Category: history

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Hope Projected

An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.

But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it. Historically, we see examples of faith empowering people to do amazing things.

I have not for many decades been able to “put my faith” into anything I cannot define. Further, just defining the thing is insufficient. There must be some basis in accepting its reality. I do not believe in gods.

But I do accept an idea of the numinous.

Recently, while listening to To The Best Of Our Knowledge, during an episode about hope, it occurred to me that we may have the whole idea of faith backwards. Humans have a habit of projecting concepts onto externalities. We attribute qualities to all sorts of things that cannot, in many instances, possess them of themselves. We do this across the spectrum. People, cars, boats, books, buildings, money. Luck is a prominent one. Public figures provide endless opportunity for us to project our desires, our preconceptions, our dislikes and prejudices, our sense of self worth.

I have always conceded, at least intellectually, that Faith (with a capital F) goes beyond concepts like trust, relying upon, dependence. All those are conditional.  Faith is supposed to be absolute, unconditional, ever reliable. Faith defies reason. Faith asserts infallibility.

And I realized that there is one thing we carry inside that fits all that, to varying degrees, which most often we take for granted, but occasionally elevate to supernatural status given the right circumstances. Hope.

Hope is a mercurial idea. Part optimism, part fantasy, part will, it is a view of the world that our place in it will be acknowledged and rewarded. To hope is to choose the positive outcome, no mater how unlikely, over the despair resulting from surrender. It is, in fact, one of the factors in getting out of bed in the morning feeling that the day will come out all right. It operates often without evidence. In short, it exhibits all the characteristics of Faith with one exception—it is entirely self-generated. In fact, there is one thing that faith supposedly provides that hope does not: comfort.

Or does it?

My conclusion is that faith is only hope projected. We put it on an external something then attribute that something as the source and then proceed to believe in it as if it actually existed. (Now, it may be that we do this to another person, in which case it is concerned with something—someone—that exists, but there is still that confusion as to the actual source.) The much-vaunted “faith in god/providence/the supernatural/etc is usually what is meant when we talk about Faith.  Also, because so many people have difficulty investing ideas with loyalty, at least in any sustained manner, we personify the idea and make into…

The question always comes back to, “do you have faith?” I have hope. I may be unable to do anything about that, it comes with the equipment. But I know the source, and curiously that gives me comfort.

It also makes me responsible for any misconceptions I might have about matters of…well…faith.

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The Unrealized Dream

I’ve gotten to the point where I nearly tune out when someone in the public eye starts going on about the Founders and what they intended. Pro or con, it’s a surmise, and cherrypicking is rampant, though some pick bigger cherries than others. A few don’t even bother, they just make up whatever feels right and layer it over a 10th grade understanding of history. They can do this because we Americans in general couldn’t care less about history. That has always been the case, just as we, who have freedom to do so, read very little on average.

Some things have emerged from what I’ve read over the years pertaining to what the good folks in 1787 intended, not so much what they wrote down (though many of them did) as to what a reasonable assessment of the history of the times tells us.

The first thing I conclude is that the vast majority of Americans, once the ties were severed from England and the nation established, went on to pay precious little attention to the Constitution or the intent of the Founders. They were too busy doing what they then felt at liberty to do, which was carve out a bit of something for themselves and their descendants, legally if they could, by whatever means they had at hand. To live their lives as they chose. Adhering to the vaunted principles set forth by the framers of the Constitution was not top of their agenda. Not that they paid no attention to what was going on in Philadelphia, seeing that whatever emerged from that august body was bound to affect them directly. But I believe their interest was largely self-directed. They had just gotten one pest off their back, it would be annoying if another took its place.

And I’m sure they were fine with the results as far as it went, probably proud of it, since the majority voted for it, but it was not about to change how they saw or made their way in the world. For one thing, it did not seem to require that they change. Those few passages in the Bill of Rights which later in our history caused some upheaval just didn’t seem all that big a deal then. As far as the self-defined audience for the new Constitution was concerned, it was for their benefit and any restrictions applied to someone else. From all appearances, especially the Bill of Rights, it was designed to interfere as little as possible with the aspirations of the average citizen.

That average citizen/settler came here or migrated west in order to succeed at some form of self-sufficiency. The “dream” here that attracted so many from Europe and other places was that you, whatever your origins, could actually own something, and the law was there to see that no one could take it away arbitrarily. This was not unprecedented—English common law offered something similar, and the 13 colonies were overwhelmingly English—but the opportunity to actualize that goal seemed far more possible here. Enough folks managed a degree of it to give real force to the idea. And the new Constitution was by and large a set of restrictions on government, to keep it from acting arbitrarily.

This goes to one of the questions about the American revolution that teases people from time to time, which is out of all the revolutions that followed, why did this one work and the vast majority of the rest did not?

Simple. Our revolution—the war, the severance from England—was done in order for the people living here to continue doing what they had been doing all along. With relatively minor modifications (initially) the institutions already established had been up and running for over a century and in the aftermath very little changed. They had been doing fine and wanted England to butt out. Likewise, the Constitution seemed designed to guarantee the same continuity. The ones that followed, almost all of them sought to completely change the institutions and machinery of their countries. They were trying to do things differently, from top to bottom. We, by contrast, had it easy in the aftermath. (Plus, it there was something you didn’t like that the new establishment was doing, you could pick up and head west, out of reach, at least for a while.)

The idealism of a freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, the guarantee of due process, all could be regarded not as radical instantiations of a new communal ethic, but merely as a promise that the government—specifically the federal government—would not intrude upon local custom. 

The big problem left on the table, of course, was slavery. Every high-minded phrase from the Declaration of Independence on talked about individual liberty, and yet the necessary changes to guarantee that were not made. Things, as I said, went on much as they had always gone on.

