Mark W Tiedemann

Category: blog

  • My World of Tomorrow

    This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

    Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

    I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

    And I liked that world!

    It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

    True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

    You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

    You could see the future.

    And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

    Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

    I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

    So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

    There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

    In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

    This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

    So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

    I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

    See you at Archon?

     

  • A Romney Review

    Over the last few years I have written a great deal on presidential politics and politics in general.  With the first debate this cycle coming up tomorrow night, I thought instead of rehashing what I’ve already said, I would simply link to what I’ve already said, specifically about Mitt Romney.  I was surprised to see how far back I wrote my first post about him, 2007, when he made his bid then.

    Romney’s Testament

    This was about Romney’s statement that he intended to put his religion in second place as president.  As it has turned out, he has not said a great deal about religion this time around.  His one stab against Obama on that basis—Obama’s supposed “war on religion” —apparently backfired.  Since then, he’s stepped quietly around the issue, ostensibly because he is still viewed with suspicion by evangelicals.  Romney’s a Mormon. Where that fits in the hierarchy of American religious advocacy is problematic, since it is to many barely recognized as christian.

    Thoughts On the End of 2010

    This was more of an overview on the heels of the mid-terms that put the Tea Party arguably in the driver’s seat of the GOP, a context Romney will have to work with, deal with, should he win—one which has been a problem for him during the past year.

    Will ‘E Or Won’t ‘E?

    Just after Romney officially declared his candidacy in 2011 and some of the contradictions and conflicts his campaign might face.

    No Longer Surprised

    This is more a critique of Obama.  It has become apparent to me that I am more partisan this year than I like.  Perhaps I’ve been forced to it, and somewhat reluctantly, but it’s true.  I just can’t see Obama as the big demon the Republican Party is trying to make him out to be.  Still, partisanship, while it has its place, bothers me.  I don’t believe in being on someone’s side just because they wear a particular label.  Partisanship to ideas and ideals, that’s different, but in that vein I have some significant problems with Mr. Obama, some of which I detail here.  I have greater problems with the current GOP.

    Poll Positions

    I discussed my views on the GOP slate prior to the emergence of Romney as their candidate.  It’s useful, I think, to remember all this because much of it has gone into the GOP Platform.

    What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

    I got testy here, true enough.  I come from an attitude that says basically “What good is fixing the economy if prosperity flowers in a country wherein the rights and privileges I believe are fundamental to what being an American is are curtailed or gone?”

    Here’s A Fact

    Most recently, obviously, this is about Romney’s 47% comments.  Which were not, I might add, the most controversial statements in that video, but certainly indicative of a mindset I find troubling, to say the least.

    You can scroll back to my latest remarks on Paul Ryan, who may have been Romney’s biggest tactical mistake in the entire year.  I have considered Ryan a policy idiot since his election to congress—and so, apparently, have many of his colleagues in the GOP, so this is not just someone on the Left beating up on him, you know, just because.  I suspect Romney made this choice for three reasons.  Ryan is certainly “conservative enough” for the Tea Partiers and the envangelicals.  He’s not afraid to be an attack dog and say all the outrageous things that Romney likely has sympathy for if not an outright belief in (which also means Romney can take a rhetorical high road and come across gentler and more humane than his running mate).  And he has (presumably) the connections in Congress Romney lacks.

    But it seems like every time Ryan opens his mouth, he makes us long for the days of Dan Quayle.

    However the debates come out, the thing that I find the most important aspect of this election year is not the presidential campaigning, but the Congressional.  Unless that contingent of intransigent ideologues are removed, we will have four more years of the kind of motionless sturm und drang we’ve been seeing for the last two at least.  The Tea Party representatives did not “sweep into office” with a mandate.  The 2010 elections were some of the lowest voter turnouts in recent memory and none of those elections were landslides, they were all close, marginal victories.  If twice the voters had turned out then, it is my belief not one of those people would have taken office.  I can’t prove that, of course, but I have some small confidence that the majority of Americans are not actually that dumb.

