Mark W Tiedemann

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  • Music On A Saturday Night

    Storms apparently kept a lot of people away. A shame.  The monthly gathering at the New Covenant Methodist Church on Bellerive happened anyway, a St. Patrick’s Day session complete with a pot of corned beef, and the limited audience enjoyed an evening of good music delivered by people who were having an enormous amount of fun.

    More fun than I’m used to having inside a church.

    I’ve been attending these now for almost five years.  Maybe longer, someone would have to check.  When I began, these open mic sessions offered nearly 80% karaoke, of variable quality.  Rich and Annette (Annette more forcefully—though Annette’s “forceful” comes across with the glee of a 12-year-old wanting to share a puppy) had been on me to come play.  I didn’t play at first.  When I did…

    Let me explain something about my music.  Way back in the distant past, in a galaxy far, far away, I had aspirations to be a rock star.  Never happened, and in hindsight it never was going to happen.  As hard as I worked for those years, I really didn’t have the full range of dedication it would have taken.  I wanted to get up on stage (or better yet in a studio) and rock out, mainly on my music, music I wrote.

    And it frankly wasn’t very good.  Like my fiction, it required time to ferment, to acquire some growth, some maturity, some…worth.  And playing other peoples’ music was just a stop along the way.

    So I quit.  Didn’t touch a keyboard for, oh, almost 15 years.  I bought a guitar, learned enough to play along at parties, and then started writing a few songs (not very good ones) and Donna bought me a better guitar, and so it went, and there were even a few gigs, but…

    After Clarion (1988) I came home, started writing stories that actually sold, and about a year later we found a piano that I thought would be perfect.  A Yamaha Clavinova.  It has a lot of bells-n-whistles, but mainly it has the touch of a real piano and two piano samples that are superb.  So, we bought it and I started noodling again.

    Fifteen years is a long time to not play an instrument, and I had forgotten nearly everything.  But I didn’t buy it to restart a career that was never going to happen, I bought to for stress release.  (And in that cause, this machine has taken a beating.  I still have it, it still functions well, and I assure you I have pounded on it.  I’ve had it repaired once in 23 years.  That’s pretty reliable.)  So while I occasionally pull out some sheet music and painfully struggle through material I once knew by heart, for the most part I just jam.

    I’ve developed a free-form style built around a handful of basic motifs that can be mixed and matched into a variety of presentations that allow me to fly.  Just the sheer joy of playing is what I want and I don’t care about the tune.  What I play sounds like something, has a familiarity to certain things, and people listen and apparently enjoy it while thinking  “I just can’t quite place that…”  It’s pyrotechnic, utterly improvised, and I do it because it makes me feel good.

    Well…when I started playing at this little coffeehouse, it apparently made others feel good, too.

    Gradually, the musicians have taken over from the karaoke.  There are now some fine players doing their bits.  There’s a floutist of considerable talent, two drummers (one of whom is phenomenal), a couple of good guitarists, plenty of singers (not me) and occasionally a violinist, a conga player, and once we had a first-rate saxophonist, and a trumpet player.

    Then there’s me.

    Charitably, I think I just shock people.  They don’t know what to make of me, but either they’re too polite or too stunned to not like it.

    Occasionally, I even play well.

    Last night we hit some grooves.  Some?  All night the playing was excellent, by everyone.

    I brought a composed piece.  I wrote it down because the changes and the overall direction was more complex, more disciplined than what I normally do.  I arrived early with the intent of (hopefully) working it out with a couple of the others and at least including drums and maybe a guitar solo.  We ended up rehearsing—

    Monkees.

    Yes, well—don’t scoff, I liked the Monkees, and I was saddened by Davy Jones’ passing.  For the ending sing-along, we did five Monkee’s tunes.

    Rehearsing those took all the time we had, so I didn’t get to work on mine with anyone.  I mentioned it to Bob, the drummer.  I asked him to sit in on the free-form I intended to do in the second half, just a basic 4/4 rock beat over which I could waffle.

    When I began playing my prepared piece, all of sudden I had a rhythm section.  Bob and the conga player, Robert, just joined in, laid down a solid beat, and to my deep pleasure I didn’t stumble, and it was…

    It was like flying.

