Every thinking person should have ideals, but ideals need to be tempered with practicality.

There’s a saying that’s been attributed variously to George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, Winston Churchill, and others that goes like this: If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain. According to research by a number of individuals, the original version of this was first uttered by French historian and statesman François Guizot when he observed, “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.”

I’d put it another way. To trumpet high-sounding ideas without any practical, workable, and politically acceptable plan for implementing them is well-intentioned idiocy, but, equally, to turn one’s back on want, discrimination, and the abuse of privilege on the grounds that attempting to remedy or ameliorate those ills is impractical is not only arrogant and uncaring, but stupid, and, in the long run, often fatal to a society that ignores those needs.

And, frankly, that’s the political divide I’ve seen emerge out of the unrest in the United States today. I look at all the rhetoric on the Democratic side, addressing valid concerns and real ills… with almost no practicality in sight. You cannot raise the money to deal with those problems by merely increasing tax rates on the wealthy; under the current structure, they’re already avoiding taxes. What’s needed is a tax structure that cannot be avoided, that is seen as fair, and that is not confiscatory. I could make the same sort of case about most Democratic proposals. Of course, that’s why almost all of them talk in glittering generalities.

On the Republican side, almost all the rhetoric is about principles…or fear… principles that aren’t working well for most Americans, except for the well-off and well-educated, and fear of change, fear of anyone who is different, and fear that people won’t live as well as their parents did.

There’s another old saying, about death and taxes, but that’s not quite right. The only two things that are certain in life are that things do change… and that, sooner or later, everyone dies. We try to prolong life, but death remains. And if we don’t adapt to change, things will get worse… and we’ll die sooner.

Neither impractical ideals nor unyielding rejection of change serves anyone well, but that’s the shape of the current political divide.

This past weekend I listened to two career politicians waffle and essentially refuse to answer questions about Trump and his administration. Both were Republicans, and it was clear that they didn’t agree with what Trump had done [in one case, selling military weapons systems to the Saudis without Congressional authorization and in the other sending more troops to the Middle East], but neither wanted to disagree publicly. In my own state of Utah, Senator Mitt Romney bounces back and forth on Trump, but so far still votes for whatever Trump wants.

Congressional Republicans, for the most part, have no plans for leading, and they haven’t for years. What few initiatives they do have are based on spending more money on defense and pork barrel in their own districts, while effectively reducing programs that benefit working Americans and decreasing the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. They’ve given up the idea of a balanced budget, or even reducing the deficit, although they occasionally give lip service to it, because they know and won’t admit that, at the present time, there’s no realistic way to reduce the deficit in any meaningful way without increasing taxes on wealthier Americans.

In the meantime, across the board, Trump tries to minimize Congress and its responsibilities under the first section of the Constitution. While the Democrat-led House tries to stop this Presidential overreach, the Republican Senate does nothing. Pretty much, the Senate Republican leadership’s reaction is either “no” or a refusal to address anything but a minimal effort to keep government running. They all know that Trump’s trade war with China is a disaster for American farmers and some industries, but they refuse to admit it. While they’ll admit, if quietly, that Russian interference in our elections is a real problem, they won’t even look at the fact that Trump openly invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, or that Trump denies that he benefitted from Russian interference.

Nor will Republicans address the thousands of outright lies and falsehoods made by Trump… or his “re-tweeting” of false and falsified material, such as the distorted video of Speaker Pelosi.

Now, Trump has proposed to issue pardons for several Americans on trial for war crimes, including one who brutally murdered a helpless Middle Eastern teenager. The U.S. military strongly opposes such pardons. These wouldn’t be Trump’s first totally unwarranted pardons. In 2017 he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff convicted for refusing to end his racial profiling of the state’s Latino residents and noted for his long-standing, brutal, and dehumanizing treatment of prisoners.

Once again, most Republicans are mute, and that makes all but a very few truly gutless wonders. What’s worse is that a few Republican lawmakers even support such pardons, something I find incredibly appalling, and unfortunately reminiscent of all too many repressive regimes and dictatorships. The other appalling aspect of all of this is that over 40% of the country presently supports such a President.

