Of Busts and American Colleges

The president and the chancellor of the University of Missouri have resigned due to pressure from students over three or four unconnected campus incidents that have been characterized as racist. Now students across the country are up in arms, protesting university leadership and demanding changes to the college and financial systems of the United States.

There's no easy way to put this, so I have to say it straight out: nobody who supports trigger warnings, complains about microaggressions, or demands a "safe space" free of disagreement will ever achieve greatness in any field of endeavor worth mentioning.  And yet the American college system is where such concepts are birthed, promulgated, and put into practice. What these young revolutionaries are demanding is destructive and poorly thought out at best.  Lacking ideas, lacking the work ethic and accomplishments and education of the people they seek to destroy, what they'll replace the current system with is unworkable.  Granted, the current system is absolutely terrible, with overpaid professors filling young skulls with rancid, politicized custard from a bully pulpit, but it's better than forgiving all student loan debt, demanding free public college education, and upping the federal minimum wage to an arbitrary $15.00/hour. That doesn't just affect colleges: it affects everybody, and it's not possible to implement.

Compare that to what's going on in science fiction literature, where certain authors have been ostracized by a small but powerful (and vocal) minority devoted to redefining the genre. Their latest success is replacing the bust of H.P. Lovecraft with something else as the World Fantasy Award because Lovecraft held racist views. Renowned Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has since returned his World Fantasy Awards, saying:

I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.

Joshi correctly made the point that the outrage over Lovecraft's racism is selective, at best: John W. Campbell and Bram Stoker were also racists, yet still have awards named after them. Why?

Like the protesting college students, not one of the people supporting the removal of Lovecraft's image from the World Fantasy Award will ever achieve greatness. None of them will ever have the same effect on genre fiction that Lovecraft had. They're destroyers, not creators, and what they'll put in place of what they've torn down is without value.

Friday Links: Michael McDowell, Stephen Volk, and Asrovak Mikosevaar

The weekend looms.  Before it falls upon us like a rotten tree, let's take a look back at what happened during the week:

• Terrorphoria reviewed Stevie Kopas's third book in the Breadwinner Trilogy: "Far more action-oriented than previous installments, All Good Things is a fast read thanks to the non-stop battles raging through the Florida streets. As the group moves towards what should be their final destination, the atmosphere is downright oppressive and it never lets up." 
  
• At his extensively incisive R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton introduced us to the concept of a mathematic conte-cruel: "The word conte-cruel has an interesting etymology involving Edgar Allan Poe, his pervasive influence on certain French authors of the mid nineteenth century, and the concept’s reintroduction to America—via Ambrose Bierce and his colleagues as well as Poe earlier—through the translated works of Baudelaire and Villiers, the latter having produced a collection of stories demonstrating the concept, Contes cruels (1883)."
• Jasper Bark introduced us to Michael McDowell in his own inimitable way at This Is Horror: "“Oh really?” I replied. “This is one of my favourite books.” I knew this even though I hadn’t read it. In fact, I knew this even though I’d never heard of the book or Calvino until I’d picked it up ten seconds before, and wouldn’t read it for another six months. I knew it the moment I came across Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and that took me a decade to finally read. I know it about Malcolm Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid and I haven’t read that yet, despite owning it for two decades."
• Ginger Nuts of Horror posted part three of its awesome interview with Stephen Volk: "I thought that you automatically have empathy with a child, so in a way it is my job to make that child vivid, plausible and multi-layered, and to avoid a “cute” kind of version of childhood, especially as young Fred is going to be depicted initially as a victim. Obviously you sympathise with a child weeping and wetting his pants in a police cell, yes, but one of the points of my story is, what is the consequence of that incident? What kind of character does that kind of (albeit well-meaning) parental abuse finally create?"
• Nev Murray interviewed Duncan Ralston at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "It’s not quite hypergraphia, but if I don’t write for a while, I get the itch. I'm not sure where it came from; I used to prefer drawing, though I was never exceptional at it. I write for myself, and I’m glad to have found a small audience for my stories."
• Here, I wrote about the July 4 knife attack on a DC Metro train and pointed you to a review I wrote of Alessandro Manzetti's Eden Underground. 

This is a bit of an abbreviated Friday Links because I want to talk about something else that happened this week.  It has to do with abortion.  This will get political, obviously, and if you're offended, think about why.  As always, I'm happy to talk about these things, as long as we can remain civil.  Remember: arguments don't change minds.  Contemplation based on strength of information does.

