There’s an old, old advertising maxim that says something to the effect that “you don’t sell the steak; you sell the sizzle.”  It was true sixty years ago, and it’s even more true today… especially in F&SF.

At almost every science fiction convention or conference I’ve attended over the past five, possibly even ten years, there’s been at least one presenter or guru, if not a whole raft, insisting that the first step to becoming a successful author is, in essence, establishing a huge internet/social media presence.  And there’s at least one very successful author in our field who’s done that, as well as a great number of other moderately successful authors who’ve also done the same thing. While I fully understand the rationale in this day of hype, personality, and instant access, I have to wonder what this does to the amount and quality of actual fiction writing.

On the one hand, if you want to be a professional author and paid for your work, there’s little point in writing something, no matter how excellent, if no one knows you’re writing it and if no one buys it because they don’t know it’s there.  And, like it or not, with the tight margins in publishing these days, very few first-time authors get overwhelming amounts of support from publishers. This problem is compounded by the shorter window during which new books – by almost any author except those extremely well-established – receive attention from readers, bookstores, bloggers, and other media. In short, authors have to work harder to be visible.

The problem is that the nature of the internet is “instant.”  If there’s not something out there practically every day, all too many readers lose interest. I’ve tried to avoid the posting every day syndrome by posting my blogs twice a week and by trying to make them “deeper” and not nearly so much about matters I regard as trivial.  That’s not snobbery, but a recognition of my own limits.  I don’t do light humor and personal trivia well, certainly not along the “cat on bacon” variety.  Even so, posting blogs just twice weekly means that I’m writing 50,000 words a year for the website, and those aren’t words that are going into books.  Both my editors and publicists have been able to see a certain effect from that, especially compared to authors of my vintage and style who have not established even a modest internet presence, but it’s difficult to quantify how much difference it makes.

Is that difference in sales because of the website, forum, and other internet efforts?  Or is it merely because what I write is still appealing to readers?  Both?  Some of each?  How much of each?

Then there’s the other question.  How much are readers affected by a writer’s internet presence and persona?  The other day I read a comment suggesting that one popular author [not me, thankfully] was a far better blogger than an author, but that was something that the author’s readers didn’t seem to catch, because, according to the blogger, the writer was a competent author and an outstanding blogger, and readers thought the author was outstanding in both areas.

My gut feeling is that the commenter is on to something, and that a good internet presence creates an impression of greater authorial ability than may exist, while a poor or non-existent internet presence likely has a negative effect – but only among readers who are active on the internet.

All that said, there’s a real question about the trade-offs.  To what degree does all the effort to develop and maintain an internet presence detract from an author’s principal task, which is to write good and entertaining books?  A website and blog, no matter how entertaining, won’t bring in much income, but if a new author isn’t an instant best-seller, without some form of vigorous self-promotion, he or she may not be around too long, no matter how good the writing.  And then, once you’re established, what happens if you try to cut back on that daily and continuing internet presence?

As I’ve noted before, stereotypes persist in all human cultures, unfortunately partly because they’re convenient mental shortcuts, and partly, again unfortunately, because the group being stereotyped almost always has within it individuals, almost always a significant minority, if not more, whose characteristics fit that stereotype. There are two kinds of buy-ins, one by outsiders doing the stereotyping and one by members of the group being stereotyped.

Part of the underlying problem with stereotyping is that stereotyping often results from pressures either within or outside the group being stereotyped. Historically, for example, Jews were stereotyped as being usurious and greedy money-lenders, but in much of Europe for centuries, money-lending and banking were among the few non-menial professions open to Jews, and certainly it was the most lucrative. Among young inner city ethnic males, failure to adhere to certain styles of dress and behavior can be detrimental to one’s health and well-being. The problem, unfortunately, is that such attire and behavior are regarded as socially undesirable, if not a warning of imminent danger, by most of those outside that ethnic male community. This obviously creates not only a social but an economic problem. The behavior and dress that allow day-to-day survival mitigate against success outside the community.

The same pressures also exist in other “communities,” although they’re seldom mentioned. Wall Street financiers are often stereotyped as greedy, heartless, and self-centered money-grubbers. The problem there is that, at least from what I’ve seen, having any sort of conscience or awareness of the impact of their actions beyond Wall Street is extremely detrimental to their day-to-day success.

At the same time, what all too many people within such groups fail to understand is that appearances and behavior matter. They affect perceptions of outsiders and how they deal with members of the group being stereotyped. What also overlooked, or at least seldom mentioned, is that stereotypes are far more detrimental to members of groups with less economic and political power. Unemployed and less educated minority youth seldom have either; Wall Street financiers and attorneys, aka shysters and ambulance chasers or, in more refined circles, “hired guns for sale to the highest bidder,” have both power and money, and money and power tend to override stereotypes, which may be another reason why so many pursue both so vigorously, rather than actual expertise in a given field.

There’s no easy answer to stereotyping, as Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, just found out, when trying to explain how he’d react to encountering various “stereotypes” on a dark street. Yet I’d be willing to bet that 99% of all Americans would do exactly what he said he’d do.

Some dictionary definitions of “monster” include: (1) one abnormal, unnatural, or hideous in appearance or (2) one that inspires hate or horror because of cruelty, wickedness, depravity, etc., (3) a fabulous creature compounded of parts from various animals, as a centaur, dragon, hippogriff, etc. Readers of my books will likely have noticed that I don’t have many, if any, alien monsters running around. There are a few dangerous creatures here and there, such as the stun lizards of Naclos in the Recluce series or the sandwolves or dustcats in the Corean Chronicles, but they’re not monsters. They’re just dangerous predators. I’ve also written about a few alien species, but they’re alien, with different motives, and not monsters, at least not in the traditional fantasy or literary sense.

Yet, lately, particularly in the last ten, perhaps fifteen years, we’ve had an explosion in F&SF monsters – werewolves, vampires, evil creatures from faerie, zombies, truly malevolent ghosts, and I’ve found myself asking why on two fronts. Why are so many authors and readers fascinated and enthralled by all these monsters, and why am I totally uninterested in reading about most of them? I’ve certainly sampled the current offerings, and I remain largely unthrilled and unenthralled.

Part of the reason these monsters are so popular with so many readers is that they show a direct danger and an obvious power, and in most cases they’re bested by a largely standard human being, or one close enough that readers can identify with him or her. I think that gives many readers a sense of meaning and power that’s seemingly missing in our complex culture where it so often seems that no one can get much of anything constructive done – especially in the last few years when so many of those who make the most money can’t even be considered to be doing anything constructive.

