To begin with, let me preface what follows with several disclaimers. First, I am a registered Republican and have been my entire adult life, even serving in the Reagan Administration. Second, I’m what one might call a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” and more than a little disenchanted with and appalled by the current Republican “leadership” — which can be better described as “followership of the far right.” Third, I have six very professional daughters and an extremely successful professional wife.

All that said, I’m absolutely disgusted with the media and all the pundits who have hounded and pounced on Hillary Clinton because she questioned an inquiry about what “President Clinton” thought and pointed out that she was the secretary of state, not her husband. Media talking head after media talking head has claimed that this was a gaffe, carelessness, a serious mistake, etc., and even blamed her for distracting from the great health care debate.

Telling the truth — a serious mistake? Are we still mired in the mindset of 1890 where a woman’s opinion means less than her husband’s? Where, when a woman points out the blatantly obvious, it’s a gaffe and a mistake? Where a woman is not allowed to show a certain irritation with such a question? Where an honest response is immediately attributed to being “over-tired”?

The media reaction demonstrates, once again, that even the so-called liberal media, who flaunt their liberalism and their supposed lack of bias, are still imbued with a “liberal” amount of male chauvinism, and some of those who exhibit it are unfortunately women. Yes, the “liberal media” tended to champion Barrack Obama in the last election, but looking at history reveals another story. Black men received the right to vote — however hemmed in that right was by wide-spread prejudice, narrow-minded custom, and outright lawlessness — before women did, and the supposedly more liberal political party of the United States just one year ago decided that a black man was preferable to a white woman as the party nominee for president. The amount of criticism faced by now-Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor in her confirmation process emphasized as much the fact that she was a woman as a Latino, although the feminine aspect was clouded by almost always linking “Latino” and “woman.”

Should it be surprising that women may not reach the same decisions under law as do men, even when they have the same education? We are all products of our backgrounds, genders, educations, and experience. While I don’t agree with all the decisions rendered by Justice Sotomayor, frankly, I don’t agree with all the decisions made by other Justices, either. That divergence of opinion is exactly why the Founding Fathers created a Supreme Court with nine members, not one, or a lesser number, so that differing views could indeed be factored into interpreting the law.[Note: I stand corrected. The original number of justices was five, and then varied from six to five to ten until 1869, when it was fixed at nine, although Franklin Roosevelt tried to add more justices.] And why, exactly, are the decisions made by men automatically assumed to be correct? After all, it was nine men who once affirmed the “constitutional legality” of segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision that affirmed segregation and stood almost sixty years in error, a decision by a Court that has had exactly two black jurists and three women in its entire history.

Both history and the events of the past few weeks point out, once again, just how deeply male chauvinism remains embedded in even the supposedly most “liberal” institutions in this, the self-proclaimed land of the free. And the fact that I seem to be one of the few pointing it out is even more depressing.

As at least one result of last year’s and this year’s financial meltdown, economists and politicians are back to debating the relative merits of “free markets” versus “regulated markets,” and everyone has a different idea of how much, if any, regulation is required for a given sub-market, i.e., securities, mortgages, housing, health care, etc.

One of the problems with these kinds of debates is that often the debaters aren’t actually debating what they think they are. What do I mean by this? I’ll give you a very prosaic example. On a Tuesday, in mid-day, I went into a food retail giant — WalMart. Among the items I was seeking were a particular brand of non-allergenic shaving gel and a variety of cat food. I’m particular about the shaving gel because I have sensitive skin, not that the brand that works best for me is either more or less expensive; it’s priced the same as the others by that company, presumably because the base is the same, and all that differs is the additives, or the lack thereof. The cat food is also standard, neither more nor less expensive than the others, and since my cats prefer it to all others, many of which they turn their noses up at, I buy that brand.

When I got to the shaving gel shelf, there were no cans of my variety. Every other variety — except the one I wanted — was stacked to overflowing. This is far from the first time this has happened. It’s so frequent that I usually buy two, and often pick up some when I don’t even need any. Needless to say, the same was true of the cat food… and that was nothing new, either. I’ve seen the exact same thing happen year after year with other items, as well as these products, in other grocery chains. Now… in a truly “rational” market, why would a retail seller have the shelves filled with items that don’t sell and continually sell out of those that do without restocking more frequently? For two reasons. First, in most grocery chains, we’re not talking about the sale of product, but the “lease” of shelf space to the manufacturer, who clearly puts a higher premium on trying to sell a wider range of products than in maximizing profit from a best selling item. Second, customer product preferences often vary from store to store, or region to region, and many manufacturer clearly must believe that the cost of maximizing sales of a given consumer product on a store-by-store or even a regional basis is less profitable than adopting a standard shelf-stocking model.