    Of course, they may be.

    For the record, I’ll restate my major reason for not voting for Romney.  He is on record as an advocate of trickle-down economics.  He hasn’t called it that, but when you look at his stated policies it is obvious.  Basically, we have had over three decades now of supply-side economics and it has left us in a shambles.  It does not do what it has been purported to do.  Why would anyone vote for someone advancing a policy with a demonstrated track record of failure?

    Of course there are secondary reasons I won’t vote for him, the number two being that he represents a Party which embraces a whole raft of positions I simply cannot support.  No matter what Romney might think personally, he has the albatross of the current GOP hanging around his neck.

    But I also do not think this is a slam-dunk for Obama, regardless what the polls may suggest.  Presidential elections are historically fraught with surprises and upsets.  I think it is therefore incumbent on voters to express their views and to show up on November 7th.  Show up.  Vote.  Because we have a history of ambivalence and, often, apathy in this country when it comes to politics (people love to argue about it, but when it comes to actually participating, that’s another matter altogether), we have often endured government by minority veto rather than majority rule.  Vote.

    If you don’t vote, you don’t get to bitch afterward.

  • Restraint

    I went back to the gym this morning.  First time in almost two months.

    For those just coming upon this site, I suffered an attack of appendicitis on August 10th.  Three weeks later, there were complications resulting in another hospital stay and further weeks of recovery.

    The surgical wound is now, for all intents and purposes, healed.  So sayeth my primary physician.

    But the doctors at the hospital said no lifting anything over 10 lbs for six weeks.  Donna decided that the second visit for the complications reset that clock, though most of the physicians involved disagreed.  Well, I have to live with Donna, so…

    But this morning we walked the dog—one mile (we have a pedometer now)—and went to the gym.  Donna watched me like a hawk.

    Yes, I lifted more than 10 lbs, but not by much.  Compared to what I was doing in July, today’s workout was pathetic.  But I got through a truncated routine without injury.  We aren’t going for records here, folks, just reestablishing a routine and carefully, oh so carefully, working my way back to something like good shape.

    It hasn’t hurt that I dropped 21 lbs since surgery.  My stomach has shrunk as well, so I’m eating less, and I intend to keep it that way.

    It’s hard.  I’m feeling better, so naturally I feel like I can do more.  And my appetite has definitely returned.  Keeping myself inside new limits is difficult.  The urge to do more, do as much as I think I can, is very strong, and I know I should not.  I should listen to Donna, who has been very good about taking care of me.  And I am.  I held back.  I restrained myself.

    This is not natural for me.

    I’ve been told that it takes the better part of a year to fully recover from major surgery.  There are times I believe it.  But I also believe that you have to push yourself a little.  Becoming comfortable with limits that should only be temporary is a sure way to lose ground, to settle for less.

    Not gonna do that.

    But, hey, I went back to the gym today and nothing hurts!

    It’s a start.

  • Stats

    I downloaded a new plug-in for my blog Wednesday, a little something called Jetpack from WordPress.  I’d seen other sites with a traffic bar showing visits, and I wanted one.  The urge to know, not necessarily who, but how many people are reading your stuff runs deep.

    The first day of its existence was both gratifying and slightly disappointing.  So far this morning, no one has come to visit.  Oh, well.

    But I ran almost immediately into a snag last night.  I received the notice on my task bar of an update for Jetpack, so I dutifully clicked it—

    —and promptly lost the whole thing.  It informed me that the upgrade failed and the plug-in had been deactivated.  I couldn’t find it in my list of available plug-ins, so I tried to reinstall it.  Which it also would not let me do.  It kept informing me that the folder already existed.  But I couldn’t find the folder in order to expunge it, so I was locked out of downloading the new version of Jetpack.

    Not to worry.  I found something else very much like it, but with fewer features—which is fine, I only wanted the stat function.

