rules ever created by man – or monkey.  Or mongoose.

It started with my younger son’s preschool teacher, assuring us with tears in her eyes and voice, that she would willingly DIE for all or any of our kids.

Uh…  First of all, this was a woman who couldn’t be bother to notice that my kid was bored out of his gourd, and who kept trying to get me to have him classified as autistic.  (As far as I can tell because she had taken autism in school.  Clearly not WELL.  I mean, what she thought was a symptom was that Marshall would listen to instructions, then look to see what his classmates were doing, or ask a classmate what to do.  That’s not autism.  That’s deafness – which it proved to be, in a specialized form.) Second… I didn’t want her to DIE for my kid.  I wanted her to prevent my kid being killed.  Whether she died or not was, frankly, quite immaterial to me.  I mean, I’d prefer people don’t get killed, but her getting killed or not was not a guarantee my kid wouldn’t also be – or not – killed.  And her self-dramatization as “martyr for preschoolers” was seriously off-putting and meant – to me – that she wasn’t using her brain over this, but trying to think with her emotions.

Then she outlines the plan handed down by the administrators.  Their plan, basically, is to – at the first sign of a threat – lock all the kids in the class.

I’m going to be blunt: in a school where the doors aren’t bullet – or strong kick – proof, locking the kids in the class just ensures if THERE IS a gunman, he can systematically go down the row of classrooms, kick the door, shoot everyone.  Reload.  Next classroom…  Or throw a grenade in the there.  Or…

In fact, I can’t conceive of a single circumstance in which locking the kids in, and keeping them all like sitting ducks in a group will keep them safe.

This is when I realized the system had gone nuts.

A)    NOTHING in their plan prevented an attack like Columbine’s.  In fact it could be said to facilitate that type of attack.

B)    It allowed teachers to self-dramatize as protectors, even though most of them weren’t armed; couldn’t have shot a lame rat in a barrel; would have wet themselves at the sight of a gun; and would never think of doing those things that could/should be done to prevent an actual massacre.  You know – throw books/desks/water/vase, then make a desperate rush at the gunman while he’s confused.

And that in a nutshell is where we’ve got.  Because of some well-publicized massacres and because the emphasis is put on guns (Columbine involved bombs also, which fortunately failed to go off, and the worst school massacre in the US – unless I misremember – involved bombs only) this allows the bureaucratic mind to go … stupid.

Instead of genuinely trying to prevent casualties in the case someone with evil intentions comes into the school, they try to control THE STUDENTS.  This is the equivalent of keeping everyone safe by preventing them from running with scissors, even if the scissors are desperately needed to cut a noose that’s strangling someone.

Keeping the students locked in classrooms does nothing but make it easier to identify the bodies.  Oh, yeah, it also allows the school to say “We did everything we could.  Ms. So and So died for her students.”

Then there is the fetishization of elements in whatever the latest well-publicized shooting.  When I was picking up the kid from school, in a downpour (we had only one car.  The school was five blocks away.  We walked) wearing a raincoat, they made me stop, remove the (dripping) raincoat and FRISKED me, at gunpoint, because, you know, Columbine involved a “trench coat mafia” (turns out it didn’t, but that’s besides the point.)  This of course meant that I, a middle aged mother of two was somehow a member of a highschool Goth clique fifty miles away.

When my friend’s kid wore a t-shirt to school showing a sword and “puncture marks” and saying “Dueling society, an ever diminishing group” (or something like that.  It was a standard con t-shirt) they made him turn it inside out, because it “could be considered a threat” (in a madhouse.  A threat is something like “I’ll kill you.”  Not “Hey, I make jokes about a dueling society” – do these people even KNOW what dueling means?)

Then there’s the fact that these people have decided guns are what causes the deaths.  Only guns.  Not anything else.

This means that the kid who chews a poptart into the shape of a gun MUST be suspended; that the kid who wears a Marine Corps t-shirt to school is threatened with suspension that the student who disarms a gunman gets suspended and that singing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s theme song on your cell phone message can get you arrested.

This is not only insane, but counterproductive, and it comes totally from “bureaucratic mind and procedure.”

Note in the last article that they said everyone did what they were supposed to: so, mishearing lyrics, then arresting an innocent student, disrupting classes in the entire district and messing up people’s schedules is what the rules are DESIGNED to do?

Good to know.

Note that if the student had recorded a song – his or another – about shooting people after school, it still would not be evidence of anything, not even a vague intention to do so.

This is the type of thinking that had a teacher FROM A SCHOOL MY SON NO LONGER ATTENDED call us because “a concerned student” had called HER because my son was posting blues lyrics on his face book page and one of them referenced suicide.  The teacher called us DURING SUMMER.  And tried to bully us into taking the boy (who when the call came was goofing around with us on the subject of going out to play mini-golf) to a psychiatrist.  BECAUSE HE QUOTED BLUES LYRICS, which he identified as blues lyrics, and was posting then analyzing in relation to the themes of blues.

Even when we pointed the context to the teacher, she insisted it was her “duty” to make us take our son to a psychiatrist.  Because someone willfully misunderstood him.

I think it was NOT her duty, but her pleasure, to stick her nose in everyone’s business.  And I think these rules ONLY encourage sticking their noses in everyone’s business.  Instead of stopping potentially homicidal students (or people from outside) who, usually, are more careful about not giving themselves away, they only encourage teachers and schools to persecute kids (or parents) who are odd, who deviate from the norm, who behave in quirky or unusual (but completely harmless) ways.

They also encourage beating back any student disposed to fighting back or self defense.

In other words, all of these are tools for enforcing conformity.

Which is why we need teacher and administrator control.  They need to be reminded sharply that their DUTY is to teach our kids academic subjects: not to raise them, not to “form” them, not to indoctrinate them, and certainly not to emasculate them.

Arm the sane teachers (yes, there are a few.  More precious than rubies and rarer than diamonds, but a few in each school) and tell them it’s their duty to shoot any attacker.  Then teach the kids to throw everything on hand at an attacker – NOT sit still and wait for death.

I don’t want the teachers to give their lives for my kids.  I want them to fight back and defend my kids.  And I want them to stop trying to stick their noses where they don’t belong.

They’ve forgotten they’re our employees and think they’re our (and our kids’) parents.  It’s time to stop this crazy train.

And those who do things like bother parents at home in summer, over a student that doesn’t even attend their school; those who make kids turn innocuous t-shirts inside out, those who charge students for chewing a pop tart in the shape of a gun, and those who causes incidents over misheard lyrics, or charge someone for saving lives (because, well, he was near a gun.  He’s “tainted”) need to be liable to criminal prosecution.  Only then will this nonsense stop.

Another post in a couple of hours, but it’s been born in upon me that I should do a little promo for A Few Good Men, which, as far as I can tell has a hard release date: today!

So…

A Few Good Men is the third book set in the Darkship continuum, but it’s not in the sequence.  As a main, voice, character, it has the — er — older brother of Max Keeva, who is killed in Darkship Thieves.

It can be read as a stand alone, and in fact I made sure some of my betas had not read Darkship.

Some men are born revolutionaries; some have revolution thrust upon them; and some find themselves becoming the pivot of long-simmering resistance and rebellion and joining the greater cause for the sake of those they must protect.

In a world in which “Good Man” means totalitarian ruler, no one could be less prepared for the position than Lucius Keeva. Unexpectedly released from prison after more than a decade imprisonment, he finds himself at risk from both his own class and the forces that would overthrow them. His only hope of survival lies with a notoriously unstable character, Nat Remy, and the organization he belongs to. Lucius Keeva would much rather not involve himself with the armed rabble that are The Sons of Liberty, much less the mystical and strange Usaian religion to which they belong. But they and the revolution they dream of are his only hope of protecting himself and the people entrusted to him.

So I’ve forgotten to turn on my humidifier for the last… week, and this morning I woke up completely stuffy – having the effect of a hangover without having had the fun of getting gloriously drunk.

Which is why this post is so late.  I couldn’t figure out what to write about, until RES suggested the joys of breathing.

I added the breathing free.

You see, when it comes right down to it, there’s only three types of political views: those who want to tell others how to live, those who want to be told how to live, because then if it all goes wrong it’s not their fault, and those who want to be left alone.  I fall in the later.  I want government to leave me as alone as possible.

I’m willing to tolerate a modicum of intrusion.  While I think there might be better ways to build roads and finance armies, for instance, the ancient and quaint custom of our civilization is to do this via taxes.  (We should just be glad taxes are no longer collected irregularly and in varying amounts so you never know how to plan f… never mind.)  I’m even willing to tolerate stuff like taking money from me on the promise of an old age payment that will never come or from my husband on the promise of an unemployment payment that will come but that we hope not to need.

I’m willing to admit some poor relief might be undertaken, though I think it should be local and on very different lines.  I would seriously prefer any of those three functions be private – old age insurance; unemployment insurance; charity – and I think those are way more efficient, but when you idiot-proof your form of government someone builds a better idiot, and I don’t think privatizing those functions will be possible without a complete (and slow) change in culture.

I don’t like any of those intrusions, mind.  If everyone in the world were of my kind, we’d probably not have a government.  (We might also not have roads or armies.  I don’t play well with others – or at least that’s what Kindergarten said before they expelled me.)  And we very well might be lacking a civilization altogether (but hey, we’d have some COOL stories.)

Everyone in the world is not my kind.  There will always be those who want to tell people what to do and those who want someone else to choose for them, either out of a becoming modesty or because they want someone to blame.  (My dad always makes mom pick where to go out to eat, because then if it’s horrible, he can blame her. It’s the worst of his non-endearing habits.)