Contrary to popular opinion, we do not live in a totally free society. Behavior in our society is in fact restricted by laws, laws theoretically made up by the people for the people, laws designed by the Founding Fathers to reflect a secular, i.e., non-religious, set of principles for acceptable conduct. Those Founding Fathers were so concerned about the adverse impact of religion on law that they insisted on the separation of religion from government.

What they either could not, would not, or did not foresee was that religion is merely one face of “belief.”

My seemingly ancient Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedic dictionary defines “belief” as “mental conviction of truth or actuality of anything without certain proof.” And certainly religion fits under “belief,” because it is based on the conviction, utterly without any form of physical proof, as Isaac Asimov once pointed out in detail, that there is a deity.

Unhappily, there are also other forms of belief, also without proof, that infect society today, and yet all too many “true believers” wish to restrict the acts and behaviors of others or to behave in a way that jeopardizes others on the basis of their beliefs. I certainly hold that people should be free to believe what they wish, just so long as (1) they do not force or attempt to use government to force those beliefs on others and (2) they or their beliefs do not do me, or others, harm.

The idea that there is a soul in two cells that one day may become a fetus and then a human being is not a fact, but a belief. To use that belief to deny a woman who has been raped, or who may die from a pregnancy, the right to determine her own future places a belief without proof above present and demonstrated harm to the mother. If that mother believes that, of course, and chooses not to abort those cells, that is her choice and right. But no woman should ever be denied a choice to preserve her life and her own control over it because of an unfounded belief. Likewise, once a fetus is viable outside the womb, there is absolute proof that another human life must be considered.

Some may insist that life is “priceless” or sacred. There’s absolutely no proof of that. There are far more miscarriages and spontaneous abortions than medically induced ones. In addition, every single day we calculate the value of human lives, whether through insurance, regulatory findings, lawsuits or wrongful death findings. All those are absolute proof that, for human beings, life is anything but priceless. As for the deity, at least deities in the Judeo-Christian mode, life also obviously isn’t sacred, not when various peoples have been supposedly instructed by the deity to kill others.

Anti-vaxxers believe that vaccinations are more dangerous to them and their children than the actual diseases. This is another deadly – and incorrect – belief, and there are scores of studies, as well as documented evidence, to the contrary. The problem here is that, because of this belief, those unvaccinated, particularly with regard to rubella [German Measles] and whopping cough, can infect children too young to be vaccinated, subjecting them to risk of death, or hearing and eyesight loss. The fact that, just this year, over 1,000 children in Madagascar died from measles obviously has no impact on such believers.

Scientific evidence continues to mount in support of the fact that the acceleration of global warming is human caused, yet global warming deniers choose to believe the opposite, and oppose measures to reduce, if not halt that warming. There’s massive evidence to support human caused warming… and virtually none to the contrary… and that warming trend is already causing significant deaths and massive destruction.

The problem, of course, goes beyond beliefs, because “true believers” almost always want others to share their beliefs, whether others want to or not… and whether there’s any real proof to support their beliefs.

Liberals, unfortunately, have the same problem. Faculties and students across the country protest when ultra-conservatives are scheduled to talk at their universities. While hate speech does indeed exist, having contrary views, so long as one doesn’t propose violence to others, is not hate speech. Telling students facts that they don’t want to hear, or giving them poor grades for poor performance, is not persecution, or creating a toxic environment, yet university faculty are being charged with just that because more and more students don’t want to hear facts contrary to their beliefs.

People react badly when their beliefs are challenged, even beliefs totally without proof.

That’s why the Spanish Inquisition tortured heretics to death. That’s why ISIS killed non-believers and destroyed historical antiquities that didn’t match their beliefs. It’s also why white supremists minimize and kill people of color, despite evidence that there’s absolutely no genetic link between “race” and intelligence.

