I have to confess that I’m a bit of a cynic about the “New Year,” as I am when someone hypes something as “the newest and greatest.” Just because the annual calendar starts over doesn’t really change anything. We’re all just a day older than we were twenty-four hours earlier, even if it is officially 2018, instead of 2017. The extra weight I gained from excessive holiday consumption didn’t magically vanish, nor will it, new year or not.

I’m also not happy about another phenomenon that I’ve observed about “new years.” They seem to come faster than they used to. When I was very young, the month of December seemed to last years. Now, it’s come and gone before I know it, and the deadline on my next book appears to be rushing toward me, without my having written all that’s necessary to meet it. Realistically, that’s not quite so, but it’s the way it feels. When you’re young, it seems as though you have time, rushed as you may be. I still feel rushed, but it’s clear I’ll never have enough time to write everything I want to write.

Being a curmudgeon about the “new year,” I also find I have fewer grand expectations about change, especially unbounded change for good. Once upon a time, I thought we might have regular space travel, at least to the moon, in my lifetime, and supersonic commercial air travel. The first is looking more and more unlikely, even if I live another thirty years, and the second may be possible, but only for the very rich, simply because of the “dismal science” of economics, and the requirement that greater expenditure of resources is necessary to move a given amount of mass at higher and higher speeds, but all the rosy expectations of my youth in these areas ran afoul of the results of Einstein’s now-effectively-proven [or so far not disproven] theories.

For similar reasons, some things won’t happen in 2018. There won’t be a huge increase in clean vehicles or in non-polluting power plants. Nor will there be any significant increase in coal-mining jobs or U.S. steel plants. That’s not because of politics or sinister acts by one side or the other, but because great changes in existing systems and industries require advance planning and extensive economic support… neither of which is forthcoming.

Some good things will happen in 2018, but they likely won’t be anything I, or almost anyone else, will be able to predict, because anything good requires change, and change upsets those whose position is dependent on the status quo. So visible change for good, such as a better and more workable health care system or further significant reining in of the patriarchal power structure, will have to come from unforeseen developments below the radar of the establishment. The good aspect of this is that American society is varied enough that some changes for good will occur. The bad aspect is that there won’t be as many as there could be.

But then my cynicism may just be the result of years of collision of my fundamental optimism with reality.

From both the comments on the blog and essays and comments elsewhere, it strikes me that, first, at least a few well-read individuals share my concerns about “modern” poetry and “second, that a great many current poetry editors and poets have made a value judgment that’s not necessarily supported by either history or logic. That judgment, stated in various ways, is that rhyme and metrical language are artificial and antagonistic to natural speech and therefore any obvious meter or rhyme is, in effect, “bad” or “less” because it is unnatural.

Yet all speech that that differs from that of the speaker can be called unnatural.

Moreover, the fantastic and bizarre images, or the convoluted word pictures and contrasts that inhabit a high percentage of the free verse that sprawls or creeps across the pages of literary and poetry magazines is anything but natural or unforced.

So structuring rhyme and meter is unnatural… or forced… but twisting words and metaphors is not?

And… what ever happened to one of the bases of poetry, the rhythmic and metrical dimension?

What I’m seeing and hearing is that it has been abandoned because it’s often badly done. Perhaps that’s because too many would-be poets don’t have the skill and/or vocabulary to write poetry with a rhythmic and metrical dimension… or because too many readers can’t or won’t take the time to really “read” a poem. Or even because metrically structured language somehow puts people off.

But whatever the reason for this change, I object to the idea that a word picture or metaphorical construct or any other structure of words without a rhythmic and metrical dimension can be termed poetry. As I wrote before, true poetry is expressed in patterned, rhythmic language, even when it is not strictly rhymed.

Anything else is just word-play with images, elaborate or sparse as it may be, even if it appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, or The Atlantic Monthly.

According to the doubtless outdated Sixth Edition of A Handbook to Literature, “poetry” is defined as “a term applied to the many forms in which human beings have given rhythmic expression to their most intense perceptions of the world…. The first characteristic of poetry, from the viewpoint of form, is rhythm…marked by a regularity far surpassing that of prose.” The discussion of poetry goes on to note that poetry is marked by “variety in uniformity, a shifting of rhythms that, nevertheless, return to the basic pattern.”

In short, poetry is patterned, rhythmic language, even when it is not strictly rhymed.

Last year, I read and clipped every poem from The New Yorker, except from one issue that vanished while we were on vacation. Exactly one from the ninety seven poems had a discernable rhyme scheme. A handful had internal rhyme schemes. Most had minimal alliteration, and most were essentially free verse, with largely iambic rhythms and irregular line breaks, presumably for either punctuation or emphasis.

The entire point of every one of them was to convey some sort of image and/or philosophical point. To my personal way of thinking, not a single one was memorable, and none of them stuck in my thoughts or mind.

I’ve also read the poetry in The Atlantic Monthly and in various literary magazines and current anthologies… and the vast majority of what is widely published today appears to fall into the “intense image” or “incident in life creating meaning” model, with very little, if any rhythmic support or rhyme.

Like so much in current life, poetry has become “of the moment,” to be read, momentarily enjoyed or considered, and then discarded.

And one of the reasons why it will be discarded is that those “vivid images” need rhythmic aids and/or rhyme for people to remember them. That’s one reason why rhymed song lyrics are far easier to remember… and why almost all the “modern” poets will vanish as if they’d never been.

We finally got the first snow of the year here in Cedar City. Only once since the town was founded more than 160 years ago has the first snowfall been later [January 8, 1977, in case anyone really wants to know]. This first snowfall wasn’t a dusting, but a respectable 8-10 inches at our house, which usually gets a few inches more than the town because we’re on a hill overlooking the main part of town.

