Corruption is, in some form or another, endemic to human societies and has been throughout history. The only question seems to be in what forms it exists and to what degree it impacts societies and individuals.

At present, the United States is facing a heated political issue over immigration, but what I find disheartening about the debate is that it is centered almost entirely on the symptoms of a larger set of problems, rather than on the problems themselves.  The estimated eleven million illegal immigrants that have flooded into the entire United States, but especially into and through the American Southwest are a problem, yes, but they’re symptoms of a far larger set of problems that the majority of individuals and politicians are ignoring with various phrases along the lines of, “We have to stop the illegal immigration and deal with it first before we can address the other problems.”

Duh!  Given that we share a border of over 2,000 miles with Mexico, there is no cost-effective and practical way to seal that border.  Doing so will require spending tens of billions of dollars erecting and manning guard towers and shooting people – or doing the equivalent with RPVs and technology.  Among other things, I really don’t like the idea of the United States, the land of the free, being reduced to creating the western equivalent of the Berlin Wall, while instituting a police state within those walls to determine who’s here “legally” and who’s not.

The second problem is that it’s still not likely to work, because the pressures that have created that massive flow of immigrants still remain and are increasing. One of those pressures, like it or not, is that a significant percentage of the Mexican government, especially on the local level, is so corrupt that the drug cartels are often considered more honest and reliable than the government. The associated problem is that the drug cartels operate one of the most profitable lines of business in the world – and the most affluent customers in the largest single national market happen to be Americans.  Because corruption in Latin America has rendered government often powerless, the various cartels are fighting for market share of the drug market there – and in parts of the American Southwest – and unlike American commercial enterprises, they’re fighting for that market share with guns and bullets.

One of the other aspects of governmental corruption is a proliferation of paperwork, regulations, etc., that cannot be surmounted except through some sort of bribery.  This makes any sort of business growth extremely difficult, and often dangerous, and without business growth the economy and people suffer.  While the United States has its share of regulations and paperwork, our form of “bribery” is a “legal” combination of bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians [it’s more complex than this, but the extended principles still hold in the more complex reality of U.S. commerce and law].  We have more bureaucrats than we ought to have because, without them, we’ve discovered over our history, the business and moneyed interests have tended to work people into an early grave under unsafe conditions.  To combat the excessive zeal of the bureaucrats, we have attorneys.  And we have politicians, who respond to both campaign contributions and voter ire.  It’s frankly, a form of legalized bribery and interest pandering,  but it does get the job done without having every petty official demanding a bribe under the threat of shutting down a business or sending someone to jail for violating this or that minor rule.  It also tends to keep competing for consumer dollars and market share confined to the economic arena and political arenas, rather than fighting it out with guns.

The problem is that, for whatever reason, very few Latin American governments have been able to institutionalize within a legal framework the power-struggles of competing interests or to control “corruption,” and as the economic stakes get higher and higher, so does the level of violence.  Thus, given the increasing lack of safety in Mexico, the ever-increasing number of deaths and kidnappings, not to mention the lack of economic opportunity, is it any wonder that people want to leave?  And since the problems exist to some degree or another in all too many Latin America countries, what destination is the logical choice?

“Merely” building a wall won’t solve the problems.  Nor will ignoring the fact that one of the driving factors behind all this is the apparently insatiable appetite of Americans for illegal drugs.  The United States imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation in the world, the vast majority these days for drug-related offenses, and all that imprisonment doesn’t seem to have put more than a small dent in the drug trade.

So… in a very real sense, our own “drug corruption” is fueling the chaos and fighting over drug market share in Mexico and the American Southwest… which in turn fuels the pressures for immigration to the United States.  [To be continued]

For several years now, various prophets have predicted that e-books would be the wave of the future, and… lo and behold, Amazon.com has just recently announced that for the first time ever for some period, e-books outsold hardcovers.  It’s to be expected that Amazon would be the first outlet to report such news, given Amazon’s emphasis on e-books and its own Kindle, and given Amazon’s appeal to the tech-savvy readers. But what exactly does this mean?

Is it the great revolution in publishing… or a sign of the end of culture in the United States and the rest of the western world?  Of course, the obvious reply to such an absurd question would be neither… but I’m not so sure that the rise of e-books doesn’t contain some elements of each.

The rise in e-book sales, especially given the marketing models and patterns in the publishing industry, is going to have a very hefty impact on true professional full-time authors, and by that I mean those authors who make their living solely by writing.  That impact is already being felt, and it’s anything but positive.  Moreover, the e-book impact is being exacerbated by other social trends, most notably the marked decrease in paperback book sales.  According to my sources in the publishing industry, initial paperback book print runs in the F&SF are averaging 40-60% fewer copies being printed than was the case for comparable books ten years ago.  Even noted “mainstream authors” who sell millions of paperback books are seeing significant drops in paperback book sales numbers.

