The Republicans in the House have elected a new Speaker – Mike Johnson. By any definition, Johnson is a far-right idealogue – election denier, extreme evangelical, anti-abortion without exception, America-firster who voted against aid to Ukraine, who opposed same-sex marriage and any LBGTQ civil rights, and who continues to back Donald Trump with bogus claims of election fraud of various sorts.

Like all idealogues, for all of his genial soft-spoken manner, he’s an absolutist. Everything is black or white. And that’s the biggest problem with absolutists in politics. Life is filled with shades of gray, and trying to force everything into black and white always results in tyranny, as well as a denial of any facts that don’t fit within the absolutists’ beliefs.

Is Johnson a true idealogue, or an ambitious politician using ideology to gain great power? Or both? In practice, it doesn’t matter. The results will be the same, because idealogues don’t compromise. That should be obvious from the voting patterns of Republicans in the U.S. House.

I don’t see Johnson compromising unless he’s forced to by the defection of moderate Republicans, but if those moderates do defect, the Republican establishment will attempt to handle them in the same fashion as they did with Liz Cheney. If Johnson can hold the House in line, he’s the type to bring the government to a halt until he gets his way, just as the far-right has paralyzed the U.S. House until they got their way.

That kind of mindset can destroy democracy under the guise of saving it, and Mike Johnson is just the type to lead such a crusade.

This past weekend, we went to a dinner party. At the adjoining table were six people, all six more than acquaintances, but less than close friends. They were talking politics, and it became clear that all were Trumpists, very firm ones at that. All six would likely fall into the income classification of upper middle class but might well deny it. The men were professionals, a CPA, a retired consumer products plant manager, and a retired senior regional executive of one of the largest big-box retail chains; the women were a retired schoolteacher, the office manager (and wife) of the CPA, and a full-time housewife.

All were talking about how much they loved Donald Trump, using exactly those words and how much they hated Joe Biden, calling him an incoherent puppet of the far left.

I was tempted to point out a few facts, but refrained because a few weeks ago, I’d had a talk with the retired regional sales executive, and I knew exactly where anything I might say to the six would go. When I earlier pointed out that Trump had been convicted of tax fraud and evasion, as well as sexual assault and defamation, and faced four indictments and 90 some criminal charges, and tried to overthrow an election, and I asked him how he could support someone like that, his answer was, “All politicians are corrupt. What about Hillary and her emails, and Hunter Biden, or Biden’s brother?”

I suggested there was a difference between hard evidence with convictions and indictments and no charges at all in the case of Hillary and charges against Hunter Biden far less damning and not involving his father, and that Hillary hadn’t tried to overthrow the election she lost, to which he replied there was no difference.

Now, I can understand someone who dislikes or despises the policies of the Democrats and who will vote for any Republican rather than a Democrat. I personally think that’s a bit extreme, but I can understand it. What I find unfathomable is LOVING a convicted criminal and proven sex offender who tried to overturn an honest election, and who currently continues to spout proven lies about people in government just doing their jobs.

And then, that night after the dinner, I had a dream, more like nightmare, about the six of our acquaintances, back in Germany in 1933, sitting at dinner and saying how much they loved Adolf Hitler because of the way he was handling the communists and the Jews.

I did wake up from that nightmare.

Societies exist because human beings fare better by cooperating in groups. Human societies have ranged from loose groupings of individuals to grand empires, but one of the distinguishing features of most, if not all, successful nations and empires is that they have adopted structures and laws that strike a balance of some sort between the rights of the individual and the need to maintain civic order while protecting their citizens from attack from without.

There are essentially two ways to hold a country/society together, either through laws based on honesty and public trust of the government or through fear and force. And even societies based on honesty and public trust use fear and force on lawbreakers and other disruptive elements to deter them from harming others.

But the greatest danger to successful societies usually results from corruption from within. Corruption can be loosely defined as breaking in some fashion social compacts or laws that maintain equal rights to personal safety, equal rights to hold and use property, equal access to public services, and equal treatment under law.

Failing to pay taxes is corruption because the evader obtains public services he did not pay for, and thus places a heavier burden on those who do. Bribing a public official for services or contracts disadvantages others (and results in unequal treatment under law) and possibly results in shoddy procurement/goods. Paying to get a government position almost invariably results in a less qualified person in that position… and also reduces faith in government. Less faith in government creates more incentives to cheat government and the mindset that “if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?”

By the same token, government policies that appear to grant special rights and privileges to certain groups or classes of people also reduce trust in government, even if such policies actually make access more equal.

Now, in practice, all societies have a degree of corruption, but history shows, rather conclusively, that comparatively more honest societies actually achieve more, have greater power, and have happier and more prosperous people.

