We had a chance to take a walk in a garden recently. After a year of basically hunkering down and avoiding the world, our limit was reached and we went to the Missouri Botanical Garden the first weekend of May. It was so good, so surreal, and so necessary.
Consequently, a couple of shots.
I do this from time to time because (a) I’m bored, (b) I’m curious, (c) something breaks, or (d) I want people to think I’m engaged, paying attention, and updating because, you know, I’m trying to be current or relevant or…
Yeah, whatever. I’m never sure what it is I’m trying to accomplish when I switch themes. Probably the equivalent of Spring Cleaning, only not as physical.
I any event, I’ve been doing the usual gaping in dismay at the national (and state) political scene, trying to find something to say that might make it all fit an understandable set of parameters, and the last couple of posts I wrote about it were attempts at explaining larger forces. That’s my way of dealing with the world, trying to comprehend, describe, and thereby put it in some form that allows me to make sense of it.
This time? I’m watching the Republican Party turn itself inside out and for the life of me it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, they’re trying to gain leverage by aligning themselves with a proven liar, a mediocre businessman, a berserker, an anti-intellectual, a boor, a sexual predator, a supremacist, someone with the verbal skills of a third-grader who has no sense of history and seems distracted by bright and shiny with no regard for worth and substance. I cannot help but think he’s got a black book on these people that puts Nixon’s enemies list to shame. But then, I look at the last four years and can’t help but think that, even if he had, he’s just not capable of using it. Not well.
So my best response usually is, WTF?
So far, Biden is doing exactly the right thing. The job. He’s not getting drawn into making comparisons, denying allegations that have no substance, responding to the kind of shallow gotcha polemics that can do nothing but make everyone look stupid. He’s not rising to the bait. And his spokesperson, Psaki? Brilliant. If they keep to this, at some point the GOP will finally crawl up its own rectum and suffocate on the nonsense.
One point for all you folks who may be on the fence about the GOP: McConnell has declared his intention to follow the same program he did with Obama—block everything he can, no matter what. That means the GOP will do nothing. Nothing will be accomplished that they can take any credit for.
In his case (McConnell’s), I believe this is because he is frankly not smart enough to know when he’s punching himself—and his constituency—in the face.
All in all, we have reached a point where there is, in fact, nothing left to say concerning the post mortem of the previous administration. I can think of one or two things that came out of it all that have some merit, none of which I can honestly attribute to any kind of studied comprehension on the part of the ex-president: We’ve been talking for decades about China and the need to address the violations in trade practices and so forth and, ill-aimed as it may have been, that shot was fired. From what I’ve seen so far, the Biden administration is not rolling back aspects of that which may do some good. It needed to happen at some point. It was a start. There were one or two moves in the Middle East that were not horrible and something can be built on it, but moving the embassy to Jerusalem was perhaps ill-advised. It may, however, have unforeseen positive consequences. It was a bone thrown to the far right of the party.
Not much. Certainly not enough to justify the tidal waves of stupidity that flooded the country from twitter and the administrative butchering our institutions received. Not enough to make the level of civic ill-ease worthwhile.
Not enough to forgive the unparalleled wreck they made of our pandemic response. And before anyone shouts “But this was unprecedented!” let me say, yes, but the previous administration had put together a response playbook which was basically thrown in the trash. Work done by even earlier administrations in anticipation of something like this was ignored as well. Preparatory groundwork was laboriously done which these people didn’t understand, wouldn’t spend the money on, and therefore faced a challenge which they subsequently mishandled. It’s amazing to me more people aren’t dead. But the damage is ongoing because the final injury done was to validate stupidity. People who feel empowered to dismiss fact and science and reason because they were told not to trust anything coming from anywhere but the president (even though very little actually came from him) will continue to thwart efforts to contain this epidemic. We may not achieve the kind of herd immunity we need or could have, not because we don’t know how but because people refuse to cooperate simply because.
Well. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.
