I’ve recently noticed a trend – or maybe it’s always been there – in various reviews, both of my books and others, of a view of ethics by reviewers that seems to believe that compromises to power and reality are always sell-outs.

Unhappily, this view has also dominated U.S. politics for at least the last decade, if not longer. The far right wants to ban all abortions all the time; the far left wants no restrictions on abortion. Polls show that the majority of Americans want something in the middle, roughly along the lines of Roe v. Wade. But the battle lines remain.

For years, Congress has been stalled on issues dealing with climate reform, a better IRS system, the high cost of prescription drugs, getting wealthy corporations to pay taxes, and the need to reduce health insurance costs for poorer families.

In early 2021, the President proposed a $3 trillion program to address such problems. The Republicans’ counter was to say that they were opposed to all of it, despite the problems. For a year and a half, the Democrats, despite having control of Congress, if only by one vote in the Senate, couldn’t agree on anything.

Once the Democrats realized that only by compromising among themselves could they get anything done did they finally pass the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which everyone should know won’t do all it promises. No one got all of what they wanted. Did that mean that the Democrats lost their ethics? Or did it mean that they did the best they could?

As for the Republicans, their “ethical” position was that they’d oppose anything. Most likely, if they’d really agreed to compromise, the final legislation would have been better. But they opposed compromise.

But what too many people tend to ignore, forget, or fail to acknowledge is that getting almost anything done in government requires compromise, not getting all that you think necessary, and having to accept things you think are unnecessary or even wrong.

Accepting compromise doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost your ethics. It may mean that your opponents have more votes and/or power. And for those who refuse compromise, especially when not acting means people will suffer, it suggests that some people believe so highly in their view of what’s ethical that they’d rather have people suffer or die than do what they think is “unethical.” And what does that say about their “ethics”?

As happens periodically, I’ve had to update and replace my old computers. Fortunately, I made the switchover before the two older computers [seven and ten years old] completely died, and because I’d backed things up. I salvaged almost all my critical files.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck, for professional reasons, with the latest version of Word, which has some “features” that strike me as glitches. For example, there’s no quick “save” command. While Word insists it saves documents as I type, that’s not accurate. It does such backup saving sporadically, from what I can tell.

So that means, when I want to save a document, I can’t just save it. No, I have to hit “save a copy,” and then click a separate “save” icon, and then be asked if I want to replace the previous file, and then be told that it’s already been saved, and that what I’m doing is redundant – except it’s not.

I also can’t add icon commands to the ribbon, where they’d be convenient. Nope. At least, I haven’t been able to find a way. Instead, I have to create a “new tab” linked to the ribbon and add the icons there, but that means I have to call up the “new tab” when I want those commands.

Does anyone who does these re-designs actually write for a living. I mean really write, with revisions, moving texts around, or redrafting?

Or are they just coming up with all these “nifty,” but useless, changes to justify their jobs?

A number of economists and commentators, including me, have raised the question of how the Russian economy can sustain such a powerful military force with such a comparatively weak economy, one with a Gross Domestic Product roughly equivalent to that of Spain, a relatively prosperous nation, but certainly no military heavyweight.

The simple answer is that Putin and the oligarchs direct more resources proportionately to the military than other industrialized nations, and much of that funding comes from agricultural and natural resource exports. Some comes from the depressed wage structure that requires labor and services, even high-skill services, at little more than survival level, if that [which, ironically, is an improvement over the 1990s, and one reason why the Russian people put up with Putin]. And some likely comes from plundering re-conquered parts of the former Soviet Union.

The Russians also steal any technology that they can, so they don’t have to develop it, and rely on foreign suppliers to provide parts for some of their industries, because they’ve never been able to afford to develop those technologies. At times, they’ve been unable to produce advanced weapons systems they’ve developed because they lack the funding. They’ve announced ambitious ship-building projects, but in reality, the actual numbers of new vessels aren’t that large, and most are submarines or smaller surface or amphibious ships. At the same time, they have difficulty maintaining and operating all of their existing fleet, particularly capital ships. They also lack the ability to gain clear air superiority over Ukraine and appear to be losing aircraft faster than they can replace them.

All that being said, Russia has a substantial backlog of artillery, ammunition, and tanks [if of older models] and the ability to induce/force men into the army as well as to stifle public dissent almost totally. So Putin will expend those assets until he no longer can, which could be years, based on the assumption that the U.S. and western European nations will give up before he runs out of artillery, ammunition, tanks, and the soldiers who are little more than cannon fodder to him.

And all that provides an example of why military-authoritarian nations continue to exist, because weaker nations can’t stop or contain them, and stronger nations that maximize individual freedoms often ignore them until they provide an imminent national threat.