A society that accepts corruption as a way of life deserves what it gets, and it will continue to get it, because corruption stems from the idea that whatever’s best for me and my family supersedes the rule of law, and when people don’t respect the law, corruption becomes endemic and self-perpetuating.

Over two million Palestinians live, and are effectively trapped, in the Gaza strip. Among them are thousands, if not more, members of Hamas. Most of the Palestinians now living in Gaza either left Israel for Gaza or are the descendants of those who did. Gaza was controlled by Egypt, but later occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. The Oslo Accords of 1993 provided for local control by the Palestinian Authority, and in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza. By 2007, Hamas vanquished Fatah and taken control of local government, after which Hamas cancelled elections.

After all its difficulties with Islamic terrorists, Israel clearly doesn’t want to govern the Palestinians, or to integrate them into Israel, and neither do any of the other nations in the regions bordering Israel want to accept the Palestinians, despite the fact that all of those nations have cultures not dissimilar to that of the Palestinians.

Since it declared itself an independent nation in 1948, Israel has been under attack, at times in all-out war, and the rest of the time from terrorist attacks. As the latest incarnation of those who have attacked, Hamas has declared that Israel must be destroyed. Although Israel removed its internal military presence in Gaza more than fifteen years ago, terrorist attacks against Israel have continued, with the latest being the most devastating in years.

Yet protests against the Israelis are growing in the United States, especially among “liberals,” claiming that the sad situation in Gaza is all the fault of the Israelis and that the Israelis shouldn’t attack Gaza because of the harm that will cause to “innocent” Palestinians.

But how innocent are the Palestinians? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see them stopping the attacks by Hamas.

It’s both a truism and a truth, that no government can stand against its people – if they truly oppose it. Of course, the problem arises when a population is divided, and a true civil war is a disaster. But in the case of the Palestinians, they don’t seem to be repudiating their support for the destruction of Israel or for Hamas. Nor does saying nothing make them innocent. Here, as in many cases, an old saying applies — all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. And that’s assuming a population that wishes to destroy Israel is “good.”

Are the Iraelis angels? Hardly, but when you’re the only Jewish nation in the world with a land area of a mere 8,000 square miles surrounded by nations that have never stopped attacking and who have advocated for your destruction for more than 75 years, being a peaceful angel will only result in another holocaust, something that the Jews cannot forget and that all the Palestinian “supporters” seem to have conveniently forgotten.

And then there’s the other question. At what point does a people or a nation have to take responsibility for the acts of their leaders? Certainly, some peoples never have. It took World War II to hold the Germans responsible for the acts of Hitler and the Nazis. It took a Civil War for the U.S. to deal with slavery, and there are still unfinished issues. No one ever held Stalin responsible, or Mao, or the Turks for the Armenian genocide.

All of that points out that most extremists have to be stopped by force, because that’s all they respect. Unfortunately, that makes whoever effectively stops them an extremist as well. And, in the case of Gaza, there’s a great deal of talk, but no one in the entire region seems to be willing to truly deal with the issues raised by Islamic extremists, except Israel, because it has no choice if it wishes to survive.

From where I sit, I’m seeing a general similarity between the situation in Gaza and the situation in the theoretically Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both are allowing violent extremists to disrupt their workings.

The Republicans blame the Democrats for all the nation’s problems, while Hamas continues to put the blame on Israel. In the House of Representatives, Republicans have a slight majority, but they’ve allowed themselves to be bound and disrupted by an extremist minority that has, depending on the situation, blamed the former speaker for working with the Democrats and then effectively blamed the Democrats for not saving McCarthy from the extremists, after McCarthy stalled almost all legislative activity while trying to placate the extremists — most unsuccessfully.

In the Gaza situation, the Israelis pulled out of local governance fifteen years ago, and the Palestinians have accepted and allowed the existence of extremist terrorists who blame the Israelis for everything while doing their best to continue their attacks.

In both cases, the extremists are pushing ideas and ideology that, apparently, very few besides the extremists can accept.

Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel and will accept nothing less, while the Republican extremists want massive spending cuts that will fall on the poorest Americans and refuse to consider even the smallest of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans (who now possess the greatest share of national wealth ever)… and apparently will accept nothing less.

Neither situation is likely to end well.

Walgreens has 9,000 locations in the United States, and, this week, in something like 200 of them, pharmacists are walking off the job, citing stress, understaffing, changing schedules at the last moment, and inadequate training for pharmacy staff.