    A word about Bob.  He’s a musician’s musician.  Keyboard, guitar, vocals, and drums, he plays it all, and he plays it with a natural grace I envy.  But as a drummer he is surpassing good.  He found my groove, figured out how to nail it, and played as if we’d rehearsed it a dozen times.  I felt my face stretching into a grin halfway through.

    I haven’t had quite that much fun playing in a long time.  Last year we did something fairly complex with a spoken-word piece I wrote (which is posted on this blog, the Jazz posts) that came together surprisingly well.  But I expected that, we had rehearsed.  This time it was spontaneous and it just rocked!  They made me sound pretty good, I think.

    The rest of the evening was as good or better, and the Monkees’ jam was just fine, even if Rich’s voice was a touch raw and he couldn’t quite make those Davy Jones high notes.

    And a lot of people missed it.

    We didn’t.

    I am so glad to have music in my life and so fortunate to know first-rate players.  Thank you all.

  • Noir at the Bar

    There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s.  They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage.  Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.

    They had me in their line-up on February 28th.  I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well.  It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up.  Right here.

    I had a good time and the other readers were fine, I recommend them.  An evening of good readings and fine company.

  • Bunk

    One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before.  It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet.  All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.

    Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.

    Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E. 37 to 68, emperor of Rome from 54 to his death by suicide in 68) became emperor after his uncle, Claudius, died.  He has been portrayed in popular fiction and some histories as a self-indulgent libertine.  The great fire that destroyed huge sections of the city in July of 64 has been laid at his doorstep for many reasons.  He was, in fact, a big urban renewal guy and one of the few theories circulating at the time that has any traction of being real was that he was doing some rather brutal slum clearance in preparation for a new construction project.  Even this seems unlikely, since the fire began very near to the Circus Maximus, which would be stupid if it were intentional, and also it began in a commercial area.  No one knows how it began.  It is much like the great Chicago Fire for which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has been forever blamed, an assertion invented by a reporter that has become such a staple of the popular folklore that even people who “know” it isn’t true still cite it.

    In the case of Nero, however, it appears that he wasn’t even in Rome when it began and when he heard he returned and immediately began organizing relief efforts.  The source of the “fiddled while Rome burned” is Suetonius and others who hated Nero.  Apparently it never happened and in this instance the exact opposite seems to be the case—he worked hard to save Rome and do what was possible after the fact.

    But such is the power of bunk that people still talk about the callous and depraved Nero playing his lyre and singing The Sack of Illium in costume while the city burned.  It is a baseless piece of folklore, an urban myth of the first order.

    There are two important things to take away from this.  The first is, of course, the power of images to fix the imagination in such a way that fact and truth have no chance of getting around the preferred myth.  The second is, such myths serve as distractions from genuine problems and redirect our attention from what is truly important onto fabulations that are easily manipulated and manipulative—because people who buy into them are more easily directed by such bunk in the hands of spinmeisters who would rather they didn’t pay attention to reality.

    Because there was plenty about Nero that deserves serious ignominy.  Just not this.

    The other thing such bunk does is paint a figure wholly one thing or the other.  There is no gray in such portrayals, no room for the ambiguities that are the way people really are.  I said Nero was a big urban renewal emperor, and this is true.  He was something of a reformer in this early reign and he did many public works that made him quite popular.  He successively extended the Empire and established rules over certain abuses by the Senate, and so forth.  Rome did not materially suffer under Nero.

    But he had inherited the trend in Roman imperial life toward assassination as a means to consolidate power and even acquire it and apparently had his mother killed, who herself may have killed Claudius in order to secure the throne for her son.  As his reign progressed, an evident paranoia took hold and he became more and more erratic until finally there was an uprising in Iberia and he read the writing on the wall and took his own life.

    He left a mixed legacy.

    But all we remember him for now is Rome burning, bad singing, and orgies (which were more evidenced in his Uncle Caligula’s reign than Nero’s).  All the nuance is leached out and any lessons of value from understanding his reign are absent.

    The other problem with bunk—you can’t learn anything from it.

