One of the basic underpinnings of religion, almost any religion, is the worship of something or some deity bigger than oneself, and the overt acknowledgment that the individual worshipper is less than the deity worshipped. Some religions even incorporate that acknowledgment as part of liturgy and/or ritual. Such acknowledgments can also be part of “secular religions,” such as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.

Today, however, there’s a totally different secular religion on the rise, with many of the old trappings in a new form, which might be called the “New Narcissism,” the elevation and exaltation of the individual, or the “self,” to the point where all other beliefs and deities are secondary.

Exaggeration? Not necessarily. What one believes in is reflected in the altars before which one prostrates oneself. Throughout history the altars of the faithful have either held images of a deity, perhaps accompanied by those of less deity, or no images whatsoever. While images of private individuals have also existed throughout history, those images or sculptures were created for posterity, of for the afterlife, so that others would have something to remember them by… or to allow them to remember themselves as they were. At one point in time, only the wealthy or the powerful could afford such images. Even until very recently, obtaining an image of one’s self required either the cooperation of others or special tools not particularly convenient to use. This tended to restrict the proliferation of self-images.

The combination of the personal communicator/camera/ computer and the internet has changed all that. Using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the internet, now each individual has the ability to create themselves as a virtual deity – and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people are doing just that, with post after post, selfie after selfie, proclaiming their presence, image, and power to the universe [with all three possibly altered for the best effect].

It’s the triumph of “pure” self. One no longer has to accomplish something for this presence and recognition. One can just proclaim it, just the way the prophets of the past proclaimed their deity. And given what positions and in how many ways people have prostrated themselves before their portable communications devices in order to obtain yet another selfie, another image of self, it does seem to resemble old-fashioned religious prostration.

Of course, one major problem with a culture obsessed with self and selfies is that such narcissism effectively means self is bigger than anything, including a deity or a country, and I have to wonder if and when organized religions will see this threat to their deity and belief system.

Another problem is that selfies have to be current; so everyone involved in the selfie culture is continually updating and taking more selfies, almost as if yesterday’s selfie has vanished [which it likely has] and that mere memory of the past and past actions mean nothing. All that counts is the latest moment and selfie. That, in turn, can easily foster an attitude of impermanence, and that attitude makes it hard for a society to build for the future when so many people’s attention is so focused on the present, with little understanding of the past and less interest in building the future… and more in scrambling for the next selfie.

All hail Narcissus, near-forgotten prophet of our multi-mirrored, selfie-dominated present.

Over the past several years, there’s been a great deal of talk about the need for “diversity.” So far as I can tell, this means stories set in cultures other than those of white, Western-European males and told by protagonists other than white males. I certainly have no problem with this.

I do, however, have some misgivings about the idea that such stories must always be written by authors from those cultures, and the equally disturbing idea that when someone other than a member or a descendent of those cultures writes about them, even when projected into the future, or into a fantasy setting, that is “cultural appropriation,” and a literary sin of the first level. The rationale behind this judgment appears to be that no one who is not a member of a different or a minority culture can do justice to representing that culture in a fictional setting.

Beside that fallacious point, what is exactly the point of fiction? Is it just to be culturally accurate? Or to entertain? To make the reader think? And for that matter, how does one determine “cultural accuracy,” especially when there are significant social and even geographic differences within most cultures?

Taken to extremes, one could classify Rob Sawyer’s hominid series, about an alternate world populated by Neandertals, as “cultural appropriation,” since most of us only have a tiny fraction of Neandertal genes. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light could easily be classed as cultural appropriation of Hindu beliefs and myths. For that matter, Tolkien certainly used the Elder Edda of Iceland as a significant basis of Lord of the Rings. And I wrote The Ghost of the Revelator even though I wasn’t born in Utah and I’m not LDS [although I have lived here for more than twenty years].

Obviously, writers should take seriously the advice to write what they know, and know what they write, but “non-members” of a minority or another culture may well know and understand that culture as well as or even better than members of that culture. Should they be precluded from writing fiction based on those cultures because editors fear the charge of “cultural appropriation”?

This concern, unfortunately, isn’t just academic. I’ve heard editors talk time and time again about how they want more diversity, but… In one case, the significant other of a Chinese-American born and raised in Hawaii wrote and offered a YA fantasy novel based on Hawaiian myth to a number of editors. When several agents and editors found out that the writer was not Hawaiian genetically, they decided against considering the book. Several well-known authors have also told me that they wouldn’t have considered the book either, because dealing with Hawaiian beliefs would be too controversial.

Shouldn’t it just be about the book…and not the genetics/cultural background of who wrote it?

In yesterday’s local paper, there was a front page article headlining the coming teacher shortage in Utah, to which I wanted to reply, “How could there not be?”

The beginning salary for a Utah teacher in most systems is not far above the poverty level for a family of four, and the average Utah teacher’s salary is the lowest in the United States. Utah spends the least money per pupil in primary and secondary schools of any state in the United States. Nationwide, anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of newly certified teachers drop out of teaching in five years or less [depending on whose figures you trust], and that rate is even higher in Utah. In 2015, half of all newly hired teachers in Utah quit after just one year. Yet studies also show that the longer teachers teach, the more effective they become. Add to that the fact that Utah has on average the largest class sizes in the United States. The academic curriculum leading to a teaching degree has also become more demanding [at least at the local university], and it often takes even the best students more than the standard four years to complete a course of study that leads to teacher certification, especially if they have to work to help pay for their studies.

Despite the often dismal salaries, study after study shows the comparatively poor level of pay is down the list for why teachers walk away from teaching. Almost all prospective teachers know that teaching isn’t a high-paid profession. What they don’t know is just how effectively hostile the teaching environment is to a healthy and balanced life.

