More than a few people know the poem “Ozymandias,” written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which in the days of my youth was part of the English curriculum, not only because Shelley wrote it, but because the poem was considered a parable about how fame and fortune vanish over time.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

What fewer people know is that Shelley and his friend Horace Smith each wrote a poem on the same subject over the Christmas holidays in 1817, and both were published at different times. But where did they come up with the name Ozymandias? In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (1279 –1213 BC), who definitely left a great deal of statuary behind.

Interestingly enough, the poem (or poems) convey stylistically an impression of the loneliness and singularity of such an occurrence, when, in fact, more than a few cities great in their time have totally vanished, with numerous references to their existence, but no present trace of their location. The latest issue of Archaeology contains an article on ten cities of the ancient world that have not yet been located, including Agade, the capitol of the Akkadian Empire; Tarhuntasha, the one-time capitol of the Hittite Empire; Serai, the capitol of the Golden Horde; and Wanggeom-seong, the capitol of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom.

In addition, almost every issue of Archaeology or Current World Archaeology seems to contain a reference to yet another empire or city (and not just small towns) recently discovered, one of the latest being an extensive urban area in Amazonia revealed by lidar scans.

In fact, one could even say that homo sapiens’ desire to be remembered is only matched by how much rubble we’ve left behind, with so few individuals actually memorialized and recalled over the ages.

Some authors would say that you have to write to please yourself, at least to some degree, because it’s almost impossible to put in the effort and skill that’s necessary to write a novel if you dislike what you’re writing. While that’s accurate, as far as it goes, if you want to be a successfully published writer, your work has to appeal to an audience larger than yourself, and most likely larger than just people like you.

One best-selling writer has created a person in his mind, for whom he writes. He has crafted that person lovingly and in depth, from where she works and what she does precisely at that job, what kind of food she enjoys, what jokes she finds amusing, down to what NFL team her husband roots for. That obviously works that writer, given his sales.

Another published writer tends to tailor each book to a specific person, or occasionally to a type of person. Another might write for a circle of friends… or for his or her writing group.

Some writers obviously “write for the market,” consciously or unconsciously adapting or mimicking wildly popular books, as is obvious from the flood of vampire novels and the number of Tolkien knockoffs. The problem with that approach is that more often than not the imitation is usually not as good as the original. There are exceptions, but they’re rare.

For whatever reason, I never really asked myself who I was writing for. I just wanted to write, although initially my creative efforts were in poetry. When I started writing science fiction, I concentrated on telling a good story with at least some measure of uniqueness. And, as I’ve related elsewhere, when I turned to fantasy, I wanted to write it with economic, technical, and human “realism.”

Along the way, I was asked what my “target” audience was, something I’d never considered defining. When I actually thought about the matter, I realized exactly who I was writing for – and that was for readers who could think and who wanted more “depth” in their fiction.

Some of that depth, I admit, was for me as much as for my readers, as when, in The Elysium Commission, I buried snippets of John Donne’s poetry in the book – since the main character is a consultant/problem-solver-for-hire named Blaine Donne. But there’s far more than meets the eye or the casual read in most of my work, although much of what I write can be enjoyed without having to know or recognize the depth. Not always, however, as in Quantum Shadows, The One-Eyed Man, or Haze.

Donald Trump now selling Bibles? That sounds like a Bill Maher far-out parody or a Saturday Night Live caricature or an Onion headline.

Apparently, it’s neither, but something that’s actually occurring.

Trump hawking Bibles is like Satan endorsing the Almighty or Iblis selling the Koran.

We all know that the Donald is willing to do anything to make a buck, or to avoid paying anyone he doesn’t have to, but Trump selling “God Bless the USA” Bibles might be his greatest feat of hypocrisy yet.

On the other hand, it also might be, in a strange way, the most honest thing he’s ever done, because it blatantly declares that he has no regard for honesty or ethics whatsoever… or for the tenets of the faith that so many of his followers profess to follow.

It also shows the absolute stupidity, gullibility, and/or hypocrisy of his evangelical followers. Trump has broken every one of the Ten Commandments and now is trying to profit from their faith. In addition, he’s also broken the commandment that “you shall have no other God before me,” because, in TrumpWorld, there is no other god but Trump.

Not that any of this matters to the sheep who follow him blindly, as did the clueless children who followed the Pied Piper. Nor does it seem to matter to the majority of Republican officeholders, many of whom privately despise Trump, but who don’t have either the guts or the integrity to oppose him.

I just looked through the latest edition of The Atlantic and discovered an article discussing why popular perceptions about the state of the economy don’t match the statistics. The bottom line in the article was that the statistics don’t match “the reality” the average person sees.

Inflation may have leveled out, but the higher prices it caused remain, particularly for food and home utilities. Also, interest rates for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards are still much higher than five years ago.

Duuh!

I pointed this out four months ago [ https://www.lemodesittjr.com/2023/11/15/prices-vs-inflation-statistics/]

There’s another aspect of this as well. It’s not just about asking the right questions, but asking the right people.

I’m well aware of the increase in food prices, because I’m the one who does the grocery shopping, but I suspect that, in most households, it’s more likely to be a woman who does the shopping… and who’s the angriest about those higher prices.

Some costs don’t hit some people. Someone younger who’s renting or house-hunting is definitely going to be unhappy about the prices of houses or rents. Someone with a fixed low-rate mortgage or who’s paid off the mortgage won’t be as concerned, although they may balk at the price of electricity or natural gas. Likewise, someone trying to get a college education or an advanced degree – or parents helping a young adult – will be more directly impacted than someone not having to worry about education costs.

And, as I pointed out earlier, many of the costs that worry people aren’t fully factored into the “favorable” economic statistics, which is why so many people don’t believe the numbers.

But I do wonder why those smart writers at The Atlantic took so long to figure it out, though.

For the past several years, Republicans, especially far-right Republicans, have trumpeted “immigrant crime” as a massive problem, using specific incidents as an illustration of the magnitude of the problem.

There’s one “small” problem with this claim. U.S.-born citizens are far more likely to commit horrendous crimes than immigrants.

Yes, some immigrants do commit crimes, and once in a while those crimes are horrendous. But a study co-led by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jácome and conducted by a team of economists found that over the past 150 years immigrants were consistently less likely commit crimes than people born in the U.S. They also found beginning in 1960, gap between immigrants and U.S.- born citizens increased enough that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be criminally imprisoned than the U.S.-born.

In another similar study, Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky and his co-authors also found that for the last 140 years imprisonment for crimes was markedly lower for immigrants, and that, today, immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white. And when the analysis was expanded to include Black Americans — whose prison rates are higher than the general population — the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is still more than 55 percent lower than of people born in the United States.

So, if the average immigrant is more law-abiding than the average U.S. citizen, why are the Republicans getting away with blaming crime on immigrants, and why have so many Americans bought into this myth for more than a century?

There are many good reasons to restrict immigration, beginning with the simple fact that the U.S. doesn’t have the resources to process the number of people trying to enter the United States, or that we should be allowing more talented immigrants who follow the rules, but claiming that immigrants increase criminality isn’t one of them.