But what amazed me most about this snowfall was the news coverage. On the front page of the local paper [one that has won numerous journalistic awards, I might add] on Wednesday,the morning before the snowfall, was a story predicting that the snow would arrive on Wednesday night, drop six to eight inches, and trail off by mid-day on Thursday. That’s very close to what happened.

HOWEVER, the local detailed forecast in the back section predicted snow flurries and no accumulation, and to top it off, the Thursday paper predicted no snow, except flurries late on Thursday. And we got another two inches of snow Thursday morning, and by mid-afternoon on Thursday, the sky was clear and cold, with no afternoon flurries.

I bring this up because it illustrates to my mind the growing tendency of younger people to compartmentalize their thoughts. No one at the newspaper, which has a comparatively young staff, even thought to compare their lead story to their forecast.

This is not exactly a new problem. I’ve noted for the past year, if not longer, that the forecast for Cedar City that appears in the Salt Lake Tribune, a newspaper published 250 miles away, is consistently far more accurate than the forecast in the Spectrum, which is published 50 miles away and which has a local bureau here.

So… what gives? It could be that the Spectrum subscribes to a cheaper canned forecast service. It could be that the staff doesn’t even read the forecast and considers it just another necessary canned feature that the newspaper has to have.

But to me, it shows that the editors aren’t really reading their entire newspaper… and that those numerous journalistic awards are suspect. Either that… or I really don’t want to read the papers that don’t get awards.

Anyway… it looks like, barring an unforecast heat spell, that we will get a white Christmas, after a long dry, cool, and brown autumn.

Several weeks ago, my wife ordered a replacement chair. She received an order confirmation, but days went by… without any chair or any more information. She called the company, and was referred to another number, where she was told they had no information, and that the order number was incorrect. She persisted, and after more than a half-hour the company finally located the chair and provided shipping and arrival information, but the only words remotely related to responsibility were, “The order number was incorrectly entered.”

There was nothing said about someone making a mistake.

And last year, The Atlantic actually ran an article on the phrase “mistakes were made.” Some of those using that phrase included Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler, on the lies he had told the Washington Post [1973]; Vice President George H.W. Bush on the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration’s lying about it [1986]; Ronald Reagan, on the same topic in his State of the Union address [1987]; Bill Clinton on administration officials discussing banking policy in front of fund-raisers [1997]; Henry Kissinger, on human-rights complaints about U.S. intelligence activities in South America [2002]; New Jersey governor Chris Christie on the GW Bridge scandal in his State of the State address[2014], and, incidentally, Albert Speer at the Nuremberg trials [1946].

What bothers me about such phrases is that, all too often, they’re an attempt to avoid personal responsibility or to blame someone else, either for doing something wrong, or for not fulfilling the speaker or commenter’s personal desires, all under the guise of seemingly impersonal objectivity.

And, as the examples above demonstrate, the desire to avoid admitting blame publicly certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon.

Action in science fiction and fantasy is often overvalued, whereas, in mainstream fiction, from what I’ve seen, it tends to be undervalued. Part of this difference, I suspect, lies in expectations. Historically, science fiction and fantasy were expected to be exciting, and most readers tend to view action as exciting, while “mainstream fiction” is supposed to be “thoughtful.”

What this view tends to overlook is the fact that action, in real life, is always either the result of an earlier decision or a reaction to some other event or action. In short, somewhere along the line, someone’s “thought” was behind all that action.

Wars don’t start when one kingdom sends knights or troops across the border of another kingdom. They begin well before that for any number of reasons, when a prince is killed by a terrorist, or when a group of dissident aristocrats protest taxes imposed by a distant ruler, or when the head of state of one country decides to take back territory taken in a previous war, which had begun because that territory had been taken away even earlier. Or perhaps the war began when the ruler of a land decided to repudiate the authority of a high priest. Or when the ruler of one land seizes the ships of another land and demands tribute. From the decisions made in studies, throne rooms, military headquarters, or mercantile banks come actions that spur conflicts of interest, and those conflicts lead to wars or military actions and adventures of various sorts.

All too often in action-oriented books, there’s little or no mention of what led to the fighting, except for a brief mention or rationale, with most of the emphasis on what those involved must do in the situations in which they find themselves, and in a way, that makes matters so much simpler. Whatever the protagonist does is for his or her survival. The tacit assumption in most books, except those where the protagonist is an anti-hero, is that the main character’s goals are worthwhile, even in those instances where he or she may not be, although, sometimes, the story is about how the noble protagonist must stoop to despicable means in order to survive or to accomplish great and worthwhile goals [and, yes, I’ve written a few books with that plotline, but I’d like to think that there was a great deal more about why he or she happened to be in that position].

All that leads to the question: Does it matter what led to the fighting or the action?

Obviously, I think it does, as well as the question of how that thought or decision led to what follows. Almost always, military and “action” figures in real life reflect some aspect of their society… and the way that society, or that part of it, thinks. That means that a character that is true to life is going to give some thought to why he or she acts in the way they do, and they may feel conflicts with their mission or their orders… or with the laws under which they live. Or they may agree totally and yet find their orders in conflict with what they believe they stand for.

In most F&SF, this conflict and others are usually resolved in terms of action, although, personally, I try never to have all conflicts fully resolved, even when the ending theoretically ties up most of the loose ends. In mainstream fiction, it’s often never resolved, even when action does occur, but then F&SF has “traditionally” been more optimistic, an optimism that’s often come under attack by the “darker” side of the field as being unrealistic, but doesn’t that make “dark” F&SF more like mainstream fiction with magic or high tech?

One of the greatest gifts of the species homo sapiens is the ability to dream of what might be. Unfortunately, that ability is also one of our greatest curses, because it allows individuals to dream up unworkable and truly terrible beliefs and inspires them to try to impose them upon others, often by force or deception, if not both. In this, mass media, like all technology, allows the amplification of human abilities to spread and impose various beliefs.