In The Dawn of Everything, a heavily documented history of the human race by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the authors show conclusively that until the last two centuries or so, a range of human societies existed, ranging from hunter-gathers to socially complex and working societies that actually maximized freedom to the point where money and wealth were prohibited, and that the “progression” from hunter-gathers to agriculturally-dominated societal structures and then to commercial oligarchies or military-authoritarian societies is at best a misleading simplification and at worst a dangerous and inaccurate myth.

What Graeber and Wengrow fail to address directly is why, after tens of thousands of years of wide-ranging societal proliferation, present societies fall within a narrow scope, ranging from commercial authoritarianism to either religious or military authoritarianism. Their book certainly gives hints, in the fact that all too often societies that elevated individual freedom and severely restricted the power of elites tended to collapse after a time or were dominated and destroyed by societies that were more authoritarian and that could mobilize more force more effectively.

Money, in whatever form, is stored power. In effect, then a capitalistic society uses that stored power to force and/or induce people to follow the dictates of those with that power. And that power is in fact necessary to create a modern technological society. You cannot build anything complex without mobilizing, organizing, and directing large numbers of people and without obtaining large amounts of resources. The effective options are buying those people and resources or conscripting/forcing their use. And paying people for their skills and resources has proved to be more efficient and requires less governmental coercion than mandating work and confiscating resources.

Even so, the organization required by early capitalism – and the requisite loss of personal freedom – was totally unacceptable to most of the indigenous cultures of North America. It wasn’t unthought of. In fact, Wengrow and Graeber document detailed philosophical discussions between French and other intellectuals and wise individuals in indigenous cultures. But those cultures found the degree of individual oppression required by European cultures repulsive and unacceptable.

The reason why such cultures were subdued or obliterated is simple. Either commercial authoritarianism or military-political authoritarianism are far more effective at developing technology and at creating and mobilizing force than societies maximizing personal freedom. Although commercial authoritarianism is more effective at creating and innovating new products and technology, and allows a greater range of freedom than other forms of authoritarianism, politico-military authoritarianism can focus force more effectively… at least until commercial authoritarian societies decide to focus their efforts on the military sphere, which they won’t until the threat is clear, and sometimes not even then.

What seems never to be acknowledged is that compared to many earlier societies, we have sacrificed a notable degree of individual freedom of action in order to obtain better health and less infant mortality [at least in the industrialized world], greater comfort, and the mixed benefits of higher technology. Personally, I’m willing to give up some of that freedom, but it’s more than clear that, first, most commercial entities don’t recognize that the “system” requires most workers to give up a considerable degree of personal freedom for sometimes dubious economic and personal security, and, second, that most Americans don’t understand that, without that commercial authoritarianism, we’d be at best on a high stone age culture level.

More than a few Republicans and even some Democrats think that Trump spurred or led the Republican Party to the “dark side.”

Unfortunately, that explanation ignores the fact that there’s been a dark side to the Republican Party for at least seventy years, beginning with Joseph McCarthy in 1950, and his mythical and essentially non-existent list of 205 Communist Party members working at the State Department. Republicans were so fearful of losing McCarthy’s support in the 1952 election that they insisted that General Dwight Eisenhower remove a paragraph in a speech in Wisconsin that attacked McCarthy as a dangerous demagogue and fabricator. Although Eisenhower later said he regretted that decision, he never did confront McCarthy directly.

Richard Nixon used abusive and misleading anti-Communist themes in getting elected to Congress and the Senate (where he claimed that a “pink sheet” proved that his liberal opponent was an avowed Communist, which she never was).

Then in 1961, Senator Barry Goldwater pushed William Buckley and the conservative National Review to go easy on Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, even after Welch had claimed that Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” because the John Birch Society had become a well-funded source of volunteers and donors for the Republican Party. The Birchers [who declared that fluoridation was a Communist plot] enthusiastically supported Goldwater and his infamous statement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

In turn, in 1968, Nixon courted Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist senator from South Carolina and said he opposed forcing integration and opposed busing and had his campaign manager tell southern Republican party leaders that he’d pick a vice president acceptable to the south and would “lay off pro-Negro crap.”

Despite efforts to whitewash matters, Republicans tend to forget that in July of 1980, Reagan’s first campaign stop was in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory, Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he declared “I believe in states’ rights,” which was and is the mantra of southern segregationists and white supremacists. The religious right lined up behind Reagan, particularly the preacher Jerry Falwell, who waged a crusade against homosexuals because he claimed they threatened the very existence of the United States. When then-President Jimmy Carter tried to point out Reagan’s ties to the religious extreme right, he was attacked for being mean.

