Years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote one of his columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on the subject of the role of “sacred poets” — the idea that poetry immortalizes and dramatizes in a way no other aspect of human culture does. He actually took the term “sacred poet” from the Latin poet Horace, who had used it in pointing out that there were other heroes besides those immortalized in Homer’s Iliad, but they had lapsed into nothingness because they lacked a “sacred poet.” Asimov also made the point that even bad poetry has resulted in creating immortality, while often creating a false impression of history, such as in the case of Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride, which leaves the impression that Revere was the hero who warned the Massachusetts colonists about the British, when in actuality Revere never completed the ride and the colonists in Concord were actually warned by Samuel Prescott. Yet most Americans who know anything about this part of American history remember Revere, not Prescott.

Rhythmic words, especially when coupled with music, indeed can have a powerful effect, but such “sacred” songs also require something beyond well-chosen rhymed words and music. They require knowledge and understanding of the events portrayed by the words and music. The more popular religion-based sacred songs rest on scripture and doctrine, but the more secular “sacred” songs [a juxtaposition that seems strange, but accurate in the sense described by Horace and Asimov] are based on history.

Thus, the Iliad is merely a long epic poem to those American students who even know anything about it, while it was effectively a “sacred poem” to the Athenians of Greece in the fourth century B.C. “The Star Spangled Banner” is a sacred song to most Americans, in addition to being the national anthem of the United States, but what is often forgotten is that it did not actually become the official national anthem until 1931, more than 117 years after it was composed during the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. It became the national anthem because it was a “sacred” song that linked history to the national emblem — the flag — not a “sacred” song because it was the national anthem.

Because the continued impact of sacred songs and texts depend on not only words and possibly music, but upon knowledge, they may fade into obscurity when the knowledge is lost, or disregarded, or minimalized by later generations. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “One Tin Soldier” were close to “sacred” songs for the young people of the Vietnam era, but they quickly faded. Today, it appears that there aren’t any replacements, not even of that nature.

What is also interesting is that the Iliad, as a sacred poem, was essentially book length. Such “sacred” songs as “America the Beautiful,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” are far shorter. The lyrics of the Vietnam-era songs were about the same in length, but were simpler and more repetitive. What people seem to remember — as a group, not as individuals — today seems to be confined to slogans, advertising slogans in particular.

Could it be that the death of “sacred” songs, texts, and poets will lie in the inability of people to listen to anything of length or complexity? Or will it lie in a cynicism that suggests that there’s little worth in “sacred” texts, regardless of the fusion of text, rhythm, and music? Or will such poems, songs, and texts just be replaced by consumeristic slogans?

Whether it’s Headline News, Bloomberg News, Fox News, and AOL… everywhere there’s instant news… and where there’s not instant news, there are instant comment shows, or failing that, instant action dramas. But the instant news exemplifies the trend… and the problems. The other day, in a moment of weakness, I happened to be actually using the satellite TV and came across a well-known sports commentator who was pitching an instant sports news network or program with words to the effect that this instant sports news access venue [whatever it was] was a must to the young and hip, and that only those over fifty waited for the regular news to learn what was happening.

My first thought, as quickly as I turned off the system and regretted the impulse that had led me to even consider that there might be anything interesting being broadcast, particularly on a Saturday, was to wonder why anyone HAD to know the sports “news” that quickly. Then, there was the secondary thought about how much of the news, these days, is really so vital that one can’t wait for the next day’s newspaper. But then, our society is all about, as one commercial called to my attention by my wife stated, how “I want it all, and I want it now.” So I suppose instant news of all sorts is just another aspect of that attitude.

Still… for all the growth of and popularity of all these forms of instant news, it seems to me that either very few people realize the implications behind these demand for instant information or those that do feel that protesting what seems like a popular tsunami of support is futile.

So… here are the implications as I see them. First, as we already know, all these varieties of media “news” have become entertainment, not a source of real information, and whatever information is contained tends to be so condensed, slanted, or incomplete as to be either inaccurate or misleading. There’s a headline about how a substance increases cancer risks by sixty percent, but nowhere does the story point out that the risk for most people for that kind of cancer is something like 1/20th of one percent. Hazardous waste sites and nuclear power plants are touted as great health risks, when guns, falls, substance abuse, and automobile accidents are all literally hundreds of thousands of times more dangerous.

Second, because the media focuses on sensationalism in one form or another, meaningful news that impacts most Americans is ignored until it becomes a sensational disaster. The problems with adjustable rate mortgages and securities derivatives weren’t exactly a great secret. They just weren’t worth exploring as news until they created hundreds of billions of dollars in losses and started costing tens of thousands of Americans their homes.

Third, it perpetuates caricaturing as a media art-form, creating images of individuals in the news that may well be at variance with who they are or what they have done… or failed to do. This has always been a mass media problem, and some of the most notable examples are the way in which Hitler used the media in Germany, the American media’s creation of an image of JFK that bore little resemblance to the actual man and his considerable lack of achievement as president or the media’s depiction of Gerald Ford as a clumsy physical bumbler when Ford was in fact perhaps one of the most graceful and athletic presidents. In our present electronic age, especially, because of the mass media time-limits and the capabilities of technology, anyone presented in this format becomes an instant caricature.

