We are just back from the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, where it was announced NANCY KRESS will be the next Grand Master of SF! Huzzah! I campaigned for it. Nan is a wonder and a joy and brilliantly deserves it.
Elsewise at LACon: accompanied by other brilliant women (wife and daughter) I gave a talk about AIlien Minds (my new book on artificial intelligence) to a packed double room, and did a fiction reading...
An evening performance of my play THE ESCAPE was very popular. (Know anyone in theater?)
I wore my kepi and it seems a vast majority of SF fans despise the anti-science/anti-future putsch that has taken hold in the USA. That we must repel in November's Gettysburg.*
And hence, I must segue into that topic.
== Why we must fight for an awkwardly childish and sometimes foolish 'empire' ==
What follows may strike some of you as nationalistic or even jingoistic. But it must be said! This fight is an old one and too much is at stake to leave this meme space dominated by sanctimony junkies, sabotaging the one and only broad coalition that might save America and the world.
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(* This posting summarizes - in new language - some of the points I raised in Chapter 9 of Polemical Judo, my book of proposed tactics that could have prevented our present mess, if any Democratic politicians had imagination or political savvy higher than a tardigrade. That chapter supplies much more detail, then appraises the rise of China. And I invite any of you to refute any part of it.*. Alas, in this benighted era of collapse literacy, I expect that what follows, below, will only be read by AI scrapers.)
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And so, I'm forced to restate what should be obvious. That there is something in America and its leadership that's worth saving. In fact, despite all our flaws, it is the best thing that ever happened to humanity and the world.
Let's start with a bald statistic that is sufficient, all by itself, to justify that assertion.
Today, after 80 years of the American Pax -- and despite many continuing horrors that we see in the news -- 95% or so of living humans have never witnessed war with their own eyes.
Go ahead and tally it yourself. (Start with China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and keep tabulating.) Ponder that for a minute and refute it if you can! (You can't.) ...then compare it to the dismal litany of human history before 1945.
Again, news media rightfully bring to our eyes and conscience reminders of the other 5%, who have been killed or maimed or terrified or traumatized by horrible human nastiness and violence... and yes, some of it perpetrated by my nation. And never forgte that we are bound and obligated to strive our utmost to solve those zones of agony!
Still, no one ever, ever mentions the 95% or this unprecedented era of peace for a vate majority of hyumans. It is worth pondering that fact for balance.
(Your brain can contain two thoughts simultaneously. Try it)
Even more telling, today 95% or so of children across Earth are in school, having never starved. IF you cannot refute that (you can't) then please, please show us any other time that did better?
Want some more such points?
* All previous 'empires' were mercantilist, raping their colonies and peripheries for wealth. (It was Gandhi's #2 complaint about the British Raj.) During Pax Americana's counter-mercantilism -- crafted by George Marshall and other geniuses after WWII -- US consumers augmented vast aid to uplift almost every economy in the world, leading to glittering cities in Japan, Germany and Korea, then Taiwan, Thailand, China and now India and Nairobi and Mexico. And yes, places with brown and black skins. (Who cares about that aspect? Alas, it must be mentioned because sanctimony-preeners make it necessary.) See this elaborated.
Furthermore, while mild European socialism - copied from the US New Deal - has done very well, actual communism made dismal wrecks of Russia and Eastern Europe and China... till the former collapsed and the latter eagerly joined the Pax Americana gravy train.
* The entire European Union - starting with the Coal and Steel Common Market, then the EEC, and then EU, resulted from US subsidy and arm-twisting, especially of the French. Indeed, the EU might evolve into an Earth Union, as I depicted in fiction, even back in the 80s. And if True America loses this current phase of the US Civil War to our recurring Confederate madness, then EU will have to lead humanity's next phase, along with Japan and AustralAsia.
If so, then they will be carrying on entirely as America's child. (And if so, mazeltov! I am proud of that and hope they can bear and augment the torch of liberty and fairness, even if we sink into madness and despair, over here. I'll not witness it, since I will have been killed, by then. If Confederate fascism wins, I may send my family away, but I will die on this hill.)
* Oh, and about the values of Tolerance, Diversity, reciprocal accountability, rambunctious individualism and fair competition? Values that usefully criticize our mistakes... or else get warped in toxic exaggeration, spewed with masturbatory righteousness by unhelpful, shrieking, virtue-signaling ingrates? Well...
Those values were spread (and still are) by Hollywood! There is NO other source - or combination of other sources - that has been more responsible for those values filling the globe. Indeed, ingrate fools who can't see where they got their own values -- suckled from almost every film or TV show they enjoyed - and from most scifi --only prove themselves to be dopes, incapable of perspective.
And note, so far at least, Hollywood (my home town) continues even now fighting for those values.
== We're no angels ==
Is any nation a paragon of virtue? Of course not. We are all still cavemen! Though many of us are trying to rise up and become responsible, decent people, instead of greed-driven, sanctimony-drunken harem-keepers.
Hence, the jerks who are trying to restore 6000 years of feudalism only prove themselves to be lobotomized cretins. Despite some of them showing nerdy brilliance at tech, they are unable to see that their grabbiness is likely to end in the death of market capitalism. And in tumbrel rides.
Moreover, all empires are shitty! Even the most well-meaning make terrible mistakes.
