blog

November

With a couple of weeks left till election, this will likely be my last political post till after it’s over. I have never been so anxious about an election. Annoyed, irritated, amused, baffled, angered…but not anxious. I thought the election of George W. Bush was a tragic misstep. I thought he was ill-equipped for the job and as it turned out he was. It was too much for him, even with perhaps the best of intentions. His first major mistake was the tax cut. He inherited a surplus. Say what you will about Clinton, he left us in better fiscal shape that any president since Eisenhower. Instead of doing what would have been more meaningful, namely investing in new programs that would have injected that money into the economy in a productive way, he advocated and got tax cuts. And of course the lion’s share went to people and corporations that didn’t need them, who only off-shored a huge amount of them, and padded their own futures, which ended up costing us down the road. Investment would have been too hard and frankly counter to what the moneyed interests wanted. His second mistake was in not rolling them back after 9/11. His third mistake was in allowing no-bid contracts for rebuilding Iraq (which of course could not have happened without mistake 2.5, which was the invasion of Iraq in the first place),  which resulted in another huge pilfering of public funds and a job left unfinished.

And on and on. He left too much up to his vice president, learned too late that he should not have done that, and then bumbled his way through the rest until, mercifully, he left office—but not before one of the biggest economic disasters since the Great Depression, which can also be laid at his feet because his administration hobbled all the regulatory agencies that might have mitigated if not prevented the 2008 collapse. 

But with all that, he left government institutions intact. I never felt he was a threat to the machinery of our democracy. 

We have no such security now. What dismays me is that, despite the declarations and threats coming directly out of his mouth, so many of my fellow citizens think Trump will serve as a good president. I can only assume they don’t believe him, don’t understand what is at stake, or don’t care. But even if it is that they think he’s kidding, all the rest of what he says and represents should signal his unsuitability. 

I don’t understand. 

Not him, he’s easy. A self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, lying bully who can’t wait to get his hands on the machinery of state so he can penalize all those who have called him out and opposed him. So he can continue the handouts to cronies. So he can avoid criminal penalties for what he has been found guilty of and escape future judgments for crimes he has yet to be tried for. He is a frightened old man who is far out of his depth and all his evasions, misrepresentations, and venality are about to bring the starkest censure unless he can win the top seat and pardon himself. He has done serious damage to this country.

He’s easy to understand. The people who think he’s their savior are the ones who baffle me.

Is the liberty to be a thoughtless cad that important?

Never mind Project 2025, that does not, I believe, figure into the calculus of the average American who supports Trump. I think it is safe to say that most of them, possibly none of them, have not even bothered to look at it, and even if they got a look at the Cliff’s Notes version they no doubt feel none of it applies to them. What might matter is the idea of payback inhering within it, that all the folks they find threatening will be “taken care of” by a second Trump administration. It’s no secret who those people are, they’ve been targeted by the Right for some time now and it’s out in the open. Gays, independent women, nonchristians, Democrats, intellectuals, the gender-fluid, ethnic minorities. Laws banning books from public libraries or school libraries, regulating parental rights to act on behalf of their children medically, voter roll purges to address a problem that does not exist (but which will affect legitimate voters by association). We have quite a list of the unacceptable before us, and I have to believe at this point that revealing such lists will do nothing to dissuade those who sycophantically support Trump. They will not be shocked, they will be encouraged, because that is what they hope for. 

For many years, I have noted, in my opinion, that for these kinds of people, the thing that drives them is what their country looks like to them, and if daily all their intolerances are teased then it should surprise no one that if the promise that it can all be “put right” is presented to them, they’ll vote for it.

It actually does not take all that many in any given community to affect the votes. 

I have been having to come to terms with the fact that what he represents is what many of my neighbors actually want. They seem unamenable to arguments about consequences and higher meaning and longterm. He’s promised to make them feel they are right, and in the absence of any counter-message they can decode in any meaningful way, that is a powerful political aphrodisiac.

Those who know better, I think, outnumber them. But we have allowed the stage to be managed the last four decades in such a way as to dampen our impact at the polls. We weren’t interested because we grew up feeling that even a subpar president like Bush could not really damage our democracy. We thought, too many of us, that it didn’t matter, that we could “fix it” next time.

Well, this time it should be obvious. Rights have been lost in this Red miasma. People have died as a result of the kind of ideological irredentism pushed by a Party dedicated to “making America great again” by making it culturally “pure.” The absurdity of that slogan nauseates me, not least because given those who wield it and shout it loudest it means exactly the opposite of what it says. You cannot make something better by tearing apart the very thing that made it unique in the first place.

So. Whatever your opinion of Harris may be, I urge you to vote for her. Not because she’ll solve all the problems, but because she won’t break the tools we need to continue working on solutions. And not voting for her does nothing but help the other guy, and he will be a disaster. He was before, he’ll finish the job this time. 

Also, down-ballot. The current GOP needs to go. They need to go off into the wilderness and remake themselves into reasonable people with genuine empathy and a grasp of the idea of service.

My objectivity, you may notice, has been compromised. Naturally. I’m voting this time to help keep my friends whole.

Community

Attention! Um….attention?

This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.

We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.

I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert. Everything from ADHD to a general lack of discipline. Occasionally someone points out that we have too much information to manage, but that doesn’t always explain why we can’t simply ignore the enormous quantity and just pick a few things.

For one thing, for people who apparently are inflicted with ever-shortening attention spans, we sure consume a lot of big thick novels and tune in to extended series and even movies are getting longer. We see people scrolling through their phones for hours at a time and the hours spent going through internet connections…

But then it becomes apparent that the depth of our knowledge on average is getting shallower. Many of us know a little bit about a great many things, but not much about any given subject.

Humans adapt. We adapt very well. Over the last forty years, since cable tv appeared just to pick a starting point, we have been adapting to an ever-expanding range of choices. We have been training ourselves to try to pay attention to more and more, which means we’re absorbing less and less. The urgency to try to stay abreast seems to drive us to simply not spend much time on any one thing. Added to that, the range of things we have to pay attention to is widening.