America has a higher proportion of people who – while gregarious or even cooperative with their fellow citizens (we give more to charity than any other country) – don’t want anyone telling them what to do.  This is what gives me hope for us.

But of course, even here most people want to be told what to do or to tell others what to do.

Right now I’m seeing this in my chosen field: Big publishers and small are preying on newbies who want to be “real.”

They might be doing very well indie, but they will ditch it all to go with the big house, which these days most of the time means less money, but it makes them feel “real.”  (The world is full of velveteen authors.)

Since I generally don’t care what people do, and it’s their money and their bet, this should leave me untouched.  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t because I’ve read some of these contracts or heard talk of the terms.

I’m going to say it here, once and for all: MONEY FLOWS TO THE AUTHOR.  (Thank you Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith for beating this into my head.)

Most of you have heard this and are at least somewhat leery of outfits that ask you to pay a fee to read/edit/publish/submit your book.  Bully for you.

What you aren’t – and you need to be – is aware that your writing itself has a value.  Yes, even you Ms. Beginner Writer, with the manuscript mostly about having breakfast, picking outfits and shopping.

The value in many cases is miniscule, or at least minimal, but in an era of ebooks, there IS a value.  (The (Ric) Locke Theorem:  For any book, no matter how ridiculous the subject, poor the plotting and lousy the language, there will be at least 1000 buyers worldwide who think it’s the best thing ever.)

If you’re putting it up Indie, you might only see you know, $700 dollars over ten years or so.  BUT YOU WILL SEE IT.  And meanwhile your writing will get better.

If you hand it to one of these scammers (and for the love of heaven, stop signing away your copyright – more on that later) and they bring it out, you’ll see zero.  (No, seriously.  Not just because you are probably not looking at the contract enough and half of these are for 50% of NET which means their expenses come out first, but also because these companies go under regularly.  One of my favorite indie authors appears to have had a nervous breakdown after the publishing company went nuts and went under. – No, I’m not going to identify author or company here, because it’s a hot mess all over the net, and I don’t need into the middle of that.)

The other part of this is that no author is good at evaluating his or her own work – NO AUTHOR.  Not even I with twenty five (six?) novels published traditionally and a few on their way to indie publication, much less a newby author.

We’re even worse at evaluating how much these things will sell. It was relatively easy to evaluate what would sell to some publisher (mostly in magazines.  In books only Baen has a recognizable brand.  Which is why the others are hosed… er… are in trouble now, when brand IS the only thing you can give a newby.)  While it’s sort of possible to predict what an editor/publisher will like, when you’re dealing with two or three people, max, the brand gets diluted for something like TOR with their rent-a-editor, and it goes outright nuts when you’re selling directly to the public, where … unless you’re psychic (if you are I apologize for doubting you.  Most authors are only psychotic.  The publishers made us that way) you can’t tell what the mass of humanity will like.

If you’re bleating that this is why you need a publisher, I swear I’ll come out there and bring my Oxford’s English dictionary for foreign learners (the most formidable blunt instrument ever created.)

I mean nothing of the sort.  What I mean is that your learner’s novel, which you think is just all thumbs and glue might take off and sell millions.  (I talked to someone who works for Amazon and who assures me even they have no clue what makes something take off freakishly.  They’d LIKE to.  But they’ve spent hundreds of thousands studying it, and they can’t tell.)

And then, if you gave it to one of the scammer’s companies, they’ll be making the millions, and selling the movie rights, and–  You’ll be living under the bridge and suffering repetitive stress injuries from kicking yourself.

For big publishers, if you’re going with a reputable publisher who can offer you brand support – and right now I can’t think of any but Baen, frankly that I’d trust enough – going with a publisher is trading your rights for a mess of… nothing.  For small publishers, make sure you get AT LEAST 50% and that it’s GROSS.  The dollar comes in, you get fifty cents.  And do it only to diversify your output.  Put some out on your own ALSO.  Then compare the outcomes and decide accordingly.  (And remember that short stories sell poorly unless you have a lot out.)  And make sure the contract with small publishers has a term limit.  Two years, at most.  One year if you can get it.

AND READ THOSE DAMN CONTRACTS.  Get a lawyer friend to skim them, at least.  ALWAYS.  Even with Baen – they might have been attacked by brain worms overnight or something.  You never know.  I respect them and trust them, but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t be taken over by aliens – or lawyers! – tomorrow.

Your work.  Your livelihood.  Your responsibility.  FREEDOM ALWAYS REQUIRES RESPONSIBILITY.

If you want someone to make choices for you, you’re also giving them power over your life.  This might be worth it or not.  I don’t know.  But it is worth thinking about, instead of blithely signing it all away for “prestige” particularly with small press that can give you none.

The glory of being “traditionally published” won’t keep your rent paid.  Indie work might.

(And yes, the reason this p*sses me off is that I can see stupid young me falling for this.  We writers all want to be “real” and are willing to risk starving for it.  I’m older and wiser, and I wish I could protect the young ‘uns.)

And now the cranky author is going for a walk before the snow (!) to clear her head so she can do some guest blogging.  (I apologize to those waiting for guest blogs.  I’ve found I can only do about five, before I HARD block on them for a month or so.  I think the fact that I’m also doing these posts everyday makes it harder to guest blog.  Like I only have so many non-fic pieces in me a month, and have to regenerate.  Maybe I’m like that author in TX and only have so many words.  I should avoid answering the phone or dinner time chat.  I don’t know if my family would be relieved or worried.)

I now have plot and voice for both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge, and I HAVE to clear the decks so I can work on them.

Because death, taxes, and demanding characters shall always be with us.  (Or at least me.)

It occurs to me that when I say things like “How to survive the soft slide down” or “How to prepare for chaos” I’m confusing some people.  (Like those who advise me to emigrate!)

I suspect I’m also confusing some people who go “But, Sarah, you say that they only captured government, and we will eventually win, because what can’t go on won’t.”

So, I thought I’d set down, once and for all what I believe about the current situation, and what I think lies ahead.  Call it Sarah’s grand, unified version.

Be aware that this author does not possess a crystal ball or even a dinkum thinkum to calculate probabilities.  I don’t even expect to be EXACTLY right.  I expect things will happen in different time frames/at different rates/in different ways than I expect.  But I expect the result to be roughly what I’m predicting here.

I spent the seventies saying something like this about the fall of the USSR, based on roughly the same thing: culture, technology and the history of the people involved.  The fall surprised me because – I’m a pessimist, okay.  Or at least, I’m a novelist, and at the time I was I guess and embryonic novelist (writing 20k words by hand every month) so my mind instantly goes to “what would be most interesting here?”  which usually involves death and destruction – there were no last-spasm missile launches.

Anyway, this is how I see the situation in the US right now:

First, there is nothing wrong with our fundamentals, by which I mean the people and view of economics.  Yes, I know we have some fantastic number on welfare. (The big issue with Romney’s mentioning that, by the way, is that he didn’t distinguish chronic welfare takers with those who are trying like heck to get out of it.  Right now we have any number of those thanks to the craptacular economy.)

BUT – though you guys might not be aware of this, I am every time I go back to Europe – our hardware-in-the-head is the best in the world.  You run into this every time you discuss welfare or taxes or anything with anyone from abroad.  (Excepted here, to an extent are the other Anglosphere colonies.  To an extent.)

It is assumed abroad that you BELONG to the country (and whoever is presently ruling it.  – yes, I know we have our share of complete idiots, too.  But nowhere near universal.)  Therefore the country can give you everything and take everything and it’s morally just.  It’s a mind set leftover from kings, where you held whatever you owned by gracious permission of the king.

Look at it this way – in Greece, in Spain, in Portugal, the people scream and shout NOT to have their benefits cut.  (It’s also not as universal as the media there – and here – portrays it, but it’s close enough.)  Here, we scream and shout to have our taxes cut.  If you think that makes no difference, you never lived elsewhere as a native.

Second, Our elites hate us.  This has been a cultural current since the very early days of the US.  The idea that Europe is somehow superior and should be imitated tends to corrupt a certain number of our elites.

From their point of view, of course, they’re right.  Almost anywhere else in the world their position would give them far greater scope (notice the ever continuing lamentations “I’m not a dictator.”  “I’m not the premier of China.”) and they would have the “people” on their side.

But here, as much as they have indoctrinated the kids (I have news – indoctrination doesn’t STICK.  My generation in Portugal was pounded with Marxism.  We turned out the most conservative generation the country has ever had.  Of course conservative means something different.  Of course, some artifacts of Marxism do remain – like the idea that the state should regulate this or that, or the inability to understand that economics IS a natural science – but by and large, indoctrination (particularly what our kids are getting, which is not just a-factual but counter-factual) rarely survives contact with the real world.) if you assume they didn’t cheat massively (and if you are assuming that, may I interest you in the Brooklyn Bridge.  You can have it for cheap.) they’re barely holding on to just a little over half of the country.  AND any number of those are the very young/woefully un-informed, one at least a condition that is self-remedied.

Three, tech is going our way.  It just is.  Despite the fact that the moguls of tech want to be cool and hip and keep joining the side of the retrogressives, the tech we now have makes it d*mn hard to keep total control over vital things like news.  Yes, yes, we’re still losing the geriatric generation who thinks that nets are for fish, and the kiddies who think comedy shows are news.  But the kids will grow up, the new kiddies will not be used to TV and… well… the elderly shall pass.  HOWEVER two things: the ability to type documents helped bring down the Soviet Union AND we’re nowhere near where they’d like us to be.  This current administration, any other time in history (before) would have something like 70% approval and an overwhelming majority of the vote.  Or, to quote younger son “We’d already be in camps.”

