A Haiku (but not really)

 Prospero expects

Gratitude from Ariel.

Caliban just laughs.

(A personal, related quip: there are really only three kinds of Star Trek Original Series episodes. Detective stories, westerns, and "The Tempest.")

Take Warning: A Poem (a "misattribution poem")

The following is based on an often inappropriately appropriated misattribution to George Orwell.

Take Warning!

 

The Rough Ones at the Ready

Stand in the dark, awake

While all the world in unawares

Praise politics to thank

For the advances they denied

Until the heads were pressured-

But not the way, as then as now,

That history remembers!

And when the fire next time comes,

Same old story’s same,

Those deflecting, casting blame

Will all be converts,

When it’s safe and tame-

They’ll reminisce of struggles, oh

Like it was they themselves that fought,

And they’ll credit politicians

For what their dollars bought.

But we who’re ready in the night,

With black garb and with flame

Know a history uncensored

Without shade or shame.

And we who march ‘neath freedom’s wings

Have long memories to boot,

So when the converts give their praise,

We’ll chuckle and we’ll hoot-

For it was we who took the wheel,

When they abandoned ship

And it was we who captained her

Till they came swimming back

With the tempest over,

The sun in sky-so-clear,

Caliban at prayer- oh Setebos!

Peace above and trouble buried,

When everything makes sense again,

Then, go along, they’ll go,

And claim they always had our backs!

But when the waters next time come,

Look at who’s first to flee the deck.

And when they come back,

Hold them up

To what they left, they’ll see

That justice isn’t for the meek,

It’s not for those who wait,

It was there to win,

And was won,

While they, now full of praise,

Did sleep.

That’s why we sing the unions’ hymns

And that’s why we burn flags.

It’s why anyone gets anything,

It’s why there’s no fair fights.

And sometimes, what it takes,

Is rough ones in the night.

For those who sleep at peace in bed,

Could do more than to blame

Those who stand at ready

To wrestle right, from shame.

For nothing came by anyone

Whose natures were so tame.

So we’ll shut down the highways,

We’ll be inconvenient as we please,

Knowing as we’ve always known

That history’s our claim.

 

Stop Using That Word... ("Politics")

 I am seriously considering that am I never going to say the word "politics" again.

There are many good, specific, accurate and insightful terms to use to discuss socioeconomic and institutional criticisms. But "politics" these days is a pejorative. It's just what people who think the status quo of neoliberal capitalism is inevitable like to label any criticisms of that status quo. It's the label that dominant groups and the ruling class apply to inconvenient criticisms about themselves. "Don't get political." "Let's keep this civil." You're all heard it before. At dinner tables, board meetings, golf clubs. Well, I don't think I've ever been to a golf club. Not my scene. But I have an imagination.

Were you seriously expecting me to say anything about the election? I'll say this... "I REJECT OUR NEW NEOLIBERAL OVERLORDS."

I also think you should go back and read some of my earlier posts. But, strictly for the benefit of anyone not in the mood to binge on this blog, I do have SOME things to say.

I have already come up with cute names. Harris is "Top Cop Kamala." Biden is "Crime Bill Joe." Some of us have what Utah Phillips called "The Long Memory." We don't forgive, we don't forget... until there are reparations. Until there is justice. That's not going to happen because "somebody who isn't Trump" is president.

The Democratic Party had an opportunity to stand for something other than Not Being The Party of Trump. They blew it. Now they are already blaming Black Lives Matter and "socialism" for their losses. Even Democrats who won in their districts, because dishonest political ads by Republicans tarnished them as "socialists" who supported "defunding or abolishing police," are blaming BLM and socialism for other Democrats' losses in other districts.

"Politics" is a dismissive pejorative. And it's theatre. It's fluff. It's bad form "debtates" and talking heads. It's red and blue and meaningless pretention. It has nothing to with reality.

A couple months ago I tried an experiment. I decided I would never talk about Donald Trump unless someone else brought him up. I figured that liberals would do it. Which of course they did, any time I articulated a general critique of the status quo before Trump, they deflected to talking about Trump. They couldn't conceive of anything being wrong with our political system or our socioeconomic order. Of course, they would pay lip service to that conception. But all they wanted to do in practice was blame the guy on top. It's not a very nuanced critique. So I purposefully didn't bring him up in conversation for months, I just waited for liberals to do it, so I could point out that there were a lot of problems inherent in the structures and systems that preceded his presidency. It's only now that I break that pattern, to illustrate a point. My experiment worked.