Aside from slavery, other problems continued. Newspapers were burned down, the presses smashed, when they disturbed local sensibilities. No one prosecuted the perpetrators on the basis of the first amendment, but on property destruction and, in some instances, assault and murder. The “Constitutionality” of the acts were not taken into account (naturally, since such actions were rarely if ever instigated by the government). The people doing the smashing and burning likely never considered the higher ideal involved. They only knew they were offended by the newspapers in question and felt they had a right to shut the down. Vigilantism overrode juris prudence and due process. And, per the early supreme court, contracts were held to be more important than individual circumstance and rights.

And of course the “rights” of indigenous peoples were almost never considered, even though the founding ideas of the country aimed at All Men. (Of course, that left women out as well.) There were several “oversights.”

It has been pointed out that the Founders didn’t think much of democracy, which is why they established a republic. Aside from educational assessments, I suspect they knew fairly well that for too many of their fellow citizens, the ideals they had managed to enshrine in the Constitution mattered very little. They knew, though, that they could not just mandate the new structures, because that would have caused many of the same problems they had just finished fighting a war with Great Britain over. So the ratification was an open vote, universal, one man one vote. The first time and for a very long time the only instance of allowing an open plebiscite. The population voted for it, en mass. It was a fairly literate population and the campaign to get it all approved resulted in the Federalist Papers. (There were also opposing viewpoints, the Antifederalist Papers, which I suspect most people today know nothing about, but it was a debate, a very public one.) People had a chance to vote no.

So did they not approve of all the highmindedness? I mean, they voted yes, they had to know.

Well, yes and no. We’ll never know for sure, we can’t, but I have a feeling that many if not most looked at what was being proposed, saw it as a set of restrictions on the federal government, and believed none of it would apply to them. It was a legal framework that gave them freedom to live the way they wanted.

No matter at whose expense. 

And it’s not that they had ambitions to do bad things, but exclusivity was seen as natural. The idea that the privileges and rights held by a white male in 1790 should be shared with everyone else…well, perhaps the theory may have sounded fine, but to actually establish that in his own neighborhood? 

By the the time the Civil War came around, a lot of people were probably thinking what a nuisance this whole All Men thing was. That perhaps the Founders had pulled a fast one on them. It had never occurred to too many of them that there was a slow bomb in the thing they had agreed to.

That slow bomb was an idea let loose from the beginning, which is at the heart of all the Constitutional controversy down through to today. Equality. Perhaps they thought it wouldn’t matter—after all, they had said that All Men were created equal, which by implication left women and children out. But Native Americans are men (those who are not women) and so are African Americans, Latinos, and so forth. Once the claim was made, it was only a matter of time before all those groups who were denied equal regard would begin pointing out the disconnect and others would agree. But it likely never occurred to those who in subsequent generations grew angrier and angrier by the assertions of rights from groups they never themselves considered equal on any grounds that what the Constitution said would actually mean things would have to change. 

(Perhaps if they had written All Humans, it would have been clearer. But as we know from history, people here and there have no problem designated Others as Not Human.)

Now, on the other side, no doubt many people knew very well what they had just voted for and liked it. Which is why they were so angry about the degree to which their country had failed to live up to its stated ideals. These populations were not monoliths. And they fought with each other. The Founders—some of them—had, in the old aphorism, put the cat among the chickens, quite intentionally.

The fight over equality has been about an assumed right to acquire the power to dictate to people with less power. Not overseas, although one can hear that being argued among certain people, but right here. The unquestioned right to accrue wealth and power which can then be used to control those with no money and no power. The argument? That this is not a right, but a privilege that has the drawback of impacting actual rights. 

That one is still being argued. Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution about that, other than that implied mandate for equality in several sections and in a good deal of the Bill of Rights, that these freedoms and protections are meant to be applied equally. We’re having a difficult time with that. The first successful skirmish after slavery over that was back during the Trustbusting days, which was an ethical fight using the commerce clause of article V to base the federal government’s legal right to interfere in financial systems. FDR nearly finished that job, not quite, and here we are again.

(Consider how often an obvious argument about equality has been side-stepped judicially in order to avoid certain ramifications. Reproductive rights, for instance, has been mainly argued as a right to privacy rather than an obvious matter of equality. When gay rights came before the courts, attempts were made to put them in the same category, but the decision was made to argue them as matters of equality. It should be noted that in the subsequent decades, reproductive rights ended up more and more vulnerable while LGBTQ rights have only gained valence. When arguments that are best made based on equality are set aside it is almost always because someone is afraid of losing a perceived privilege.)

Because that was the aim, to find a system wherein everyone had a share, a say, and no one could take away their voice. Wherein everyone had an equal right to the possibilities of community.

The American Dream has for too long been characterized as a materialist fantasy—money, property, etc. True, much of the dream requires a material component, but only in service to the larger dream, which is for each of us to be able to live in the world as who we are without arbitrary limits imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with the principles upon which we were ostensibly founded. 

But living that way requires we respect everyone else’s right to live their way. The unimagined (but perhaps not unanticipated) varieties of tolerance necessary did not have so many challenges to the people then who felt it was simply and exclusively all about them. They probably knew that at some point there would be a reckoning, between principle and reality, certainly over slavery—in fact, they did know since the argument was built in to the Constitution (the 20 year delay in allowing the issue to be addressed in congress), so some of them might well have had an inkling that there would be more and for them stranger examples of the meanings they had set to emerge.