Here in Utah, for example, there are state legislators who complain about pampered and lazy teachers. They’re obviously unaware of the unpaid after-school, weekend, and evening workload required to support an eight-hour teaching day. Or of the number of parents who complain about their darling children’s grades – such as the one who wanted to know how his son could possibly flunk an art class [which turned out to be the fact that said son failed to attend most of the classes and never did a single art activity]. Or about the increasing reliance on testing to determine teaching effectiveness [when the testing itself reduces instructional time, when the test results determine teacher retention and ratings, and when the tests tend to measure factoids, and fill-in-the-blank skills, rather than thinking or being able to write even a coherent paragraph].

It also doesn’t help when the local papers are filled with pages and pages about the sports activities of the local high schools, with seldom a word about academic achievements or other more academic successes, such as plays, concerts, success in engineering competitions and the like.

Nor is it exactly encouraging when school administrators offer little understanding or support of their teaching faculty. That’s more commonplace than one might realize, although national surveys show it’s a significant factor in contributing to teacher drop-out/burnout. Certainly, a number of former students of my wife the university professor have mentioned this as a difficulty in their middle school or high school teaching positions.

And finally, in the end, what’s also overlooked is that it’s actually more expensive to continually replace a high number of departing teachers than to take the necessary steps to cut the teacher drop-out rate. But based on the current public view of education and the unwillingness to make meaningful changes, I don’t see this problem changing any time soon. In fact, it’s only going to get worse… far worse.

I admit it. I did watch the Super Bowl. How could I not when my grandfather was one of the first season ticket holders back in the days when the Broncos were truly horrible? I can still remember him taking me to a game, and he went, rain, shine, or snow, until he was physically no longer able. I wasn’t able to go with him, unfortunately, because by then I was working in Washington, D.C.

And yes, I was definitely happy that the Broncos won, particularly since I’ve always felt that Peyton Manning is a class act, but that brings me to the point — Cam Newton’s postgame interview, if it could be called that, which was anything but a class act. Yes, he was disappointed, and he wasn’t the first great quarterback to be disappointed, and certainly won’t be the last.

Newton’s real problem is that he is so physically gifted and also has a mind good enough to use those gifts that he’s never considered a few key matters. First, in anything, no matter how big you are, how fast you, how strong you are, how intelligent you are… there’s always someone bigger, faster, stronger, and more intelligent. Second, football is a team game, and the team that plays better as a team usually wins. Third, sometimes you get the breaks, and sometimes you don’t. Fourth, you don’t win just because you have the better record or the better offense – as Denver found out two years ago. Fifth, it is a game, if a very serious one played for high stakes.

Newton also needs to realize that he’s paid extraordinarily well to do exactly the same thing that every writer does, except few of us, indeed, are paid as well as he is. He’s paid to entertain the fans, and while that means winning as much as possible, it also means not pissing everyone off and coming off like a spoiled kid. This is also something writers need to keep in mind.

Given his talent, I’m sure Newton will be a factor for years to come, but it would be nice to see a bit more class when things don’t go well. You don’t have to like losing, but in the end, as even the great Peyton Manning has discovered, we all lose… and the mark of the truly great is to show class both when things go well and when they don’t.

The United States is one of the high-tech nations of the world, yet our productivity has hovered around a measly two percent per year for almost a decade. In the depths of the great recession that made a sort of sense, but the “recovery” from the recession has been anemic, to say the least. With all this technology, shouldn’t we be doing better?

Well… in manufacturing, productivity has to be up, whether the statistics show it or not, considering we’re producing more with fewer workers, and that has to mean greater output per worker. Despite the precipitous drop in the price of crude oil, the oil industry is almost maintaining output with far fewer rigs drilling and far fewer workers.

But perhaps what matters is what technology is productive and how it is used. I ran across an article in The Economist discussing “collaboration” with statistics indicating that electronic communications were taking more than half the work-week time of knowledge workers, and that more and more workers ended up doing their “real work” away from work because of the burden of dealing with electronic communications such as email and Twitter. And, unhappily, a significant proportion of the added burden comes under the “rubric” of accountability and assessment. But when you’re explaining what you’re doing and how you’re accountable, you’re not producing.

This is anything but the productive use of technology, and it may provide even greater incentive for businesses to computerize lower-level knowledge jobs even faster than is already happening. It just might be that, if you want to keep your job, less email is better. But then, if your boss doesn’t get that message as well, that puts you in an awkward position. I suppose you could console yourself, once you’re replaced by a computerized system, that your supervisor will soon have no one to badger with those endless emails demanding more and more status reports… before he or she is also replaced by an artificial intelligence.

We’ve already learned, despite the fact that too many Americans ignore the knowledge, that texting while driving runs a higher risk of causing fatalities than DUI. Will the supervisory types ever learn that excessive emailing may just lead not only to lower productivity, but eventual occupational suicide?

Some of the complaints that the older generation has about the younger generation have been voiced almost as far back as there has been a way of recording those complaints, and they’re all familiar enough. They young don’t respect their elders; they don’t listen to their elders; they have no respect for tradition; they think they deserve something without really working for it, etc., etc. And, frankly, there’s some validity to those complaints today, and there always has been. That’s the nature of youth, to be headstrong, self-centered, and impatient with anything that hampers what they want.

But being adjacent, shall we say, to a university, I’m hearing what seems to be a variation on an old complaint, except it’s really not a variation, but a very troubling concern. What I’m hearing from a significant number of professors is that a growing percentage of their students can’t listen. They’re totally unable to maintain any focus on anything, often even visual presentations, for more than a few seconds – even when they seem to be trying. When they’re asked what they heard or saw, especially what they heard, they can’t recall anything in detail. We’re not talking about lack of intelligence – they do well on written multiple-guess tests – but an apparent inability to recall and process auditory input.

Unless there’s something of extraordinary interest, their attention span darts from one thing to another in a few seconds. Whether this is the result of a media driven culture, earlier teaching methods pandering to learning in sound-bites, a lack of discipline in enforcing focus, or some combination of these or other factors, I can’t say. But, whatever the reason, far too many students cannot focus on learning, especially auditory learning.

