As some of my readers know, these days I binge-read fiction on business trips or other travels, and, for the most part, I make an effort to search out books and authors I haven’t read, as well as books that deal with what I’d call interesting subjects or more familiar subjects addressed in a unique fashion.

The problem is, at least for me, that, beneath the veneer of “new and different” claimed by publishers and authors, I’m finding that there really isn’t all that much truly new and different. Oh, there are definitely books that deal with “new and different,” but not nearly so many as the publishing hype might suggest. Perhaps that’s always been the case, and perhaps when an author gets older, and has read as many books in the field as I have, it’s just harder to find something that’s truly different.

But I’m not so certain about that. Tolkien re-invented heroic fantasy with The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t even count the number of follow-ons and knock-offs. As far as I can determine Fred Saberhagen re-invented the vampire genre with The Dracula Tape in 1975 [Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire wasn’t published until May of 1976], although one could also claim that Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend [1954] was the first of the true twentieth century vampire “re-births,’ but Matheson’s blood-suckers were more “generic.’ Saberhagen also pioneered the whole idea of malevolent, non-gendered cyber beings with his berserker stories, something that tends to get overlooked in all the hoopla about Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and its sequel.

Certainly James Tiptree, Jr., [Alice Bradley Sheldon], Joanna Russ, Sheri Tepper, and Ursula K. LeGuin were questioning gender roles and societal norms some thirty years ago, and even in 1987 Melissa Scott wrote The Kindly Ones, a masterful work in which it is impossible to determine with any certainty the gender of the protagonist.

The Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones are essentially huge-scale epic fantasies, with a few twists, that, in my mind, at least, fall into the post-Tolkien follow-on school.

Now, as I’ve noted in some of my comments on what I’ve read, there are still books with unique twists on old themes and some few with new themes, and I’m still looking, but it just could be that, as I’m getting older, it’s just harder to surprise me.

What do you think… and what books have struck you as unique… and why?

Donald Trump’s initial reaction to the questions raised by federal appellate judges about his Executive Order establishing a travel ban clearly establishes his viewpoint – again. Anything he believes is right is indeed right, and it doesn’t matter what judges, history, or the Constitution say, because he is right. Even after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the stay on the travel ban, Trump insisted that the Court was wrong and that the Supreme Court will see it his way.

Since the Ninth Circuit merely ruled on the issue of not allowing the ban to take effect until it is fully reviewed by the judicial system, it’s certainly possible that some version of the ban will be approved. In time, in fact, that’s very likely to occur, but it most likely won’t be the ban that Trump initially proposed.

The ban issue also is merely one facet of an unfortunately larger issue. The man who outsourced the production of all of the consumer products bearing his name (but who champions verbally U.S. production while avoiding it) is “right.” The man who stiffed scores of contractors is “right.” The man who insisted for years that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen is “right.” The man who promised a clean sweep of corruption and business as usual in Washington and who started his administration by appointing the wealthiest and most “business as usual” types as his cabinet picks is “right.”

This is a man who refuses to accept proven and verifiable facts that contradict him and who attacks personally the people who cite such facts to oppose him.

I’m not sure which appalls me more, the fact that Trump is so arrogantly sure about what is clearly not so, while being blatantly hypocritical, or the fact that some 48% of U.S. citizens apparently believe him, and more than 55% approve of the travel ban.

We truly live in a polarized country, so polarized that what is accepted as fact depends more on ideological beliefs than concrete and provable evidence. Polls show fairly clearly that more and more people are rejecting provable facts that don’t agree with what they wish to believe, and Trump is not only playing to this weakness but doing so in a way that attempts to destroy the credibility of anyone and any institution that disagrees with him… and his supporters and 90% of Republicans are lapping it up, according to a recent poll by Emerson College.

This sort of attack on the media isn’t new. A then-little-known German politician started the same way in the late 1920s, with blistering attacks on those who opposed him, with deceptive statements and outright falsifications, and by the early 1930s had complete control of Germany.

