Some ten years ago, I attended a memorial service for a woman who had died from a heart attack – the last of a series over a year or so.  The church was filled to overflowing, and everyone had wonderful things to say about her.  She was excellent technically in the position she held, and, as a single woman, she had even fostered a wayward teen girl and tried to set her – and her daughter – on the path to a more productive life.  She worked hard and long at her job, and she was helpful to her colleagues. But she had one fault. She wasn’t averse to pointing out when she was given a stupid or non-productive assignment, and, worse, she was almost invariably accurate in her assessments.

The result?  Her superiors piled more and more work on her while effectively cutting her pay and status, and because she was in her late fifties or early sixties trying to support herself and two others, she had little choice but to keep working.  For whatever reason, the one colleague with whom she worked well had her job abolished – only to have it reinstated a year or so later and filled by a man [who didn’t last all that long, either].  Employees in other departments who tried to be advocates for her were either ignored or told that it was none of their business… and, besides, she brought it on herself because of her sharp tongue. After her first heart attack, as soon as she could, she went back to work because her position wasn’t covered by short-term disability insurance, and she was too young for Social Security.  She died, of course, some months later, after she’d lost her house and was living in a trailer.

Just another sad story, another one of the countless tales of people who have run afoul of adversity after adversity. Except… a goodly portion of those people who had offered tributes at her memorial service were the very people who had effectively undercut her and driven her to her death.

They praised her talents, but hated her honesty.  They praised her charity toward others, while practicing little toward her.  And, in the end, after the memorial service was over, she was quietly forgotten, and the once-wayward teen moved out of town, and life went on for the men who had driven an honest, if acerbic, woman to death.

Why do I remember these events?  Because, in reflecting on one woman’s death, I see them played out on a larger and larger scale, day after day, when the voices of honesty and reason are drowned in a sea of rhetoric, often quietly fomented by those who created so many of today’s major problems, especially the politicians and the financial community.  At the same time, no one with the power to resolve the situation wants to or to recognize the embarrassing facts about their part in creating the current problems… even while romanticizing the acts and deeds of deceased politicians with whom they often disagreed while paying lip service to hard-working Americans whose real wages have declined over the past decade.

But then, maybe calling the acts of the perpetrators and their subsequent rhetoric mere hypocrisy is too generous.

Tolerance of the unjust, the unequal, and the discriminatory is anything but a virtue, nor is fiction that brings to light such problems in society a vice.  Yet among some readers and reviewers there seems to be a dislike of work that touches upon such issues. Some have even gone so far as to suggest such fiction, in portraying accurately patterns of intolerance, inequality, and gender discrimination that such fiction, actually reinforces support of such behaviors.  Over the past few years, I’ve seen reviews and comments about my fiction and that of other writers denigrated because we’ve portrayed patterns of discrimination, either on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.  I certainly hope what I’ve seen are isolated incidences, but even if they are isolated incidences, I find them troubling, especially when readers or reviewers complain that illustrating in fiction what occurred either historically or continues to occur in present-day society constitutes some form of discrimination and showing how it operates is hateful and insulting.

Discrimination is hateful, insulting, and degrading, but pretending it doesn’t exist while preaching tolerance is merely a more tasteful way of discriminating while pretending not to do so… and that’s not only a form of discrimination, but also a form of hypocrisy. It somehow reminds me of those Victorians who exalted the noble virtues of family and morality and who avoided reading “unpleasant” books, while their “upstanding” life-style was supported at least in part by child-labor, union-breaking tactics that including brutality and firearms, and sweat-shop labor in which young women were grossly underpaid.