Unfortunately, the response of higher education has been to attempt to make learning “more interesting” or “more inspiring” or, the latest fad, “more experiential.” Learning through experience is an excellent means for attaining certain skills, provided the student has the background knowledge. But when a student hasn’t obtained that background knowledge, experiential learning is just meaningless and a waste of time and resources. And, generally speaking, learning has to begin with at least some listening.

Furthermore, in the “real world,” employers and bosses don’t provide “experiential learning.” They give instructions, usually vocally, and someone who can’t listen and assimilate knowledge from listening is going to have problems, possibly very large ones.

Despite all the academic rhetoric about students being unable to learn from lectures, lectures worked, if not perfectly, for most of human history. That suggests that much of the problem isn’t with the method, but with the listener. And it’s not just with professors. They can’t listen to each other, either. That’s likely why they’re always exchanging text messages. If this keeps up, I shudder to think what will happen if there’s a massive power loss, because they apparently can’t communicate except through electronic screens.

The state legislature here in Utah has proposed setting aside $14 million for legal action against the federal government to “force” the United States to turn over all public lands to the state. This is just the latest effort in Utah to grab federal lands.

There are several aspects of this hullabaloo over federal lands that neither the legislature nor the Bundyites seem to understand… or want to. First, the Constitution vests public lands in the federal government, and numerous court cases have upheld that reading of the Constitution. Second, a 2012 study calculated that managing those lands would cost the state of Utah something like $278 million a year, and while much of that cost might be initially reclaimed by oil, gas, and coal leases, once the resources were extracted, the costs of management would remain, and the lands would have even less value. Third, if the grasslands were leased to ranchers, either the grazing fees would have to increase, since the BLM only charges about a third of what it costs the BLM for management [and one of the problems now is that the BLM doesn’t have enough money to manage the wild horse problem and a few others], or the state would have to pick up the difference, which it can’t afford.

In short, not only is what the legislature proposes illegal and unconstitutional, but the federal government is actually subsidizing the ranchers and the state of Utah, something the legislators don’t seem able to grasp.

The ranchers here in southern Utah are furious that the BLM doesn’t essentially round up all the wild horses so that there’s more forage for their cattle, but even if the BLM had the resources to do that, which it doesn’t, because Congress has insisted on not fully funding the BLM and upon keeping grazing fees low, that still wouldn’t solve the problem, because not only were western water rights predicated on the climate of the early part of the nineteenth century [which geologists have discovered was one of the wettest times here in the west in something like 10,000 years], but so were grazing rights. That is why the BLM has cut down on the number of animals allowed per acre, which is yet another rancher complaint.

In short, the ranchers, the legislature, and the Bundyites are precluded from doing as they please by the Constitution, the climate situation, and the Congress, and they’re so unhappy about it that they think the second amendment is the only answer. So, despite all their railing about their Constitutional rights, I guess they really mean that they intend to comply with just those parts of the Constitution whose they agree with, and that they’ll continue to insist that the Supreme Court has been wrong about what the Constitution means for over a century.

Over at least a decade, there’s been debate about entitlements and about a younger generation that may or may not feel “entitled.” Almost always, the use of the phrase is derogatory and suggests individuals or groups who feel they deserve something without paying for it. Although the actual meaning of the word “entitled” means that someone has been given the right to receive something, Americans have a problem with those whom they believe do not deserve that right.

My problem with all the debate is that it’s not inclusive enough, that all too many groups and individuals are receiving societal/governmental benefits for which they either have not paid anything or for which they have paid a minimal amount in comparison to the value of what they have received. Now… in the United States, there are certain benefits to which law-abiding and tax-paying citizens are or should be “entitled.” We deserve fair and impartial laws and a justice system that supports them. We should have a government that protects us from attack by other countries and by terrorists or by law-breakers within our own society. We have decided as a society that part of the role of government is to support highway systems and air transport systems that benefit us all, and to regulate businesses and organizations so that we all have clean air, safe food, and various safe products. For these and other services we pay taxes.

The entitlement problem comes when people are perceived to receive services and benefits out of proportion to what they have paid. When people receive welfare benefits of various sorts for long periods of time, with some families receiving them for generations, people get angry, even though statistics show that most welfare recipients don’t receive benefits for nearly that long.

Likewise, often business owners or professionals in a field get angry when younger people express the idea that they are “entitled” to a job, especially a particular position, even when they don’t have the requisite education and/or experience.

Those are the well-known examples of “undeserved entitlement,” but what about those that aren’t so well known? For example, isn’t the corporation that receives the overall services, legal system, and national market provided by the government, but which pays no taxes on billions of dollars of income, receiving an undeserved entitlement? Or the Bundy family, which is supposed to pay $1.70 per cow and calf for federal grazing rights [a fee less than a tenth of that charged on private land], yet hasn’t paid any of those fees for almost a decade and claims that the land belongs to them through what amounts to squatters’ rights? What about a company that “bargains” for tax breaks from states when relocating a new facility [which effectively places more of the burden for state services on other taxpayers]? Are oil companies and others investing in oil and gas development entitled to a “depletion allowance,” which can reduce taxable income by as much as fifteen percent, simply because it’s possible they might run out of oil and gas to extract? Why are homeowners entitled to deduct their mortgage costs from their taxable income [perhaps as a subsidy to the construction industry?], but renters can’t deduct their rent payments? Then there are the unnecessary military bases that the Defense Department can’t close because senators and representatives insist their constituents are entitled to the remaining jobs at those facilities – which means the rest of us end up paying for those entitled jobs.

So… when people start complaining about entitlements, perhaps they should consider how many they enjoy that they haven’t considered. But then, those are always the exceptions that are deserved.

More than a few commentators and political figures have trotted out words to the effect that we live in the most dangerous time in human history.

