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.

Over the past several centuries, all manner of ethical and practical questions have been raised about the necessity of economic profit, its role in a society, and even whether it is necessary. Most truly thinking individuals [yes, a value judgment on my part] believe that, because there has never been a long-standing civilization that did not incorporate a market-based economic system in some form, some form of profit is also necessary.  Beyond that, I have some doubts that any majority consensus exists.

From my own experience and research, however, I will make two observations:  (1) Absolute maximization of profits results in a minimization of freedom.  (2) Absolute minimization of profits does the same.

The second point is more obvious to most people because a market-based economy, for a practical purposes, ceases to exist if there is no profit at all, and even the egalitarian Scandinavian countries had to pull back from taxation levels that were so high that they effectively destroyed profits.

The first point is continually ignored or disputed by extreme free-market types, despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary. What isn’t obvious to most people, particularly politicians, regulators, and ultra-price conscious consumers is that maximization of both revenue and profits requires keeping wages and costs low, keeping inventory to those items in the highest demand, and eliminating competition.  Politicians and regulators, at least at present, only look at low prices.  The Amazon lawsuit against Apple and the Big Five publishers was a perfect example.  The Department of Justice effectively stated that it didn’t care if Amazon’s practices gave it a ninety percent market share.  All DOJ cared about was that short-term prices were lower.  Well…now that Amazon won, just what happened to all those low prices?  I certainly don’t see much difference to the consumer.  Another example is the cable/satellite television market.  Now that the major communications content providers have largely consolidated and are maximizing their profits, the diversity of content has dropped drastically… and prices have increased. Walmart is yet another example.

Or put in another context, freedom in any area isn’t free.  Just as there’s a cost to political freedom, there’s also a cost to economic freedom of choice, and when low prices completely trump freedom of choice, not only does quality suffer for the goods most people can afford, but only the ultra-rich can afford truly high quality goods and services… and some goods and services aren’t available at any price… and in the long run, prices aren’t even lower.

In the early to mid-1970s, a Jesuit priest began a quiet, indeed almost unknown [at the time] effort, to help political refugees, liberals, and reformers, escape incarceration or liquidation by militarily-dominated South American governments.  During this period, the priest never spoke out against these governments, although one Catholic bishop – Jeronimo Podesta – did so and had been promptly suspended as a priest, never to return to the clergy.  At the same time, this Jesuit priest continued to help many of those persecuted by the government, and various reports put the number of those he helped or saved in excess of a hundred, possibly more, at a time when literally thousands of people vanished, never to be seen again. Much later, in 2000, he was the first prominent Catholic to declare that the Argentine Catholic Church needed to put on “garments of public penance” for its failures during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s. That Jesuit priest, of course, was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

Some of his detractors fault him for not speaking out and taking a public position during the Dirty War.  Others, particularly those he did save, praise him for what he did, noting that he even saved people and made efforts for those with whose political beliefs he did not agree.

Was he a hero, as some say, or did he betray his duty as a priest by not taking a public stance? While likely everyone will have an answer, I’d like to pose the question differently – when is taking a public position useful, even heroic, and when is it a futile and meaningless gesture, one that essentially keeps the individual from doing any good at all?

In a way, to my thinking, what happened in Nazi Germany before WWII offers a useful analogy.  In 1930, speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis might have done some good, especially if more powerful and noteworthy individuals had done so.  By 1940, doing so was suicide, and a suicide that accomplished absolutely nothing.

Father Bergoglio had been ordained as a priest in December 1969, and did not even become a Jesuit until 1973.  He was not that well-known, if known at all outside of a limited circle, and, as a man from a humble background, who had been a janitor and a low-level laboratory technician, he certainly didn’t have powerful friends or influential contacts at that point in his life.  When those few in the church who had position and power, such as Podesta, did speak out, they were silenced, in one way or another.  It would appear that Father Bergoglio did what he could do and did his best to save those that he could.