Now that e-books are being made available, at least in my case and that of other authors, on the same day as hardcovers, any e-book sale that replaces a hard-cover sale results in a direct drop in income for the author.  Depending on the author’s royalty rates and sales numbers, that drop in income could be as little as 10 cents per copy or as high as $2.60 per copy.  As for paperback books, the impact varies by when the e-book is sold, because the agency model has a declining price for the e-book over time.  In general, however, authors will theoretically make more money by selling e-books than paperback books.  That’s because for the first year or so, when paperback sales are generally the highest, the e-book royalty rate may result in a higher per copy return to the author than from a paperback.  The problem here, though, lies in three unanswered questions.  First, how much will piracy reduce paying hardcover, paperback, and e-book sales?  Second, will all retailers report accurately “straight” download sales?  In the case of paperbacks, there is inventory control because the retailer either has to pay for the book or return the stripped cover for a return refund.  Physical items provide for a check against intentional undercounting.  What checks exist for an electronic item with no physical presence?  Third, what happens after several years when the e-book price drops to essentially nothing?  At that point, the author’s backlist sales revenues plummet, and the so-called “long-tail” provides far less revenue than would a paperback.

The other problem is the proliferation of “reader” platforms.  Until or unless this situation is rectified and standardized formats compatible across readers are instituted, there will be very few independent electronic “small presses.”

Based on what I’ve seen so far, although it’s likely to take several years to sort itself out, the combination of e-books and existing reading/publishing trends is going to result in an increasing decline in the number of midlist authors who are able to support themselves by writing, as well as a decline in the income of A-list writers.

As for the impact on reading and cultural trends… that’s an area where there are far fewer hard facts, but I speculate, and it’s purely speculation at this point, that the results will be mixed.  The screen readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook and all the others, are already a boon to older readers because they can enlarge the type, and more and more older readers are finding this greatly increases what is available for them to read.  Since these readers are more interested, in general, in reading than in whipping through stripped-down action novels and the like, they will support to some degree continuation of more traditional books.  On the other hand, a considerable number of the younger generations, who are more likely to be involved in screen-multi-tasking, already have manifested a certain impatience with novelistic complexity that isn’t reflected in “action” magic or technology.  Whether this will result in even greater pressure for action-oriented simplicity in the e-book market remains to be seen, but the vampire/supernatural crazes in bookselling suggests strongly that may well be the case.

As with most revolutions, a lot of innocents are going to be affected, and not necessarily positively, from readers to writers to small publishers… and I’ve probably only touched the surface here.

Years ago, there was a story in ANALOG about a “political engineer” who, despite his engineering degree, knew little about engineering and who had reached a position of power in his organization because of his “political” and “administrative” expertise – who dies when his undersea dome implodes on him because he didn’t understand that there are indeed times when subject matter expertise is vital.  I was reminded of this when reading Sunday’s New York Times education section, which documented the growth of professional administrative staff members in U.S. colleges and universities.  During the time period from 1976 to 2008, the number of professional administrative employees has doubled – from 42 such employees for every 1,000 students to 84, while the number of full-time faculty has dropped from 65 to 55 professors for every thousand students.  Put another way, more than 60% of college employees are not involved in actually teaching students, and the numbers often exceed 70% at private colleges and universities, whereas thirty years ago, those percentages were reversed.

Now… I’m probably very old-school, but I do have the belief that higher education ought to focus on educating students, imparting both knowledge and understanding, and for all the lengthy and considerable rationalizations for the need of more administrative personnel, I think such rationalizations are largely just that – a way of justifying positions and excessive administrative salaries.  At the colleges and universities with which I’m somewhat familiar, the majority of “administrative” personnel above the clerical level – and that number is considerable – make salaries well in excess of actual professors of similar age and experience [except for business department professors, who apparently live in a la-la land of their own, despite the rather dubious record of this discipline in the real world in recent years].

One critical point seems to be continually overlooked – all that administration isn’t what teaches students.  In fact, all those administrators create more non-teaching workloads on faculty rather than easing faculty workloads.  The number of reports, assessments, committee assignments, etc., placed on college and university faculty has possibly quintupled over the past generation – and those reports and assessments not only haven’t improved the quality of teaching, but have decreased it, because they reward faculty who are politically and administratively adept over those who are most adept at teaching and they take time away from actually pursuing greater scholarship and improving teaching skills by requiring more and more forms and assessments for the administrators.

So… while recent reports have surfaced showing that, despite all the advertising, British Petroleum has collected something like 97% of all the “severe” violations for shortcomings in offshore drilling, their political and administrative experts have been busy trying to convince the world that their engineering shortcomings are merely “unavoidable risks” of drilling.  All hail the political engineers!

Likewise… despite study after study that shows the single key factor in effective education is the level of subject matter expertise and the capability of the individual professor, colleges and universities have consistently short-changed the teaching faculties to support an ever-increasing administrative structure.  All hail the administrative educators!

And… when, exactly, if ever, will we stop rewarding excessive administrative growth and get back to rewarding actual skill and accomplishment in doing rather than administrating?

The other day I happened to catch a few minutes of the disaster mega-epic 2012.  A few minutes were all it took to remind me why I don’t, and shouldn’t, watch such cinematic giant-buttered-popcorn features.  I may not have all the details precisely correct, but that shouldn’t matter much because those details are so hugely and absurdly wrong in the first place – and, yes, there will be a point to all this, but after I first present those absurdities.