My point? Well, the obvious one with regards to the nonsense foisted on us about Originalism. Even if philosophically there were some validity to the idea of Originalism, it’s an impossible argument to make, because we continually refuse to address the obvious, that people then were not much different in key respects than they are now. They did not go forth to conquer and settle this country spurred by the vaunted ideals of the Founders, but to make as much money and guarantee as much security as they could, and were quite happy to have a legal structure—they thought—that approved of their personal ambitions. The Founders knew that and some of them managed to create a guiding document intended to open up and emerge with more and more force as circumstances arose to trigger those inherent meanings. This would be the very definition of a Living Document.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Justice Scalia was right when he dismissed the idea of the Constitution as a living document. It doesn’t matter. Because it is a document based on an idea and ideas are useless without a living mind to embrace them. Assume then that the Founders, some of them at least, knew what they were doing when they put all those bits about equality into these various instruments, that in the future the living minds that accessed the underlying principles of those documents, the ideas, would have to unpack them and interpret them. (Alexander Hamilton said there was no need for a Bill of Rights because the structure of the Constitution would force people to oppose each other over ideas, issues, and rights.) There are only so many ways to interpret Equality. The document may not be alive but the ideas cannot be otherwise. Many of the Founders likely had a constrained idea what equality meant. Or maybe not, maybe they just had a limited notion of who they intended it for. But they likely knew their understanding of it would not be the only one through time. And they put it in there anyway.

Meantime, we’re having the same fight. Between people who wish to live in a better, more equitable society, and those who wish to be free of any interference so they can get what they can, preferably without having to be brutal, but certainly prepared to be if they can’t manage any other way. The latter group are the ones complaining today about Wokism and frankly terrified of education. Born of the previous generation who hated Political Correctness, something they misunderstood and/or mischaracterized then. And they came from those who hated Civil Rights, because they thought they’d lose power if actual equality were established. They’re the same sorts who back in the day thought nothing of wiping out native tribes and stealing their land because of some nonsense called Manifest Destiny. The idea of actual equality would have sounded…foreign…to them. Certainly frightening.

Imagine what it would be like if we actually did embrace equality…

From 1789 on we have had two Americas. The one we like to brag about, but which too many people really don’t want. And the one we live in, which is still stuck in an anti-idealistic struggle engineered by people who have a stake in keeping us frightened of each other. It’s troubling to me how eagerly we seem to embrace our fear, even while we often sing praises to the unrealized dream.

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Standing On Principle

Now that it’s clear who the contenders are, I thought I’d make a few statements about the upcoming election. I doubt anyone who has read these pieces over the years will be surprised at who I’ll be voting for. But I want to address a problem that plagues us in aggregate and I see it raising its problematic head again. Let me start though with something that may strike you as curious.

My mother is frightened.

My 89-year-old mother is terrified that Trump will win. She was mightily disturbed back in 2016 when he did. Today she has reached a point of near-despair.

To put this in perspective, she was born 1934. She remembers World War II. She remembers fascism and how the country came together to oppose it. She has never not seen Trump as a homegrown embodiment of everything this country fought against back then. Now, you might quibble with me, a so-called Child of the Sixties, and question my sentiments, but her feelings are different, formed in a different time, a time I hear too many of the die-hard adherents of Trumpism claiming they want to take the country back to. (They seem to have their geography wrong, though.) From her youthful experiences, it seems that this is something few then would have supported.

Some would have, that’s true. But then as now it was the same kind of pathology. People wanting to seal off an idea of America and keep anyone that didn’t measure up to the vague and rage-inspired metrics of the self-selected arbiters of what “America” is out. When you break it down, that’s all this is—hatred of the Other. Any other, which is what makes it so frightening.

During the four years of his presidency, I watched and listened, often in dismay, as those who began as supporters and those on the inside spoke up about the dysfunction, the corruption, the low-down meanness of his administration. People from his inner circle, who had been counted among the elect, changed their assessment and yet when they did they were not listened to but were summarily cast out and defined as pariahs, traitors. Those who had been reliable ideologues up till that point suddenly, once they suggested that maybe things were not as they seemed, were wrong, were out of control, lost in a heartbeat the confidence they had enjoyed from supporters not a day before. That was a set of tea leaves we all should have been able to read, that no matter how much one approved of this policy or that, this was a broken administration that would leave ruin in its wake because it was not about the good of the country but the ego of a leader.

My mother hears the echoes. She saw what people like this did to the world. We’ve seen this before and she is dismayed and disillusioned that a country with so much possibility and success in being human would even contemplate choosing that.

Those who would return this man to office rely on the principles of those opposed to them.

I’m already hearing people grumbling that they will not vote because Biden has not lived up to their expectations. They will stand on principle rather than support a man who hasn’t delivered on all his promises. In spite of some understanding of how politics work, knowing that no single leader can simply wave a hand and accomplish what he may want, seeing evidence that the failures are the result of the in-fighting in Washington, they blame Biden. Alone. As if.

It is not possible for a president to simply do what he intends. No president ever has. Not even FDR, which is probably the model on which these wishful assessments are based.

But it is possible for a president to wreck a great deal, especially if he has a loyal congress to rubberstamp his acts. We saw too much of that between 2016 and 2020.

It astounds me that the choice is not obvious. Guaranteed ruin or the chance at moving the ball forward. To say “you didn’t move it forward enough, so we’re going to let the other guy win” is the epitome of political childishness.

That this matters nothing to Trump’s supporters surprises me not at all. They have bought into the whole Government Is The Problem nonsense and any argument that what Biden has done has been working means exactly the opposite of what it means to us who support him. What Biden’s success means to them is the failure of government to be nothing. Until we understand that, until we internalize the bizarre mirror-think of the current Right, we will continue to argue with them without effect. What we want and what they want are so apposite as to constitute separate and mutually incomprehensible languages.

But stand on principle, stay at home. Give the demagogues another shot. Maybe this time the mob will manage to kill some congressmen.

