In overall terms, the world of books is rapidly becoming a scary place. Borders Books is teetering on the edge, with an anticipated report of poor sales in the third quarter of the year. While Borders is not the largest of the chains, it still represents a significant chunk of the retail book market, and no author, me included, wants to see something like 400 super-stores vanish. Nor does any publisher. Fall sales of virtually all new titles from all publishers have declined, and one major publisher has reputedly ordered the editorial staff to stop acquiring new titles, at least for a while. Some agents are reporting more difficulty in pitching titles to publishers.

Is all this just because of the economic slowdown? In some respects, I’d like to think that it is. Unfortunately, it’s not. The economic hard times are revealing a real weakness in the market for books, especially for fiction. As I’ve observed in earlier blogs, the modest increases in books sales have come more from greater sales to an ever-smaller percentage of the population, because the percentage of the population that reads is decreasing, and the greatest decrease is among the 16-25 age group. Likewise, historically the over-55 age group, particularly those who are college-educated, has had the highest reading percentage, and retirees, often steady readers, are economically harder-pressed and are likely buying fewer books.

But, there’s far more to the decline in book sales than these factors.

At one point, I’ve been told, there were over 1,500 Waldenbooks, B. Daltons, and small mall bookstores, often two in every mall. In addition, before that, there were individual paperback book racks in almost every drugstore in the country, and those racks were tailored to local reading habits, and often were located right next to the comic book racks. Both the mall stores and the drugstores allowed easy access, what’s called impulse book buying. While the more profitable small mall stores have been replaced by book superstores that are actually mall anchors, these stores tend to be more destinations for already determined book buyers than a source of impulse buying — and there are far fewer of them than there were smaller mall bookstores.

At one time, virtually no mall was without a bookstore, albeit a small one. Now there are hundreds of malls without any bookstores, and whole sections of major cities without bookstores, and most of the corner drugstores are long-since gone, and I don’t see many book displays in the generic drug chains that replaced them. Yes, many supermarkets, and even WalMarts, have book sections, but most Super WalMarts are lucky to have 20 F&SF titles, or for that matter more than 50 titles of any genre or mainstream fiction. In other supermarkets the selection is even more meager. Even the tiniest of Waldenbooks used to have several hundred titles in each genre [and I know, because I visited that store before it was closed].

By concentrating resources in book superstores, the book chains have largely eliminated what was effectively a feeder network that helped make books available to a larger segment of the population. It’s unscientific, but I’ve traveled most of the United States in the past fifteen years and found that very few malls in minority sections of most cities have bookstores. The bookstores tend to be concentrated in or near affluent white, higher-income neighborhoods. This is a great way to maximize an existing customer base, but given the fact that a considerable number of children in lower income areas will grow up to be higher-wage earners, it’s a very poor long-term strategy, and another example of our cultural mindset to maximize short-term profits, regardless of the long-term implications.

Add to that an educational system that tries to do too much with too little discipline, too few teachers and inadequate resources, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that effective reading levels continue to decline, regardless of what the school “tests” say, since more accurate Department of Education tests on college graduates show that almost 60% lack the capacity to read and understand a complex newspaper editorial. On top of that, regardless of the intellectual brilliance of students, the current teaching systems and the video culture have created a mindset where long-term concentration is difficult, if not impossible, for all too many students — and long-term concentration is definitely required for reading books.

So… I suspect that the majority of publishers [excepting mine, who has spoken out long and hard against these trends and taken steps to counter them] and book store executives will console themselves that the declining sales are merely a function of economic hard times. But those who believe that recent declining sales are all a function of lower income and higher unemployment are seriously deluding themselves.

Last week the business section of several papers had headlines reading something like, “Retail Sales Plummet.” Because I’m an economist by educational background and training and also because I’m skeptical of scare-style headlines, I read the stories. The bottom line was simple. Retail sales dropped off about 2.8% in October compared to sales in October 2007. Now, the papers also had a graph that showed what appeared to be a convincing drop from one month to another — unless you read the numbers. The scale showed only the range of sales figures from $360 billion to $400 billion, or roughly ten percent of the total sales range — so of course a drop of nearly 3%, close to $12 billion, shows a “visual” drop of one third of the graph. Pretty scary — but it would have been hard to pick out that three percent drop on a graph that showed the entire $380 billion.

Needless to say, following the news story, which doubtless ran coast to coast, the stock market sank, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if more Americans decided not to purchase unnecessary goods.

All of this illustrates one of the greatest problems in a generally free market economy: everything literally rests on the margin… and much of what happens on the margin reflects popular perception. Since mid-summer for example, the price of crude oil has dropped from almost $140 a barrel to about $50, a decline of more than 60%. Did crude oil supplies increase by 60% or even 20%? Or did demand for gasoline drop by 20%-60%? Hardly. In fact, crude oil production has been cut, and demand for gasoline is down around 5% from last year at the same time. The same sort of marginal “tightness” and increased demand in housing was what fueled the housing boom… and a comparatively small, in percentage terms, number of defaults and lessened demand led to the subsequent bust.

A similar set of circumstances is wracking the stock market, if with slightly different mechanics at work. Hedge funds and private investors seemed convinced that the market would continue to rise, and they leveraged their investments through buying stock on margin and in various other creative ways. But when the market turned down, and investors in those funds wanted out, the hedge funds had to liquidate huge blocks of stock at whatever price they could, and prices headed down. That panicked more investors into selling… and so the cycle went. Then, because business outlooks deteriorated, a number of dividend-paying stocks cut or eliminated dividends — one financially solvent Canadian power trust even cut its dividend by over 70% — and the prices of those stocks deteriorated even more.

Effectively, on average, most pension and retirement funds have been cut between 30%-60% over the last few months, but especially in the last month. As more Americans saw their assets melt away, they further decreased their buying, and sales of large items like automobiles fell dramatically. Now the big three American manufacturers, who never understood that they couldn’t sell oversized and overpriced SUVs forever, are begging for a bailout from Congress.

In an economy as large as that of the United States, comparatively small changes in supply and demand, generally all on the margin, so to speak, can have enormous financial and economic consequences.

Now… when you add to that the scare tactics of the media, always in search of the next headline, small problems get bigger, and moderate problems become major… and that, unfortunately, is what is happening… and it will most likely get worse.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” How many times have you heard that saying? The problem with the saying, however, is that one seldom asks the necessary accompanying question: “For what?” I’m not being flippant. The value of any picture lies in its use.

A photo ID is far more valuable than a written description of the ID-bearer. In terms of showing straight “action,” a graphic novel can depict battle scenes in far greater detail than is easily possible in straight prose. But no picture can carry the rhythmic auditory impact of poetry or words set to music, and even pictures set to music have an impact different from words and music. As human beings we remember and re-create songs and lullabies. We don’t and can’t do that in the same way with visual images [unless you’re a professional entertainment sound designer].