Throughout the 1990s, Pat Robertson claimed that all sorts of Satanic dupes – otherwise known as J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, the Federal Reserve, the United States, Henry Kissinger, the liberal elites – were out to destroy the United States, and threw his weight and that of the Christian Coalition behind Newt Gingrich to help the GOP get control of the U.S. House, and six years later backed George W. Bush over John McCain in 2000 (possibly because McCain had far more scruples than George W.).

Then in 2009 came the Tea Party, filled with paranoia, racism, and rage, waving Confederate flags at rallies and claiming that Barrack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya, that Obama’s health care plan would set up death panels, and that Obama was a full-fledged Marxist who hated white people and was setting up concentration camps for his political opponents. When the Tea Partiers rallied at the Capitol in 2009, the Tea Partiers carried posters showing Obama as Sambo and calling Obama and his supporters “Nazis.” Those same Tea Partiers were welcomed by House Republican leader John Boehner, and Representatives Eric Cantor [later House Majority Leader] and Mike Pence.

Donald Trump didn’t create the hatred and viciousness out of nothing. He merely called it up out of the Republican Party, thrived on it, and encouraged it in every way possible… and only a handful of elected Republicans protested.

The other evening, I was watching a news show, and a commercial came on. Fancy that.

But that commercial stunned me, because it was about shoes, and it began by saying how much trouble it was to have to bend over and put on or tie your shoes. Then it went on to suggest that these new slip-on shoes would save you from the drudgery involved in footwear.

Oh, the work and effort involved in putting on shoes!

Now, while I realize that putting on shoes can be quite an effort for people with physical limitations, this commercial was aimed at prosperous and quite physically able individuals and pictured them as well.

But then, I’m definitely dated. I not only wear footwear, usually boots, but I also keep them moderately well-polished, another habit that appears to have vanished.

Hasn’t the sloppiness and comfort at any cost movement gone far enough?

We already see tank tops and flip-flops on commercial flights, in grocery stores, in many restaurants, and I’ve even seen them in theatres.

Is it such a trial to wear actual clothing these days?

Well… perhaps it is. Perhaps actual clothing has become as passe as actual facts.

“The Democrats and Merritt Garland raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and now they’re coming for you.”

Republicans are flooding the internet with that sentence, or something like it.

But it’s a scare tactic with almost no elements of truth behind it. First off, the Department of Justice has been trying for months and months to get Trump to return the classified materials.

Trump ignored the requests. Then several months ago, some fifteen boxes of classified material were returned. FIFTEEN BOXES of sensitive material that many nations would love to get their hands on, and that was stored with virtually no safeguards, documents he was supposed to return a year and a half ago. A Trump attorney signed an affidavit declaring that all material had been returned. Someone lied, because an informant tipped off the DOJ that more documents remained at Mar-A-Lago. A search warrant was issued.

The FBI didn’t burst into Trump’s mansion. They presented the warrant and were admitted – and found more sensitive and classified material.

They didn’t make it all public. Trump did… claiming he was raided, as if he were some innocent person and that it was all unexpected.

Really?

Trump was briefed on how to handle such material. All presidents and senior government officials handling such matters are briefed routinely. He didn’t follow the law, and now he’s complaining because he was caught. What he’s really claiming is that he should be above the law.

But the right-wing Republicans, which is what most of them are today, who’ve been so behind law enforcement officers suddenly aren’t supportive of law enforcement. Those very same Republicans are howling as if Trump were innocent and this is some miscarriage of law enforcement. Just like they think that rioters who staged the January 6th insurrection should be above the law.

Because, after all, white males, especially wealthy ones, don’t have to be law-abiding if the law gets in the way of what they want. And they certainly don’t believe in democracy if anyone else gets more votes.

Right now, it appears to me as though the majority of elected Republicans are cowardly, lying, hypocritical apologists for both Trump and the rest of the American oligarchic class.

When someone like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning makes off with classified documents, Republicans are all for throwing the book at them, but when Trump does the same thing, and the FBI tries to recover the documents – not even to charge Trump with anything criminal – Republicans scream that it’s a raid and an outrage. Their attacks against the FBI make it even more apparent that they prefer that the law only be enforced against the poor and the powerless.

The majority of them deny that the January 6th insurrection was violent or that Trump did anything wrong, and they attack any Republican who dares to tell the truth about what did happen, especially those few who remained law-abiding and principled. Yet many of these senior Republican officer-holders deplored the attack immediately after it occurred, and now they’re repudiating what they said then… which can only mean that they’re not only unprincipled, but they’re also self-serving cowards who care more about being re-elected than being truthful or upholding the principles on which this country was founded.