Yet, for the last several years, and perhaps for as long as a decade, a number of social scientists have been making the point that, statistically, the present is the best time to be alive because, among other things, the likelihood of death from violence is the lowest ever. The reasoning behind this is that, historically, a far smaller percentage of the population dies from violent causes today than ever before. Statistically, speaking, based on both records and the causes of death determined from ancient skeletons, in Iron Age times and before, an individual faced a ten to twenty percent chance of dying violently, depending on the locale and year. The author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker, notes that in “the transition from tribal societies to settled states, there was a reduction from about a 15 percent chance of dying violently down to about a 3 percent chance in the first states.”

In the eighth century, the An Lushan Revolt in China resulted in 36 million deaths at a time when the world held roughly two hundred ten million people – a world-wide casualty rate of more than 15% just from that one uprising. The Mongol Conquests of the thirteenth century resulted in roughly 40 million deaths at a time when the world population was between 350 and 435 million people, meaning that Genghis Khan effectively killed ten percent of the world’s humans. World War II resulted in 55 million deaths from a world population of 2.3 billion [2.4%].

There are pages and pages of statistics supporting the general conclusion that, on an individual statistical basis, we live in the safest and most peaceful time in world history. While the statistics can be convincing, very few people believe them, true as they are.

Why not? First off, very few of us live the life depicted by the statistics. Compared to a slave in 1850, an inner city black male today is statistically far better off – but compared to a white male junior executive, he’s a lot worse off. And when some thirty percent of women, just in the United States, suffer domestic or sexual abuse in their lifetime, it really doesn’t mean much to them to hear how much worse it once was. While it may be “statistically comforting” to know that the murder rate for males has dropped from 15% to less than one percent over the centuries, that isn’t exactly comforting to the families of the nearly ten thousand men killed in the U.S. every year, or the fact that almost fifteen percent of all males will suffer severe physical violence during their life.

Second, most people don’t relate to numbers and statistics. They relate to people they know, to what they hear from acquaintances and friends, and to visual images they see, especially on television and social media. And those stories and images convey danger, danger, danger. But while each of those personal stories or received images is largely accurate, they don’t represent the totality of the world.

There is also a third factor, which bothers me. Although it is uncontestably true that the percentages of death by human violence have been decreasing over the years and centuries, human population has been growing, with the result that the number of deaths caused by World War II, for example, would have wiped out the entire human population of the world three thousand years ago, or a third of it at the time of Christ. Or consider that over 100 million people died as a result of war in the twentieth century, equivalent to roughly half the world’s population at the time of the Roman Empire.

Somehow, saying that it’s a lot better than it used to be isn’t as comforting as some of the statisticians claim, but, at the same time, it is a whole lot better than it once was. The improvement’s just not near as good as it should be… or could be. And, please, don’t tell me it could be worse. It has been, and, if we’re not careful as a species, it will be again.

As many of my readers should know, my long-time editor and friend, David Hartwell, died last Wednesday, January 20, 2016. He died from a burst cranial artery either from, during, or incident to a fall down a staircase while lugging an expensive bookcase. The glass in the bookcase was undamaged, which, in a bitterly and ironically strange way, could only have happened to David, the editor of countless books and the passionate and incredibly knowledgeable collector of so many more. I’m still a bit numb from losing someone with whom I shared so much for so long and so regularly, but David’s death brings up the fact, again, that no one gets out of this life alive. Yet so often, we act as if death is something that always happens to other people.

Perhaps that’s an instinctual survival mechanism, a denial of the inevitable, just as perhaps so is the belief in an afterlife or reincarnation. Yet death also can be a poignant reminder to the survivors not only of what we have lost, but also of what we still retain.

What I have retained from David’s death is all that I learned from him and all we shared over the years, and that was a great deal. I also know, because of the great number of both authors and editors whom he mentored and taught, that what he stood for and believed in will endure far beyond his passing, and if those whom he influenced in turn pass on that legacy, his contributions to society and culture will likely long outlast his name, for names are forgotten, even while the effects of the acts of those names ripple down through the ages.

That’s also true of the words and stories that were published under his editorial oversight, because the number of authors he developed and/or supported and backed over more than four decades is truly astounding, and some of us would never likely have been published without David’s expertise and understanding. David was never about finding the next best-seller; he was about finding the next good and great book that had something to say and then getting it into the best form and content possible, and then getting it published, month after month, year after year. So far as I know, few of the authors he published wrote mega-best-sellers, but many were best-sellers, and a very high percentage of them sold well.

In thinking about David’s death, I realized that upon several occasions, I have had mishaps on staircases that could have been serious, but were not. A casual acquaintance and neighbor of mine went walking several weeks ago and slipped on the ice and suffered internal cranial bleeding. When and if he will recover is uncertain. I, too, have slipped on ice while on my morning walk, and somehow managed only to bruise my back and shoulders. I could list other similarities, but that isn’t the point. What these terrible accidents brought to mind was how narrow the margin is between minor injuries and fatal impacts, and, if you will, how uncertain life is… and how important each moment can be.

And that is something with which David would have agreed, as well, because he did his best to make every moment count with not just me, but with everyone he knew, during all the years we shared.

When I married an operatic soprano more than two decades ago, I had absolutely no idea how much that would change my life and also affect my writing. One of the earliest directly observable results was Of Tangible Ghosts, the first of the three books comprising the “Ghost Series.” Later came the Spellsong Cycle, as well as other books and other characters. I’ve also come to enjoy opera, not all operas, I’d be the first to admit, but many, and I’ve been introduced and observed a great many opera professionals, largely because my wife is a national officer in a national opera association as well as president of the local music arts society and in charge of bookings and contracts for classical artists and groups.

Consequently, I’ve ended up doing a certain amount of research in the field, and I have to say that I’m worried about the future of opera. While the number of tickets sold to operas nationwide has not seen a significant decline, overall, the number of patrons has declined, but the decline in diverse patrons has been offset by the fact that core supporters – those who really love opera – are buying more tickets. One of the problems with this, though, is that many of these patrons really love old established operas. Part of this may be due in part to the fact that a number of the newer operas are more avant-garde and have fewer singable melodies. That’s not to say that some new operas aren’t gripping and melodic, but for whatever reasons, new operas are staged less frequently and don’t appear to draw as large an audience as the old chestnuts.

