“So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised us these beautiful things…

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew…”

Kipling – “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings”

So… in less than two weeks, countries, corporations, small businesses, and huge numbers of individuals are facing economic ruin, not to mention the fact that virtually everyone’s retirement and portfolio have been trashed… and potentially a great deal more.

Why?

Covid-19 didn’t cause this. What caused this mess was the leveraging of greed at every possible level in human society.

Leverage is a great idea, in perspective. Who doesn’t want to get more for less effort, less investment, fewer employees?

Take just-in-time supply chains. They cut inventory costs because a firm doesn’t pay for components almost until needed [and the way some companies handle payment probably until after the components are already in a product on its way to be sold, if not already sold]. The company doesn’t maintain inventory for the government to tax [taxing inventory may prove to be one of the worst a decisions ever made in modern economic history]. There’s no cost for additional warehousing space. Ideally, that means a cheaper product [practically, it means higher profits and executive compensation].

Automation is another form of leverage. Improvements in technology mean that AI-guided systems replace human guided systems. That results in greater precision at lower cost and a smaller human workforce. Computerization is drastically reducing administrative jobs, which also has resulted in increasingly high workloads on reduced numbers of lower-level “executive” employees.

Outsourcing and off-shoring are other forms of leveraging capital, often essentially human capital, although they’re seldom described that way.

And, of course, raising money in the stock-market so that others pay for much of the capital in a company is also leverage. Again, I’ve never seen it described that way, but that’s what it is.

Then, add in specialization, where a few firms, perhaps only one or two, produce just one component vital to a number of firms…and spread this across not only the U.S. economy, but the world economy, and have an economic system the like of which the world has never seen. The only problem is that while all this specialization and leverage has enormous benefits, it also has enormous fragility, something that “the smooth-tongued wizards” of the Gods of the Market have ignored and downplayed. That’s a failure that the smooth-tongued wizards never pay for.

Unfortunately, we, as a society, will pay mightily for being seduced by the siren song of pure and over-leveraged capitalism, and for failing to recognize that we needed to master and restrain capitalism, rather than allowing ourselves to be mastered by it.

Every writer has his or her own personal requirements to be successful, and that’s often why workshops and courses sometimes don’t work, and why writing gurus often think, I’ve spelled it out step by step. Why doesn’t the idiot get it?

I was once one of those idiots.

The first time that I tried to write a story, I was around fourteen. I didn’t want to write it. I knew I wasn’t a fiction writer [which really meant I hadn’t learned and found the process too daunting. I didn’t have a choice. It was a school assignment. I wrote it. It was grammatically excellent. As a work of fiction, it was far beneath God-awful. As I recall, my English teacher’s comments were something like, “Grammatically fine. Not much there.”

And some readers, for whom action is the only mark of story, might well say, “Not that much has changed.”

It wasn’t that I disliked writing. I had no problems with writing lengthy history papers, but I tended to underestimate the time required to do a really excellent job, a trait not uncommon among teenaged males. I enjoyed going against the grain when I wrote “critical” English papers, and usually got brought up short, but every once in a long while… I actually surprised a teacher, favorably, that is. And I liked writing stories for the tiny mimeographed school newspaper.

But my true love was poetry – traditional poetry. About as far as I’ve gone in enjoying [but not in reading] “modern” poetry are poets such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas. That’s probably because I love words and the way they sound and how rhythms, rhymes, and meanings forge something stronger than the evanescent mist of most modern poetry. The other aspect of why I liked poetry didn’t dawn on me until later – I could work on something until it was right… or as right as I could make it.

Of course, by the time I graduated from college, where I had two outstanding professors [William J. Smith, who later became U.S. Poet Laureate, and Clay Hunt, a truly brilliant scholar and literary analyst who tragically died far too young of cancer], traditional poetry was largely passé or relegated to chapbooks or the smallest of literary magazines. This hasn’t changed. Even today, rhymed or even semi-traditional poetry is almost verboten at The New Yorker and other “literary” magazines. While I was in the Navy and for a few years after, I submitted to various magazines…and very occasionally got accepted, but only by small magazines and only for work in the “Eliot” vein.

My problem in developing as a fiction writer was fairly basic. At that point in my life, all the explanations about how to construct a story simply did make sense to me. Oh, I understood the terms, the concepts, and I could see exactly why they were all necessary, but assembling a story that way just didn’t work for me.

It wasn’t until I put together “dreary and involved” economics with a beleaguered Coke-swilling junior economist like I’d recently been with money-shifting here and there and no one seemingly caring that the basics clicked. Simply put… I had to feel the story… really feel it.

Now… turning that understanding into reliable professional success, that took almost another twenty years.

The other day I came across a term new to me (“loreporn”), or at least new in the context in which it was used, that being the idea of excessive background information in novels as analogous to the excesses of pornography. I’ve occasionally run across “porn” used as a suffix before, negatively denoting excesses of various sorts, but I have to admit that I’d never seen it used as a derogatory term for excessive literary or fictional background.

The problem with this sort of labelling is that writers, being writers, have different styles. Some like more background, some almost none. Also, readers of different genres have differing expectations. Readers who favor fast-moving action tend to favor less historical background and find legends that take more than a sentence to explain distracting. Some fantasy readers find more lore and background intriguing and fascinating, others less so. And that’s fine.