They bend over backward, at least in public, not to offend Trump, despite all his lies and misdeeds, and they depict him as a victim because the FBI used a search warrant to find and remove classified files from his Mar-a-Lago mansion, files that he had no right to retain – and that was only after months of efforts by the FBI to obtain and return the records.

Trump has called avowed and criminally violent white supremacists “good people” and even said that he loves them – actions that elected Republicans conveniently ignore. When being deposed about possibly criminal business dealings, Trump obviously didn’t want to tell the truth or lie under oath; so he took the Fifth Amendment to avoid making statements that could incriminate him.

And the vast majority of national Republican officeholders go along with Trump and so does a significant fraction of the Republican Party, all of whom obviously believe that Trump’s lying words and illegal actions matter less than truth and honestly… and that no crime is too great so long as it serves to get votes.

And people want to re-elect him President? What does that say about the Republicans?

I’m sick of companies that send me reminders and requests to rate them or the products/services that I’ve purchased. I’m also more than a little tired of polls that guesstimate how the public feels about this or that issue or politician, almost on a day-by-day basis, and particularly the pseudo-polls sent by both parties that misrepresent the issues in order to beg for contributions. Not to mention companies that legally misrepresent prices and interest rates… and, of course, politicians who declare that the election was stolen when recounts, investigations, and audits show that it wasn’t.

I purchased the product or service. Whether I purchase more is what really counts for the company. What I especially hate are those questions asking how the company could improve its products and services. If a manufacturer or service provider doesn’t already know its shortcomings, the odds are that they won’t take my suggestions anyway. And why should I provide free market research that they’ll ignore? The bottom line isn’t what I think, but whether the product/service is good and the company sells enough to remain in business.

While good polls can reveal what those polled feel at the moment, what such polls don’t reveal is, in most cases, more important than what they do. Today, everyone is most concerned about inflation. It takes a poll to verify that? The more important question is why they blame the current administration, when it has only a minor part in creating the inflation. This isn’t an apology for Biden; it’s been a problem for decades, if not longer. The factors that influence the economy have long lead times, and whoever’s in office now gets the credit or blame for the acts of his predecessor. The polls just focus the blame/credit on the wrong person… and most of the public is either too stupid to understand or doesn’t care, because they want someone to blame.

And far too many companies misrepresent prices, like the replacement window company that offers your second window at forty percent off, provided that you buy four, which means that you get the first four windows at ten percent off, but the number that sticks in most people’s mind is forty percent. Or the car dealers or others who advertise no payments for the first year, but don’t mention that the payments after that include interest on the entire amount for that first year.

As for the Republicans who insist the election was stolen, the bottom line is the final authenticated vote count, and, interestingly enough, the bottom line in Kansas on abortion was that sixty percent of the voters voting [which was a record turnout for a primary election] didn’t want abortion banned, no matter what the right-to-lifers claim.

There’s a certain trade magazine “serving” the F&SF fiction field that’s facing considerable financial difficulties caused by limited subscribers, increasing print costs, and declining advertising. Now I’ve subscribed to this magazine for years and years, and over at least the past five years, I’ve donated modest sums to the foundation that publishes the magazine. But one of the biggest revenue problems the publication faces is the significant decline in advertising revenue. And frankly, from what I see, that decline is largely one of the publication’s own creation.

Years ago, the head of one of the larger F&SF publishers pointed out to me that the magazine had never really done any significant interviews, reviews, or stories on a mega-selling series or on its author. In fact, virtually none of that publisher’s best-selling authors received any significant coverage. The magazine tended (and still does) to focus more on “avant” authors or those perceived to be new and/or cutting edge, many if not most of whom do not sell even mid-list quantities of books. While that’s a laudable goal, essentially minimizing coverage of more “mainstream” F&SF authors means that larger publishing houses, in a time of tighter budgets, decided that they didn’t need to advertise as much, or at all, in the magazine. This was compounded by the attrition of older publishing executives who regarded advertising in the magazine as a form of public service.

As far as advertising funds go, small presses don’t have much money to spare, and successful indie authors are going to put spare funds into activities and venues that show a direct result. The authors and presses who benefit the most from the magazine don’t have the funds to support it, and the publishers who do have the funds no longer see much point in doing so.

If, over the years, the magazine had included more articles and interviews that benefitted more mainstream authors, the advertising drop-off might not have occurred or been so drastic, but from what I’ve seen, the magazine’s editorial choices and slant have become more and more focused on works appealing to a smaller and smaller segment of the reading and writing marketplace.