I grant you, some of the problem is organic, but it may be self-inflicted. We adapt. We’ve adapted to a changing ecology. We haven’t done so very well. But then the ecology itself has not yet stabilized.

Fractured Attention Ecology.

Now, this may be something already being studied, so I won’t suggest I have a brand new idea about this, but no one else recognized the term, so for the time being I’m taking credit for it. It does suggest a different way to look at the problem.

More information for us to deal with.

Absurdity

Status Whatever

In a little over a week, I will be 70. The mind, as they say, boggles. How did this happen?

All in all, though, I have little to complain about. Physically, I seem to be in fairly good condition, I just got my COVID and flu shots, the minor inconveniences that dance around me like gnats are largely insignificant and can be ignored.

I have a lot on my plate, though, and I have noticed a marked decrease in…

I don’t know if it’s energy or just give-a-damns. There are things I think it would be a good idea to do and then I just sort of fade when it comes time. I have less time during the day when I feel like a ninja warrior able to defeat all enemies. (I haven’t done any martial arts exercises in I don’t remember,) Our local SF convention is this weekend and I have a full roster of panels and such. I’m looking forward to it, as much as I look forward to anything.

I’ve passed up some shows I wouldn’t mind seeing. Partly this is a money thing. I still cannot get my head around the price of tickets these days. But let’s not go down that path, which leads to a desperate nostalgia and does little good. At the end of the month we’re going to see a farewell tour (Renaissance) that I expect will be excellent though melancholy. All my musical heroes are aging out or dying. Kind of like the writers and actors I grew up with.

And now I have to acknowledge that perhaps for someone, somewhere, I count as one of those aging relics.

Trust me, I have every intention of seeing the Tricentennial. (I doubt I’ll make it, but everyone needs a goal.) It does, in a way it never did before, depend on whether civilization survives. We are on the cusp of that wonderous age we all anticipated from the pages of whatever SF magazine we were reading at the time. As William Gibson said, the future is here, it’s just unequally distributed.

But I for the first time actually have before me a handful of projects I could consider my last. Again, it’ll take time to do them, but I sort of know what I’m going to be working on for the next five or ten years.  In one way, that’s a bit unnerving, but mostly it’s reassuring that I have that much to do.

There’s a game some people (maybe most) play, if you died tomorrow would you be satisfied. I don’t quite understand satisfaction that way. It involves being “finished” in ways that I can’t figure into my own desires, but I get the gist. Maybe, I have to say. More so than not. The thing is, I still can’t quite accept that I’m no longer the new kid on the scene. I don’t know what has to happen to make that sense of myself go away. Not sure if I want it to. I suppose that means I’ll just keep working until.

Until whatever.

Anyway, the best part of the last seven decades has been the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. Fine folks. And they put up with me. I guess I still have them fooled.

So, unless something strikes my fancy between now and then, I’ll see you all on the other side of….damn….70.

culture

Dolls

Something non-political. Or maybe just less political. (Or possibly political in an abstracted way, or stealth political.) Whatever. We’ll see what evolves.

Way back in my youth, in a galaxy far far away.

Gender roles supposedly used to be rigid. Boys were boys, girls were girls, and the only time that got mixed up was in ways we weren’t supposed to know about until we were married (or at least of marriageable age, but that’s another matter). I grew up knowing nothing about Drag or gays or any of that, despite what we may have been exposed to in movies (Some Like It Hot, Flip Wilson, what have you). To make sure we all knew who we were supposed to be, playtime was controlled. What we played with and how was a matter of serious tradition. Little boys were cowboys or soldiers, little girls were nurses, teachers, or home makers. I think. The lines were sufficiently established that we (boys) didn’t really know, unless it became the subject of teasing and jokes.

Fairly early on, I remember being annoyed with what the girls were given to do. In movies and tv mainly, but occasionally it came up in real life. Nothing revolutionary, just…discomfort. Why couldn’t the girls be soldiers or cowboys or engineers or doctors or whatever? I didn’t push it much. I pretty much accepted what I was told. But I was never quite satisfied and I found over time that I really liked movies where the girls were put in positions where they had to be More. I think this was due to my identification with the underdog more than any kind of gender awareness.

Anyway, what happened in 4th grade became a teachable moment, even though the lesson didn’t “take” for years. It still makes me smile. It makes my mother smile.

The big toy around then was G.I. Joe. The commercials on Saturday morning were overwhelmed with him. It was so cool!

Now, I had been playing with toy soldiers for years. Mostly, these were the one-or-two inch tall green plastic figures you could get in a bag. There was the prone rifleman, the bazooka guy, the advancing infantryman, Others, I don’t specifically recall now. I must have had about three hundred of these at one time. For a couple of years you could get Germans, which were gray, and Japanese, which were light brown. I recall there were other types—other eras— as well, but I was wholly enamored of World War II, so that’s what I had. I’d lay out my lines on the living room floor, fight my battles, and nary a word was said by mom or dad. Things were as they should be.

Then I wanted a G.I. Joe. And the controversy began.

“Absolutely not,” dad said.  “It’s a doll.”

“Huh? It’s a soldier! Look, the uniform, the rifle, the utility belt!”

“It’s a doll.”

I didn’t get it. At least three of my schoolmates had them, and then there was my friend Steve who lived at the end of my block who not only had Joe but the footlocker with almost all the accessories (and there were a lot of them; in retrospect his parents must have spent a small fortune on them). It was a hardship to be without.

Mom apparently talked to dad and he caved. But he had rules. Just the action figure, no accessories, ever, especially no other uniforms. I don’t know if this is still a thing, but G.I. Joe could become a sailor, a marine, an air force pilot, all the varieties of those, by a mere change of uniform. There were field packs, a field radio, a variety of weapons. A whole buffet of soldierly add-ons. For a kid at that time who was into this kind of thing, it was the grail of military toys. (I know, I know, but that was the culture then. The horror of Vietnam was just beginning and we were enamored of John Wayne and the marines and all that storming the beach stuff.) I was bereft. I must tell you, that I was not That Kid who pined away for the latest whatever. I generally just accepted what I got and managed to be content. This was one of the very few times I lobbied for a toy. And I had to be careful, because dad could decide I was being too excited and contrarily refuse because he hated me following trends. (Had I liked the Beatles when they were fresh on the scene, I don’t know what he would have done. But I didn’t, so it was never an issue.)