Because what should be crystal clear after January 6th is that Trump has all the makings of one of those dictators who win a democratic election and then never leave. Because they think they only had to get into office and then it would be forever. Per the Constitution, if he wins this time he can’t have another four years. I have no doubt he will try his best to change the rules so that he can stay there. He has all but said it and what he has stated clearly (which too many people, then as now, believe was nothing but campaign rhetoric) should trouble us to our core.

I do not for a moment believe he is smart enough to engineer all this himself. The gray eminences, the moneyed interests, those unelected directors who have enabled him and who whisper in his ear, they’re smart enough. But of course that kind of thinking borders on conspiracy theory and it’s not that. We’ve seen them, we know mostly who they are, and somehow we have been unable to say no to what they do. If it all ends with this election, it will not be that we didn’t see it coming or understand how.

But by all means, stand on principle and refuse to vote or write in some third-party ghost you know will never get elected and enable Trump to seize the throne. Be pure, clear of conscience.

Say what you will about his handling of the office, Biden is a traditional American who believes in our institutions and a basic idea of democracy.  I believe it’s possible he may be the last of his model we will ever see. He will leave it all intact for the next generation. The other guy will not. By word and deed he has shown us that he won’t.

So there’s my position. Just in case anyone wondered.

I’ll leave you to ponder your choices ahead of November.

Community

I Do Not Believe

It was a toss-up what this post would be. Something about upcoming books or…this.

It is said that we are more polarized than we have ever been. I do not believe that. What I think is that in the last 40 years the band-aid has been ripped off and because of the emergence of social media we are now seeing just how polarized we have always been. Look at any period of our history and ask a simple question: were people more tolerant then or was it that anything that might challenge them in their complacency was simply kept buried and they didn’t have to deal with it?

There’s nowhere to get away from it today. Which I think is all to the good, because unaddressed problems, wounds, dysfunctions, and ruptures never just go away by themselves. The rising cry against so-called Wokism is nothing but people who never had to deal with their erroneous assumptions complaining that they don’t want to own their shortcomings. During the last few decades we have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause nonsense in the form of denials that the Civil War was all about slavery. In response, a flood of actual data was presented to show that, no, in fact, it was all about slavery. All of it, at every level, and by the Secessionist’s own admission. The objectors to this historical reality have been living with the solace of muffled history all their lives. It was unpleasant for them to be confronted with the fact that they had accepted misstatements, propaganda, and lies about something they wanted to feel no connection to. Even as they continued to support, implicitly or otherwise, a civic ecology of racism that exists out of all the unaddressed inequities of that soft-focus, romanticized Gone With The Wind* mythology.

The divisions of which we hear today have always been there and we were able to largely ignore them because of the weight of sheer numbers. The oppressed were too few, too weak, and therefore too voiceless to cause discomfort. Except for those times when it became intolerable even for the majority to bear. Eruptions of social justice movements burst forth, often violently, and Things Were Done to mollify the genie. After which things settled back into an uneasy stasis of hoped-for quiet.

There have been strides, changes we can collectively be proud of, but too often it was left unfinished. Too many people have been left out of the solutions and certain people would like to go back to believing everything is fine. The entire MAGA movement is nothing more than a demand for the cosmetics of a misremembered past when people didn’t complain and we could be pleased with our place as some kind of icon of decency…and power. The dissonance of the demand—Make America Great Again—begs the question, especially at a time when we have an unprecedented capacity to do genuine good in the world. And every time we are tasked to do that, the MAGA crowd howls in discontent that we ae somehow less and the country must be rescued and remade according to Hollywood history.

At the base of this is a habit of cognition which, in proper perspective, should not be a problem, but when pushed past the limits of its utility has become a serious problem.  “What do you believe in?” In normal usage, it’s merely a question of conditional acceptance, a placeholder, if you will, until better information can either modify or replace how one understands something. But when used as a litmus test of trustworthiness, it becomes toxic and inimical to the one thing that might save us from destruction, namely our ability to see clearly.

For years I’ve had a problem with the phrasing “Do you believe in science.” I know what it’s supposed to mean and what it often does mean, but I still chafe at it. The usage carries implications that are the exact opposite of what is intended. And it is those implications that those who intend something else know very well and use to subvert the legitimacy of any casual answer. I’ve gotten to where I will not say Yes. No, I do not believe in science. I accept science as a valid and useful tool, I accept the answers it provides, I privilege its product above mere statements of belief. I trust it, yes, but as a process. The question “Do you believe in science?” reduces science to an object, one with innate qualities on par with a deity. It renders ones acceptance of it as a volitional act of surrender to those qualities and its dictates. It redefines the proper relationship and turns it, by degrees, into a faith, a religion.

No, I do not believe in science.

Go down the list. That question, about anything, is generally a shorthand, a quick way to determine the basis for further discourse, but for some people it is a statement of fidelity and admission to an exclusive club.

Long ago, in my adolescence, I became entranced by the speculations of Erich von Daniken. Along with the whole UFO craze, I thought his ideas percolated with a coolness actual archaeology could never hope to achieve. But I was raised by a father who was determined that I never be taken in. By anything. Question. Never accept that we know everything, in particular that I know everything. It is impossible to go through life constantly off-balance by doubt, but always be aware that certainty is conditional. So I did finally go looking to genuine archaeology and found out that the nonsense Van Daniken espoused was little more than the stuff of a good story. I felt betrayed. I liked the notions he put forth, the part of me that preferred a great yarn wanted very much for his implications to be true. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, not after I found out the facts. The same thing happened to my affection for UFOs. And Atlantis. And so many other things that turned out to be mere stories woven from a few threads of reality by what I later understood as the practice of conspiracy theory.