Over the years, I’ve intermittently received comments along the lines of “you don’t get/understand [fill in subject].”

What this usually means is “you can’t possibly understand.”

Occasionally, the commenter is correct. Very few people living – possibly only those with a near-death experience – can understand death from the first person personal view. Or being incinerated in a by a huge fireball. For everyone else, including authors, trying to portray such circumstances requires research, extrapolation, and imagination… and you still might not be accurate, which is why I don’t stray too far from what I’ve experienced and seen. I haven’t actually crashed an aircraft, but I have lost the only engine I had and survived the autorotation into a field, and I’ve rescued survivors of a crash moments after it happened and seen the bodies of those who didn’t make it.

And most times, though, this author does understand; I just might not “understand” it in the way the commenter feels or sees it. That’s only natural. We’re all different, the difference ranging from attitudes and feelings we share and understand about others to total emotional incomprehension.

I’ve given my best advice, both personally and professionally, and seen people disregard it… and then lose their careers and futures. I’ve also taken my own advice… and failed miserably on more than one occasion.

I doubt that I’ll ever feel the seemingly blind love and joy others take in personal weapons of mass destruction or feel the undoubting self-righteousness of a true believer, possibly because I’ve always had a lot of doubts. But that’s why I only portray such individuals from the outside. And most times, at least for me, that’s the best way, because people usually react to what they see and experience from others’ behavior.

Also… perspective matters – enormously. The man or woman who kills someone shooting up others is likely to feel a lot less guilt than someone who murders their boss over something trivial [but then, maybe not, given some bosses].

And, sometimes, the author doesn’t get it, but with good writers, that doesn’t happen as much as the critics think, if more than the author would like to believe.

Once upon a time, a young teenager operated a lawn-mowing business with his younger brother. This was long before powered string-trimmers. I was that teenager, and I did a lot of hand-trimming [hand-powered clippers] and edging [muscle-powered half-mower], although the main mower was Briggs & Stratton powered. It was hard work, and when I got old enough to drive I left the lawn-mowing business behind and became a lifeguard.

Even though I was one of the better competitive swimmers in the region, I still had to be Red Cross Water Safety Certified and pass a rigorous test against a number of other candidates. Getting a lifeguard job in Denver back then wasn’t all that easy.

Fast-forward to the present.

Because I know what drudgery lawn-mowing is, when I became successful enough, and when my children were long out of college, my first personal luxury was hiring a lawn service, and it definitely wasn’t cheap, but I was tired of mowing the lawn.

For a time, that was fine, but then that lawn service just vanished, literally overnight. I found another lawn service, but over the past several years the quality of mowing and trimming has diminished. My neighbors, with other lawn services, have noted the same problem. Then last Friday, the lawn-mowing team arrived, spent twenty minutes, and vanished, leaving the lawn two-thirds unmowed and totally untrimmed. I haven’t yet had a response to my inquiries.

On a related note, several weeks ago, I ran across a syndicated news story about how quite a number of public swimming pools across the United States were closed or unable to open because of a shortage of lifeguards.

I definitely have to wonder.

The other day I came across a comment to the effect that authors who portrayed society where the majority of power wielders and decision-makers were white were in effect supporting racism. That’s a rather broad brush. If you’re writing historical fiction, fantasy or not, that’s the way the culture was. If you’re writing present-day or near-future fiction of any sort, that’s the way most cultures are and will be for at least a generation. Accurate portrayal isn’t racist, although glorifying or rationalizing existing racism certainly is.

In writing Isolate (and it’s forthcoming sequel, Councilor), I changed the “color” palate. Those of the aristocracy and older commercial wealth tend to have darker skins, whereas farm workers and lower-class manual workers have lighter skins. While I believe that would be the outcome in that society, it’s still “racist,” in a reverse way, but every culture in human history has had a way of “discriminating” against some group. Even animals do on occasion.

As I’ve noted before, the Roman Empire was far less race-conscious than American culture is today, but they discriminated, nonetheless, mainly by economic status. Slaves came in every color and so did people of wealth and power, especially outside of Rome, and even a number of emperors were not of Roman birth.

A similar problem exists for a writer with regard to gender. Like it or not (and I don’t), in the U.S., men, as a group, still tend to minimize women and attempt to keep them out of positions of power and to restrict their rights, and in the near future, for a number of reasons, it can’t and won’t change [even if the Supreme Court were to be drastically re-structured overnight and equal rights and pay legislation became law tomorrow].