I haven’t been writing fiction lately. I have a novella in the queue at Analog, but I don’t know when that will be coming out. I’ve got a few short stories that are making the rounds. And I’m shopping for a new agent. I’ve been here before, but I’ve never been here when I’ve been this tired. I have one story I’ve been laboring at for months now. Partly, this is a time issue. Partly, this is a recovery issue. The holiday season just past taxed me to my limit physically. I’ll write about that some other time. I’m 66. I don’t bounce back like I used to, although to be honest I think I’m doing pretty well for a 66-year-old. I still get the gym, I still put in a full day’s work, I’m still alert. But I’m no marine. Partly, also, there’s a certain amount of discouragement attaching to all this.
I put my photography galleries online for the purpose of selling my visual work, but to date I’ve gotten very thin response. I’m not sure if people realize they can buy the work available. I’ll be revisiting that whole thing in the coming months.
I’ve had both my shots now. I’m officially vaccinated. We were lucky not to have gotten ill. It will be nice to be able to go out again, but I doubt anything will be normal for a while.
My father is in a home. None of us wanted this to happen, but it did. He’s 90. Mom is coping as best she can and we’ve been visiting her more regularly. Things are murky in that area. No matter what, nothing will go back to what it once was. Seems to be the theme of the last few years.
This has been a catch-up kind of post. New look, a state-of-the-union statement, so to speak. I may be writing more personal reports in the coming year. Stay tuned. And I hope all is going okay with you.
It’s Sunday. That’s all. Here’s a flower.
So it snowed here. I took some photographs. Today, a bit bored, I did some fiddling. So, here’s one result. I hope you like it.
One of the images that came of our recent Polar Vortex Event. I’m rather pleased with this one. I like abstracts that are clearly Something. Anyway, click on the image and it will take you to the gallery, and if you’re so inclined, you may hang it on your wall. (Especially you folks in Florida who seem to have “weathered” this all in fine form.)
It snowed. For a photographer, this is an opportunity to make images that will literally vanish if not made at once. Long ago, this was the only reason I looked forward to snow, which is otherwise, for me, a major inconvenience. (As long as I can sit in my warm house, with a hot cup of coffee, and just gaze out at it, I’m fine. If I have to go anywhere…well.)
But I did make some photographs this time, just around the house, which fortuitously offers quite a few settings for interesting images.
I am a lover of good black & white, but I confess that color has enamored me more and more since my last lab job and I was forced to learn color printing. I hated it, actually—the chemistry is more toxic than b&w ever was and the fey unpredictables of color filtration frustrated me no end, but I got reasonably good at it, and I learned to appreciate it. Since going digital, I like its possibilities even more. But black & white is my first love.
It’s hard to decide, though. Some things self-evidently declare themselves for one or the other, but often it’s too close to call. So I offer two versions of a recent photograph and leave it to you to judge. Which do you like better?
It’s two days past Valentine’s Day. There’s a blanket of snow on the ground and I’m at home with my best friend. I wanted to take a little time to brag about her.
I met Donna in 1979 (correction, I am informed it was January of ’80), started seeing her in 1980, moved in with her by the beginning of 1981, and we’ve been together since. She is, simply, my best friend.
Of all the things she has done for me, the one that mattered most was that she simply accepted me. For who I was (whatever that may have been at any given moment) and supported me in anything I wanted to do. When she discovered that I wrote, she read what I had done and encouraged me to pursue it. That led, of course, to everything since. I wonder sometimes had we known how difficult it would have been, would we have done it. The writing, that is.
But it would not have mattered to her, not much. If I had really wanted to, she would have done what she could to help.
And help she did. I have friends, but I do not think I’ve ever known one so limitless.
For a time, I still thought I might pursue the photography. We actually did the ground work to open a new lab once. But the more the writing took hold, the less interest I had in that, even though I was good at it and when it came to Day Jobs, it was one that supported us for almost 30 years.
