Over the past few years, especially among book lovers, there’s been a continual undercurrent of dissatisfaction with chain bookstores, and I’d be the first to admit that I have my problems with the big box bookstores.  Certainly, those who’ve followed this site for several years know that I felt from way back that Borders was badly managed, but what I find interesting is that I’ve seen very little on what led to the rise of the mega-bookstore… and it wasn’t just corporate greed. Because I’m an author and because I’ve been to well over a thousand bookstores of all sizes and shapes in almost every state in the United States [excepting five], however, I may have a slightly different perspective from others.

Over the last thirty years especially, the book business has changed dramatically, the most significant factors, in my opinion, being the collapse/centralization of the wholesale distribution network and the closure of more than 2,000 smaller mall stores. The closure of the mall stores resulted from a failure of Borders, in particular, to realize exactly what those stores did, which was to increase the reader base while providing a very modest profit.  That modest profit wasn’t enough for the corporate types, unfortunately, and they thought large destination stores would provide higher margins, which they do [if run well, which Borders was not], but almost everyone who goes to a big chain store is a dedicated buyer… and the closure of the mall stores left entire areas of major cities with no convenient bookstore. With the centralization of the wholesale distribution networks, most of the bookracks in drugstores and elsewhere vanished, as did the local expertise on what sold where. These factors have reduced the number of readers and buyers, as well as led to the growth of the large book chains, including WalMart’s book sections, and, in turn, to aggressive price discounting on best-sellers. That aggressive pricing made the economics unworkable for many small independent booksellers.

Yet for all the woe and hand-wringing by some authors and others, I have very mixed feelings about smaller bookstores.  I love their passion and their love of books, and their dedication to literacy and reading, but… having visited scores of them, one thing stands out in my mind.  Except for a comparative few specialty F&SF stores [less than thirty nationwide in 1990, and less than a handful today], very few of the small independents carried much fantasy and science fiction.  I’m fortunate if I see more than three or four of my titles in any small independent bookstore, and generally there is only one copy of each. This is true of even F&SF top best-sellers as well, if with a few more copies of each title. Now… there are exceptions, such as the small store in my home town, but they’re rare.  On the other hand, the big box chains carry almost all my fantasy titles, and if they didn’t, I’d be looking for a day job or eking it out on what I’ve saved over the years.  The plain fact is that big-box stores have supported genre fiction far more than have the small independents, and that’s especially true for fantasy and science fiction.  What’s also true is that the old dispersed wholesale rack system also supported genre fiction more than the independents did.  So now, the only real outlet for a broad range of genre fiction, especially F&SF, appears to be the big box stores.

Some authors in the field are optimistic that the internet will provide another outlet, besides Amazon and B&N.com, but I have my doubts, simply because most readers don’t want to search author sites and the like – at least not until they know the author and his or her works.

So… like it or not, for now those of us in the F&SF field are pretty much tied to the big box boys and Amazon… because for all of the concern about the independents, much as I like them and their devoted people, the independents alone can’t come close to supporting the field… although that’s something that far too many authors won’t admit publicly.

The other day, my brother sent me a copy of the final column of a retiring columnist [Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinal].  If the column is representative of Mr. Reese’s views, I’m glad to see him no longer in print and wish him a very happy retirement.  His view was that all of our ills as a society can be laid to 545 people – the Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, because not one of the taxes, not one of the federal budgets, not one of the federal regulations, not one of the deficits, and not one of the federal court decisions that have led to the mess we’re in could have taken place without the acts of those individuals… and that each and every one of them could have said “no.”

And, in the strictest and most simplistic sense of the word, he’s absolutely right.  But in the larger sense, he’s absolutely wrong… because we live in a representative democratic republic, and we, as voters or non-voters, decide who represents us every two years. As some of you may know, I spent some 18 years in Washington, D.C., first as the legislative director for a congressman, then as the staff director for his successor, then as the head of legislation and congressional relations for the U.S. EPA, and finally as a consultant, i.e., beltway bandit, representing corporations before the Congress and the Executive Branch.  Given that I’ve also worked in private industry and as a small businessman, not to mention as a Navy pilot, I’ve seen how government works and doesn’t work pretty much from all sides.  And it’s anything but simple.