For me, at least personally, that poses a bit of a problem, because most of the real monsters I’ve encountered or even read about haven’t been alien – they’ve been monstrous human beings, usually very successful at rationalizing their actions in some way or another… or in justifying them by placing some sort of blame on other people because life hasn’t gone the way they wanted. But then, that kind of monstrosity doesn’t sell millions of books or make blockbuster movies. Even so, my “monsters” are likely to remain the human kind. For me, they’re much more interesting… and, hopefully, for my readers.

This past weekend, an interesting analysis appeared in a number of newspapers, showing that the highest-paid people in medicine weren’t the doctors, but the “senior management” types in healthcare. Hospital directors make a lot more than the most expensive surgeons, and multiple times what general practitioners do. This is a problem, but it’s not confined to medicine. It’s everywhere. The senior executives in pharmaceutical companies make ten times what their top researchers make – if not hundreds of times. In my wife’s university, from what I can determine, nine of the ten top-paid individuals are “management” types, and most of the top fifty are either management types or professors of business or management. The same has long been true in corporate America as well.

The question is, then, just why are these management types so much more valuable than those under them who actually do the work, design and make the products, do the market research, sell those new products, teach the students, build the highways, heal and repair the sick. Not only that but even among the top executive types, pay levels are marginally related, if even that, to actual performance or worth to society. The highest-paid individuals in America are hedge fund managers and other financial types whose greatest accomplishments are speculation and speed-trading, which is essentially legal high-speed graft and extortion, justified by them as “providing market liquidity.” Study after study has shown that the highest-paid executives tend, overwhelmingly, to be taller, good-looking males – whose actual performance on the job is, on average, less than that of either shorter male CEOs or women.

These facts are anything but unknown. So why do we continue to select and reward individuals and occupations that aren’t the best for improving life for the vast majority of us? For that matter, why don’t corporations pick executives and managers based on more than a modicum of talent and a maximum of appearance and charisma? And what’s the societal point of minimizing productive people and resources in the United States so that a comparative handful of executives and speculators can pile up more hundreds of millions or billions of dollars?

Are we really that self-destructive?

The last few days, with graduations occurring somewhere practically everywhere, it’s not surprising that I’ve run across columns, letters, and blogs all decrying the increase in the cost of education. They’re all correct in the fact that the cost of education has increased faster than the rate of inflation, and almost all of them are wrong about most of the rest of it, especially their “remedies” for reducing costs.

The first thing that people tend to forget is that a huge component of the increased costs is the number of students attending college. In 1960, only 7.7% of the population had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2013, the percentage was 33.5%. Now, considering that the U.S. population was 180 million in 1960 and was 317 million in 2013, that means that there were only about 14 million people with an undergraduate college degree or higher in 1960, while there are 106 million today. No one seems to be considering the cost of at least tripling the infrastructure needed to educate close to a hundred million more students. And in some ways it’s worse than that, since in 1960 roughly forty percent of graduating high school seniors entered college and fewer than half graduated from college. Today, more than 66% of all high school seniors enter college, and still only about half make it through. With a still increasing population, that requires more facilities and more teachers.

Some of this problem could be solved by stricter admission standards and more rigorous grading and higher academic standards, especially on the secondary school level, both to improve preparation for college and to weed out early those students either unable or unwilling to do college-level work. Greater investment in teaching high level, non-college skills would also help, but all of these are currently politically highly unlikely.

The second factor is that in all areas, but especially in the more technical areas, the cost of educational equipment and facilities has increased. When I taught university more than twenty years ago, most faculty didn’t have computers. Now they all do, and they’re necessary, given state and federal requirements. Laboratory equipment is far more expensive, as are building and safety requirements.

Interestingly enough, while university personnel costs have increased significantly, the largest area of growth has been in administrative personnel, while cost growth in teaching faculty has been restrained by hiring far fewer tenured and tenure track faculty and ever greater numbers of part-time adjuncts, so that on average college and university faculty have gone from being more than two-thirds full-time faculty to one third full-time and two-thirds adjunct, while the numbers of high-paid administrators have continued to increase, in some instances by as much as ten times the increase in full-time faculty.

Then, as I’ve mentioned earlier in other posts, the share of who pays the overall cost of education at public universities and colleges has also shifted dramatically over the past fifty years, from the majority of such costs, often 90%, being paid by the state in the immediate post WWII era, to the present, where, on average, 90% is now paid through student tuition and fees.

Given all these factors, and the fact that public universities and colleges, who educate the vast majority of students, have essentially limited staff and faculty pay to less than the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, any significant cost cuts in teaching personnel are not possible, no matter what anyone claims, and no one seems willing to even look at administrative bloat. In addtion, because the college-age population is still increasing, the need for more facilities and equipment isn’t likely to shrink, either. The only question is whether voters and taxpayers are willing to increase the state and local governments’ share of funding higher education, so that less of a cost burden falls on the student or the student’s family, or whether the United States will, by default,effectively restrict higher education to those of greater means and to the comparative handful of less affluent students who are so brilliant that they can obtain scholarships and grants.

The biggest problem American companies and probably every other corporate-level business in the world has is that few of them, if any, understand that there can indeed be too much of a good thing, or at least too much trying to obtain too much of a good thing, especially when that “good thing” happens to be increased revenues or profits or increased CEO and high-level executive compensation. Revenue and profit have become such a dominating target that almost none of their CEOs or corporate boards ask, “How much is enough?” Those that do ask invariably answer, “As much as we can get.”

I’m not against profit, just as I’m not against eating, but trying to gorge on profits is the corporate equivalent of gluttony, and sooner or later it results in either corporate unwellness, terminal corporate illness, or societal malfunctioning on a grand scale. Corporations are continually trying to do more with less, in order to increase revenues and profits, but none of them ask what the results of their “success” will be, or the implications for the future.

The other day I went to get a plastic pipe joint for my sprinkler system – just a piece of PVC pipe maybe five inches long at most. When I got home I discovered I actually had an unused one, but I thought they were different. They were. The new one was almost an inch shorter than the older one, which means that it’s not as strong. I suppose it doesn’t make that much difference for a buried sprinkler system pipe, but the problem is that making things smaller and cheaper while selling them for the same price or even more doesn’t stop at PVC pipe. It goes into things like General Motors car ignition switches, whose failure resulted in people being killed, all for a savings of a dollar a car. And the only lesson Detroit has learned since the Pinto fuel tank disasters is that people eventually forget.