I’ve written about her before, but I wanted to say more this time. We’re coming up on 41 years. To be honest, it took me a while—longer than it did her—to realize what we had, to come to the conclusion that she was the One. I’d been through a very bad break-up and I was gun-shy, tender in spots, and unwilling to either hurt or be hurt again, so I was, perhaps, too cautious.
She waited. And every year since, I’ve had cause to be grateful.
We’ve lived in three places. She had her own apartment first, and I moved in with her. (When I told my parents, dad’s reaction was “It’s about time.” They knew before
I did how important she was.) Then we found an apartment on Grand Avenue, where we solidified, partied, laughed, made plans. It was from that apartment that I went to Clarion in 1988. Six weeks away, the longest we’ve ever been apart.
We took each other for granted. Both of us, with the other. Any relationship that lasts any length of time will have that about it. In a way, the fact that you can do that is a testament to how much trust—unspoken trust—you have with each other. But we always realized it and compensated and renewed what we had.
If this begins to sound unreal, forgive me. Some things, when reduced to words, do seem improbable, unlikely, too good to be true, pretentious. I can’t help that. It is easier to make tragedy and pain convincing sometimes more than joy. More difficult is to make contentment and safety sound either convincing or compelling, but that is a failure of the language and the culture in which we live, one that prizes shock over calm, at least when it comes to what entertains us.
So we celebrated another Valentine’s Day together, our 40th. I think she still loves me. Always best to check. In any event, she’s here. She is my home. It is one of 
my motivations to make her proud of me, to make her feel safe with me, to make her laugh, to help her. We are very different when it comes to talents and proclivities. (It is best we clean house and so forth apart from each other.)
This lockdown has been a struggle. In some ways, we’ve had to find new strategies to not get on each others’ nerves. As time passes, it wears. But then, it occurred to me recently that we haven’t had too much trouble with that. We’re…comfortable…with each other.
There’s not a lot of activity in the going out department. We have movies. I’ve taken up reading aloud to her, so we share a book simultaneously. It’s a pleasure. But boy, when the worst of this passes, there are places I want to take her. She is a private person and doesn’t like to show off, but I like to let people know how special she is.
I have always found her incredibly sexy.
So here I wanted to brag. I have a partner, a companion, a sweetheart, a lover like nobody else. Remove her and you lobotomize me. If I am anything in this life, it is because she found something and breathed life into it and said “Hey, you should do this.”
My parents recently celebrated their 67th anniversary. They had known each other a year or so before marrying, so let’s say almost 69 years for them. I like the idea of spending another 28 years with Donna. It will not be dull.
We travel well together and have been many places and will be many more places. It is a journey I relish. Even the strange new worlds of imagination have given us
many places to visit together. (We started going to science fiction conventions in 1982. We even tried out costuming a short—very short—while.)
I’m rambling. I’m feeling nostalgic. For the past, certainly. I like the idea of Quantum Leap, being able to dip in and out of our timeline at various points. I’m trying to think if there’s anything I would change. Minor stuff, to be sure. Regret is part and parcel of engagement, if for no other reason than you can’t do everything you want to do, no matter how little sleep you get.
So I’ll wrap this up now. I’ll leave a couple more pictures below. I appreciate your attention.
I hope you all have found or will find your lifelong valentine.
Have a good life.
When I was a kid there used to be a number of “movie” shows on television. We had three major networks and a couple of local independent “affiliates.” Paltry choices compared to today, and yet there always seemed to be plenty to watch. As older films became available to lease by networks, these shows proliferated. The Three O’Clock Movie during the work week, then later some prime-time selections, but I always remembered the Picture For A Sunday Afternoon as my favorite.
It was nostalgic, even then. And kind of arty. We saw a lot of films that didn’t have much to do with Oscar winners or things like that. And it was all in glorious black-and-white, because we didn’t have a color set. Even if we had, most of these films were from the Forties and Fifties and were shot in black-n-white.