Even more important, because words are symbolic as well as literal representations, and because words are the only way we have of expressing and conveying abstract concepts such as idealism, altruism, love, hate, friendship, and so on, words can do far more than pictures in affecting and changing both the course of individual lives and the direction of entire societies.

In terms of the underlying “worth” of various types of entertainment, the old saying of “you get what you pay for” holds true, if in a slightly different context. In general, cinema or graphic novels/manga are more accessible, and more sense-oriented, and if a quick rush of action or romance is what you want, they usually can provide it far more easily and, for most people, far more quickly than can a book. While a paperback book is comparable in cost, it also has a second “cost.” It requires active thought and reader participation, but, for that cost, can often [I won’t say always because there are bad books and bad readers, just as there are bad cinema and bad manga and bad viewers] deliver far more than mere entertainment and can leave you with greater insight or feeling, if not both.

In an overall sense, pictures tend to be “complete” in themselves. There’s little or no stimulus to consider beyond the image presented. That limitation may well have been one of the reasons why nineteenth century art led toward into surrealism, abstractionism, and all the other “non-representationalist” forms, as part of an effort on the part of the artists to engage their viewers beyond the image itself.

By comparison, a single word [except “yes” or “no”] is seldom ever complete, and sentences lead on to more sentences and more meanings and questions, often into the exploration of ideas and concepts. It’s no accident that generally the most advanced and most vital cultures have had languages with the largest vocabularies and greatest complexity in language.

So… just because a picture presents a particular image more completely than words, don’t assume that the picture is necessarily better. It all depends on what’s at stake… and, often, whether you want to look beyond the image.

I was recently reminded of a pattern I’ve observed over the years in academia, when professors sneak to a chair or a dean complaining about the acts or behavior of a colleague, citing their interest “for the good of the students.” In no cases have such individuals actually talked to their colleague, even when the complainers are fully tenured and risk nothing, and in the majority of the cases, they don’t even know the facts surrounding their complaint. Their sole interest is not in the “good of the students” or solving the problem, but in creating trouble for a colleague.

The problem with this kind of behavior is that, unfortunately, it’s not confined to academia. Remember, there was a fellow named Hitler who engaged in genocide and created something called the Holocaust “for the good of” the Reich, the Fatherland, and the purity of the Aryan race. And there were some folks in the United States who seceded from the Union, for “the good of states’ rights,” otherwise known as the freedom to enslave others. We’ve recently had “ethnic cleansing” in what was once Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for the “good” of this or that group or culture. More than a few centuries before that, the Spanish inquisition and other functionaries of the Catholic Church tortured people to death in order to “save their souls,” all for their victims’ own good, of course.

In the United States, as a result of a single terrorist attack, we’ve endured all sorts of restrictions and infringements of civil liberties for our own “good” and security, even when subsequent acts by airline passengers, for example, have suggested strongly that repetition of the 9/11 methodology is highly unlikely to be successful a second time around.

Most recently, we’ve had the leadership of the Church of the Latter Day Saints pouring millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers into the effort to support Proposition 8 in California, in order to prohibit same-sex marriages, all supposedly for the good of the “traditional” family, which, for all the rhetoric, really makes no sense. If you’re concerned about family stability, shouldn’t you be for anything that strengthens families, even non-traditional ones? Besides, it’s not as though many same-sex couples are interested in undermining Mormon marriages, unlike the Mormon Church, which seems clearly interested in undermining same-sex marriages.

In all these cases, and doubtless hundreds, if not thousands of others, those who have professed to be “for the good” of something really weren’t. They were using the argument of “good” to oppose, if not to kill or destroy, that which they opposed, and most of those using the “for the good of” argument have in mind restrictions and punishments of others, and not solutions to problems.

I object strongly to this tactic. It’s hypocritical, devious, misleading, and unethical. If you believe something to be wrong, say so, and be prepared to explain exactly why it’s wrong, and why you need to destroy, restrict, or otherwise infringe on the liberties of others, and why there is no other better solution. There times when that may in fact be necessary, but I’d wager that those cases are very few indeed, especially compared to the number of times when “good” is trotted out to harm others.

Over the past few years, there’s been what I’d call a desultory, on-and-off debate, if it can be termed such, over the future of books, and of fiction. While few believe that either books or fiction in some form of print will vanish, it’s clear that changes are occurring, and those changes both reflect current trends in society and foreshadow future changes.

Over the past decade the number of fiction titles and the number of copies sold are up, but not so much as population growth. Other studies suggest that there actually may be fewer readers, but that those readers are individually buying more books, as a result of the growth of chain bookstores and on-line stores. This possibility is bolstered by the distribution of sales figures as well. With the exception of authors of block-buster works such as Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and the top romances, most authors are writing more books, but the numbers of copies of each title sold tend to be lower. In the F&SF field, more than a few authors who used to be mid-list authors published by major houses are now being published by smaller houses, even while they’re getting quite favorable reviews and positive critical attention. Recent surveys also indicate that fiction reading has dropped off enormously among the 16-25 year old age-group.

What do these changes mean? For one thing, I personally believe that they largely reflect a change in personal entertainment preferences, and that change is driven, in large part, by the impact of technology on our lives and in the corresponding transformation of the nature of work. A greater and greater percentage of work has moved from physical labor to tasks requiring mental efforts or services with social interaction, if not both, and the hours worked have not decreased in the U.S.A., and in many fields, have actually increased significantly. I have heard more and more individuals say, time and time again, that when they get home from work, they’re simply too exhausted to be able to concentrate on a book, and like it or not, reading does require a certain amount of concentration.

Bookstores are also carrying larger and larger sections of graphic novels, anime, and manga. This isn’t totally surprising, given that younger Americans are a more video/visual entertainment generation, which also explains the growth of video/computer games. The concern that I have about this shift is that reading, fiction in particular, requires the reader to construct a mental image of the setting and the events, rather than merely to observe and participate, as is the case for visually-based entertainment.

Where will these changes in entertainment preferences lead society as a whole? Will they have that great an effect? Some preliminary studies suggest that the brain development of the video generation is different, but I haven’t seen any work that says what the change in development does to perception and behavior. Some differences that I’ve observed and that concern me are: (1) the younger generation seems to have a greater difficulty in visualizing or imagining things described only in words; (2) they have more difficulty in transferring skills learned in one application to a different application; (3) their writing skills, in general, are far weaker than those of earlier generations; (4) while constructing and supporting statements/arguments logically and factually has always been difficult for students, that difficulty seems even greater now than in earlier generations.

Even assuming that my observations are true and hold for a larger body of young Americans than I’ve observed, will they affect the future of the United States? How?

