Month: March 2024

OCF Drought Warning – The Curse Has Come Upon Me

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

Folks, the next nine days will be terribly busy ones for me.  I’ll be away from my desk and a virtual prisoner for most of the day during this period.  I will attempt to keep the quotes and photos stocked if I can.  And I’ll try to have some content available if time and circumstance allow.  But truth be told, things will be kind of quiet here at the site while I do penance for a decision that I am already regretting.  No good deed ever goes unpunished.

The Future History of the People’s Revolt

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, My Fiction, OCF, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews

Writing my sniper story has been an interesting project.  I’ve recently realized that it provides me with a way to escape from the repressive environment that we find ourselves in.  I can imagine a world where people find a way to escape from the Left’s stranglehold on our lives.  Science fiction was often described as escapist fiction; an escape from the real world.  Dreaming of a trip to the Moon or Mars was a highly enjoyable pastime.  I remember as a kid going to the library and taking out the Heinlein juveniles one by one and wishing there were a hundred instead of a dozen or so.  I guess it’s human to dream about a richer or more exciting or a better world.

And when I was a kid, we then got the Apollo program and we really did go to the Moon.  Well, maybe we actually will revolt from the Left.  After all, it’s been done.  The Soviet Union fell.  Communism or Wokeism or whatever anti-freedom regime we find ourselves under is no godlike entity.  It’s just people who crave control over others to enrich themselves.  Surely such an enterprise can be swept away if it ceases to provide the population with a reason to keep it going.

So, I don’t flatter myself that whatever MacGuffin I invent to carry my story forward; whether it be nuclear powered drilling equipment or fusion reactors or giant lasers; has any special rationale for really coming true.  But that’s not really important.  Just as the terra-forming capability that Heinlein’s stories are based on, is completely fictitious and the Earthlike conditions on his Mars and Venus stories are completely erroneous does nothing to ruin the enjoyment that these stories afforded and still allows a fan of these stories to imagine that actual planetary exploration is an exciting and worthwhile human endeavor.  After all, a manned mission to Mars is something being seriously discussed and planned.

So, I plan to write a series of stories in a fictitious future where a band of plucky heroes upset and upend the oligarchs who currently run our world and make a fight out of regaining their freedom.  As with Heinlein’s Future History, not all of the stories may be aligned with each other.  I can always cover up my mistakes by pleading alternate realities in the “multiverse.”  Sure, why not?  If Marvel can have multiple spidermen then why can’t I play fast and loose with the future?

Now I’m not doing anything that isn’t already out in the world.  In about two weeks a movie is opening up called “Civil War.”  And this movie has the United States broken into warring factions and a ground assault on the White House.  So, my stories will be well within the mainstream.  The only difference is that probably this movie and any other movies or “best sellers” that come out will cast the Left as the heroes and the Right as the awful traitors.  Well, that’s alright.  To each his own I always say.

So, thanks, to Uncle Bob Heinlein for his inspiration.  I’m officially in the future prediction business.  But in the words of L. Sprague de Camp “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”  So, I better learn to be vague.

New Identities and Myths

photog Current Events , ,

The Left has gone to great lengths to tear down the American Identity and its Myths.  By foisting identity politics into the center of the culture and openly destroying all the historical icons; The Founding Fathers, various heroes and even the institution of the family; they’ve snapped the bonds that united the people living here.  Now this was done intentionally to encourage strife between people based on race, sex and sexuality.

And to a very great extent they’ve been wildly successful.  I can attest to that personally.  They’ve managed to make patriotic allegiance to the current regime in Washington look like a sad joke.  And they’ve drained the joy out of sports, fraternal organizations and even the Boy Scouts.  Even many mainline Christian denominations have been infected with woke hatred for what this country used to be.

Wildly successful.

So, all that’s true.  They’ve smashed the culture down to the ground.  But at the same time, that means we’re free to build from the ground up.  We can keep whatever we want from the old.  We can toss out whatever no longer suits us and we can add in whatever helps us to build a new identity and new myths.

And I’m sure it’s already happening.  When the Left rejects the Fourth of July and embraces instead “Juneteenth,” it allows us to take ownership of the Fourth and make it what we want it to be.  Maybe it can have a double meaning.  It looks back to the original founding of the country but now it can also stand for a new declaration of independence.  We can declare ourselves independent of the coercive guilt that the Left tried to force on us.  We can begin to build our own organizations and platforms and companies that serve our needs.  Eventually we’ll build a new political party that will replace the Republican Party too.

But most important we’ll create new myths to replace the old ones that have been shown to be obsolete.  These things will be the hardest of all to replace.  The hardest one to lose was the myth that all Americans were brothers.  That despite all of our differences and squabbles when the chips were down, we would all band together to fix problems and strive to make America the shining city on the hill where our children would inherit a better and richer world than we had.  But the Left has burned that dream in the streets of the George Floyd insurrection.  We are not one nation and the Left is not under God and liberty and justice is not for all but only for the favored ones that the regime elects.

So that’s what we’ll have to do.  We’ll make our own rules and our own ways of working with each other and against those who hate us.  And we’ll come up with stories that explain how things work in the new world we now live in.

Maybe it won’t be a single new identity.  The days of a single culture or even a couple of cultures may give way to a host of different identities.  I could see the Hispanic people dominating the Southwest and the Northeast remaining as the old New England identity mixed with a hodge-podge of things added.  The Old South might rise again.  But what won’t happen is a return to what was.  You have to believe in a myth to keep it alive and the old American myth is as dead as a dodo.  And no amount of flag waving or exhortations for God to bless America can bring it back.  The Left buried it and they’ll have to live with the consequences.