So now we live in a country where the President of the United States believes that a tax bill that conveys the majority of its benefits upon the wealthiest one percent of all Americans will improve life for everyone and where a significant percentage of Americans shares that belief. A country where the President and policy makers believe that there’s a workable military solution to the nuclear weapons efforts of North Korea [and there is, that is, if you’re willing to accept the destruction of South Korea and millions of Korean deaths]. A country where roughly half the population believes that the massive proliferation of individual weapons of death actually reduces violence, despite endless and irrefutable [factually, that is] statistics to the contrary.

These sorts of delusions, of course, aren’t limited to the United States, and some other countries are far worse, but even here in the “good ole USA,” I run across personal examples that stagger me, even as I recognize that belief is stronger than fact, stronger than rationality, and more powerful than a speeding locomotive [to totally scramble metaphorical comparisons].

This week, a student we know revealed that she was told not to come for Christmas by her mother because she had set a horrible example for her younger siblings. Her offense? She was dating a young man who was not of her faith. Rejecting your own child for that?

Then I heard the university president claim that over the past twenty years the university had more than doubled in size, but the student/faculty ratio was lower. When the full-time faculty has increased by only thirty percent, but the administration and adjunct faculty have more than tripled, is this self-delusion or deliberate deception?

Here in Utah, President Trump proclaimed that his action to cut the Bears Ears National Monument by more than eighty-five percent would allow native people to have a rightful voice over the “sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.” Those Native Americans clearly didn’t think much of that, since they supported the original monument size and in fact have so far filed four lawsuits against the Administration. The president also contends that the best Senate candidate for the open seat in Alabama is a confirmed sexual predator of high school girls because the Senate needs that Republican vote, while, of course, Al Franken and John Conyers – both Democrats – should be expelled from Congress for their sexual predation.

A national poll and study revealed that Americans continue to value men on their accomplishments and women upon their appearance. And, as I’ve mentioned so many times before, educational bureaucrats and politicians keep claiming education is getting better, and that more students are going to college and graduating. That may be so, but a greater and greater percentage of them can’t learn and synthesize information or write coherent paragraphs.

All this gives me the uneasy feeling that the “true believers,” those who place belief in their political tribe or faith above facts and reality, are winning and that the United States is indeed moving toward becoming even more of a La-La Land, where all that matters is the strength of belief, whatever that belief may be.

A few days ago, a friend of mine, who was also the husband of a colleague of my wife the professor, became a statistic. He shot himself fatally while his wife, also a professor of music, was at work. We’ve been friends, if not the closest of friends, for a number of years, and we even had them over for Thanksgiving dinner, as we have had for the past several years.

He had been an on-site construction manager for industrial projects, and some thirty years ago was badly injured in a construction accident. He was almost completely paralyzed for some time, but managed to regain enough muscular control that he could walk, talk, and handle most everyday tasks, although he did lose what I’d estimate as probably 60-70% of his former muscular strength, especially in his upper body. He lived most of his life since the accident in some degree of pain. With the help of opioids, he’d managed a normal life as essentially a house-husband – he did the cooking and light cleaning. And this worked for more than 25 years. But several years ago, even though he’d never abused opioids, with all the furor over them, he was essentially denied their use. Then he fell getting out of bed and shattered his leg, and had to go into total rehabilitative care because he didn’t have the upper body strength or coordination to use either crutches or a walker. Even after the leg healed, the pain got worse, and he lost 60 pounds in a year, and the doctors kept insisting the pain was all in his head.

He tried more physical therapy, to the degree that it was physically possible, and forced himself to take walks three to four times a day. Nothing that the medical profession suggested worked, and to top it all off, at one point, doctors even implied that both my friend and his wife were opioid users, which was totally ludicrous, given that she abstained from any kind of stimulants or drugs, except coffee, tea, and diet cokes… and that he had never turned to illegal drugs or to illegal means of acquiring prescription painkillers.

In the end, when he finally took his own life because the pain overwhelmed him, he became, not a victim of opioids, but of the war on opioids. He was an intelligent and highly disciplined man, a devoted vegetarian, who’d never used any drugs, except the opioid painkillers, and those never to excess, and who might have two glasses of wine with dinner, very occasionally. He was gently and kindly witty and very good company. He’d managed very well for 25 years on a moderate opioid regime, but with all the furor about opioids, this relief was denied to him.

This is not the only story I’ve heard along these lines, but it’s the closest one that I’ve witnessed personally.

As I’ve noted before, it seems as though the policymakers in this country, and possibly elsewhere, are ignoring the problem of pain and are essentially treating everyone who seeks relief of that pain as a potential criminal statistic. If this continues, and I see no sign of it changing, there will be a significant increase in both suicides and/or the use of illegal drugs or “illegal” possession of legal opioid painkillers, if not all three. And that’s assuming that these increases haven’t already begun.

One of the seemingly unfathomable and comparatively new outlooks my wife the professor has noted among students entering college in the last two to three years is a comparatively much lower level of understanding of certain connections and values that used to be easily comprehended by past students.

For example, students given full tuition scholarships, which require at least an even “B” average, are blowing off classes and not doing the work…. and they lose a four-year scholarship, which is worth tens of thousands of dollars. And we’re not talking about well-off students with family money, nor are these students disadvantaged minorities. They come from working or middle-class families; they have good grades in high school and high SAT/ACT test scores. Some of them will overcommit to part-time work in order to pay for what those of us in an older generation would have considered luxuries, such as newer cars and I-phones, but they’re not using the money to buy textbooks, or even borrow them, or in the case of music students, not even to purchase the music they’re supposed to be learning as part of their major, complaining all the time that they don’t have the money. It’s almost as if college is an imposition.

At the same time, they pay for everything with plastic, almost as if they had no idea of where the money represented by the endless card-swiping comes from.