They’re losing the news but more importantly they’re losing entertainment AND they’re starting to lose education.  The future is a never-end of pain for them, not for us.  Which is why people who call themselves “progressives” are madly trying to return to the 1930s because, to quote Athena in the beginning of Darkship Revenge (you will see it when I’m done.  Shut up and sit down.) “Life is full of these little ironies.”

Four, unfortunately governments have hold of certain functions (if you consult this moldy document called The Constitution, they are delineated there.  Not saying a free people can’t replace them, but it will take organization of a parallel governmental structure.  It will come to that, but not soon. Or not soon enough.):  Common defense is one of them.  Negotiating with foreign powers is another.  Regulating relations between the states is another.

They’re not doing any of these, because to our elites these aren’t nearly as much fun as telling you what to eat and drink or distributing free contraceptives, or determining what treatments grandma can and can’t have.

In some cases they’re not just not doing them – defending the borders – but are preventing others from doing them.  In other cases, they are doing things that are not that convinced it’s that – getting us involved in wars where we have nothing to gain, under the impression the only good war is one undertaken for altruistic motives.

This will have consequences.  Also under that regulating interstate commerce, they’ve decided it’s their right and duty to regulate how much State A gives to their indigent, who is indigent, etc.  I read this article about sequester was stopping free school lunches (which to begin with is bullshit.  A cut of 2% in the projected increase for the year does not stop school lunches.  The INCREASED spending is STILL going somewhere.  This is the equivalent of our city, when we don’t let them jack up the taxes, turning off the street lights, but still paying for “art” downtown.) and my first thought was “that’s a federal function HOW?”  Which explain why school lunches are a boondoogle of favored providers and of kids dumping the whole thing uneaten.

However, the Federales big noses and their sins of commission and omission WILL still bite us in the butt over time.  Trust me on this.  Until… the system changes.

Five – we are living through a time of massive tech change.  Catastrophic change, is the proper name.  This is LARGELY for the good – in the end we’ll all be better off, but the way there is iffy.  Like the industrial revolution it will displace massive groups of people and change how people view themselves. It will bring upheaval and confusion, which will add to the problems we have of a disconnect between governing elite (not just politically.  I see this everywhere, from churches to scientific disciplines to industry) and the people actually doing, creating and trying to fix things.  It might contribute to accelerate the transformation staring us in the face, but it WILL also make it more brutal and painful.  Count on it.

So, put it all together and this is my prediction: In the end we win.  I’m not sure what the end result will look like, but in the US at least I expect something like our founding documents, though the implementation might be modified in a different direction than the road we’ve been on for well over a hundred years.  In some ways our founding documents are more adapted to our society as it’s emerging than they were for the rural age they were written in.  Or maybe in a way they’re eternal verities.

(Adaptations will be needed for voting procedure/assembly times and such – because a lot of these had travel by oxcart (okay horse) built in.)

I expect our way might infect the world even more, as the rest of the world starts using the newer tech also.

I think in fifty years the world will be more prosperous, freer, and more respecting of individual human liberty and dignity than it’s ever been.

I also don’t expect to live to see that.  (Though I might.  I come from ancestresses who lived to their late eighties with village healers and occasional recourse to over the counter meds.)

I am fifty and I expect, if I’m lucky, to see the beginning of the rebuilding and the sketching of what comes after.  (I’d like to.  I wouldn’t write Science Fiction if I weren’t mad in love with the future.)

In the mean time…  Well, look at those things the elites still control and will control until a combination of tech advance and their craptacular ineptitude wrenches them from the little know-it-alls hands.

I expect we’ll lose a city, maybe more.  (I could be wrong, okay?  As I said, I expected actual nukes over the collapse of the USSR.  Wounded bear and all that.)  We MIGHT for all I know be the Almighty’s favored child and escape unscathed like a child who falls from a tenth floor window and walks away.

That and the multiple regulations (until they become unenforceable, which they’re close to being now, through sheer number and contradictory nature) will make economic life a misery, because you can’t regulate economics any more than you can regulate the weather – but you can collect all the water before it hits the fields and starve people (to stretch a metaphor.)  The one thing government regulation has proven really good at in the economic realm is creating famine.

I think we might very well lose California (and I don’t mean to nukes, though that might be part of it.  And I don’t mean to the sea.  I mean, just leaving to aggregate with Mexico, or going it solo or something.  In many ways it sounds already lost.)

I expect the next 5 to ten years to get increasingly rough, the amount of roughness depending on where you live.  I expect we’re going to get a crash course in reality, with emphasis on “crash.”

But I expect us to survive.  More.  I expect us to thrive and continue improving on tech.  Humans are curious monkeys.  Americans are to an extent self-selected as troublemakers and descendants of trouble makers.  Yes, we have some throw backs who want mommy.  Yes, we have a generation of wounded children, the result of crappy families.  BUT we’re still the world’s last, best hope.

And the merchants of despair and retrograde oppression lose.

As long as we keep our chins up and keep fighting, as long as we’re prepared, ready and willing to work for it – I think that’s how the story will go.

And though at times I feel tempted to say “poor world” – I think in the end we win.  We, freedom lovers, we Americans, we, the human race.

I really wanted to title this “How to pack for Armageddon” but that is not right, and not something I can do anyway.  There are tons of sites on that.  What to pack in the scaredy bag, what to have for “shelter in place.”

I’m not saying those won’t be needed.  As I said before, I don’t think anyone has taken into account – well, maybe someone has, but that’s not a comforting thought – that while this crew in power is playing at being “more sensitive than you” they’re giving signals to a lot of very bad actors.  The crew in power might be ill-intentioned (mostly I think they’re power-greedy and trying to cover it up by doing the things they’ve been told are “good”) but I suspect they honestly believe that if we unilaterally disarm we’ll be safe.  Don’t laugh.  A lot of my colleagues believed that all through the eighties.  It has nothing to do with intelligence, but with having lived quiet, sheltered prosperous lives where the wildest environment they knew was their kindergarten class.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen other sides of life, and I’ve studied history.

If we can do things like let all the sequester cuts fall on defense, and eventually start reducing our nuclear arsenal (more flexibility, remember?) and NOT get hit, we should just assume the USA is the Almighty’s favorite child and my made up USAians were right.  If we don’t lose a city or more to enemy attack in the next five/six years, I’ll assume this country is G-d’s personal project and that He’s zealously guarding us.

But alas, I think we’re human like other humans and our project of liberty and individual freedom is ours.

So, some regions of the country almost for sure will have to deal with Armageddon conditions to an extent or another.  Which depends who hits us and whether it’s a missile or a backpack nuke.

Yes, I feel crazy just typing that – it’s like ebooks, you know.  We expected ebooks to hit any minute now, and they didn’t, for almost twenty years.  I attended conferences in ninety four where they were talking about how ebooks were the coming thing.  But most people don’t like reading on the computer, and therefore it didn’t happen.  And then suddenly there was the second model of kindle (the first was too green and computer-like) and by that time anyone who’d been immersed in the business was SO convinced ebooks would amount to nothing, that they never, really, got their heads around the reverse.  They still haven’t.

To an extent we have the same relationship with nuclear attacks.  We expected them all through the cold war, which means most of our lives.  It never happened.  Now we tend to roll our eyes as we think of them.

But they are a heavy possibility.  There is a huge difference between attacking the US when you’re the USSR and you know you’ll get hit back, and attacking the US when you know it’s weakened and infighting, and you’re a small back water country and know if the US retaliates the world community will complain they’re picking on you.  (My brother after the Axis of Evil speech “Why is Bush picking on tiny, mad North Korea?” is what I expect to see.)

So, if you live in or near one of our major cities (unless it goes completely astray, which is possible since this is mostly “Russian Technology”, I expect it will be in one of the cities that everyone hears about on TV and shows: DC, NYC, Chicago, LA, San Francisco – with an outside chance of cities that have had TV shows set in them – Cincinnati, Dallas.  While it’s possible there will be one in Denver, for instance, that is an extremely outside chance unless there’s a sudden upswell of  documentaries about “Denver, the power of the west” that makes it abroad.) have a get away bag, just in case, and DO for the love of G-d know some funky, back-road route out of the city.  Make it a weekend project to scout those.  If you live in NYC and don’t have a car – Yes, you DO know who you are – make sure a friend-with-car includes you in his evacuation plans.

For what to put in the bag, and what to put in your basement/crawl space/armoire if you have to sit tight, there are survival blogs all over the net, and if you don’t know any, someone in this blog will link it on request.

My post – taking this long to get to the point is the hallmark of the fact I have had only one cup of tea – is about not the apocalypse, but the gentle slide into chaos and a (much) lower but still civilized lifestyle.

I’ve never been convinced by the “apocalypse” stories simply because American authors, never having experienced it, seem to think of something like a nuclear hit, or even several, crippling all our major cities and making our daily life a negotiated mess (and I want to stress that last one is – I think – highly unlikely in the situation right now.  We’re more likely to get the equivalent to “terrorism with nukes” than to get a planned, carefully carried out attack.  OTOH the attack might well unleash our own tensions and release Civil Unrest with a capital Mess – in which case, it won’t be much different from most cities taken out.)  will immediately send us back to some past age, ranging from the stone age to the nineteenth century.