That should be changed, and, in time, I’m hopeful that it will be, but to declare that fiction that doesn’t represent racial or gender “equality” as racist or gender-biased is unrealistic, because all societies “discriminate” in some fashion. Depicting a racist or gender-discriminating society isn’t by itself racism or discrimination, but endorsing or glorifying such a society is.

A recent article in Salon [“Republican Voters don’t actually “believe” the Big Lie about January 6 — they’re in on the con”] makes the point that, historically, authoritarian movements such as the Nazis and fascists have espoused lying as a repudiation of the “enlightenment values” of truth and feel that any strategy that will gain them power is acceptable. The Salon article goes on to illustrate how those involved in the January 6th riots and attempted coup, as well as others in the U.S. far right movement, fall into that pattern of behavior.

The use of lies is accepted and exalted by authoritarians because lying is not only an expression of power, but expresses dominance over accepted truths because authoritarians believe those espousing democratic ideals are slaves to their words and truths. For example, white supremacists lie and seek power because they reject the idea that “all men are created equal” and refuse to accept that premise.

What’s especially dangerous about this behavior is that the “great American experiment” in democracy is based in large part on an underlying respect for truth and a belief in the idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty, while the far right believes that the left was guilty of stealing the election without either evidence or truth.

The January 6th insurrection was based on a proven falsehood because those behind it believe that any means to power is justified since the other side is so “evil.” Of course, they don’t seem to understand or acknowledge that using any means possible to gain power is a greater evil than the policies they oppose.

When power itself is the goal, almost any means to achieve it can be rationalized, and the Republican support of the “big lie” fully illustrates how they place the desire for power above the desire for a true democratic republic, which they seem intent on destroying in order to save it.

Today, the biggest concern of most voters is inflation, but two years ago, the big issues were COVID and economic stagnation and lack of income. So… in response to those concerns, the federal government, under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, pumped billions of dollars into business and personal pockets, which gave people funds when they didn’t have work or had less work, and funneled cash to businesses who could document that they would otherwise lay off employees. But because of the damage to the supply chain caused by COVID, all that money chasing too few goods triggered inflation… and now everyone’s blaming the current administration for the inflation caused by two administrations doing what people wanted.

The United States has more firearms in private hands than all the firearms in the rest of the world in private hands. Is it any wonder that we also have the greatest number of civilian deaths from firearms?

Year after year, the United States has effectively dumbed down education by requiring teaching to the test, exerting less classroom control, and by allowing rampant grade inflation. We’ve insisted that college is THE answer, and we’ve also passed on more of the cost of college to students. Now we have twice as many young people graduating from college as there are jobs requiring college education and a massive student debt load that all too many graduates struggle (and often fail) to repay. We also have a shortage of skilled workers in fields not requiring a college education.

Still only about sixty percent of Americans are vaccinated against Covid… and we have case numbers again rising with the advent of yet another new variant.

Other countries massively subsidize new facilities to build sophisticated electronic microchips. The U.S. doesn’t. Now we don’t have any significant microchip manufacturing facilities, even though every sophisticated military weapons system requires such chips, and China leads the world in such capacity.

Too many American students don’t like and/or don’t have the educational background in hard sciences, which leads to a lack of top-notch scientific talent. At the same time, we’re turning away brilliant technical types who want to immigrate.

Today more and more wealthy Americans and their accountants have become more “creative” in calculating their taxes, but the IRS is weeks, if not months, behind in processing tax forms. Although audits of questionable tax returns are at an all-time low, and the government is running massive deficits, Congress keeps trying to cut funding to the IRS, while pushing for more tax cuts and more spending

There’s a lot more, but that’s enough to consider for now.

The other day, a reader called my attention to what might be called a relatively polite rant, i.e., an op-ed in The New York Times by someone called Tim Krieder, whom I’d never heard of. According to the op-ed, he defines himself as a Millennial who’s disgusted with the entire structure of work and sickened and angry with the excessive greed of the corporate moguls, who work at underpaying their employees and squeezing every last dollar from them. And what’s worse, so much worse, according to Kreider, is that so much work is meaningless.

Kreider begins by saying, “A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system.” That’s somewhere between hyperbole and utter bullshit. American capitalism works. In fact, that’s the problem. It works far too well at making money for the capitalists and not nearly well enough for those they employ – except for a handful of those at the very top.

Kreider goes on to excoriate the cults of “busyness” and “hard work is necessary for success,” then declares that people are enervated not just by pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which they have neither faith nor investment. This isn’t exactly new.

What Krieder – and apparently much of the millennial generation – doesn’t seem to get is that jobs are work, often work that seems meaningless to many workers who aren’t involved in manual tasks or those where the results can’t be immediately perceived. The Millennials want “meaning,” and what they mean is work that they feel is meaningful. Anything else apparently doesn’t count.