    This has happened before.  With maybe two exceptions, every time I’ve changed my blog theme it has been because an upgrade has been offered and when I accepted it, it trashed my files and I lost my theme and had to go get a new one.  This is most annoying, because an inevitable consequence has been that attempts to reinstall the trashed theme result in the “you already have this” message, which bars me from having a theme I really like.

    I have sworn off accepting upgrades.  The only ones that work (knock on particle board) have been the WordPress upgrades.

    I wouldn’t mind so much except there’s this little reminder on my task bar when I have one of these pernicious thingies waiting and I feel annoyed and irritated because I can’t find a way to just say No to them and make the reminder go away.

    If there is one thing about the computer age that is one of the most irritating and cost-inefficient—and hugely expensive for business, I might add—it is this continual upgrading.  I know progress is important, I know things get better with work, I know improvements are made all the time, but damn, give it a rest!  I wonder how many people not directly involved realize just how much systems upgrades and changeovers cost in terms of time and lost productivity.  Even a tiny, tiny enterprise like mine, one guy writing stories.  Hours have I wasted when finally forced to change a software system or configure a new machine or learn a new template.

    The other day I complained about MicroSoft Word.  I dislike Word.  I’ve been using WordPerfect for almost 25 years and for my money, WordPerfect 5.1 is still the gold standard.  Simple, intuitive, did everything I wanted or needed.  Why fuck with it?  But I am now on Version 11.

    The problem is, the publishing industry operates on Word, which is not nearly as easy to use or intuitive.  And there are translation problems converting WP to Word which annoys my agent.

    Also, I am still using Windows XP, which seems to be a very stable platform.  (I still wonder what was so wrong with Windows 98—please, no litany of its sins, it was a rhetorical comment.)  I am told we are now up to Windows 8 and some day I will be forced to junk my current machines, buy all new, and learn a new system.

    Give it a rest.  I mean, seriously.  I know we have to keep the economy going, but this is ridiculous.  It is not the same as the automobile industry.  You can still drive a ’38 DeSoto on today’s roads, and having learned to drive that you can, with one or two minor adjustments, drive a brand new car.  Your old model does not cease to function because the new upgrade won’t allow it to interface with other drivers.

    Still.  I manage.  I’m just cranky.  This is not Luddism, do not for a minute think I am anti-cool tech.  But I also do not have a cell phone*.  What I resent is the overcomplications involved in getting “up to speed” with what it au courant.

    I have to go back to work now.  At least English doesn’t go through upgrades that require us to learn, from the ground up, an entirely new language.

    _________________________________________________

    *Yes, it’s true, I have no cell phone.  Donna has one, but it was purchased exclusively for emergencies when she took a job in West Jericho.  I refuse.  When I’m not home, you don’t have to reach me.  This may sound selfish, and I agree to an extent, but we managed quite well being “disconnected” for significant parts of the day.  I realize eventually I will have to cave in, but for now I will not participate in the Tech For Tech’s Sake culture.  You want to talk to me, send me an email or leave a message on my answering machine, I’ll get back to you.

  • Maturity

    I’ll keep this brief. Maybe. We’ll see.

    Our ambassador to Libya has been killed in an assault on the consulate in Benghazi.  The attack was in response to a video that aired throughout northern Africa, a satire (I use the term loosely, as apparently it does not deserve so elevated a label) by an amateur filmmaker in California that allegedly mocks Mohammed.  A similar attack occurred in Cairo, but no deaths resulted as security there proved more effective.

    This is my opinion.  This kind of crap is a consequence of a profound lack of maturity on the part of religious extremists.  Of all denominations and philosophies.  I do not here single out any one religion or culture.  The idiot who gunned down the people at the Sikh temple here is of the same infantile level of literal-minded incapacity to see past the end of a wrongheaded embrace of religion-as-substitute-for-mature-thought.