Based on history, one has to wonder. Certainly, a significant number and great percentage of our ancestors either could not read or never read fiction. In fact, the first recognized novel [Pamela, by Richardson] wasn’t even published until 1740, relatively late in the development of what we call civilization. And, generations ago, fiction was considered by some pillars of society to be frivolous and mentally damaging, just as video and computer games are by some today.

In the end, the question may not be about how many people are reading fiction, but who those readers happen to be, and what they take from it.

Last week, I went to the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary [which was why there was no posting the previous Friday]. While I was there, in addition to talking to a number of American and Canadian writers, I also had the good fortune to meet with some Dutch and French fans and writers, among many others.

One of the French writers, who has been published in American F&SF magazines, made the observation that a very large segment of the French market in F&SF novels has been taken up by translations of American works, so much so that it was easier to write in English and be published by U.S. publishers and magazines than to be published in French. What’s intriguing about this is that it costs more to publish translated American fiction because of the linguistic differences. Any American or English work accurately translated into French will run at least thirty percent longer in French, and sometimes more than that. In my own case, most of my books translated into French come out in two volumes, and they’re not slim.

The same volume/translation problems also crop up with other romance languages, largely because American English has over three times the number of words as any romance language does, and that means that what is often a single American word requires either a phrase or a continuing simplification process in translation.

One of the Dutch participants observed that she preferred to read American F&SF in English, because the translations, even by respected Dutch publishers, leave something to be desired.

The German market for translating U.S. works literally boomed in the 1990s and the very early 2000s… and then almost totally vanished, so much so that my German publisher literally left the second half of Scion of Cyador unpublished, which has led to more than a few inquiries by German readers.

I was surprised, but pleased, to discover from an Israeli publisher that my Hammer of Darkness has recently appeared in Israel in Hebrew, which I did not know because U.S. publishers are rather slow about informing authors about foreign sales [perhaps because their parent companies like to hang on to the royalties longer?] and because I overlooked or did not see the single Google reference to it. But then, search engines aren’t all that good searching in other languages, particularly when I can’t speak or read the language in question.

All in all, a good conference… with good people… and lots of intriguing information.

There are and have been quite a few teachers in my family, as far back as my grandmother, and they include those who have taught or are teaching at the elementary, secondary, collegiate, and post-graduate/doctoral levels. Every single one of them, at one time or another, has been singled out as an excellent and inspirational teacher. And every single one of them who is still living is concerned about a trend in American education that has received very little attention.

Oh… there is a great amount of concern about the state of education and whether students are getting the education they need to succeed in an ever-more complex and technological society. There are the proponents and the opponents of more testing to ensure accountability. There are those who favor more inclusive curricula and those who favor a “back to basics” approach. There are those who push merit pay for “better” [I quote this, because to date, I haven’t seen any good and fair way to determine exactly what determines “better”] teachers, and those who oppose it.

But… while someone, somewhere, may have pointed out the trend I’m about to mention, if they have, it’s certainly been lost amid all the other “teaching issues.” And it shouldn’t be. It’s very basic.

The responsibility for learning has been quietly but dramatically shifted over the past two generations. Long years ago, when I was in school, and longer years ago, when my parents and grandparents were in school, the responsibility was very clear. Regardless of the circumstances, the student was the one who was responsible for learning, and the teacher was responsible for teaching. Today, everywhere I look, and everywhere the teachers in my family look, the responsibility for both has been placed on the teacher. Today, teachers must inspire; they must create the atmosphere in which children will learn; they must create a climate where student self-esteem promotes learning. Everything must be positive, despite the fact that, outside of school, life has a tendency to provide far more sticks than carrots, and that “life lessons” can be brutal.

It has gotten to the point where most students take little or no responsibility for learning, particularly if the subject is difficult or “boring.” I’m sorry, but learning well the basics of most disciplines can and will be boring. It takes practice and more practice. Everyone seems to understand that in terms of athletics, but it’s a point apparently lost in school and academics. Learning beyond the simple basics is work; work requires effort; and it shouldn’t be the teacher’s responsibility to provide the student’s motivation.

Whether this is the result of a media culture that spoon-feeds, simplifies, and dumbs down everything, or a tendency to over-protect children, or results from other societal factors is, frankly, secondary. What is being overlooked is that no teacher, no matter how good, talented, and inspirational, can be more than marginally effective when faced with large classrooms filled primarily with students whose motivation is not to learn, but to get through without working or to obtain good grades with the least amount of effort. And all the educational reforms, all the merit pay, all the “back-to-basics” movements, all the testing, and all the legislation will not improve education significantly until parents and society recognize that students have a responsibility for their own education… and act to instill that responsibility.

The actual will to learn has to come from the student, and until our society understands that — and acts on it by emphasizing that students are personally responsible and by letting them fail, horrible as that sounds, when they are not responsible — all of the other “reforms” will result in little improvement in the education of the majority of students.

Over the years, I’ve often heard the argument that all too many laws are biased against the poor or the disadvantaged. One particular example that was cited for years was that in many jurisdictions, the penalties for possessing “crack” cocaine were far stiffer than for possessing exactly the same amount of powdered cocaine, and because crack was more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods, the law was more lenient in dealing with wealthier addicts. Another example is that often criminals who commit what amount to small scale robberies with weapons face far, far greater sentences than do “white collar” criminals who embezzle or misdirect far, far greater sums. In fact, from what I’ve seen, this differential goes much farther than that and generally seems based on the idea that threatening someone with a weapon or violence outweighs all other factors.

I’m not suggesting greater leniency for criminals who try to get their way with weapons or force. Far from it. What I am going to suggest, however, is that, as a society, we’ve bought into the idea that a crime that does not involve violence is somehow less of a crime… or that an act that “legally” deprives others of their money, houses, or other goods, even when the victims are not culpable, is not a crime at all.

Currently, we’re in a financial crisis that has effectively reduced the collective wealth of the United States by something like forty percent. Certainly, my retirement funds, parked in a solid and stable and conservative set of mutual funds, are down somewhere in that neighborhood, and I’ve heard of others losing even more. I didn’t gamble with the money. I didn’t follow hot-shot brokers and tips. But like hundreds of millions of Americans, I had that money taken, in effect, stolen because a group of hot-shot money managers came up with ways to leverage financial assets, in some cases as high as 130 to one, in order to boost their corporate profits and to “earn” extraordinary bonuses.

Now… if you asked any one of them what would happen if ten percent of these assets went bad, at least some of them could have predicted what would happen. That’s knowledgeable neglect. Most didn’t understand at all. They just went along. That’s negligence.

The basis behind criminal law, in an overall sense, is to deter crime and harm to the individual and to punish those who create such harm. We tend to classify such crimes on the severity of the harm and on the intent of the perpetrator, with an offense such as premeditated murder being one of the more severe, because the perpetrator knew he or she was going to commit the offense of taking another life. Assault generally merits less punishment… and so on. But some acts, even when “accidental,” also merit punishment, such as involuntary manslaughter or accidental vehicular manslaughter.