I can guarantee that all those jobs and busywork that Kreider deplores are “meaningful” to someone, or those greedy capitalists at the top of the pyramid wouldn’t be paying for them. The capitalists certainly have been more and more effective at reducing staff and while maintaining output, and they aren’t going to pay for work they think is “meaningless.”

While I certainly agree with his points about mind-numbing and exhausting work that seems meaningless, that’s been true for a good century, if not longer.

My first job after I left the Navy was as a statistical analyst for a manufacturer of compressed air filters, lubricators, and valves, trying to determine sales patterns and project future trends, using a series of formulae developed by the former head of market research. Being somewhat of an iconoclast, I kept two sets of projections, those predicted by the various formulae and those I wrote down based on my gut feel. After a year, two things became clear. My gut figures [which I kept private] were more accurate, and that I wasn’t suited to that kind of mental drudgery. Today, of course, all that would be done by computers, but this was at a time when desk-top electronic calculators had just become available. After my departure, my position was filled by someone much more enamored of that sort of work. I also noted, about ten years ago, the retirement of my immediate superior at that company, who clearly had spent fifty years dealing with marginally meaningful numbers.

From the compressed air position, I then went on to other pursuits, some where I failed miserably, before getting into politics as essentially a combination of analyst, researcher, and composer of all sorts of political analyses, correspondence, testimony, and speeches, none of which survives except in long-filed archives, if there. And all of that would be meaningless, by Mr. Kreider’s standards, but it did enable me to survive mostly comfortably, to raise a family, and to write F&SF on the side until I was successful enough to become a full-time writer.

I’m far from being that much different from millions of others over the past five decades who struggled between trying to find meaning and supporting themselves and others.

What Mr. Kreider says is, for all his protests that the current American “work culture” is meaningless and carries that meaninglessness to extremes, is nothing that hasn’t been said before, and said with far less self-pity and self-righteousness.

And the answer doesn’t lie in protesting the lack of meaning, in dropping out of the workforce, or in working as little as possible, as Mr. Kreider seems to advocate, but in political and legal action to change the corporate culture from one that continues to over-reward the capitalists to one that grants economically a greater share to those who create the goods, services, and products.

Many years ago, when my wife and I moved to southwestern Utah, we encountered a number of, shall we say, “cultural” practices based on the prevailing religion. Some of them were understandable, if somewhat restrictive, such as the de facto practice of not scheduling university concerts, performances, or recitals on Sundays, even if that was an imposition of a religious belief on a public institution. Some were less acceptable to a public academic institution, such as the insistence that no performances, lectures, classes, or other activities be scheduled on Monday evenings, because the prevailing religion had declared Monday evenings as “family home” evenings.

Those who protested were often told that, if they didn’t like it, they should move, which non-members of the prevailing faith called “My Way or the Highway.”

Over the years, the more onerous attempts to impose religious cultural standards on the university have diminished, but not totally vanished. From what I’ve seen, this sort of local/religious parochialism that restricts the rights of non-believers exists in far more places than southwestern Utah, as does the attitude that “if you don’t like it, then leave.”

The first problem with this attitude is that the United States is a nation, not a confederation. The Founding Fathers tried the confederation approach and discovered it didn’t work. Even “accommodating” slavery in the South didn’t work, because the ramifications of doing so adversely impacted the North and the West.

Segregation didn’t work all that well either, and its legal abolition, particularly in the South, resulted in economic and social improvements in the areas that practiced it.

As a matter of equality, why should individuals face a situation where they must choose between a job for which they’re qualified or having their rights circumscribed because of the religious/social tenets of the area in which the job is located. This isn’t a theoretical question; it’s one that exists in many parts of the United States.

Abortion is just the most obvious example. In the case of abortion, current state laws: (1) create unequal rights for women based on geography; (2) discriminate against poorer women; (3) close off or limit economic opportunity for women unless they are willing to accept fewer rights.

Making abortion legal throughout the nation and where the choice is up to the woman (along a structure similar to Roe v. Wade) does not deprive those who are opposed to abortion of their rights. Criminalizing abortion does deprive women, as well as health care professionals, of rights.

That means, effectively, that the United States, as a nation, must agree on what constitutes basic human rights, on a secular basis, based on known fact, not upon belief, no matter how fervent, and in the case of those rights, the majority needs to prevail. Obviously, there are always instances where the situation may not fit within the legal structure, but to define basic legal rights in different ways in different states is not only setting a precedent with effects similar to other forms of legal discrimination, but also creating a possible recipe for legal and civil chaos, violent unrest, and civil war.