    I took some time with this business of Nero in order to lay the groundwork for my more contemporary point.  See, we can all of us pretty much talk about things that happened two thousand years ago with some dispassion.  (No one, I think, has a stake in falsely portraying Nero anymore.)  We can step back and look at the false picture and see where it came from and how it happened and understand something about how popular animosities have always given rise to distortions and outright falsehoods.

    The reason we should always be aware of bunk like this is so we are not distracted from what may be far more important.  Bunk is noise, it is in a perverse way camouflage.  Not only does bunk mask what may be good about someone or something, but it works just as well as a mask for what may be significantly worse.  And for the one buying the bunk, it seriously erodes credibility, so that any valid criticisms he or she may have are suddenly given the same weight as the bunk—which is to say, none at all.  Bunk cheapens everything.

    But there has always been bunk.  We love it.  Often we prefer the legend to the truth.  Legends are more colorful and certainly have the distinction of offering explanations that validate prejudices— but they do so without adding one worthwhile bit to any serious discussion.  Often just the opposite happens.  People who maintain the bunk version of events often impede constructive understanding and, if pressed, may actually turn on those trying to educate them out of the bunk.  Bunk can be very hurtful.  At the very least by taking up space where something useful might exist.  But also by providing a convenient test for determining who is or is not a friend or enemy.

    I don’t think I need list the various manifestations of bunk that currently make the rounds of the internet and fill people with rationales for their displeasure and explain absolutely nothing.  We’ve all seen it.  Worthless allegations, unsubstantiated accusations, constructions of arguments that miss the real point, false comparisons, and outright slander.  We can recognize bunk because it always fails two major tests—logic and Occam’s Razor.  I suppose, though, that those tests are really different sides of the same one.   To put it simply, if something requires too many parts and demands the silent participation of too many people, or is simply far more complicated than seems reasonable, it is likely bunk.  (It’s best not to attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by oversight or incompetence.  History, after all, shows us that, with very few exceptions, most conspirators are incompetent—and they usually always overlook something.)

    Anyway, I wish you all a bunk-free day.  It’s too much to hope for a bunk free year.

  • The Chance of Failure

    Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.

    I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.

    I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.

    I have thousands of little tricks to keep myself from doing the hard, important work.

    But somehow I’ve written over 15 novels, published 10 of them, along with many short stories. My failure, such as it is, will not be seen in my production (though I see it, indeed I do) but in Follow Through.

    I’m terrible at self-promotion, self-marketing, all the little component parts of conducting a Career that are necessary but, to me, intimidating. After all, I’m a writer—dealing face to face with people is not what I do, not what I want to do. If I wanted to do that I’d get a job as a salesman. I’ve been a salesman, I was even good at it long ago and far away, but I loathed it.

    That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.

    The one element Mr. Smith did not discuss is an intrinsic failure of finding the right way to do what you want. I have the passion, I have the drive (though I’m getting a bit frayed around the edges) but I somehow keep driving off the road into a ditch. I can see the road, I just can’t seem to stay on it. All by virtue of producing product that has, in the past, not attracted the right attention.

    Or so it seems.

    Even this, I know, is an excuse, but sometimes a necessary one to maintain sanity. These are the nibbling ducks of chance—the right publisher, the right agent, the right window for publication, the right reviews, none of which are in your control.

    Nevertheless, you need to do, and do well, the one or two things that are in your control, so that when the stars are right and the planets align, the work is ready. The most necessary and often hardest thing to do to facilitate that is to ignore all the other stuff. It is the Work that matters. Never mind the market, never mind the dwindling bank account, never mind the critics who were boneheaded about your last book, never mind all the ancillary shit that is certainly important but only serves to distract you from the Work.

    That’s hard to do. It takes practice. And it’s wearying.

    But I do recommend hearing Mr. Smith out. Because what he’s talking about are all the things people do before they even get to the Work to sabotage themselves.

    What you have to do is take a chance on yourself. Just…take a chance. Regret is a terrible thing on which to end your days.

  • Thirty Two

    We cleaned part of the garage today.  Put up shelves, threw stuff out, made new room for more stuff.  A chore, sure, but it was a pleasant day.