From what the section of the movie I did watch showed, Earth is doomed to disaster in the year 2012 because the Earth’s crust will shift, but around China as a pivot point [no, I don’t know why China was used, except that it seems to further the plot] so that great arks can be built for select humans in China and in great secrecy — and underground as well.  These two points alone are beyond merely dubious.

Taking the second one first… we can’t even spend enough to restart the space program or rebuild our highway bridges and infrastructure…and we’re going to be able to build something that no one outside of China knows about costing tens of hundreds of billions of dollars?  And the Chinese will cooperate when all they have to do is nothing to end up, literally, on top of the world?  I won’t mention, except in passing, the scenes where helicopters ferry elephants and giraffes dangling beneath them over frozen mountains in the last hour before disaster hits China or driving Bentleys out of the cargo hatches of aircraft landing in icy mountain valleys.

The first point is the one that truly frightens me, because it reveals how little either Hollywood or most people understand about the world, and plate tectonics in particular is just one example.  There are continuing references to the Earth’s crust shifting something like 23 degrees and thousands of miles, and I suspect this part of the movie had its genesis in a pseudo-scientific thriller of more than 20 years ago entitled The HAB Theory.  Such a gigantic shift in hours is not only technically impossible, but if it did occur, there wouldn’t be much life left anywhere above the microscopic or very small cellular level.  There certainly wouldn’t be mere huge fissures running alongside McCaran Airport in Las Vegas, and the earthquakes wouldn’t be a “mere” 9.4 on the Richter scale.

A “mere” tectonic plate shift of a few yards in the right place can generate an earthquake of over 7.0.  It’s estimated that the earthquake that dropped the land around Seattle some twenty plus yards some 800 years ago[as I recall reading] might have been over 8.0, and if a similar quake occurred today, there would likely be nothing of size or significance left standing within fifty miles of MicroSoft headquarters.  Comparatively TINY shifts in the earth’s crust and continental plates, resulting from shifts over years, if not centuries, result in massive damage.  You certainly wouldn’t need even a single degree of shifting of the Earth’s crust to level everything and destroy any vestige of culture and civilization.

But, of course, a shift of a single degree just doesn’t sound cataclysmic enough for Hollywood or the consumers of giant-hot-buttered-popcorn cinema.  Is it any wonder that no one gets upset over the prospect of a few degrees of global warming… or that they can’t understand that those mere few degrees of increased temperature would result in inundating every major port city in the world?

Or… put another way… little things do mean a lot, something that’s so hard to get across in a world obsessed with the titanic… or the apparently titanic.

This past weekend, my wife and I watched Local Color, a movie presented as a true-to- life story of a summer in the early life of artist John Talia, when he was mentored by the Russian-born impressionist artist Nikoli Seroff – except that it’s not… exactly.  It took a while to track down the story behind the story, and it turns out that “John Talia” is actually George Gallo, the director of the movie, who did begin as an art student, but not of “Seroff,” but of the Lithuanian-born impressionist George Cherepov.  The use of the name Seroff was also confusing, because there was also a Viktor Seroff who was a scholar of the relationship between impressionism in art and in music.  Like “Talia,” director Gallo believes in representational art, and like the fictionalized “Talia,” after stints in Hollywood as a director, he was recognized as good enough to have his artwork featured in well-known New York City galleries.

The movie was shot on a literal shoestring, with most of the actors doing it for love and little else.  It never got wide distribution and received very mixed reviews, ranging from five stars downward.  While I enjoyed and appreciated it, in some ways the discovery that it was “fictionalized” bothered me far more than any short-comings it may have had, although I didn’t find many.  On the one hand, I can see why Gallo may have wanted to fictionalize the names, particularly his own, but by doing so, in essence, what could have been, and should have been, a tribute to Cherepov was lost in the process of creating an “image” of sorts.

I tend to be disturbed by the entire “image-making” process anyway, because the process of image-making obscures, if not totally distorts, the facts behind the “image.”  Certainly, such image-making is hardly new to human society and culture, although the power of modern technology makes it far, far easier.  Still, even in American culture, the images have run rampant over the truth, and in the process, often make heroes out of one man while ignoring the greater accomplishments of another in the same situation.  In “A Sacred Poet,” an article published more than thirty years ago in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov noted that, because of the popular poem, written in 1863 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, most people believe that Paul Revere was the hero who warned the America colonists of the imminent British attack on Concord.  While that warning did indeed result in a colonial victory, it wasn’t delivered by Revere at all, because he was caught by a British patrol, but by Dr. Samuel Prescott.  Yet Longfellow’s poem about the “ride of Paul Revere” created a lasting image of Revere as the heroic rider who warned the Americans, and that image has effectively trumped history for more than a century.

Every American presidential campaign is an exercise in image-making, and generally, the more successful the campaign, the more distorted the image… and the greater the potential for loss of popular and political support when facts to the contrary eventually leak out and become widely-known.

Perhaps George Cherepov was even less likeable than “Nikoli Seroff,” and George Gallo didn’t want to misrepresent the real artist. Or perhaps… who knows?  But it still bothers me, I have to say.