According to the dictionary, moral behavior is “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior” and “holding or manifesting high principles for proper conduct.”

And certainly the Founding Fathers were definitely concerned about moral behavior, even if their focus was initially on white male property holders and proper (and submissive) wives, but over time that focus expanded to include women, and after the Civil War, and especially after the Civil Rights Act, minorities as well.

But what is “right behavior” or “proper conduct?” Certainly, for the first hundred and fifty years of the United States, there was an emphasis on morality, excessive at times, but without doubt there was a difference between moral and immoral behavior, and there were unspoken standards for such behavior. Even when people didn’t meet those standards, the standards remained, generally applicable to society as whole.

Those standards weren’t just confined to criminality, but to all aspects of life. In additional to being law-abiding, being “moral” required public politeness to everyone, certain standards of attire appropriate to the locale and situation, charity toward those less fortunate, at least a nod to a higher power, respect for those in authority, and polite language in public. Underlying this was the tacit or unconscious realization that such “morality” was important to hold society together.

For various reasons, this more traditional understanding of civic morality has largely vanished, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump, who, by any definition, is totally immoral and who even proposed suspending the Constitution if it suited his purposes.

Equally disturbing is the change in attitudes of younger Americans. A long-standing survey of incoming college students shows a disturbing pattern. In 1967, about 85% said that their principal goal was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2000, only 42% said that, while the majority said being financially well off was their goal, and by 2015, 82% of students said wealth was their principal aim in life.

Interestingly enough, over recent years, Americans have also become less charitable. In 2000, over two-thirds of households have to charity, but by 2018, that percentage was just below fifty percent.

While the Constitution clearly established both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, right-wing “Christians” have become increasingly vocal and effective in passing laws based on their beliefs in an effort to force their beliefs on others, failing to recognize that a society that imposes one set of religious values on the entire population by law is not a moral society, but an immoral tyranny.

While “traditional” morality had quite a few flaws, it also held the precept, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” something that current society, especially the extremists, also seems to have discarded and replaced with “me first, no matter what.”

Recently, with all the publicity surrounding the charges against Donald Trump, there’s been a great deal of commentary on a “two-tiered” system of justice, where those with fame and money are treated far differently that those without either. That’s indisputable. It’s also always been the case – anywhere in the world.

What seems to get overlooked is just how long it takes for so many criminal cases even to get to trial. Recently, a CBS News investigation uncovered a massive backlog of court cases. Data from courts and district attorneys’ offices in more than a dozen major American cities showed that “pending” criminal cases jumped from 383,879 in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to 546,727 in 2021. In California, New York, Florida and Michigan, the number of “pending” cases in 2021 totaled nearly 1.3 million.

The indictments against former President Donald Trump join a major backlog of cases, since Trump’s case in the D.C. federal district court is just one of the more than 6,000 pending criminal cases there. Trump may be the best known, but he’s far from the first defendant charged in connection with crimes related to the 2020 election. More than 1,069 people have been charged with crimes related to Jan. 6, which the indictment says Trump’s actions helped fuel.

But this isn’t just a Washington, D.C., problem. In one Georgia case, a man charged in a shooting spent ten years in pre-trial detention, finally had his case heard, with the result that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, leaving the defendant facing another trial. Even in Utah, the current case backlog in just the state courts is over 10,000 cases.

In many cases, defendants spend more time in pre-trial detention than they potentially could serve if convicted. Is it any wonder that some innocent (usually minority) defendants who are unable to make bail “plead out”, rather than spend months in detention before trial? It’s also why many who are convicted get “credit” for time already served.

But whether it’s Trump or someone we’ve never heard of, waiting months, or even years, to even get to trial is a disgrace… and suggests that our justice system is anything but just, since the poorest are the ones most penalized by such seemingly endless waiting – except in the case of Trump, where he hopes waiting will allow him to escape justice.

The ultra-conservatives and many in the right wing of Republican party tout all sorts of conspiracies, including 9/11 being a clandestine government operation, the “liberal” deep state (with various acts purportedly associated), the “stealing” of the 2020 election,” that the January 6th insurrection was an antifa operation, that liberals, including Hillary Clinton, ran a child porn operation, and that Joe Biden is the head of a family crime ring.

There are, however, significant problems with all these purported conspiracies, principally that not a shred of hard provable evidence exists to back up any of them, despite years and years of trying to find any hard evidence — and this is in a country that can’t keep anything secret for long and where cellphone photos are everywhere.,

Yet, despite the lack of hard evidence beyond unprovable rumors and repeated lies, the true believers in all these “conspiracies” persevere in their beliefs.