This couldn’t come at a worse moment for Walgreens, whose stock value has roughly dropped fifty percent over the last year, and whose earnings aren’t improving significantly., and whose CEO departed recently. The company blames some of the problem on the fallout from fewer Covid vaccinations and says that the walkouts are limited to a few stores.

But, from what little I’ve seen, the problems are far worse than the company admits, and affect more than just a few locations.

We have a single Walgreens here in Cedar City, and it’s also where my wife and I get vaccinations, as a great many people do, because there aren’t that many options in Cedar City. It’s also not one of the stores cited as having walkouts.

Two years ago, I could call the store and get an appointment for a vaccination. Last year, Walgreens implemented a mandatory national vaccination schedule. Even if the pharmacy was empty, you had to go online to get an appointment.

This year I scheduled an appointment for Covid and flu vaccines. When I arrived, I was told that the Covid vaccine hadn’t arrived and that the store hadn’t been told the vaccine would be delayed in enough time to contact people – if, indeed, they’d had enough staff to do so, which they didn’t. Now… the staff was pleasant, and apologetic. And I got the flu vaccine quickly, with little fuss … and waited to reschedule the Covid shot. I also noted that the pharmacy staff never stopped moving, except to wait on people or answer the telephone.

When my wife went to get her vaccination, after the Covid vaccine arrived, despite the advance registration, the waiting time was forty-five minutes because the pharmacy didn’t have enough staff.

I’ve thought back, and over the past three years, that Walgreens appears to have changed almost all the pharmacy staff at least three times. I’ve had a different pharmacist or pharmacy tech give me a shot each time, and yet there are never more than five or six people working in the pharmacy.

So… I’m inclined to believe the pharmacists who attribute the problem to management, and I also suspect that management needs to pay more attention to operations than to the stock price.

Americans are dissatisfied, in a wide range of areas, but particularly in their current political choices, and I’m afraid that the dissatisfaction is only going to get worse because, as a nation, we refuse to face certain realities.

The first unpleasant reality is that no society, even the U.S., can offer the higher standard of living which most Americans want to all its population (unless the society is small and relatively homogenous). In the U.S., there aren’t enough resources and energy sources to do that (not to mention the “small” problem that using that much energy would increase global warming). The second is that we’re producing twice as many college graduates for high-paying “elite” jobs than there are jobs, which means that more than half of those degree holders are unlikely to ever be able to pay back the debt they’ve incurred in pursuit of those degrees, and each year those numbers increase, and so does dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the fact that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. are more than willing to come here, because almost any form of subsistence in the U.S. is better than what they face where they are, and there’s at least some hope by coming here.

Add to that the fact that the majority of Americans are looking for a one-size-fits-all perfect solution. No system, plan, or method works perfectly all the time, and the greater the diversity of those relaying on a system and the greater the range of problems the system has to deal with, the lower the probability of agreement among the users of the system. For large systems to work, political or economic, compromise is necessary, like it or not.

On top of that, a significant percentage of Americans don’t want to compromise. Those with great wealth are piling up more wealth, and those with few or no financial resources feel their comparative situation is worsening. The wealthy have the political power and resources to avoid compromising, and the poor have comparatively less and less.

All of these facts and factors are well-known. They’re everywhere. So what are our politicians doing to address them?

In recent political debates, especially among Republicans, I’ve observed that, for the most part, the politicians who assess the current situation more realistically and also advocate at least semi-realistic changes appear to be the least popular. I see the same problem among the Democrats.

Could it be that everyone fears that any actual realistic solution will hurt them or go against what they believe? And that any politician who’s realistic faces getting thrown out of office?

It’s certainly possible, since the U.S. continues to spend far more than its revenues and the politicians appear unable to cut spending (because too many people will suffer) and unable to raise taxes on the wealthy (despite the greatest income disparity in U.S. history)… and yet they’re unwilling to work out a realistic compromise, because it’s clear that too many voters find compromise unacceptable… and are demanding the unworkable and unobtainable perfect solution.

I’d venture to say that the vast majority of Americans have encountered something written by Charles Dickens, even if it’s only one of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, or perhaps high school English class required reading of A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield.

One of the aspects of Dickens that has always bothered me about his work is the lack of loose ends. As one New York Times book reviewer wrote years ago, “Dickens seduced his readers with atmosphere and then clubbed them with coincidence. He dreaded loose ends – no one has ever tied up his literary anxieties with more circumstantial knots.”

While Dickens has been criticized for “paper” main characters, excessive sentiment, and a reliance on fortuitous circumstances, what bothered me more was the lack of loose ends. Even as a student in high school, it always seemed to me that life was filled with meaningless death and loose ends.