I didn’t realize how hard the restriction would be. Joe came with a basic fatigue uniform and a campaign hat, not even a helmet, and an M-I Garrand rifle and a plain utility belt with a canteen attached. That was it. My friend Steve eventually gave me a field radio, but all the possibilities available were denied me.

At some point I lost patience. What I began to do….

Mom had taught me how to sew when I joined the Boy Scouts. I wasn’t particularly good at it but good enough. I started raiding her samples box for material and began making clothes for my G.I. Joe.

I recall one evening dad walked into my room and saw me doing that. The look on his face was unreadable. He stared. I waited. The tension in the room was electric.

He said nothing. He left my room and never brought it up. After that he never said a thing about G.I. Joe and dolls or anything related to that. He left it alone. I have no idea what went through his mind, but he realized that anything he might say or do was fraught with the possibility of disaster. He also never denied me accessories for G.I. Joe.

I never acquired a lot of them. They were expensive. And after a couple of years puberty began to set in and Joe was abandoned. I’m not sure how that affected me going forward, but I lost any kind of gender rigidity. Playing with a doll apparently had no real impact on my basic personality. It wouldn’t have been the doll but a poor reaction from my parents that would have had a bad result. But I did abandon any notion that girls should be kept out of any game they wanted to play.

So maybe this story does have some politics in it. Going forward from then I never understood the rigidity certain people insist on in defining boys and girls. And today, with all the debate and discourse going on around “roles” I find myself lacking any patience with those who can’t accept  the dissolution of arbitrary boundaries. Especially boundaries that seem “natural” but keep being revealed as arbitrary and remain in play only because we haven’t yet done away with them.

Today, it wouldn’t be the idea of me playing with a doll that would bother me as much as all the war toys that wall-papered my life at the time.

I doubt Mattel intended it as such, but I think G.I. Joe was a subversive toy, one that attacked the rigidity of the boundaries. Despite my protestations at the time, it was a doll, and I could easily see him and Barbie getting together.

Oh my. What’s the world coming to!

Community

Tomorrow Denied

In retrospect, the situation we face in the country today is born of factors that have been present all along, but were buried under a common optimism about the future which used to define us, at least in our public discourse. Looking to the future has defined this country in one way or another since its inception, but very aggressively since the mid-20th Century. Once we had the technological capacity to build a common infrastructure, the Future became a destination for more people than ever before.

So what happened?

Because that is what we find ourselves on the verge of losing. The Future.

For the moment, consider the narratives. Since the prognostications of science fiction took root and grew into a forest of speculation, we have been offered visions of heroic and dynamic futures with adamantine towers and plenty and the ability to go to the stars and cure ancient illnesses and contemplate our place in the universe in ways impossible before since we were trapped on a single world with limited ability to change our tomorrows. Many of us took hold of the vision and couldn’t wait to get there. Our imaginations were fired with mission and with such stories clearer ideas of what that future might look like.

Alongside these grand possibilities, the obverse marched in lockstep. The collapse of everything, armageddon, reducing even what we had already achieved back to times when disease, famine, and immobility overrode aspirations. Often these scenarios were depicted as a direct consequence of the progress we desired. Certainly it was not implausible. Along with advances in medicine and energy and agriculture, we faced total destruction by dint of wars that might last a day and leave nothing standing. The challenge was working together to get past that to reach the better tomorrow.

What many of us did not anticipate was that so many people would embrace the dystopic vision. Not just dictators and authoritarians, not just greedy profiteers, but common people who saw themselves as perhaps heroes only in the rubble and preferred the broken landscape where they imagined having a purpose instead of brighter landscape wherein they frankly could not imagine having a place.

The emergence of so-called survivalist groups seems on its face a logical response to Cold War fears of nuclear war. But. As the Cold War came to a close and the specific threats faded, these groups found themselves unable or unwilling to move on and invented new threats heralding the end of the world, assuring them of the necessity to separate and isolate themselves from the recovering and progressing culture they have come to distrust and reject. A culture still largely based on progress. With the addition of Apocalyptic religious groups, the nature of the perceived threat/fate changed into one aggressively resistant to the usual counterarguments based on the given reality.

The persistent assertion of these positions has gradually eroded boundaries separating them from the culture at large and in often unexpected ways have changed even so-called mainstream apprehensions of previously unquestioned aspects of a progressive agenda, specifically modern medicine, economic adaptability, and a suite of characterizations of government designed to diminish or destroy public confidence in institutions. For the leaders of such groups, this is winning tactic, because as faith in said institutions is broken, systems stumble and fail, and this is seen as justification for further pronouncements of collapse. Self fulfilling prophecy.

But why does it work? 

Take vaccines. The efficacy of vaccines is a matter of established fact. The reduction and near eradication of certain diseases, many if not most of which have horrific fatality records among children, is an established historical fact. Public health institutions, through robust vaccination programs, boast a heroic degree of success. So much so that we have a couple of generations now that came of age with no direct experience of these diseases. Whereupon a peculiar thing occurred. People began treating those times as mythic. It would be reasonable to assume people would refer to such history and base decisions upon the facts at hand, but human nature is perverse in the things it is willing to accept in the absence of first-hand experience. 

“Those illnesses are gone, so why is the government still insisting on these vaccines?”

This is a question those of an apocalyptic mindset appreciate. The government programs themselves are co-opted to stand in for any fabricated theory that will advance the agenda of those who have embraced a dystopic view of…

Well, everything.

You can see the worm of perversity in the way no reasonable answer is accepted. 