Then there are those of higher than average intelligence who cannot take a series of events, or pieces of music, or facts and synthesize what they have in common or how they differ. Nor can a majority of them write a coherent paragraph. Far too many of them feel that they have no obligation to learn, and that every professor is under an obligation not only to inspire them, but to spoon feed them what they need to know. This is not helped by an administration whose overt and clearly expressed philosophy is that professors are solely responsible for keeping students in school and that student retention is a higher priority than a good education.

A majority of these students have little or no intellectual curiosity, as well as little knowledge of either American culture or history, let alone the history or cultures of other lands.

Yet, they’re generally good young people, if as self-centered as most teenagers have been in at least the past several generations. They’re not mean or vicious, but they don’t seem able to figure out what work needs to be done unless they’re given specific directions. And when they reach the end of those directions, they stop and look around blankly.

In many ways, for a generation cited as the most connected in history, it’s almost as if they’re totally disconnected from anything but their electronic “reality.” They don’t talk to the people around them. Far too many of them don’t understand deadlines and get upset when professors don’t “understand” that they’re stressed or have emotional issues. They don’t really seem to make a connection between the quality of work and success. They don’t understand, or want to understand, the history that led to where they are.

Too many of the voice students can’t even explain what they feel when they’re singing, and yet they want to be professional singers… and they don’t get the fact that unless they can master their own bodies, and understand the feelings and muscular control necessary, they’ll never make it as singers or teachers of singing. In fact, many actively reject connecting to their physical feelings.

Disconnection may shut out a world they find unpleasant or unimportant… until that world crashes through their electronic bubble and asks them to pay the bills with real physical work requiring meeting standards on someone else’s timetable. And it will… sooner or later.

As I’ve pointed out before, both in this blog and in various novels, public trust is vital for a working civilization on all levels. We trust that there will be water and power. Despite a handful of terrible mass shootings, we trust that, in the vast majority of times, we can walk the streets of our communities without being gunned down. We used to trust the media for comparatively honest reporting, but that trust is rapidly vanishing, and has vanished entirely in the minds of a large segment of the American population.

Because we’re a social species, we instinctively look for individuals in whom we can place trust. Most people don’t trust numbers, and they tend to trust those who try to persuade them with numbers and statistics even less. They want to trust people who are like them and who seem to tell the truth.

But what happens when more and more public figures are revealed not to be truthful in their private lives, or worse, to have engaged in reprehensible behavior that they kept secret through their power? Immediately, people begin to wonder in whom they can put their trust. Americans have already lost faith in most career politicians – one of the reasons why Trump was elected.

More than ever we’re seeing how many more politicians and media figures have engaged in far less than exemplary conduct in their private lives, and the trustworthiness of the media, never that high to begin with in recent decades, is plummeting, as is the public image of business leaders. What we don’t like to admit, either privately or publicly, is that what we’re seeing about public figures isn’t anything new, but merely a revelation of what has gone on all along. What’s different is that the formerly powerless people who used to be abused without recourse now have recourse, and the results are anything but pretty. History has also revealed that revered and beloved leaders often kept secrets that might have driven them from power, had they been revealed, but those revelations usually didn’t come out until much later.

What some powerful people also fail to realize is that, in a mass media and social media society, very little can remain hidden for long, and it’s harder and harder to keep secret personal shortcomings or abhorrent or potentially illegal or immoral behavior. And, no matter who you are, all of us have deeds or words that could be embarrassing or worse if revealed to the world. This isn’t something new. We want to have leaders better than we are, and we want them to be above reproach in everything. But our leaders don’t come from some spotless heaven; they come from society. Yet we feel betrayed when dirty secrets or sexual harassment charges appear in the media.

And that sense of betrayal makes it harder and harder for leaders to lead, and to reach any sort of consensus, partly because each side doesn’t believe it can trust the other, and partly because, when there is a lack of trust, people want absolute guarantees and, too often, an absolute guarantee for one side totally alienates the other side.

Now… if we want to reduce the magnitude of the “trust” issue in business, government, and the media, there’s one fairly straightforward way to elect politicians less likely to engage in sexual harassment, or to choose news executives and anchors who are less likely to use the “casting couch,” and that’s to put more women in charge. While there are some women who have sexually harassed others, according to EEOC figures, men in power are more than five times more likely to abuse their position than are women. Not that this will set well with most men… like most unpleasant facts.

Another possible way to deal with the trust issue is to spend more time verifying those facts that can be verified, rather than blindly trusting people we find appealing and likable. Another way is to be more skeptical and to judge political and media figures by what they’ve done… and what they’ve failed to do… and to evaluate what they propose by what the impact will be… and not by what they claim. We may not ever know all the exact details, but when a tax cut has the greatest immediate benefits for the wealthiest one percent, is it really prudent to trust the politicians who claim that it’s a great benefit for the other 99% of the population? When every nation in the world, except the U.S., has taken a stand of some sort against global warming, is it really wise to trust politicians who ignore this, or who claim global warming is a hoax.

When a political party rigs the representation in a state so that by winning less than half the votes in that state, that party controls 60% of the state legislature, can the politicians of that party really be trusted to be truthful?

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reduce our emphasis on personality or increase our emphasis on facts and actual accomplishments. We might not be quite so disillusioned then.

Writing what you know is a well-intended piece of advice for aspiring writers that is too often misconstrued or misapplied. First, what we know is the result of our experiences, both good and bad, and also interesting and, frankly, boring. A long time ago, I spent a year as an industrial market research analyst, and my job was to analyze past sales patterns and forecast future sales of compressed air filters, regulators, lubricators, and valves used primarily in heavy industry. In the more than forty years since I departed that job, I have yet to find a way to make it terribly interesting to readers, except as a motivation to escape such detailed and precise boredom.