Over the years, I’ve seen that novelists certainly recognize and often overdo meaningless deaths, if sometimes imbuing deaths with more meaning than they actually have, but some seem to work too hard to tie up all the loose ends, even if that seldom happens in real life, which is far less tidy than fiction.

But today, as in Dickens’s time, a great many readers enjoy having all the loose ends tied up and feel that the only loose ends that shouldn’t be tied up are those that will indeed be tied up in the sequel. This is natural, given that life is indeed untidy, and one of the reasons people read novels is not only to be entertained, but also to be challenged, as well as given a sense of meaning or order in life.

As a result of my feelings about loose ends, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I leave more than a few loose ends in any novel, some of which will never be resolved, and that just might be because I have the feeling that, more often than not, the only order and meaning in life come from what individuals and their societies create, and that no one is capable of tying up all the loose ends in life.

But that also might explain, at least partly, why I don’t have a best-seller like Tale of Two Cities, which, tied-up loose ends and all, has sold more than 200 million copies and is still selling, more than a century and a half after the author’s death.

Right now, it appears as though the main objective of the right-wing Republicans in the U.S. House isn’t to improve government, or to adopt a sensible federal budget, or even to keep the government going, but to attack and try to impeach President Joe Biden because he beat Donald Trump in the last election.

To me, it also seems as though the Republicans in the House have forgotten that they live in a representative democracy where they need to consider the views of all the people, not just those in their districts who elected them. Right now, the far-right wing in the House has little or no interest in working policy matters out, despite some of their rhetoric. Even the rhetoric is totally unrealistic – just how are they going to pass eleven appropriations bills in a few days, when in nine months the Republican leadership has only been able to get one relatively non-controversial appropriations bill passed by the House?

The Republican right is far more interested in imposing their views on everyone else, just like Trump (not to mention Tommy Tuberville) wants to do, regardless of the Constitution and long-standing political processes and practices.

It apparently doesn’t matter to those of the far right that the overwhelming majority of Americans want some form of legal abortion close to what Roe v. Wade provided. It doesn’t matter that the majority of Americans doesn’t want government shutdowns, or massive cuts in Medicare or Medicaid, or the freezing of military promotions. And, of course, the far-right wants also wants to stop all investigations and prosecutions of those involved in the January 6th insurrection and attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. They also want to close the U.S. southern border, but have no workable plan (and will never be able to implement one without turning the U.S. into a total autocracy, as I’ve discussed earlier).

And, ironically, despite all their efforts to run over everyone else’s rights, they persist in calling themselves the “Freedom Caucus.”

A recent ABC news poll finds Trump almost ten points ahead of President Biden in a head-to-head match-up.

How is it that a man convicted of sexual abuse and sequential tax evasion, who’s also facing four more criminal indictments and 91 felony counts, is outpolling the President who’s accomplished more legislatively in two years than any other President in at least a decade, if not longer, and, messy as it was, finally extracted the United States from a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan?

How is it that Biden gets blamed for the inflation that was started by overspending in the Trump administration? How is it that the most pro-labor President in decades is losing labor votes to a billionaire whose every action in the private sector prior to becoming president effectively minimized or screwed labor and their employers?

How is it that people worry so much more about Biden’s age than Trump’s, especially since there’s not that much difference in age between the two, and since Trump is a convicted criminal and a serial liar who takes enormous liberties with the facts, a behavior far more indicative of senility than Biden’s occasional speech gaffes (which he’s had most of his life, possibly the result of a childhood problem with stuttering)?

In addition, the poll shows that more people blame Biden than Trump for Congress’s failure to act to stop a government shutdown, when the shutdown is being caused by the right wing of the Republican party, and when the Republicans control the House, and so far have only been able to pass one minor appropriations bill.

The only answer that makes sense is anger at rising prices and government’s failure to deal with issues – most of which failure lies with Congress, not with Biden.

But right now, it appears the majority of Americans are so blinded with anger that they honestly can’t see or think straight… and that’s a real problem.

Some pundits and many Americans seem think that both political parties are equally corrupt. Now, I know as well as anyone that facts seldom change anyone’s mind, but I can always hope that some day it might happen.

As for the equal corruption… let’s see how the Republicans stack up.

Exhibit #1 – Donald Trump. In addition to four pending criminal indictments, with 91 separate criminal charges, he also lost a civil lawsuit for defamation in which he was found guilty of sexual assault, and now faces another charge of defamation in which he’s again been found guilty, but hasn’t yet been sentenced. Trump and the Trump companies were found guilty of gross tax evasion. He also paid hush money to a porn star not to reveal his sexual relations with her.