That’s also why Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri legislators want women who’ve been raped to have to bear unwanted children, while sending doctors who perform abortions to jail. And, oh, yes, these are the same folks who oppose welfare, health care, and food for poor children, but they don’t seem to consider that “saving the [unwanted] unborn” results in more unwanted poor children that they don’t want to support. And that’s just one of the problems with beliefs that ignore facts.

Barbara Howes and Anne McCaffrey had very little in common, except both were writers, one a quiet but excellent poet and the other a commanding, dominating force in the development and history of science fiction. The other commonality is that I met each of them once, the first briefly… and the second, not quite so briefly.

In 1964, I studied poetry under William Jay Smith, who three years later went on to become the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Upon one occasion he had several students to his house in North Pownal, Vermont. There he briefly introduced us to his wife Barbara Howes, by saying she was also a poet.

At that time, I had no idea that I stood before two of the more talented poets of the time, both of whom later had books of poetry that were finalists for the National Book Award. To me, one was my professor, and the other was his wife. While I’d like to think that I made the most of the time I studied with William Jay Smith, the truth is that, while I certainly didn’t blow off the opportunities, I also didn’t take full advantage of them, like all too many students. And I certainly didn’t realize that Barbara Howes was far more than just another poet until years later.

My only personal meeting with Anne McCaffrey was, thankfully, more than a brief encounter, that took place at the World Fantasy Convention in London in 1997. That convention was one of the few where my wife accompanied me, and her presence made all the difference. We had barely arrived at the convention when we were summoned (and Anne did summon) to join Anne. She was seated on a raised long hotel settee and insisted that I sit on one side and that Carol Ann sit on the other. Then she asked me to sign a copy of The Soprano Sorceress, which she had blurbed most favorably. After that, we talked for perhaps ten minutes at most, before she turned to Carol Ann, and the two of them – both sopranos – talked singing for a good half-hour, to the chagrin of my publisher, who waited all that time to get a few minutes to talk to Anne.

Although Anne did offer public fulsome praise for the next Spellsong Cycle book, that time in London was the only time we actually met… and I was very glad for the opportunity.

In retrospect, I only wish I’d had enough sense to spend at least a few minutes talking to Barbara Howes.

I’m not a computer designer, coder, or programmer, but I have been using computer applications for more than thirty-five years, and I continue to be amazed at how many applications whose use is said to be “intuitive,” and then discovered that I had no “intuition.”

For example, getting to use the flashlight ap on my IPhone. The instructions seem simple enough. Swipe up from the bottom of the main screen. Except that didn’t seem to work, except occasionally, and I almost gave up on trying to use it. Eventually, I figured out why it didn’t usually work for me. For that “swipe” to work reliably, it has to be done holding the phone in one’s right hand. I’m left-handed, and to make that swipe work means either shifting the phone to my right hand, or using two hands in a most awkward and unnatural way. Yes, it’s intuitive… if you’re right-handed.

After more than fifteen years of using Word, I have yet to figure out what combination of keystrokes suddenly resets the page from a single page, centered on the screen, into multiple pages… or separated half-pages. Nor is it clear why if I type too fast and hit three keys, I’ve closed the document I’ve been working on without saving it, despite the fact that I’ve programmed Word to autosave anything I exit. I know it’s a speed key function, and I’m certain there are instructions somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find them.

Nor are improvements always better. In older versions of Word, I can do a keyword search of every file in a directory. Not so in later versions… or at least not so in any way I can discern. For the most part, I’ve had to learn, by experimentation and trial and error, a great many of the capabilities and functions of a great number of programs because very few of those functions can be accessed intuitively – unless you’re a programmer.

So don’t tell me it’s intuitive. Just label it as “requires previous familiarity with precursor or similar systems and considerable trial and error because instructions are either opaque or non-existent.”

The other day, I came across a reader comment that suggested that I’d bowed to the “PC censors” and made the protagonist of a recent book into a “beta male,” because he actually listened to women, rather than a “real hero.” The reader then went on to suggest I should go back to writing “real heroes” as in the old days and “shock the sour PC fantasy killers.”