Fourth, the emphasis on the current, new, and instant creates a pressure to act and react on inadequate information, and, as the Founding Fathers knew [which was why they structured our government to preclude hasty action and reaction], hasty actions almost always result in bad decisions and less than desirable repercussions. Yet today, the entire media culture presses people to decide “now.” Check your credit card balance instantly so that you can decide how much you can charge for that new wide-screen television. Vote your preferences online for the candidates — political or American idol, it makes no difference. It’s only entertainment.

Finally, as a result of the above, the entire idea of “news” as having a special or intrinsic value is devalued, and it becomes harder and harder for the average person to find the information that they need and should have without digging deeper and harder than ever before — exactly at a time when those who should learn more don’t want to and those who would like to know more have less and less time to explore it.

If these pressures remained in the electronic media, that would be bad enough, but they’re not. They’re also now exerting a considerable impact on the publishing industry. I can recall, years ago, reading the introductory chapters of James Michener’s books. Frankly, I really didn’t care much for the novels, but I found the popularized history and background fascinating, and that led to my reading more and more non-fiction in those areas.

One of the fastest-growing print entertainment areas is the anime/manga subgenre or cross-genre. I don’t have a problem with anime/manga per se, but I have great problems when I go into a bookstore and see carrels of books being replaced by what amounts to graphic novels, because, regardless of what the anime aficionados may claim, when real books are being replaced by grown-up comic books, the intellectual capacity of the culture isn’t headed in the right direction. It’s just another form of the over-visualized and over-simplified.

In the end, thinking requires a depth of information and time to consider. Instant news, instant entertainment, and instant reaction are all being pushed by the media in order to get people to instant-buy, but this rush to instant-everything denies any real depth of information and denigrates thoughtful consideration of facts and issues. And, if the trends continue, they’ll also water down, if not destroy, the thoughtful side of the print fiction market.

And the thought of losing future readers to instant sports or celebrity news tends to irritate me… and probably more other writers than would care to admit it.

Most current American fiction,by its very nature, and especially science fiction and fantasy, generally tends to repudiate the “absurdist” movement of the French existentialists of the mid-twentieth century. Does this repudiation, both directly and through its indirect influence on other media, actually perpetuate the very question that the existentialists raised, as well as help fuel the high degree of religious belief in the United States? Now that I have at least a few readers stunned…

I’ll doubtless end up grossly oversimplifying, but since I don’t wish to write the equivalent of an English Ph.D. dissertation, we’ll go for a modicum of simplicity. Sartre and Camus and others of the absurdist school tended to put forth the proposition that, in essence, life had no intrinsic meaning, that it was “absurd,” and that, in as illustrated in Camus’s L’Etranger, the only real choice one had in life was what to do with one’s life, i.e., whether to take a meaningful step to end it or to let life continue meaninglessly.

The question is, simply enough: “Does an individual life have intrinsic worth or meaning by the mere fact of existence?” The absurdist view would tend to imply that it doesn’t. The deeply religious Christian view is that every single life has meaning to the Deity.

While I can’t claim, and won’t, to have read even a significant faction of the something like 30,000 new adult fiction titles published every year, at times I have read a large fraction of what’s been published in the F&SF field, and I can’t recall more than a handful of books that discussed or considered intelligently the absurdist premises or more than a tiny fraction where the characters acted as though life had no intrinsic meaning. In some, a disturbing fraction, I have to admit, that intrinsic meaning was to be available to get slaughtered by the heroes or the villains, but a certain sense of value was still placed on the lives of even the most worthless.

Is this comparative authorial lack of interest in the possible meaninglessness of life bad? Not necessarily. In LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, however, one of her characters makes the statement that to oppose something is to maintain it. I’d suggest, following LeGuin’s words, that the continued cheerful, and unthinking assumption that life has intrinsic Deity-supported meaning leaves all too many readers and people wondering if that is really so… and why they should believe it.

For whatever wonder may be generated, though, very little finds its way to the printed fiction page.

I will offer one observation and clarification. Many, many authors speculate on the meaninglessness of a given character’s chosen life path, but that isn’t the same as whether life has an intrinsic meaning to or within the universe. In fact, I could even claim that the realization of or belief in a meaningless occupation or set of acts affirms the idea that life is meaningful in a cosmic sense — an application in a backwards way of LeGuin’s words.

Yet… on one side we have a universe some sixteen billion light years across in all directions with some 100 billion galaxies, each with between 50 and 100 billion stars, with the believers in intrinsic meaning claiming that each life has a special meaning. And there’s almost no one on the other side?