Are such conditions better than they were a century ago?  Of course they are – in the United States and much of the developed world.  But gender/sexual discrimination still exists even here – it’s just far more subtle – and it remains rampant in much of the developing and third world.  So… for a writer to bring up such issues, whether in historical or fantasy or futuristic science fiction is scarcely unrealistic, nor is it “preaching” anything.  To this day, Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country is often violently criticized – if seldom in “respectable” print, but often in male-oriented discussion – because it postulates a quietly feministically-dominated future society and portrays men as dominated by excessive aggression and sexual conquest, yet a huge percentage of fantasy has in fact historically portrayed men almost “heroically” in such a light. Why the criticism of writers such as Tepper?  Might it just be that too many readers, largely male, don’t like reading and seeing historically accurate patterns of sexual discrimination reversed?  And how much easier it is to complain about Tepper and others than to consider the past and present in our world today.

There’s an old saying about what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander…

A week or so ago, my trusty and ancient writing computer bit the dust, and I replaced it with a brand-new version, equipped with the latest version of Word.  After a fair amount of muttered expletives, I managed to figure out the peculiarities of the latest word processing miracle from Microsoft, or at least enough to do what I do.  Then I discovered that every time I closed the program, the new defaults for page setup and font that I’d established vanished when I opened the program.  My local techs couldn’t figure out why, but they did give me a support number for Microsoft.  The first tech was cheerful, and when we quickly established that I’d been doing all the right things, and she couldn’t figure it out either, she referred me to another tech.  In less than five minutes, he’d guided me through things and solved the problem – and it wasn’t my fault, but that of a piece of software installed by the computer manufacturer.  Word now retains my defaults, and we won’t talk about some of the other aspects of the program [since I’ve dwelt on those before].

All that brings me to the next incredible discovery – and that’s the blundering idiocy known as a grammar checker.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft people didn’t retain a wonderful feature of my old Word 7.0 – the separation of the spell-check and grammar features.  So… if I want to spell-check a document – which I do, because my typing is far from perfect – I must endure a grammar check.  Now… I wouldn’t mind an accurate grammar check, but what passes for a grammar check is an abomination for anyone who writes sentences more complex than subject-verb-object, and especially someone who likes a certain complexity in his prose. The truly stupid program [or programmers who wrote it] cannot distinguish between the subject in the main sentence and the subject in an embedded subordinate clause, and if one is plural and the other singular, it insists that the verb in the subordinate clause be changed to match the subject in the main sentence.

[It also doesn’t recognize the subjunctive, but even most copy-editors ignore that, so I can’t complain about that in a mere program.]  There are also a number of other less glaring glitches, but I’m not about to enumerate them all.

For me, all this isn’t a problem, although it’s truly an annoyance. But for all those students learning to write on computers it is a problem, especially since most of them have absolutely no idea about the basics of grammar, let alone about how to write correct complex sentences – and now we have a computer grammar-checking program that can only make the situation worse!

There are definitely times when “helpful” technology is anything but, and this definitely qualifies as such.

When I returned to Cedar City after going to the World Fantasy Convention in early November, I was surprised – and appalled – to find merchants, especially our single “big-box” chain store – busy replacing the Halloween displays and immediately putting up Christmas decorations and sales promotions.  There was little space or mention given to Thanksgiving.  And I wondered if this happened to be a mere local phenomenon.  Then I went on my whirlwind tour for Scholar and discovered that in all the cities I visited, the same thing was happening.  In fact, more than two weeks before Thanksgiving, I didn’t seen any commercial references to Thanksgiving, only to Christmas, and in most stores and malls Christmas music was playing.  Then I read where some merchants were pressing to begin the Christmas madness sales at midnight on Thanksgiving Day, forcing sales personnel to stay up all night or to do with little sleep – to cram in a few more hours of sales madness, pushing “black Friday” into Thanksgiving Thursday.

Years ago, I remember reading a short story by Fred Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” that was set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and, of course, I’m sure that many readers found that delightfully exaggerated back in 1956, when the story was first published, but Fred certainly anticipated a point we’ve almost reached.

To say that I find this trend disturbing would be an understatement.  Halloween and Christmas squeezing out Thanksgiving?  A Christmas buying season now beginning in October?