Of course, most of those stories were written to convince us to unilaterally disarm, which, of course, meant exaggerating the awfulness.

Here is what is not going to happen:

Most people are not going to become looters overnight.  Yes, it will happen in some places, but let me remind you of when the lights went out in NYC for most of a day, and people just quietly walked home.  Whether you’ll have to shoot looters and keep vandals away depends on what region of the country you live in and how dangerous it is now.

You’re not going to need to grow your own wheat and mill your own flour overnight.  Yes, I know “on demand” supply, etc.  So, the local groceries will run out of ice-cream, Hersheys and the other stuff like that.  They might also – always depending on where you live.  We’re in the Khaki for vegetables out here, unless it’s summer, and even then – run out of steaks, or onions, or even (but unlikely.  I think the stuff spontaneously generates) cabbage.  BUT it’s unlikely to run completely out of flour or beans or rice.  (Of course, if you’re low carb you should be making your own preparations.)  Nor will it prevent local farmers from putting stalls by the side of the highway selling local produce ¾ of the year.

You’re not going to have to make your own clothes.  Look, I’m a writer, which means our income fluctuates, which is a polite term for “sometimes it’s non-existent.”  It always hits rock bottom at the most inconvenient times, too, like, when my husband is unemployed, (knock on wood, only happened twice in our entire married life.)  We’ve had to cut back on food, by going to the essentials and having me cook from scratch (but I do that, anyway, by preference) BUT we’ve never really had to cut back on clothes.  In fact, I think I have more than fit in my closet, and one of these days the hanging apparatus will crash.  (Partly because I treat them as disposable, since I hate aprons and all confining clothing, and so I tend to stain clothes while cleaning or cooking.)  — first, the clothes in your closet will not evaporate into the ether.  Second, and VERY important, society as a whole probably has a larger supply of clothes than we could consume (without throwing away) in a century.  I know this because we shop for our clothes at an ARC thrift store nearby.  A LOT of the clothes are brand new still with tags, usually because a store donated surplus.  And I have a rule never to pay more than $5 for a piece of clothing unless it’s designer. Then I’ll go up to $7.  If I go to $10 I get the frown of doom from my husband…

You’re not going to have to make your own furniture – see above.  We’ve gotten used to changing furniture at the drop of a hat because we stopped liking something, but if things get rough we stop throwing it away, and I bet you that what we have will last generations.  (Here I do have advice on what to choose. And what to have.)

This is not saying that things will be either comfortable or wonderful.

So – what do you watch for, and how do you prepare?

This post comes from the fact I was talking to my husband and said “the first thing is usually the post office going unreliable.”

Right now you’re looking at me like I’m a lunatic.  “But our post awful was always—”

No. There are differences.  Yes, in most countries the post office jobs are a sinecure for a politically favored majority (Or minority.  I might be wrong in this, but I have a vague idea most postal carriers in South Africa were Afrikaans speaking.)  and that they are a union shop in most countries, and that jokes about mis-delivered mail exist everywhere. That’s not what I mean.

Part of this is tricky when it comes to the post office, btw – because ours is suffering from catastrophic technological change, as well as everything else.  HOWEVER:

The slide goes like this – it begins with mail distribution twice a day six days a week, and the mail fairly reliable in the sense that yes, you do get human error and things delayed a bit.  Then it goes to once daily.  (I don’t know if the US started with twice daily.  By the time I came here, it was once daily. Part of this was tech change.  Used to be that before the telephone letters in-town were used to say “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon.”  Read a mystery of the early twentieth century for that.)

Then slowly the mail becomes more unreliable.  Then one day is cut out.  Then delivery is every other day.

BUT the most important thing is how unreliable it gets.  We’re already pretty unreliable, the reason they’re mostly used for spam.  (Though their tendency to misplace stuff doesn’t help.)

But along that slide comes the time when the mail is COMPLETELY unreliable.  Anything you entrust to them has a fifty/fifty chance of arriving, and anything even vaguely useful/valuable WILL get stolen, unless you’re very, very crafty.

This is a sign post on the way down.  When you start seeing outright unabashed theft by postal employees, and no attempt to track down your registered package, it’s time to have your preparations for the rest of the slide made.

Because that type of theft is a “societal strictures have broken down.”  It’s not “the neighbors will rape and pillage” but it is the “people will pilfer from strangers as a matter of course.”  A package, entrusted to strangers to carry across the country is, of course, at high risk.

This is highly unlikely and there are already signs we’re headed in that direction.  Whether and how much it will affect the private carrier companies, I don’t know.  Whether there will be Amazon Delivery vans that are more reliable, I don’t know.  I do know that the break down in trust needed to efficiently run mail in a continental-sized country is already well underway and getting markedly worse by the day.

The way to deal with the post office is to disguise the contents of whatever you’re sending.  Put an old coat over the new dress you’re sending aunt Emily.  Learn to make false bottoms on boxes.  Encase you check in several pages of blather.

Or, more likely, in this country, in the 21^st century, find ways to send ecash, email and different carriers (thank heavens.)

But even if we have more options – that break down in trust is a telling sign.

The other slide is what used to be called in Portugal “a zeal strike” which I understand is the opposite of what the words mean in OZ where they mean “be over-picky over everything and delay everything.”  In Portugal it means “show up for work, but do whatever.”

This, not as a strike but as a way of life ensues.

What I mean is, you don’t realize how much we, Americans, are used to getting what we want, when we want it.

This is likely to go by the way side.  People won’t be breaking their backs to get stuff done and also, sorry, but all businesses are likely to be understaffed for the foreseeable future, because it’s right now almost impossible to keep your margins up in this country unless you’re GE and the government is feeding you dough by the bucketful.

So, things to have:

Any staple you can’t do without, even if it’s not a “survival essential” thing.  Say you’re mighty fond of a brand of coffee, have three or four bags put by in your freezer.  Before you run through them, it will be on the shelves.  Restock when it’s on the shelves and you can afford it.  That way interruptions in supply don’t affect you.

In the same vein, this coming spring, can, pickle and dehydrate veggies.  I don’t think they’ll vanish forever, but supply can/might/almost certainly will (depending on where you live) get mighty irregular.

Any parts you need to keep your car and house running, and which you know are likely to breakdown or need replacing – have by.  And either know how to replace it yourself, or establish a relationship with someone who does.  Knowing how to rewire something in the house and/or how to deal with plumbing is important.  (My husband is okay with it.  But getting one of those comprehensive books from the hardware stores, you know “how to fix anything in the house” is NOT a bad idea.)

Also not a bad idea: if you have to buy furniture and CAN afford it, buy real wood and the best construction you can.  “Furniture you can will to your grandchildren” should be your goal.  Mostly because you might have to.

Also, if you have a young family, buy the biggest house you can afford.  Look, I’ll be blunt, the one slide I saw up close and personal ended up with three and four nuclear families per house.  I.e. kids married and had grandkids, but they were still living with the parents/grandparents.  This did not change till the economy got better.  (And yes, it SORTA is cultural in Portugal, but it was not the norm since the forties, and in fact, as soon as people could afford it, they went their own way, even if children normally live NEAR parents.)

For those people with three kids in a one bedroom apartment it could get tough.

If you’re renting, try to get in a place where the rent won’t go crazy and where you can hunker down if you need to.  Establish a good relationship with your landlord.

Have a deep freezer, so you can buy meat when it’s available/relatively cheap.  (This is a good idea at any time, but it might be vital in a slide down.)

Acquire some knowledge of folk medicine and lay some supplies by.  I’ve recently found that Manuka wound honey (available from Amazon) is the awesome, and will definitely stock it.)  This is obviously part of the slide down at least for this country.  Finding a doctor might become an issue.  DO try to make friends with a doctor or a trained nurse.  It might save your life.

Other things that are probably sort of kind of less vital but that you REALLY don’t want to do without.  One thing I’ve never seen in a slide down is a country sliding into the gutter without significant, pervasive disruptions in the electrical supply.  I don’t mean electricity goes bye bye and never comes back. I don’t even mean LONG black outs.  For those you should have a generator/whole house battery (we can’t afford either) but I expect most of the time you won’t get that.  I mean brown outs and black outs become a fact of life to the point they affect your daily life/ability to work. Not enough to get you to crisis point, not even enough to spoil food in freezer, if you keep it closed.  But enough to annoy you and make things a daily slog.

First – have something you can use for light.  I used to love candles when I was a kid, but of course there are better options.  If you are using flashlights, keep your battery supply up.  I’ve also laid by some of those solar garden lights.  The light is not wonderful, but it is enough to read by.

Speaking of which, since it’s almost impossible to have extra batteries for the kindle (I don’t know about other e-readers) have a car charger, so that if your electrical crashes, you can charge the kindle enough to finish reading that novel.  Also, keep the vital stuff like “how to” manuals in paper.

In the same vein, if you get your living by using the computer, have extra batteries for your laptop.  Keep three of them or so by.

And have an alternate means of cooking, if you rely on electrical.  A grill will do, though I have an entirely coal fired hibachi as well, but that’s because I’m a nut.

Have an alternate means of heating (IF we’re going to stay in this house, I want a soapstone stove.  Sigh.  Maybe Witchfinder will buy me one.)

These things will seem frivolous.  They’re not “how to survive apocalypse” – but having lived through the slide-down, trust me, it makes your life immeasurably better to know that you can still finish that chapter, or write that report, or whatever, even if electricity just went down, and/or you can cook that dish even if the store is out of peppers.