Outside of the fact that no one gets a look at my books before they go to my editors, let alone a P.C. or any other censor, or the fact that I don’t write to please either the politically correct or the politically incorrect, the comment raises a number of preconceptions that readers have, such as the fact that there’s some small cadre of PC types who decree what books get published or that a hero or a protagonist has to fit a specific mold. While there are certainly readers, reviewers, and even some editors who push the extremes of the PC mindset, what still determines what gets published is what readers will buy. And that is why Larry Correia, Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, Patricia Briggs, N.K Jemison, Ann Leckie, Charlie Jane Anders, and I all sell a significant number of books – and we all write very differently.

There are all kinds of readers in the F&SF field, and while there’s still a large contingent of readers, mostly white males, from what I can tell, who prefer the traditional, “take-no-prisoners” male hero who loves weapons and gadgets more than women, and who expects women to know their place, I think it’s fair to say, although most of my main protagonists are male, that very few, if any, of them fall in lockstep into that stereotype. And, of course, there’s also the fact that, at last count, I’ve written something like 11 books where the main protagonist is female.

That reader comment raises the question, of course, about what a “real hero” should be in fiction. Obviously, there’s quite a range of qualities in fictional heroes in F&SF books being written and published today, and some of the ones I’ve liked the best in recent years have been heroines. For every reader, however, the “real” hero or heroine is the one with whom they can identify, or at least appreciate and come to understand.

Personally, as should be obvious from my books, I’ve always had trouble (and more as I’ve grown older) with the “take-no-prisoners” protagonist, even as I’ve written about people who’ve had to do just that, because, from what I know of history and personally witnessed and experienced, those kinds of “heroes” invariably wind up creating a massive body count, and either end up as dead or tormented for the rest of their lives. To my way of thinking, anyone who piles up bodies like that and remains unmoved and untouched isn’t so much a hero or heroine as a sociopath or psychopath.

That’s why, again in my opinion, Charyn in Endgames is more of a “real” hero, because he makes hard choices with a high personal cost and avoids the massive body count to forge a working consensus among warring classes… but that’s my view, and readers who prefer something else can certainly find it, because, despite that reader comment, there aren’t any PC censors out there. The growth of more diverse heroes and heroines with different thoughts and viewpoints just reflects a widening of those who read F&SF as well as a change in the views held by many readers.

There’s an old saying along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and swims like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” There’s also the one about “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

President Trump has not only now uttered something like 10,000 statements that are false, misleading or outright lies, but gone far beyond that. Following the duck analogy, it strikes me that it’s more than fair to call him a brazen liar. As for smoke, there’s smoke everywhere. Even from what’s been made public from the Mueller report, and from all the indictments and guilty pleas from Trump associates, it’s pretty clear that there are a number of fires, some of which, such as Russian inference in our elections, are still burning.

And the fact that Trump doesn’t want anyone to see the full Mueller report, or his taxes, or even have Mueller, or Donald, Jr., testify before Congress look like the acts of a guilty man trying to hide his crimes. He’s even saying that he’ll fight any possible impeachment all the way to the Supreme Court. Why would he even need to do that when Republicans control the Senate – unless he really is so guilty that he fears his own party will disavow him if all the facts come out?

Trump isn’t acting like an innocent man wronged by the opposing political party. He’s acting like a very guilty man, who’s using every possible stratagem to keep all the facts from becoming public.

Like I said above… if it quacks like a duck… or in this case, behaves like a guilty man…

There is often a significant difference between an ethical action and a legal action. Under current U.S. law, it’s obviously not illegal to raise the price of a drug that a child needs to stay alive from $40 to nearly $40,000, but is it ethical? I’d say it’s not, especially given the record level of profits reaped by the pharmaceutical industry. I’d even claim it’s a form of medical/health blackmail.

Is it legal for police to be stricter in enforcing the law on minorities than on Caucasians? So far, in most cases, it’s been held to be legal, but is it ethical?

Is it legal for a professional basketball team with a losing record not to play as hard near the end of the season… and possibly gain a higher draft pick? Again… so far it appears to be.