Another critical factor, and this is strictly a personal belief on my part, is that all too many opera directors are so wedded to “period,” i.e., the movements and the way the opera is believed to have been originally sung and staged, that they’ve forgotten the basic and original purpose of opera – to entertain the audience. To me, it appears that the press for the new and different and the emphasis on “period” and tradition tend to come at the expense of entertainment value.

As I’ve noted before in my blogs, the first thing that I as a writer must do, if I’m to continue as a professional writer, is to entertain my reader. If I don’t do that, nothing else I do will count, because I’ll lose readers rather quickly, possibly all of them.

This is not a new issue in the history of opera. Almost all early operas were about gods and other mythical figures, or about rulers. Mozart broke convention by writing operas about everyday people – like a valet and the lady’s maid he loves – in The Marriage of Figaro and in other operas. This trend proved wildly popular for Mozart and other composers, as evidenced by the subsequent success of La Boheme [with a consumptive seamstress and starving artist], Carmen [cigarette factory girl and love triangle between her, a soldier, and a bullfighter], or many others, not that a few royalty-based or diety-based operas also weren’t popular, but they all emphasized human qualities and entertainment.

When she directs, my wife is well aware of this precept. She has to be, because she’s presenting operas in a university town set in rural Utah where a majority of the students are from rural backgrounds and even most of those from urban backgrounds have never seen an opera before. What she presents has to both be true to the basics of opera and yet to entertain… or she won’t have an opera program, regardless of its educational and instructional value, because universities do look at both student participation and audience numbers. She’s been successful, as evidenced by the fact that her program is in its twenty-third year and that a significant number of her students have gone on to careers in music, and while some of her operas have won national awards, she’s also been criticized by those judges for not being “period” or traditional enough.

I’ve seen some of the more “traditional” presentations, both professional and scholastic, and frankly, I’ve been bored stiff in some cases, possibly because a beautiful voice or set of voices and a “stand and plant” presentation of an aria just doesn’t do it for me… and I have my doubts that it did it for Mozart either, if The Magic Flute is any example.

To begin with, the term “political honesty” is an oxymoron, a complete contradiction in terms, and a practical impossibility in governing a nation as diverse as the United States.

Yet large numbers of people clamor for politicians and candidates who speak their mind simply and directly and stick to their guns, so to speak.

The problem with such “honesty” is that, because we live in a diverse and highly complex society, both socially and technologically, anything that most people think is simple and “honest” is so oversimplified that it’s inaccurate and anything but honest. And any politician or public figure who tries to give a more detailed and accurate depiction of matters can’t fit that within the sound-bite limitations of the media and the attention span of the majority of voters, all too many of whom distrust what they can’t understand and who seldom make the effort to understand anything not required in their everyday life.

Add to that the fact that the growth of lower-wage jobs that are physically tiring and often emotionally stultifying has built a culture of anger and resentment among those individuals who hold them and who more and more want simple and satisfying answers – except simple and satisfying is usually simplistic, misrepresentative, and inaccurate.

Then there is the fact that those who are fortunate enough to have higher-wage jobs find themselves being asked to do more and more as business after business strives to be leaner and meaner than the competition, which results in all too many of those higher-paid individuals also being time-stressed and forced to focus on their jobs and family [and sometimes not even family] in order to hang on to their jobs.

To this mix, add a generation of career politicians, for whom the first priority is keeping their office. Combine with a gerrymandered political system, and the result is that almost any politician who says anything his or her constituents don’t like is likely to get voted out in the next primary election, “primaried,” as it were. And since only a tiny percentage of Americans actually understand the issues in depth – or even want to – most voters really don’t like anyone, either an incumbent officeholder or a challenger, who tries to explain why “simple” won’t work.

A border wall won’t work. Neither will lowering income taxes further. Neither will turning federal lands back to the states [besides the fact that doing so is unconstitutional]. Neither will trying to deport eleven million “illegal” aliens. Neither will banning the teaching of evolution or absolutely banning abortions. Nor will free universal college educations [at least not without significant tax increases]. All of which means that almost all of the “simple and satisfying” solutions proposed by the “honest politicians” can’t be implemented and won’t work.

As the Founding Fathers designed, we have a government that requires cooperation and muddling through… and that’s another honest fact that few politicians want to admit… if they want to keep their jobs, anyway.

One of the problems with good language and good ideas is that more than one person can come up with a good thought or idea – honestly, without plagiarizing the idea. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both were working, initially independently, on the idea of natural selection and evolution at the same time, and, in fact in July of 1858, both their papers on natural selection were jointly presented to the Linnean Society of London.

Dozens of men were trying to develop the first powered aircraft at the same time as the Wright brothers. And the first mechanical computer, as I’ve noted previously, wasn’t that of Thomas Babbage in 1837 [although the entire simplified analytical engine was never actually constructed in his lifetime], but the Antikythera device of the ancient Greeks, which has been dated to 100-150 B.C., and which was, and is, an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to digital computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions.

Which brings us to parachutes and minds…

Until last week, I’d never heard of Sir James Dewar, perhaps because he was a noted British chemist of the last century and because chemistry was the only general science course I never took in either high school or college. Then, I ran across a quote attributed to Dewar:

“People’s minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.”

This took me a bit aback, because, having never read Dewar or even heard of him, some twenty years ago, in writing The Parafaith War, I had one of my characters note:

“Minds, like ancient parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed.”

What I wrote was not quite the same as what Dewar said or wrote, but it was eerie to see a quote so similar when I had thought myself so original. Well, I was original, in the sense that I thought the idea up independently, even if I hadn’t been first, and so far as I know, I was the first to complete the idea in the way I did… and, in the time since I did, American politics have once again demonstrated the effective striking hardness of a closed mind.

Which all goes to show that there’s a certain risk in claiming originality.