The problem with doing more with less and maximizing profits is that the goods and services are cheaper, that fewer employees have good paying jobs, and the profits go to those already well-off, either through dividends, capital gains, or higher compensation. All that makes executives happy and well-paid, and investors equally happy – but only for the moment. The problem is that ninety-five percent of Americans (and before long it’s likely to be 99.5%, it isn’t already) aren’t sharing in this wealth, and, as I’ve noted before, in a consumption driven economy that also imports more than it exports, as income inequality increases, the ninety percent have less and less to spend, and that means that they buy less and they buy cheaper goods. It also means that welfare and food stamp program costs go up, yet with tax revenues already in deficit, that means that infrastructure programs have lower funding, as do research, defense, and education, among others necessary for the successful functioning of society.

In effect, the quest for greater revenues at all costs is bankrupting the country, slowly but inexorably. And for what, so the top 25 hedge fund managers can make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America? So U.S. corporations can outsource more and more jobs? Maybe, just maybe, if the top ½ of one percent of the earners in the United States had to pay taxes at U.S. levels in the 1960s, they might not be so obsessed with profits, and we could pay for the basics society needs without running deficits, and we might get back to 1960s prosperity. And… please… don’t talk about welfare cheats; the biggest cheats are in the finance industry.

But don’t count on any real tax and structure reform happening so long as the Republicans claim that higher taxes are job killers. Higher taxes on the right people aren’t. Tell me, honestly, exactly what benefit do all those exorbitant multi-million dollar compensation packages provide for the country?

The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have formed another committee to investigate the so-called Benghazi scandal. Besides being a waste of time and money, it’s also an example of the total self-centeredness and the failure of the Republican Party even to follow their own self-proclaimed principles. The deaths of the U.S. Ambassador and three others were tragic. They shouldn’t have died, but let’s look at the situation. The two possibilities for the cause most cited are: (1) the killings were motivated by a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video produced in the U.S. or (2) the attack was planned and executed by anti-American Islamic terrorists. The bottom line is that four people died because a great many people in Libya and throughout the Middle East hate Americans and because security was not adequate. In the larger context, it doesn’t matter that much which anti-American cause led to the killings. The real cause was poor security, and and that was not caused because the Congress had cut State Department funding, but because the career staff of the State Department, not the Secretary of State, not the political appointees, had allocated the security personnel as they saw fit and failed to offer adequate support for the ambassador when he visited a CIA post in Benghazi. Yet the Congressional investigations continue to focus on former Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama, for their misleading political statements about the issue, rather than on those in the State Department who were actually responsible for the lax security. Of course, Clinton and Obama tried to spin the issue after the fact. So did the Republicans, and they’re still trying. The problem here is that yet another hearing won’t do a damned thing to solve the problem. It will convince die-hard Republicans – again – that Clinton and Obama are out to mislead the public. It will also convince die-hard Democrats, again,that the Republicans are continuing to avoid doing anything constructive while using the Congress as a basis for personal attacks. And, guess what? The left and the right are both correct… and totally ignoring the real problems and issues.

Now… in this light, let’s look at the BLM mess in the west. We have a Nevada rancher who has refused to pay grazing fees for twenty years. After twenty years of essentially doing nothing, the BLM suddenly decides to seize his cattle. Hundreds of self-proclaimed militia appear, armed with everything from handguns to high-powered rifles and semi-automatic weapons. The BLM backs down, again, and the “militia” remain patrolling the area and stopping residents and others at will. This is hardly an issue of an overbearing government. For years, the BLM has charged grazing fees set as low as legally possible, at rates often as low as ten percent of what private land owners charge and far below the rates charged by states on state-owned lands. In addition, the BLM has failed to maintain the lands, at least with regard to wild horses, so that there are tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands that can only support a fraction of that total, and excess of 2,000 alone in just Iron County, Utah. Yet, last week, a BLM wrangler was threatened by two men, one of whom was armed, for actually transporting horses to a holding area, and an elected state official led an illegal ATV ride through a roadless area closed to motorized vehicles, in protest of BLM procedures protecting environmental and archeological features of the area.

In both of these cases, we have Republicans and Democrats both playing politics… and neither side seems in the slightest interested in addressing the underlying problems. We don’t need another political Benghazi investigation; we don’t need posturing over citizens’ and states’ “rights” to claim federal lands, so-called “rights” that have no basis in law. And we certainly don’t need self-proclaimed militia telling residents and government alike what to do. What we need is less posturing and more action, but, of course, almost no politician really wants action because enforcing the law and looking into real incompetence, as opposed to politically-trumped-up issues, just upsets various political interests and costs votes, and votes are apparently far more important than law or good government to the vast majority of politicians. But then, maybe after so many years in politics, they really can’t even tell the difference.

The vast majority of people believe what they want to. What distinguishes a thinking individual from a believing individual is that thinking individuals do their best to evaluate all the facts in their environment and in the universe, not just the ones that support what they believe. What complicates this is that some individuals believe in things that are so; that is, what they believe is aligned with what the facts indicate is in fact so, but they do so out of belief, and often the basis for those beliefs rests upon other biases not grounded in fact. Add to that the fact that someone can be a thinking individual in some respects and a total “believer” in something that is anything but grounded in fact in others. In life, most of us are a mixture of thinker and believer.

From what I’ve observed and from what some psychologists report, all too often when “loyalties” that require adherence to a belief ungrounded in fact [and by that I mean the preponderance of fact and not just selected facts] conflict with the preponderance of fact, loyalties almost always win out. Thus, a far greater number of Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim than do Democrats, while a far greater number of liberals oppose all genetically modified foods than do conservatives. Extreme fundamentalist Christians cannot accept evolution because it conflicts with an essential loyalty. Extreme libertarians believe that minimal or no government secures the most freedom for the most people, despite the bloody evidence of all human history to the contrary.

What makes all this even more of a problem is that when one marshals even what might seem an unassailable array of facts and proof against a belief with little or no support grounded in reality, all such an assault does, in the vast majority of instances, is to strengthen the belief. Which is why a small army of self-proclaimed and armed militia members continue to patrol the side-roads around Bunkerville, Nevada, most firmly convinced that Cliven Bundy, the man who owes the federal government [i.e., the taxpayers] over a million dollars, is a patriot supporting states’ rights, in particular rights that the state of Nevada relinquished in writing upon gaining statehood, and rights that are superseded in writing in the Constitution, that very document those true-believing militia types insist they are upholding.

But then, how many of us have beliefs ungrounded in fact and reality that we uphold against the evidence all around us, evidence we choose not to see because it conflicts with what we need to believe?

As at least some of my readers know, I began my career in science fiction by writing short stories, initially primarily for ANALOG when Ben Bova was the editor. I still have a love of short stories, but, since they don’t come anywhere close to paying the bills, for me, and I suspect for most writers, short stories are either a labor of love or to get experience, if not both, along with a little income.