In addition, the following Trump aides were charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison: campaign chair Paul Manafort; former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates; former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; former adviser and former campaign aide, Roger Stone; former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos; Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg. Also, former White House national security advisor Michael Flynn was charged and convicted, as were Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and Elliot Broidy, vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee.

Finally, those charges don’t include criminal charges against more than eighteen other individuals that are still in the process of being litigated.

Exhibit #2 – Ken Paxton. Over 21 years, the Republican Texas Attorney general has been charged with duping investors, using inside information illegally for profit, using his office to interfere in legal proceedings on behalf of a friend, using government funds to hire outside counsel to investigate his political enemies. The Republican dominated Texas State House impeached Paxton, with 70% of the Republicans supporting impeachment, but the Texas State Senate acquitted him on all charges. In the meantime, Paxton was indicted in federal court for criminal fraud in lying to financial institutions and faces a federal trial.

Exhibit #3 – Republican Congressman George Santos. Indicted on 13 felony counts, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.

Exhibit #4 – Republican Congressman Jeff Fortenberry. Convicted in March of three felonies involving lying to federal investigators and concealing illegal campaign donations.

On the other side, all the Republicans seem able to do is to claim that Hunter Biden failed to pay his taxes on time, that he used drugs, and bought a gun while under the influence. But Hunter Biden isn’t even an officeholder, and so far, with all their rhetoric and hearings, Republicans have yet to come up with any evidence involving his father, just as they never could come up with criminal evidence against Hillary Clinton. Also, isn’t a little strange that the Republicans are hounding Hunter Biden about $2 million in fees he received from Ukrainian businesses, but they seem to have forgotten the $2 billion that Ivanka’s husband Jared Kusher got from the Saudis?

I’m not saying that Democratic national political figures are blameless or that some haven’t been convicted of felonies, because some have been, but never recently on this scale. In recent years, however, there’s no comparison in corruption on the national level… and by the way, Watergate was also a Republican example of corruption, with real evidence and jail sentences.

As some readers may know, we have dogs and cats – well, we’ve downsized in more than one way. We’re down to two dogs and one cat, and the dogs are both dachshunds.

One of our dachshunds was supposed to be a miniature English cream longhair, but with dachshund puppies you often can’t tell. When we got him, he looked like the others in his litter. Then after a month or so, he developed whiskers like a wire-haired dachshund, but his ears were smooth like a short-haired dachshund, even as his coat began to grow out like a long-hair. That coat turned into a mixture of gold and reddish brown, but it was neither long nor short.

We began looking at dachshund pictures. After looking at hundreds, if not thousands, we found one that looked like him. One. Later we found a few others. More research determined that he looked like what one book described as a short-coat wheaten – considered by many of the texts and tomes we perused as the rarest color for a dachshund – although, as we discovered, dachshunds come in quite an array of colors.

The other thing that bothered us was that he didn’t bark. Oh, he was verbal, but it was and still is a whine-whimper that ranged from questioning to pleading to insistently demanding. He was affectionate and enthusiastic, but didn’t bark.

All of this provided the background for Rudy, the dachshund protagonist of “The Unexpected Dachshund” in the animal rescuers anthology Instinct. And like Rudy, finally, at age two, our boy began to bark.

But there’s more to the story. Dachshunds were originally bred to hunt badgers or other largish rodents. Our short-coat wheaten has never had any interest in such, but any bird he can see, anywhere nearby, any size, large or small, and he’s off like a shot. He’s caught one, which I managed to rescue before any apparent damage was inflicted, but his enthusiasm is unabated.

The other day I took him out in the back yard, and he began to bark, insistently. There was no one around. No birds in the evergreens, no cats, and no other dogs, either, except our other dachshund, an older black long-hair, and she was contently rolling in the grass, clean grass, mind you, because she’s very prim and tidy, but, had there been any other dog or person around, she definitely would have sounded the alarm.

But our boy kept barking, and finally I looked up. Our supposedly rodent-hunting miniature wheaten dachshund hadn’t been distracted at all from his self-discovered calling – despite the top of his head being only a foot off the ground, his concentration was focused thirty feet in the air on the top of our neighbor’s roof at four huge ravens having some sort of raven conclave, with low muttering caws so unlike their usual piercingly ugly call.

The unexpected dachshund birddog.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans continue to spend more money than the government takes in.

The Republicans say that they want to cut spending, but only on programs that benefit the poor and working classes, while cutting taxes paid by well-off Americans, and allowing programs that benefit business and the rich to continue uncut, while the Democrats continue to press for expanding social programs they can’t fund, except through deficits.

When somewhere around 23% of this year’s federal spending requires running a deficit, neither political party is behaving rationally, but then, we all know that the term “responsible politician” is an oxymoron.

