One of the seemingly unfathomable and comparatively new outlooks my wife the professor has noted among students entering college in the last two to three years is a comparatively much lower level of understanding of certain connections and values that used to be easily comprehended by past students.

For example, students given full tuition scholarships, which require at least an even “B” average, are blowing off classes and not doing the work…. and they lose a four-year scholarship, which is worth tens of thousands of dollars. And we’re not talking about well-off students with family money, nor are these students disadvantaged minorities. They come from working or middle-class families; they have good grades in high school and high SAT/ACT test scores. Some of them will overcommit to part-time work in order to pay for what those of us in an older generation would have considered luxuries, such as newer cars and I-phones, but they’re not using the money to buy textbooks, or even borrow them, or in the case of music students, not even to purchase the music they’re supposed to be learning as part of their major, complaining all the time that they don’t have the money. It’s almost as if college is an imposition.

At the same time, they pay for everything with plastic, almost as if they had no idea of where the money represented by the endless card-swiping comes from.

Then there are those of higher than average intelligence who cannot take a series of events, or pieces of music, or facts and synthesize what they have in common or how they differ. Nor can a majority of them write a coherent paragraph. Far too many of them feel that they have no obligation to learn, and that every professor is under an obligation not only to inspire them, but to spoon feed them what they need to know. This is not helped by an administration whose overt and clearly expressed philosophy is that professors are solely responsible for keeping students in school and that student retention is a higher priority than a good education.

A majority of these students have little or no intellectual curiosity, as well as little knowledge of either American culture or history, let alone the history or cultures of other lands.

Yet, they’re generally good young people, if as self-centered as most teenagers have been in at least the past several generations. They’re not mean or vicious, but they don’t seem able to figure out what work needs to be done unless they’re given specific directions. And when they reach the end of those directions, they stop and look around blankly.

In many ways, for a generation cited as the most connected in history, it’s almost as if they’re totally disconnected from anything but their electronic “reality.” They don’t talk to the people around them. Far too many of them don’t understand deadlines and get upset when professors don’t “understand” that they’re stressed or have emotional issues. They don’t really seem to make a connection between the quality of work and success. They don’t understand, or want to understand, the history that led to where they are.

Too many of the voice students can’t even explain what they feel when they’re singing, and yet they want to be professional singers… and they don’t get the fact that unless they can master their own bodies, and understand the feelings and muscular control necessary, they’ll never make it as singers or teachers of singing. In fact, many actively reject connecting to their physical feelings.

Disconnection may shut out a world they find unpleasant or unimportant… until that world crashes through their electronic bubble and asks them to pay the bills with real physical work requiring meeting standards on someone else’s timetable. And it will… sooner or later.

As I’ve pointed out before, both in this blog and in various novels, public trust is vital for a working civilization on all levels. We trust that there will be water and power. Despite a handful of terrible mass shootings, we trust that, in the vast majority of times, we can walk the streets of our communities without being gunned down. We used to trust the media for comparatively honest reporting, but that trust is rapidly vanishing, and has vanished entirely in the minds of a large segment of the American population.

Because we’re a social species, we instinctively look for individuals in whom we can place trust. Most people don’t trust numbers, and they tend to trust those who try to persuade them with numbers and statistics even less. They want to trust people who are like them and who seem to tell the truth.

But what happens when more and more public figures are revealed not to be truthful in their private lives, or worse, to have engaged in reprehensible behavior that they kept secret through their power? Immediately, people begin to wonder in whom they can put their trust. Americans have already lost faith in most career politicians – one of the reasons why Trump was elected.

More than ever we’re seeing how many more politicians and media figures have engaged in far less than exemplary conduct in their private lives, and the trustworthiness of the media, never that high to begin with in recent decades, is plummeting, as is the public image of business leaders. What we don’t like to admit, either privately or publicly, is that what we’re seeing about public figures isn’t anything new, but merely a revelation of what has gone on all along. What’s different is that the formerly powerless people who used to be abused without recourse now have recourse, and the results are anything but pretty. History has also revealed that revered and beloved leaders often kept secrets that might have driven them from power, had they been revealed, but those revelations usually didn’t come out until much later.