One of my very personal problems with a great deal of the short fiction that I’ve read in the last decade is that, in my very prejudiced and personal opinion, too many of the stories being published are either techno-gadget stories or excessively dark. I have nothing against either a good techno-gadget story or a dark story. I’ve certainly written my share of techno-gadget stories, particularly early in my career, and I’ve written a few dark stories – not insanely dark and vicious ones, but quietly dark tales. I do have a dislike of dark and gimmick stories in great numbers, but that’s a personal preference of mine, clearly not shared by many editors and readers.

From what I’ve seen, the predominance of “dark” stories isn’t limited to F&SF, either. In fact, “dark” seems to be the predominant flavor all too much of the “mainstream.” Now… I know there’s a great deal of funny and witty chick lit being written, but as a male, for me a little of that goes a long way.

I still do write short stories, although the last one I had published appeared in print over two years ago, but to achieve what I want in a short story seems to require intense bursts of work, followed by weeks or months of unconscious contemplation, followed by revision, more contemplation, and more revision, all in the spaces between novels, or at least chapters of novels. Then, add to that the fact that most of the stories I write seem to appeal more to anthologists and book editors than to U.S. magazine editors. Beyond that… yes, there are more short stories coming, but not for a while.

The other day I was talking to my editor, something I attempt to do weekly, and in discussing the industry he made the observation that hardcover sales were largely holding on, overall, although this varied to some degree by author, and that the explosive growth of ebooks had stopped, with a very slight increase in overall sales last year, while the sales of mass-market paperbacks had continued to decline far faster than the sales of ebooks had increased. In my own sales, I’m seeing a modest increase in the combined sales of hardcovers and initial ebooks, although the percentage of hardcovers is declining slightly while the percentage of initial [i.e., higher-priced] ebooks is increasing. The sales of ebooks sold at the “paperback” price continues to increase, but not as much as the sales of mass-market paperbacks have declined. On the other hand, ebook sales of older books have strengthened, largely because, I suspect, few bookstores carried new copies of older paperbacks, and readers who want those books are turning to ebooks.

Obviously, I can’t speak for other authors, but what I’m seeing suggests that a strong backlist may become even more of a necessity, at least for those authors who do not become instant, or near-instant, mega-sellers. The problem for newer authors, of course, is how to get published enough times so that you have enough of a presence in readily accessible venues, largely internet these days, so that readers who have not read you will see your name enough to want to try your work. The associated difficulty is making certain that the venues where your name appears are venues that appeal to those who will like your books. This can be anything but easy. For example, there are several forums where the forum-leader [for lack of a better word] or leaders are inclined to be favorable to my books, but from both the tenor and volume of the comments, it’s fairly apparent that either a great number of the forum frequenters are not… or that those who do like my books refrain from commenting… and I‘ve never been able to ascertain more than the obvious fact that some frequenters of those forums and sites like my books and some don’t. I hope for the dominance of the silent readers who like and buy my works while continuing in all ways that are feasible and cost-and-time effective to maintain a certain visibility… but that’s far easier for an established author than a newcomer with only a book or two out there.

I could name a handful of relatively new authors who have been incredibly successful in building sales through an internet presence, but they all seem to have a very good and accessible sense of humor, both in print and in person. I can also name a number of authors whose careers have essentially vanished because their public presence is almost non-existent and their personal appearance and presentation are less than stellar, and some of them are technically better writers than others who have continued to publish and sell. Yet I can also name at least one best-selling author who has essentially no public presence outside of the books and whose personal appearances have often been reputed to be disasters to the point that the author’s publisher prefers not to tour the author.

All of which goes to show, I suppose, that continuing success in writing doesn’t ever boil down to a magic formula that any new or would-be author can follow to the letter and gain success. But then, hasn’t this always been the case?

At our house, after twenty years, we’ve finally decided to remodel and add to the dining room and kitchen. Given that the so-called dining room is scarcely larger than an extra-large walk-in closet [no, I’m not kidding], and that I’ve been promising my wife that I’d do something about it for fifteen years, it’s definitely overdue. Why so long? Let’s just say we’re conservative about spending and raising eight children was expensive… but that’s not what the point of this is all about. It’s about stuff.

When you remodel, we’ve discovered, you have to move things out of the space to be remodeled, and in our case, out of the adjoining garage. And then you discover the stuff… stuff you vaguely realized you had and kept, just in case. But, guess what, in all too many cases, just-in-case never came, and you’ve still got the stuff. Like fifteen baskets, of different sizes and assortments. Like five boxes of extra tiles for counters and the like [which we’ll now never need because the 1980s tile is going].

Then there were the flower vases. My wife’s a performer and director, and she gets flowers occasionally. I also send her flowers. They come in various vases, and we’ve kept the really nice looking ones – and then in cleaning out things, you discover several boxes of really nice flower vases, some of them red glass and green glass, and a couple – maybe more than a couple – that look like crystal but really aren’t… and only three or four have ever been used again.

And paint! There were four gallons of dried-up gray floor and deck paint,not to mention five separate gallon cans so old, and of such strange colors that I wondered if they might have been left by the previous owner, except that they never left anything. I did keep the newest can of deck paint.

Now, not all stuff is useless. I really wondered what I was going to do with the eight different socket sets I inherited from my father-in-law, but having those eight socket sets has saved me more grief over the years… and the same with the four sets of Allen wrenches,and the fifteen that don’t belong to sets. Why does every furniture manufacturer, every tool maker, everyone who makes everything use a different dimensional Allen screw?

But then I found more replacement parts for the sprinkler system than I ever recalled buying, most likely because I couldn’t find the first sets because they were in another box, neatly stacked, but unlabeled, on the garage shelves. We’ve always been fairly neat and organized, but when you don’t look in those neat and organized boxes and stack another neat and organized box on top, well…

And, oh, yes, the broken Christmas deer lawn decorations – three gathered over the years and left stashed in the garage attic because they wouldn’t fit in the mandated city garbage cans, and I never took the time to make the ten mile trip to the city dump [and yes, it is ten miles away, in an abandoned open pit iron mine, but that’s another story]. I could go on, but I think I’m made it clear.

And the sad thing is… we really thought we were organized and only kept what we really needed.

As a science fiction writer, I’ve generally tied to keep my “space drives” at least tenuously related to scientific reality as we currently know it, but that distance is likely more attenuated than many readers realize.