The only good thing about last week, is that liberals can't blame Trump anymore for all the worst aspects of neoliberalism. That's not a defense of the guy, I didn't like him, but I understand his presidency as the culmination of a trend that has escalated over the past several decades. Yes, there is a straight line from the Moral Majority, to the Christian Right, to Trumpism. But there are other tributaries to that river, and just like we can't honestly blame all of society's problems on one person, we also can't, honestly, blame them all on one party. Fascism is merely a "wing" of imperialism. It is capitalism in decay. It's part of the oppression, but not the beginning of it. It maps particularly well onto neoliberalism's outcomes, but the pure, ideological fascists are just one faction in a broader coalition, and even that coalition alone is not solely to blame.

Liberals and Democrats had an opportunity to hold themselves and their own party accountable. They failed. They sunk to the lowest bar possible: "Anybody but him." Now, the architect of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill is President and a top prosecutor who herself not long ago called him out on his opposition to bussing, is Vice President. It seems that Blue Lives Matter is very much alive, despite the upcoming end of the Trump Regime. This is just another regime. And in a way, it's much more honest this way. But I have no faith that Democrats and Liberals will hold themselves accountable. They are already casting the blame left, targeting a lot of people who went along with them because they- we- agreed that Trump had to go.

This is how the Overton Window shifts right. This is how authoritarianism becomes mainstream and basic economic justice becomes mischaracterized as a radical fringe. I don't expect Medicare for All from this administration. But it goes beyond that...

Listen, I'm a fucking social worker in Philadelphia. Every single one of my clients is black. The child welfare system is disproportionate in that way. That's not a Philadelphia problem. The pattern holds in majority-white counties. Black children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system because institutional racism persists, and that's still going to be a problem under the Biden Regime.

When my black teens go AWOL from their placements and are out past curfew in the middle of the night, I will worry about their safety in a hypothetical police encounter just as much as I would have worried a few weeks ago. These are black kids who have experienced trauma from abuse or neglect, and also from being separated from their families. The cops are more likely to perceive them as older and bigger than they are in reality, and more dangerous. Cops are more likely to be afraid of these kids than white kids or Asian kids. There is extensive research to support this. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not able or willing to endorse the kind of policies that would make this country safer for my kids. The fact that Kamala Harris is a woman of color has no bearing on this, because neoliberalism does not promote positive social change. It's an illusion and a deflection from the reality. Real change is bottom-up. It doesn't matter who's at the top. I am going to still fear for these kids' safety under the next administration as I do under this one.

And you can't have it "both ways," by smearing me as an "idealist" either. There's nothing ideal about this. I"m being utterly fucking realistic.

I do have hope. But not in political parties. I have hope, not in the State, but in the Public, which is the Enemy of the State. The State is the authoritarian instrument of industrial capitalism. It is the violent and coerceive defense of private property, which is prioritized over human health and safety. The State is a monopoly on coercion. It's not different from any megacorporation. Democrats like to talk about change, and liberals like to talk, in general, and hear themselves talk. Meanwhile, I hate the sound of my own voice. I like to actually see policies that have a real meaningful impact on systemic poverty, systemic racism, systemic patriarchy. And I'm very, very frustrated with a lot of "educated" people who seem to think that these things can be technocratically managed by elite appointees of a ruling class that will never oppose the capitalist system that maintains and reinforces these systemic problems because that would mean opposing their own interests.

I'm not a fool. It's people who think the status quo works out who are the "idealists," and it's the people who think it's just inevitable who are the "pessimists." I am utterly fucking realistic in my analysis and critiques. It doesn't come from some dusty old philosopher. It comes from being a practicing social worker and community organizer.

The other thing- and this needs to be said- I used to be a liberal. Back then, like many liberals, I thought I was a radical leftist. I considered myself a socialist, but I voted Blue No Matter Who and I wasn't connected to a broader Leftist community with an ongoing dialog and dialectic that could have helped me deconstruct my own racial and sexual and class biases and prejudices at an earlier time in my life. I wish I had been like that, then, but I had to grow.  People hear me now, they hear my criticisms, and they don't consider that I've not always been this way, that my critiques, at various points in my past, were misdirected and problematic. I used to locate blame in the "other." Republicans. Conservatives. And it's hard for liberals and moderates, increasingly hard, it seems, to consider how leftist criticques don't necessarily replicate that kind of dogmatic and factional blame. And that's why I feel like people only hear half of what I say. They just want me to tell them who to blame, so they can play like they have the moral high ground and make it like I'm the one villifying "Christians" or "Republicans" or whatever, and they are oh-so tolerant because they find common ground with people who think we're both agents of Satan, or evil secularists. They don't listen to the part of my critique where I empathize with people who are being exploited. That includes a lot of white Christians, even though White Christians are a politically dominant and culturally dominant and very wealthy group in the United States who put of a lot of pressure on government to let them impose their views on other people and make things hard for various minorities. I think this movement is a product of capitalist exploitation as much as the existence of an underclass is the product of capitalist exploitation. As a (religious) leftist friend of mine put it recently, "Religion is a market in America," and political parties like the Republicans and increasingly, the Libertarians, exploit that market. People confuse my secularism with "anti-religion," but these people are the ones looking down on religious conservatives as a "scary other" and I'm the one saying that a lot of them are also part of an exploited class.