One disruption or interruption is piddly stuff.  An unpredictable succession of them saps the soul and kills the spirit.

Now, the thing is, in the low slide down and counterintuitively, things can do very well you’d never think about.

Look, let me put it bluntly: babies are still born, birthdays still happen, girls still want to buy something pretty for a pick me up.

The people who did well in my brother’s generation (the most affected in Portugal by the slide-down) learned to do something crafty to sell.  Usually bead jewelry, which they sold (literally) on street corners, but also stuffed animals which you could sell to friends of friends of friends.  Paintings, if you were good.  That sort of thing.

Yes, we have walmart and jewelry for a song.  How long it will be cheap is something else, with the dollar plummeting, BUT

But people will pay the same/a little more for something that’s unique/looks better.  And people will still buy toys, baby clothes, (giving stuff to babies is a deeply-rooted tradition.) pretty things that make them smile, unique bits of apparel/accessories that make a tired outfit look new.

Cultivate some crafty skill – first it will keep you from going nuts while you’re worrying about jobs or what not.  Second, it might bring in enough money to survive between jobs/if permanently sidelined by this atrocious economy

Crafts to pick, if you don’t have a favorite should be things that are useful/don’t need proprietary materials.  Scrapbooking would be right out on the first count, and stamped cross-stitch on the second.

But say learning to make clothes out of scraps of material might be in, ditto with braiding rugs.  (Clue zero, but I know people in the village did it.  They bought/got rags off other people and made these gorgeous rugs.)  In a cold climate quilting is a good one.  Altering clothes is too.  Even with the surplus we have, people will grow up, grow wider, or lose weight.  If you know how to alter clothes to make them look GOOD you have something you can trade on/get money for.

I’m decent at refinishing furniture, and I’ve picked up on fillet crochet again.  I used to do this obsessively, then I hit my head and lost the ability to keep track of where I was on the pattern (wonder if that affected writing too?) which is slowly coming back.  Right now – by way of warm up – I’m working on a massive (bedspread size) curtain for our outsized front window.  But I’ve recently come across normal sized patterns for pillows and hangings (and maybe clothes inserts) from the turn of the century, which I think fall under “beautiful and unique” and would probably sell well at SF cons.  And the little ones I can do in an evening, the bigger ones in a week of evenings.

Though I expect ebooks will continue to sell and I even expect Baen to survive.  (The other houses… They’re houses of the living dead right now.  They look alive, but…)  It’s just that you might have to time your publishing/buying for the times the net is up.  And yep, I expect those will actually sell better, because if the net is down there’s less gaming, etc. available.

In that vein, don’t get rid of ALL your obsolete stuff.  Keep DVDs by, even if you have Amazon streaming.  Keep CDs by, even if you buy a lot of music electronic.  I’m clueless about game systems because I don’t use them, but if there’s a way to keep games by, and have power for the systems, do so.

CDs, DVDs and other forms of entertainment not depending on connectivity (if the electricity goes down in your area, so will the net service, most of the time) might make good trade-goods, as well.  So if you see them at the thrift store, buy and store, just in case.  Don’t spend an enormous amount and don’t fill your house with them, but having a few around to trade for others you want is not a bad idea.  Burn you MP3 to CD as backup and keep one of the old stereos around.

Also, because in the long slide down things like the over-restrictive “must cook this in a sterilized kitchen with no one else in the house” health laws tend to slide, even baking and cooking might not be a bad thing, particularly because I suspect a lot of people can’t cook beyond pre-prepared and will be looking for alternatives.  Having the house where the working couple can pick up the pot of pot roast and give you something in return because they’re that kind, might not be a bad idea if the stores are having trouble stocking tv dinners.  (In Portugal it was bread.  Very few people knew how to make bread, but the bakers’ union got bumptious and started not delivering when expected.  Suddenly the people who could bake bread were very popular.)

These are not survival skills, but they’re “keep the world spinning” skills and “make people feel they’re not living in the end times” skills.  They will stand you in good stead.

Most of them are a matter of degree from the Armagedon skills.  So if you believe Armageddon is more likely, by all means, learn to make soap.  BUT learn to make scented, interestingly shaped soap, and you have a skill in case it’s a slide-down.  Learn to make beer, but if you make it micro-brewery specialty beer you can also do well in the slide-down.  Learn to make clothes – but also learn to fix/alter clothes.  That way you’re okay either way.

The only difference is stuff like laptop batteries which are vital in a slide-down and useless in the end of the world.  BUT having them won’t cost you too much.

And it might save your sanity… and allow you to make money off ebooks or whatever it is you do.  If it’s just a slide down.

We’re already in a slide-down, even if not critical yet.  There’s a good chance of a crash, but there’s a chance, also, the slide-down will continue.

In your packing for the crash, don’t neglect preparation for the tumble down the stairs.  It’s usually just a little more effort/expense.  But it can make all the difference.

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit readers and thank you to Glenn for the link!  I was ironing, a masochistic ritual I engage in for a few hours once a month (because it makes a difference on how husband and sons look!) and came back to a ‘lanche.  Very nice. Those thinking I’m overly pessimistic might want to read today’s post!

I’ve talked before about being in the political closet.  The thing is, though that’s the easiest shorthand, it’s not the right shorthand, which made it worse.

The political closet would be right if one identified strongly with one party’s entire perceived agenda and were pretending to be the other. (The perceived is important and will come in later.)

My problem of course was that for most of that time, the party I identified most closely with was the Libertarians.  But even with them I have issues – I won’t go into it too deeply, lest we get Josh going – but to be blunt, there was an assumption that pacifism could work and that if we don’t attack other people they won’t attack us, which didn’t fit in with my life experience or my reading of history.

Before 9/11 I sorta kinda convinced myself maybe this time it would work that way, but after 9/11, particularly as half the Libertarians in my region went bananas and started frothing at the mouth about how we’d brought it on ourselves by being mean to the poor brown people.  (This is still one of my triggers, this ridiculous, disguised racism wherein Arabs – who, btw, would consider themselves white and nothing else – are considered sort of immature children and we have to take their sins onto ourselves.  Kind of like if you pick on a two year old and he breaks the cup, it’s your fault not his.  I say foreigners, whether they tan or not, are people too and capable of evil as well as good.  I should know.  I was born foreign.)

The other half went… Well… Look guys, let’s level up: I think drugs should be legalized because I think it would be easier to convince people not to take them (or to minimize the number of people who take them.  Some always will, and I’m not their collective mother) if they’re out in the open.  But there is a large cohort of Libertarians who make the legalization of drugs the be all-end all of their existence, not just because the war on drugs is ineffective, a statist power grab and distorting our polity – but because (perhaps because they’re enraged at these ills and kneejerk into the rest of it) illegal drugs are supposed to be good for everything including hair loss and ingrown toe nails.

Look – I know too much about the biological side of it to think most drugs – yes, including pot – are a net good.  I’ve also seen too many of the results.  Yes, all of them – including pot – have SOME beneficial effects.  But, as with all medicine, including the legal, there are the other effects and counterindications.

Anyway, in our area, that’s all the people that remained capital L, active and registered Libertarians.  Since all my email seemed to be peace demonstrations or pot taste-ins, I quietly dropped out of the active Libertarian thing – though not out of the registration until last year.

But I can’t say I fit the Republicans any better.  For one, most Republicans don’t fit the perceived Republican party any better.  I mean, of all the people I know who generally vote Republican, I think only two are fundamentalist Christians and even those have no issue with my gay characters or my other unorthodox positions.

Oh, and I don’t think (though some of them I know only on line, and who cares) any of them live in a trailer park, and only one (rather obvious and well known) is a billionaire, and our correspondence is at best irregular due to his being a very busy man.  (I wish he were one of you lot who read here.  Then he might, in an unconsidered moment, hit the kitty for a hundred thousand or so, which at the moment would relieve me of worry over husband’s job enough to write without issue.  But he’s not.  And I think even for billionaires, you don’t just throw that kind of money around – which is just too bad.)

I’ve met some caricature republicans while working on the campaigns – one of them almost made me leave the office – but they were so stereotypical, and so unlike any real Republicans I know, that now I wonder if they were moles.  (Like the crazy guy who thought he could camouflage as republican by having a chic-fillet bag with him.)

But if you turn to the “real republicans who govern”, I still don’t fit in with them very well (they by and large don’t fit in with base too well) because ultimately they are power brokers and power dealers, and their idea of government is to continue expanding the Federal power only not in the same directions as the Democrats.

As a friend of mine put it on FB, one side wants to give other countries vast subsidies so they’ll like us, and the other side sends over our young men and women to protect other countries, so they have the money to run their social programs and ignore their defense.

Yes, I do understand the necessity of keeping the lanes of commerce open – I’m not a total lack wit – but part of me thinks if we’re going to protect them, they should pay, not the other way around.  Then maybe they would perceive the benefit of what we’re doing, instead of resenting us like teens still living in mommy and dad’s house.  (On the other hand – I told you I wasn’t a lack wit – I am aware that from “we pay for the armies” to Empire and Tribute (which is a great name for a book) is a series of not very painful steps over a century or so.  Humans aren’t perfect and life is full of these little tradeoffs and things being what they are, a hundred years of our continued existence sound like to dream the impossible dream.)