Yes, sometimes we do have experiences that are exciting, but if all you do with them as a writer is rehash the past, no reader will be interested. I’ve used my years as a Navy pilot not to relive the Vietnam years but as the basis for writing about piloting spacecraft, but even that requires integrating new information with old. What my experience does provide is the “feeling” of being in that sort of situation. The same is true of my years as a senior political staffer in Washington, D.C., where the experience and knowledge I gained become the basis for writing about politics in different governmental settings, in both SF and fantasy.

There are times, however, when using experience is counterproductive in writing fiction, and that’s when popular but inaccurate images and tropes have been fed so thoroughly to people that conveying what your experience has demonstrated is accurate conflicts with the popular images that are anything but accurate. I discovered this with The Green Progression, a then near-future SF mystery thriller I wrote with Bruce Scott Levinson about environmental politics in Washington, D.C. Although it actually got a review from a D.C. paper praising its accuracy in depicting Washington politics, the book was a miserable failure in terms of sales, largely because, I suspect, its depiction of national politics was far more mundanely brutal and cruel than the glamorously exciting, body-filled, last-minute-escape-from-danger images created by both popular thrillers and movies. What’s ironic about that was, when, several years ago, I had lunch with the head of the consulting firm I once worked for, he laughed at the fact that we had essentially written a lightly fictionalized version of what his firm did… and no one believed it. He also paid for the lunch.

Experience does matter, because a wide range of experience makes it far easier to convey in depth different settings, occupations, and environments and how people react to such settings and occupations. How much it matters depends on what you write and how you write it… and the audience for whom you write. Page-turner thrillers, from what I’ve observed, rely on action and more action, and not as much depth in other areas is required. Novels that explore character through action generally can benefit from more experiential depth.

But like all sets of advice and all generalizations, there are authors and books that are quite successful… and go against every observation I’ve just made.

…for my occasional rant about when it would be proper to start celebrations and gift buying for Christmas, that is, AFTER Thanksgiving.

Yet in most of the United States, by November first, right after Halloween, Christmas decorations appeared and sales were announced. Sirius’s XM satellite music service shut down the Billy Joel channel and replaced it with Christmas music, too much of it the elevator kind. Some Christmas decorations and sales items were appearing in Walmart in October.

While Christmas has historically been the time to celebrate the birth of Christ, only two of the gospels even mention his birth – Luke and Matthew – and none give any hint of what time of year his birth took place. Some early believers thought it was in April, but the Egyptian Christians decided to celebrate it on January sixth, while others favored the winter solstice. Eventually by the fourth century the Christian Church agreed on December 25th.

Even the Christmas tree had nothing exactly to do with Christmas, but more with non-religious German customs, and wasn’t common even in England until Prince Albert made it a custom of the British royal family in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I can understand the uncertainty about the time of Christ’s birth. I can see why, with the exact date unknown, it made political sense some seventeen centuries ago to agree on a date that matched other celebrations in the hopes of gaining converts.

What I don’t accept is the idea that a religious holiday and supposed celebration of faith should become – cancerlike – a massive commercial sales shill that threatens to gobble up [pun-intended] the comparatively non-commercial celebration of Thanksgiving.

But then, what else should I expect from a religious holiday that was moved to appeal to the pagans, now that it’s been swallowed by worship of another pagan deity – either Plutus [the ancient Greek god of wealth, from which comes the term plutocrat] or Mammon, take your pick.

Before I married my wife the opera singer and university professor, my primary interests in the arts were literature, especially F&SF and poetry, and painting. My principal musical interests were instrumental classical music and “non-twangy” country music. The country music has faded to the background as I’ve also come to appreciate and enjoy opera and musical theatre.

I’ve also moved from being immersed in national politics to being a close observer of university and faculty politics… and have come to realize that in all too many instances, Henry Kissinger was right – university politics are every bit as bad as national politics, or they were until the last year or so.

One question that keeps coming to mind for me is exactly what is the role of a university president? Are university presidents primarily glad-handers and fundraisers? Or are they supposed to set the course and policies of the institution? Or, in the case of state institutions, to lobby the legislature to obtain a share in increasingly hard to get state funding?

The current president of the local university is a lawyer, a profession that I’m convinced has created a disproportionate share of the mess in which our federal government finds itself. I have nothing against attorneys in their proper place [and I shouldn’t, given the number of them in my family], but I firmly believe that neither accountants nor lawyers should be in charge of anything. Yes, every CEO needs a good attorney for advice, but attorneys as CEOs or university presidents? Not a good idea. I feel the same way about accountants.

I’m certainly not privy to all this president has done, but I have to say that, from what I’ve seen, his priorities are… can I say, of dubious value.

Every door in the music department had to be replaced not once, but twice, for legal reasons, because professors couldn’t be observed teaching otherwise, not that there were ever any complaints. On the other hand, there’s still no funding to replace the sixty year old defective and potentially dangerous lighting system in the recital hall… although plans have finally been discussed, but the replacement has been postponed for three years running. When asked about the possibility to replace the sixty-year old and overcrowded music building, he told the faculty they needed to find a wealthy donor… and that they “knew what they were getting into” when they became music professors.

The university president religiously attends every football game and touts the football team, which has won the conference title for two of the last three years. He hasn’t commented on the fact that singers from the music department have made it to the national finals of the National Association of Teachers of Singing for the past three years. Nor has he noticed the theatre alumni/alumnae who have appeared on Broadway or in touring national productions. He certainly hasn’t noticed the professors who taught and mentored those graduates. But he has forced out the director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, one of the two men who built it into a national Tony award winning regional theatre, and eliminated the modest stipend paid to the Festival’s founder. The only music department concert he now attends is the annual choral-rock concert, and he’s inordinately proud of the university’s recent achievement as being cited as the most “outdoors-oriented” university in the country.

For more than fifty years, the university president has served as a board member of the Cedar City Music Arts Association, the oldest all-volunteer arts organization in Utah. Some presidents were more active than others; all attended board meetings [nine a year] occasionally. This president never attended and recently resigned.