    Oh, and it was our anniversary.  Thirty-two years ago Donna and I went on our first date.  We saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (which she had never seen before) and ate Chinese (which was new to her).  At the end of the evening, she agreed to go out with me again.  Little did she know.  Or me, for that matter.

    More about that later.

  • Any Time They Want

    I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in.  I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine.  (Remember him?  No?  Well, there’s hope after all.)

    In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible.  No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake.  Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See?  This is what we’re talking about!”

     

    Here’s a conversation.  I’ve scripted it, but it is based on reality, and if we’re honest we have all heard something like this.

    “What do you do for a living?”

    “I’m a fundraiser for an NGO.  We operate in twelve developing nations trying to implement grass roots reforms in education.”

    “Wow, that sounds really interesting.  How do you get work like that?”

    “Well, after I earned my Masters from Stanford, I went into private sector work for a big agro firm. Part of what I did there was coordinate large scale testing of new cultivation methods in order to improve yield per acre in a variety of conditions.  At first I was pretty hands-on with the researchers, but more and more I took over the actual negotiations, which meant a lot of PR work.”

    “You traveled a lot?”

    “Oh, I’ve been to China, Japan, Indonesia, India, plus a good part of the EU.”

    “Must have been a lot of language barriers.”

    “Some, but I speak Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and a bit of Urdu.”

    “Sounds like a full-time job.  Do you do anything for fun?”

    “Oh, sure.  I really like climbing and whenever I get the chance I do whitewater canoeing.  I also play piano, but to really unwind I cook.  I did a semester at a culinary institute, so…”

    “Your husband must like that.”

    “Oh, I’m not married.”

    “Too bad.”

    “Not really.  Maybe someday, but right now I just don’t have time for a full-time relationship.”

    (Significant pause.)  “Is there anyone special in your life?”

    “There are a couple of men I see fairly often, but most of the time it’s just casual dating.”

    “Hmm.”  Goes away thinking: slut.

    A joke?  Unfortunately not.  Seems sometimes no matter what a woman does professionally or otherwise, no matter what her achievements might be, if she is in any way nonmonogamous, for many people that’s the only thing that matters.  Whore, slut, garbage, trash, scum.  More than one penis gets in there by her choice, everything else is worthless.

    But with a man?  The more successful professionally, the more it seems expected that he has had a string of “conquests.”  It’s part of the perks that come with virile masculinity.

    Yes, I know this is not a universally held attitude, but it is the majority default reaction, so the more thoughtful “good for the goose, good for the gander” attitude does not hold sway.  We pander to the concept of the Man Who Lays Many.  It’s cool, whether we like to admit it or not.  We feel sorry for the male virgin and we have a variety of labels for him that are not particularly nice, the number one being Loser.  (Yes, Loser appends to many other traits, but even the millionaire computer geek who can’t get laid is seen as pathetic.  Money’s nice, but come on!  And then there’s the second-tier attitudes toward men who use prostitutes: “You have to buy it? Jees!”)

    The double standard, in other words, is not only alive and well, it’s stormed into the party and is wrecking the buffet.

    There are many causes of this, it does not emerge from any one source—if it did, we might be able to do something about it more effectively—but all sources have one thing in common—fear.  It’s not that men fear women as such.  They fear being irrelevant, and at the end of the day success with women, especially passive, noncompetitive women, is balm to the savaged ego of many men.  To have women compete directly or even (gasp!) exercise the right to indulge their sexuality the way men do (or are supposed to) is an intolerable threat.

    This is sexual politics 101 and why we have to go over this again after the Sixties and Seventies baffles me.  Unless the lesson simply didn’t matter.

    There has been a growing tsunami of reaction since the Women’s Movement broke down the walls into what had been seen as an exclusively male domain.  It has washed up on the beach now and into the halls of power where it is being made a Cause by men who, try as they might to spin it some other way, just can’t stand having women live independent lives.

    So, yes, this whole nonsense over contraception is nothing less than an attempt to put women back in “their place” and people like Rush Limbaugh seem to think there is traction and resonance in labeling women sluts because they have sex “any time they want.”  Of course, what is implicit in that “any time they want” is that they can say No any time they want.

    And that’s probably what bothers the Rush Limbaughs the most.