I’ve known personally dozens of representative and senators, and professionally dealt with hundreds of them… and well over 90% of them faithfully and diligently represented the views of the majority of the voters who elected them.  It’s all well and good to extol the “good old days” when the USA was the economic power of the world with balanced budgets and prosperity… but that often wasn’t the case.  Even before the Great Depression, there were other brutal depressions and financial collapses, and certainly in World War II, the budget was far from balanced.  By the time of the Great Depression, the majority of Americans were ready to move away from unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism, and they showed it in their support of Franklin Roosevelt and whom they elected to Congress.  With unemployment over 25%, and breadlines everywhere, with older people in poverty, who could blame them?  They voted for what they thought they wanted, as they did before, and as they have ever since.

Since I left Washington, have my representatives and senators represented my views?  Hell no!  But my views aren’t in the majority where I live.  And because only a little more than half the eligible voters actually vote, especially in off-year elections, it may well be that many senators and representatives do not represent the views of the majority of their constituents, but only the views of the majority of those who vote… but that’s not the fault of the Congress.  It’s the fault of those who fail to vote.

To blame the problems in Washington on a Congress and a President that reflect the views of the majority of voters is not only simplistic, but it’s also taking the easy way out.  Recent elections have shown, more than ever, that any representative or senator who goes against the wishes of the majority of voters in his or district or state usually gets tossed out.  The plain fact of the matter is that the majority of voters, for better or worse, really don’t want fiscal discipline.  They don’t want cuts in the federal programs that benefit them, only in those that benefit someone else, and they don’t want to pay more taxes, although it might be all right if someone else did.  And Congress has continued to listen to them and reflect their wishes.

Would any of us want a government that didn’t?  That would be even worse than what we have… and what we have isn’t all that wonderful at the moment, but it’s still better than the alternatives.  The problem isn’t the structure, and it isn’t the Congress.  As Pogo said many years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Although most Americans would deny it, a great number are actual employ one aspect of fantasy in their day to day lives, at least when it comes to their relationship with politicians and government.  They employ “magic thinking” – the belief that one particular single “magic wand” will resolve the problems with government.  For those on the left, in general, their magic wand is more government programs and more comprehensive government programs.  For those on the right, their magic wand is lower taxes and less government.

Both sides, of course, are living in a fantasy world stranger than anything I’ve ever written, but any attempt to inject a strong dose of reality into their magic thinking results in violent rejection, and, with that sort of rejection, it shouldn’t be any surprise that those who represent them in Congress offer equally strong reactions to any legislative proposal that conflicts with their fantasy view of the world.

Those on the right continue to insist that all will be well if government just unleashes the power of “free enterprise,” but to which free enterprise are they referring?  The free enterprise of the banking system that accepted something like a trillion dollars in government funding while using it primarily to build reserves while also finding ways to invest in anything except rebuilding jobs in the United States?  Or the corporate free enterprise system that continues to automate and outsource jobs while reducing jobs to increase profits to record levels?  Or the government free enterprise system that has implemented massive cuts in education and modified our tax system so that corporate farmers get subsidized and hedge fund managers pay a smaller percentage of taxes than do police, firefighters, and teachers?

On the left, those “magic thinkers” continue to insist that greater and greater deficit spending will create jobs through massive income subsidies when a huge amount of that spending is used to buy imported goods and foreign oil.  They continue to insist that more spending on education will improve the system when they undermine it continually in a myriad of ways, ranging from blaming the teachers for everything to insisting that college-oriented education is the only way for every student.  At the same time, they drive all too many good teachers out of the field through low salaries and outrage at those who insist on high standards for students.  They want more government programs, but only if those programs are paid for by someone else, which has resulted in more than half the population paying no federal income taxes at all.

And all too many of them would believe [if they read my books, which most won’t] that my works, which shows costs for dreams and change, are just too fantastic to believe.  And, come to think of it, in today’s United States… maybe they’re right.

For a society seemingly governed by the bottom line, we Americans have always had difficulty in recognizing and accurately assessing any cost that isn’t expressed in dollars. We’ll cost-compare the price of any good at each place where it’s available and generally travel extra distances to get the “best” deal, while ignoring the costs of time expended, the extra gasoline, or the impact on the environment… or the cost to the community as a whole.  That’s the principal reason why such retailers as WalMart, Costco, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, and other big box retailers have come to dominate local economies… and why Amazon is squeezing out many bookstores.  [It’s far from the only reason why chain bookstores came to dominate the bookselling industry, and that’s something I’ll address in a later blog].