So far, after three years, he hasn’t managed to land major financial support, nor has he been able to persuade the legislature to come up with significant additional funding, even though the legislature has insisted that the university accept more students every year, so that tuition continues to climb. And despite the increased enrollment, very few additional full-time faculty have been hired, but the number of adjunct faculty has burgeoned.

But the football team is better.

One of the problems with excellence is something that I’ve seldom seen acknowledged, especially by those charged with determining and “measuring” it.

Simply said, excellence is individual, limited, and determined by specific accomplishments or “products.” Mozart and Beethoven wrote specific exceptional musical works. That defined their excellence, and that excellence was independent of their personal behavior, which was, to be charitable, far less than excellent. Einstein’s excellence manifested itself primarily in his theories of general and special relativity and the photoelectric effect.

These days, colleges and universities have essentially tied the idea of excellence in education to bureaucratic systems and accountability to rigid standards that miss the mark. Buzzwords like “essential learning outcomes” and “experiential learning” and “detailed rubrics” and “enhanced student retention” all abound. Syllabi have become detailed tomes that need to be written with near-legal precision. All of this and more is presented as both a means to excellence in education and as a way of measuring what constitutes such “excellence.”

And… of course, whether anyone will admit it, such methods and systems are failing. They’re failing because no one wants to look at what actually measures excellence in education. Excellence is not measured by how many students stay in school and graduate, nor is it measured by inflated grade-point averages, or university student evaluations, or by the immediate post-graduate earnings of such students. Diplomas, in all too many cases, have become almost meaningless paper credentials. First jobs and accomplishments pale, and touting the earnings of former students shows more about their interest in money than their accomplishments or their interest in actual accomplishment.

In the end, what represents a college’s excellence is the accomplishments in life of its students, especially in later years. The problem with this measure of excellence is that it’s long-term, and the educrats need immediate and flashy bookmarks to placate and motive legislators, donors, alumni, and parents and students paying ever-higher tuition and fees.

All too many universities recognize and honor primarily alumni or alumnae who have either attained celebrity status or donated substantial sums of money. Universities who recognize concrete and significant accomplishments of alumni with as much ballyhoo as those who donate enormous sums of money are rare. Student athletes who become successful professional athletes are touted over former students who become successful professionals in other fields.

The same is also true in terms of faculty recognition. Solid, career-long accomplishments of faculty seldom are lauded. Popular awards, awards that can be used for PR purposes, or accomplishments that gain press or increase enrollment, are all too often the faculty “accomplishments” that are touted by universities… and seldom do they represent excellence. Nor, apparently, do most people, even university alumni, even care.

They’re more interested in whether the football team has a winning record.

For the past four decades, if not longer, Americans have been told in more ways than one that a college education is the way for a young person to get ahead, in fact, just about the only way. In 2009, 70% of all high school graduates entered college, an all-time high. Today, the figure is around 66%… but only a little more than half of those who enter college actually graduate.

The cost of higher education may be one factor for the recent decline, given that, over the past forty years, college costs to students have risen at an average rate of seven percent per year, roughly twice the rate of inflation. Part of the reason is that state colleges and universities have passed on more and more of the costs to students and their parents, and often neither can actually afford them.

The result? Forty-four million Americans have student loans. Almost 20% of those loans are in default, and the default rate is continuing to rise.

Why? The simple answer is that the former students can’t afford to repay the loans, suggesting that they don’t make enough money to cover both living expenses and loan repayments. That’s one reason why many recent graduates are still living with their parents.

One of the reasons is that, as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, there aren’t as many jobs out there requiring a college degree – and thus providing the income necessary to pay off substantial loans – as there are graduates seeking those jobs.

Yet education remains “the answer.”

I won’t try to address all the occupations where this is a problem, just one area that I know something about – fiction writing. When and where I graduated from college, there were few degree programs in creative/fiction writing. I could and did take several semesters of creative writing, but had a double major in economics and political science. Today, Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) programs in creative writing have proliferated. The first M.F.A. program was established at the University of Iowa in 1936. By 1994, there were 64. By last year, according to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, there were 381 M.A. or M.F.A. programs in creative writing. Annually, some 3,000 plus students a year graduate with such a degree.

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) currently states there are 145,900 “writers and authors” in the U.S., a quarter of them are part-timers, and 56% of them make less than $12,000 annually, which would place them below the federal poverty level for a single person. This isn’t especially surprising, given that Nielson Bookscan reported that of 1.2 million books tracked, only 25,000 — barely more than 2 percent — sold more than 5,000 copies. At current prices and royalty rates, selling 5,000 copies will generate between $12,500 and $15,000 – spread over two years at a minimum. Also consider the fact that, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the average book sells less than 500 copies.

There are roughly 1,900 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and less than 10% of them make more than about $30,000 annually, according to a former officer of the association. Noted F&SF editor and author Eric Flint once estimated that only 32 F&SF authors in the U.S. earned a consistent comfortable income, presumably an income above the median family income of $55,000.

Under these circumstances, for how many M.F.A. graduates is the degree really worth the cost? And this isn’t just a problem for would-be authors, but for more than a few other fields, as well. I just happen to know the numbers for writers better.

According to the BLS, there are roughly 800,000 employed lawyers in the U.S. today, and those who are employed make an average of $118,000… BUT the BLS also states that every year there are more unemployed law school graduates because the number of graduates is greater than the number of new positions created. This is also true in higher education, where the job market is so tight in most fields that educators with doctorates from good universities can only find part-time positions as adjuncts.

Such numbers also raise another question. Given the increasing costs of higher education, isn’t insisting on a college education risking becoming another form of economic segregation, potentially bankrupting those with heavy loans who don’t win the “jobs lottery,” not to mention offering unrealistic hopes to far too many young people?