  • Saturday Cat

    I don’t do many cat photographs.  Unlike many folks in science fiction and fantasy, I’m not blown away by them.  I’m a dog person.  For one thing, I’m mildly allergic to cats.  For another, it’s hard to take a cat for a walk (which I admit, sometimes, would be a plus).

    But they can be marvelously photogenic.  So here is our friend Lucie’s cat, in the hallway of her apartment building, being a most essential cat.

  • Meltdown

    I considered writing something about the recent primaries in Michigan and Arizona, in advance of Super Tuesday, but things have become so mind-numbingly bizarre I’m not sure I’d have anything relevant to say, at least not about this particular election cycle.  As a personal observation, I’d like to say that any of the Republican candidates still vying for the nomination disturb me. Romney is the least noxious, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for someone (and yet, we often do).  I don’t find him as objectionable as the other three, and in another era he would probably be a half-way decent president.  But he would be a creature of his party and right now the GOP is in the process of a major meltdown.

     

    Whether you agree with their policies or not, this is simply a fact that cannot be denied.  Of course, many Republicans are very good at denial, which is one of the reasons their party is in the shape it’s in.  Climate change, bailouts, evolution, birth control…their favorite word has become No and unfortunately for them you can’t run a government that way, much less a country.  With the addition of the small but inordinately vocal and strident Tea Party contingent in 2010, the internal workings of the GOP have become untenable.  If you don’t believe me, just look at John Boehner sometimes when he’s not being interviewed.  The man is, I think, reasonable, but he’s saddled with an unruly bunch of pseudo-libertarians who think the best way to fix things is to do a complete tear-down and start all over.  Combine them with the contingent that seems to believe the only citizens in the country are in the seven-figure income club and you have a recipe for doing virtually nothing for ordinary citizens.  Boehner is not just trying to herd cats, he trying to guide a creature that is a cross between a honey badger and a burro.  (I know, I know, that’s supposed to be the Other Party’s symbol.)

    It has been so long since the sides in this war were formed, most people can be forgiven if they don’t really know what the fighting is all about.  Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the battle lines that were drawn up way back in the Sixties and had concretized by the Nineties.

    Republicans have traditionally been the party of the individual.  This is the party that supports the self-made man, the entrepreneur, but there was a time that did not always mean the millionaire.  They believe that America is made strong by encouraging and even occasionally forcing individuals to strive, on their own, to Make It.  That interference from government hinders that potential, therefore as little control from above as possible should be applied.  Let people go out and struggle and then reap the rewards of their efforts.

    As quaint as that may sound, it’s a good philosophy, and it’s based on sound principles borne out by experience.

    Democrats have traditionally been the party of factions.  Large groups are their natural constituency, often groups made up of those who have been unable to compete in the individual struggle and ended up at the bottom of the heap.  Consequently, they have been the advocates of trade unions, minorities, and various organizations that claim to speak for the voiceless.

    You can see how this played out during the Great Depression.  Few of the programs that FDR pushed in his first years were in any way original—or Democratic.  Hoover started most of them.  But Hoover did so with such penny-pinching trepidation, bolstered by his belief that direct government aid would damage the American worker and make him hopelessly dependent, that none of them did a bit of good.  Still, he might have sold it had not the Bonus Marchers been met with the same pecuniary stinginess and, when they refused to go home, tanks.  As soon as General Douglas MacArthur finished burning the shanty town of impoverished veterans out than Hoover told his staff that they had just handed the election to Roosevelt.

    FDR funded Hoover’s programs to the hilt and started the slow process of digging the country out.  He wasn’t much interested in the effect government aid might have on individuals, all he knew was that one-in-four American workers were unemployed, and that 25% made a big group that had to be dealt with, individuals be damned.

    The philosophical differences could not have been more manifest.

    And FDR was right.  This was not a crisis of ordinary proportions, it called for something more.  Hoover and the Republicans worried over the effects of big government and were willing to let people starve to preserve the principle.  (Not really, but they kept insisting private charity should take up the slack, ignoring the growing evidence that private charity was as overwhelmed as everyone else.  They didn’t really want anyone to starve, they just thought it should be compensated for privately, not through government.  Sometimes, size matters.)