    Partly this the result of a peculiar kind of insularity that does not allow for exposure to diverse ideas.  Like disease, you cannot develop tolerance if you keep those things to which you are susceptible always at bay.  Information, the daily encounter with differences, with ideas, with modes of thinking, all these things act like vaccines and you learn over time to put matters in context and acquire perspective.  Religious extremism relies on the absence of such exposure, the cordoning-off of experience.  People overreact to that which seems threatening of which they have little direct experience.

    Poking fun at things, mocking things—I don’t care what they are—do not justify killing.  If you insult or mock the things I hold important, I might get a bit testy, but ultimately I know you speak from lack of knowledge, from prejudice, and from a similar dearth of maturity.  More importantly, I have to consider that you might have a point, that what you say may demand some consideration on my part.  At the end of the day, my discomfort over your words, however intended, that have no merit leaves no scars; what you say does not hurt me.

    Until this becomes internalized, misunderstanding across cultural lines is inevitable.  Tragic, stupid, and an impediment to any future rapprochement.

    Besides—idiots—someone in California made that video, not the people in our embassy, and it did not represent anything more than the views of one person, not the official position of the United States.  Maybe you pretend to be a monolith and if one speaks you are all represented, but not here, and you should know that.  You should know by now that we value the individual right to self-expression.  Just as some believe they have a right to issue blanket condemnations of America and the values we embody, we likewise have a right to express our opinions.  On anything.

    All such violence does is provide further evidence of a thin-skinned immaturity, the kind of adolescent pique that is only important to the one indulging what is essentially a feckless hissy-fit.  It is my fervent hope that one day we will all grow up and get over ourselves.

    Thank you for your patience.

    ________________________________________________

    As an addendum, apparently a serious look at Islam by Tom Holland has been pulled from screenings by the BBC because of a wave of protest.  The film that prompted the assaults that resulted in the death of our ambassador, as it turns out, involves Terry Jones, the infamous pastor who made news burning Qu’rans in Florida and is a piece of execrable slander.  Comparing the treatment of the two events, however, points up my thesis—the Holland film is supposed to be a serious historical look at Islam, an objective analysis and this is viewed as unacceptable by a segment of the Muslim community.  While no deaths resulted from the BBC boycott, intellectually and morally they are on par.  We’ve been seeing this since at least the unsupportable treatment of Salman Rushdie (and I have spoken to Muslims who thought he should be condemned verbally if not killed who never read the book) and to my mind is part and parcel of the same cultural pathology.

  • Still Plodding

    I’m finally able to sit in front of my computer for more than five minutes at a stretch.  (Nothing painful, just really uncomfortable.)  I suppose I’m progressing. My patience abandoned me weeks ago, but since I have almost no energy, it’s not an issue.

    Next Tuesday I have my follow-up at the various clinics to see if I’m doing well enough to be “unplugged” and go on my own.  Which only means that afterward I have to be vigilant for a couple of months in regards to fever, etc.  Last night I discovered I’ve lost 15 pounds, which under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mind terribly much.

    Meantime, I’m doing some reading.  I have a few books going at the same time.  I’m finally reading the first Aubry/Maturin novel, Master and Commander.  This has been recommended to me by so many people whose taste I trust and I have been so utterly put off by it till now that I feel a bit embarrassed.  The big problem is the plot—which proceeds at a snail’s pace.  But I’ve given it the major attention it clearly deserves and I can appreciate what O’Brian was doing.  Not sure I’ll continue on with it, but I can now declare that it is indeed a fine piece of work.

    A couple of history books, and I’m reading Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.  Yes, this is a reread, but since my first time was forty-plus years ago, it’s virtually a new book, and I guarantee I missed a lot back then.  I’ll be doing a long post about it soon.

    Anyway, I’ve booted up my novel again and I’m noodling with it.  I’m only three or four chapters from done with it, which makes this past month a real annoying waste in my mind.  But the downtime has given me the space to rethink a couple of things, which is all to the good.  A better book will emerge from this.