Now… let us say that an individual has diligently saved five percent of his or her earnings for thirty or forty years, a sum amounting to years of work… and through either premeditation or negligence someone takes it away. If that someone is a thief or an embezzler, the act comes under criminal law. If that someone is a corporate CEO who agrees to massive trades in credit-default swaps and derivatives, then he can just claim he made a mistake… and most won’t even do that, even in front of a Congressional hearing.

Right now, a broker, a brokerage firm, an investment banker, and many other individuals can take actions that lead to financial devastation for millions of others — and walk away, essentially unscathed, saying, “It was just the market.” Or “we did the best we could.” And all too many of them take enormous bonuses when they leave. We tend not to let careless drivers, doctors, or lawyers get away with such excuses when they’ve committed malpractice. Exactly how did we set up a structure where those individuals who manage our savings and our retirement have no liability and accountability for incredibly poor judgment or out-and-out negligence?

Perhaps to take care of the worst abuses, we ought to enact legislation that creates criminal punishments for “involuntary theft” or “fiduciary negligence,” in cases where the actions of an individual, regardless of his corporate standing, lead directly to the loss of significant sums of money on the part of large numbers of individuals. Perhaps then, if they faced the possibility of long prison terms, some of these financial types wouldn’t be quite so quick to adopt and endorse leverage schemes they don’t understand.

I know… any such suggestion will have the financial gurus claiming that such laws and regulations will destroy the world financial structures. So… for all those of you who don’t like my thoughts and suggestions, what exactly would you suggest to create greater accountability and responsibility? And… please, please… don’t cite Adam Smith and the invisible hand or the pure and free market. History has proved, time and time again, that, while such a free market might work if men and women were angels, history has also demonstrated that people aren’t anywhere close to that honest and altruistic where money is concerned, especially other people’s money.

Are the stock markets and the publishing markets subject to the same sorts of ups and downs…and crashes? In some ways, that sounds like an attempt to draw an impossible parallel, but since the fluctuations of both are created by the interplay of financial, logical, and emotional factors, I’m not so certain that there aren’t certain similarities.

Theoretically, each is based on financial principles. If a publisher doesn’t make money, sooner or later, the company goes under or gets reorganized. Authors whose books don’t sell sooner or later don’t sell any more books… and it’s often sooner, rather than later. Likewise, the price of stock in money-losing companies usually goes down, and if a dividend-paying company can’t pay its dividend, or cuts it, the stock price usually plummets.

In both the stock market and in publishing, there are scores of analysts who try to predict what will happen and what stock or book is hot… with more than a few reasons why you should or should not buy said book or stock. And in both areas, they’re often wrong.

And in both markets, the financial results are strongly influenced by hype and by perception. Some books that show marginal technical writing ability, but which tell a story that taps into a popular sensibility sell incredibly well, far beyond what most editors and publishers would have predicted, while others, even with the same general theme and better written, do not. Also, there are books that, like a popular “stock-de-jour,” enjoy a quick flash on the best-seller list and then sink, forgotten by all within a year. There are other books, like stodgy and conservative utility stocks, that sell well but not spectacularly year after year.

But what about crashes? Will the publishing market suffer the same sort of financial melt-down as the financial markets appear to be experiencing at present?

So far, at least, and for the past century, overall book sales don’t seem to be quite so precipitous in either their ascents or descents as the stock market. But… that’s not true of the sales of individual authors, some of whom have either seen smashing sales success, followed by years of decline into oblivion, and others who have been one-book hits, and still others who have toiled for years, barely staying in print, until some book, somehow, propelled them into success.

And as in the stock market, no matter what the “experts” claim, successes and failures don’t seem to follow just logic or expertise.

Recently, I’ve run across a number of blogs, commentaries, and the like about the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been awarded to a well-established French writer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, whose work is less known outside France. Interestingly enough, the Swedish Academy praised Le Clezio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure… explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

According to public information, the new Nobel Laureate has published more than 40 essays, novels, and children’s books, where he has written of exile and self-discovery, cultural dislocation and globalization and the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures.

At the same time, a noted critic of American fiction, Horace Engdahl, who is also the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has suggested that it is unlikely that the U.S. will produce a Nobel Prize winner because American writers are “too insular, too isolated” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”

Now… I have nothing for — or against — Mr. Le Clezio, because I have to confess that I’ve never read any of his work, partly because there aren’t any French bookstores in Southwestern Utah and because his work is largely untranslated into English.

But I have to ask, “To which American writers are you referring, Mr. Engdahl?”

I have written all the themes claimed as reasons for awarding the Nobel to Mr. Le Clezio, and there are several handfuls, if not more, of talented American writers who have also done the same. All of us have written well outside contemporary U.S. culture, while at times also dissecting that very culture and contrasting it to alien cultures. Many have produced a larger body of work than Mr. Le Clezio, and certainly a writer like Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, has more than transcended her “own” culture. Or is the problem that all those who might nominate American writers only select those who are in fact “insular,” rather than nominating from the F&SF community, where writers usually do go well beyond the parochial?

Of course, I’m just a “genre” writer, but I do find it most interesting that what I — and others also classed as such — write fits into the description of what it takes to win a Nobel Prize for literature, at least according to the press releases of the Swedish Academy, while those who are praised and acclaimed by “mainstream” U.S. critics are dismissed as “too insular” by those associated with the Nobel Prize selection and administration.

That leaves us F&SF “genre writers” damned either way, it appears.

Once upon a time, some two thousand years ago, there was a city of a million people, with great aqueducts, public baths, a solid sewage and sanitation system, and that city ruled the largest empire the world had then known. Little more than two centuries ago, that great city had dwindled to something like 50,000 people living above and amid the ruins of greatness. Although Rome has since rebuilt itself, for much of the past millennium it was a shadow of its former greatness. Some 4600 years ago, another city, known as Mohenjo-Daro, flourished in the Indus River valley. It too had good water and sanitation systems, with bathing facilities in individual dwellings, and a central granary that suggests a sophisticated culture. Today, only ruins remain.

The world is littered with ruins of former great cities and empires. And why do I raise this oh-so-obvious observation? Because these ruins obscure an even more basic and obvious point — one that was overlooked by the vast majority of the citizens of each of these fallen great cities. That may be because what lies behind the observation is so very simple.

Because of the complexity of great and advanced cultures, such societies are incredibly fragile and can only be maintained by equally great and cooperative effort.

And it is a form of cultural and societal arrogance to refuse to understand the underlying fragility of a complex society. Look what happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans… or in L.A. almost a generation ago during the Watts Riots.

Just look at the chaos in the world financial markets. We were on the brink of having an entire productive society shut down because banks could not or would not lend… because they have no way of trusting or verifying the trustworthiness of those who would borrow. We have incurred trillions of dollars in debt because those who created various securities also created an uncertain and untrustworthy marketplace. Yet… have we had a global famine, or a war of the scale of World War II? Or even a continental impact on crops similar to that created by the dust bowl of the 1930s?