But you didn't hear all that, did you?

You just want me to lay all the blame on Trump. Or on Republics. Or "Christians." Or "uneducated people." You haven't been listening. Educated people need to hold themselves accountable. Especially educated white liberals. It's not going to be so easy for them to play the moral high ground when the next police murder- and there will be a next one- happens in Biden's America.

So, no, I didn't celebrate last week. I don't fucking care about national elections. Talk to me about socioeconomic issues. We can talk about systemic racism. We can talk about class stratification and why, even though I don't agree with their proposed policy solutions, plenty of conservatives actually have half-decent critiques of the liberal welfare state. Namely, it does keep people poor. I don't think the solution is to take government programs away. I am against means-testing. Look that up.

I'm for abolishing capitalism, and I'm for full wealth redistribution, and that would alleviate most of the socioeconomic and psychological stressors that Americans are constantly acting on and not fully aware of. But don't talk to me about this thing you call "politics." That's not a conversation I want to be a part of. It's misleading at best, and dishonest at worst. There is no such thing as "politics," not in the way you mean it. There is policy, which is real, and there is spectacle, which is theatre. As a social worker and an organizer, I care about public policy. And it is this that made me increasingly consider myself an anarchist these days. I wasn't always an anarchist. I was first a liberal, who thought I was a leftist. Then I was a "social democrat," and later a moderately leftist socialist. Reality kept pushing me Left. Then, the worst socialist organizers I've ever met, who really don't deserve to be called socialists at all (they are really just left-liberals and social democrats) smeared me as an "anarchist" because I had more nuanced critiques of trade unions tan they did, and I associated with the IWW (which is a labor union, and not, I repeat, not an "anarchist organization"). I didn't even consider myself an anarchist then. I did after I allowed myself to be influenced by other organizers, and I found it just seemed right. And a lot of the good organizers I met through Leftism drifted toward Anarchy too, for the same reasons. So it really didn't come from any dogmatic theory, but more as the sum of my experiences as an organizer and a social worker.

So don't talk to me about "politics" unless you want to hear some inconvenient critiques of power. And maybe even of yourself, if it puts you on the defensive. When that happens, it's usually about ego.  I believe we all need to hold ourselves accountable. I'm not letting anyone off.

I still consider myself locked in struggle with the very foundations of this racist, patriarchal, heterosexually and religiously supremacist country.

Don't tell me "All Lives Matter." They clearly do not.

Don't tell me "All viewpoints are equal." Some ideas do more harm than others, and some ideas are more just than others.

Don't tell me "It's inevitable," because if I believed that, I'd be mouthing the same bullshit platitudes as the people I'm complaining about. You think it's inevitable. I don't. That doesn't make me an idealist. Don't smear as that. I simply have a more nuanced critique of power structures and institutional systems than you.

And I am saying this for the benefit of anyone reading because I very much do have hope, in people, but not parties. I don't have a horse in the race here. There's no one running on an "anarchist" platform, that's really not how anarchism works. I wouldn't trust anyone who took themselves seriously as an "anarchist candidate" (although some people did well making a joke out of it). Anarchism is about communities organizing themselves. It's not top-down.

Historically, conservative, moderates, liberals, fascists, and many socialists and communists have confused the public with the State. It's a deadly conflation. But anarchists know that the public is the enemy of the State, and the State must be abolished. It's the same thing as abolishing capitalism. Because the State is capitalism's defense by military and police.

You can't ask for a more cogent critique because every other "political" theory conflates the State's interests with the interests of the public, even groups like the Christian Right, who like to pretend they're victims of both, despite all their power. But it's not just about them. It's about all of us, not holding ourselves accountable, but instead casting blame and vilifying a scary "other," a boogieman. For liberal secularists, that's the Religious Right. For the Religious Right, it's everyone else. For a lot of people, for the last four years, it's been "Trumpism." But for me, it's always been Supremacy, whether patriarchal, religious, racist, heteronormative, or anything else you could name- it's all part of global capitalism. In that way, neoliberalism is a far scarier prospect than Trumpism. It will outlast the Right's infatuation with that man and over a longer period of time, will do more harm than he could in 4 years. Actually, it already has, and it will just keep on doing harm.

There never was a status quo. Trying to impose that now is just about holding back the demand for more radical anti-supremacist policies. Neoliberalism will prove just as oppressive as it always was. And because of this- fascism will rise again.

But I still have hope that more people will come to see it that way. They will become "realists" too, and they will cast aside neoliberalism's chains when they learn they have nothing else to lose.