So…  So I settle for voting for those people who will grow the deficit SLOWER and who stick their noses in what I eat, what I wear and how many kids I wish to have LESS.  The fact that they’re despised by the plutocrats in the press is a plus, because it means when they’re in power the press actually DO hound them and bark at their heels, as opposed to rolling over and asking to tummy rubs after Benghazi, fast and furious, and the executive orders that are slowly bringing SOPA and PIPA into effect (at the command of the vast entertainment corporations.)  Yes, I know that’s – sort of – the gateway to hell and that it’s how we got when we are, but societies and states are slow and cumbersome to turn around and the tech is going our way, taking away the power of schools and vast media operations, and putting it in individual hands.  We need another generation or two and then we’ll be a sufficient majority.  (We’ll never be an overwhelming majority.  A lot of people ALWAYS prefer security over liberty, though I grant you fewer of them in America than anywhere else.)

What I have been trying to avoid is the headlong RUSH into the abyss that might stop the tech advance BEFORE we can raise another generation, with different values.  Ah well.  To dream the impossible dream.

So, you see how complex my political positions are.  What is more, they change, in response to events, in response to new knowledge from history, in response to a whole bunch of things.

You’d think this was exactly the type of mind you’d want in someone who writes science fiction (or even fantasy) and who is therefore – by professional requirement – likely to build challenging societies, with loopholes, contradictions and points of conflict.  Right?

Wrong.

What the publishing establishment I entered in 1999 (remember I didn’t get into Baen until 2004) wanted only one thing: really articulate, literate parrots who would expound the status quo of the “intelligentsia” (and that btw, as caricatured as their idea of “Republicans.”) and join their voices to the chorus of all these things everybody knows (which just ain’t so) like “If there were no men, there would be no war.”   “To be truly liberated a woman must be a lesbian.” “Human extinction is the only way to change the Earth.” And my ever-favorite “We must not go to space, because we haven’t yet learned to take care of the Earth.” (As though humanity were MEANT to be some sort of gardeners or Earth were sentient.)  There are others, of course, including the ever fertile chestnut that if someone is rich he/she stole it from someone or his/her ancestors did.

I couldn’t hack it.  Tried.  You see, I had this idea that if only we got one or two more generations, we’d need people capable of explaining liberty to those generations, so there COULD be a rebirth, eventually.  Heinlein did a capital job, but he’s not around now, and science fiction AGES.  (My kids still loved Heinlein, but let’s admit it, right now it’s parallel history and it’s lost that veneer of “this is the future.”  Of course, it’s possible that veneer was part of mid twenty century culture and can’t be brought back.)

So my idea was to stealth it, till I got really big, and then from there to slowly uncloak and start talking about the important stuff.

Ah… well…  Let’s say that I miscalculated on several counts.  First, I might lack the necessary talent/proficiency.  (I keep reading in books and hearing my colleagues say that at heart we each know exactly how good we are, but if that’s true I’m even more of an oddity than I thought.  I have no clue how good I am.  I like some of my books, it’s all I can tell you – even though it might be bad manners.) Second, by the time I entered publishing, you had to be especially favored to even survive with the same name past three books – and you had to have impeccable political pedigree (usually supported by who you know, what schools you attended, etc) and usually other stuff like personal beauty or charisma (I’m not bad, but I’m female and I broke in after 30) to be pushed to bestseller.  And the “push” was in the house’s control.  (Again, I’m not talking about Baen, who has to grow bestsellers the old fashioned way.  And does, one of the reasons the other houses hate it.)  And THIRD – I couldn’t do it.  I didn’t realize how bad I was at it.  No, seriously, I didn’t.  I used to be good at it, or else, I wouldn’t have a degree in Languages and Literature from an European university.  But I’ve gone back and read some of my books that didn’t sell, and uh… there is this certain lack of confidence in authority and established credentials that keeps leaking through…  I guess having got out of school and spent a few years alone with my own thoughts, I was too iconoclastic to hide ALL of it.

I know people who are stealthing it, some much better than others, all better than I do.  (And I take my hat off to them.)

And I know people who are stealthing it in other fields, at least two of whom read this blog and comment under pen names, and one of whom I told I don’t want to know his/her real name.  I don’t want to risk letting it slip.

I admire their ability to do this, and I get very upset when – often – some blog or some commenter on a blog starts saying that they’re cowards for not confronting their family/colleagues/boss with their real political opinions.

Me?  I think more is won by planting seeds.  If Heinlein hadn’t got to me with fiction, I might very well have ended up in the politically correct chorus.  And he got to me because no one in Portugal had thought of isolating minds from him by accusing him of being homophobic, or xenophobic, or misogynist or whatever.  Yes, at the age of eleven or so, if I’d been primed, I’d have seen that in the books and not read them.  I’m sure I – at least in my public identity – have managed to land myself on several “do not read” lists.

On the other hand… on the other hand…

On the other hand, I think – or at least, after dealing with the failure of my stealthing attempt I tell myself that – I too might have a place in the ranks, and my position too can be useful.

First of all, because I’ve been on both sides of this and therefore can tell you the problem with the stealth position.  I’m one of very few people who has done this – most others are actual converts.  The problem with the stealth position is the problem of double agents.  You start out by pretending to be something you’re not, but if you’re good enough at it, it starts leaking into your thought and your identity.  (This is part of being human and a social creature.) I don’t mean you start thinking like them, but parts of the shibboleths of the dominant culture will start affecting your thinking.  Mostly the prejudices.  You’ll start feeling, for instance, anyone who defends the free market must be greedy, and flinching a little at unabashed defense of personal liberty.  This never happened to me personally.  I have seen it happen, until the person is completely captured by the other side and doesn’t even know it.  You’ll find them saying things like “Well, I’m a republican, but republicans are soooo anti-woman.  They don’t see only women can bring peace to the world.”

At that point if you’re another of the stealthers, and if this person was a friend (discovering other stealthers used to be a thing.  Sometimes I thought we should have a hanky code.) you salute a fallen comrade, route around the leak and move on.

I – and others – of the stealthers went the other way, though.  And it’s just as bad.  I got to the point where all these people that I knew, objectively were actually decent, good people – or at least not bad – but just didn’t think or challenge the dominant culture (either from cowardice or desire to fit in) were Evil with a capital E.

I had “friends” in the field, but none of them could be real friends, because none of them could see the real me, and I didn’t like the “them” they presented.  I started hating people for their opinions, even when I knew those opinions were  just the result of their growing up in a place and time and wanting to fit in.

And that is poison to the soul, particularly when you consider that I am, at heart, very gregarious and spent my formative years in a “live in your extended family’s pockets” culture (the fact I ever left probably means I am at heart rather insane, anyway.)

In the first route, you become a prisoner of the status quo.  In the second, though, it slowly makes you bitter and encased in a loneliness nothing can break.

I dedicated A Few Good men To Glenn (of Instapundit) because without the blogs, without knowing there were other people out there like me – with whom I might not agree on EVERYTHING, but with whom I agreed that political direction and beliefs were something to be examined and discussed in the light of history – were all that kept me – marginally – sane in the ten years of deep-cover.

It is still hard, sometimes, for me to remember that say, people who believe we should have the minimum wage are not CONSCIOUS Marxists.  Yes, they do implicitly assume that if a benevolent (where they find that, is beyond me, it being like everything else, a human construction and therefore at best mixed) government doesn’t watch over businessmen, businessmen will – of course – exploit their fellow human (who is always defenseless, poor muggings, like 19^th century peasants) beyond all reason.  BUT they don’t realize their thoughts have been infiltrated.  Depending on how annoyed I am that day, I’m likely to unload with both barrels before I pull back and think that “oh, yeah.  Someone who has never even thought about this and for whom it is an “of course.””  These people are different from the hard-core vile progs and might or might not be winnable back to sanity.  Those we can win back must be won, because if we can survive this, we’ll need all hands on deck.  But right now I’m more likely to blast them with the burner.  My ability to distinguish between red and deep pink is gone.

It can’t be helped, at least for now.  It’s a war wound, and touching it brings a reflex response.  It might get better – supposing we survive (To Dream The Impossible Dream) over the decades.  It might not.  You pick your course, you place your bet, you take your lumps. None of us is perfect or unscarred.

Worse, though, it was affecting my writing.  I’d got in the habit of never writing about anything I REALLY cared about and was well on my way to learning to write about nothing, which is –of course – the road to grey goo.  (It’s paved with awards I hear, not that I ever saw one of those awards.)

I came out of the political closet because I dimly perceived that to stay in it, I’d lose myself.  If my occasional flailing around with how we got here and what it all means helps some of my still-stealthed comrades, in writing or other professions almost entirely taken over by vile-progs then it’s all worth it.

I will continue to run ultra-secret indie-only pen names who stealth.  Who knows?  Those might get through some of the “never thought” people.

Meanwhile I’m glad to be out of the political closet, sorry I couldn’t stick the stealthing, wondering if anyone can without in one way or another losing their inner selves – and profoundly grieved we live in a time where such conformity of thought is demanded by the establishment, even of people who are supposed to be creative.  I’m grieved that you’re not just required to generally believe in their principles (no, I don’t believe that only government is impartial and benign and they can’t make me. But I could allow that sometimes – rarely – government isn’t all wrong) or agree with them on some things (I am, for instance, for the legalization of drugs, among other things – even if my reasons are different from most of those the vile progs tout) BUT you’re required to loudly promote and proclaim the party line, even when it changes.

Life is what it is.  You live in the times you live in.  You do the best you can with it.

To my stealthed colleagues, I salute you.  To those who have fallen, I thank you for your service and I’m sorry we lost you.  To those who never thought of being stealthed, I assume you knew yourselves best, and are doing the best you can.