But why are politicians unwilling to face up to the problem?

The answer is simple. Any politician who goes anywhere close to telling unpleasant factual truths quickly gets attacked and voted out of office. Of, if they’re “fortunate,” like Nikki Haley, when she pointed out that both political parties were responsible for inflation and excessive spending, they’re simply ignored.

But it’s worse than that. In today’s political climate, politicians who tell, time after time, popular political and economic falsehoods get rewarded by a public that also doesn’t want to hear unpleasant truths.

You can’t have lower taxes and all the programs people have come to rely upon without running a deficit or increasing taxes. You can’t have an all-volunteer military without paying them more. You won’t get better teachers with higher standards unless you pay them more. You can’t have less expensive consumer goods without offshoring or automating production of those goods, and either way reduces industrial jobs in the U.S. You can’t keep producing more college graduates, when the economy requires only half the number of graduates, without increasing the debt-loads of the graduates who can’t get higher paid jobs. You can’t keep increasing income inequality in the United States without creating more and more anger and resentment.

But no one wants to hear any of this, least of all the majority of politicians, all of whom insist that they’re not like that.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I was under the impression that one of the “benefits” of satellite networks like Direct TV and Dish was to obtain programming free of all those annoying ads, but now ads are appearing in the middle of movies – even movies made decades ago. And while the profits of Hollywood studios are down, those of Netflix, Amazon, and a few others are way up.

Ad breaks used to be a few minutes, but on satellite and cable networks, now they’re often five minutes long. And sports TV/internet is now using split-screen technology so that you get a silent picture of the “action” on one side and a loud commercial on the other side. And yes, advertising revenues are way, way up.

And, oh, yes, my monthly internet access bill went up 40%, unannounced, last month.

So, with all the revenues from this vast array of news and entertainment going up and up, exactly why are the real content providers, i.e., the writers and actors (the majority of them, not the super high-paid stars) getting stiffed and striking? And why do the media giants complain that they can’t afford real people? To pay for the exorbitant pay of high executives, perhaps?

As a provider of entertainment content myself, I can see that the list price of one of my fantasy hardcovers has gone from $21 in 1991 to $32 in 2023, an increase of slightly more than 50%. That’s over 32 years, which amounts to an increase of 34 cents a year, or an annual price increase of under 2% (not exactly exorbitant). In the meantime, my property taxes have doubled, and to replace my 2009 SUV would cost twice much as I paid for it.

But I’m one of the more fortunate authors. I know a number who no longer can make a living from their writing or who couldn’t save enough and afford good enough health insurance and who’ve been financially and sometimes physically destroyed. I’ve seen editors sacked by publisher after publisher, with downsizing after downsizing.

And, unhappily, this isn’t just happening in the entertainment industry. The IT industry is famous for hiring young talent comparatively cheaply and then laying off more experienced (and higher paid) technical staff in their forties and fifties, and sometimes younger.

Academia used to rely on the expertise of tenured professors. Now those positions comprise less than a third of university teachers, and are declining every year, while the majority of undergraduates are taught by part-time adjuncts, who get no health or retirement benefits and have no idea whether they’ll have a job in the next semester.

At some point, all these comparatively underpaid workers will no longer be able to service the debt that they’ve built up while struggling for better pay and job security… and then what?

These days, there is a plethora of ways to classify or categorize almost anything, and fantasy fiction is certainly no different.

The Masterclass system lists eighteen different fantasy subgenres, yet almost no fantasy novel I’ve written fits neatly, or even not-neatly, into any one of those classifications, and that’s true of quite a few other writers I know.

“Discovery” lists fifty fantasy sub-genres, and only a handful or so have the same categorization as the Masterclass system, while Wikipedia offers a listing of thirty fantasy subgenres, with a disclaimer that the listing doesn’t encompass everything.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, the scholar Farah Mendlesohn (a lovely scholarly lady, by the way) takes a different approach, by providing four ways of classifying fantasy: portal/quest fantasy; immersive fantasy; intrusive fantasy; and liminal fantasy, the last of which is fantasy where the reader really isn’t sure whether it’s fantasy or not (if I understood the explanation correctly).

Then there are those who simply break fantasy into two types: high and low.

In effect, almost everyone has their own definition/classifying system for fantasy, and I’m no different, although I haven’t seen any other classification like mine (not that someone hasn’t done it besides me, just that I haven’t seen it).

My “system” breaks fantasy into two types, one type where the characters live fantasy lives in a fantasy world/universe, and another where the characters live “real” lives in a fantasy setting. By “real” I mean that the characters have to have jobs and a way of supporting themselves, and that the economics, politics, society, and magic all work logically and consistently in that fantasy setting.