Is it legal for members of a given faith to prefer hiring those of the same faith? Or giving preference in promotions or bonuses? While discriminating by race is illegal, discrimination by faith appears to be alive and well, at least in certain parts of the U.S.

The list of such instances in the United States is long, and from what I can see, it’s getting longer. So why do I care?

Because ethics are the foundation of a healthy society. All one has to do is look around to see that. One of the reasons why tens of thousands of immigrants struggle out of certain central and Latin American countries is because of corruption and violence, and that corruption and violence are the result of totally unchecked greed on the part of governments, so-called law enforcement agencies, and even of large corporations and wealthy individuals.

One cannot instill law-abiding behavior through law enforcement. The police should represent and personify ethics through their actions, and I believe the majority do – but far from all of them. Even so, with a few exceptions, the best that law enforcement can do as an institution is to catch and remove law-breakers.

When legality is the rule, rather than ethics, more and more people do what they can, rather than what they should, and this leads to more and more corruption because no code of law can cover everything.

As a side note, this is a particular problem with corporations, because law has essentially held that a corporation’s greatest obligation is to maximize profits for the shareholders, within the confines of the law, regardless of the impact on people, on society, or on the environment. And when corporations use their revenues in support of political actions to whittle away legal protections on health and environment, in order to increase profits that are already at historical all-time highs, isn’t this greed a form of corruption?

When people see that the wealthy and the powerful can get away with anything, why should they be ethical and obey the law? And when the wealthy and powerful get more wealthy and more powerful, and it gets harder and harder for the poorer segments of society to make a living, there’s an ever-growing temptation for the non-wealthy to follow the example of the wealthy. And in countries like Honduras or Guatemala and a score of others, there’s too much violence for underpaid law enforcement to handle, partly if not largely, because the poor don’t have enough money to pay taxes, and the wealthy control the system and ensure that they’re not taxed enough to pay for public services.

Aren’t we already seeing those sorts of trends here?

Equally important… if your standard for ethical behavior is what the law allows you to get away with, you may consider yourself a law-abiding citizen, but are you really an ethical individual?

Some readers may recall that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the major U.S. publishers because, as a group, they refused to discount ebooks to Amazon, and that practice was considered a restraint of trade [it was far more complicated than that but since that’s not the point of this blog, that summary will do], and all of them eventually capitulated, even Apple, and paid fines of various amounts, none of which were insubstantial.

At that time, I wrote a letter to DOJ protesting the Department’s action because I felt that DOJ was in fact enabling not only a monopsony but a monopolistic practice where, in the end, after Amazon drove out or weakened a great number of brick and mortar bookstores and bookstore chains, Amazon would essentially replace them and prices would rise.

And what happened? The entire Borders chain went out of business; Barnes and Noble has been closing stores and cutting back on books in stock in the remaining stores; and a great number of independent bookstores closed, far more than have opened in a recent small resurgence of smaller bookstores. In addition, in effect, Amazon is also now effectively dictating some terms of sale to the publishers, which it is able to do because it’s the single largest sales outlet in the book business, and that, in effect, illustrates that Amazon is in point of fact the textbook case of a monopsony.

Even more interestingly, Amazon now has brick and mortar stores and is planning more, although the Amazon experiment with “pop-up kiosks” just ended with the closure of all 87 kiosks and an Amazon statement to the effect that Amazon would be concentrating on the more permanent Amazon bookstores.

As a result of all this, publishing margins dropped, and when those margins fell, publishers stopped publishing, or published less frequently mid-list authors or authors who had something new or different to offer but who did not sell as well. Even the incomes of many best-selling authors dropped, particularly those without an “outside” media presence.

Through its marketplace, Amazon is also doing much of the same thing to retailers across the entire United States, using lure of lower prices in the present to obtain a market position that enables it to eventually control the market and raise prices.

But that’s what Americans get for always focusing on price… even when it’s clear they’ll pay more in the long run, both in consumer prices and in jobs.