The other day I realized something that probably should have been obvious, but that I’d never thought much about. There are millions of readers in the world, but there are very few characters in books who actually read books. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t recall a book I’d read – except my own – where a character reads a book or mentions one or quotes from one. It could be that my memory was faulty; so I went to my bookshelves and looked at all the books lined up there, and tried to think of a single one that mentioned reading or writing books, and I finally found one – Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax – and recalled another one – Gene Wolfe’s The Borrowed Man.

Now, I’m certain there are others out there, but I’m willing to bet that the percentage of F&SF books that have characters who actually read or write books is less than five percent. I’m not talking about reading or writing books as the focus of novels, but just as a mention of part of the character’s lives.

Yet biographies of great people usually mention books in some fashion or another. Almost every biography of Lincoln has the story of the borrowed book that he had to replace, and Jefferson’s love of writing and books is certainly renowned. Patton read the classics, and Churchill won a Nobel Prize in literature. Scores of famous people mention the Bible or quote from it, but seldom do authors depict the equivalent in F&SF.

Likewise, almost every human culture has some form of music, and while a larger percentage of F&SF books mention/show music, the percentage is small compared to the field as a whole, despite the ubiquity of music in history and life.

Then there is the issue of family. Families play a part in everyone’s life, and whether immediately present or not, definitely influence actions and motivations. Again, there are more books that show this than there are novels that depict books…but comparatively few F&SF books use familial interactions and pressures.

Just a few thoughts on what’s often not there.

Way back in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea of “the social contact.” The simplified concept is that government represents a tacit contract between the people effectively to be governed and behave in order to escape the “natural state” [which Rousseau tacitly admits never existed, but that’s another story].

One of the interesting facets of his concept was that the social contract tended to break down if the income inequality between the rich and the poor became too great, which in fact is exactly what happened with the French Revolution several decades later in the last years of the century, and after Rousseau’s death. In point of fact, it’s rather interesting to note that in the more than 300 years since Rousseau made that observation, there have been more than a few revolutions and a great deal of social unrest in times of great income inequality.

At present, the United States is in one of those periods. According to Rousseau, the popularity of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump should scarcely be surprising, given that income inequality in the United States has now surpassed the income inequality of the previous period of greatest inequality in the 1890s, which was, of course, the time during which William Jennings Bryan ran for President as a fundamentalist/pro-silver/anti-big-money Democrat. After three years of economic depression, in 1896, Bryan carried 22 of the 45 states at that time and took almost 47% of the vote, despite being outspent by a five to one margin by McKinley.

Today, what is interesting is that the “establishments” of both major U.S. political parties are being challenged by those within the respective parties who feel economically and/or politically threatened or disenfranchised by the current political system. And, no matter how the next election turns out, the problem of income inequality isn’t about to disappear.

The greatest danger is, in fact, is if people think that the election resolves the problem, because then, nothing effective will be done, and most likely both income inequality and economic conditions will worsen.

Why?

It’s fairly simple. Right now, corporations and other institutions are literally sitting on close to a trillion dollars in uninvested dollars. These dollars are not invested because those holding them do not see a market for the goods or services that could be produced with them. The reason for this is that too many Americans are too poor to purchase anything but the basics. The idea that low taxes on high earners makes more money available to create jobs is, like a lot of simplistic “solutions,” half-right. It does make money available, but no one is going to use that “excess capital’ to create that many new jobs in the U.S. if a huge percentage of the population can’t afford the goods and services created by those jobs.

This is where a massive government-funded infrastructure development program would help, provided it’s designed right, and not merely a subsidy to the construction and technology industries. We have hundreds of thousands of unsafe and/or rapidly decaying bridges and tunnels, unsafe municipal drinking water systems, an air-traffic control system that verges on the obsolete and inefficient, a power grid that could be destroyed by a solar flare, thousands of miles of highways that are crumbling, national parks that have billions of dollars of delayed and deferred maintenance… and we do nothing about any of this, while nearly a trillion dollars of uninvested capital sit largely idle because unemployed or underemployed workers haven’t the money to buy anything except the extreme basics – if that.

Yet, as I’ve argued, and as have others, in the end, those ultra-high earners, the one tenth of one percent, could likely make even more money if they were taxed a bit more and those taxes put to work in improving infrastructure.

Will it happen?

I have my doubts. I suspect it won’t until the social unrest and economic stagnation become even worse, which they will, unless matters change in the mindset of the American political system. The problem is that, if matters get too much worse, we may face a revolution, rather than an evolution. I could be wrong, I’ll be the first to admit, but right now, the odds are in favor of pessimism.

The past six-month period has been one of the worst for us that I can recall in years in terms of the number of friends who have suffered, some of whom have died. All this suffering that I’ve witnessed has brought home to me a tremendous short-coming in our modern medical system or structure. It’s simple enough. In prolonging life, especially in treating some forms of cancer, in saving wounded soldiers and victims of accidents who surely would have died in earlier times, in fact as recently as a decade or two ago, we have created a massive problem and source of suffering – a huge increase in people suffering agonizing pain.