Was it heroism?  Probably not grand and glorious heroism, but it took great courage and strength of will, because, if he had been discovered, he would likely have vanished as so many others did during that time. And is it heroism, truly, to speak out when it is vain, when by being less obvious, one could save more?  Yet…how does one tell?  And without being in Father Bergoglio’s cassock at the time, how can those who would judge him tell, either?

NOTE:  As one whose beliefs approximate Anglican/Episcopalian agnosticism, I’m trying to offer an open question.

Moby Dick is indeed missing, but it’s the asteroid, not the Herman Melville book, which, I have to confess, I could never get around to finishing, one of the handful of novels I chose not to struggle through… and considering how many bad novels I’ve had to read over my career, I think that says something.  The asteroid Moby Dick [asteroid 2000 EM26], a chunk of rock some 270 meters long, was supposed to show up sometime last month roughly 2 million miles from Earth… and didn’t.

The fact that telescopes couldn’t find it doesn’t mean that aliens exploded it or that it disintegrated, but that either astronomers didn’t calculate its orbit correctly when it was discovered in 2002 or that various gravitational forces nudged it into a different orbit.  What’s troubling about this is that the “failure to appear” is indicative of our vulnerability to large objects colliding with Earth.  A piece of rock roughly the size of a WWII cruiser falling to Earth doesn’t sound that catastrophic to most people, but most people don’t understand the results produced when even comparatively small chunks of rock slam into the planet.

The Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia a little over a year ago with a force of 500 kilotons [some 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima] was much smaller than Moby Dick, only some 20 meters across, but it injured some 1,500 people seriously enough to require medical treatment and damaged over 7,000 buildings – all from the effects of a shock wave that began more than 20 kilometers away high in the atmosphere. That’s what a comparatively small chunk of rock did after hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 40,000 miles per hour.

In 1908, another object, either a comet or a small asteroid, exploded above the Tunguska River in Siberia, flattening some 80 million trees over an area of 800 square miles, and, of course, there is also the Chicxulub Crater at the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula – a crater 110 miles in diameter formed 65 million years ago when a bolide six miles in diameter struck the earth at 40,000 miles per hour.  Scientists have calculated that the impact would have released two million times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, broiling the earth’s surface, igniting wildfires worldwide and plunging Earth into darkness as debris filled clouded the atmosphere. Some suggest this was the event that led to the end of the dinosaurs.  Whether it did or not, such an impact today would effectively destroy pretty much all human societies and their infrastructure.

But for all the suggestions and warnings, what have we done?  Not nearly enough.  Not anywhere close to all the near-Earth asteroids and other objects capable of impacting Earth have been discovered and followed, and we certainly haven’t developed the capability to deflect even moderate sized rocks.  In the meantime, the financial industry spends tens of millions of dollars to execute securities trades in nanoseconds in order to make billions through sheer speculation.

From reading some of my posts, readers might get the impression that I’m not extremely fond of religion.  In some ways, I’m not.  I’m especially skeptical of organized religions that, in their attempts to grow and perpetuate their doctrines and “way of life,” succeed in creating a mental state where those who practice the faith become essentially blind to the shortcomings and huge inconsistencies inherent in that faith… and often reject literal physical realities because they conflict with their beliefs.

On the other hand, given human nature, I’m not so sure that human societies without any religion at all, at least today, might not be far crueler, less ordered, and less desirable places in which to live, but then, ultra-theocratic societies tend to be religiously ordered to the point of denying human freedoms, as well as also being crueler and less desirable places to live, especially for women.