Of course, in the end, I suspect few readers really care about classifying what they read, or even what “classification” or type of fantasy the novel happens to be, but about how entertaining they find the novel, and possibly about what insights it provides.

According to the dictionary, moral behavior is “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior” and “holding or manifesting high principles for proper conduct.”

And certainly the Founding Fathers were definitely concerned about moral behavior, even if their focus was initially on white male property holders and proper (and submissive) wives, but over time that focus expanded to include women, and after the Civil War, and especially after the Civil Rights Act, minorities as well.

But what is “right behavior” or “proper conduct?” Certainly, for the first hundred and fifty years of the United States, there was an emphasis on morality, excessive at times, but without doubt there was a difference between moral and immoral behavior, and there were unspoken standards for such behavior. Even when people didn’t meet those standards, the standards remained, generally applicable to society as whole.

Those standards weren’t just confined to criminality, but to all aspects of life. In additional to being law-abiding, being “moral” required public politeness to everyone, certain standards of attire appropriate to the locale and situation, charity toward those less fortunate, at least a nod to a higher power, respect for those in authority, and polite language in public. Underlying this was the tacit or unconscious realization that such “morality” was important to hold society together.

For various reasons, this more traditional understanding of civic morality has largely vanished, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump, who, by any definition, is totally immoral and who even proposed suspending the Constitution if it suited his purposes.

Equally disturbing is the change in attitudes of younger Americans. A long-standing survey of incoming college students shows a disturbing pattern. In 1967, about 85% said that their principal goal was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2000, only 42% said that, while the majority said being financially well off was their goal, and by 2015, 82% of students said wealth was their principal aim in life.

Interestingly enough, over recent years, Americans have also become less charitable. In 2000, over two-thirds of households have to charity, but by 2018, that percentage was just below fifty percent.

While the Constitution clearly established both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, right-wing “Christians” have become increasingly vocal and effective in passing laws based on their beliefs in an effort to force their beliefs on others, failing to recognize that a society that imposes one set of religious values on the entire population by law is not a moral society, but an immoral tyranny.

While “traditional” morality had quite a few flaws, it also held the precept, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” something that current society, especially the extremists, also seems to have discarded and replaced with “me first, no matter what.”

Recently, with all the publicity surrounding the charges against Donald Trump, there’s been a great deal of commentary on a “two-tiered” system of justice, where those with fame and money are treated far differently that those without either. That’s indisputable. It’s also always been the case – anywhere in the world.

What seems to get overlooked is just how long it takes for so many criminal cases even to get to trial. Recently, a CBS News investigation uncovered a massive backlog of court cases. Data from courts and district attorneys’ offices in more than a dozen major American cities showed that “pending” criminal cases jumped from 383,879 in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to 546,727 in 2021. In California, New York, Florida and Michigan, the number of “pending” cases in 2021 totaled nearly 1.3 million.

The indictments against former President Donald Trump join a major backlog of cases, since Trump’s case in the D.C. federal district court is just one of the more than 6,000 pending criminal cases there. Trump may be the best known, but he’s far from the first defendant charged in connection with crimes related to the 2020 election. More than 1,069 people have been charged with crimes related to Jan. 6, which the indictment says Trump’s actions helped fuel.

But this isn’t just a Washington, D.C., problem. In one Georgia case, a man charged in a shooting spent ten years in pre-trial detention, finally had his case heard, with the result that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, leaving the defendant facing another trial. Even in Utah, the current case backlog in just the state courts is over 10,000 cases.

In many cases, defendants spend more time in pre-trial detention than they potentially could serve if convicted. Is it any wonder that some innocent (usually minority) defendants who are unable to make bail “plead out”, rather than spend months in detention before trial? It’s also why many who are convicted get “credit” for time already served.

But whether it’s Trump or someone we’ve never heard of, waiting months, or even years, to even get to trial is a disgrace… and suggests that our justice system is anything but just, since the poorest are the ones most penalized by such seemingly endless waiting – except in the case of Trump, where he hopes waiting will allow him to escape justice.

The ultra-conservatives and many in the right wing of Republican party tout all sorts of conspiracies, including 9/11 being a clandestine government operation, the “liberal” deep state (with various acts purportedly associated), the “stealing” of the 2020 election,” that the January 6th insurrection was an antifa operation, that liberals, including Hillary Clinton, ran a child porn operation, and that Joe Biden is the head of a family crime ring.