I was not alone in not celebrating last week. But then, I did something that made me feel much better.

I re-registered as an independent and I made a vow never to vote in a presidential election again. I don't even believe in having a president. I made a vow never to be vote-shamed by people with more privilege or less perspective than me. I made a vow to vote only in local elections for city council and possibly mayor if there is a challenger to a neoliberal incumbent or candidate, but I will never vote for a neoliberal again. I will not choose the "lesser of two evils." I will simply not participate in evil. I will be very selective, and I will continue, every other day of the year, to do what I have been doing for years- organizing in communities, building a radical, anti-capitalist movement. Nothing's changed for me. It was never really about Trump.

I really don't think national elections are very important. If you insist on calling this "politics," it doesn't change my point. There are better things to do with your time than vote once a year, or once every four years. There are 365, sometimes 366 days in a year when you can be part of something bigger than yourself. If you still want to vote, that's fine, no one should stand in your way (though, realistically, some communities experience more voter suppression than others). But don't get on your high horse once every four years when I'm in the room. I will shoot that horse and rip you down. Take some accountability for this mess that is America, please. Because we don't have long left before the powder keg explodes again.

"Workers of the World, Unite."

Poem: "If you lived here..." (non-SF)

If you lived here, you’d throw rocks,

Trash and bottles, too.

Strangers think you’re having fun,

But you don’t think it’s cool.

Your survival is their buzz,

Your death, a 5 minute story,

Sensation holds attention,

When the news cycle is spinning.

But if you lived here,

You would cry,

Every time a neighbor dies,

You’d see yourself,

Your kids, in them,

And never wonder why again.

In His Image :: The Nightmare of Narcissistic, Solipsist Billionaires (Chantix does it again!)

A few nights ago, Chantix did it again. Only this time, it was a nightmare.

I was a time traveler, and the past disappeared. When I went back to investigate, I found myself confronting the female Elon Musk.

She was a gimmicky wrestler, and a narcissistic solipsist, who rebooted the universe to appoint herself God.

She was admiring a portrait of herself and tweeting. She loved twitter. It’s how she kept in touch with her cult of personality.

She fed the universe into some sort of holodeck and rebooted it in her image. She was techno-Cthulhu.

 

(Arrives back in time to witness the reboot)

Me: “Oh. I get it. You’re basically Elon Musk. How disappointing.”

 

People ask why I don’t like Elon Musk.

I don’t like billionaires or industrialists. I don’t trust their class. I don’t trust the system they maintain, or the system that maintains them. I want to liberate the technology they monopolize. And I don’t like their attitude- the paternalism and condescension. It turns me off. The “billionaire-knows-best” attitude. It makes me want to hit my head against the wall.

It’s not Musk personally I don’t like. Although his family did own a gem mine in Africa… which I am to understand means they are exploiters, slave masters, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. It’s Blood Diamond level shit. No, I don’t think he “contributes” to society. None of them do. They are members of a class of social parasites.

That rocket he launched a few years ago was wasted energy, to put a big phallic symbol and ego-mirror in space. That energy could have been put to much better use on Earth, helping people to survive the ravages of global capitalism. And screw him for his appropriate of David Bowie.

Musk’s factory is also notoriously unsafe for workers. And the Tesla company is not exactly honest about it. There have been cover ups. The man prioritizes profit over human wellbeing. Many have been injuredlaboring for this man. Many more will join their ranks.

Elon Musk, and his ilk, must be stopped. If they could reboot the universe in his image, they would.

And I don’t trust cults of personality. I don’t trust cults, period, whether pseudo-religious or techno-utopian.

Nothing the man does could make me trust him more. His views on Artificial Intelligence are also indicative, as I have written before, of anxiety over organized labor.

And don't get me started on why UBI is nothing close to (and a manipulative diversion from) full wealth redistribution. Why do you think billionaires like Musk and Silicon Valley Tech Bro Utopians support it? They have a condescending view of the working class and think money will make us shut up. But money is the problem. And they are the problem. That's another post, though (I'll get around to it). I don't want to keep money out of any working person's hands and more is better than nothing, but better than nothing is not enough. That is the whole point of my novel, "Rentkids."

I’m not anti-tech. I’m a techno-liberationist.

Set the Sad Clown Free: A Local Group Story

Dear Readers,

A long time ago, in college, I wrote a shameful, elitist technocratic liberal-democrat wish-fulfillment novel that pretty much blamed Republicans for everything and didn't really handle race or class well... though it did predict many aspects of Trumpism and the Occupy Movement, in retrospect.

As I've written elsewhere, this is why I no longer generally write stories about the politics of the near-future. Too often, my political predictions turn out too eerily accurate, and that usually means people suffer or die. It makes me feel like a Cassandra because no one believed me back then. But a lot of my concerns materialized over the next decade, though my politics shifted.