    Now we come down to the present.  Since Reagan came to power, these traditional lines have hardened.  There are problems with the Democratic insistence that groups matter more than individuals.  People cannot be dealt with in cookie-cutter fashion.  Democrats have long been blinded by the unstated but implicit assumption that individuals who can take care of themselves (A) don’t need anything from government and (B) are dangerous to programs aimed at groups.  This has led to some disastrous legislation from time to time, as in the Welfare Act of 1965 and Department of Education policies that ride roughshod over local school districts.  Their one-size-fits-all approach has caused damage, just as unintended, I’m sure, as Republican’s inability to recognize when individuals just can’t get out of a hole on their own.

    In times when there was an equitable distribution of reasonableness across both parties, these differences offset each other.  Not perfectly, but things got done that actually did the country good.  Sometimes you have to treat problems from a group perspective.  Other times, you have to stand up for individuals.

    But in both instances, these are policy problems, not something for which you go to the mat as though your soul depended on it.  As the prime motive of an ideology, they are dangerous, and we’re seeing the results of just such an embrace now.

    An underlying part of the disparity of viewpoint between the two, related to their fundamental differences, is their respective attitudes toward systems.

    Let me explain.  As people mingle, communicate, build, etc, they inevitably build systems.  Infrastructure, certainly, like roads, railways, canals, telephones, and the like, but also social systems, which are like the deltas of great rivers—channels dug by long use that are difficult not to use, that direct the flow of people and sometimes ideas along lines that become preset.  We sometimes call this culture, but culture is more than just a social system.

    It seems—and my own interaction with Republicans over the years tends to support this—that Republicans don’t care to credit systems very much.  Their traditional insistence on the hegemony of the individual underplays and often rejects the idea that systems matter much.  An individual genuinely self-motivated can circumvent or even ignore systems.  Which suggest that for those who don’t, can’t, or won’t do so choose not to.  Hence you get the belief that poverty is indicative of the person’s will or character rather than a consequence of systems.

    Democrats for their part tend to fall to the other side and place an overemphasis on the effect of systems, that in fact they are all that matter, and those individuals who can effectively ignore them are aberrations.

    Now, I don’t suggest that each individual Republican or Democrat consciously thinks along these lines—but taken in aggregate the trends are obvious.  (In a curious way, it’s almost a Nature vs Nurture argument, and when you look at the rhetoric of the extremists on both sides this emerges quite clearly—American exceptionalism on the one hand, American Imperialism on the other.)

    What has also been clear historically—and I am speaking now of all history, not just American—is that those who grasp the fundamental operation and importance of such systems usually end up acquiring the power.  (As a dramatic example, consider the French and the Germans of 1870.  The French believed in elan, the courage of the individual French soldier, that as long as one had elan, nothing could defeat him.  The Germans believed in training and logistics.  The Germans won.)

    The GOP has gone through a curious metamorphosis, though, over the last 30 years.  While still operating from their basic premise that individuals matter most—and I have actually not heard any of them state this as a principle in a long, long time—they have fought the Democratic Party for control in order to save the country from an overburden of systems, which the Democrats consistently advocate as solutions to all sorts of problems, often to the detriment of the very people they seek to serve.  In order to do this, they have honed their tactics and policies to the point where in order to deprive the enemy of the ability to conduct the war they have focused on funding and, paradoxically, on a kind of intellectual eugenics.  While the individual matters most, they seem to advocate, only a certain kind of individual is really meant.  This has led them to abandon the progressivism that once made up a significant part of their party philosophy—because progressivism was becoming more and more a matter of systems, vis a vis the so-called Safety Net and through federal education initiatives and so forth.  Now, to take the extremist view, only True Americans are important, and they are defined by—

    Well, that’s a problem.  What constitutes a “true” American?

    No matter.  Someone will do that along the way, in fact the very individuals they are defending and encouraging will do the defining, and that has led them into a cul-de-sac wherein the members of the club are setting the admission standards and they get stricter and stricter every year.

    This year, whether they intended it or not, they seem to have defined women out of the club.  Along with gays and along with certain economic minorities and along with anyone who might otherwise qualify for membership who supports the aforementioned groups.