So many forms of medical treatment can now keep people alive, but at the cost of continual pain. According to the National Institutes of Health, 17% of all Americans suffer severe pain intermittently, and 65% of those – 11% of the U.S. population – suffer daily, chronic, and severe pain. Yet while we have relatively effective forms of pain control for mild pain, the only substances currently effective for severe pain are opioid-based, and the problem with these is that with continued use, they become both addictive and less and less effective. So those in pain take more and more, and often mix those painkillers with alcohol, just so they can dull the pain and sleep, which is another reason why there are so many deaths as the result of combining alcohol and painkillers.

Yet this problem is scarcely recognized by most people. Nor is there any real recognition of why this pain problem has occurred. I certainly didn’t grasp its magnitude until recently, when more and more people I know ended up with excruciating pain. Instead, there’s an incredible push to stop the “overuse” and “abuse” of opioid painkillers. In my home state of Utah, the LDS Church effectively blocked even a modest piece of legislation that would have allowed the medical use of cannabis products and extracts [all specified as non-hallucinogenic]. The upshot of all these efforts appears to be that even terminally ill people are often being denied painkillers adequate to mitigate their suffering, but if they’re terminally ill, why worry about whether they’ll become addicted?

I’ve seen reports on promising new developments in non-addictive and non-hallucinogenic painkillers, but it will be years before any of them are widely available. In the meantime, what are we going to do for the more than 25 million Americans dealing with severe pain on an on-going basis? [And, no, I’m thankfully not one of them.]

Just tell them to hold on because we don’t want them addicted to opioids or marijuana?

Just as people have different tastes in food, they have different tastes in the “art” they enjoy and appreciate, and, for the most part, people tend to rate more highly art and food that they enjoy. I will submit that, while people should be allowed to enjoy what they enjoy in food and art, there are food dishes that are markedly superior to what most people would claim is “the best” and there are books, paintings, performances, and musical compositions that are superior to what is popular.

This past weekend I saw two performances of the opera Little Women [and, yes, there is such an opera] as performed by the local university’s opera theatre, which, in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit was produced and directed by my wife the professor. The opera was commissioned roughly twenty years ago by the Houston Opera, and when performed by the Houston Opera in 2000, was recognized as a masterpiece by The New York Times and other critics, and a television production was then done by the Houston Opera for the 2001 PBS Great Performances series. A few hundred people saw the university production, and the audience was very receptive and enthusiastic. The professional musicians who saw it rated it highly.

Three weeks before, some of the same singers participated in a choral extravaganza in the same theatre – and the music was all 1970s rock and roll. More than a 1,000 people filled the theatre, and the audience went wild. The professional musicians thought it was “fun,” but quite a number questioned why a university’s classical music program was putting on a rock and roll concert. The chorus director replied that it was to build support for the music program, and to increase attendance, despite the fact that the music program is designed for two groups of students – those who will teach the basics of music in secondary school and those who will play or sing professionally, either classically or semi-classically.

The vast majority of the people who attended the rock and roll concert did not attend the opera. I have no problems with that. Nor do I have problems with rock and roll concerts.

What I have a problem with is the tacit admission by the Music Department, by putting on both concerts, that rock and roll is on the same level of expertise and excellence as operas, symphonies, oratorios, art song, or chamber music. While I will admit that there are actually a handful of popular rock and roll and country music performers with excellent classical training, the vast majority couldn’t do vocally or instrumentally what most graduating seniors in the good music programs across the country do on a daily basis.

Liking what you like is fine, but popularity is not excellence, and that’s something that is getting lost more and more in a culture that rewards the bottom line far more than excellence.

As some of my readers might recall, way back last August, I made the observation that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would do far better than people realized, although at that time, I did express doubt that Trump would be able to capture the Republican nomination. While I had a better feel than most for the depth of anger, what I didn’t realize was how many Republicans would become literally too angry to think and how much they wanted to lash out at all politicians, regardless of what it might do to the country. The attitude of these voters is literally that they don’t care, that the country and the rich have screwed them, and that they’ll be damned if they’re going to vote for any “professional” politician.

I spent close to twenty years in politics, largely in Washington, D.C., and I loathe the “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” myth, the idea that all politicians are either up to something illegal or incompetent. In fact, most politicians are very good at voting what their constituents want. What almost no one wants to think about is that such lock-step voting is exactly what’s caused the current gridlock in Washington. Politicians who want to keep their jobs are well aware that voting against their constituency is likely to cost them their job. So they don’t. And no one can afford to compromise. And political views are polarized with enough strength on either side that not much can get done without compromise. The less that gets done, the angrier people are and the more likely they are to punish politicians who show the slightest hint of moderation. Yet with all the anger, a huge number of people react by becoming more extreme, totally failing to recognize that they – not the politicians – are the cause of the problem. In general, the politicians fall into one of two categories, those who are ambitious and unscrupulous in exploiting that extremism, or those who are true-believing extremists who glory in that extremism.

Along with this failure of recognition is that too many of these angry voters also fail to realize Donald Trump is in fact a consummate politician who has read the public mood far better than any of the “professional” Republican politicians and who is exploiting the wide-spread anger by appealing blatantly to those angry people and promising to do things that are either physically or financially impossible, unconstitutional or illegal, or just plain stupid – and the anger of those supporting Trump is so strong that his supporters either just don’t care, are truly ignorant of the impossibility of any of Trump’s promises being enacted, or believe that what Trump says is merely rhetoric to get him elected.

But then, being angry and venting makes so many of us feel better. The difficulty is that all that venting doesn’t solve the underlying problems, and, in this case, will only make them worse.