I have always loved black & white photography. I even have a slight preference for pen-and-ink and charcoal drawings. The one time I had a conversation with the late Kelly Freas, he and I both geeked out on the superiority of black & white illustration.
In the aftermath of the Civil War (once also called the War of the Rebellion), many people were certainly concerned, uncertain, and baffled about the future. The purpose of the war had been the preservation of the Union. That statement, that explanation, however, contains within it manifold intentions and issues with which we evidently struggle to this day.
Chief among them being the question, Union of What?
Lee’s surrender at Appomattox gave a formality to the end of the war which was deceptive. Hostilities raged on in various places for years. Look at any war and it is obvious that formal declarations of surrender, victory, etc, are only that—declarations. State intentions. Conflagration continues in the aftermath, small conflicts, what we call brushfire wars, go on over unresolved questions of territory, national identity, ideology, all to some extent driven by the refusal to acknowledge that it is over.
If we look at the events of this past January 6th and take them as evidence of a civil war, then it might be legitimate to say that the successful inauguration of Joe Biden marks the formal end of that war, and it would be about as true as any other such declaration. It might be well for us to examine all the elements of that event to see where it might lead.
Firstly, is there a Civil War?
Let’s look at the prior one and see how it compares.
Our Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. (Issue number one, among many “issue number ones” this time, is the accuracy of that claim. Despite the wishes of naysayers, it is indisputable that the secession movements of the 1860s were centered on that one issue. They said so themselves. The desire to claim otherwise in recent years is one of the hallmarks of our current difficulties and in a significant way the reason the current movement lacks any credibility.) Dress it up any way you like, slavery was the issue. I can say this regardless of claims to the contrary even without the written proof by the hands of the secessionists by a simple formula. States Rights is the less odious claim. But States Rights to do what? To be a state? That right already existed and was not under threat. The drive to secede must therefore have been spurred by a sense of threat to a perceived right that was at issue. The “state right” under threat was the right to hold human beings in chattel bondage. Period. That was the defining issue for those states, that they claimed the right to maintain the one institution that they saw as essential to their very identity, i.e. slavery.
All through the Trans-Atlantic Slave period, there were people arguing that slavery was immoral, inhumane, and ultimately despicable, so it was not that they didn’t know any better, it was only that those practicing it believed in their own self-interest more. Inasmuch as we regard this as at least in some part a class issue, the assumed superiority of the slaveholders is demonstrable across social lines. If they could have found a way to enslave the poor of any ethnic group, they would have (and in many ways did). The racist aspect becomes evident when the clearly-stated and institutionally pernicious differences between the various forms of bondage are examined.
How does this relate to the present?
That desire for self-superiority has never been fully dealt with and drives most if not all of the current politics informing those who participated in the insurrection on January 6th.
What the states that formed the Confederacy possessed that the present agglomeration of socially and economically disaffected reactionaries lack was a concrete set of conditions over which to separate themselves from the Union. Concrete but ultimate insupportable. Slavery as an economic system had limits, and was reaching them. The only thing that would have allowed the South to maintain the system in any economically sustainable way was expansion and that was severely threatened politically by the actions of the North. Even without that, the South was in many ways trying to maintain a dying system that could not be sustained either environmentally, morally, or economically. At some point it would have become clear that the slaveholders would not have been able to afford to maintain the system. The returns were already trending in that direction, hence the urgency in expansion. They were on the long road to bankruptcy. Outlawing slavery outright would have brought that about much sooner.
By comparison, what do the present crop of the disaffected have to fear?
Going down a list of issues, few have the kind of concreteness faced by the antebellum elite. And yet, there is a similarity that is tragic in much the same way.
The casualties (on both sides) of the Civil War fell most heavily upon the poor. Men drafted into service to fight for a cause of which they had no real stake. The average Confederate soldier did not and never would own a slave.
In the same way, the people in Washington D.C. who invaded the Capitol are not and never will be independently wealthy.