    What I fear is they have defined themselves out of a viable constituency, because the definitions are narrower even as in the general population the definitions are broadening.  The Democrats are better able to make political gains in this situation, if they so choose, because this is how social systems operate, and they are all about systems.

    I’m not optimistic about this in the long run.  As usual, both parties are missing certain fundamental realities.  The Democrats have always bothered me the way trade unions bother me.  I think we need more unions, but I don’t like them.  I see them as necessary monsters, because, as unitary systems, they have little room for individuals with needs that aren’t part of the whole.  I think we need them because the people who own the businesses are not kind and gentle souls, but single-minded, acquisitive wolves.  It is not that such people don’t care about people but that people to them are simply components.  Components in a system under their control.

    And paradoxically these are the people that Republicans tend to support as examples of individuals.

    I do not want to see the destruction of an organized conservative party.  Unbridled progress can be as destructive as the utter suppression of progress.  We need both in order to have a viable community.  The worst aspects of the Democratic Party have not manifested for a long time simply because the Republicans waged a somewhat successful campaign against liberalism and the Democrats, in order to hang onto some power, moved to the right, and are now almost as centrist as Republicans of the Sixties and Seventies were.  Systems, remember?  They followed the runnels of the systems.  But if the GOP melts down and fragments completely, we may see a different sort of Democratic Party emerge.

    Right now, though, it appears to me that meltdown is on its way.  The GOP has lost touch with the average American in a big way.  They are becoming marginalized and if not this year then by the midterms of 2014 we will see them grappling with the death throes of becoming irrelevant.  They have bent their ear to individuals, true, but only the individuals who still seem to talk to them, and they are a rarefied group indeed.

    On the other hand, I may be overstating it.  Whatever the case may be, something has to change within the GOP.  They cannot survive as a party of extremists.

  • A Moment For A Promotional Message

    Tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 28th, I’ll be reading at a venue that is somewhat a departure for me.  It will be at a little ongoing literary rumpus called Noir At the Bar—here’s a blog post to give you a taste—in University City, on Delmar, at a little place called Meshuggah’s.  I’ll be there with three other readers—Kevin Lynn Helmick, Caleb J. Ross, and Gordon Highland—and what makes this unusual for me is that Noir at the Bar is, as the name suggests, for NOIR.

    Now, yeah, I write mysteries.  After all, my three Asimov robot novels were “robot mysteries.”  Remains is as much a mystery novel as a near-futre SF novel.  Realtime was a police procedural of sorts.  But I haven’t published any straight mysteries.  And having attended a few of these events before, I can state unequivocally that my work is very different from theirs.

    Or maybe not.  We’ll see.  But I am the first science fiction writer invited to attend, so it will be interesting to say the least.

    I thought I’d write something new for it, but since I’ve been eyebrow deep in finishing the current novel I haven’t had time, so I’m taking a few possibles along to see what will be the best fit.

    If any of you in the St. Louis area want to come by and lend some support, I can promise you something different.  It’s a good crowd and the stories are…unique.

    So: Meshuggah Cafe, 6269 Delmar, St. Louis, MO, 63130 tomorrow night, 7:00 PM.

  • Narratives and the American Landscape

    I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

    At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American.  Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

    It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines.  And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

    As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit.  For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

    We can go down the list.  Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst.  Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit.  And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

    Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

    Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them.  But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

    What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are.  In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

    But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

    Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative.  I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side.  In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge.  You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans.  I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse  has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it.  It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

    But nuance, as I say, gets lost.  I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment.  And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs.  If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

    But I don’t want to continue the excuse making.  The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

    And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps.  Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent.  I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984.  (Admission time.  I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980.  In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election.  I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements.  Until Obama.  He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

    Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans.  There are still Conservative Democrats.  But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean.  The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

    I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical.  On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical,  concerned only with power and wealth.  On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

    Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

    What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore.  I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it.  He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

    Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital.  When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past.  When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future.  We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own.  We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

    Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think.  For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified.  For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies.  This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo.  Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there.  Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well.  Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled.  By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

    I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time.  For now I think I want to do without labels.  But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.