In doing some research for my next book, I came across the speeds of the fastest outbound human space craft, which is currently Voyager 1, at 38,610 mph, or roughly 10.7 miles per second.  For those who are interested, the speed is measured outbound, because anything launched toward the sun will have its velocity increased by the sun’s gravity.  As an example of that, when Comet ISON was discovered in 2012, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, its inbound speed was calculated at roughly 10.5 mps, but by the time it reached perihelion, that speed was between 63 mps and 360 mps (or 1,300,000 miles per hour)[that depended on who was doing the calculating, because exact figures were not possible, given that ISON was either so close to the sun or actually on the far side of the sun from earth at the time around perihelion]. The fastest sun-grazing comets could theoretically reach a speed of over 400 mps.

If a human spacecraft could attain and maintain such a speed headed out of our solar system, it would still take over 118 days to reach the average orbital distance of Pluto from the sun… and something like 2,300 years to reach Alpha Centauri [those are rough calculations; feel free to refine them].  These figures indicate why SF writers tend to focus on interstellar travel through “jumps,”  “warps”, wormholes or the like, especially since there’s the not-so-small problem of what happens when one encounters a comparatively immoveable object at that velocity.  While space is largely empty, it appears as though most solar systems have all sorts of objects scattered around their periphery and approaching any other system with that sort of velocity would be problematical.  So, of course, we writers come up with screens and shields, and never mind the energy consumption required for such powerful drive systems and the requisite shields.

Then, too, according to Einstein, any object approaching the speed of light would also gain a huge amount of mass, possibly infinite mass… and there’s not enough energy to push that mass.  So… we’re back to getting around the speed of light and all those pesky relativity problems.

Theoretically, from what I’ve read, a so-called Hawking wormhole could be used to thwart the speed of light limitations.  There’s just one catch – to create one would require the energy of a small black hole… each time it was used.

Is it any wonder that more fantasy and less hard SF is being written?  And that the vast majority of all the space operas [including, I must admit, some of my own SF] ignore those facts? 

What most people in the United States accept without thinking about it too much is that American democracy – or our representative democratic republic, if one wants to be technical about it – rests largely on voluntary compliance with the laws of the land.  We also have a Congress designed to update and make new laws as necessary, and an elaborate judicial system designed to interpret those laws under the guidelines laid out by the Constitution.

The situation that developed in Bunkerville, Nevada, between rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM is an example of what can happen when people adopt a view of what laws apply to them and what do not, and defend their position with force.  There is absolutely no doubt that Bundy is a fairly big-time law-breaker.  He is grazing his cattle on federal lands without permission;  he has not paid grazing fees for over fifteen years; he owes the federal government over a million dollars; and he and the other ranchers and close to a thousand hangers-on with fairly heavy weapons gathered to oppose the BLM round-up of the offending cattle. Fearing bloodshed, the BLM backed down, at least for the moment.  Bundy justifies this on the grounds that his family has grazed on the lands since the 1870s and that he therefore has a “right” to those lands.  Unfortunately, according to news reports, some local officials are sympathetic.

I’m not sympathetic to Bundy’s views.  I’m outraged, and anyone who understands American democracy and values it should be equally so.  Why?

First, Bundy’s claims aren’t even good law.  Second, allowing the force of arms to flout two fundamental bases of the American system sets an example that could more easily than many understand lead to an even greater breakdown of law and order…or equally unpleasant, an even greater establishment of preferential law enforcement based on the power of arms and money. As for the legal “issues,” those are basic.  According to the treaty of Guadalupe Hildago in 1848 that ended the Mexican War, all of the states of Utah and Nevada became U.S. territory, and any lands owned by Mexican citizens remained theirs and all others belonged to the federal government.  Since Bundy’s ancestors weren’t there at that time, and the only inhabitants were native Americans, either the lands belonged to the federal government or to the local inhabitants.  If Bundy is claiming that land rights belong to who was there first, then the lands rightfully belong to the native Americans.  Otherwise, legally, they’re federal lands.

The more troubling issue is the use of “second amendment rights” to flout federal law on federal lands. If the government used force to arrest Bundy and seize his cattle, it would have resulted in bloodshed and outrage on the part of the ranchers, which would, in turn, have justified in their minds the need for arms and protection against the government for taking away “their rights.”  But, by backing off, the BLM reinforced the idea that the government defers to power of some sort, especially if one considers the economic meltdown of 2008, where hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes, their jobs, and often everything… and where not a single bank or mortgage company has ever been indicted for fraudulent loans, and where financial executives are once again getting enormous bonuses. We have the highest rate of imprisoning people in the industrialized world, and possibly in the entire world, and most of them are people without power. More and more government is portrayed as the enemy. As an illustration, one right-wing Washington, D.C., newspaper put it this way, “the elites in D.C. aren’t happy about the drubbing that they took at the hands of a citizen’s movement in Nevada… Their protest sent a message to anyone with a beef against Washington that if you stick to your guns, you can win.”

Exactly how long before voluntary compliance with law and ethics erodes even further? Especially with about one quarter of the population stockpiling weapons, and with continuing dissatisfaction, and with more and more examples of corporations and others with power either avoiding the law or paying it off?

And how long can one keep a democracy when it’s clearer and clearer that power trumps ethics and law – apparently always?  And even if the BLM does punish Bundy, how many people will just see it as a case where justice is only enforced against those without the power to oppose it?

Over just the past few years, I’ve gotten the general impression that the reading public’s attention span in dealing with new books has shortened, but that impression was gained mainly from my observation of other authors’ book sales from the outside and what I observed in far more detail from everything surrounding my own books, i.e., the sales patterns, the reviews, the blogs, internet commentary, letters, etc. What I observed in my own case was that, besides changes in overall sales figures, the initial sales “bump” and associated “buzz” have been compressed into shorter and shorter periods after, first, the initial hardcover release, and then again, at the time when the mass market paperback sale, and lower ebook price, occurred. Because we all have the tendency to generalize based on our own experience, my first thought was that, because I’m an older author, this just might be particular to me… and possibly to other authors with a similar career profile.

So I started looking for other figures that might confirm or refute my impression. A quick look at The New York Times listing of books remaining on the fiction bestseller list for extended periods showed that the number of books with long runs on the bestseller list had a pattern – of sorts. That is, there were about the same number of books with a long time on the list in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1990s and 2000s, but not in the 1970s or 1980s… or since 2010. Looking deeper into the lists, I discovered something else. While there still remain a few “mega-seller” books every year that stay on the lists for months, sometimes, years, as in the case of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, the percentage of fiction bestsellers with moderate runs, say more than five weeks on the list, shifted fairly significant in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so that a far larger percentage of best-sellers are “one and dones,” if you will, or perhaps hold on for two weeks. Speaking frankly, that’s certainly been the case for my books. My only multiple-week best-seller was in the 1990s, although, in hardcover sales numbers, my biggest bestsellers have been after that shift, several even after 2010.