And yet in both instances they were coopted into fighting for those whose ranks they could never join—in both instances, the rich.
Before going into that, though, consider the issues presently fueling this movement. Most of them are entirely fabricated. QAnon is entirely nonsense, and yet it has dangerous momentum. The libertarian aspirations on display are at most distractions. The protests against LGBTQ rights are informed by the worst kind of misapplied identity tropes. Abortion is the one issue with any real traction and even it is projected in opposition to secularism and questions of gender equality which on their face require one to ignore so many ancillary realities as to be little more than antiquated prudery dressed up as a moral crisis.
These are all wedge issues, existing for only one purpose—to divide people into camps that can then be manipulated into fighting each other. Reasonable solutions are available to answer differences of opinion, but they are cast as betrayals to some kind of fundamental morality and undermines American Exceptionalism.
The tagline for the movement gives it away. Make America Great Again.
That begs so many questions.
Now, this is the kind of thing that seems to annoy the reactionary the most, the request for definition. They know what they mean, and see your inability to understand what they mean as a sign that you are part of the problem. That you would ask the question automatically defines you as their opponent in a struggle for the unquestioned emergence of the wonderfulness they support. It should, it seems, “go without saying.”
It must be asked, though—what good is anything that cannot be said? And is the lack of definition just a mask for that which has no reality?
Greatness, however one defines it, is only legitimate as an emergent property. If it is a set goal, with predefined shape and expectations, it is both unachievable and illegitimate.
Those who seem to be Trump’s loudest and most energetic supporters seem not to understand this. They seem to regard Greatness as a prize to be won, a condition with evident benefits that can be bought, a state of being understood by the adulation it commands. This is clear in Trump’s case by any casual look at the produce of his life—if it looks great, that’s enough, never mind what substance it contains. He is, above all, a promoter, and the promoter never has to produce, he only has to sell. The “promotion” comes into play when what is being sold is not quite what it is claimed to be.
Consider: the insurrectionists invaded the precincts of the Capitol. They invaded, they took the halls, the floors, had run of the building. They rushed in there believing they were about to achieve their goals. And then what? They acted like children. They wandered around, they collected trophies, they took selfies.
They had no plan.
What if they had captured some congresspeople? Some were clearly prepared to arrest those they had been told are the source of their disaffection. What then?
What demands might these people have made? And on whose behalf?
Many are now lamenting how they had been misled. They blame Trump, certainly, but that misses the point, which is that had they not prepared themselves to be misled, he would never have been able to draw them in. They were there because they wanted to be.
But wanted to be for what?
Among the various signs on display, a variety of bigotries were evident. Antisemitism. Ethnic exclusiveness. Libertarian protestations. QAnon messaging. As one digs through the morass of ideological motives, it moves from ancient hatreds to contemporary fantasy. A melange of distortions, absurdities, and petty insecurities. It is not difficult to find ample information to debunk and delegitimize each and every position. But it has all found common ground among people who would rather attack the institutions defined for them as their enemy than consider reexamining the bases of their disaffection.
One woman recently charged by the FBI posted about her intention to find Speaker Pelossi and “shoot her in the friggin’ brain.” This is evidence of a profound disconnect with any reasonable picture of reality.
Again, though, the question must be asked—over what?
So far, no one has been found with any after-takeover plans. Nothing has been revealed about the intended replacement of current institutions with something different. Given that the complaints about the government have become surreal and that of the people who chose to go to Washington and who participated in the insurrection, an answer to this question is a bit more than academic. The stated intention to abduct representatives (not only federal but state officials), in some cases kill them, in every case render the government as it is unable to function requires an explanation. And at some point at least an idea what would take the place of what would be destroyed.
Instead, we see the fire and fury and no plan. No intention to govern in place of. No one stepping up to the plate with a set of ideas on what to do instead of what has been done.
Largely, this is because we have a method, a plan, a set of procedures here to put forward changes. It’s called an election and representative democracy. The insurrectionists seem unable to make that work for them. Essentially, because they cannot get what they want, they feel the entire system is a failure and should be burned down.