I wrote a piece for Liberty Island that riffed on the blistering, searing hot take that Cracked wrote and then re-posted about the legalization of gay marriage.  My piece referred to the footage of Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services talking about the sales of human body parts acquired through abortion (among many other appalling things).  My thoughts on abortion are available for reading here.  It's impossible to overstate how horrific this footage is, from its subject matter to the vain but desperate attempts by abortion-friendly media outlets to downplay it, including so-called objective news outlets like the Associated Press.  I write dark, horrific stuff every day, and if I'm not writing it, I'm thinking about writing it.  This is far worse than anything my most depraved imaginings have attempted to portray.

In Michael Moorcock's extraordinary tetralogy of fantasy novels called The History of the Runestaff, there was one antagonist who was so over the top that you almost couldn't take him seriously.  His name was Asrovak Mikosevaar, and he was the mercenary Warlord of the Vulture Legion.  He bore a banner that said, in scarlet letters, Death to Life!  A madman for battle, he was always at the front lines.  In light of recent revelations regarding Planned Parenthood's business practices, Mikosevaar no longer seems quite so far-fetched.  Developing a culture that respects innocent human life takes hard work and requires that we all make difficult choices every day.  I'm up for the challenge.  Are you?

Illustration by Alain Gassner for Stormbringer's Perils of the Young Kingdoms supplement.

Hugos, Puppies, and Politics

Other than journalists, nobody likes what’s been going on with the Hugo Awards.  Even though my fiction lies mostly within the realm of horror, I’m a fan of science fiction, and like many of you, I just want to read good genre books and not deal with the political angst behind them.  It’s extremely likely that what’s happened to science fiction is going to start happening to horror (if it hasn’t already), and I don’t want to end up as the last line in a Niemöller quote.  So I will address this.

This is going to get political.  If it offends you, ask yourself why, and then feel free to discuss it with me. 

Let’s Set the Table

There is not one element of modern life that has not been politicized in some way or other.  Politics have infected everything from education to science to the environment to professional sports to individual entertainment choices.  That’s inarguable.  Who’s responsible for it can be debated elsewhere, but I defy you to find me one human endeavor that hasn’t been touched by politics. 

What the American Left has done is deny that their politics are politics at all; that is, they’ve attempted to normalize their point of view as a non-political viewpoint.  Leftism is, therefore, the natural state of things.  This explains why so many Leftists self-identify as independents, moderates or even apolitical despite espousing left-wing ideas, supporting left-wing causes, and voting for left-wing political candidates.  They’re not being political, they’re just doing the right thing.  Leftists have redefined politics as what other people do, not them.

This, of course, excludes those individuals and organizations that specifically identify as progressive, liberal, or left-wing. 

The American Right, vastly outnumbered in the entertainment, education, and journalistic industries, tends to conceal itself among the general public a little more than Leftists.  Outside of political environments, conservatives aren’t as explicit about their beliefs, in part because the right-wing point of view hasn’t been as successfully normalized in popular culture.  Right-wingers aren’t cool.  They’re sticks-in-the-mud who resist change, especially social change.   Who wants to be known as a fuddy-duddy?  A conservative might identify himself as an independent, but he’ll rarely call himself a moderate.  He is sensitive to the politicization of modern culture because he resists social change.   He has his political viewpoints and feels about them as strongly as the Leftist, but outside of places where conservatives gather, he tends to keep his cards closer to the vest. 

Until now.

Politics in the Hugos

Even the most casual observer will see that, over the last decade or so, the selection process of the Hugo Awards has fallen victim to the same politicization that so much else in our culture is subject to.  Hugo award nominees have been selected, in large part, on the basis of diversity of author, not the quality of the stories, or even if those stories meet the genre classification of science fiction (see: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love). 

When discussing diversity, almost nobody means diversity of opinion, outlook, or imagination.  They mean diversity of race, skin color, gender, social status, or sexual orientation, all of which are surface qualities that inform the intellect, but don’t define it.  They’re categories useful to those who try to appeal to specific identity groups on the basis of their external differences.  If the Hugo Awards are supposed to celebrate the best stories, then the author’s melanin content, plumbing, and what he/she does with his/her plumbing don’t matter.  What matters is quality.  What matters is diversity of story, not race.

By elevating these surface aspects of diversity, the Hugos have been politicized to deliberately exclude authors based on their skin color, gender, and political viewpoint.  White men need not apply, especially conservative white men.  Or conservatives of any color and gender.  Scalzi and his allies have altered the Hugo Awards to focus on message fiction written by people who fit their definition of diversity, not quality science fiction.  As Leftists, they don’t (or can’t) acknowledge that they’re politicizing the Hugos; to them, they’re simply doing what’s right and good and proper (and keeping the riff-raff out). 