At least in a general sense, those figures tend to confirm that “peak sales” are being squeezed into a shorter and shorter period for all but literally a handful of mega-authors. While a short sales period has been the norm for first-published authors as long as I’ve been writing, the shortened prime sales period for all but the mega-authors appears to be a comparatively recent development. Whether that causes a shorter period of heightened “buzz” about an author, or whether those who create the buzz are only interested when a new book comes out… or a combination of both, I couldn’t determine in any factual sense, not unless I wanted to invest months in market research and analysis… and I left that career behind a long time ago.

At the same time, it’s a mixed blessing to learn that my perceptions based on my own situation weren’t totally off base, because it shows on the one hand that I wasn’t too self-deluded, but on the other it does indicate a much shorter attention span on the part of readers in dealing with new books and authors, and I can’t help but think that hurts not only up-and-coming writers whose work is good and solid, even outstanding, but not flashy, but also mid-list authors who don’t get the media and internet buzz for as long a period as before… and this has to impact their sales to some degree.

P.S.  Interesting enough, just after I posted this, I read an entry on Tor.com [ Under the Radar: Mid-Series from the Mid List ] that has a related theme.

Why do civilizations or nations fall?  There are many specific reasons, but, in the end, they all boil down to one point – the inability or unwillingness of the majority of inhabitants to pay the price necessary to sustain that civilization or nation.

Sometimes, that inability is largely the result of factors beyond the control of the inhabitants. One can certainly argue that the fall of Angkor Wat, the Pre-Columbian Mayan civilizations, Mohenjo-daro, and the Anasazi cultures of the American Southwest were all due to massive changes in rainfall patterns than rendered physically impossible the continuation of those civilizations as they were then constituted.  That does not mean the inability to live in those areas, but the inability of that “civilization” to survive under those conditions.  A good example of that is the collapse of the Norse settlements in Greenland.  At the same time the Norse were dying off or leaving the Inuit were successfully moving in and thriving.

The classical Greek culture never reached the heights, at least comparatively, of the Periclean era for one simple reason.  The Greeks would never pay the price of political unity, or accept the need for a core of shared values.  This is borne out by the fact that until the modern era, and even perhaps now, Greece has never been united except by an outside conqueror – Philip and Alexander, the Romans, the Ottoman Empire. It wasn’t that the Greeks didn’t lack talent or ability, but they couldn’t harness either in a shared fashion.  Ironically, a huge factor in the success of the Roman Empire was the use of those brilliant Greeks.

 So why aren’t people willing to support their nation and civilization?  Because no one really values civilization per se.  We all want what we want, and so long as our nation/civilization gives us what satisfies our needs, we’ll support it.  When it doesn’t satisfy the needs of a significant majority, however… that’s where the trouble begins.  I’m seeing signs of this all across the United States, and the “range war” problem in Utah and Nevada is symptomatic of what is occurring. 

The ranchers of the southwest want to hold on to their way of life, a way of life that extends back some four generations. But that way of life was developed in the 1880s at a time when there were fewer demands on the land and greater levels of rainfall. As average rainfall has decreased, overgrazing became more common.  The federal government attempted to manage the land by reducing grazing allotments, and, frankly, little else.  The ranchers haven’t seen much active management by the BLM, but they have seen the government reduce their grazing rights in favor of protecting wild horses and the desert tortoise.  On the other hand, as I noted earlier, federal grazing fees are far lower than the fees on privately owned land.  The BLM has not lived up to its own plans in managing wild horses, and that upsets the ranchers because they believe that threatens their way of life.  The environmentalists believe that excessive grazing is destroying the environment, and that will eventually harm everyone. In Iron County, the BLM currently permits grazing rights for 21,000 cattle animal unit months [AUM], and one AUM refers to a cow and a calf.  But… there are currently slightly more than 2,000 feral/wild horses on federal and private lands in Iron County, 1,700 more than allowed under the wild horse protection laws, and the range won’t support both.  Nor does the $1.35 BLM charges the ranchers cover the management costs for just the wild horses.  But the political power of the ranch and farm lobby keeps the fees low, and from what I’ve seen, if the fees were higher, I suspect that the revenues would be diverted for more “urgent” federal programs.  So we have a threatened way of life, a threatened environment… and the majority of Americans are clearly not wanting to pay more for either… and particularly not to support ranchers who are in fact being subsidized by the government.  The ranchers don’t see it that way.  Believe me, they don’t!  That’s why almost a thousand of them turned up in Nevada last weekend, many of them armed, and why the BLM backed down and released the cattle they’d impounded because Cliven Bundy hadn’t paid over a million dollars in grazing fees.

If this were just the case here, it wouldn’t be so bad, but various types of protests are occurring across the United States because people aren’t getting what they want.  Many women are angry because Congress won’t support legislation that would make it easier for them to get equal pay.  Same sex couples want the same “marriage” rights as heterosexual couples;  religious groups see their “rights” and way of life being threatened and want those rights put into law, even if that disadvantages others who don’t share their beliefs.  Businesses want the right to maximize profits, even when that profit maximization denies workers affordable health care.  Workers want affordable health care even if that means their employer is less profitable… and may even close.

And… the thing is, that even though we have as far higher standard of living than two centuries ago, our wants have increased far more than the standard of living.  Yet, when enough of those wants aren’t satisfied, then we’ll end up losing our civilization because, collectively, we won’t pay enough to maintain it.

We’ve all seen it, over and over.  A bridge collapses, usually over a river.  Or here in Iron County, a landslide closes a state highway, and it takes eight months moving a huge chunk of  mountainside to repair the damage and re-open the road. All across the country, we have infrastructure teetering on the edge of collapse, with the potential to kill people and cause millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in damage in each case. But nothing gets done until there’s a crisis, and then what’s done is often only the cheapest acceptable fix.

In the case of the landslide here, the eight-month closure was the third that has closed the highway in the twenty years we’ve lived here.  Independent engineers who’ve studied the road suggest that it should have been built on the other side of the canyon where the rock and ground are more stable.  They even suggested it after the last eight month closure and repair that added more than a 100 mile detour to the commutes, delivery routes, and local cargo haulage trips of local residents, businesses, and tourists.  The state highway department turned that proposal down, claiming it was too expensive.  Yet, if the highway had been built where the better engineers suggested, that section wouldn’t have to be rebuilt every five to ten years, and the overall cost to taxpayers would be less, not to mention the possibility of reducing fatalities.