What’s so amazing about all of them is that they ignore the biggest conspiracy of all – that Donald Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. So far, Trump has been indicted and arrested on ninety-one criminal counts in four separate jurisdictions so far, on both state and federal charges. He’s currently out on bail, awaiting all those trials.

And there’s plenty of evidence, unlike in all the Republican conspiracy theories. We have Trump being recorded asking an election official to find him over 11,800 votes, and his attorneys documented as fabricating false slates of electors. There’s video and documentary of him retaining classified information, as well as paying hush money to a porn star not to reveal their sexual encounters.

And, oh yes, Trump’s even lost a civil case involving his sexual assault on a woman.

None of this is speculation. There are thousands of pages of documentation, as well as hundreds of video images.

Yet the right-wing conspiracy types not only insist that Trump didn’t nothing wrong, but they’ve gone so far as buying mug-shot mugs and donating even more millions of dollars to Trump.

All the evidence in the world won’t change their support of Trump, not surprisingly, since, where Trump’s concerned, those who actually have minds lost them long ago.

From even before the founding of the United States, Americans, in general, have been an impatient lot, and technology has made us even more impatient. With the arrival of cellphones, Amazon, and the internet, more and more people want what they want now, regardless of reality.

My wife, the music professor, encounters this all the time, with students who just want to Google an answer or who want to sing better instantly. They don’t want to hear that learning how to work out the answer develops skills that they need. Nor do they understand that it takes time to train muscles to produce the best singing, or to learn music – because, whether in a musical or in opera, you can’t Google the music while you’re on stage.

But the problems of wanting instant results also bleed into other areas. A few years ago, if you had the money – or the financing – you could go to a car dealer or other sources and get a car of your choice, or close to it, in days, if not hours. Now, depending on the make and model, people may have to wait months. Assembling parts and systems to produce a car takes most manufacturers around two workdays, but what gets overlooked is that the average car consists of around 30,000 parts, which come from different sources, and all of those parts take time to manufacture and ship to the assembly plant, and after assembly, the finished car has to be transported to a dealer. But until COVID disrupted the supply of certain critical computer chips, very few people understood or cared how long the entire process for building a car took. They just paid their money or financing and got a vehicle quickly.

Most products – even produce – get to the end consumer in a similar fashion, and most consumers don’t give the slightest thought to the process, or to the fact that nothing of value is produced instantly, even information on the internet.

The problem arises when there are glitches in the system… or when the system can’t produce the desired results. But the present system is relatively recent, especially historically.

I’m old enough to remember when the only items most people bought on credit were homes and cars. I didn’t even get a credit card until several years after I graduated from college, and in those times, it was difficult for women to get credit cards in their own names. Most people could only get what they could pay for in cash or check, and often you had to save for a time to afford large purchases.

Credit cards and then the internet changed all that, and, curmudgeon that I am, I’m not so sure that the instant credit and purchase system serves most people all that well, especially given the massive growth in personal debt and the seemingly ever-growing anger when instant gratification is denied.

As with many, if not most, of my books, the “reviewer” reviews of Contrarian include those reviewers who often review me but didn’t, to those who didn’t like the book very much, to those who liked it, and those who liked it very much.

As some readers may know, more than thirty years ago, after having published eight novels and nine short stories, all science fiction, over the previous seventeen years, I took on a new challenge, that of writing a fantasy novel with at least semi-realistic economics and politics, and a logical and internally consistent magic system integrated within the economics and politics of that world. That novel was, of course, The Magic of Recluce.

At that time (1989), there were few fantasy novels that even attempted the goals I set out. And then, and even today, many readers were looking for escapism unconstrained by reality. In either arrogance or naivete, if not both, I thought it was possible to write a fantasy novel with realistic people, economics, politics, and logical magic that some readers would buy and enjoy, and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve done so repeatedly, or at least come close.

But along the way, I’ve come to realize that many of the readers and even some professional reviewers who reject more “realistic” fantasies don’t reject them because they’re realistic, but because they don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, certain aspects of the real world.

That’s why one reviewer of the Grand Illusion books can term them taut political thrillers while another rejects them as boring and unrealistic, why one person smiles knowingly when reading about a seemingly boring vote on agricultural subsidies or “incidental” appropriations and another puts down the book.

In the end, how interesting and exciting a book is – or isn’t – depends not just on the author, but also what the reader brings to the book… or doesn’t.