Well… maybe there are many on the other side, but outside of Richard Dawkins and those few like him, I’m not seeing all that many, and I’ve certainly not read about many heroes or heroines who look up into the night sky and consider the odds on whether life has that kind of meaning. Almost a century ago, Alfred North-Whitehead observed that when one wishes to understand truly a society, one should examine the basic assumptions of that culture, those which are so basic that no one has ever scrutinized them. I’d submit that one of those assumptions underlying western European-derived culture is that there is a God-given meaning to each life, and that the fact that the absurdist proposition died away so quickly suggests that this assumption remains strong… and largely unexamined.

I tend to deal with this issue, as I suspect a few other writers do, at the second remove, by having my characters act along the lines of: If there is a God/prime mover, then we should do the best we can because that’s what expected; if there’s not, it’s even more important that we do our best because we’re not getting any divine support.

But I do wonder if we’ll see many popular atheist/absurdist heroes or heroines anytime in the near future.

Many years ago, when all my grown children were still minors, one of them wanted to know why I seldom said that anything they did was good. My answer was approximately, “You’re intelligent and talented, and you’ve had many advantages. I expect the merely good from you as a matter of course. If you do better than that, then I’ll be the first to let you know.” Perhaps I was too hard on them, but that was the answer I’d gotten from my father. But my answer clearly didn’t crush them, or they survived the devastation of not having a father who praised everything, because they’ve all turned out to be successful and productive, and they seem to be reasonably happy in life.

As some of my readers know, I’m married to a professional singer who is also a university professor and opera director. She has made the observation that these days almost any musical or stage play, whether a Broadway production in New York, a touring Broadway production, a Shakespeare festival play, or a college production, seems to get a standing ovation… unless it is so terrible as to be abysmal, in which case the production merely gets enthusiastic applause. The one exception to this appears to be opera, which seldom gets more than moderately enthusiastic applause, even though the singers in opera are almost invariably far better performers than those in any stage musical, and they don’t need body mikes, either. Maybe the fact that excellence still has a place in opera is why I’ve come to appreciate it more as I’ve become older and more and more of a curmudgeon.

My wife has also noted that the vast majority of students she gets coming out of high school these days have almost all been told through their entire lives that they’re “wonderful.” This is bolstered, of course, by a grade inflation that shows that at least a third of some high school senior classes have averages in excess of 3.8.

In a way, I see the same trend in writing, even while I observe a loosening of standards of grammar, diction, and the growth of improbable inconsistencies in all too many stories. I’ve even had copy-editors who failed to understand what the subjunctive happens to be and who believed that the adverb “then” was a conjunction [which it is most emphatically not]. Matt Cheney notwithstanding “alright” is not proper English and shouldn’t be used, except in the dialogue of someone who has less than an adequate command of the language, but today that means many, many characters could use it.

At the same time, I can’t help but continue to reflect on the change in the meaning of the word “discrimination.” When I was growing up, to discriminate meant to choose wisely and well between alternatives. A person of discrimination was one of culture and taste, not one who was prejudiced or bigoted, but then, maybe they were, in the sense that they were prejudiced against those aspects of society that did not reflect superiority and excellence.

But really, does everything merit the equivalent of a standing ovation? Is excellence measured by accomplishment, or have we come to the point of awarding standing ovations for the equivalent of showing up for work? Can “The Marching Morons” of Cyril M. Kornbluth be all that far in our future?

To begin with, I have to confess I’m as guilty as anyone. About what? About writing about writing, of course. Now… for some background.

When I began to consider being a writer, I thought I was going to be a poet, and I did get some poems published in various small poetry and literary magazines. And then, there was this escalating altercation in Southeast Asia, and I ended up piloting helicopters for the U.S. Navy and didn’t write very much. When I got out of the Navy, I started writing market research reports dealing with the demand for industrial pneumatic accessories by large factories. Then I wrote a very bad mystery novel, awful enough that I later burned it so that it could never be resurrected. Only after all that did I attempt to write science fiction, and after close to ten years of hit or miss short-story submissions, with only about half a dozen sales while I was working full-time at my various “day jobs,” I finally got a rejection letter from Ben Bova which told me to lay off the stories and write a novel. And I did, and I sold it, and I’ve sold, so far, every one I’ve written since. Now… all this history is not bragging, or not too much, but to point out that virtually all the writing I did for almost forty years was either occupational-subject-related or poetry or fiction that I hoped to see published — and even more hopefully, sold for real money and not copies of magazines and publications.

All that changed a year ago, when I started blogging… or more specifically, writing about writing or about subjects that bear on writing, if sometimes tangentially. Instead of writing fiction for publication, I’m writing close to the equivalent of a book a year… about writing. I’m certainly not the only one out there doing this. In fact, I’m probably one of the later arrivals in this area.

But I can’t help wondering, no matter how my publicist has said that it’s a good idea, if there’s something just a bit wrong about writing about writing, instead of just writing. What’s happened to our culture and our society when readers seem to be as interested, or more interested, in writing about writing than in the writing itself. And why are so many younger writers going to such lengths in their blogs to attract attention?

At least one well-known publisher has noted that no publicity is all bad, but is this sort of thing all that good? Or is it not all that good, but necessary in a society that seems to reward shameless self-promotion as vital for success?

Who could say… except here I am, along with hundreds of others, writing about writing.