The biggest problem with true believers isn’t what tenets they hold to be sacred; it’s that they want to force those tenets and what goes with them on people who don’t share them.

For example, in the United States, if a true believer doesn’t want to have an abortion, no non-believer is going to force her to have one. But if a non-believer wants or needs a medically safe abortion of a non-viable fetus, the true believers pass laws that not only restrict her freedom, but endanger her life. Their action endangers the non-believer… and there’s no cost to the true believers.

True believers have opposed restrictions on corporate political statements and contributions because they outlawed certain corporate practices. This ignores the fact, as events have recently demonstrated, that unlimited corporate “freedom of speech” effectively restricts individual freedom of speech not only because money drowns out individual viewpoints, but also because only wealthy individuals can afford to dispute the corporate view and because no individual in the corporation can be held legally responsible for falsehoods, misstatements, or lies. So, effectively, the corporation gets preferred treatment under the law.

Same-sex marriage doesn’t harm true believers. There’s no requirement for them to marry someone of the same sex, and, in fact, same-sex marriage is more likely to benefit the true believers because it creates more stable bonds and less societal disruption. But true believers oppose it because it doesn’t fit their beliefs.

True believers cannot recognize or accept facts contrary to their own beliefs, which is why so many still believe that lying, thieving, hypocritical Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

The true believers are the ones causing disruption because they and their political allies are passing laws and overturning others that are against the wishes of the majority of the people. In effect, they’re imposing minority rule, while failing to acknowledge it, and in fact hypocritically claiming the opposite.

Decades ago, one of my political science professors made the statement that Christianity was a religion for slaves. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s in this world, but believe in Christ, and you will be rewarded in the next. It’s a wonderful way of keeping the slaves in their place.

He was right, and the political right has taken full advantage of this fact that still underlies Christianity.

Corporations have the right to drown out everyone else’s right to speak, because they are in fact de facto Caesar in our current society.

The church, aided by the evangelical right and moneyed interests, now has the right to rule pregnant women’s bodies, while corporations get government to allow them to destroy the environment and to impair the health of the multitudes in order to increase what Caesar gets. But it’s all right. True believers will receive their reward in the next world, and for those of you who aren’t true believers, well… tough shit.

The right to pray and to coerce others to pray cannot be restricted, but a woman’s personal right not to reproduce, even if she’s raped or if it could cost that woman her life, cannot be allowed. No matter how you put it, that’s a form of enslavement. And it’s based on a belief that, first, life is sacred, and second, that there’s a soul – even before conception, apparently. Both are without proof, and they’re a set of beliefs imposed on non-believers.

The right, especially the religious right, has fought and consistently opposed an equal rights amendment. It’s not an amendment to give women greater rights, but equal rights. Why does the right oppose it? Largely because too many men don’t want women to have those rights, even if most men won’t admit it, because, after all, faith declares women must be subordinate to men, and also because it will cost corporations billions if they have to pay women equally.

What the far right wants has nothing to do with what’s good for most people; it’s strictly to maintain control over people’s lives and maximize the wealth of the few – and, despite efforts and words of the Founding Fathers, they’re using a slave religion to boost belief and bucks.

The true believers in the U.S. political system are savoring their successes. They’ve furthered the ability to carry all kinds of firearms under any circumstances. They’ve arrogated, on the federal level, the near absolute right-to-life of a few cells over a woman’s personal control over her own body, and they’re aiming at enacting more absolutes into law, as well as further eroding the Constitutional separation of church and state.

While they’ve accomplished their immediate goals, citing both what the Constitution says and what it doesn’t, they’ve employed very selective readings that other scholars have disputed and ignored anything contrary to what they want to believe.

One of our great Presidents made the statement that the battle of Gettysburg was fought so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Right now, however, the true believers insist that government of the people, by the minority of the people, for the minority of the people, shall be their goal.

The majority of the people believes that some form of abortion should be legal. The majority believes that there should be some form of restriction on who should be allowed to carry firearms and under what conditions. The majority believes that the results of fair and free elections should be honored. The majority believes that the right to vote by all citizens should not be restricted.

The true believers on the right believe none of that.

That is because true believers cannot comprehend that there is any validity to anything in which they do not believe, even when the facts do not support their beliefs, and even when those beliefs are not shared by the majority of the people.

If one looks at history, societies governed by true believers have seldom endured, and when they have endured, they have become brutal tyrannies. And, interestingly enough, and contrary to both the rhetoric and beliefs of true believers, most tyrannies in history have risen out of conservatism, not liberalism, or even ultra-liberal radicalism.

And those are two other facts that the true believers on the right cannot understand or accept.