We have not, and yet our entire system of commerce, on which our civilization is predicated, is teetering, and no one seems to have an answer.

Cooperative effort has to be based on trust, and trust comes from believing that most others will do their part and not take undue and undeserved advantage of others. Cooperation can be maintained, for a time, without trust, through bribery of various sorts, such as buying votes and public support through the diversion of resources or increasing public debt, and through fear of a greater calamity — such as a great enemy, either real or contrived — or through promises of a better tomorrow of some sort. But, over time, and in the end, if public trust is not either maintained or rebuilt, that society is doomed.

Right now, that public trust is threatened, and all the technically “correct” adjustments to the lending and borrowing will fail unless steps are also taken to reassure the people that the abuses of the past will be corrected and that massive and undeserved diversions of resources into the hands of a comparative few will no longer be tolerated.

It’s not communism or socialism to suggest that financial rewards — for salaried employees, because that’s exactly what CEOs are — of as much as 1,000 times the income of an average worker, if not more, are both economically unwarranted and an abuse of public trust.

Yet those who have taken such rewards fail to understand, or perhaps, like the Roman emperors of old, choose not to understand, that continuing such a system makes a society more and more fragile, both economically and politically, until it reaches the point where it cannot and will not stand on its own. In the past, such an erosion of public trust took longer, because communications and knowledge were slower to diffuse through the system and because those lower in society had less access to both.

With higher technology everything happens more quickly, both prosperity and expansion, and in turn, the loss of public trust and confidence. Will we be so sure of ourselves and our society, so arrogant that we will refuse to see the fragility of our society and refuse to act to renew and rebuild it?

Sic gloria transit.

When I proposed the idea of my collection of short stories — Viewpoints Critical — my editor observed that, first, I wouldn’t get and/or make nearly as much from the collection as I would from even my worst-selling book and, second, that collections were invariably a very hard sell for a publisher. For the record, despite some outstanding reviews of Viewpoints Critical, he was right.

But all that got me to thinking. Why is this so? Why are people more willing to buy long novels than collections of stories? Why are the sales of fiction magazines, both in the F&SF genre and elsewhere, continually declining? Now, some enthusiasts of on-line short fiction publication cite costs as a reason, and given paper and distribution costs, I wouldn’t dispute costs as a contributing factor, but circulation was declining before the cost increases became as significant as they are now.

In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald was paid as much for a single short story in a popular magazine as the annual earnings of an average lawyer. Even a half-century before Fitzgerald, short story writers could sometimes actually live off their earnings [if poorly]. Today, it’s physically and financially impossible for a short-story writer to support himself or herself, even at the poverty level, on earnings from short fiction sales alone.

It’s been asserted that part of the problem is that paperback books made reading novel length works far cheaper, and that the rise of paperbacks corresponded with the decline of fiction magazines and even of magazines that weren’t exclusively devoted to fiction. It’s more than that. “Women’s magazines” used to print more fiction. Some that used to provide short fiction now print little or no fiction at all.

Beside, theoretically, paperback books already provide story collections and anthologies of better quality to readers, and far more cheaply than would be possible by subscribing to a number of magazines, but readers aren’t buying all that many collections or anthologies, and it’s certainly not a matter of cost.

Could it be that a short story requires a different kind of reading skill, one that is in decline in English-speaking populations? Or does writing shorter fiction well require a creative skill that is in short-supply among modern authors? Both… or some of each?

Or is it that a nation and a world that has come to value size and “more is better” in everything from food to transport automatically equates a thick book with satisfaction and has difficulty appreciating smaller “gems” of writing?

Whatever it is… one thing is clear. You won’t make anything close to a living just by writing short stories… even if you win lots of awards and praise… and even if you can find a publisher who will publish them as a collection.

As stock markets around the world are plunging, various financial executives are claiming before Congress that it really wasn’t their fault and that they deserved their multimillion dollar golden parachutes and million dollar salaries and bonuses. At least one former executive was being retained as a “consultant” at a million dollars a month while, days after the AIG bailout, AIG executives held a resort retreat in California, to the tune of something like $440,000. Now, admittedly, what’s a few hundred thousand after you’ve blown billions, but it does tend to make voters and taxpayers a bit irritated.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury keep pumping billions into the system, and what happens? Not much, because, as of the moment, the banks in general still refuse to lend. That means that either they’re so far away from meeting their reserve requirements that they can’t lend or that they have decided that they can’t make loans because they can’t trust anyone. Either way, that suggests a certain lack of competence in bank lending departments. To get around this, the government is now beginning to lend to corporations directly, based on commercial paper, so that these corporations have the cash to meet payrolls and pay suppliers.

Many years ago, I knew a banker who made the statement to the effect that, “I don’t lend on numbers and financials; I lend on people.” Interestingly enough, his children still carry on the family tradition… and that modestly sized bank is also still quite solvent. Years ago, he knew what most modern finance types don’t seem to have learned — anyone can juggle figures. It’s harder to juggle character, but with all the regulations, it’s also more and more difficult to judge character without facing a lawsuit for some form of discrimination or another.

Even so, there’s more than one kind of arrogance behind the financial and credit collapse. In addition to the executive pride and arrogance and privilege and clearly undeserved multi-million dollar salary and bonus package mindset — call that personal arrogance — there’s another kind. It’s the arrogance of the financial analyst, and the technical types who were so convinced of their models and the fact that nothing could go wrong.

Except… it did… and so badly that the entire world is going to suffer. Pension funds have already, on average, lost 30-40% of their value; housing starts are the lowest in decades, while foreclosures are the highest; credit card debt and failure to pay are skyrocketing; state budgets are plummeting; and the economy is closing in on losing more than a million jobs this year, and that’s before more than half of the bad debt has even surfaced.

And these executives, seemingly to a man, and most of them are men, have the nerve and arrogance to claim that they did nothing wrong? Yes, Americans have been spoiled. As a nation we over-borrowed and overspent. BUT, none of those in charge of lending and finance ever spoke up and said, “Hold it. You can’t borrow any more.” Nope. Instead, they flooded the market with unasked for credit cards and marginal home equity lines of credit based on over-inflated housing values. They increased credit card limits, and often made home loan prepayments or refinancing impossible, all the time relying on finance models most of them, under questioning, couldn’t possibly even explain, let alone justify in practical or moral terms. They also created so-called hedge funds that were so highly leveraged that it appears most, if not all of them, will be out of business before the meltdown is over, all the time seeking higher and higher returns, and ignoring the simple fact that the stock market, as a whole, cannot grow, over time, much faster than the sum total of economic growth, inflation, and capital inflows.