Like a lot of liberals, when I was a liberal, I thought I was a Leftist. But back then, I had a lot of really bad ideas. I thought I was so smart I couldn't have bias. But I was writing about things I really didn't understand and hadn't directly experienced.

I'm more mature and realistic now, and I've had a lot of life experiences I didn't have back then. And as a result, I'm much less egotistical. Less prone to trying to reinvent everything myself. I have more trust in other people now. I have more trust in myself. I was very insecure then, and in that first novel (which should never, ever be published), it showed.

That novel had a lot of assumptions about the way politics work I later came to question. I feel it was a very biased and problematic novel. But some of the basic character archetypes still appeal to me, and I still use them in my much more distant future stories set in the "Local Group" 'verse.

The following story is based on a reexamination of that (extremely long, too long) novel, which I usually pretend doesn't exist, but if I'm honest with myself, is still a part of my dialectic, though I've moved far away from that slice of the spectrum. So, I have kept the politics of this world unusually vague for one of my stories. The political situation isn't the point. It's about how these characters interact with each other and their world. None of them are very healthy individuals. That's because this story is about a Bourgeois family, and the Bourgeoisie are, to appropriate a Gregg Araki title, "Totally Fucked Up."

I needed to write about the "House of Roe." It was the best part of that novel, the only part that holds up today (other than the eerily prescient predictions I mentioned before, which don't really feature in this story). The rest of this story has more to do with my memory of war. Not going to war myself (I was fortunate and privileged compared to the kids my age who fought and died in that senseless conflict), but coming of age at a time when my country was beginning its longest-ever war. I knew that war would never end. That we'd be mired in Iraq and Afghanistan for a very long time. How you wage a War on Terror? The same way you wage a War on Drugs, or Poverty, I guess, and look how that turned out! The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and everybody's on drug in a combat zone. But I digress- the House of Roe.

I needed to write about the House of Roe. About the Sad Clown. About Philipe, his hedonist daughter, his militant son, and artistic wife. The patriarch of holy fools and his troubled family was resurrected for this story alone.

It was my pleasure to write about this family again, to make them part of the Local Group. I'm glad you will get to know them. And maybe, I'll write of them again, some day, but for now, I think this short story does them justice.

Set the Sad Clown Free

 

Yohst… third planet of Coriander 1…

Taung Sector… Triangulum Galaxy…

Sometime in the 427^th century…

 

Trapped in God’s Tears…

 

The Valley People called the idol Umrahash-Hummraha. Once, it resembled a yellow valley jaguar, if the mosaics and tapestries were to be believed. Philipe Roe had seen them in the museums back in Tosco County, in his native Síllion Federation, but this was the first time he’d laid eyes on the idol of the jaguar god. According to legend, the idol wept and roared. The remains of a primitive hydraulic pumping system, fed by a crumbling aqueduct that cut through the jungle, wrapped in vines, explained this.

The mighty tears of long ago had eroded the jaguar god’s face and created the impression of a sad clown wearing an artificial smile with little drips beneath its eyes.

He had to set the sad clown free.

The villagers would be here, any minute. They had surely seen his autocopter landing. He swung his axe and chipped away at the sad clown’s face.

As he hacked away, he heard the villagers approaching. Quiet rustling in the leaves of the bushes of the valley. They were murmuring anger at the sight of the outsider hacking apart their idol.

He dropped the axe, and he ran. The sun was breaking through the morning clouds and the thorns snagged impishly on his camouflaged jungle garb. A warning of arrows penetrated the bush but missed him by meters. A warning, only, not to disturb the gods. He half-suspected the natives were unallowed to kill with intent on sacred ground. He hid, and he waited until he could no longer hear the villagers. Then, he signaled the autocopter.

 

The House of Roe…

 

Silas Roe drove his yellow Ridgemaster L500 autowagon up the driveway on the steep hill. The House of Roe rose from the zenith, all stone and wood beams. The House was older than old, a relic of the First Republic, from the waning days of the Ancients. It had been months since Silas came home, but it was time: college no longer held his interest.

He parked the autowagon in the rough vehicular circle at the end of the driveway by the House of Roe’s north wing.

He had a plan, and he needed an empty house. The House of Roe was already nearly empty.

Except, not today. Silas’ youngest sister, Phoebe, was passed out in the eclectic living room with four other girls her age. A bottle of day-glow rested, nearly emptied like the house, on the floor between them.

He trod to the kitchen and looked for the coffee maker. It was broken, so he boiled water and poured it on grounds through the machine’s filter, holding the filter over his thermos with grip of thumb and forefinger so as not to get burned. When he was finished, he took his coffee outside and walked among the woods.