By the way, for those as ignorant of Dewar as I was, he was born in 1842 in Scotland and died in 1923, and was a pioneer in the solidification of gases. He invented a special double-walled vacuum flask, now known as a Dewar flask, that facilitated his work in liquefying oxygen and hydrogen. He was also a co-inventor of cordite smokeless explosive powder, and was awarded the Copley Medal, Rumford Medal, Franklin Medal, Albert Medal, and the Lavoisier Medal. Reputedly, he was also a fascinating lecturer.

Over the past year, there have outbursts of sporadic violence as a result of police actions regarded as excessive by American blacks, many of which have indeed proved to have been excessive. These outbursts have been followed by at least some political efforts to improve police behavior and tactics in a number of locales, but they have also resulted in some locales in higher crime rates because of local police deciding to patrol less aggressively. All of these instances deal with one side of the “justice problem” — the perception, and in many, but not all, cases the fact that the law and law enforcement appear targeted more intently on poor and minorities.

In one basic sense, any form of punishment for criminal behavior will fall more heavily on the poor and disadvantaged. If someone lives from paycheck to paycheck, or doesn’t even make enough money to get from paycheck to paycheck, any fine, any time in jail, even any requirement to take time off from work to deal with charges or citations – any of these are a far harder burden on the poor and minorities than upon middle-class or affluent Americans. Interestingly enough, some Scandinavian countries have recognized this to a degree – and wealthy individuals there can receive mere speeding tickets with five-figure fines, based on the rationale that such high penalties are equivalent in impact to much lower fines for poor or less affluent speeders.

At the same time, over the same period, I’ve watched how “justice” deals with certain white and more affluent Americans, such as Cliven Bundy, the rancher who refused to pay over a million dollars in overdue gazing fees to the government, fees that, to begin with, were a fraction of what private landowners charge for leases. Bundy gathered a militia and forced a stand-off with the BLM, who relented and released the cattle they had been seizing for non-payment… and so far, roughly a year later, from what I can tell, the BLM has done nothing.

Now, Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, leads another “militia” group that has seized and occupied a Fish and Wildlife Service building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and this group vow to stay there until the federal government returns federal lands “to the people” and that the government release two ranchers jailed for arson and other offenses on federal lands, despite the fact that the lands have always been federal lands, and before that they belonged to the local Native American tribes. If the government acquired those lands by fraudulent means, which Constitutional scholars agree it did not, then the lands should revert to the local tribes, not to white ranchers and loggers. Yet, so far, the federal government has done nothing to deal with young Bundy and his backwoods white toughs.

After County Commissioner Phil Lyman illegally not only rode an ATV through a federal roadless area, and one of the protected and most sensitive archeological sites in the state of Utah, but also organized and championed that ride, he was fined and sentenced to ten days in jail – and the state legislature commended him and attempted to pass legislation to reimburse him for his legal bills.

The Bundy and Lyman cases are certainly a far cry from the “justice” received by all too many of those far less affluent, and what bothers me is that these are just examples of what happens every day. That’s not to say that I’m unabashedly in favor of anywhere close to all the recommendations made by the more extreme of those in the “black lives matter” movement, but the plain fact is that if a group of black men had behaved the way Phil Lyman or either of the Bundys have, they’d almost certainly been dealt with far more strongly. I can’t imagine an armed black lawbreaker owing the federal government millions of dollars confronting government officials with high powered weapons, being allowed to continue to refuse to pay what he owed, and being allowed to continue his lawbreaking unimpeded.

Some of this “double standard” rests on political beliefs. White environmental activist Tim deChristopher, as I chronicled earlier, submitted a fraudulent bid to lease oil and gas rights on federal lands,in order to keep the lands from being despoiled,and was sentenced and served 21 months in jail, despite the fact that, even before he was sentenced, the U.S. Solicitor General had voided the lease sale as illegal, while the same “justice” system merely sent Phil Lyman to jail for ten days, although Lyman destroyed archaeological artifacts and flouted federal law, while deChristopher’s acts cost the public and the public welfare very little.

All this tends to suggest strongly suggest that affluent and well-connected white conservatives definitely are treated ultra-leniently, unless of course they fraudulently take money, or threaten to do so, from ultra-wealthy white conservatives… and then, of course, all bets are off.

It’s not often that a F&SF writer can use one of his own books to show the shortcomings of statistics. However, as I write this, Solar Express has an “average” rating of three stars [3.2 stars, to be more exact], yet precisely one reader has given it a three star rating. Fifty-nine percent of the reader reviewers like it fairly well or a lot, and thirty-eight percent dislike it a little or a lot. So much for averages.

Yet as a society we tend to rely on statistics, all too often without really understanding what they mean. How often have you read a news item that states that eating something or using a certain product will increase the likelihood of getting cancer, or diabetes, or something else horrendous by ten or twenty or even a hundred percent? Yet do these statements ever point out the baseline risk?

For example, some advocates of using statin drugs [such as Lipitor] claim that use of statins reduces the incidence of heart disease by 50%. According to clinical studies over any five year period, roughly 2% of American males in the 50-60 age group will suffer a non-fatal myocardial infarction. Studies also show that statin use will reduce that rate to one percent. That is indeed a fifty percent reduction rate, but it’s only an actual risk reduction of one percent. Other studies showed that the decrease in mortality from fatal heart-related factors was offset almost completely in patients older than 70 by a corresponding increase in cancer deaths. But unless you or your doctor read the fine print in the studies, all you’re likely to hear is the fifty percent reduction in heart events. And if cancer runs in your family… well, you just might be better off not jumping at that “50% reduction.”

And take family income. In 2014 average [mean] family income was $72,641, but the median income [the amount where half the families make more and half make less] was only $51,939, or $20,702 – 40% less than the average. As a result, actually, about 67% of U.S. families make less than the “average.” Nor do such averages consider that one third of all American families live “paycheck to paycheck” and that 66% of those families are middle class with a median income of $41,000, well below the “average” family income.