But this is not about acceptable answers. This is about rejecting any answer—indeed, any question—that might entail change. Once that becomes the goal, then the capacity to process change, the need for it, becomes, if not impossible, redirected into the construction of internal fortifications that in their ultimate expression deny anything outside the boundaries of personal identity.

At this point, designations of Right or Left become nothing but talking points. The early supporters of Lenin and then Stalin here in the West indulged this refusal to examine evidence that contradicted their desired perspective.

In all this, the thing most damaged and often lost is balance.

But isn’t constant progress unbalancing, too? If not paired with an ongoing appreciation for that which has already been achieved and is worthy of preservation, certainly. 

The line is drawn elsewhere in the divergence of the desired future. Progress entails change, necessarily, and sometimes change is destructive. The question is, what is being destroyed? This goes to costs. What are we willing to give up in order to live in a better world?

You might argue that what is a Better World for some is not for others, and in the muzzy precincts of sentiment and nostalgia we might find valid concern. However, it need not be quite so exclusively personal. Certain changes spring from concrete necessities and what is displaced is not so easily consigned to the “charm” of the past. 

What, in brief, does it cost to preserve against change?

We have to look at the whole picture. If that which is being changed exists at the expense of our well-being, then there is no justification for denying the changes required to correct the systemic distress. In other words, to be broadly blunt, if the leisure and comfort of one group necessitates the bondage of another, then nothing legitimately argues for the preservation of that system.

If what you are trying to conserve by denying progress rests upon addressable inequities, then you argue in bad faith.

Those who rail against public health, economic redress, social justice should consider the costs of their conservation. If people continue to live in poverty, in poor health, and are denied access to the very systems being guarded against change, then the argument that those systems are in need of revision at the very least has more legitimacy than the preservation of specific privilege. You as an individual may well argue that you have a right to refuse to participate in the revised system, but you do not have the right to demand the system remain static in order to protect your preconceptions.

This is what present-day conservatism seems all about—demanding a reset to a prior incarnation of our public systems in order to mollify a descriptive preference. Rolling back already adopted changes which redress past inequities.

The assault on fact, truth, and our perception of reality is dystopic to its core. 

Part of the dream of a better future, aside from all the technological progress and the social improvement, we believed that the superstitions of the Past would fade. That people would disenthrall themselves from the numinal ideologies of mythic interpretations. That “belief” in that which finds expression only in assertions of identity found only in the supernatural, the legendary, the unsubstantiable, that self-professed claims like manifest destiny and racial superiority and divine preference would be relegated to the margins of history. We underestimated the hold such narratives maintain on too many of us and did too little to offer a better story.

Too many of us have let this pass unchallenged. We have watched the language be hi-jacked and altered over time, a willingness to compromise taken advantage of to everyone’s detriment, and a crisis of national character emerge with frightening suddenness and ugly ramifications. We are in the midst of a struggle between progress and regress which caught too many of us unprepared. 

I grew up believing the world could be better, cooler, richer. We were on our way, all we had to do was build it. By the time I was old enough to recognize the gap between my expectations and reality, I thought, like many others, these lapses were oversights, that everyone wanted to fix them and take us further along the road to that better future. It took a while for that illusion to die and realize that the “lapses” were more often than not the result of intentional opposition to changes. Some of it was technological, certainly, but as those problems were overcome and the solutions remained unachieved, I had to realize that there are people who do not want that better future. Certainly they don’t think of it that way, they believe what they want will be that better future. It’s not that difficult to demonstrate that they’re wrong.

Or selfish. Greedy. Or simply incapable of making the imaginative leap.

Or, most frighteningly, there are those who want to be heroes in a broken world, and they’re willing to break the world for the chance to be its savior. 

I believe that is what we are facing.

blog

Policy Points

My previous post was an emotional tirade in behalf of Kamala Harris and in opposition to the Other One. It is fair to say that too often we see and hear jeremiads against politicians that are little more than pure spleen, with almost no substance to back them up. We’ve grown used to people on the Right slamming liberals with claims that we will destroy the country, and then, when pressed for details, crickets.

So allow me a little space here for a few details.

What do I have against DJT?

Aside from his demeanor, which is that of an aging frat boy who never learned that No means No, he comes from a career of shysterism quite common in American culture. We usually don’t elect them to higher office. He has built his brand on braggadocio. He’s a clown, really, performing for the media, acting like he has the inside scoop on anything Wall Street, and that he has made a vast fortune based on his business acumen.

It is easy to show that this is all glitz and no substance. He started his working life with a $400 million dollar loan from his parents (what passes for a self-made man among the moneyed class) and proceeded to dodge bankruptcy for the next four decades. I remember the carnival-esque reporting on his first major fall in the 80s in which he was treated to a monthly stipend equal to the annual salary of many upper middle class people. Heaven forbid he have to move into a two bedroom walk-up of no more than 800 square feet. Too many of us laughed at the clear evidence that the rich receive different treatment. 

He has left behind a trail of unpaid debt, shafted businesses, law suits, and defaults. This is a matter of public record. How anyone can look at that and see a successful businessman, I do not know. Unless you count gaming the system a measure of success. Perhaps. I think a lot of his “aura” has to do with how much he has gotten away with. Americans enjoy a clever and successful bandit story. We are sneakily taken with a rogue who makes off with the jewels while leaving the authorities baffled. And as long as he’s not stealing from us, then it’s just a story.

Mistaking the narrative coolness of that story for actual competence is a problem we have because we are a culture immersed in narratives, especially anti-authoritarian narratives. We don’t really want to live without reliable authority, but such stories appeal to the rebel in our national mythos. Add to that a celebrity status with a television show…

The problems begin when we mistake celebrity appeal with actual ability. We do that here. Popularity overwhelms realistic assessment. We complain about the party apparatus that vets candidates before we get to vote for them, but frankly it has served us better than not by keeping the utterly incompetent yet inexplicably popular away from real power.

Reagan is an example of when this system fails. He was not just problematic for the nation, he damaged California as a governor. Among other things, he wrecked one of the best higher education systems in the country. His public health policies pumped adrenaline into the homeless problem. (You thought I was going to go after his economics, didn’t you? Well, how is the destruction of public health not an economic issue?) He was a B-picture actor who became clay in the hands of Movement Conservatives.