How does this relate to our present divisions? When people are trying to ban books, ignoring history, asserting faith over fact, it should be obvious. Our divisions manifest in multiple ways, but are rooted in the desire by one faction to above all believe. It is, perhaps, easier than constantly reassessing. Reassessment always comes with the possibility of having to discard a favorite story as Not Fact.

In the constantly escalating heat of our divisions, one is forced, it seems, to take hard positions just to maintain equilibrium. So I will here state that I Do Not Believe In…anything. Not in the sense meant by those seeking to undermine everything I find of value.

Authority is never absolute and it seems to me that those most invested in proclamations of What Do You Believe want above all to end all questions. Aside from everything else, it is this assertion of absolute authority—in the guise of taking back our country—that I find I cannot support and which the Republican Party is now deeply invested in. Only they aren’t doing it by finding better information, clearer facts, a firmer grasp of reality, but by trying to silence the debate. I cannot accept that and heads the list of the things I do not believe in.

 

 

 

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*Which is itself a species of selective apprehension. There are two ways to watch Gone With The Wind, the most common apparently being as a love letter to a vanished utopia. But there is such a thing as subtext and below the surface throughout that film one can read all the hypocrisy and ugliness that valorized surface covers. In many ways it is a thorough condemnation of the South and the Peculiar Institution and the rose-tinted notion that there was anything beautiful about the antebellum world.

Art

Slouching Toward The End

I’m in the last stages of the current novel I’m writing and I have entered the zone of “I Don’t Want To Do This Today.” I get that way from time to time, especially with a long project like a novel. I’m writing the sequel to Granger’s Crossing and I reached 66, 000 word this morning. My brain is a funny thing in that when I reach the end of a chapter, everything just shuts down for the day. If I manage to squeeze out a sentence or two on the next chapter, I know I will probably rewrite it the next morning. It has ever been this way. Fortunately, when I get on a roll, I can do a chapter every two days.

But this is a different problem, in that I generally do not want to write the next chapter because I am very tired. So the las few chapters will be rushed and thin as I push to get to the end of the book. I know I’m going to do thorough rewrite, so it no longer bothers me, and since I no longer write on dead-line, it really doesn’t matter that much. (I have my own internal dead-line, though, which tends to make me crazy when I can’t get a move on.)  It’s as if on some level my subconscious has decided that I ought to be done already and is ready to relax. It becomes a bit of a fight with my innate laziness and my desire to produce a good piece of work.

This one has been a particularly difficult challenge. See, I wrote Granger’s Crossing about eleven years ago. It never got any traction anywhere, so I shelved it and went on to other things. Over time, I even got rid of some of the books I had on hand to research the period. I put my notes over there, certain files over here, and generally let everything become scattered. So when Amphorae asked to see it and then decided to take it, I thought it would be a good idea to write the next book, just in case.

Which meant I had to reconstruct all that research. As a result, it took longer to get started on the actual book and here it is almost a year later and I’m just now to the point of seeing the end.

Still pretty quick, but if I were still working a day job, I wouldn’t be nearly this far along.

At least I knew (more or less) what I wanted to write about in the second book.

Of course, the plot has gone in unforeseen directions, with details I never imagined, and research requirements that have led me to some odd corners.

But I am at this moment pretty exhausted. I don’t want to be, but I have no control over it. I can well understand how some writers might give up at this point, feeling that they have lost the golden thread. And truth be told, there are some projects that are not worth the effort, but it’s hard to know which those are. I have habituated myself to slogging on. I will finish. (Actually, the current book is shaping up to be kind of cool in several unexpected ways.)

I have added a new item of advice for those times when I may be dispensing it to newish writers. Specifically, if you’re writing historical fiction, do not wait a decade before starting on a sequel. entropy is real, and it works on the imagination as well as the filing system. Had I back then just gone ahead and put some of this on paper, it would have been much easier. I think.

On the other hand, I may just be a bit better of a writer now than then, so…

Trade-offs are part of the process. One, for instance, is that while I’m working on this I’m working on nothing else. I don’t want to risk pulling out of the headspace for an historical to try to do science fiction just now. I don’t know if that might not result in a conceptual train wreck. I’m close enough to the end of the book now, though, that I don’t feel too bad, and since I just placed three new short stories (all written before I dived into this) I feel I can spare the attention.

The question now is….do I just go ahead and write the third one when I’m done?

Decisions.

Art

From There To Here, the Curious Path to Granger’s Crossing

It’s a good question: how does a veteran science fiction writer come to write an historical mystery-slash-love story? Especially one set in a period and place wherein, as far as I can find, no one else has bothered to set fiction. 

There are clear parallels between historical fiction and science fiction (clearer still between historical and fantasy) in that, depending on how far back and where you go, world building becomes a major component, and science fiction is very much about world building. Though the emphasis on that has of late verged on too much. We still have to create character, develop plot, and have something meaningful to say.

Like most people who grew up learning anything about St.Louis and its origins, I knew the basic story. In 1763, Lafayette and Company came up the Mississippi River and established a trading post on a bluff which quickly became the town of St. Louis, named in honor of Saint Louis the IX (though it didn’t hurt, I’m sure, that Louis XV was still king of France). The Chouteaus developed the place into a vital confluence of trade and in 1804 it became one of the main entry points for the westward expansion of the United States after Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to Jefferson in a fire sale at bargain prices.

Like most students of my generation, that was about it. Things became more interesting in the 1960s when one of our mayors, Cervantes, went on a campaign to celebrate “our Spanish heritage.” Like many people living here at the time, I scratched my head and said “what Spanish heritage?” After all, this is St. Louis, there are streets with French names, towns to the south have French names, it was the Louisiana Purchase, we lived in a French Catholic city with universities named for French Jesuits…and on and on. Mayor Cervantes was going on about something that ran counter to our sense of self. What Spanish heritage?