    So, till later…

    “Rides”

  • Plodding Along

    For those who may be interested, recovery continues.  I know things are improving because my memory is fairly clear about how bad things were.  Last week, the week before.  But, as is the nature of the critter, we tend only to focus on the present and how crappy it may be.

    But I am getting work done.  I’ve completed the first few prints I intend to exhibit in this year’s Archon art show.  Done the critiques of the short stories for the workshop I’m conducting then.  And just about finished two chapters in the current project.  (About those chapters, it is with wry amusement I note that I was about to doggedly go down the wrong path in one of them when this nonsense struck.  Between the time off and the percocet hell, I realized the mistake I was about to make and corrected it.  Always look for something positive, you know?)

    Other things are better.  Not great.  I seriously doubt I’ll be back to the gym for at least another month.  And my body seems to have entered another phase of healing, because around noon or one o’clock I seem unable to stay awake.  My sleep is deep.  I’m assuming my body knows what it’s doing.

    Part of my reticence involves a growing lack of patience.  I’m getting well enough to start chafing under the restrictions.  I would really like to walk my dog by myself.  I would like to go to the grocery store so that Donna doesn’t have to.  So on and so forth.  I’d like to be able to say I’m catching up on my reading, but that hasn’t been a notable achievement.

    In any case, I’m still alive and that’s the best part.  So till my next entry here, I’ll leave you with a new image and a hope that the rest ofyour summer is just fine.

     

    Sugar Steel Mill

  • Sky Sea

    On my own this weekend, with the dog, working on rewrites.  For the time being, a little cloud-gazing for you.

     

    Cloud Sea, June 2012

  • Reflections On the 4th of July: A Personal Statement

    I am not given to setting out pronouncements like this very often, but in light of the last several years I thought it might be worthwhile to do so on the occasion of the 236th anniversary of our declared independence.

    I don’t think in terms of demonstrating my love of country. My affection for my home is simply a given, a background hum, a constant, foundational reality that is reflexively true. This is the house in which I grew up. I know its walls, its ceiling, its floors, the steps to the attic, the verge, and every shadow that moves with the sun through all the windows. I live here; its existence contours my thinking, is the starting place of my feelings.

    The house itself is an old friend, a reliable companion, a welcoming space, both mental and physical, that I can no more dislike or reject than I can stop breathing.

    But some of the furniture…that’s different.

     

    I am an American.

    I don’t have to prove that to anyone. I carry it with me, inside, my cells are suffused with it. I do not have to wear a flag on my lapel, hang one in front of my house, or publicly pledge an oath to it for the convenience of those who question my political sentiments. Anyone who says I should or ought or have to does not understand the nature of what they request or the substance of my refusal to accommodate them. They do not understand that public affirmations like that become a fetish and serve only to divide, to make people pass a test they should—because we are free—never have to take.

    I am an American.

    I am not afraid of ideas. My country was born out the embrace of ideas, new ideas, ideas that challenged the right of kings to suppress ideas. Ideas are the bricks that built these halls. I claim as my birthright the freedom to think anything, entertain any notion, weigh the value of any concept or proposition, and to take refuge in the knowledge that wisdom comes from learning and the freedom to learn is among the most hallowed and sacred privileges we have inherited as a country. The greatest enemy of our republic is the fear of ideas, of education, and by extension of truth and fact. Those who see no harm in removing books from libraries or diluting fact with wishful thinking and teaching our children to accept things entirely on faith and never question will weaken the foundations, damage the walls, and corrupt every other freedom they themselves boast about and then fail to defend.

    I am an American.

    I do not need to demonize others to make myself feel safe or superior or even right. I do not need to pretend that I am innately “better” than anyone else to prove my own worth. America was founded on the idea that all of us are equal in potential value. I do not need to oppress, undercut, strike, or otherwise impede others so that I can claim the dubious and ultimately meaningless label of Number One.

    I am an American.