What’s amazing is that merely pointing out that the Hugos have been politicized leaves one open to attacks of politicization, as though the accusation is enough to condemn the accuser rather than the accused.  So if I point out that Book A was nominated for a Hugo because it espouses a particular viewpoint, not because it’s a good story, I’m the one politicizing the process.  Combine this with how progressives cannot or will not acknowledge that their point of view is political, and you have a very comprehensive, if utterly transparent defense: it’s the Puppies’ fault that the Hugos are a political football because they accused the Leftists of politicizing the Hugos, which is impossible because Leftists don’t practice politics.  Also known as, “I know you are, but what am I?”  Hence, the Puppies’ efforts to nominate stories based on their criteria are, de facto, illegitimate.  It’s perfectly fine to nominate only Leftist message fiction written by Leftists, but it’s gaming the system to nominate science fiction stories written by conservatives.

It may be that you like message fiction and think that science fiction needs a broader diversity of authors to maintain the genre’s relevance in the 21st century.  In which case it’s only natural that you would decry the Puppies’ efforts.  Just know that you’re also engaging in politics.  You’ve decided to redefine the Hugo Awards to celebrate a political viewpoint rather than promote quality fiction. 

The system’s already been corrupted, already been gamed, already been politicized.  It’s just that now, the other side has decided to fight back.  If this is a problem for you, be honest with yourself about why: it may be because your politics are being challenged, not that the process has become politicized.  

Forbearance and Who We Are

I'm going to wade into the ugly lake of politics here, but not in the way you might think.  What follows might upset you.  If it does, ask yourself why.

I was lucky enough to find Sonny Bunch's essay on the concept of forbearance in the Washington Free Beacon.  If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it as an incisive piece, something that you can find yourself nodding along with as you absorb it (or, as my little boy says, "think about it with your brain").

There's a lot to it, but one takeaway is this: just because someone throws you a pitch, you don't have to swing at it.  Even on social media.

I'm as much into politics and current events (the two are inseparable) as anyone, and more than most.  My political/philosophical viewpoint has been honed by personal experience, research, and careful reflection.  Regular readers of this blog know that I like to strip away euphemism to get to the heart of things.  To dig deep.  You grow when you're made to feel uncomfortable.  I like to write fiction, but I won't live it.

One of the reasons I write this blog is to stretch myself, to write about things I hadn't before, like short stories/flash fiction, or war stories from my past employer.  But I'm also here to create that all-important writer's platform: a place where people can find me online and learn about my books.  The dirty little secret nobody in writing wants to tell anyone is that the vast majority of writers don't want to blog, Facebook, or get involved in any kind of social media.  They just want to write their books, and they want you to buy them.

Honestly, I can't stand Twitter.  I loathe it.  But it's a social media box to check, so I'm there and I participate.

With all that in mind, I have strong, informed opinions about the issues of the day, but I won't communicate all of them here. This blog, first and foremost, is about building a relationship with you, my readers, and if I tell you exactly what I think about, say, the recent election returns, half of you will be turned off.

So despite that I want to talk about what's going on with Ebola in the US, what happened a week ago on Election Day, and other such things, I can't.  I shouldn't.  I...forbear.  Even though controversy and disagreement get attention.

See, I'm not this guy:

Huge amounts of snow in Maine yesterday! Republican voters should probably stay home tomorrow, safe & dry! HAHAHAHAHA.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) November 3, 2014

As jokes go, it's weak sauce, and even King himself saw that, hence the HAHAHAHA.  However, I'm quite familiar with his other non-fiction pieces, and I know for a fact that he thinks that people to the right of him politically are not only stupid, but actually evil.  He's allowed.  Just as I'm allowed to find my horror literature elsewhere.

I understand that it's very difficult to forbear when you're certain that the people who disagree with you are actively trying to destroy the world.  It's like making friends with a murderer.  The idea, however, that refusal to invest in failing green energy businesses means that you're in favor of ruining the planet with global warming is a false equivalency, and descends into the lack of a sense of proportion that I already talked about.  Achieving that sense of proportion and combining it with forbearance create a grace we used to have before instantaneous, semi-anonymous communication changed us into, well...take your pick of rude words.  We've changed as a culture, and not for the better.

Just because we disagree, even on the important things, it doesn't mean one of us is an evil idiot.

Forbearance is very much a prized quality, more so for its rarity.  It's something to work on, because it inspires grace and civility, even in the most heated communications media.