And now, when it’s all coming crashing down, they have the arrogance to say that they did nothing wrong in lending more than the people of the nation could possibly repay and in profiting personally from those excesses. And the worst of it seems to be that the executives who’ve replaced the ones who failed seem to have inherited the same arrogance that caused the problem.

One of my soon-to-be-published novels recently received a review which essentially said that the book was engaging and well-written, but the conclusion was perfunctory because it “leaves unresolved the larger issues of the role of magic in public life and the position of women in society.” Oh? And exactly how many reviewers would think of criticizing Jane Austen for not resolving the position of women in society? Or Tolkien for not resolving the issues of the role of magic in public life?

In case you haven’t gathered, the book is The Lord-Protector’s Daughter, and in it, the protagonist is faced with a nearly impossible situation where she must fight an extraordinarily chauvinistic culture and the expectations placed on her in order just to survive. She does more than that, but it’s clear that the reviewer expected one young woman to totally change society in less than half a year. I’m not bringing this up because I’m more than slightly irritated at the denseness of the reviewer, which I am, but because many readers — and reviewers — of F&SF exhibit what I’d call a “save the world expectation.” This expectation is endemic, so far as I can tell, only to two genres — thrillers and F&SF. No one expects Hercule Poirot to save the world, only to solve the mystery. In virtually all so-called mainstream literature, the characters may not even be able to save themselves, let alone the world. In romances, the characters only have to save each other.

Now… I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with F&SF books where characters save or destroy worlds, or galaxies. I’ve certainly written some. What bothers me is the expectation that this must always happen… or the book is somehow unfulfilling. I’m certainly not the only one to notice this, either. As a matter of fact, the sometime author, editor, and critic Matt Cheney made this observation about another of my books, Archform:Beauty:

Finally, I was particularly pleased with the resolution of the central plot elements. Though the mystery is solved and the bad guys get taken care of (and two of the characters even find love and at least momentary happiness), the triumphs of the novel are primarily personal. For the police and politicians, it was all one crisis among many, and for most of the citizens it was just a good news story for a day or two. What we, the readers, see is that for a handful of people, life has changed, but the world around them has not. Even though things are different for these characters, they still have to work their way through the world, they have to get through their days, they have the remaining moments of their lives to live. That, it seems to me, is a courageous ending for a book of this sort, perhaps even a subversive one…

Anytime a scholastic genre critic like Matt has to note that a book that doesn’t “save the world” is subversive, it certainly suggests to me that we have too many world-savers and not enough books that “merely” provoke thought… or heaven forbid, entertain without saving or destroying worlds.

But then, as someone categorized as “subversive,” I suppose I’m being optimistic when I hope that readers — and reviewers — won’t be disappointed when my characters don’t always save or transform the world.

I’m old enough to recall when one of the fads sweeping the country was “paint-by-the-numbers” kits, where anyone could produce a reproduction, at least of sorts, of a famous artist by simply matching the number on a tiny jar of paint with the number printed on a cheap canvas stretched across cardboard and dabbing each number with the correspondingly numbered paint.

The older I get, the more I’m seeing our society structure itself along similar lines. It seems like everything is analyzed “by the numbers” and then either quantified, evaluated, or replicated… according to the numbers. Vital services — such as medical care, road and highway maintenance, public safety, and education — are evaluated in terms of their cost-effectiveness for populations as a whole. The problem is that all too many people and situations don’t fit the numerical models. And numerical models seldom result in excellence, any more than paint-by-number kits resulted in great paintings.

In education, students’ futures are effectively being determined more and more by standardized tests, and teachers’ effectiveness is being measured more and more by the performance of their students on those tests. Besides the problem that there are students who test well beyond their real-life abilities and those who test below their potential, and the corruption of the system into teaching to the tests, there’s the even larger problem that the tests are designed to measure the ability to succeed in “intellectual” settings and occupations, and there’s also a tacit assumption that the abilities measured by those tests are the only ones that count. Now… I confess. I’m one of those who did well on tests, and to the test-designers and analyzers, I’m proof that the tests “work.” At what? Such tests are excellent at identifying a set of skills useful for perhaps ten percent of the population. twenty percent at most. And what about all the others?

I’m sorry, but, as well as I may test, you don’t want me trying to repair your leaky faucet, or your home wiring. I’m a good painter and a barely passable wood-worker, but keep me away from the mechanical side of your automobile or almost anything else. Yet the numerical, test-taking educational experts are acting as though it only takes people like me to run everything in society, because, by acting as though their tests measure all that is important, they effectively ignore those who don’t fit in a narrow numerical model.

I’m more than happy to pay experts in fields other than those I know… but experts like that are getting harder and harder to find. The problem is that, in our zeal to evaluate education “by the numbers,” we’re not steering those students who aren’t “intellectually” inclined to fields in which they could be both successful occupationally and financially. We’re treating every one of them as either intellectual successes or failures, because that’s what the numbers say.

In medicine, the numbers pressure for cost-effectiveness by the government and by insurers has resulted in fewer and fewer doctors who going into “general” or family practice, and those who do end up being pressured into seeing more and more patients for shorter and shorter visits… just to pay the costs of modern high-technology medicine. Reports are coming in showing that, in community after community, doctors are limiting the number of Medicare patients because the combination of excessive paperwork and low-mandated reimbursement results in their losing money on such patients… and in fact the inflation-adjusted real earnings of “family doctors” are declining, largely as a result of cost-effectiveness measures developed by the numbers and imposed on medical general practitioners.

On the other side, as I’ve noted in a different light in earlier blogs, the emphasis on financial success, by the numbers, has played a significant role in the housing/credit/mortgage melt-down, because almost everyone in the financial sector was focused on maximizing short-term yields and returns. Call it high finance by the numbers.

From the media to elite institutions, more and more, those lauded publicly are those who have been financially successful or who have been so and donated large sums of money, not necessarily those whose contributions to society cannot be easily quantified. Bill Gates is a figure known-world wide, because of the staggering “numerical success” of MicroSoft, but I can’t even recall the names of the men whose pioneering work in transistors at Texas Instruments made that success possible, and I doubt most Americans could.

All this emphasis on the numerical and quantifiable neglects some very basis aspects of life and society.

No student was ever touched — or inspired — by a number. No patient was ever healed by a number. No criminal was ever physically apprehended by a number. No fire was ever extinguished by a number. But excessive emphasis on numbers — from the stock mania of the 1920s that led to the Great Depression, to the body counts in Vietnam, to the dotcom and housing booms and busts of the last decade — has always led to one form of disaster or another.

Long years ago, when I was first involved in politics, my mentor was a courtly political operative named, believe it or not, Robert Lee. Bob Lee had an impressive record of masterminding unlikely political success stories, but he understood the basics of practical politics better than anyone I ever knew. He provided two basic insights about politics, among others, that have stuck with me and seem particularly apropos to the current situation. The first was, “Don’t mistake money for results.” By that he meant that too many politicians and political operatives concentrated on fund-raising when the goal wasn’t to raise money, but to get more people to vote for your candidate. In the end, what counted was not how much money you raised, but how many votes you got. The second point was that to win any political race, “you have to give people something to vote for.”