This has been a problem for F&SF sales in the big-box stores, because, depending on locale, F&SF sales can be the largest fiction seller in a store… or the worst, and sometimes that depends on as little as whether the section manager, or even one employee, is enthusiastic about a given genre. But again, the primary consideration for some booksellers isn’t necessarily maximizing sales, but minimizing costs. Of course, if you don’t sell enough books, or anything else, minimizing costs merely prolongs the time before you have to declare bankruptcy — which has been one of the problems, in my opinion, facing Borders.

In terms of healthcare, similar questions arise. One question that many, many women raise is why so many healthcare plans stint on things like birth control and preventative care, while paying for erectile dysfunction drugs and expensive heart procedures for older white males? Is it because health plans are run largely by men with those priorities or because there’s a wealthy section of the health-care marketplace, albeit through generous insurance plans, willing and able to pay for those health services? Or are there other economic reasons?

The biggest reason for the housing and financial services meltdown lay in the fact that there was a far greater profit margin — short-term, to be sure — in selling houses — and mortgages — to borderline homeowners than in servicing honest and reliable homeowners.

All of this leads back to one question: Rational and profitable economic behavior for whom… and at what cost to everyone else?

For the past several years, I’ve been running across a mantra, or slogan, along the lines of “knowledge wants to be free.” This is complete bullshit. Knowledge isn’t an entity; it’s a compilation of data, information, insights, and the like. What the simplistic slogan means is that people want knowledge, information, and entertainment to be free, and many, if not most of them, will pirate songs, stories, e-books, and the like under the excuse that those who create it are already making exorbitant profits… or that it’s somehow their right to have such “knowledge” without paying for it. Now… we have a rationalization of this in book form.

A gentleman by the name of Chris Anderson recently released a book entitled Free, which I have not read, but which, according to interviews and commentary, which I have read, makes the point that the internet is the marketing model of the future, where content is free, because that’s what people want. I’ll agree with half of that. People always want good things for less than they cost, but a great deal of what’s free really isn’t. In fact, most of it isn’t. It’s paid for in other ways.

Take this blog. Whoever reads it gets the contents without charge, but it didn’t come for nothing. Tor paid for the design and pays for the servers on which it is hosted, as well as for the technical people who put on the artwork and book covers. I write the text, questions, schedules, and news, and no one pays me. The hope is, of course, that both Tor and I will be repaid by readers who go out and buy more books. But free, in the sense of costing nothing, it’s not.

Mr. Anderson also apparently believes that whatever appears on the web should be free and that whoever creates it should profit, as do some musical groups, apparently, by sales of tickets to live events and selling merchandise. This may be fine if one has other merchandise to sell, but if one’s livelihood is gained from people buying intellectual property, one has to limit what one provides for free. I can provide economic, political, and fiction-related insights here for free, because I have fictional “merchandise” to sell through online and bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Other writers, I have to admit, are far better at this than I am. But what of editorial writers? What will happen to that profession if news goes entirely on-line for “free”? Or musicians and songwriters? We’re already seeing a dwindling of truly professional smaller musical groups, the kinds that actually could grub out a living by touring small clubs across the nation. In fact, I recently read that some clubs are now actually charging the musicians, rather than paying them. Is this because something like 90% of the “recorded” music out there is either “free” or pirated? Or because the smaller groups can’t effectively use the “free” aspect of the internet to promote money-generating concerts that will repay the costs of providing “free” services? In a related aspect, my wife the singer and opera professor has noted that the cost of sheet music has skyrocketed because singers and students are buying far less because they can copy it easily… and consequently, the music for more and more songs and operas is out of print, because those songs and operas are less popular and sales won’t pay for even the printing costs.

In addition to these questions, there’s another one, and to me, it’s far more troubling. It’s the idea that worthwhile services — whether insights, music, or entertainment — should be marketed as “free,” because they’re not. They’re paid for indirectly and in other ways, either by advertisers, or subsidized by the sale or other goods and services, and often the user/consumer has no way of knowing who or what is behind anything. Some “free” providers are very up-front, as am I in offering this blog to interest readers in my books. But how many people know how many hundreds of millions of dollars Google has poured into YouTube? Or even who all the other providers of “free” stuff happen to be, and what their agendas might be?