The white dwarf sun of the planet Yohst shined bright, even through the yellow sky full of industrial smog. It made twiggy shadows of the winter-bare branches. The air was cleaner out here in Brandaniel, eight kilometers outside the city Corthyllis. The multicolored betaphyl of the leaves glistened with dew. Beyond the hill’s ridge, was Tempac Valley. And somewhere beyond this continent, was his father.

Philipe Roe- the man couldn’t be bothered with home or family. As a child, Silas knew his father would be gone for long periods of time. His mother sequestered herself in her studio, making abstract sculptures that captured the inner thoughts she never expressed. When seen, she always smiled, but she never had anything important to say. She married a holophotographer fifteen years her senior, when she was young. He stayed a wanderer, she a homebody artist, alone in her studio. Silas thought, she could have been down there now and probably didn’t even know he was here, with her favorite ghostcore or tranceblast epics on full volume.

He was hungry. He knew he should have eaten before he set out. He wondered if there was anything in the cryopantry.

 

There wasn’t. Not anything edible, anyway. Expired goatcream, some ancient, mold-ridden takeout, a decaying half a sandwich, and an unidentifiable, sticky purple stain.

He wondered if it was flavored carbofizz. He really wanted a plushberry fizz. But there was nothing in the house except coffee, water, and expired goatcream.

So, he made more coffee, and he listened to the news on the wireless caster.

The voice on the caster told of the coming war with the United Ipnash Kingdoms.

 

And Now, the News (electric guitar riff)…

 

The Síllion Federation dominated the Northern Continent on Yohst. The United Ipnash Kingdoms ringed the Federation in mostly unbroken island chains. A tenuous truce existed, and had been maintain for thirty years, but times were hard, tensions were high, and the drums of war were beating fast. A diplomatic envoy’s ‘copter had been downed in the Sepnoy Sea, and the Federation blamed the Kingdoms for harboring the terrorists who claimed responsibility. There had, in recent years, been a schism between the Secular Court and the High Ipnashim Temple. The Secularists had reached out to the Federation for help, and the Federation had refused. So, they killed an envoy. Negotiations had failed and the Federation was gearing for conflict. While Silas Roe drank his second thermos of coffee, the coastal bombardment frigates were taking position in guns’ range of the Ipnash Island Ring, and combat ‘copters of the Federal Guard hovered ominously above the continent, buzzing as they swarmed around the airships that dominated the skies.

 

Eternal Summer…

 

The clay took form on the wheel, like a breath of junjaw smoke, curing and twisting into a complex form. Summer Roe altered the spinning clay with practiced hands, achieving the shape she desired from the picture in her mind.

This was a contract piece, from the town’s only modern art gallery, Evolution. They wanted a sculpture that represented the Unity of All Things. Summer was a Unitist herself, a member of a sect of free-spirits, and she had been selected from a list of ten local artists to represent Unity in clay. She believed in the Spirit of Unity, and it was the Spirit that infused her work with purpose.

Her favorite tranceblast music flooded the studio, erasing all other sounds. She did not know her oldest son was home. She didn’t even know Phoebe and her friends were lying unconscious upstairs in the living room. She had been sequestered in her studio for a day and a half. She had not eaten or slept. The work demanded her full attention. While she worked, toxins accumulated upstairs in her daughter’s body. The girl began to vomit but reflexively choked. No one heard her death-shudder. No one knew it happened. The other girls slept through it, their bodies and minds weak from three days of nonstop partying in Corthyllis. They had all poisoned themselves competitively, but Phoebe won that contest. The prize was a one-way trip.

The girl choked on her own vomit as the clay spun on the wheel, and Silas brooded over the news. In the kitchen, he shook his head in disgust and turned off the caster. That was when he heard it. But he was too late. The other sleeping girls awakened only as their host’s brother thumped his sister’s chest in furious determination to resuscitate her. But he was too late. She was too long without oxygen, and he could not clear her airways in time.

His sickened and desperate mind turned on the other girls and he demanded they leave. He accused them of killing her. He let loose a tirade of obscenities and analysis and he wasn’t entirely wrong. He despised their hedonism and frivolity, but the truth was, he would have chased them out anyway. He needed the space. He wasn’t thinking of that, not consciously, but the priority was there, lurking, guiding him as he redirected his rage against these unwanted guests. He hated them, and in that moment, believed they were all that was wrong with everything. Hyper focused as he was on their wrongness, he didn’t notice his mother coming up behind him, her hand going to her mouth to stem, somehow, the outflow of shock.

Phoebe was dead, and Silas turned on his mother, too. He turned on her with the same obscenities, the same analysis, his materialist anti-hedonism, and he wasn’t entirely incorrect, but he could have said it better. His mother wept speechless and ran from the room. She ran barefoot into the woods. Silas never saw her after that. She never did return. Some in Brandaniel Village claim a ghost-woman walks those woods and leaves mysterious clay objects and stones in ceremonial piles like the Rock Worshippers of Old. They say she wails but never speaks. They say she walks by the abandoned rails, and the edge of the Black River, barefoot, even in the cold, so she must be a ghost.