In 1935, the novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel entitled It Can’t Happen Here about a U.S. politician taking power in the same way. But it can happen here, particularly if Trump and his supporters are allowed to flout the laws and tell blatant falsehoods without being challenged. All it takes is 51% of the voters to vote for such behavior on a continuing basis.

Political disagreements are endemic and necessary in our system of government, but vicious personal attacks by the President and his staff, blatant lies and falsehoods, and, in particular, personal attacks on other branches of government that disagree with the President are neither necessary nor desirable. Nor are attacks on a free press anything but a disservice to us all.

President Trump has unleashed his pen and set forth something like twenty Executive Orders, in an apparent effort to carry out a number of his campaign promises. What is obvious about this rush of rash action is that neither Trump nor his advisors have thought through the implications and ramifications of those orders, nor the legal requirements under the Constitution.

One of the basic rights under the Constitution is the right to fair treatment under law, and a keystone of that is the right to due process of law. Certainly, the travel ban doesn’t seem to comply with the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which states that “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” Procedural due process requires that government officials follow fair procedures before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property, and those procedures minimally require the government to afford the person notice and an opportunity to be heard.

That apparent failure was one of the legal bases for the various lawsuits to stay or lift the travel ban.

Beyond the legal issues are the practical issues. Forty university presidents signed and sent a letter to Trump protesting the ban, noting that they had students, professors, and university employees scattered across the globe, and that many were being summarily detained or denied a return to the United States, and that the travel ban would have an adverse effect on those universities and individuals. What seemed to be overlooked is that the U.S. hosts over four million international students, and a great number come from countries where Islam is the prevailing religion.

In addition, businesses and non-profit organizations with international activities would also be affected in a similar fashion, and the “roll-out” imposed significant costs and disruptions upon the airlines as well – all without a significant impact on terrorism.

Like it or not, we live in a high-tech, complex global economy, and simplistic, or “simple,” solutions are seldom suited to resolving problems, especially when they’re thrust without notice or warning on unsuspecting travelers, businesses, and, especially, the government officials who are supposed to implement them.

Yes, we’ve had some terrorist acts in the United States, but we’ve likely had more deaths recently caused by driving or walking while texting than terrorist killings. We’ve certainly had more deaths caused by good U.S. citizens killing each other or themselves with firearms, or in vehicle accidents, and I don’t see any Executive Orders banning texting, drunken driving, or detaining anyone carrying a firearm. But our good President can certainly whip out an Executive Order banning anyone from seven countries from entering the United States on the grounds that a handful might be terrorists.

Yes, we likely do need a careful vetting of immigrants, but that’s been going on all along. For the past several years, under present security procedures, the number and percent of Islamist-inspired terrorist activities is quite low in the U.S., and some of those acts have been carried out by people who were either raised here or born here and who would not have been precluded from those acts by the travel ban. We’ve also had some nasty native-born terrorists over the years, such as Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, or senseless killings of six-year-olds by automatic weapons at Sandy Hook elementary school, but those didn’t seem to require Executive Orders to address.

Equally important, a slap-dash ban will only increase the incentive for that minute fraction of Islamic believers who are terrorists to radicalize more people. That’s a far greater danger than that posed by refugees and immigrants, and also an example of the damage hasty and ill-thought campaign promises can create when dashed off as Executive Orders.

With Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, liberals are fuming, and conservatives are rejoicing. Both ought to be weeping.

The “battle” over the appointment of a justice to succeed the late Antonin Scalia hasn’t been a battle over law, or justice, but a fight over who can impose what on whom. And it’s a fight we shouldn’t be having, one that the Founding Fathers very much tried to avoid, both in the structure of our government and in the clause that was designed to separate church and state.

That clause was included in the Right of Rights specifically because European history of the previous centuries had essentially been a series of “religious wars” fought to determine who could impose whose belief system on whom.

The conservative religious right in the United States very much wants secular law to embody their religious beliefs, and, where possible, they’ve attempted to accomplish just that. The ultra-liberal left tends to want to impose what one might call mandated equality of outcomes, as opposed to true equality of opportunity.