Now, it is reasonable to say that in higher office, the public face of the person holding said office is important. One of the things a governor or a president must bring to the job is Presence. That’s why speeches are important, that’s why delivery is necessary. Especially the president, who must be, internationally, the Face of America. Obama was exemplary at this. Everything about him resonated with gravitas, competence, the best qualities of the American persona.  Reagan, for all his faults, did bring that to the job. Sometimes, depending on all other circumstances, that may be enough, at least for short periods.

But it’s not everything, not by a long shot.

So what did Trump bring? Celebrity status, certainly, but what kind? 

Back when George W. Bush was running, I heard many people decide he was their guy, not for any policy position he might have held, but because “I feel like I could have a beer with him.” I understand, he seemed approachable, he seemed down to earth, he came across as one of them. They did not feel diminished by him, intellectually at least. And he didn’t act like someone who came from a dynasty. The problem was, people on average couldn’t do that job. It requires more, and frankly if that’s your metric then you have to ask how you might come across to other heads of state. 

Not well. By the end of his administration, Bush was being publicly dissed by other national leaders. especially in Europe. They did not take him seriously. Nothing overt, but you could see it if you paid attention. He did not receive the deference of his predecessors. Partly, this was due to the shadow cabinet his vice president ran. No one knew for a time who was running things here. Cheney undermined Bush’s credibility. It seemed obvious that in his second term, Bush realized this and made moves to reassert his own authority, but too late, and the mess he created in Iraq and Afghanistan was of such magnitude that we’re still suffering from it today.

Obama restored that international credibility. Like it or not, he revived respect globally.

Trump destroyed nearly all of it. Again, if you paid attention, you could see it. By his second year, no one trusted him. But worse than that, from the start of his campaign it was evident he was not even appealing to the average American, but to the schoolyard bully and the intolerant brute among us. The surprise was that so many of us contained that stunted child and got off on the tasteless jokes and the mockery of the disabled.

Nearly everything he did diminished the prestige of the presidency, from serving McDonald’s to an internationally acclaimed sports team to his wife’s destruction of the Kennedy rose garden to his praise for authoritarian leaders. The word salad that served as public addresses got worse the longer he was in office. His callous treatment of service people who contradicted him, the intemperate asides about veterans, and the fact that he kept changing his military advisors based on their lack of sycophancy demonstrated a lack of understanding about the nature of the office. 

His base loved all this. I can only speculate why.

But that’s image. What about policy?

The trade war he started, with China specifically, cost us over 1800 manufacturing plants  by 2018. Nearly 300,000 manufacturing jobs lost. One of the “unintended consequences” of this was a huge impact on farmers because China shifted its soy imports from the U.S. to Russia, which has now entailed closer ties between Moscow and Beijing at a time when we need China to stop supporting Russia over Ukraine. This was a knee-jerk policy decision that seemed “popular” with a public that had been primed for it over China’s intellectual property thefts and their purchase of American debt over the years.

But this also created the supply-chain situation that crippled our response to COVID-19 and exacerbated inflation after the pandemic. American companies reduced stocks on many things hoping for tariff rollbacks, which did not come. (And yes, Biden kept most of those tariffs—the economy had adjusted and the whipsaw of sudden rollbacks would destabilize markets that had finally found some equilibrium. Complex, certainly, but that’s just the point.) 

In the meantime, he signed into law a massive tax cut for the top. Between its signing and the pandemic, the economy slowed by two-thirds. Unemployment, which had been dropping steadily under Obama, at about .75% annually, dropped more slowly, to .25% annually. The Dow had been gaining at an average of 16% annually before the tax bill. Afterward, it gained only 5 or 6% annually. Everything slowed. That slowing probably would have resulted in recession just before or just after election anyway, but the pandemic kicked it into overdrive.

As to that pandemic. Obama left behind a fairly robust pandemic response team. Trump’s budget cuts disemboweled it, along with funding for basic research. His chaotic incomprehension and apparent inability to let someone else be the smartest one in the room contributed directly to a tragic response. He has no understanding of science, he distrusts anyone who knows more than he does (this is evident from the pattern of firings almost from the beginning of his administration; firings of people many of whom he then did not replace, leaving important posts vacant), and from the beginning he was part of the conservative movement to reduce the size of the federal government. His response was textbook incompetence that put too many people in their graves.

His open and unapologetic embrace of dictators extended beyond fannish adoration and slipped into security breaches. The debacle of our Afghanistan withdrawal was engineered entirely by his people, though Biden got blamed. But that aside, he invited Taliban leaders to the White House in 2019. Why is this bad? Because he did not invite the legitimate Afghani government to the same meeting, which signaled his abandonment of them. Spin it as you wish, there is no seeing the Taliban as ethical or moral partners on any basis.  Multiple messages can be seen from this, including an embrace of authoritarianism, a disregard for women’s rights, the dismissal of previous policy from 2003 on, and a blatant attempt at some kind of showmanship.

His stacking of the Supreme Court. Now, I do not believe Trump himself has the intellectual savvy to understand what he did. He was advised. Likely those like the Heritage Foundation who drafted Project 2025 picked those candidates and we have gotten so used to just rubberstamping nominees that the evident disqualifications not to mention the slick prevarications allowed three demagogues to pass right through. This has resulted in a stunning reversal of what we usually consider settled law, which all three declared they would respect. We were set up and Trump played his part. Emphasis on played. 

The only people who made out well were those who always do well under Republican administrations. The ones who got the tax breaks. And to make it clear, the middle class got a tax increase thanks to the tariffs.

You may question Biden’s policies all you want. We are on the path to a historic recovery and perhaps a sea change in national character long overdue. I’m just telling you here some of the specifics on which I base my assessment of DJT. Rather than just run about panicking that he’s terrible and leave it at that, I thought I’d share a bit of why.