    Sometimes I wear my sentiment on my sleeve, display my emotions at inappropriate times. I often side with unpopular causes, cheer those who aren’t going to win, get unreasonably angry over unfairness. I believe in justice and I don’t have any trouble with the idea of making an extra effort for people who can’t afford it for themselves. Other times I am stoic, even cynical. I accommodate a world-weariness far beyond the scope of my heritage. I do not believe in providence. Things will not just “work out in the long run” and the bad are not always punished and the good too often are crushed. I know the world doesn’t care and has no interest in level playing fields or evening up odds or anything other than its own ravenous acquisitiveness. It’s an uphill battle against impossible odds, but it’s the only one worth fighting, and I have an unreasonable belief that as an American I have a responsibility to help fight it.

    I am an American.

    I take a childish pride in many of the attributes and details of my heritage. We build things, we invent things, we have moved mountains, changed the course of rivers, gone to the moon, created great art, changed the face of the earth, broken tyrants on the wheel, and made the world yield. At the same time I am embarrassed at many of the other details of my heritage. We have hurt people unnecessarily, killed and raped, we have damaged forests, poisoned rivers, waged war when there were other avenues. I like the idea that I can work my way out of poverty here, but I hate the idea that we idolize the rich when they put barriers in the path of those like me just because they can. It’s not the money, it’s the work that counts, but sometimes we forget that and those with less must school those with more. That we have done that and can do that is also part of my heritage and I am glad of it.

    I am an American.

    I am not bound by ritual. Tradition is valuable, history must never be forgotten, but as a starting point not a straitjacket. Those who wish to constrain me according to the incantations, ceremonies, and empty routines of disproven ideologies, debunked beliefs, and discredited authority are not my compatriots, nor do they understand the liberty which comes from an open mind amply armed with knowledge and fueled by a spirit of optimism and a fearless willingness to look into the new and make what is worthy in progress your own.

    I am an American.

    I do not need others to tell me who I am and how I should be what they think I should be. I elect my representatives. They work for me. They are employees. If I criticize them, I am not criticizing my country. If I call their judgment into question, I am not undermining America. If I am angry with the job they do, I do not hate my country. They should take their definition from me, not the other way around.

    I am an American.

    If my so-called leaders send soldiers in my name somewhere to do things of which I do not approve and I voice my disapproval, I am not insulting those soldiers or failing to support them. They did not send themselves to those places or tell themselves to do those things. My country has never asked one of its soldiers to kill innocents, torture people, lay waste to civilians, or otherwise perform illegal, unnecessary, or wrong deeds. Politicians do that and they are employees, they are not My Country. Greedy individuals do that, and they are not My Country. No one has the right to call me unpatriotic because I condemn politicians or businessmen for a war they make that I consider wrong, nor that I am not “supporting out troops” because I want them out of that situation and no longer misused by the narrow, blinkered, and all-too-often secret agendas of functionaries, bureaucrats, and bought stooges.

    I am an American.

    My success is my own, but it is impossible without the work done by my fellow Americans. I acknowledge that we make this country together or not at all and I have no reservations about crediting those whose labor has made my own possible or condemning those who seek to divide us so they can reap the plenty and pretend they made their success all by themselves.

    I am an American.

    Which means that by inheritance I am nearly everyone on this planet. I am not afraid of Others, or of The Other, and those who would seek to deny political and social rights to people who for whatever reason do not fit a particular box simply because they’re afraid of them do not speak for me. I reject superstition and embrace reason and as a child I learned that this is what should be the hallmark of an American, that while we never discard the lessons of the past nor do we let the fears and ignorance of the past dictate our future.

    I am an American.

    I accept the rule of law. This is a founding idea and I live accordingly, even if I dislike or disapprove of a given example. If so, then I embrace my right to try to change the law, but I will not break it thoughtlessly just because it inconveniences me or to simply prove my independence. My independence is likewise, like my Americanness, something I carry with me, inside. The forum of ideas is where we debate the virtues and vices of the framework of our society and I take it as given my right to participate. Cooperation is our strength, not blind commitment to standards poorly explained or half understood. Because we make the law, we determine its shape and limits. The more of us who participate, the better, otherwise we surrender majority rule to minority veto, and law becomes the playground of those who learn how to keep the rest of us out.