Courage.  It might seem like we’re dreaming the impossible dream, but it’s always darkest before dawn, and a friend once told me that the other side always crows victory the loudest when they know they’re losing.  There are signs, hard to read because so many of us are stealthing, that it might not yet be to late to turn this thing around.

Courage – return to your positions and do your best.  And I’ll do mine.  I’ll stand here and do my poor best.  And hope it serves something.

It’s now been two years since I was on the Tor “seminar” for the launching of Learning Curve, the first installment of Heinlein’s bio – and I’ve almost (but not quite) stopped steaming.

What affronted me at the time was my colleagues who would come in and say “Was Heinlein sexist or homophobic?  Absolutely” – and did this freely admitting they’d never read Heinlein, they just knew he had no queer characters (Brother, the scene between Galahad and Isthar would shock them) and no strong women who weren’t “men with breasts” (this is the no true Scotsman fallacy.  What is a man with breasts?  Any woman who is capable and self sufficient?  I think the people complaining should ask themselves if their characters aren’t female dogs with no brain.)  Alternately, or often at the same time, Heinlein gets accused of writing only submissive women, because in the intervals between shooting the bad guys, working astrogation problems and solving/causing world crisis, his characters want to have babies and – shocker, I know – fall in love with men.  As proof of their submission the fact that they wear high heels and – horrors – aprons is brought up.  (It’s a good idea to wear aprons while shooting bad guys.  Blood is a pain to get off good clothes.)

The truth is that Heinlein gets crucified for two reasons only:

1. He propagated the idea that There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and the philosophy is embedded in his books.
2. None of the people who rage and rag on him and call him names have a tenth of the talent he had in his little toe.  And none of them has now, nor will ever have the same influence on the culture.

The first one is of course the most important point.  No, wait.  It’s not the most important point, no.  But it is the point that serves to hang up all their discontents.  They read Heinlein’s characters who do-for-themselves (male, female and juvenile) and they get upset.  I belong to the same vague socio economic group as these people, and let’s face it, we all grew up with nonsense like “follow your dreams” and “to dine own self be true.”  And we’ve interpreted it – having largely lived soft and sheltered lives – to mean that we should in fact do this, regardless of the economic consequences of it.

I’m a little different because I was fortunate, very early on (“Never ruin your children by making their lives too soft” RAH) because I experienced true poverty – due to political-social circumstances – I not only know what it’s like to go to bed without having “eaten all you want to?” – which is the question used to establish “hunger in America” – but I often went to bed without having eaten much substantial.  (It’s okay.  I had a lovely figure.)  Because come evening, the cupboard was bare.

I attended a magnet school in the rich area of town and had to go between the ages of 12 to 14 without a single new piece of clothing, except what we got from red cross.

Now, am I claiming I suffered horribly?  H*ll, no.  I’m not even claiming I suffered.  My mom and dad grew up eating a lot of vegetable soup when all else was absent, and mom went barefoot summer and winter, and gleaned for coal by the side of the railroad for cooking.  She grew up with four siblings and a cousin all in a three bedroom house where the kitchen had a dirt floor and the only bathroom was an outhouse at the end of the garden.

Compared to her, I was a pampered princess who whined when we couldn’t afford hot water in winter.

However it brought me up close to the idea that when there isn’t enough, you can’t have it.  You can say all you want to that you have these rights and these needs, but when something isn’t there, you can’t have it.  (It also brought me up to the idea that a government powerful enough to give you what you want can also take it away from you, but that’s something else.  And it gave me a profound distrust of authority and the certainty I don’t want anyone to have TOO much over me and mine.)

And that’s what sets my colleagues off.  Look, to establish a writing career these days, you’re going to be unproductive for a good long time.

Or at least, you’re going to make very little money.

Those of us who are disposed to feel we have to pay our way through life (and many of us are) are at the very least going to feel guilty.  Some, like me – and a lot of my friends – will justify our compulsion by doing things like running the house on one person’s salary, at the same level as friends making double the money (which I did for years.  It’s called cooking from scratch, mending, refinishing AND doing without – we drove an $1100 suburban with a missing front bumper for ten years.)

My husband convinced me that it was worth it doing this, that it was a risky investment but an investment which would eventually pay off by supporting us in our old age.  I thought he was nuts.  Now indie is a possibility, I wish I would have listened to him more. I’d have a lot more things ready to go up.

But a lot of people have to rely on parents, siblings, even friends in those early years.  For a lot of them it paid off.  (And a lot end up just doing this the rest of their lives.)  The guilt they felt about this makes them very upset at hearing TANSTAAFL.  They feel it as an accusation and therefore they lash out at the man they think is accusing them.

Am I holding Heinlein up as a paragon?  Kids, no one in early SF was a paragon.  Oh, okay, maybe one or two, but I’ve heard stories of con parties.  I also get told – regularly – how boring and stodgy we are now, with our spouses and our kids and our middle-class lives.

That’s fine.  Heinlein was married three times and he was a man of his generation.  He had ideas of his generation.

However, considering most of those ideas are now being implemented in our schools, our mass media and our “public counseling” that can’t be why they turn against him.  (And let me tell you, compared to what is being written today in contemporary romance, Heinlein wrote books suitable for nuns.  WELL BEHAVED nuns.)  And the way he wrote sex working in the future was possibly – maybe – something that MIGHT make sense for a society where you live practically forever and where sex and reproduction are almost entirely divorced.

If writers of science fiction are meant to be saints, I must give it up now.  To quote from Pride and Prejudice “my temper I can’t vouch for.”  (Though my good opinion once gone isn’t gone forever.  In fact, I like many people whose politics I abhor.  I’m just likely to tell them to their faces that they’re Marxist [or statist] poopy heads, and when they take offense at that it loses me friends or allies.  It’s a character defect and one I’d like to overcome.  But I’m not willing to go back to hiding my deepest feelings, either.)

But of course, the people – mostly writers – accusing Robert A. Heinlein (who was known for his epic rows with everyone from Communists to Libertarians, so I might get that from him, if one assumes – like Pratchett does – that there are genetics that have nothing to do with the physical) are also not people who live immaculate lives, they’re not people of even and sweet tempers, and the work they do is not in fact perfectly balanced and giving every side and point of view (partly because a book that did that would be soup.)

No, what irks them most about Heinlein is that he had influence they couldn’t have – that he molded minds of people who started out in a culture so different his characters opposition to taxation or their insistence on owning guns made them as alien as another species.  But little by little, his stories showed me the logic of his arguments.  (No other writer has done that to me.)

People crucifying Heinlein are not even those standing on the shoulders of giants.  They’re non-house-broken puppies, peeing on the shoulders of giants.

In a related note, I confess I never read Ayn Rand.  (I watched the Atlas Shrugged movies and, yes, I was the one person in the world who loved the first.  No.  One of two people.  My younger son did too.)  I have this thing with the way words are put together.  Perhaps because I see the non-colloquial way the words fall.  I also can’t read Nabokov.

I do realize a lot of her ideas are “extreme” in the sense that “people don’t work that way.”  But I have several friends who worship her because of what she said about the trends of society, and for being the one voice in fiction (until Heinlein, I guess) pointing out that no, you don’t have the right to anyone else’s sweat.  To live off the work of others is NOT a moral stand.  It might be a need.  I lived off my husband’s salary for a long time, but I tried to give something back.  I have friends who are unemployed and who are trying like h_ll to give back.  But that is different from assuming you are entitled.  (No one does that?  Then why was one of the excuses to pay the health care bill, that it would free you to pursue your artistic ambitions, instead of having to get a nine to five job?)

My friends seem to discount the more extreme bits of the philosophy the same way I discounted the free love poliamoury in Heinlein.  (One of the saddest things at a con was the woman in the audience who said “I read Heinlein when I was a virgin and I tried to follow his ideas, and it messed up my life.”  I wanted to say “oh, you sad little puppy.  If you’d read Harry Potter, would you have jumped out the window on a broom?”  I too read Heinlein when I was a virgin, but being a virgin – that I know – is not supposed to make you lack all common sense and ability to observe your surroundings.  Maybe I was an unusual virgin.  And no, I didn’t say it.  If I’d told her that, she MIGHT have jumped out the window on a broom.)

Anyway, my friend Amanda Green takes up the issue of “why hate Rand?”:

Let me ask you this: if Rand’s world is so unrealistic and its heros so “evil” (read politically incorrect) what about Herbert’s Dune? Oh, I hear the complaints now. That wasn’t a book that pushed philosphy. Bull shit. It just pushed a different sort of ideology. Go back and read it without your poltically correct glasses on. There are any number of other books out there that hit the readers over the head with the author’s philosphy. But those books are all right because they push the “right sort of thinking”.

Read the Whole Thing.

As a writer who is neither a saint nor a model of much of anything, and who wrote, in A Few Good Men a book that will probably get her crucified not just by both sides of politics, but possibly by sides that will come into existence for the purpose of hating me, I can only say that I hope twenty years after my death there will be panels at cons where the subtext is “Hoyt, immoral pervert or political menace?”

I’ll be in good company.

No, I’m not talking about my issues.  I do in fact, have a “complex” of autoimmune issues that seem to run together – eczema (severe) rheumatic arthritis (not troubling since I’ve been in Colorado and weirdly worst in my teens) and asthma (also not a problem pretty much since my teens, though living in South Carolina brought it back briefly – and is one of the reasons I’m glad we moved.)

So… I have some experience with there being nothing wrong with you except your stupid immune system attacking your own body under the misguided impression that it’s an invader.