Well. Like anyplace that has been around more than a minute, the history is far more involved—and interesting—than that which we learned in grade school. But I had to arrive at it by decades of roundabout study, which leaves me wondering why history is so often taught the way it is. Prior to my research, early St. Louis history for me began with the Founding and ended with the Purchase, with a brief note about Lewis and Clarke. Next time it entered my notice was with Dred Scott and then, almost as briefly, the Civil War. Next up was the building of the Gateway Arch. We are too often contemptuous the history of our birthplace and generally know more about other cities than we do of our own.

My entry point, though, was stranger than most, perhaps. 

Many years ago, I worked as lab manager in a photo shop. Shaw Camera. One of the two best jobs I ever had. We were a custom black & white lab and we had a host of amazing customers. One of them was the city water department, which possessed a huge archive of photographs going back easily to the mid-19th century. They embarked on a project to have their glass plates printed and new copy negatives made.

One day they brought in a series of plates of the construction of Eads Bridge. They were surreal in the way a lifelong SF reader might find them, stirring connections to Jules Verne. The pictures of the bridge, rising from the waters of the river, the early stages of the anchors, the steel. I made a separate set of prints and gave them to my friend, SF writer Allen Steele, and we spent an evening going over them and speculating and doing some story construction based on those images. The idea of writing a novel based around that place and time took root. I started doing research.

That novel has yet to be written, but I did a lot of research into St. Louis of the 19th Century. (I still have some hopes of getting around to that book, so I still have all the research.) In the meantime, other projects came up.

I developed an idea for an alternate history novel set in St. Louis. I won’t here detail all the byways that took, but I did write that one, plus two more. While working on it, I continued my research. Since it was alternate history, I went all the way to the Founding to make sure my divergent history made sense.

And in the course of that stumbled on the colonial period.

Did you know there had been a battle of the revolutionary war fought in St. Louis? I didn’t. At best I recalled something adjacent having to do with George Rogers Clarke and Vincennes, but had no idea anything directly involved St. Louis.

And that’s where the Spanish heritage came into it. If it hadn’t been for the Spanish lt. governor, De Leyba, the battle might have been a non-event. The Spanish were the allies of the American rebels and De Leyba insisted St. Louis fight.

It was a one day affair, mainly. There are a number of personal journal accounts, many of which contradict in certain details. And there had been an assault across the river at the same time against Cahokia. The battle itself was interesting, but did not in itself suggest a whole novel to me. But there had been an American presence and…

Step by step, sidewise and widdershins, the elements of what became Granger’s Crossing came together. I was toying with switching genres and thought to do mysteries. I wrote two, one contemporary, the other historical. For a long time, neither attracted any interest.

But the more I looked into the period, the more interesting it all became, and multiple stories suggested themselves. The first is almost entirely fictional. But the background, the setting, is as close as I could make it to what was actually there. 

St. Louis at that time was a village, hovering around a thousand people. Three major north-south streets, farmland shooting west, a pond and stream along which a mill was eventually built, surrounded by now-gone mounds left by a native civilization long absent, and just south of the Missouri River, it became the center of the fur traffic in the midwest, overseen by a number of prominent people, but dominated by the Chouteaus, who were a political as well as financial dynasty. It was the town to which French settlers moved in the wake of the Seven Years’ War from the east side of the Mississippi, and younger than Ste Genevieve to the south, which was eventually inundated by the river and forced to move inland. From its founding in 1763 almost to the advent of the Purchase, the population remained roughly the same, but that is deceptive, since it was a trade center and a good number of people came and went, both trappers and Indians, occasionally driving the population up considerably in some months.

Spain took over because when France lost the war, Louis XV ceded the Louisiana territory to them rather than see it fall into British hands. Since the British then dominated Canada and started building forts in the north, there was bound to be conflict, and in 1780 a half-hearted bid was made by the British to take St. Louis. That would have seriously crippled Spanish trade. They failed. The habitants of St. Louis fought them off, even though outnumbered. The fact is, the combatants the British fielded were not regulars but largely local Indian tribes that, while ostensibly fighting for the British, were there for their own reasons, and when victory was neither quick nor easy, they left the field.

Into this, I introduced my main character, Ulysses Granger, a young lieutenant in the Continental army, seconded to Clarke’s militia as an observer, along with his best friend, Ham Inwood. When Ham goes missing, Granger comes looking for him, and finds his body, clearly murdered rather than a casualty of combat.

Due to the necessities of war, it is three years before Granger can return to start trying to find out what happened to Ham.

That was the point of departure for the novel. 

I said that historical fiction shares a common trait with science fiction. The further back in time one goes, the more alien the world encountered. Granted, people are people, but customs and resource contour our reactions, and in truth claiming that “people are all the same” is a facile and almost worthless aphorism when trying to reconstruct a time and place. Quite a lot of how people lived ends up being conclusions drawn from conjecture and reconstruction. You have to sit back from studying what is available, close your eyes, and try to build the world suggested.

The temptation to overlay contemporary ideas of right and wrong should be fought. Not that certain principles would not be found harmonious across time, but they would not necessarily manifest the same way, and certain questions likely would not even arise.

In the end, though, it is fiction, and it must speak to us now. Just as when one goes the other direction to imagine a future that may or may not happen, care must be taken to remember that change is a constant, and what we take for granted now may not remain relevant tomorrow.