* But if you visit Vietnam today, you'll find that Americans are immensely popular. Folks there are unbelievable friendly to US citizens! Despite all the suffering that our biggest mistake wrought upon that poor country, while we delusionally thought that we were 'saving' them... despite all that, they like us! Now why would that be?
Over 100,000 Filipinos died during WWII, fighting for their supposed 'colonial masters'... and for themselves, and even more Indians fighting for Britain... in part because they believed our promises.
Promises that we KEPT, right after the war ended.
== You never had a friend like.... ==
* Okay, here's another: For 80 years, the non-Leninist nations of the world developed mostly in peace, while spending just 1% or so of their GDPs on arms and defense - instead of the 30%+ or so that was normal before 1945, ever since humans developed agriculture.
Ponder that. 30% of GDP, that could have been spent - across all of those centuries - on infrastructure and development and education and uplifting poor children, wasted for 6000 years because of the paranoia of kings. (The kind of world order that Putin and the PRC and Republicans are trying to re-establish as civilizational rivals will take us back into such dark times.)
Indeed, that vast wealth -- the freed-up 29% or so -- was spent that way: all over the globe, from Latin America to East Africa to Indonesia.., though not (alas) along the Pakistan-Indian border... on infrastructure and development and education and uplifting poor children. In most of the world, for eighty years! Though not in the USA or USSR. Where arms and armies did take the old toll on taxed citizens.
Gee, I wonder why the USA spent so much on defense, an umbrella that let eighty or so nations spend far less.
Any Eastern European will tell you why. In gratitude that someone held the line on their behalf. As will any beneficiary of that umbrella of protection, who has sapience above the level of a slime mold. And all the while somehow finessing past the Armageddon War that seemed scheduled to happen, in the normal cycle of human affairs.
* Oh and then this. For the first 50 years after WWII a vast majority of world leaders from all nations got their educations in American universities, till their numbers amassed enough for universities to boom everywhere else. Hey, you're welcome.
(And if our know-nothings win, here in the USA, they'll continue the evisceration of American universities that have ben the greatest wonders of the world. Only, in that case, um. can I send any grandchildren to Nairobi U, please?)
== Why we fight ==
And yes, during all that time, dark, recurring cancers of the American soul kept conniving, trying to end our Renaissance! Turning us back into a dismal, pyramid topped by super-rich harem masters and lords and their inheritance brats, restoring 6000 years of unsapient and gruesomely vile feudalism.
And now, just as in 1861, they are rallying poor white fools to march for them in favor of racism, sexism and rule by oligarchs. And ultimately, restored slavery. Above all, they ruminate grudge-hate of fact professions! And the Constitution....
... and to suppress the finest locus of adult maturity in the world, the United States Military Officer Corps.
And alas, just as in every other phase of the recurring US Civil War, they will learn they have roused a sleeping giant and filled us with a terrible resolve
== And so, we heed the call... ==
The fight is on. The next 2.5 months and more may be our Gettysburg*.
Our friends around the world... and those sapient enough to know their own self- interest... are rooting for us and helping where they can. Like the incredibly helpful-brave stance of dear Canada!
Others swirl around us, as biting gnats, gleefully distracting and feeding off our pain. Gnats who aren't even worth swatting-at.
(Especially dismal twits from nations whose own colonial crimes led to the Congo basin and Namibia and Afghanistan and the Sahel and some others being the saddest places on Earth.)
But this missive doesn't hope to persuade either domestic or foreign sanctimony gnats. Around the planet, there are friends who know what Pax America gave the world for 80 years. Or, at least know that they cannot name any other nation, anywhere across history, that had a better ratio of good deeds to atrocious mistakes.
And was all of that my own version of sanctimoniously self-justifying preening?
Perhaps, partly. But I am in this fight, up to my neck.
I wear my blue Union civil war kepi with pride and confrontational impudence.
And I do not feel 'helped' by yammering ingrates, either on the ditzy farthest left or across the entire undead monster cult that the Republican/Foxite/Putinist Republican Party right has become...
...or in nations that owe almost everything they have to the world that George Marshall and other geniuses made for them.
Help us - and in so doing, help yourselves! So that we can get back to ending racism, sexism and other travesties and become the kind of people that our new, AI children can respect and even admire.
And so that Pax Americana can be that LAST Empire! And worlds of optimistic science fiction can come true.
===========post notes==========
* The coming US elections will be fraught times. The Foxites and their Kremlin masters can see a deluge coming. They need massive MAGA turnout, which might be achieved through an act of martyrdom! And hence I pray for competence in the US Secret Service.
Or else they plan some kind of super-9/11 tragedy to excuse martial law, blamed on both Iran and lib'ruls. Though we will hit the streets in multitudes shouting Reichstag Fire!
(Democrat legislators etc. watch youir backs, then next 6 months. Hitler's very first move after the Reichstag Fire was to round up opposition members)
Optimism? Perhaps this will finally propel defectors from Fox and the suborned/blackmailed GOP. And no, boys, I now know that won't happen. It will - by hook or crook - be about us earning our Gettysburg. And your grandchildren will be so very grateful to heroes.
Finally... everyone who knows anyone in a red state, tell them to check their voter registration and KEEP DOING IT till November.
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