What some powerful people also fail to realize is that, in a mass media and social media society, very little can remain hidden for long, and it’s harder and harder to keep secret personal shortcomings or abhorrent or potentially illegal or immoral behavior. And, no matter who you are, all of us have deeds or words that could be embarrassing or worse if revealed to the world. This isn’t something new. We want to have leaders better than we are, and we want them to be above reproach in everything. But our leaders don’t come from some spotless heaven; they come from society. Yet we feel betrayed when dirty secrets or sexual harassment charges appear in the media.

And that sense of betrayal makes it harder and harder for leaders to lead, and to reach any sort of consensus, partly because each side doesn’t believe it can trust the other, and partly because, when there is a lack of trust, people want absolute guarantees and, too often, an absolute guarantee for one side totally alienates the other side.

Now… if we want to reduce the magnitude of the “trust” issue in business, government, and the media, there’s one fairly straightforward way to elect politicians less likely to engage in sexual harassment, or to choose news executives and anchors who are less likely to use the “casting couch,” and that’s to put more women in charge. While there are some women who have sexually harassed others, according to EEOC figures, men in power are more than five times more likely to abuse their position than are women. Not that this will set well with most men… like most unpleasant facts.

Another possible way to deal with the trust issue is to spend more time verifying those facts that can be verified, rather than blindly trusting people we find appealing and likable. Another way is to be more skeptical and to judge political and media figures by what they’ve done… and what they’ve failed to do… and to evaluate what they propose by what the impact will be… and not by what they claim. We may not ever know all the exact details, but when a tax cut has the greatest immediate benefits for the wealthiest one percent, is it really prudent to trust the politicians who claim that it’s a great benefit for the other 99% of the population? When every nation in the world, except the U.S., has taken a stand of some sort against global warming, is it really wise to trust politicians who ignore this, or who claim global warming is a hoax.

When a political party rigs the representation in a state so that by winning less than half the votes in that state, that party controls 60% of the state legislature, can the politicians of that party really be trusted to be truthful?

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reduce our emphasis on personality or increase our emphasis on facts and actual accomplishments. We might not be quite so disillusioned then.

Writing what you know is a well-intended piece of advice for aspiring writers that is too often misconstrued or misapplied. First, what we know is the result of our experiences, both good and bad, and also interesting and, frankly, boring. A long time ago, I spent a year as an industrial market research analyst, and my job was to analyze past sales patterns and forecast future sales of compressed air filters, regulators, lubricators, and valves used primarily in heavy industry. In the more than forty years since I departed that job, I have yet to find a way to make it terribly interesting to readers, except as a motivation to escape such detailed and precise boredom.

Yes, sometimes we do have experiences that are exciting, but if all you do with them as a writer is rehash the past, no reader will be interested. I’ve used my years as a Navy pilot not to relive the Vietnam years but as the basis for writing about piloting spacecraft, but even that requires integrating new information with old. What my experience does provide is the “feeling” of being in that sort of situation. The same is true of my years as a senior political staffer in Washington, D.C., where the experience and knowledge I gained become the basis for writing about politics in different governmental settings, in both SF and fantasy.

There are times, however, when using experience is counterproductive in writing fiction, and that’s when popular but inaccurate images and tropes have been fed so thoroughly to people that conveying what your experience has demonstrated is accurate conflicts with the popular images that are anything but accurate. I discovered this with The Green Progression, a then near-future SF mystery thriller I wrote with Bruce Scott Levinson about environmental politics in Washington, D.C. Although it actually got a review from a D.C. paper praising its accuracy in depicting Washington politics, the book was a miserable failure in terms of sales, largely because, I suspect, its depiction of national politics was far more mundanely brutal and cruel than the glamorously exciting, body-filled, last-minute-escape-from-danger images created by both popular thrillers and movies. What’s ironic about that was, when, several years ago, I had lunch with the head of the consulting firm I once worked for, he laughed at the fact that we had essentially written a lightly fictionalized version of what his firm did… and no one believed it. He also paid for the lunch.

Experience does matter, because a wide range of experience makes it far easier to convey in depth different settings, occupations, and environments and how people react to such settings and occupations. How much it matters depends on what you write and how you write it… and the audience for whom you write. Page-turner thrillers, from what I’ve observed, rely on action and more action, and not as much depth in other areas is required. Novels that explore character through action generally can benefit from more experiential depth.

But like all sets of advice and all generalizations, there are authors and books that are quite successful… and go against every observation I’ve just made.

…for my occasional rant about when it would be proper to start celebrations and gift buying for Christmas, that is, AFTER Thanksgiving.