    I am an American.

    Such a thing was invented. It came out of change, it encompasses change, it uses change. Change is the only constant and too-tight a grip on that which is no longer meaningful is the beginning of stagnation and the end of that which makes us who we are. Change is annoying, inconvenient, sometimes maddening, but it is the only constant, so I welcome it and understand that the willingness to meet it and work with it defines us as much as our rivers, our mountains, our cities, our art. A fondness for particular times and places and periods is only natural—humans are nostalgic—but to try to freeze us as a people into one shape for all time is the surest way to destroy us.

    I am an American.

    I do not need others to be less so I can be more. I do not need others to lose so that I can win. I do not need to sabotage the success of others to guarantee my own. I do not have to take anything away from someone else in order to have more for myself.

    America is for me—

    My partner, my family, my friends, the books I love, the music I hear, the laughter of my neighbors, the grass and flowers of my garden, the conversations I have, the roads I travel, and the freedom I have to recognize and appreciate and enjoy all these things. I will defend it, I will fight anyone who tries to hurt it, but I will do it my own way, out of my own sentiments, for my own reasons. Others may have their reasons and sentiments, and may beat a different drum. That’s fine. That is their way and we may find common cause in some things. This, too, is America.

    “All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed — selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful — we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.”
    John Steinbeck, East of Eden

    “There’s the country of America, which you have to defend, but there’s also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it’s an idea. An idea that’s supposed to be contagious.”
    Bono

    “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
    John F. Kennedy

    “When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
    Adlai Stevenson

  • Upon Finishing A Novel

    Oculus, the sequel to my alternate history Orleans, is finished.  I sent it off last week to my agent.  (Which means that, in fact, I will have to do another pass when she gets through making notes, etc, but for now I am content.)

    They’re all a slog at some point.  The only novels I ever wrote that weren’t were the second Robot Mystery, Chimera, and the one Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf (which wasn’t supposed to be the title—that was the working title I slapped on it because I have to have a title before I can write a piece, but given the impossible schedule and the fact that the publisher needed it, like, THEN, they went with the title as is).  Don’t get me wrong, they were both hard work, but they went relatively smoothly from beginning to end.

    However, this one was a slog because the first draft was really rather not good.

    Anyway, it got better and I sent it off.  Now comes the decompression and the preparation for the next project.  Cleaning the office, becoming reacquainted with the dog, having some kind of food that takes more than two minutes to prepare.

    I have written 21 novels, beginning to end.  Ten of them have been published, six of them probably never will see the light of day again.

    It’s difficult to describe to people who don’t do this what it’s like.  The total immersion in the world of your fiction, and having now written other things besides science fiction I can tell you that it doesn’t matter.  The world of your novel is A World and you have to live in it while you’re building it.  So far I haven’t found myself confusing the fictional realm with the “real” world, but I have found myself ignoring a great deal of what’s around me.  There have been a couple of times I’ve felt like someone emerging from a shelter after a nuclear war, wondering how much the world has changed while I was underground.

    It’s also, for me, an act of faith.  Having the confidence or the optimism that a book will turn out worth while after all the work can be based on experience once you’ve written enough of them, but it’s still a gamble.  You could very well write a piece that is wholly inaccessible to anyone else.  While you’re inside it, making it, it becomes, at least for me, problematic as to whether or not it will appeal to anyone else.  It’s always a pleasant surprise when it turns out others like it.

    Next week, I dive into the major rewrite of another, this one a historical—straight history, with a mystery—and the rest of my summer will be devoted to making it as good as it can be.  I do, however, intend to do a few other things this summer besides just tour the precincts of my fictional realms.

    I’ll also have a special essay for the Fourth of July.  Something I’ve been working on for a bit.  Just a little heads up.

    Ah.  There’s something else needs tending.  See you later.