I found a few books that proved very helpful in pointing my the right directions. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by Patricia Cleary; Beyond the Frontier: A History of St. Louis to 1821 by Frederick A. Hodes; Francois Valle and His World by Carl J. Elkberg; Founding St. Louis by J. Frederik Fausz. Those dealt primarily with St. Louis. I used a number of broader histories to place it all in the broader context of the Revolutionary War, but those books, with their excellent references, took me through and into details that helped make the novel better, and I than them for their work.

So now the book is in the world. I am working on a sequel, set a couple years after the events in Granger’s Crossing, this one based on an actual murder, though I am delighting in looking somewhat past what was recorded and creating what I hope will be a richer mystery. 

And then there are the other novels which led me to this one. It’s been a strange path to get here. One of the pleasures has been to answer that question from my childhood: “What Spanish heritage?” Indeed.

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Intellectual Parasitism

This will be brief. Sometime around 2010 a term entered common usage—Woke—which basically meant be alert and aware of racial prejudice in all its manifestations. It took hold and came to stand for general awareness of discriminatory conditions and practices across a wide range of social interactions. Being alert and aware and, a step further, choosing to speak out about a variety of all-too-commonly held beliefs that slowly, deeply poison our daily discourse, from anti-LGBTQ statements to all manner of anti-Progressive resistance from certain quarters. In the short decade since, it is being weaponized as a pejorative on behalf of the very attitudes and mouthpieces the term was intended to call out. The Right is very good at this sort of thing. Look what happened to the term Liberal. To some people it’s another word for devil-worship and pederasty.

And people who repeat the detractions and attack Wokeism (as they call it) seem blissfully unaware that what they are railing against is merely a call to vigilance. They throw the accusation of Woke as if they know what it means. Well, they know what it means to them, perhaps, but it always puzzled me that they themselves would have to be functionally Woke in order to even recognize the thing they’re opposing. I don’t believe they are. I don’t believe they understand what they’re denigrating at all.

I’m reminded of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  Someone, somewhere, has gifted them with the intellectual equivalent of that delightful fungus and they go forth issuing challenges and putting up barriers and challenging anything that runs afoul of their pet aphorisms and they do so at the behest of the parent organism that has infected them. The basic scenario is this: Person A makes a blanket statement about Those People. The statement is worse than useless, it parrots something they may have heard growing up, but they’re comfortable with it because most of their life it has gone unchallenged. Person B says “That’s not true. In fact________”  What follows is a string of actual data which shows the original statement to be a load of dingo berries. Person A responds “That’s a load of Woke B.S.” and triumphantly withdraws from any potential dialogue that might threaten the comfortable zone of thoughtless categorization they use in lieu of actual intellection.

I have witnessed this. Almost never is any substantive rebuttal offered and direct engagement is refused.

Someone like Ron DeSantis told them Woke is evil and, unquestioningly—because the hapless ant walks around with a host of substanceless heuristics that allows them to walk through life without doubting their own intelligence—they go forth and refuse to learn. Instead they have a new heuristic in their arsenal of defenses that prevents any possibility that they might reconsider a longheld prejudice and rethink their attitudes,

Zombies in service to ignorance. And rather than take any steps to find out if that is the case, they will simply turn it around and accuse those questioning them of being exactly what they are—zombies in service to ignorance.

Look: even if you end up reaffirming that thing you believe, doing a little work to find out if it’s true never hurt anyone. But refusing even to look in the evil telescope or open the forbidden book is the kind of behavior that leads to the collapse of civilization.

But it may not be your fault. Poor little ant, you’ve got a parasite.

Community

Imperial Theology

I made an off-hand reply last week on FaceBook to a question that has become so common as to almost be meaningless. How can so many people who claim to be christian follow an exemplar who is the exact antithesis of everything Jesus stood for? The usual response—well, they aren’t really christians—will not serve. Because it overlooks too much of what is going on and what has preceded it. My response was that they are Imperial Christians, adhering to what the religion became after 313 C.E. Prior to that date, it was pretty much just one of dozens of religions, having no better claim to relevance than any other. After that, it became the state religion of Rome, thanks to Emperor Constantine’s mandate.

That changed everything. What Jesus said (may have said, the other inconvenient fact being that we really do not know, even if he existed*) played less and less a part of what then unfolded, because it became then an arm of the government, and governments are never pacific. At best, governments are pragmatic. In this case—and it can be argued—Constantine was a pragmatist with an eye toward posterity. (Also there was this little thing called the Battle of  Milvian Bridge, which Constantine won and took the throne under the sign of the cross, which he then parlayed in his justification for being emperor; right there Christianity was inextricably tied to military victory and an imperial mandate) The constant tumult that had emerged with the advent of a faith that had the temerity to declare that it was the One True religion and had an obligation to convert (Judaism had a similar claim, but it was never an evangelical doctrine and kept pretty much out of politics, except in the question of a homeland, so they actually caused little trouble for Rome) had created a degree of civil unrest that made governing difficult. Time to settle things. Constantine’s mother may have had something to do with it. In either instance, Constantine decided it would be best for there to be a single state religion and decree that the others should get in line.

The details comprise several bookshelves of historical research. We can try to analyze the whys and wherefores, what was he thinking, and so forth, but the fact is christianity ceased being what it had been and became an imperial tool, which meant conversion with the backing of the Law. Not Yahweh’s law, but Roman law. That aspect—that character—of what has come down to us has pretty much corrupted the whole thing. When people refer to the New Testamant and the red letter sections to try to point out the hypocrisy of certain people, they unfortunately overlook the real world aspect of christianity, which is that is a colonial movement, an occupier, a set of principles designed to privilege a single worldview even to the destruction of all others. It is a Roman artifact. So when a Leader steps forth who holds up the sceptor of that movement and declares that it will triumph, whatever Jesus might have said is utterly irrelevant to those who follow. They adhere to a conquering religion. (That’s one reason right wing christians almost never refer to the Beatitudes. What a lot of weak-chinned, namby pamby pacifist nonsense! You have to force people to believe and all that tolerance and empathy will gain you nothing!)