Earlier this week, I flew back from the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio, with what I thought would be a comparatively simple itinerary, at least for me, given that getting to and from Cedar City isn’t ever a single flight – except to Salt Lake. My first flight was from San Antonio to Salt Lake City on a fairly comfortable aircraft, an Airbus 320.

Boarding was without incident. Then a few minutes before scheduled push-off from the gate, the pilot announced that there was a fuel discrepancy that needed to be resolved. It took more than an hour and ten minutes to resolve the “discrepancy” and handle the paperwork.

The pilot had announced that the aircraft had the proper amount of fuel, but that the discrepancy still had to be addressed. So, believing that we had been sitting around for more than an hour just to unravel a bureaucratic paperwork snafu, I inquired into the nature of the discrepancy. One crew member finally told me that the problem wasn’t the amount of fuel, but that its location was. Apparently, there was a 20,000 pound imbalance of some sort. How this occurred or whether the crew member had it precisely right, I don’t know, but I do know that an Airbus 320 has two tanks in each wing and a center fuselage tank. To me, a 20,000 pound fuel imbalance sounds serious [especially given that the maximum fuel load is roughly 42,000 pounds], and according to FAA regulations, aircraft are prohibited from taking off with significant fuel imbalances, not that I knew that at the time

As a result, once we arrived in Salt Lake, despite my sprinting between gates, I missed my connecting flight to St. George by ten minutes… as did at least three others, who were either smart enough or pessimistic enough not to run. That meant a five hour wait for our connection. Several others couldn’t leave Salt Lake City until the next day, while a few “fortunate” souls could sprint and make their connections. I finally got home at close to one in the morning.

While I’m very thankful that the pilot caught the error/problem, the incompetence of the refueling crew cost everyone time and money, and had the problem not been spotted, it’s possible that matters could have been far worse.

I may not like weather delays for aircraft, or Air Traffic Control delays, or even some maintenance and repair delays, but delays created by incompetence are another thing entirely. Now, it could be that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I get older [although some of my offspring might claim I’ve always been that way], but it appears to me that I’m seeing a great deal more of this kind of sloppiness. My wife sees it in students; an Army lieutenant colonel who’s a battalion commander tells me that new soldiers need much more training and “reminders” about the importance of details, and has the statistics to back up his statement; and our son, who runs a very high-end retail outlet, has had to fire more people in the last two years than in the previous decade for exactly the same reasons.

Yet I see statistics insisting that the young people of today are more intelligent than ever. In my view, intelligent people don’t misfuel aircraft or require continual occupational reminders and babysitting.

And then I got a survey from Delta asking how they could have better handled the situation. My answer won’t be considered, I’m sure. I suggested that passengers who are delayed and inconvenienced by incompetence should be financially compensated, and that such compensation should be funded by deductions from the paychecks of senior airline executives.

The number of deaths from opioid overdoses and misuse continues to climb. All sorts of legislative and regulatory proposals have been floated, almost entirely, from what I can tell, dealing with controlling or restricting the prescription and distribution of opioids. Most recently, the President has signed an executive order purportedly addressing the opioid crisis.

Almost none of these measures will work, just as the measures proposed to deal with illegal drugs have failed miserably. And these “new” approaches will fail for a very similar reason: They don’t address the real problems leading to opioid deaths.

According to the National Institutes of Health, over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, and opioid-related overdose fatalities have doubled over the past ten years to more than 60,000 last year. While the NIH has recognized that pain and overdose deaths are related, and that medical pain treatment methods need to be improved, the underlying problem is incredibly simple… and presently not solvable for the majority of those suffering long term severe pain.

Opioids are the only legal way to relieve pain for most of those individuals suffering long-term severe pain. Continuous use of opioids requires higher and higher dosages to be effective and also makes users increasingly more sensitive to pain. In addition, chronic intense pain makes sleep difficult, and sleep-deprived individuals have even more difficulty handling pain. The medical profession has also been successful in “saving” people, at the associated cost of painful and chronic medical conditions.

While researchers are seeking other non-addictive pain remedies, so far as I’ve been able to determine, no non-opioid medication useful on a daily and long-term basis for a range of pain conditions has reached the stage of human clinical trials, and until something meeting those criteria is developed we’ll continue to face an “opioid crisis.” Restricting prescription painkillers will only drive people in pain to illegal drugs on a greater basis than at present, and that’s frightening, because overdose rates for illegal synthetic painkillers such as fentanyl are now approaching 20,000 deaths per year, an almost six-fold increase since 2002.

The problem isn’t opioids; the problem is pain. And very little of the rhetoric even acknowledges that.

Early this week, the Department of Interior announced plans to increase the entrance fees to some seventeen of the nation’s largest national parks in 2018, more than doubling the previous fees during the most crowded times. Among those parks are several here in Utah, including Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, and Arches.

The local reaction was fierce and immediate, not to mention negative, all along the lines that families can’t afford to pay $70 per car [now $30] or $30 per individual [up from $15] just to get into a national park. And if families can’t or won’t do that, Utah tourism will take a significant hit.

I understand the reaction, even if the proposed fee is far less than a day at Disneyland or Disney World. But I also understand the problems facing the National Park Service, which needs desperately to repair decades-old and damaged infrastructure, an infrastructure that gets damaged more each year by the increasing number of visitors. Currently, the Park system’s maintenance/repair backlog exceeds eleven billion dollars.

What also struck me was that this is the same reaction to all too many government programs, whether it’s SNAP/food stamps, health insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, disaster relief, interstate roads and bridges, tuition and fees at state universities… the list is seemingly endless. The least affluent members of society are hit the hardest by either increasing costs or decreasing services, and because politicians don’t ever want to raise taxes on anyone, either things don’t get fixed, or a few things get some help, and federal spending is financed more and more by increasing deficits.