The current bailout effort in Washington, D.C., failed Bob Lee’s tests on both counts. The question isn’t how much money you pour into the bailout effort, but how you get the people and their representatives to support it and vote for it, because without support, all the money isn’t going anywhere. The second point is even more important. The way the issue was formulated, it didn’t give anyone much to vote for, but it gave them a considerable number of things to vote against. The administration failed to make the point that our entire credit/banking system is at risk and why it is. Because it did not, those who opposed the bailout weren’t voting against a solution. They were voting against excessive executive compensation and Wall Street extravagance, against using tax dollars to bail out Wall Street at a time when Wall Street’s mistakes have pulled down the entire economy, against a finance system that requires poor or middle-class borrowers to pay escalating mortgage costs while rewarding financiers, against a system that is perceived as destroying American jobs while granting multimillion dollar bonuses to those behind that destruction, and against a system that rewards crooked financiers while underpaying teachers, police officers, firefighters, and hundreds of other vital and underpaid occupations.

If the current Congress and Administration really want to stop the crisis, they need to give people something to vote for, and a reason to support their “reform package.”

Here are a few suggestions. First, cap total executive compensation for any company being bailed out at a mere 100 times the pay of an average worker in the company[as opposed to the thousand plus multiple in some cases], and also make any compensation paid above that amount in any other company in the USA non-deductible for tax purposes. Second, not only continue the existing prohibition on naked short-selling [the principal contributing factor to a number of corporate failures], but require any brokerage firm which does so to be closed for violating the law and [in case future administrations decide to turn a blind eye, as has the present administration] make any violation a cause for civil recompense and quintuple damages. This will get the attorneys working for the public good instead of against it. Third, limit the amount of mortgage payment escalations in adjustable rate mortgages to something approximately realistic [perhaps no more than a 10% increase in payments annually] and eliminate excessive prepayment penalties. Fourth, eliminate the securitization/bundling of sub-prime mortgages with other classes of mortgages. If the bankers and lenders want to bundle mortgages, let them do so, but make them bundle like with like. That way the risks are out in the open. Fifth, enact specific reserve requirements for all classes of debt, including CDOs and other collateralized obligations. Sixth, make violations of these provisions criminal offenses.

I’m sure other thinking individuals could come up with proposals that both make sense and which would garner public support, but these are a few that should be considered. There are other approaches, including a government-backed restructuring of debt markets with more private investment that might work as well… but whatever solution is next proposed must explain the positive benefits.

As for the argument that the financial community won’t like these… well, aren’t you the ones asking for rescue? Shouldn’t the taxpayers who are underwriting the rescue be the ones setting a few terms, particularly since the financial community hasn’t shown much fiscal or moral responsibility lately?

When I was writing an earlier blog, I ran it through the spell and grammar checker, and the grammar checker came up with three errors that weren’t, and suggested three very ungrammatical fixes. At first, I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that I’d used a complex sentence structure with parallel subordinate clauses. Now, I obviously have nothing against technology per se, but this incident got me to thinking about the implications… and to a writer like me, those implications are between annoying and frightening.

It’s clear that the software doesn’t work nearly so well with complex phrases. Is that because it’s not worth while to design it to that level of complexity? Or that it can’t be? Either way, the end result isn’t good, because it’s applying simple rules to complex phrases, and that’s one of the biggest problems with most technology, especially when the user understands neither the entire field in question nor the limits of the technology. But, as in the case of word-processing software, technology often allows the marginally competent to look like the competent — until something really goes wrong.

These days, more and more young writers are relying on software to clean up their work, and every time I read manuscripts for a contest [which I do upon occasion] I’m reminded of this… and the fact that very few of them truly understand their native language.

Another problem that plagues me is the autoformatting feature of Word, especially when I have to go back three lines and put in a hard return so that I don’t end up with an after-the-fact indented paragraph. I mean, after all, I didn’t indent that paragraph when I typed it out. The software all of a sudden undid — or redid — what I did because I didn’t conform to its programming. This is a recurring problem with all computer-based systems. They do what you tell them to do, not what you intended to do, and, sometimes, they even do something that you had no idea they could do, and that you certainly didn’t plan on. The problems begin when there are features you don’t know are incorporated in the system. You think you’ve told the system to do one thing, but your instructions are reformulated by the system. This is an annoyance in word-processing, but it can be a disaster, as in the case of the Mars probe that crashed because there were conflicting measurement systems programmed into the navigation systems, systems of which some of the scientists programming the deceleration were unaware.

And, of course, just about the time I’ve finally worked through and understand most of the glitches in a system, some hot-shot programmers and profit-motivated executives re-design the software… and before all that long I’ll be forced to learn another new and improved system with unknown quirks or glitches, whether I want to or not, because sooner or later, things like the latest printers don’t have printer-drivers for the old software, and because I tend to burn through printers, that limits my choices. And that irritates me, especially since “new” is often not better. I can count on it to be more complex, but not necessarily better, and certainly not simpler… and that’s unfortunately true of most technology.

Why does Tor always put “The New Novel in The Saga of Recluce” on the front of each new Recluce book that comes out in hardcover? I understand the idea of getting this across to the readers, but it must look rather silly to someone who has many Recluce books in hardcover to line them up with ten or so volumes, each proclaiming that it is the “new” one.

Why is good practical judgment called “common sense” when it’s anything but common, especially among politicians?

Why is it that the United States, which is one of the oldest continuous forms of government and which prides itself on equality and opportunity, is only one of two major western powers that has never had a female head of state?

In the United States, according to various polls, over 90% of the people believe in God, and the majority of those believers are Christians. Although one of the tenets of Christianity is theoretically charity and another is judging people by their acts, 60% of those good souls would refuse to vote for an atheist. Why? It’s not as though good religious folk haven’t been the ones who’ve done most of the evils in societies over history.

Why is it that liberals — usually Democrats — are so ready to spend tax dollars to make sure that those who are less advantaged can attain the “American dream” and so ready to condemn and tax those who have actually achieved it?

Why is it that so many conservatives — usually Republicans — are so fond of the Bill of Rights when it comes to the first amendment [freedom of religion] and the second amendment [owning guns] and want to ignore it so much when it comes to matters such as the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments [freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, warrants, trial by jury, due process], especially when they apply to the poor and less advantaged, who are the ones who need those rights most?

Why is it that some political candidates declare that the answer to the pay-gender gap is that women should get more education when women have been getting more collegiate degrees than men for at least a decade? Or is what they mean that women have to have more education to get the same — or less — pay than men?