Or take firearms. While there are 88 guns for every hundred Americans, all those firearms are actually in the hands of 43% of U.S. households.

Or… if you look at the Amazon stars, Solar Express is just an average book, despite the fact that only one person thought so.

Martin Shkreli has been arrested. The man who took over a generic drug selling for $13.50 a pill and who then raised the price to $750 a pill has been charged with fraud and other financial crimes, essentially defrauding those who had money to invest in his fraudulent and money-losing hedge funds.

Yet under our laws, he can’t possibly be charged with price-gouging those who needed Daraprim order to survive, although he even claimed that he made a “mistake” in setting the price at $750 a pill, because that was “too low” and that he was behaving altruistically because Daraprim was unprofitable at the old price. Even those with insurance coverage would have ended up paying $150 a pill. In his next move, Shkreli led an investor group to take control of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, where Mr. Shkreli agreed to license the worldwide rights of a drug used to treat Chagas’ disease, a potentially deadly parasitic infection – but at a much higher price. And, of course, most of those infected won’t be able to pay that price, which will either result in more deaths… or in gouging the public health agencies that treat such infected individuals.

Shkreli’s acts and the way the law treats them are just another example of how U.S. justice has gone overboard in recent years in “protecting the market system” – the ultra-capitalistic market system. Now, I freely acknowledge that any workable economic system has to have a capitalistic/market basis, but when the ultra-rich pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do middle-class wage earners, when basic health care becomes increasingly less affordable for tens of millions of Americans [and when the Republican response is essentially to declare that requiring healthcare insurance is the cause, rather than a symptom of an unnecessarily overpriced private health care bureaucracy], when maximizing profits at any cost, regardless of the social and environmental costs to everyone else, has become a “necessity” for executive survival in the corporate world, doesn’t it seem that a few changes in the legal, regulatory, and taxation structure might be a trace overdue?

And if those changes aren’t made…

When the laws protect only those who have money, and it doesn’t look like matters will change, it may not be all that long before those who don’t have massive wealth decide to take matters into their own hands… and bring the entire system down. Such events have occurred more than a few times before. And I’m sure that most of the Russian and French aristocracy felt that such an uprising was nothing to worry about.

“Would anyone consider Einstein merely a ‘successful scientist’?” I don’t remember who said or wrote words to that effect, but that question has stuck with me for years. And it’s even more relevant today, I believe, than ever. Just what is success?

The first two dictionary definitions I came across were: “a favorable or desired outcome from something attempted” and “attainment of wealth and fame.”

A favorable or desired outcome. That sounds so milquetoastish…almost pedestrian. It’s not exactly soul-inspiring, and what does being rich and famous have to do with real accomplishment? Is “success” just settling for comfort, as opposed to striving for something more?

Is the United States too focused on success, especially as opposed to greatness? When I was young, people had dreams of great achievements, of being President, or a doctor or astronaut, of writing the great American novel, or coming up with a cure for a horrendous disease. I can’t recall anyone who just wanted to be rich or famous. Or of being merely a successful doctor or dentist or teacher or whatever.

Then again, world-class achievement is getting a bit harder to accomplish. Everest has been conquered, and now it’s just another mountain that hundreds if not thousands have climbed. Astronauts have walked on the moon, but not for more than thirty years, and exceeding the speed of sound in an aircraft is so passe that we’ve abandoned the only supersonic passenger jet because it was too expensive, just as manned space exploration has been put on the far back burner for the same reason – despite all the hoopla about The Martian and the record-breaking opening weekend gross of the latest Star Wars movie. Even the New Horizons mission that recently reached Pluto and sent back breath-taking images was launched over nine years ago, and I’m not aware of anything that ambitious in the works in even the unmanned exploration programs. And given that the comparatively low-budget New Horizons mission was begun roughly fifteen years ago, that suggests no “great” achievements in space exploration are likely or even possible for 20-30 years, despite a series of “successful” smaller missions.

Once upon a time, composers were truly celebrated for their works, but today in the music world great success doesn’t mean great musical work; it means great financial returns, and works that show musical excellence seldom are those that generate enormous financial returns. In pharmaceuticals, success isn’t measured so much by discovering drugs that “cure diseases,” but in finding blockbuster drugs that yield billion-dollar returns. In business, success isn’t building an outstanding product, but building one that makes billions, and whether it’s outstanding is very much secondary. In politics, success is getting and holding office, not what one accomplishes through that office.

In short, today’s “success” seldom, if ever, reflects great or lasting achievements, and I find that sad and worrisome.

Much has been said about “living in the moment,” and there is in fact some truth to the need to live in the moment, simply because we cannot undo what has happened in the past, nor can we do much about the future, except prepare for it, and there is such a thing as over-preparing for a future that may never come, or a future that bears little resemblance to what we’ve predicted or imagined.

Unfortunately, as many wise individuals have declared, the past and history have a tendency to repeat themselves, or at least rhyme, as Mark Twain put it, and the saddest and truest rhymes are those based on human failings. This unhappy truth has a great bearing on one of the greatest weaknesses in current U.S. culture and education – the lack of knowledge and understanding about past U.S. culture and history by younger Americans, and an almost total ignorance of even recent past world history. The failing is compounded by a great lack of knowledge of basic economics and politics and an over-emphasis on present-day culture and instant satisfaction, supplied in large measure electronically.

What most young Americans know about Hitler, for example, is that he killed a great many Jews [and some even doubt that] and started World War II. Most cannot explain either World War I or World War II. Nor do they know anything about the student protests surrounding the Vietnam War. They don’t know and can’t explain the factors underlying the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression is essentially two meaningless words to them. Oh, they may be able to cite various dates and events, but understanding is almost nil – and irrelevant to them.

On the other hand, most can recite from memory an incredible array of present-day trivia. They’re glued, if not welded, to their smartphones. Most of them are against any form of discrimination, which wouldn’t be so bad if so many of them didn’t confuse unpleasant facts and honest discussion of difficult ethnic and racial issues with hate speech. They don’t, in general, like learning facts and situations contrary to their beliefs and hopes, and they avoid doing so as much as possible. And to make matters worse, far too many educators are indulging this incredibly childish view of the world.