It’s a national epidemic of “We need this, but we don’t want to pay for it.”

And yet, despite ballooning deficits, the Republican-led Congress and the President are pushing for massive tax cuts, claiming that such tax cuts will fuel growth that will wipe out the deficits. This is political bullshit and voodoo economics erroneously based on the experience of the tax cuts proposed by President Kennedy and signed into law by President Johnson as the Revenue Act of 1964, which reduced the top individual rate from 91% to 70%. The corporate tax rate was reduced from 54% to 48%. In fact, there was a moderate but significant growth attributed to those tax cuts.

Today, the tax rates are much different, and much lower than then. The top individual rate is 39.6% for individuals [with taxable incomes above $418,000 a year] and 35% for corporations, although the average rate paid for corporations is closer to 20% [and some large corporations pay no tax at all]. In addition, statistics show that there’s plenty of unused capital that’s not being invested in new businesses or jobs because the demand isn’t there. Since most of the tax cuts will go to the well-off, they won’t increase spending by the bulk of the population, which is what would be required to stimulate demand significantly.

And that means that the problem of “needs” being greater than the funds to pay for those needs is only going to get worse. And while many decry the growth of Social Security and Medicare, exactly how else, at present, are we as a nation going to provide for people too old and too infirm to work? Then, too, regardless of political philosophy, meeting some of those needs, such as our aging infrastructure, an overcommitted military, disaster relief and rebuilding, and yes, the national parks and the environment, are vital to the future of the country.

But no one wants to pay for enough for them… or to agree on what spending can be cut.

I can’t say that, with a few notable exceptions, that I’ve found many books to be slow reading. I’ve found books that I thought were less than well-written, books whose action sequences, upon reflection, seemed to have little point, books where I didn’t care about the main character, and books where there was less action, but I didn’t think of them as “slow.” I can only claim to have found one set of books truly slow, the Gormenghast Trilogy, but I know that there are a few readers who don’t find it slow.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that more and more readers are complaining that books are slow. I was astounded to find a huge listing of “slow” fantasy books on Goodreads. Some of those listed as slow included Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, George Orwell’s 1984, the Harry Potter books, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Andy Weir’s The Martian, and even George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. The list of “slow popular books” was over 900 books.

As I’ve mentioned before, I try to read a number of new writers every year, and it does seem to me that there are fewer and fewer books with slower pacing every year… and yet the number of readers complaining about slow books seems to be growing.

So… is it about the books? Or is it that more and more readers are used to fast-paced [and often shallow] video-based entertainment and expect books to be “faster” in the same way? Or could it be that more and more Americans have less ability to concentrate and possess reading skills inferior to the readers of previous generations? Given the huge expansion of graphic novels and manga, there certainly seems to be a segment of the “reading” public that prefers fewer words and more pictures. Is this because of declining reading skills or because the expansion of “visual”/video culture has stunted the ability of some portion of the reading public to create mental images of what they read? Perhaps both?

Certainly, the scores of teachers I know and have asked about this all believe that, in general, students in high school or college have more difficulty focusing,tend to avoid reading whenever possible, and complain that reading assignments that would have been considered light or easy a generation ago are too long and too hard – and that includes even students who score high on SAT or ACT tests, suggesting that they’re not lacking raw brainpower.

Slow books? Maybe. But I’m inclined to believe that it’s as much poor and slow readers as slow books.

For the most part, the manners of the first half of the twentieth century have been “modernized,” ignored, trashed, or updated. Which word describes one’s assessment depends on the individual and background, and there may well be additional terms better suited in the minds of others.

The social upheaval that began in the mid-1960s focused on manners as hypocritical and dishonest, among other things, and while that doubtless wasn’t the only factor, it was likely the most significant. What the downgrading or even disposal of manners and social custom ignored or disregarded was the role manners played in affecting individual self-worth.

Hypocritical as manners may be and often are, they require effort on the part of individuals. When people say “please” and “thank you,” when they address or refer to people as Mr., Ms., Mrs., or Miss and the appropriate last name, when they don’t crash or crowd lines, when they open doors for people who need help, when they address letters and emails with names and titles, rather than “Em” or “Bob,” it tends to send a message that others have worth. And when millionaires and billionaires dismiss the concerns of the poor, the working class, and minorities or when political figures call the supporters of an opponent “deplorables,” it’s neither accurate nor useful. More important, such behaviors send messages of devaluation.

How does this tie into Donald Trump and the polarization of the United States?

Both “sides” feel that they’re being devalued by the other side, especially by the leaders of the “other side.” There’s no sense of polite disagreement. The other side is “the dark side,” to be attacked and trashed for their “values” or lack of values. The large majority of Trump supporters, in particular, feel that they’ve been devalued and disregarded and that no one was speaking up for them. Ironically, many of them are willing to overlook Trump’s total lack of manners because they didn’t see anyone with manners able to articulate their views and feelings strongly enough.

Hillary Clinton was more mannered, but far less passionate, and it showed. As a result, too many Democrats drew the conclusion that she needed to be more of a gutter-fighter. Add to that the fact that many people seem to equate crudity with honesty, and manners as a trait of the self-serving elite, and she came across to too many of the undecideds as manneredly dishonest. Trump has proved, rather conclusively, that crudity doesn’t mean honesty. Politeness doesn’t, in itself, mean honesty either, but politeness has a far better record in allowing people to talk over controversial issues.

The more someone feels devalued, the less they’re going to listen to the other side, and the only way to even begin to bridge that gap is for the name-calling and vulgar and incendiary epithets to stop, and for people to address the issues politely. Being polite and mannered doesn’t mean giving up passion. Whether one liked Martin Luther King or not, he was both passionate and fought for his goals in a mannered fashion. The same can also be said of our greatest Presidents.

Like most social conventions, manners are a tool, one devalued in false service of “honesty” and one whose employment would be most useful today.