This came to mind because the other day Older Son was babbling about auto-immune disorders (younger son is likely to go on about physics.  It’s… interesting at the dinner table.  I just achieve this zen state where I’m listening to the parts I understand, while plotting at the back of my mind.  But you know, considering all the years I babbled plot and character at them, and considering that my beloved is likely to get a notebook in the middle of dinner so he can sketch out some equations that he thinks will solve this problem he’s been having at work – I don’t think we can throw stones.)

As he was describing the basic workings of an autoimmune disease, I thought “that’s what our country has.”

From living with eczema, which is a chronic auto-immune disorder, I can tell you that it much resembles the way we stumbled through from the forties (perhaps earlier.  But in the forties, Heinlein described the communists taking over the Democratic party.  And considering it took him till the eighties to vote Republican for the first time, I don’t think he can be considered a biased source.) through to 2001 like I live – most of the time – with my eczema: it flares up in a specific part of my body, and it itches like heck, which of course means that I don’t give my full attention to anything much, but because I’ve lived like this since I was one, it doesn’t really bother me or I should say – I don’t know what it’s like when it’s not bothering me.

It can rise to the level of “argh” when it settles in a body part that’s hard to keep clean/dry and free of irritating agents.  Since it decided it wanted to live in my hands, last couple of years, I’ve had trouble keeping from having infected wounds – I use my hands for everything and kitchen work is hard when you have open sores.  (I’ve been using surgical gloves, but that makes my hands sweat, which aggravates the condition.)

The problem is twofold – first, any “aggravating factor” can cause a monumental flare up, where the condition becomes near-impossible to live with.  (Since one of the aggravating factors for eczema is stress and since the airlines live to make my life interesting, those of you who have seen me at Liberty, with eczema all over my body know what I’m talking about.  It gets so I can’t sleep and I can’t think, and it impairs my functioning all across the spectrum.)  The second issue is that, sleep deprivation and the very fact that my body is – with gonzo-like enthusiasm – attacking itself, means it’s not paying much attention to external enemies – virus and bacteria – which walk right in and settle down, leading to a never ending stream of infections.

And because there is nothing fundamentally wrong with my body, I’m treated to an never-ending stream of people – starting with acquaintances and ending with some doctors, about whom the least said the better – who tell me things like “you just need to stop scratching.”  (Trust me on this, while scratching aggravates it, and this is why – to the despair of both my mother and my mother in law – I keep my nails cut almost to the quick, the skin will still flare up – sometimes overnight – with no scratching whatsoever.)

For those who’ve been following our politics in puzzled wonder, it might help if you think of our issues as an autoimmune disorder.  Let’s for the moment forget where it came from.  Most autoimmune disorders are a bit of a mystery.  Yes, part of it was the same bad philosophy that affected Europe at the time, and some of it might have been Soviet agit prop leaking over the ocean (as someone who grew up in Europe and in a fractured country, I know most Americans ignore the chances of that.)  Part of it was a predisposition to it.  The US and the ancient Israelites are the only people I know of formed on a set of principles and engagins in detailed criticism of themselves over their principles.  (Most other nations engaged in a criticism of OTHER countries over their own principles and blame OTHER countries for their own failures.  For further study, I recommend Europe.)

Anyway, mostly we’ve been living with it and ignoring it, like I do with eczema.  The areas where it was chronic: college campuses, “intellectual” areas were relatively minor.  Even when it affected Hollywood, as long as it wasn’t flaring up too badly, most people rolled their eyes and ignored it.

When I came to the States, the situation puzzled me, sort of like it puzzles people who see me going around cheerfully with, say, the inside of my elbows looking like a third degree burn.  They flinch and go “What happened?” and I look down and go “Oh, that?  Eczema.  Never mind.”

You have to understand, I came over expecting this one of the world’s superpowers to be, if not as repressive (I’m not stupid) as the USSR, at least as defensive.  I expected it to be considered bad form to trash talk the US or talk up the USSR in public.  Because, well… that’s only sane.  Imagine my shock when – in the eighties – not just TV personalities, but people who were considered/considered themselves “high class” talking about the “good ideas” of the USSR and talking down the US and particularly “ignorant rednecks.”

It puzzled me, but I could see also that the country was sort of ignoring it.  I mean, we discounted the biases on TV and the twitches of the upper class like I discount the (normally) minor itch and skin bubbling up of the eczema. In real life, where things functioned normally, the crazy people were largely ignored.

The problem is this – the flare up continued growing.  All through the sixties and the seventies, and the eighties, and yes, of course, the nineties, the flare up of self-hatred grew.  And just like the eczema in my hands, it started affecting areas we can’t live without: K-12 schools, business, news.

And it’s not just a little.  The news have been biased left for a long time (yes, I know the left thinks they’re biased right, but that’s because the left is to the left of Stalin, while the media are basically propping up a state-capitalism system much like China’s.)  If you consider Fascism right, then you’re darn tooting the media is biased right.  Since I consider it a misnomer, well…

But more importantly, unlike the manifestations of totalitarian impulse in other countries – Russia, Cuba, China – the autoimmune problems are NOT affecting just out governance or our industry.  It’s not a matter of destroying our industry so we’ll all be poor.  That would be bad enough.  The problem is far worse, though: the problem is that the statist ideology now in control of our government, our media, our education and what passes for “high culture” doesn’t just hate this or that part of us.  No, they’ve been told/convinced/brainwashed that what’s wrong with the world is US – that the country and its existence ARE the enemy.

It might be the first time in history where in a non-occupied country flying the flag is an act of daring that in certain neighborhoods can get you shunned by all your neighbors.  It might be the first time in history where teaching the good parts of your history in school is considered an act of defiance, and where the higher-class and all the bien-pensants push distorted histories and documentaries that run down the country that hosts them.

Autoimmune.  Systemic.

The shock of 9/11 beat back the illness for a while.  The forces of sanity rallied.  But in any autoimmune illness, the more you rally, the stronger the backlash.  And it’s come.  And it’s worse than ever, to the point kids get sent home from school for patriotic clothing.

So… what to do?

I don’t know.  The analogy accurately describes the problem, and to the extent that it applies to the recovery, I can tell you we’ll never get rid of the auto-immune reaction – not fully.  But you knew that.  The same qualities that allow us to try to improve our governance according to our principles provide an opening to the flare ups.  Like a person with a strong immune system is more likely to get an auto-immune flare-up.

But we can’t live with it infecting all of our body politic.

The only thing I can suggest – and it is not going to make me any friends – is that you beat it back wherever you find it.  We, like me with eczema, have got so used to the minor flare ups that we ignore them.  People at a party saying the US is uniquely back, say, because it was founded in genocide…  Beat it back.  Explain about germs, and about the fact that at any rate the colonization was all over the Americas and our part of the Americas saw the least abuse.  (Mostly what happened to the original inhabitants is that they died of unfamiliar illnesses and THEN were genetically swamped.  They’re mostly still here – a bit in everyone.)

Learn our history.  Learn economics.  Learn the history of ideas.  Learn about other nations.  Not the prettied up “multicultural” histories they teach our kids in school, but the real histories (the fact this feels like hitting the weak tells you how badly off we are.  We are the only ones it’s fair to hit on.)  When people start running ourselves down, do a little comparative teaches.

Apply medicine to the flare ups, big and small and try to beat the condition to manageable level.  To survive all of us need to do it (however subtly.)

The alternative is a body – or a nation – that can’t function, much less defend itself.

UPDATE: Post on Herding Ducks (and health) over at Mad Genius Club.

By which I don’t mean it was even remotely fun.  I don’t know if other people have these, but I do periodically, where there is no comfortable position, all the blankets feel too… rough or folded or something, and on top of all I’m now too hot now too cold.

I don’t think it’s an illness, though it is possible — it’s just out of sorts and a bad night.  I need to package books to send to several of you and I’m considering walking to the post office to see if it will clear my head.  I hope it will because I really need to write a bunch of guest blog posts and do something I promised PJM, and right now I’m not even up to writing a post for this blog.  If my head doesn’t clear, I might go back to bed.

I also need to edit a novella in the DST universe and finish editing a couple of short stories because I haven’t put anything up in very long.  And of course, I’m halfway through editing Shadow Gods and then will start on Witchfinder.  (I’ve figured the next book is Rogue Magic, because that’s the problem in the story.  I need to outline it before Friday.)

And of course, there’s the rewrite to do for Noah’s Boy.

Today was not a good day for a bad night…  But as we were discussing (bickering, infighting, throwing fish) yesterday, humans aren’t just creatures of the spirit, nor even (as I must remind myself) creatures of will power.  Sometimes the body gets a say.

So, I shall leave you unfed today.  Free ice cream tomorrow.  Today I’m going to drink three gallons of tea (might be more) and then go to the post office.  G-d willing by the time I come back I’ll be human.

UPDATE: And meanwhile, for those who need something to chew on, Amanda is talking about the state of the business over at Mad Genius Club.  I confess I haven’t, lately, because in this as in politics, it’s gotten to the point all I can do is shake my head.  But Amanda’s head shaking is fun.

The inmates have managed to get out of their cells and are running around loose. Now, most days, it is pretty entertaining to watch. After all, they usually are either pointing at the sky and screaming about how the aliens are coming and taking over the world, or they are burying their heads in the sand and doing their best to ignore the changes needed to be made in order to survive. But today, well, all I can do is shake my head and wonder how long this current farce will run before the final curtain falls on it.

Read the whole thing.