In short, most of today’s younger generations are largely living in the moment, shutting out the lessons of the past and ignoring the future ramifications of what is happening now. Oh, a significant percentage of the top ten percent of students and young Americans, perhaps half, don’t fall into this categorization, but, as history shows, five percent isn’t enough to save a nation against the ignorance, the indifference, and the self-centered anger of the remainder, or to stand against a revolution of the disappointed when the satisfactions of the “moment” vanish, possibly for generations.

I ran across an interesting blog analyzing/critiquing my recently released hard SF novel – Solar Express. The blog used the intriguing construct of a discussion of the book between a futurist, a science fiction reader, and a UFO researcher… and none of them were particularly pleased with the book. I’m likely simplifying, but the bottom line was that the book portrayed a future a hundred years hence that was far too much like the present, and that I’d failed to show massive social changes, or any of the potential new scientific advances predicted by SF fans and futurists.

And all three of these presumably fictional characters were generally right. I didn’t, and I didn’t because most of them won’t happen, and most certainly won’t happen in a hundred years. Now, I’m not saying that there won’t be changes, some of them dramatic, over the next hundred years, because there will be, but very few will be of the nature postulated by those three characters, or by most futurists or science fiction writers.

Why? Because, despite all the rhetoric, hype, and hope to the contrary, we’re entering the Age of Limits. I’ve touched on this before, but it’s true nonetheless. We now have, on this planet, instantaneous communications. The limitation now is our ability to process and act upon those communications, and even if we replaced our biological circuitry with instant/electric capabilities and cyborged bodies, the physical speed of effective reaction couldn’t be that much faster. Nor would most human beings, even in that state, assuming we as a planet could afford it, which we can’t, think and comprehend that much faster.

We aren’t going to see superfast interplanetary or interstellar travel either. While there are some intriguing theoretical possibilities, using those possibilities would require massive amounts of energy,and for interstellar travel that would mean harnessing energy at the level contained in small black holes, and using that much energy near any planetary body or surface would have devastating impacts.

We now have ebooks, the instantly available electronic texts on every subject… and it doesn’t appear that they have markedly increased literacy or learning [and may have decreased reading longer works among the younger population], which is scarcely surprising, given that learning is limited by the individual’s biological and cultural cognitive development. Technology itself doesn’t automatically improve cognition.

It’s very possible that we’ll see solar voltaic films with much higher power generation efficiency than anything so far developed, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see that, but to use that energy requires supporting technological devices, and while 3-D printers can do a lot of that on an individual basis, where will all the raw material come from, because not everything can be printed solely out of carbon-based feedstocks?

We’re seeing incredible advances in medical technology, but those increases have come with equally incredible price tags, so that the real limitation on the implementation of some of these technologies wouldn’t be the technology, but the resources with which to pay for them. Greater and greater percentages of even the citizens in developed countries are either unable to afford or are precluded from obtaining cutting edge medical treatments, and using those technologies to extend and save lives only increases a society’s energy and resource requirements. Add to that the fact that population is still increasing and is projected to exceed 11 billion by a century from now. That means a greater demand on resources.

The bottom line is that the universe has physical limits, and human societies do as well. We have to make choices about how to allocate the application of effort and resources, because we can’t do everything we theoretically could do for everyone. And that’s why any halfway realistic portrayal of the near future is going to incorporate many factors and limitations of the present. They just don’t vanish because it’s the future.

Does this mean that Solar Express is a total “downer”? I scarcely think so. The greatness of human beings, I believe, lies not so much in exceeding limits, but in the struggle for meaning and greatness against those limits. That’s why, as an author, I’ve struggled against portraying unrealistically great and soaring achievements, and why my characters usually pay very high prices for their achievements – because struggling against the limits of the universe – any universe – is costly.

But recognizing this is hard for most people to accept, and that’s another reason for the proliferation and success of mighty heroic, and totally impossible, comic book heroes in movies and books these days. And why some people who call themselves futurists really aren’t at all, because the future our children and grandchildren will live in will be based, like it or not, or aspects of the present-day reality.

Human beings are the ultimate tool-using species on this planet, and in this Solar System, it would appear, and yet… all too often our most powerful tool is ignored, minimized, and overlooked. I’m referring to language, the use of words. Without language, our tool-making skills would likely be stuck in the Stone Age, if not before.

Despite its power, it often seems to me that people go out of their way to abuse language. The other night I watched part of the Hundred Year Grammy Celebration of the birth of Frank Sinatra, and listened while a bevy of Grammy Award Winners performed a host of Sinatra’s original arrangements. I came away from what I watched with two impressions. First, none of those talented Grammy artists sang those songs as well as Sinatra had. Second, all of them sounded better singing Sinatra’s arrangements than they did singing what made them successful and popular. Now, that’s just my opinion, but it was so nice to actually hear and understand the words the more “modern” artists were singing.

Why is it that so much modern vocal music effectively degrades the use of words, twisting them and singing them against a melodic cacophony that so often makes it impossible to decipher what they might have been? Or for that matter,even finding the melody line itself [and I can certainly do without high bass volume repetitive percussive abuse]?

But pop music isn’t the only offender. Attorneys, bureaucrats, education administrators, politicians, entertainers, programmers, and even writers, often torture language to the point where it becomes excessively jargon-laden and meaningless.

These days it often seems that the most used aspect of language as a tool is not to communicate ideas, not to educate, not to share emotions or experiences, and not even to entertain, but to persuade people to buy, to buy ideas, goods, propaganda, various religions, and, of course, political candidates. But then, humans are also the ultimate opportunists, and it’s clear that our market-driven culture knows just where the highest value of words lies, and that’s in sales.

So much for the Bard, A Brief History of Time, “The Waste Land,” “Easter 1916,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” or even The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or War and Peace.