All religions that become aspects of government end up evolving into something other than their presumed intents (or almost all, since some religions are designed from the start to be governments). What we’re seeing in the screeling irrationality of so-called fundamentalists (so-called because if they truly were “fundamentalists” they would adhere to what Jesus presumably said—indeed, they would first know what he said, instead of regurgiting updated takes on Old Testamant Angry God theology—but instead they are soldiers in the march to be religious imperialists always with an eye on the “reward”) is a revelation of what christianity has become for them. They are christians, but they are Constantine’s not Yeshua’s.

Personal aggrandisement, either of wealth or reputation, and a need to silence detractors are the hallmarks of this brand. Naturally they will follow a leader who promises both. We should stop trying to shame them into reason and get some explanation from them as to why they aren’t christians. They are. But they belong to an 1800-year-long tradition of an imperial theology that doesn’t really take Jesus very seriously.

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*No, we actually do not. Not concretely. This is the fly in the ointment in all this. We have no “original” documents, only copies of copies, and none of them agree with each other. It’s a morass of supposition. But. My own personal view is that Yeshua bar Joseph did exist. Someone said some things that have come down to us as his words and whoever that someone was, he was a serious philosopher. There are some radical things in those attributions, and if taken seriously would have posed a threat to the status quo at the time. Whether we call that man Jesus or Sam, it doesn’t matter. Ideas came down to us that still have resonance. The pity is that such a large number of people won’t really look at those words in any but metaphorical and ritual terms.

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Reunions and Sentiment

I have a strained relationship with the idea of reunions. History (personal) has a lot to do with it, but also aspects of my sensibilities. There are people very dear to me and getting together with them is always desirable, even if opportunity is a target difficult to hit. Others…I don’t mind, but I don’t actively seek or even anticipate seeing them. And then there are groups of people with whom I share so little that I wonder at the very idea of getting together. Why?

Recently my high school reunion happened. Fifty years. I saw the notices, sure, and after a while I realized I had no moment of connection that suggested this was something worth doing. There are a few people I knew in high school and I still associate with them (my best friend, for instance). I kept in touch. The others? Now, I don’t mind owning the fact that this is as much my fault as anyone else’s, but I was never much part of the scene, any scene, back then, and wandered through 4 years of high school all-too-often scratching my head in wonder at just what was going on. I learned to go through certain motions as if I understood, but I felt through most of it like a visiting alien from Alpha Centauri trying to figure out the local customs and rituals. As to personal connections, I don’t know what others felt about me, but I never sensed much interest on their part. Getting out was my primary interest in the whole experience, so why would I go somewhere to celebrate something which clearly meant something to a lot of them that I never quite got?

I saw a photograph of the attendees posted after the event and I recognized not one face among all the aged and wizened people. They got old. I have, too, but somehow I don’t feel old, not like that. I honestly don’t know what I would have to say to any of them.

On a more personal level, we attended my partner’s family reunion over the weekend. A modest gathering, just her siblings and their partners. I like them. I would never in a million years (as they say) attend a reunion of my family. Even as a kid, hanging around with many of my cousins, aunts and uncles, and so forth, I felt virtually no connection. Nothing toxic, but nothing that made me want to remain in contact the way some families do. Again, this is more me than them. I don’t do that kind of association. Since my teen years I picked my family from among those who became close, closer to me than I ever felt by way of blood. And over the years, some of them have fallen away, new members have joined, and we go on, knowing that any “reunion” would be superfluous because we are not structured that way.

I suppose there are expressions of sentiment I have never embraced, or been embraced by.

I think too often these things like high school reunions, while well-intended and for some quite wonderful, come across to some of us—me, for instance—like afterthoughts. One becomes an accoutrement in the bric-a-brac of other people’s lives and as time passes, the attempt to cling to what was requires reaching out to whatever remains of those times. And then, of course, there’s a certain revisionism that happens, memory plays tricks, or we would rather not recall what really happened. I recall being an object of puzzlement to most of the people I knew back then, ignored for the most part, occasionally resented, but I never felt seen much less understood.

And that’s okay. For me, anyway. The best part of my life happened after leaving high school. What went on there is of some historical or topical interest, but almost no sentiment is attached. I too often ran afoul of all the social things going on then primarily because I didn’t know the rules, but then no one explained them, so I came to believe no one cared one way or the other that I had even been there.

And, I repeat, that’s okay. Who I am is not defined by that time.

But I should explain that I would have no problem (and may even welcome) sitting down with one or two at a time, here and there, and kicking the memory ball around. That is where I find the preferred connections. Not in big group things. We are individuals, first and foremost, and as such I have remained pretty aloof from most of the “important” social identity collations. (There is one group I would welcome such a get-together with and I trust they know who they are, but those connections are still personal and individual. Any reunion would simply be the means to have those one on one encounters, because they would be based on genuine one on one connections.)

This is me being that kid of Alpha Centauri still who watches all this with bemusement and a certain anthropological interest. I am not a joiner and I have learned over time that I distrust very large gatherings. And, sure, I’m getting older, too, so I find it difficult to hear conversations in large groups. It’s a thing.

I did have a good time at the family gathering. It may not be my natural milieu but if there are people who have always mattered showing up, I welcome it. I do not write this to judge or offend but to sort my reactions and my thoughts and try to understand. But also to remind myself (and others) that I am not a reflexive part of anything. I do very little “just because it’s a thing everybody does.” I know this bothers some people, and I’m sorry for that, but there it is.

Thank you for your time while I indulge some musings.