But what it is they want, other than not to have to deal with what is?
If this were only a problem of a rabble it might not be such a problem. But in fact, the Party that presumably represents them the most—the GOP—exhibits the same frustrating condition. They block, they oppose, they condemn, the filibuster, they deny, they appoint judges, challenge legislation, and except for one tax cut after another, they do not put forward substantive plans as a Party to replace what they clearly seek to tear down. So the model is there, writ large, for the rabble to follow. Just tear it all down and the “right thing” the thing that will “Make America Great Again” will simply emerge.
For decades now we have been subjected to an erosion of public trust and a decimation of public programs fueled by the antagonistic politics fomented by people who are increasing their market share by virtue of the violence and division created with the intent to destroy. It was learned long ago that chaos can, in some instances, allow profit-taking at an elevated rate. Greater prosperity across the board can be created only in periods of greater unity and cultural amity, but that is neither fast nor easily funneled into the narrow channels that currently feed the so-called 1%. We have been led to places where it seems the only rational response to change and to people different from us is exclusion, intolerance, hatred, and rebellion.
The pot boiled over. We have just been through a battle of the current Civil War.
And for what?
As odious as the institutions the Confederacy sought to defend were, they were substantive. There was something to them. They needed to go, but the battle was not over fantasies and mirages.
This current battle is over…
“I don’t want to.”
There is a petulance about it all that, despite the intensity of violent imagery and posturing and the cacophony of belligerent rejection, cannot be denied or ignored. Anti-maskers trying to make their refusal to cover their mouths and nose for the sake of public health into a First Amendment issue, which it is not. Anti-vaxxers trying to elevate folklore, self-entitlement, and ignorance to the level of responsible citizenship, which it is not. Anti-immigrant sentiment couched as “border security” rather than what it is, bigotry and the tribal howl of fear of the outsider. Anti-tax sentiment that somehow assumes that taxation is the chief impediment to an economy that will allow greater prosperity, which it is not. Anti-safety net, pretending to be a principled stand against “socialism” rather than a species of political resentment toward people believed to be receiving aid “unfairly,” which is really just class envy and fear of losing privilege.
Petulance. We have a civil war going on over petulance.
There is no plan because any plan can only be another version of the same set of systemic resentments that are presumably the current problem.
All thunder and no rain.
For those who understand this, those who for a long time have been tolerating the lies, the targeted destruction, the flouting of all standards of evidence, and the assumption that all opinions are of equal validity, it is perhaps time to stop allowing the space for it. Nonsense is nonsense and the more it is allowed to go unchecked, unchallenged, and unaddressed, the harder it will be to find solid ground when we need to come together.
There will be no secession this time because there is no Lost Cause at the heart of this. There are only the Lost. The problem is, they are armed and they are angry and they believe that as long as they can shout reason and reality down, then they are right.
Now that Trump is off the playing field, they are milling about and feeling betrayed. All they had to give them focus was him. A blowhard who played them for the benefit of his brand.
His entire legal team has just quit on him. There is nothing left for them to make any bank on. It is a hollow cause, devoid of substance, and yet of such density that it will suck those still in attendance down into a mire to drown.
The question now is not, what did they actually think they were going to do? but rather, what are we going to do with them now? Millions of people, many of them the likes of Representatives Greene and Boebert, believe in substanceless conspiracies, false theories of government, and the apparent right of people to separate themselves from everything in order to live according to standards that are only supportable within a community, the very kind of community they reject, are among those believing in…
Well, that’s the problem. Believing in what?
We have four years to figure this out before it all comes back to try this nonsense again.
I’m getting acquainted with the new scanner and having to learn its tricks. File size being one of them. But.
There are some images a photographer goes back to again and again, trying it one more time, reinterpreting, finding a new or better way of bringing it out. This is one such. From New Mexico
Enjoy.