It’s one thing to point out that a writer’s “lore” doesn’t work as supposedly designed, or that it was borrowed from feudalism or Shinto, or other cultures, and really isn’t applicable to the society described by the writer. It’s also fair to point out when there’s more background than story, or where the background has more character than the protagonist.

But to brand anything that doesn’t fit into one’s own perceptions of what is proper as “loreporn” is more often than not a cheap shot and misleading. One could thoughtlessly apply the term to much of Tolkien, but all of that lore is an enormous part of what makes The Lord of the Rings what it is.

What I find disturbing about such a term is the almost moralistic condemnation it implies to a style that a reader finds not to his or her taste. There are societal and practical reasons to derogate, or at least be skeptical of excessive depictions of sexual acts, but to equate expansive descriptions of history, myth, or legend to out and out pornography seems more than a little excessive to me. And using a single derogatory word to describe any author’s lore, legends, and myth is carelessly and cruelly excessive.

But then, we live in an age of excess.

Over the years, fantasy has explored the power of names, and the degree to which knowing someone’s “true name” can give a wizard or witch or someone else the power over that individual. Even if that’s a dubious proposition in the real world, studies and practical experience suggest that names do have certain impact.

Studies show that, in general, voters prefer politicians with simpler names, and that, even in the legal profession, supposedly devoted to legal impartiality, attorneys with easier to pronounce names were more likely to make partner, regardless of the ethnicity of the name. Again, in an overall sense, stocks of start-up companies with easy to pronounce names do better initially than those with names harder to pronounce (later on financial performance tends to take over).

Just calling someone by name can get their immediate attention.

But how much do names tell you about someone? Does what someone was named affect who they are and who they become?

I have to admit that, if someone had asked me those questions thirty or forty years ago, I would have said that names tell some things about a person, or at least their background, but I would have been dubious about names affecting personal behavior. Now… I’m not so sure. But is that just what we want to see? Or do names shape how people develop?

Just because every “Summer” either my wife or I have ever met has been bright, but ditzy, does that reflect just the coincidence of our meeting ditzy “Summers” or does the name do that to them? Likewise, why is every “April” we’ve met flighty and lacking even a semblance of a work ethic?

Then there’s the name/nickname trade-off. I’ve encountered a number of men with the birth name of “Richard.” All of the ones who went by the nickname “Dick” (despite current connotations to the contrary) were solid, bright, individuals. Those who went by “Richard”… not so much so.

On the other hand, I haven’t had much luck with guys named “Bob,” and neither did the composer Menotti, whose weak-willed drifter in his opera The Old Maid and the Thief was also named Bob.

As for “Donald”… the “Dons,” so far anyway, have been good people. As for the “Donalds…” you can probably guess my thoughts about them.

And I have to admit that I’m not consistent. I address all of my children by their full names, although most all of them have names that can be and often are shortened – except the eldest, who’s named after me… and I call him by the same nickname that my father had and that I have. That just might be the reason why he didn’t name either of his sons after me. And, as you all know, I don’t write under either my full name or my nickname.

Everyone will have some sort of take on the Democratic Presidential campaign after Super Tuesday… and the apparent political resurrection of Joe Biden from the “political dead.” I’m no exception, but my thoughts/points don’t fall into grand conspiracies, possibly because most theorized conspiracies don’t exist… and never have. Human greed, stupidity, and incompetence, along with blind and unthinking belief, usually do a better job of explaining events than conspiracies.

So… my observations…

First, no matter how smart and competent she is, Americans as a whole, even supposedly progressive Democrats, shy away from nominating or electing a woman. All this is disguised and rationalized by various “explanations.” “I’m for women, but not [that woman].” “I worry that a woman can’t stand up to Trump.” “I’m for women, but most people aren’t, and we need to win.” And those are just the beginning.

Second, most people – except those who feel they have nothing to lose – are leery of revolutionaries, because they want to keep what they have and are looking for improvement in their situation, not a total restructuring of their life by government. Trump’s appeal in 2016 was not that he was going to change things, but that he was going to “restore” things. Make American Great Again was code for putting minorities back in their place, restoring higher paying semi-skilled jobs [which couldn’t and didn’t happen], keeping out immigrants, and continuing to prop up the stock market and financial sector with cheap money.

The vote for Biden on Super Tuesday was a vote for incremental improvement. Support for Sanders in California and Nevada reflected how expensive life there is and how the young people and minorities there don’t see how mere incremental improvement will help with the problems they face.

Third, Americans are wary of detailed plans and programs. The results, at least to me, were a rejection of detail and of thoughtfulness. Almost meaningless rhetoric and generalities once again triumphed.

Fourth, young people talk and tweet a lot, but it’s the older people and a dedicated core of voters who show up and vote in higher percentages. Black voter numbers were up, as were suburban white voters, from the reports I’ve seen, but not numbers of young or Latino voters. Most black voters, particularly older black voters, studies and numbers show, are actually wary of radical political propositions and those who push them.

How all of this will play out in the months ahead is another question, especially if Elizabeth Warren stays in the race.