Yet pretty much everywhere in the United States, and likely elsewhere in the world, since I doubt human nature changes that much once one crosses borders – with a few possible exceptions – the same sort of deferred maintenance or “do it cheap now” attitude prevails with regard to the basic structures of society, despite the fact that spending a few more dollars now would save more dollars and lives later.

Why?  Because there seems to be an attitude that keeping taxes as low as possible is prudent.  It’s not.  Keeping taxes as low as possible when calculating costs and expenditures over a twenty or thirty year period is prudent, but keeping them as low as possible every year and deferring every possible maintenance or construction project until something has to be done only results in higher taxes… and higher costs on the community.

There’s an old saying that expresses the point succinctly – “penny wise and pound foolish” – but sayings like that are somehow out of date, which is ironic since it’s usually the Republicans who are looking to cut government spending, even while they keep saying the support traditional values.

This past week, what amounted to a small scale range war erupted just across the Utah border in Nevada, and in a spirit of misguided “idealism,” compounded by greed and ignorance, Iron County [Utah] officials weighed in on the side of a long-time law-breaking rancher.  Now… that’s not the way the local media put it, but so far as I can determine, here are the facts.

A Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy has been grazing over 500 head of cattle on BLM land for over 25 years without paying federal grazing fees, ever since the BLM decreased the number of cattle permitted on the federal lands that the Bundy family had used for roughly a century.  Despite previously paying grazing fees, Bundy has claimed that he and his family own the lands through their “beneficial use.”  After twenty years of contention and two recent court decisions denying Bundy’s claims, the BLM began removing Bundy’s cows this past week.  Fearing violence, BLM issued an order banning the Bundy-family from the federal lands where the cows were being removed and deployed heavily-armed agents to protect the federal-hired wranglers who were removing the livestock.  The Bundy family ignored the order and attempted to videotape the removal.  When they were ordered to leave, one family member refused and offered physical resistance.  He was arrested, and the round-up proceeded.

To make matters worse, the Iron County sheriff and the Iron County Commissioners, citing the Bundy case as another example of BLM trampling over local ranchers in favor of wildlife, offered an ultimatum to BLM, claiming that BLM’s failure to round up excessive numbers of wild horses on BLM lands was jeopardizing the health of the land and thus penalizing local ranchers, whose access to and leasing of federal lands was limited because of the poor state of those lands caused by too many feral horses.  The Iron County officials threatened to round up the horses themselves if BLM failed to come up with an immediate plan.  Late last week, BLM agreed to develop such a plan, after previously saying that it didn’t have the funds necessary for such a round-up.  Yesterday, both Iron County and Beaver County began moving feral horses off private property, claiming that, if the horses weren’t removed immediately, they would “destroy”the range in the next three weeks.

This is not a case of right versus wrong; it’s a case where everyone is wrong, and it’s a mess.

Under federal law, the Bureau of Land Management [BLM] can lease grazing rights to BLM lands in eleven western states, under a formula set by Congress, and last revised in law in 1978.

This past February, BLM set the rate at $1.35 per animal unit per month [AUM], the same rate that has been the case for the past eight years.  An animal unit means either one cow and her calf, one horse, or five goats or sheep.

This rate isn’t a bargain; it’s an absolute steal.  To begin with, according to the General Accounting Office of the federal government, grazing fees amount to less than one-sixth the cost the federal government spends maintaining those lands.  In addition, a 2005 GAO study found private, state, and federal grazing fees running anywhere between $20 and $150 per AUM, with rancher-friendly Texas charging that higher fee for some of its state lands.  According to a Congressional Research Service Report, “The average monthly lease rate for grazing on private lands in 11 western states in 2011 was $16.80 per head.”

In the Bundy case, the family hasn’t paid any fees in over twenty years – and feels that they’re the victims.  What’s more disturbing is that the Bundys report they’ve received letters of support from thousands of people across the west.

The BLM is far from blameless. According to BLM figures, the BLM lands in Iron County should only have 300 wild horses, but BLM estimates there are over 1,200, and BLM has cut grazing allotments to ranchers, claiming that the funding Congress has allowed for dealing with wild horses is inadequate – and it likely is, given that $70 million was appropriated last year for wild horse management, compared to the nearly $1 billion spent on livestock management on federal lands. How could they let these situations go on for over twenty years?  And why has BLM set the grazing fee so low at a time when the government is running massive deficits? And how could they let the wild horse situation get so bad that there are hundreds of horses on the verge of starvation and that certain lands have been badly overgrazed to the point of becoming true deserts?   As for the local ranchers, I find it hard to believe that, first the range could be totally destroyed in three weeks, but if it could be, exactly how long will it take their cows to do the same thing and why didn’t they make such a claim before things got so bad?

And finally, why are all those ranchers so indignant about federal overspending and big government – when they’re right up there with all the welfare cheats, getting huge subsidies at the expense of everyone else?

The other day, a reader commented that I’d chosen to live in the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret, otherwise known as Utah. In the abstract, and in the fact that we did move from New Hampshire to Utah, that’s true.  In the real world, it was far from that simple… and that’s true of many major choices most people make in life.

In our case, the facts were that my wife was teaching at Plymouth State University, in a full-time but not tenure track job, when the New England economic downturn in the early 1990s hit the state university system and her job was eliminated on very short notice. She was offered an adjunct position at less than half pay and without benefits.  I had just become a full-time self-employed writer two years earlier, and while we were making ends meet, it would have been rather difficult to do so if she had to accept half-pay, and we had to make ends meet.  In her field, there are very few jobs open or offered in any one year – anywhere in the United States – and especially for women, because singing professorships remain one of the few areas where gender discrimination is permitted, and remains.  All a music department has to do is specify that it is looking for a bass, baritone, or tenor.

So… when she was offered the position of head of the voice and opera program at Southern Utah University, because writers are portable, the choice was between a great and likely downhill financial struggle in New Hampshire or moving to Utah,and  it didn’t take much time to decide to move to Utah… a move we certainly haven’t regretted, despite certain cultural aspects we knew in advance would be difficult… not to mention a long and costly struggle to sell the New Hampshire house, and one that we only could sell at a 40% [yes, that’s correct] loss.  However… was it really a choice?  Technically, you can say it was a choice, and we made it, but most people, I suspect, when faced with those sorts of choices, decide as we did, to accept the choice that makes the most sense occupationally and financially.

While we came through this difficult time eventually better off, there are others faced with so-called choices who aren’t so fortunate.  Poor full-time working single parents with children often are faced with the “choice” of making slightly more money – and losing Medicaid health care for their children, which means that more income results in a lower standard of living.  Is deciding against working more really a choice?  Or the illusion of one?