But there are other costs to a society dominated by the bottom line, and one of them is a growing societal inability to assess and appreciate quality in any way except as a trade-off between price and “quantity,” which includes the number of features and capabilities a good has, regardless of their applicability and usefulness.  The “more” something has, the better it is.  With this societal tendency has come a change in language usage as well, call it linguistic inflation [and that inflation has been pressed into service in aiding and abetting the excessive use of praise].

Whatever happened to the praise “good job,” which meant just what the words signified? These days, especially among the young, telling someone that their accomplishment was “merely” good is taken as faint praise indeed, if not as an actual insult.  For praise to be worth anything, the words used must go far beyond good.  The accomplishment must be great, wonderful, awesome, most excellent, or even greater superlatives must be employed in service of description.

The same is true of products or people… or anything being evaluated or described.  We’ve become the society of superlatives, where a simple adjective or adverb will not suffice… and in turn, all such superlatives have become largely worthless, because everything is being described in superlatives.  If you will, comparative terms have become so supersized that there’s no meaningful comparison possible.

It doesn’t end there, unfortunately, because these linguistic excesses bleed over into other aspects of society, such as the media and politics, where such terms as “death panels” and other exaggerations are routinely bandied about with little concern for accuracy, either in degree of scope or degree.  It used to be that inflation referred only to the currency and meant that the money was worth less and less because it took more and more of the currency to buy less and less in real goods. But now, it seems, not only is the currency inflated, but so are the linguistic terms on which we rely to convey worth and value, with the result that, with all the exaggeration and hyperbole, very few Americans really have any true measure of much of anything these days… but then, perhaps I’m deluding myself, and they never did.

Still… it would be nice if we could call a spade a spade, rather than either a superannuated digging implement.  

 Recently, I’ve been spending more time among college professors, that is, in addition to my wife, and their observations on students have confirmed certain trends among younger Americans, trends that I, perhaps curmudgeonly, find disturbing, including a certainly behavior that can only be described as addictive.

To what am I referring?  The almost insatiable desire for endless praise.  The craving by students to be told over and over how wonderful they are.  The desire to be praised, if only for effort, even when their achievements merit neither praise nor acknowledgement.

Now… we all desire praise.  I know I certainly do, but praise  based on inadequate accomplishment is like junk food  – without much spiritual nutrition –and that leaves those who receive such empty praise hungry for more.  Yet our educational system is so concerned with not hurting young people [and not upsetting their parents] and motivating them solely through “positive” means that the message that comes through is that everything that they do – or even try – is “wonderful.”  Subconsciously, I suspect, in many, many cases, these young people know that their acts and accomplishments are not that stupendous, but it’s hard to protest being praised.  Unfortunately, this societal behavior has several ramifications that are anything but good.

The first is a form of “praise inflation.”  Such evaluations as “a solid job,” “competently done,” or “good job” – or a grade of “C” or even “B,” are regarded as failure.  The second is that most young people fail to understand that in most of the world, solid accomplishment is not a cause for praise – it’s what is expected.  The third is that they become ever more hungry for praise, like addicts for their next fix.

They become “praise junkies.”

 And, as praise junkies, they resent accurate assessment of their performance and manifest anger, or at least resentment, at those who won’t provide their next fix.  Teachers and professors who attempt to provide accurate and constructive assessment are regarded either as teachers who “hate”“ them or as bad”  teachers who cannot teach or who are trying to keep them from becoming successful, when, in fact, in most cases, those teachers are trying to prepare them for the real world, or at least for the reality of occupational competition that exists outside of the growing empty praise culture of the United States.

The symptoms of this excessive praise culture are everywhere, from little leagues where everyone gets a trophy or a ribbon, in schools where effort is considered as equivalent to actual achievement and rewarded as such and where every student gets As and Bs, and even by legislation such as No Child Left Behind, which fails to recognize that the only way no child can be left behind is when there are no real standards of actual achievement… because there are always those who cannot and/or will not meet real standards of academic achievement, and it’s a societal delusion to think otherwise.

But… after all, if you praise children, that’s all it takes to get real achievement.