There are, however, significant problems with all these purported conspiracies, principally that not a shred of hard provable evidence exists to back up any of them, despite years and years of trying to find any hard evidence — and this is in a country that can’t keep anything secret for long and where cellphone photos are everywhere.,

Yet, despite the lack of hard evidence beyond unprovable rumors and repeated lies, the true believers in all these “conspiracies” persevere in their beliefs.

What’s so amazing about all of them is that they ignore the biggest conspiracy of all – that Donald Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. So far, Trump has been indicted and arrested on ninety-one criminal counts in four separate jurisdictions so far, on both state and federal charges. He’s currently out on bail, awaiting all those trials.

And there’s plenty of evidence, unlike in all the Republican conspiracy theories. We have Trump being recorded asking an election official to find him over 11,800 votes, and his attorneys documented as fabricating false slates of electors. There’s video and documentary of him retaining classified information, as well as paying hush money to a porn star not to reveal their sexual encounters.

And, oh yes, Trump’s even lost a civil case involving his sexual assault on a woman.

None of this is speculation. There are thousands of pages of documentation, as well as hundreds of video images.

Yet the right-wing conspiracy types not only insist that Trump didn’t nothing wrong, but they’ve gone so far as buying mug-shot mugs and donating even more millions of dollars to Trump.

All the evidence in the world won’t change their support of Trump, not surprisingly, since, where Trump’s concerned, those who actually have minds lost them long ago.

From even before the founding of the United States, Americans, in general, have been an impatient lot, and technology has made us even more impatient. With the arrival of cellphones, Amazon, and the internet, more and more people want what they want now, regardless of reality.

My wife, the music professor, encounters this all the time, with students who just want to Google an answer or who want to sing better instantly. They don’t want to hear that learning how to work out the answer develops skills that they need. Nor do they understand that it takes time to train muscles to produce the best singing, or to learn music – because, whether in a musical or in opera, you can’t Google the music while you’re on stage.

But the problems of wanting instant results also bleed into other areas. A few years ago, if you had the money – or the financing – you could go to a car dealer or other sources and get a car of your choice, or close to it, in days, if not hours. Now, depending on the make and model, people may have to wait months. Assembling parts and systems to produce a car takes most manufacturers around two workdays, but what gets overlooked is that the average car consists of around 30,000 parts, which come from different sources, and all of those parts take time to manufacture and ship to the assembly plant, and after assembly, the finished car has to be transported to a dealer. But until COVID disrupted the supply of certain critical computer chips, very few people understood or cared how long the entire process for building a car took. They just paid their money or financing and got a vehicle quickly.

Most products – even produce – get to the end consumer in a similar fashion, and most consumers don’t give the slightest thought to the process, or to the fact that nothing of value is produced instantly, even information on the internet.

The problem arises when there are glitches in the system… or when the system can’t produce the desired results. But the present system is relatively recent, especially historically.

I’m old enough to remember when the only items most people bought on credit were homes and cars. I didn’t even get a credit card until several years after I graduated from college, and in those times, it was difficult for women to get credit cards in their own names. Most people could only get what they could pay for in cash or check, and often you had to save for a time to afford large purchases.

Credit cards and then the internet changed all that, and, curmudgeon that I am, I’m not so sure that the instant credit and purchase system serves most people all that well, especially given the massive growth in personal debt and the seemingly ever-growing anger when instant gratification is denied.

As with many, if not most, of my books, the “reviewer” reviews of Contrarian include those reviewers who often review me but didn’t, to those who didn’t like the book very much, to those who liked it, and those who liked it very much.

As some readers may know, more than thirty years ago, after having published eight novels and nine short stories, all science fiction, over the previous seventeen years, I took on a new challenge, that of writing a fantasy novel with at least semi-realistic economics and politics, and a logical and internally consistent magic system integrated within the economics and politics of that world. That novel was, of course, The Magic of Recluce.

At that time (1989), there were few fantasy novels that even attempted the goals I set out. And then, and even today, many readers were looking for escapism unconstrained by reality. In either arrogance or naivete, if not both, I thought it was possible to write a fantasy novel with realistic people, economics, politics, and logical magic that some readers would buy and enjoy, and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve done so repeatedly, or at least come close.

But along the way, I’ve come to realize that many of the readers and even some professional reviewers who reject more “realistic” fantasies don’t reject them because they’re realistic, but because they don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, certain aspects of the real world.

That’s why one reviewer of the Grand Illusion books can term them taut political thrillers while another rejects them as boring and unrealistic, why one person smiles knowingly when reading about a seemingly boring vote on agricultural subsidies or “incidental” appropriations and another puts down the book.

In the end, how interesting and exciting a book is – or isn’t – depends not just on the author, but also what the reader brings to the book… or doesn’t.