In cases similar to ours, but unlike us, what if one spouse has a solid job in the local area, and the other spouse can’t find a new job at anywhere near the same skill and pay level in that same area, while the still-employed spouse can’t find one in the new area – and moving will result in a totally lower income?  Either choice is bad… and this is happening to more and more two-paycheck families.  Yet those who come up with the statement, “But you chose,” don’t see that such a “choice” isn’t really a choice for anyone who weighs the options carefully.

What’s also overlooked is that earlier choices in life restrict later choices.  Having children early in life restricts what a couple can do for the immediate years to come, but having them late in life may mean that you won’t be retiring any time soon.  Borrowing vast sums of money to pursue a medical career likely means long years of private practice and likely a specialty field, because those are usually the only parts of the field where the income can pay off massive student loans.  I’ve known lawyers who have turned down judicial appointments for similar reasons.

This “illusion of choice” permeates everywhere.  Although it’s one thing when executive decisions are patently illegal, does a junior executive or a field engineer with a family and large student debts loudly and persistently question executive or corporate decisions that may be questionable?  How often?  How loudly?

What’s so often overlooked or quietly ignored is that so many of the so-called choices in life are anything but the result of choosing between “equal” or close-to-equal possibilities.  I’m not so sure that the only “real” choices one has are in the supermarket, where you have at least several varieties of every product all close to the same price, not to mention the generics. 

In short, in real life, all alternatives of choices have downsides, and most “choices” aren’t between equal alternatives, and, yes, people do make bad choices… all the time.  But from what I’ve seen and experienced in life, at all too many times, no choice is optimal, and suggesting that someone who selects the least damaging choice is at fault for the downsides is disingenuous at best, if not arrogantly dismissive.  It also perpetuates the “illusion of choice.”

As a writer, for most of every day I work alone, at least in terms of human companionship, although what I do is observed by our three dogs and two cats.  Thankfully, in regard to my professional activities, their communication skills do not extend to writing, proofing, or commenting upon what I produce.  This means that I’m relatively isolated from much of the activity in that area of the United States where we live, Utah, otherwise known as the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret.  At times, periodically, events of such a pointed nature surface that even I cannot escape such reminders of the omnipresent theocracy.

Two months ago, it was the pronouncement by the theocrats – or one of the theocracy’s General Authorities, as I recall – that the LDS Church firmly opposed any change in the state’s highly restrictive and often ludicrous liquor laws.  Needless to say, although a number of legislators had suggested bringing the laws into the twentieth century, thus only being a century or so behind the rest of the nation, the legislature immediately decided against considering any changes.

The second reminder arrived with the Monday morning paper, the Salt Lake Tribune.  As part of the paper, there was a “32-Page Special Section,” under the Tribune letterhead, and with no indication that it was an advertising section, entitled “Commencing With a Mission,” featuring the color photograph of a good-looking male high school student who will be skipping his high school graduation ceremony in order to begin his two year LDS church mission.  Only inside the edition next to the page numbers is any indication of the purpose of the section, and there the words “LDS Conference” appear.  In short, the “Special Edition” consists of 32 pages specific to the Mormon Church and its biannual faith-wide General Conference.  The section has ads, just like the rest of the paper, and while some clearly have an LDS slant [more about those later], every story is LDS-themed.  It’s clearly not an advertising insert.

I certainly would have expected such an insert if I subscribed to the Deseret News, which is owned and operated, if through LDS subsidiaries, by the LDS Church – but because I’m anything but of the LDS faith, that is why I subscribe to the Tribune.

As for the ads, some were the “normal” types for tankless water heaters, vacation destinations, eyeglass providers, and furniture stories, etc., while others were clearly aimed at missionaries, advertising the best “missionary suits” and garb or offering “missionary discounts” on luggage, as well as a few others tailored toward church-related goods  The ad that I found screamingly objectionable was the full-page spread by Utah State University, perhaps because the lead “point” in the listing of USU’s features was that it boasts the “World’s Largest LDS Institute Program.”   I have trouble when a state-supported, state institution receiving federal funds advertises in a religious supplement about its religious capabilities… and those capabilities are limited to a single faith.

Somehow, I can’t imagine the Los Angeles Times printing, or getting away with printing, a special supplement devoted to covering Scientology, especially in such a flattering fashion, or the Boston Globe printing a similar section on Christian Science… or state universities in either California or Massachusetts advertising their support of a specific faith.

But then, California and Massachusetts aren’t semi-sovereign theocracies.

Decades ago, I read a study that compared the abilities and success of teachers in public secondary schools to those of teachers in elite private schools.  The conclusion back then was that the overall teaching capabilities of teachers in public schools were actually better than those of teachers in private schools, but that the students in private schools, on average, learned more.

From what I’ve seen over the years, as a student, as a parent, and as a university lecturer, I suspect that conclusion remains largely accurate.  That’s why I’m extraordinarily suspicious of any “new” idea or concept in education that comes from institutions such as Harvard or Yale, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Smith, Ripon, and any other number of “elite” colleges or universities.  Why?  Because when you have both top level students and professors, almost anything will work in educating those students… and that’s something that all too many educators, particularly the administrations at state colleges and universities, don’t seem to grasp.

Now… if that “new” idea works at an inner city charter school, or public school, where most of the students are well below grade level, then… then I get interested.  Or if it works at a mid-level state university or college. But after teaching at a state university and being married to a professor who’s taught at that level for over thirty years, I’ve seen more “new” ideas floated and fail that I can even begin to count, and almost none of them worked as well as the old-fashioned methods of maintaining standards and accountability and simply requiring students to learn the material.

The same principle also applies to “inspirational” teachers. Certain individuals have the capability to inspire.  From what I’ve observed, the ability can be refined and better directed, but not all teachers have that capability, nor do all CEOs, nor all professionals in any given field.  Yet  I don’t see anyone claiming that the only good CEOs. lawyers, doctors, or dentists are the inspirational ones.  But in education, I’ve seen all too many books and articles based on what inspirational teachers do that claim that inspiration is the only way, and I’ve seen those methods succeed in making students feel better, but fail in improving their learning.

The techniques used by successful professionals [the ones who have been successful for decades, not those who are “flavour du jour”] in any field vary considerably, but the one thing those successful professionals all have in common is subject matter mastery, combined with self-discipline… and both of those are exactly what it takes for students to be successful.  And, just as in the rest of life, not all students have the ability, for whatever reason, to master certain subjects, and of those who do, not all have the self-discipline to keep at it steadily enough to attain that mastery.

What’s overlooked all too often in all the educational fads is that the desired end result is a student with a mastery of the subject, with the ability to think and apply that knowledge with skill, and the self-discipline to do so.  Fads come and go;   those basic requirements don’t.