But Silas doesn’t believe in ghosts and doesn’t have time for that anyway.

In the years since that fateful day, he has transformed the House of Roe into a training camp for young people dedicated to the Cause. The swimming pool was turned to an artificial swamp, part of an extended paintball arena that surrounds the grounds behind soundproofed walls. The neighbors are still too far away to know what really goes on there: the discipline, the regimentation of those idealistic recruits. They call Silas “the General” now. He hates when anyone calls him “boss.” Says that’s not what he’s about. He’s pretty low-key these days. Buys his coffee and downloads the news from the kiosk in the commercial district. Plays the role of Warden-to-the-Estate. His name is on all the right papers and the constabulary never bothers to check on him because no one hears the constant sounds of simulated warfare behind those sound-proofed walls. If asked, he’s really into paintball. Got his own team. Used the family fortune to invest in that, and a military surplus chain. But anyone who really knows Silas knows that’s all a front. Silas is about the Cause; the Cause is Silas.

He’ll tell you about that Cause, if you really want to know. But he never talks about Phoebe or Summer or Philipe.

Philipe never made it back. His autocopter was mistaken for a diplomatic envoy and shot down over the Sepnoy Sea. The real envoy never left the United Ipnash Kingdom. No one knows which faction garbled the transmission that got Philipe confused for a diplomat, killed, and started the war, but the war’s still going on, and the people of the Federation are losing their freedoms, day by day, to a mighty, marching, military machine. It happens slowly enough that they can rationalize it, most of them. But Silas was never very good at that, and so to this day, he’ll tell anyone who cares to listen how it didn’t used to be this way and the people don’t know what they’ve lost. The airship and ‘copters still hover ominously over the land. There’s tension thick in the air as the yellow industrial smog, and the smog is worse now than on the day Phoebe died and Summer ran away from her terrifying son.

When Silas thinks about that day, he thinks it couldn’t have turned out better. He says it was worth it. He needed this house. It was the only place his organization could have used. The Cause was more important than his mother’s art or his sister’s health. After Summer ran away, Silas smashed her sculptures. It’s the only thing he regrets, other than not saving Phoebe. But he knows the place is more useful to him now than it was when his family was alive. It’s not a matter of sacrifice. It’s just the way it happened.

And Silas looks with pride upon the training youths on his compound and he thinks some day they’ll make the difference they wish to see in the world. He knows sometimes force isn’t an option, it’s a duty. He’s reconciled himself to that. He believes what he sees every day is more violent than any armed resistance. And he’s not entirely wrong about that, either. His people would rather give their lives up for peace than for the war machine. They know they’ll die either way. They’re out here in Brandaniel, avoiding conscription, but training for an entirely different war.

That war will not be announced on casters. There won’t be a build-up, a drive. It will come to the people who least expect to be personally affected by war- the people who start wars. The people on top.

Silas could have been one of them. But that wasn’t him. He didn’t want that. He doesn’t want to take credit or impose. He sees himself as a liberator.

Sometimes, you have to set the sad clown free.

Post-Scarcity Is Not Science Fiction, It's Liberation :: Why we don't need ubertech to achieve this goal

 My readership deserves a more optimistic perspective, and I believe that Leftism is based on optimism, not cynicism. Cynicism is what turns old radicals into liberals, and liberals into moderates, and conservatives. It’s what turns conservatives into the Far Right. That’s not for me. I have hope, not for parties or our current political system, or our current socioeconomic order, but for people.

So, I am going to attempt outline my mind-bogglingly simple theory about how a post-scarcity future is not science fiction.

Ready for this?

We could have a post-scarcity, post-disparity economy now, if we got rid of capitalism and put technology to work for the working class.

How, you ask me?

Since the 1960s, we have had the technological capability to build a slower-than-light but long-ranged interstellar starship that could reach another solar system within my lifetime. It could be powered by any number of nuclear drives, likely a variant of the Orion Drive (nuclear pulse drive) or another existing model of interstellar propulsion, like an Enzmann Starship or a Medusa Drive (fission sail). The technology exists, but it is monopolized by governments and private industry. And that is why it has never been done, not because we can’t, but because our leaders are unwilling to take a risk that would threaten their own power.