I know that there are people who will look at the above and wonder what my problem is. Well, back at you, folks. 

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Just To Be Clear…

Just to be clear…

I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly. 

We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years. One could make an argument for the last 70, but I think it became alarming with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Disclaimer: I voted for Reagan the first time. Like too many people, I was swayed by the optics, by the substanceless bluster. And Reagan made the usual slew of claims that he would not do this or that, to mollify those who, conservative as they might have been, were content with a great deal of what was in place since FDR. 

But Reagan put our economy on the track to suffer recurrent bubbles, resulting in higher paydays for those who knew how to play the market, and increasing disparities in income, and a degradation of middle class security. He was the first Republican president whose policies left us with a huge debt and a deficit that became a political football for the next 9 election cycles, a problem no one in the GOP wanted to solve because it was too good to run on.

Reagan brought a religious element into national politics that has brought us to a point of division as bad as the one that caused the Civil War, all in order to leverage a particular kind of political opportunism that pumped ether and adrenaline into issues that had never been controversial before, issues which went on to become talking points no one wanted to actually solve because they were such excellent campaign issues.

Reagan started the whole denigration of a federal government that had till that point worked miracles in terms of public service since the 1940s. All in the name of dividing the states and permitting a partisan war that served the interests of Big Money.

After Reagan, the allowable agendas shifted to the right and even a centrist like Clinton found himself unable to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which took down the last bulwark between commercial and private banking that led directly to the 2008 collapse. The weak legislation passed to make up for what had worked perfectly well since the 1930s received death blows in the form of Supreme Court decisions on the side of Money, primarily Citizens United, which in the 1960s and 70s would have looked like sheerest nonsense to D.C.

All of which brought us into the era of politics which saw unbelievable increases in campaign spending, an environment in which the primary job of an elected official is always the next campaign (perpetual running), and a deterioration of reliable information sources which has given us a toxic media ecology that has very little to do with substantive policy.

Hillary Clinton was buried under an unrelenting media avalanche which should have had no traction. They kept bringing her back for Benghazi. She never pleaded the Fifth (one of her aides did, but Clinton herself never did), and the last time she sat for 11 hours. The fact is, if the Republicans, who were in charge of these investigations, could have found something, why didn’t they? Because wrapping it up would have taken one of their campaign issues off the table.

We are living in an absurd period. 

It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask, how is the average citizen supposed to know what to believe?

In specific, it’s a huge task. But when it comes down to identifying legitimate issues from bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard.

We have politicians railing against tampon distribution in schools. Really? Are you that hard up for a campaign issue?

This is simple, at least for me. Those who continually attempt to deny voting rights to various groups are the enemy.

Those who seek to strip rights from otherwise legitimate groups are the enemy.

Those who continually tell you who to fear, especially with no evidence to support their positions, are the enemy.

Those who support book banning, under any circumstances, are the enemy.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the chief components of violence are the enemy.

Those who reject science are the enemy.

Those who back corporations instead of neighborhoods are the enemy.

We can go on. And, unfortunately, there are people who wholeheartedly support the enemy. In the absence of a larger perspective, their personal intolerances and knee-jerk fears supplant coherent thinking. All of these things are the trademark today of one party. For the first time in my life I am rejecting any Republican out of hand. The GOP is, in my opinion, on the wrong side of history—indeed, civic morality—on every issue.

And for the moment it appears they are finally beginning to implode from it.

The cherry atop the sundae is Trump. I have never been so dismayed by the categorical blindness of so many of my fellow citizens over something which should be obvious to a child. The man is a trash fire. He managed to accomplish two things during his presidency (three if you count packing the Supreme Court with ideological drones): another enormous tax cut for the top 1%; a tariff program that set the stage for all the distribution nightmares triggered by a pandemic he then refused to take seriously until the situation was dire (which set us up for the inflation we are still trying to contain); and, though this was unofficial, chaining the GOP to him in such a way that he is still telling them how to vote even though he is out of office…which led directly to one more failure in congress to deal with the immigration problems he exacerbated. Why? Because, like so much else, it is too good an issue to solve.

He has stated pretty much unequivocally his desire to be a dictator. For a day or life makes no difference to me, he treated it like a joke, but his actions around January 6th show clearly that he’s one of those politicos who believe he only has to win one election and he should be there for life.

It is part of the incoherence of his supporters that they will not understand reality. Biden has performed incredibly as president, and yet none of the MAGA camp can tell you what he has done much less why it should be seen as bad. The repeated canard that Biden has and is destroying the country is so blatantly untrue, yet people—many of whom have benefited from Biden’s programs—believe in their bones that we are about to collapse, when the opposite is true.

And then there are those who like to position themselves as somehow morally superior who refuse to consider voting for either because, a pox on both houses. This is little more than a refusal to accept how politics function and an excuse to not compromise, without which we have the gridlock we are all so justly tired. Third parties never do anything but sow chaos, at least when they come out of the gate going for the top prize without having done the decades long work of grassroots community building. People like that keep their gaze fixed on the presidency while their local school boards end up run by religious zealots who prefer a high teen pregnancy rate and rising STDs to actually dealing with the problems as things which can be solved and, oh, while they’re busy with Abstinence Only nonsense they’re trying to ban books and shove the Ten Commandments into the classroom. They don’t, by the way, do that because they think these things will help, they do it because they want the problems shoved back in various closets, the costs notwithstanding.

I want more people to vote and for it to be easier for them.

I want books of all kinds available to everyone.

I want women to be equal not just before the law but before the community.

I want wealth to remain in communities.

I want us to stop burning the planet down in the name of a few more points on the Dow.

I want people to be cared for without it bankrupting them.

And I want Being American to mean everyone, not just code for Being White.

I want the stupidity to end.

Now, that last one, I realize, may be hoping for too much. But we might start by actually educating kids rather than just trying to make them conform.

We might start by getting rid of those who traffic in intolerance just to hold office.

Big job. Maybe we should actually start by stop mistaking political expediency for being fair.