The right doesn’t really want true equality of opportunity because it would destroy the world they know by getting rid of legacy admissions to Ivy League universities, limiting preferential education and opportunity based on familial resources, removing female deference to men and acknowledging that women do not have to be brood mares, eliminating male gender superiority in virtually all economic and political structures, and by requiring an acceptance of all individuals based on character, ability, and accomplishment.

The left doesn’t really want true equality of opportunity because it would reveal that, regardless of anything else, individuals have different capabilities; that certain cultures and cultural practices are in fact toxic, that certain other cultures and cultural practices do in fact achieve better results, that effort without competence and ability is meaningless, and that all the government programs in the world cannot elevate those unwilling to make the effort…among other things.

And both sides tend to be resolute in their view that compromise is unacceptable; even while decrying the same sort of unyielding religious warfare that is taking place in the Middle East.

As I’ve written before, justice is an ideal, an ideal that can never be reached, but one that we should aspire to, nonetheless, while law is an imperfect tool, albeit one of the best we have, in an effort to achieve justice… but it is not the only tool. Without understanding, compassion, and compromise, law becomes a tyrant. And right now both sides want absolute control of that tool, rather than seeking a way to keep it from imposing a tyranny on the non-believers, i.e., the other side.

During a discussion with a friend, who spent a career in the production side of popular music, ending up as the head of a fairly well known record label, the question came up as to what actually constituted a “standard” in popular music, that is, a song recorded and/or covered by a number of well-known performers. Our friend the former music industry executive immediately pointed out that each generation had its “standards,” to which I rejoined that not all “standards” were necessarily equal, because there can be a difference between standards, particularly given in the technical skill of the composer and performer of one generation’s standard, and that of another generation’s standards, and that there also can be a great difference between popularity and artistic excellence.

That brings up several questions. First, how can a listener tell the difference? Second, does it really matter? And third, assuming that one can tell the difference, why does it matter?

To begin with, most listeners can’t tell the difference, not really, because a listener can’t tell the difference if he or she hasn’t listened to a broad range of music, and the majority of listeners tend to listen in a narrow comfort range, both in terms of type of music and the time and style in which it is/was played or recorded. In addition, if someone doesn’t know something about the technical side of both instrumental and vocal music production, the distinctions are merely based on likeability or familiarity. That’s fine from a personal point of view, but it means that such a person really can’t see how music has changed.

Does being able to see the changes and what they indicate really matter? Again, on the level of whether one enjoys the current “standards,” it doesn’t. On a cultural and societal level, I’d submit that it does. When complex melodic patterns are replaced on a wide scale by short melodic repetitions, when repetitive rhythms and percussive effects overshadow melody and meaning, when lyrics become increasingly crude and simplistic in popular music, those all reflect a considerable societal change. But anyone who hasn’t listened to poplar music spanning decades or hasn’t studied it won’t even see the change, much less consider the implications.

Popular music is symptomatic of culture, and the issue goes well beyond music. The same issues apply to popular fiction, what art is popular, what movies and television shows earn the most or have the highest audience ratings, and even what theatre is most popular – or what entertainment form is dominant.

The majority of those immersed in a society/culture really don’t see, let alone question, what such changes mean… and what they foretell. Part of that is that most members of any culture don’t understand their own history, let alone the broader path of past history.

In the early days of Rome, gladiatorial contests were rare, and semi-religious. Chariot racing was small-time. By the time of the empire, particularly after Augustus, both had become popular blood sports. A century ago, football in the United States was a collegiate sport, and limited to comparatively few colleges at that, and baseball was the national sport. There was auto racing, but it was the habit of a few, generally wealthy, individuals.

Now, football has become the national blood sport; basketball has gone from being a generally non-contact sport to a contact sport, and NASCAR is a multi-billion dollar business. And, oh, yes, the most popular music is incredibly simplistic and linguistically almost unintelligible (while sounding pretty much all alike), and a greater percentage of movies now incorporate more and more sex and violence.

Do you see what I see?