As I’ve noted before, the only codes of behavior the majority of human beings have accepted, at least for most of human history, have been those with strong roots in religion.  I suspect that’s because most of us really don’t think another human being has the “right” to declare what rules our conduct should follow, but that “God” does.  Yet, paradoxically, “God” doesn’t tell us that.  Other human beings tell us what God told them is correct behavior, and for most people throughout history, such theologically derived codes of law and behavior have been accepted. I suspect part of the reason for this is not necessarily great unanimity, but a combination of religious belief and simple pragmatism, and it may be that the key to a “good” society is indeed the combination of a theological concern and a secular pragmatism.  Certainly, those few societies without a significant religious “tie,” such as Nazism and Communism, have been anything but “good” places to live, yet the same is true for ultra-religious societies.  Oh… the “true believers” in those societies did well, but not many others.

History does show that societies dominated by religion tend to be short on human freedoms, creativity, and progress.  Societies where religion plays no role in setting cultural values also tend to be short on human freedom and restrict creativity, but often achieve progress for a time by stealing from others in various ways.

So, as much as I may complain or point out the notable shortcomings of religion, and organized religion in particular, it appears that healthy societies require some theological basis, at least at the current level of human ethical development.  The question then becomes to what degree religion should influence government, law, and behavior. Personally, I think the Founding Fathers got it right, but I mean it in the way they wrote the Constitution, and not in the activist way in which too many true believers seem to think that freedom of religion means the freedom to compel others to behave according to their religious beliefs or the freedom to enact laws that in some fashion or another effectively institutionalize those beliefs.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to a modern dance concert and then, on an airplane enroute to Denver, I read through a poetry magazine that I had received as a thank you for a speaking engagement.

The modern dance concert was actually a fiftieth year retrospective by an established and respected mountain states company that presented a cross-section of dances previously offered over the years and concluded with a new piece that presented a “prospective” dance  just choreographed by the company’s new director/choreographer.  After the concert, we compared notes, and we both agreed – the older the work, in general, the better we liked it, and since my wife the opera singer and director has worked with music and dancers for more than forty years, she does have some expertise.  The newest “piece,” while theoretically presenting windows into life, seemed almost aimless, themeless, and without much truly musical accompaniment, not to mention the fact that much of the “dancing” seemed to occur with the entire body either on the floor, or extremely close to it.

The poetry magazine, from my professional viewpoint, was even worse, although it was a slick, well-designed, and well laid out effort, bound like a small trade paperback. The magazine has been published semi-annually for over five years.  The issue I read included 82 poems by 49 authors.  The first thing that struck me was that there didn’t seem to be any poetry in the “poems.”  Further scrutiny supported that impression, as I could discover neither end-rhymes, internal rhyme, alliteration, nor any discernable meter, merely an attempt at innovative typography… and that was true for every single “verse.”  After reading the short biographies of the contributors, I was even more astounded. Most had published widely, and several had won prizes for their work.

Now… I will admit to having been skeptical of most “modern” verse for years, and I have wondered, not infrequently, whether the verse [I hesitate to call it poetry] I have read in the pages of publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker was really representative of the state of American poetry today.  It appears so, unfortunately.  Well over a half-century ago, and perhaps longer, one of the last great American poets – Robert Frost – made a statement to the effect that writing free verse was akin to playing tennis with the net down.  From what I’ve seen, all too many would-be poets not only don’t know the rules of the game, they don’t even know that there are rules as to what poetry is., or at least, what the rules historically have been.  And, well, if the lack of rules constitutes the “new rules,” then it ought to be called prosedy or something similar.

In both the instances I’ve mentioned here, the “creators” don’t seem to have the faintest idea that greatness or excellence doesn’t come from ignoring the rules, but from knowing them, using them, and transcending them [which occasionally means breaking them, but doing so effectively requires knowing what the rules are, how they should be broken and why… and what the exact effect one is attempting to achieve by doing so].  The point underlying both these examples is that excellence in anything requires structure, not just scaffolding.  Yet this loss of structure seems to occurring everywhere in the U.S., from the decline in courtesy to our crumbling infrastructure, and  everywhere rules are being broken, “just because.”

There’s a line from an old Janis Joplin song that says, “Freedom’s just another word for having nothing left to lose.”  And when structure goes, you don’t indeed have much left.