So, yeah, I’m voting for Kamala. Not because I expect her to magically solve all the problems. If she solves one it will be an achievement. But the other guy—the other Party—seems uninterested in solving anything. Rather, they’d like there to be a few more, so they have something to get their base stirred up and keep voting for them.

See you in November.

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Anniversaries

Permit me to take a moment out from the current world mess to indulge a bit of personal nostalgia. Thirty Six years ago I was at Clarion, working hard and hoping I could become a writer, in company with some of the finest people I ever met, a number of whom are to this day among my best friends. It was the first time I had given myself over to such a program, had gone out of state to attend school (sort of) and had found the humility to know I couldn’t achieve my goal all on my own.

Did I achieve it? Well, I have a body of work: several novels, nearly 80 short stories, a bunch of reviews, opinions, screeds, etc. I’ve lectured, taught workshops, and even managed an agency for the support of reading and authors. The trail of evidence leading back over three decades would suggest that I am.

Since then, Clarion itself has moved (from Michigan to California) and those people I mentioned? I’ve lost track of some of them, but among those I am still in touch, they’ve done all right. A few of them have achieved more than I have. I’m proud to be affiliated with them. They write cool stories. That was what we all wanted to do, write cool stories. Publish them, share them, write some more, rinse repeat.

But I am not the same. Not in many things. I did not anticipate having to guard myself against cynicism. The thing is—and they can tell you this as plainly as possible and you still won’t fully accept it—the profession of writing can break your heart. In large part because it is so glacial in its machinations. It takes so long to get things published. I look back over my work and I can name only one novel (not a franchise) that did not take close to a decade to find a publisher. Many of my short stories languished in the files before someone picked them up. You have to be patient. Patient. And you have to love doing the work.

But hey, I got to do what I wanted to do.

Thank you. Clarion. And good thoughts to the friends and colleagues, that core bunch I met at Clarion and those I have met along the way. See you in the Future.

Absurdity

Single Cat Ladies

Single cat ladies…

Cats, it seems, have been politically representative for a long time. I suppose one could argue that from when the Egyptians deified cats, they have played a part in defining certain cultural affiliations. The association between cats and women who drew the disapproval of surrounding communities can be dated to when witchcraft dominated the fears of European populations.

Absurd, of course, but not the first absurdity to come with dire consequences for marginalized people.

Of course, this is part and parcel of the Right’s urgent attempt to return women to what might be termed the Domestic Sphere. Globally, there are a number of governments currently quite concerned about population growth. Rather, the lack of. Births per capita in many places have been declining for some time. States concerned with their ability to compete are worried that they’re running out of potential new workers.

While this is a problem of economic organization more than one of sheer numbers, the impetus to see it that way is, as usual, much resisted by those at the top who like where they are. Of course, these same people, on average, themselves have fewer children…and always have.

Stripping away all the Chicken Little panic attendant upon this, we should keep in mind that the only way to reverse the trend decried is to force women to breed. Which means stripping them of rights. Which means taking away choice. Which means reducing them to chattel.

Why?

Men are too much involved in their co-operative and  competitive relations to act as a public for one another. Woman is outside the fray: her whole situation destines her to play the role of concerned spectator.                         Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Culturally, historically, socially, women have been made the audience. The current struggle underscores this, because all these males trying to make laws to control them seem clearly designed to secure for themselves their expected audience. Women who step onto the stage with them cannot be an audience. It confuses the insecure male. There are, obviously, degrees of the required condition, but the more women, in any period, have rejected the role, the more authoritarian the response from men, including the arbitrary reduction of women to stateless, propertyless, indeed identityless ciphers with no power.

But only poor women. Or lower middle class women. Of any woman lacking the financial means to circumvent the rules the majority live by. Nothing new there. Lest we forget, the whole abortion debate has never been about whether women can obtain one but about which women will obtain one. People with money have never lacked for…options.

I find all these warnings about shrinking populations darkly amusing. Sixty years ago we were generally concerned that we were on some Malthusian roller coaster and in danger of over populating. Insofar as people rose to meet that challenge, we are now faced with a different fear, that of an aging population with a shrinking rate of replacement. It never seems to occur to certain people that the real problem is inequity. 

But really, my visceral reaction to this is a categorical rejection of the proposed solutions. Mandating, essentially, that women have children instead of careers. Or, perhaps, to put it more  bluntly, preventing women choosing to live lives they wish to live rather than the ones their communities want them to. There ought not be a conflict here, but according to certain people there is.

Where are all the tirades about men who remain childless? I mean, I am, by choice. I would make a most unwilling parent and I knew this decades ago. This choice can certainly be described, if you wish, as selfish, but on the other hand taking myself out of the pool can also be described as refusing to inflict indifferent parenting on an innocent child. In either case, of course, the weight of the argument is heaped on women? Why? Well, because they get pregnant, they have to take measures to secure themselves from unwanted outcomes in ways men do not, they are the ones who end up shouldering the responsibilities. In general, the attack is aimed at those most vulnerable. You can complain about males not willingly impregnating females all you want, but in the end it’s an absurd argument if the woman is not also willing.

Unless you intend stripping her of her ability to decide for herself. Spin it any way you like, that’s a kind of rape.

Why is it, in a culture that celebrates the Individual, so many people are so ready to jettison that ideal when it comes to women?

Rhetorical question, really, but I think it should be forcefully put more often. Make these people admit that they do not regard women as equals, indeed, as fully human. All this talk about the obligation to the species is just misdirection. 

There are so many problems which can be laid at the doorstep of population growth that we are now, some of us, willing to disregard in the name of dominance. The difficulties raised are primarily economic with certain attendant technological and infrastructure aspects, not a question of sheer numbers. A closer look and the resistance to such solutions can be seen as privilege trying to maintain itself at the expense of those who lack the means to defend themselves and their rights.