To me, the disguised “free” content idea is just another way in which social institutions end up separating responsibility and accountability from making money. The concept of “free” is also intellectually dishonest… but… all that “stuff” is free, and that excuses everything… doesn’t it?

The fact that I was once an economic market research analyst still plagues me, because it’s become clear that I ask questions about writing that probably are better left unasked, at least in public forums. But then, when I was an economic analyst I also asked those questions, and they were part of the reason why I didn’t remain an employed analyst. As the most junior economist in the company, you don’t question the vice-president of marketing’s brand-new and very expensive product, no matter how bad an idea it is, or express doubt about fancy economic models, not if you want to keep your job, no matter how correct posterity proves you — because if you do, you won’t be working at most companies long enough to experience that posterity. I wasn’t the first economic type to learn this first hand, and I was far from the last. More than a few analysts and economists did in fact question the long-term effects of derivatives, and most of those who questioned were not exactly rewarded. A few were fortunate enough to be ignored; the rest fared worse.

With that as background, I’m going to observe that the vast majority of the very most commercially successful authors write “more of the same.” By this I mean, for example, that while the events in subsequent books may change, the feel and structure of each “new” book tends to mirror closely the feel of previous books. I’m not saying that all authors do this by any means, just that a large percentage of those who sell millions of copies of their books. This practice, from what I can tell, emerged first in the mystery/thriller field, followed closely in what I’d call the “high glamour” type novel by writers such as Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, and others, but now it seems to be everywhere.

Some authors [or their agents] are so sensitive to the commercial aspects of the “more of the same” that the author uses a different pen name when writing something even slightly different, so that Nora Roberts also writes as J.D. Robb, and by noting that she is writing as J.D. Robb, she gets to cash in on her fame as Nora Roberts while announcing to readers that the J.D. Robb books are a different “more of the same.” In F&SF, Dave Wolverton became David Farland to write fantasy, and perhaps to also make clear that he wasn’t writing Star Wars books about Princess Leia, Jedi apprentices, and the like.

Who knows? Maybe I should have adopted a pen name, say Exton Land, for all my fantasies when I started writing them and saved the L.E. Modesitt, Jr., moniker for my science fiction. But then, which name would I have used for the “Ghosts of Columbia” books? And The Hammer of Darkness really isn’t either. By strict logic, then, to maximize commercial success, I shouldn’t have written any of those… or even The Lord-Protector’s Daughter, because it has a “different” feel.

And in some ways, I may be in the worst of both worlds, because the Recluce books have enough of a similar feel that I’m often criticized for being formulaic there, but I’m clearly not formulaic enough to replicate the success of Harry Potter or The Wheel of Time, etc.

At the same time, when I do something different, such as in Archform:Beauty or Haze, those readers who were expecting a faster book, such as Flash or The Parafaith War, feel that I haven’t met their expectations.

Then again, at least I’m not totally captive to “more of the same.” That would be almost as bad as having been successful as an industrial economist.

Over the past few years, there’s been a great deal of enthusiasm about the internet and how it’s likely to revolutionize the world, and almost all of the commentators express optimism.

The Economist recently reported a study on the effect of the internet, and the conclusion of the study was that the extent and range of contacts of internet users had become more limited, both geographically and culturally, with the growth of internet usage. This certainly parallels the growth of “niche” interest sites and the “Facebook” effect, where like gathers to like.

In effect, if these trends continue, and if the study is correct, and the authors caution that it is only preliminary and a proxy for a far wider and more detailed effort, the internet is creating a voluntary form of self-segregation. What’s rather amusing, in a macabre way, is that when Huxley, in Brave New World, postulated the segregation of society by ability and by the programming of inclination, the government was the evil overlord pressing this societal division upon the population as a means of indirect and effective repression and social control. Now it appears that a significant percentage of internet users are effectively doing the same thing enthusiastically and voluntarily.

A similar trend is also occurring as a result of the proliferation of satellite and cable television, where programming is broken into a multiplicity of “viewpoint-orientations,” to the point that viewers can even select the slant and orientation of the news they receive. This is having a growing impact as the numbers and percentages of Americans who read newspapers continue to decline.

At the same time, we’ve seen a growing polarization in the American political system, combined with a disturbing trend in the government away from political and practical compromise and toward increasingly strident ideological “purity,” along with the growth and vehemence of “public” and other interest groups.

Somehow, all this open communication doesn’t seem to be opening people’s viewpoints or their understanding of others, but rather allowing them greater choice in avoiding dealing with — and even attacking — the diversity in society and the world. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?