When government gives money to individuals who can’t make ends meet, it’s called welfare, but when it gives money to corporations, it’s called an incentive or a credit [or an absolutely necessary financial system reform]. Why the difference?

Why is it that when a man with small children runs for public office, he’s hailed as a good family man while a female candidate for the same office is asked how she can handle the job and her family? Is this because we expect the job to be so taxing that the office-holder must neglect family and because no man is expected to take on family responsibilities? Isn’t that just chauvinism one step removed?

And why is it that, when one asks questions like these, they’re either ignored or addressed with platitudes or simplistic answers… or result in attacks?

As many Americans have been, I’ve been following the current housing credit/financial meltdown, and, as someone who was once a practicing economist, I have more of a professional interest than many. But in reading all the business and financial journals I receive, I’ve noticed something startling: almost no one talks about the moral dimensions of the mess. It’s as though the “business model” has subsumed all sense of ethics and morality.

Now… let’s put this in a simplified perspective. Builders were building too many houses for those who could qualify for housing under the “more traditional” standards. So more “innovative” ways of mortgage financing were developed, many of which required no money down and minimal, if any, detailed credit checking. In turn, these marginal and sub-prime loans were bundled into larger mortgage tranches, if you will, which were then securitized and sold to various institutions. In many cases, the “leverage” was close to 65 to 1. In plain English, that meant for every $65 loaned, only one dollar of reserves, or cash on hand backing the loan, was available. Now, leverage works both ways, and when the housing market slowed, and when home-owners began to default on loans, each dollar of default theoretically required the institution holding the securities to come up with an additional $65. That meant that less than a five percent default rate could wipe out the value of the other 95% of the mortgage package. Most financial institutions could not come up with anywhere close to the additional reserves required… and… the rest, as they say, is history, if aided, by another illegal but tolerated practice of the brokerage business — naked short-selling, which the SEC just belatedly announced would no longer be accepted.

Where does morality come in? At all levels.

First, it’s been estimated that something like 30% of the subprime loans were written with terms that effectively made refinancing impossible if the price of the house did not increase dramatically. Not only was this financially unwise, but locking a gullible buyer into such a situation is unethical, to say the least. Then, the higher level junior executives who sold these mortgages to the institutions that securitized them dramatically understated the risks, also not exactly the most ethical of behaviors. The institutions that bought the securitized loans didn’t exactly perform the greatest due diligence, and there are stories, if currently unverified, that some analysts who tried to raise the question were quashed… because, after all, this quarter’s yield is far more important than what will happen a year or two from now. The CEOs of the institutions involved certainly didn’t look beyond the immediate balance sheet, and they were paid and took enormous salaries and other compensation while insisting that their firms were solvent and would remain so, which is a form of either naivete [and one shouldn’t be a CEO with that level of naivete] or misrepresentation, which is a form of fraud. And it doesn’t appear that all the brokers who decided to profit from the market decline by short-selling the stock of companies like AIG, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch, without having the stock to cover the short-sales, were even behaving legally, let alone ethically. Now, because of the intertwined nature of the world financial markets, in some form or another, U.S. and other taxpayers will have to come up with the cash reserves to keep the whole system from crashing, and that cash requirement is nothing more than an enormous theft from the public — an elaborate variation on the Ponzi or pyramid schemes of the past, which have resulted, if only in the past, with their perpetrators going to prison. Here, the executives at all levels of these public companies raked in enormous salaries and bonuses as a result of these unethical and sometimes even illegal practices, and I sincerely doubt that any of them will face criminal charges.

Didn’t anyone of importance say, “These kinds of mortgages are wrong.”? “These appraisals are inflated.”? Didn’t any executive observe that the leverage requirements were so far out of line with banking and securities reserve requirements that they were in effect dangerous and fraudulent? Didn’t any brokerage firm or executive crack down on naked short-selling?

So far as I can tell, none, or very few, did. Instead, they followed the “business model” of “the highest level of short-term profit possible by any means allowable under the law.”

The problem that no one seems willing to face here is that brilliant men can always find a way around the law. Always! Our saving grace as a society in the past has been that there has been a preponderance of men and women who also asked, “Is it honest? Is it right?… instead of asking, “Is it legal and how much can we make?”

And it’s also sad that, so far, very few, if any, of our vaunted media, self-anointed guardians of liberty and discoverers of wrong-doing, have asked the questions posed here.

All the new rules and regulations will mean nothing until we, as a society, stop insisting on “more” at any cost and start asking, “Is it right?”

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s an old line from the comic strip Pogo, but it’s even truer today than it was when first printed.

I’ve been observing the current presidential campaign and trying not to succumb to terminal nausea as I see the media of the left and the right, and the far left and the far right, all working their damnedest… to do what? To create fights where there are none, and to intensify conflicts and differing opinions into class wars.

Why is this happening? Because conflict is “news,” and the greater the conflict, the greater the news “value,” the higher the ratings, the greater the advertising revenue, and the more exorbitant the profits. And we as a people not only accept this, but we encourage it by insisting that greater profit equates to greater good. I’m certainly not against profit, but when Americans come to believe that a company has somehow “failed” if its profit margins don’t increase year after year, there’s something very wrong.

There are two very conspicuous current disasters showing the absolute folly of insisting on ever-increasing profits. The first is the mortgage/housing/securitization meltdown, whose impact continues to spread and worsen and which I’ve discussed earlier, and which resulted from essentially defrauding financial markets in an effort to pad profits even more… with the strong likelihood that we’ll end up in a deep recession, if not worse, as a result. The second is the vicious and polarizing “Let’s you and him fight” attitude that permeates the media. This attitude is most obvious in the incredible growth of violence in television dramas, in the proliferation of “reality TV” shows, and in the almost-instant media focus on any short-coming of any public figure of any political party.

Thomas Jefferson had slaves and affairs with them. Lincoln’s wife was clinically depressed and possibly worse. Franklin Roosevelt had affairs throughout his life and even during his presidency. So did Kennedy and Johnson. Grover Cleveland had an illegitimate child. Even honest Ike had an affair when he was an Army general. In those days, such matters were seldom brought up by the press, and even when they did, most Americans paid little attention. Did such “dirt” bear upon the conduct, policies, and actions in office of such officials? Apparently not, or very little.

So what’s more important — candidates’ personal and family foibles or their legislative and public record and their stand on the issues? Exactly how does the choice of a pastor or a daughter’s romantic exploits bear on the great economic and military challenges facing the next administration? Why is the number of houses a candidate’s wife owns more important than that candidate’s stance on Constitutional rights? Is whether we’d like to have a drink with a candidate more important than how he or she would lead the country?

For that matter, why do so many Americans let the media use these diversions to determine public discussion on the future of our country? The media isn’t employing such diversions for our good, but to boost their bottom line… and that’s something else to consider in the course of the campaign.