Any civilization capable of this feat- and we are such a civilization- would also be able to eliminate most scarcity and establish a totally classless, much more egalitarian society. It would not be utopia because new social problems would arise, but a classless society, in my mind, could better navigate the nuances of those problems. For example, automation or artificial intelligence would not be a threat to a work-voluntary society, and people who find meaning in work could still labor out of passion or love. We don’t need AI or even such a starship to do this, merely having the capability to do build such a starship is enough. It would be more than enough energy to feed, clothe and shelter the entire planet's poulation, and it would be concurrent with full wealth redistribution. Money would go the way of the dinosaurs, and the future would be bright. Not perfect, but better.

The theme of my novel, “Rentkids,” which I am attempting to publish, is that “better than nothing” is never “enough.” Some people call this idealistic. I think it’s realistic, and pragmatic, from an anarchist perspective. Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the democratization of daily life, work and family. The Starfarers in my stories and novels, such as “Rentkids,” are a nomadic group of spacefaring revolutionaries. Their society is not perfect- they have their biases, such as when confronted with the hyper capitalist world of Tantalus II where the main characters hail from. But their society is egalitarian enough that their humanity can wither away those biases. I don’t believe society will ever be perfect. All societies are complex and nuanced. But I think we can navigate nuance and complexity better and with justice if we liberate technology from the elites. I don’t believe in a technocratic meritocracy. I don’t like the fetishization of intelligence or its conflation with morality, ethics or values. But I am not an anti-intellectual, and I am anti-elitist. I believe anarchism resolves these conflicts. It resolves church and state. It resolves science and religion. Anarchism is the liberation of people from division and conquest by the ruling class. To do this, we must liberate ourselves from bourgeois values. We, the People, must aim to rise not from our class, but with our class, in the words of Eugene Debs, labor organizer and one of the founders of the IWW.

I believe in Eugene Debs’ credo, quoted from his statement upon conviction under the Espionage Act in 1918, for which he was persecuted for opposing conscription in a war fought mostly by monarchs and the political class of liberal democracies:

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said them, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

I believe in the spirit of that statement. I believe it encapsulates solidarity. I believe it is a blueprint for a better future.

It’s not science fiction. It’s liberation.

A Very Strange Social Work-y Dream That Would Probably Make A Good Story

 Full disclosure: I am on Chantix, and it's awesome. It's reducing my tobacco cravings. And it gives me weird dreams. The good kind of weird.

I am a child welfare worker and this was a dream about child welfare. Sort of.

Let me start at the beginning.

Real life context: before you can get cases in Philadelphia's partially privatized (thanks, neoliberals!) child welfare system, there is a 3-month training.

In my dream, during my training, I shadowed another child welfare worker on a visit to a family in need. The family consisted of three children, a boy of about 12 years old, and his two little sisters. There were two parents, who were both dying (I am not sure what was killing them but it was sort of disease), and had also been laid off from their jobs. The family needed help and my agency was working with them to secure permanency for the kids after the parents were gone.

They lived in a building near where I grew up, that was like a mall, with a shopping concourse, but it also had low-rent apartments. This building had a number of elevators, as well as a bank of huge slides from the top floor all the way down, with airport-level security just to use the slides.

By coincidence, several months later, I moved into this same building with a big-hearted but naïve yuppie roommate whose mother was a fading starlet of a bohemian artist, who lived in a retirement complex nearby, that was full of aging bohemians. I liked her, we got along very well, and became friends.

To help pay the rent, my friend Stephan and I bought a big blue truck and sold Captain Picard merchandise like commemorative plates and coffee mugs outside the building. For some reason, Stephan had to leave, and I needed to go upstairs, so we left the truck unattended. While I was upstairs in my apartment, I saw through the window that the three children from the distressed family (who were now my neighbors) were stealing my truck!

My side business impacted, I went to confront the children's parents, hoping they would remember me, but I encountered another child welfare worker who was frustrated because no one would answer the door. I don't remember the next part of the dream, but somehow I found myself inside the apartment, where I learned that the parents had died, and the children were left on their own. They were living in filth and eating only candy. The 12-year old boy was trying to take care of his younger sisters, but they were running out of money, and he had marked the days left on their calendar until he planned to join the Army with a fake ID to support his family. I immediately filed a report on the situation and the children were taken into DHS custody.

Then, my big-hearted but naïve yuppie roommate decided he wanted to adopt the kids, but I felt the kids needed to be in a more therapeutic environment than the apartment of two bachelors. I wanted them to go to a therapeutic foster home. But my yuppie roommate couldn't separate his compassion from his ego, so I visited his mother in the retirement complex nearby to ask her to convince her son to let us do what was best for the kids. I also didn't want them in my home because they stole my truck and sold it, along with all the Captain Picard merchandise that was helping to pay my rent.

Then, it turned out that one of the names on the report was confused with a similarly named celebrity, and DHS accused me of "bad faith reporting." But I pointed out that only the person's last name was the same, and the report was validated. Then, I went through security and was allowed to use the slide.

That's when the dream ended.

Yes, I am in therapy.