Yet in most of the United States, by November first, right after Halloween, Christmas decorations appeared and sales were announced. Sirius’s XM satellite music service shut down the Billy Joel channel and replaced it with Christmas music, too much of it the elevator kind. Some Christmas decorations and sales items were appearing in Walmart in October.

While Christmas has historically been the time to celebrate the birth of Christ, only two of the gospels even mention his birth – Luke and Matthew – and none give any hint of what time of year his birth took place. Some early believers thought it was in April, but the Egyptian Christians decided to celebrate it on January sixth, while others favored the winter solstice. Eventually by the fourth century the Christian Church agreed on December 25th.

Even the Christmas tree had nothing exactly to do with Christmas, but more with non-religious German customs, and wasn’t common even in England until Prince Albert made it a custom of the British royal family in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I can understand the uncertainty about the time of Christ’s birth. I can see why, with the exact date unknown, it made political sense some seventeen centuries ago to agree on a date that matched other celebrations in the hopes of gaining converts.

What I don’t accept is the idea that a religious holiday and supposed celebration of faith should become – cancerlike – a massive commercial sales shill that threatens to gobble up [pun-intended] the comparatively non-commercial celebration of Thanksgiving.

But then, what else should I expect from a religious holiday that was moved to appeal to the pagans, now that it’s been swallowed by worship of another pagan deity – either Plutus [the ancient Greek god of wealth, from which comes the term plutocrat] or Mammon, take your pick.

Before I married my wife the opera singer and university professor, my primary interests in the arts were literature, especially F&SF and poetry, and painting. My principal musical interests were instrumental classical music and “non-twangy” country music. The country music has faded to the background as I’ve also come to appreciate and enjoy opera and musical theatre.

I’ve also moved from being immersed in national politics to being a close observer of university and faculty politics… and have come to realize that in all too many instances, Henry Kissinger was right – university politics are every bit as bad as national politics, or they were until the last year or so.

One question that keeps coming to mind for me is exactly what is the role of a university president? Are university presidents primarily glad-handers and fundraisers? Or are they supposed to set the course and policies of the institution? Or, in the case of state institutions, to lobby the legislature to obtain a share in increasingly hard to get state funding?

The current president of the local university is a lawyer, a profession that I’m convinced has created a disproportionate share of the mess in which our federal government finds itself. I have nothing against attorneys in their proper place [and I shouldn’t, given the number of them in my family], but I firmly believe that neither accountants nor lawyers should be in charge of anything. Yes, every CEO needs a good attorney for advice, but attorneys as CEOs or university presidents? Not a good idea. I feel the same way about accountants.

I’m certainly not privy to all this president has done, but I have to say that, from what I’ve seen, his priorities are… can I say, of dubious value.

Every door in the music department had to be replaced not once, but twice, for legal reasons, because professors couldn’t be observed teaching otherwise, not that there were ever any complaints. On the other hand, there’s still no funding to replace the sixty year old defective and potentially dangerous lighting system in the recital hall… although plans have finally been discussed, but the replacement has been postponed for three years running. When asked about the possibility to replace the sixty-year old and overcrowded music building, he told the faculty they needed to find a wealthy donor… and that they “knew what they were getting into” when they became music professors.

The university president religiously attends every football game and touts the football team, which has won the conference title for two of the last three years. He hasn’t commented on the fact that singers from the music department have made it to the national finals of the National Association of Teachers of Singing for the past three years. Nor has he noticed the theatre alumni/alumnae who have appeared on Broadway or in touring national productions. He certainly hasn’t noticed the professors who taught and mentored those graduates. But he has forced out the director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, one of the two men who built it into a national Tony award winning regional theatre, and eliminated the modest stipend paid to the Festival’s founder. The only music department concert he now attends is the annual choral-rock concert, and he’s inordinately proud of the university’s recent achievement as being cited as the most “outdoors-oriented” university in the country.

For more than fifty years, the university president has served as a board member of the Cedar City Music Arts Association, the oldest all-volunteer arts organization in Utah. Some presidents were more active than others; all attended board meetings [nine a year] occasionally. This president never attended and recently resigned.

So far, after three years, he hasn’t managed to land major financial support, nor has he been able to persuade the legislature to come up with significant additional funding, even though the legislature has insisted that the university accept more students every year, so that tuition continues to climb. And despite the increased enrollment, very few additional full-time faculty have been hired, but the number of adjunct faculty has burgeoned.

But the football team is better.