Single cat ladies a danger to civilization my ass. Males who aren’t sure they can compete is more likely. The super wealthy who don’t want to see sensible changes in economic policy and a readjustment in wealth distribution, certainly. (And before you think I condemn all the rich, no. I’m sure there are many who do not agree with a program they regard as unethical and possibly immoral. But it doesn’t require them to be a monolith. It should be obvious by now that it does not require a majority to impair, derail, and thwart such things. You only need a handful of adversaries to bollocks up anything. At least for a while.) 

Anyway, that’s my opinion. Carry on.

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Harris

It has now been a couple of weeks. We were on vacation and pointedly ignored newscasts, so when we returned on that Sunday it was to the announcement (just made; I suppose they were waiting for us) that President Biden is stepping aside and passing the torch.

Politics as usual was never much of a thing, only to those who pay too little attention to what actually goes on and respond only to the surface, but this is one for the history books. Biden won all his primaries, so everyone assumed it was a done deal (forgetting of course that primaries and caucuses are not part of the Constitution, were in fact Party devices that were not formally adopted at a national level until after the 1968 election season, and then only as an attempt to avoid the kind of messy floor fights that were hallmarks at the national conventions. Even afterward, it was assumed that a Dark Horse might emerge at the regular convention. Point being, none of this was built into the system originally and those feeling that something fundamental has been overturned are not as informed as they might believe.)

What Biden did, then, is in no way illegitimate, just startling, but hey, we could use a little shock just now. 

I did not feel Biden had cause to do this. A poor performance at the debate was not indicative of his ability to govern. He was governing, he continued to do so, ably. But we are very much wedded to Performance Politics—not in how well the office might be managed but in how our representatives look while doing their jobs. Poor appearance has become deadly, regardless of actual ability, a factor in our politics which I abhor. We have for too long elected politicians based not on their ability to run an office but on how well they campaign, and while raw skill may have a lot to do with both, they are not the same skillset. But Americans have always responded to glorious bullshit more readily than actual ability, a trait that has only become worse.

That said, it was becoming clear that Biden has lost the confidence of many in the Party, and regardless of actual accomplishments and ability, he can’t do his job with that kind of disaffection. It would get overly complicated and ugly and he risked damaging the very thing he has worked to build, namely the kind of selfless dedication to service that ought to be the hallmark of our politicians. This is something his opponent seems constitutionally incapable of understanding. 

So he bit the bullet, as it were, and did what he thought best for the country. However one may feel about the circumstances that put him in this position, his decision cannot be criticized but only applauded. Whatever the outcome, he did this for the good of the country.

Barring any kind of blindsiding floor fight at the convention, Kamala Harris is our nominee. She has been pulling support from all quarters and for the moment looks to be a lock. It seems that people were waiting for someone to vote for, not just someone in opposition to the other guy. With only a few months left in the campaign season, this has left the GOP scrambling. They honestly seem not to have considered her a threat. That’s bad planning, but what do you expect? Harris is a woman, nonwhite, something of a progressive, three factors the GOP have spent a lot of time dismissing as irrelevant. How could a progressive black woman possibly beat the Great White Hope?

Stay tuned.

It doesn’t matter to me, I intended to vote in opposition to Trump no matter what. For me this is simple. We have a candidate who states clearly his intentions to do away with our democratic system. Only by the most contorted of mental gymnastics can one take him as being anything other than a wanna-be dictator. The kool-aid was spiked with everclear and perhaps some psilocybin for those who think he is in any way going to preserve their rights under the Constitution. It may be that he could face a Congress arrayed in opposition, but why should we have to go through that kind of a fight when we have a sane alternative? 

But I confess to being just a bit more hopeful than before. I like Joe Biden, I appreciate what he has done, what he tried to do, and I wholeheartedly approve the general direction he was taking the country. The other guy’s constant assertion that Biden has destroyed or is destroying the country flies in the face of dozens of facts and metrics that show otherwise. But Trump is fully immersed in Appearance Politics and substantive change doesn’t play well on his stage. He’s a jingoist and all he sees is how he looks on the Jumbotrons. Making America great for him is entirely a matter of what can be covered up beneath a veneer of bombast. If the crowd is cheering, he’s been successful.

But then they all go home and none of the problems that nibble at their lives like ducks have been fixed. Blaming it on the Democrats only goes so far, especially when a Democrat has actually overseen real solutions to many of those problems.

Nothing happens in this country at the national level quickly, but a large segment of the electorate seems to think it should. Solutions to problems that took 50 years to create will not be solved in a year or two. But we have no patience, it seems. Especially when the lives too many take for granted feed into the problems. The great problem of the American voter has always been a demand to Fix It But Don’t Change Anything.

Harris comes from a generation that may well believe otherwise. Regardless, this is what handing it off to a new generation looks like.

Back in 2015, Harris was one of those contending for the nomination I rather liked. Of course, Clinton was anointed. Now it’s Harris’s turn.

Let me be clear: I pretty much reject nearly everything the Republican Party has come to represent. You cannot have their program unless you’re willing to strip rights and privileges from certain people. Too many of their number seem to think that granting equal rights to those they have traditionally disdained means losing those very rights for themselves. They want to feel in charge, not equal. They feel, perhaps, that the largesse of our nation should be theirs to dispense as they see fit, not share as a matter of basic human dignity. The people the current GOP seems to speak for are people who want to hurt my friends.

We will not see a decent future in the hands of racial and political elitists who are afraid of anyone who does not resemble them.

Lastly, we need to pay attention to the down-ticket races. The only way substantive change can happen is if we purge the statists. In my own state, we have two senators neither of whom speak for me. (Hawley has made something of a name recently trying to gain compensation for victims of nuclear waste left over from WWII. In this he’s positioning himself as a champion of the people. I agree, compensation needs to be made, but a broader look at Hawley shows that, in my opinion, the chief benefit for him in this position is that it is another way to make the federal government look bad, and these folks are all about that, because they wish to limit the broader protections that attend to federal laws. Nothing else he supports is consistent with any kind of “man of the people” mantle.)

So again, I urge you: vote. In this election, sitting it out is, to my mind, a betrayal. 

We’re working to keep Sauron out of the White House. We can debate the merits of who actually tossed the ring into the fire afterward.