Yet, on reflection, it’s certainly understandable.  Thanksgiving was a holiday originally celebrated for giving thanks for having survived hard times and having attained modest prosperity.  And how many people really give thanks today?  After all, don’t we deserve all the goods and goodies we have?  Aren’t we entitled to them?  Then, too, Thanksgiving doesn’t put that much loot in the pockets of the merchants.  It’s a time for reflection and quiet celebration at home.  It requires personal time and preparation to be celebrated properly.  You just can’t go out and spend money and buy love or assuage your guilt with material gifts.  You have to consider what your blessings are, and what you’re thankful for… and reflect upon those who don’t have much for which to be thankful.

Christmas and Halloween have much in common in current American culture.  They’ve become all about the goodies – both for the consumer and the merchants… and both our son, who manages an upscale men’s fashion outlet in New York City and my editor have made the point that the comparative success or failure of the year depends on how much they sell in the “Christmas” season.  They’re certainly not alone, and many jobs, and the earnings of many workers, depend on such sales.  Yet, the economic health of a nation depending on holiday conspicuous consumption?  That’s frightening in itself. Add to that that such consumption is crowding out times of personal family reflection and an appreciation of what we do have for a frenzy devoted to what we don’t have.

Economic necessity or not… couldn’t we still reserve a small space of dedicated time for Thanksgiving between the buying and selling frenzy?

After finishing a whirlwind tour – seven cities and some of their suburbs in seven days – I’ve seen a trend I noticed years ago becoming even stronger… and more than a little disturbing.  Once upon a time, books were so expensive and hard to come by that only the very wealthy possessed more than a few, and most people had none.  Libraries were few and reserved effectively for the well-off, because few of those less than well-off could read or could manage access to them.

What does that have to do with today or my tour?

Only the fact that, despite such innovations as ebooks and e-readers, in a subtle yet substantive way we’re on a path toward the past in so far as books are concerned.  Yes, millions of books are printed and millions are now available, or soon will be, in electronic formats, but obtaining access to those books is actually becoming more and more difficult for an increasing percentage of the population across the United States.  With the phase-out of small mall bookstores, more than 2,000 bookstores that existed thirty years ago are now gone.  While they were initially replaced by some 1300 “big-box” bookstores, with the collapse and disappearance of Borders and consolidation by other chains, the numbers of chain bookstores has now dropped at least 25%, if not more, in the last few years.  Add to that the number of independent bookstores that have closed, and the total shrinkage in bookstores is dramatic.

Unhappily, there’s another aspect of this change that’s far worse.  Overwhelming numbers – over 90%  – of large bookstores in the United States are situated in “destination” locations, invariably near or in wealthy areas of cities and suburbs, reachable easily only by automobile.  At the same time, funding for public and school libraries is declining drastically, and, in many cases, funds for books are slim or non-existent and have been for years.

But what about electronic books… ebooks?

To read an ebook, one needs an e-reader of some sort, or a computer.  In these economically straitened times, adults and children from less affluent backgrounds, especially those near or below the poverty level, have difficulty purchasing an e-reader, let alone ebooks. Somehow, this fact tends to be overlooked, again, as if reading might not even be considered a problem for the economically disadvantaged

In the seven cities I visited on my recent book tour, every single chain bookstore or large independent was located in or adjacent to an affluent area. Not a single major bookstore remains in less affluent areas.  As I mentioned in a much earlier blog, this is not a new pattern, but the trend is becoming almost an absolute necessity, apparently, for new bookstore locations. Yet who can blame the bookstores? Small mall bookstores aren’t nearly so profitable as trendy clothes retailers, and most mall rents are based on the most profitable stores. Hard times in the book industry have resulted in the closure of unprofitable stores, and those stores are almost invariably located in less affluent areas. These economic realities also affect the WalMart and grocery store book sections as well.  In particular, grocery retailers in less affluent areas are less likely to carry books at all.

But no matter what the reason, what the economic considerations may be, when a city and suburbs totaling more than two million people have less than ten major bookstores, with only one major independent, and all of those stores are located in economically well-off areas, I can’t help but worry that we are indeed on a road to a past that we shouldn’t be revisiting.