Night Music (Part Five)

Home stretch time for our tale of intrepid explorers on a radically transformed Mars. This is the part that took me the longest to write; things start to get a little weird.

So without further ado, here is Part Five (of six) of my noveloid, "Night Music."

Here's the folder with this and all previous parts.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Bajíos y Honduras: Gradual Emergence

The AP reports that the government of El Salvador is set to officially recognize the elected government of Honduras. It is a thing most fervently to be hoped that other nations in the region will soon follow suit. Might one even posit that the current American Administration will at last execute a quiet little pivot in its thus far reprehensible treatment of the lawful, relatively orderly, and altogether geopolitically inoffensive internal affairs of the sovereign nation of Honduras?  Shall we soon see a "well, alright; we still don't like what you did, but here's your aid and visas back. But we've got our eye on you" from Hillary's! State Department?

May be so. But it is fair to say that the Honduran government will have due pause before trusting many of its ostensible allies for the foreseeable future. And if the language with which the Honduran affair is described does not change with some alacrity, they would be all-too well justified in such caution:

Some Latin American nations do not recognize Lobo's victory in November elections, because the vote was held under the interim government that replaced Zelaya.

A leader of Honduras' congress says lawmakers will start considering a bill on Tuesday to grant an amnesty to those involved in the June 28 coup that removed Zelaya.

 Say it with me yet again, bretheren "It. Was. Not. A. Fracking. Coup."

Night Music (Part Four)

Big Things are afoot on the terrestrial political front today. What better reason to take a jaunt into outer space!

This week's installment of Night Music brings perils and revelations and other intriguing developments. We're two-thirds of the way through....

Here again is the folder in which this and previous installments reside.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Night Music (Part Three)

Another Wednesday, another installment of Night Music. Last time, the crew of the good ship Conestoga had fallen into orbit of Mars, only to find that it jealously guarded its mysteries, including the fate of the Zubrin outpost. Meanwhile, tensions begin to appear in the curious equilibrium formed by the crew itself.

Again, here is a link to the folder containing this and previous installments.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Steep In This

Last Tuesday, it was with no small amount of dismay that I read this editorial by the New York Times' David Brooks, on the subject of the Tea Party movement.  Here's a sample of the tone of the thing:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

And here:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

 Get the picture? One the one hand, you have the "Educated Classes," on the other, a "fractious" rowdy rabble of reactionary nay-sayers. Brooks' position is characteristic of the near-monotonic position of the mainstream media with respect (or rather, its lack) to the Tea Party movement, and of the supposed lack of credibility which any "reasonable" person should ascribe to it. Depending on who you ask, the fiscal conservative, small-government message of the Tea Parties is either a thinly-veiled front for a theocratic SoCon agenda, or else it is a feeble-minded rejection of all that highfalutin'  college-boy/girl doubletalk...or, still more objectionable, it is a fetid fog rising from the dingiest backwaters of the Confederacy to block the uppity aspirations of the Nation's first Black POTUS.

And, of course, if the evocation of these memes should fail to dissuade the rare fence-sitter from putting forth a good-faith effort to understand what these people are on about, there is always the tried-and-true technique of middle-school locker room mockery. After all, who would want to speak up at any of the best parties in defense of "Teabaggers?" (huh-huh. huh-huh)

All this talk of "educated classes" makes me very uncomfortable. The clear implication is that one needs to be in possession of academic accolades, a member of the most rarefied reaches of the upper stratosphere of the intelligentsia in order to be entrusted with the business of governing a Republic of the people. I strongly suspect that the response of many of my hypothetical readers to the previous sentence would be a hearty "Yeah? And?"

I have a BA from NYU, and a PsyD (Doctor of Psychology) from a well-known institute in Pennsylvania. Big Deal. These help me to ply my trade and realize my dreams, in much the same way that a certificate in HVAC enables one to realize his or hers. I’m plenty educated, thankyouverymuch. And I am very favorably disposed toward the Tea Party movement.

This insistence that our Leaders possess august academic credentials is predicated on the idea that those leaders are expected to Do Things, to manage and craft society like a massive intellectual exercise, and that this is the proper role of government. I used to believe this myself. I subscribed to the Philosopher King model of leadership, and so believed that power should not be entrusted to anyone of lesser intellectual/academic heft. As little as five years ago, the very notion that someone like Sarah Palin should be greeted with anything but a snort of derision would have been anathema to me, as it currently is to those who --consciously or no-- still feel our Nation would be best served by a Philosopher King.

But I’ve evolved to a very different place since then. I have come to believe that the proper role of government, as willed into being by the Founders of this Nation, is not to Do Something, but to stand aside, doing as little as possible, while the mass of free individuals pursue their ends and deploy their hard-earned capital as they see fit. We do not need a Philosopher King…or any other kind of king (or queen) for that matter. We need competent administrators with the humility and common sense to remove unjust obstacles to the people's pursuit of liberty’s fruits, protect their rights to liberty and property…and then to stay the frack out of the way. This is what the Tea Partiers advocate, and they have made it abundantly clear that they are not beholden to any given political party in their campaign for these goals.

A useful dialogue may be had on the question of whether a society is best-served by a member of the anointed academic elite, or by a savvy pragmatist of a more 'populist' stripe. The answers to such questions will tend to hinge on the whether one espouses a Conservative or a Liberal view of how resources and power should be distributed for the optimal functioning of this society (I keep coming back to this post on the day after Election Day 2008. I beg the reader's indulgence; I think it's about as clearly as I've ever articulated the difference between these viewpoints). Unfortunately, that is just the sort of conversation which is drowned out in what has become a clash of dueling caricatures. Liberals default to a largely unquestioned stance of haughty, elitist derision, and Conservatives to one of clamorous anti-intellectualism with more-or-less equal (and equally maddening) frequency, and we all lose.

For those who might still be reading, I refer you to this spirited and unusually even-tempered defense of the Tea Parties over at The Daily Beast. Key grafs:

It is hardly surprising that in times like these there should be a large, angry, populist movement. But populism does not conform to the standard left/right divide, and in different circumstances it can go either way. (A rather good Greenwald column makes this point, too.) The populist’s personality is driven as much by wounded pride as by economic concerns, and so he resents the cultural elitism of the liberal elites, including their patronizing desire to help him, as much as the economic elitism of the wealthy.

Yes, the populists fear and hate the big businesses and Wall Street; but—and this is the heartening thing—they have not let this turn them against capitalism and the free market. They seem truly to have taken in the point, long emphasized by libertarians and others, that big business is not the same thing as capitalism or the free market, that it is in fact often their enemy. Perhaps the Obama administration has finally driven this point home, as it has been an object lesson in how the party of big government is really in bed with big business, giving it all the bailouts and favors. So by this reckoning, the Tea Parties would be a very serious development in which anti-big business forces would finally join with anti-big government forces to create a genuine free-market party that would maximize the opportunities of the little guy—like this small-business owner from California. (Note, this YouTube clip has nearly 250,000 hits and 6,000 comments.)

This video makes me emotional, because this woman represents an America that Tocqueville would have lauded. I will take her any day over the “educated class,” the bureaucratic mollusks and the defeatist sad sacks in Washington. I do think the Tea Partiers are political amateurs, but the content of their politics is deadly serious. The professional politicians will dismiss them at their peril.

Indeed.  History has yet to determine if, despite the considerable centrifugal forces which exist in a loosely-constituted confederation of populists, the Tea Party movement will succeed in focusing the energies of the GOP toward the presentation of a coherent and positive alternative to the centralizing tendencies of the Progressive camp...or whether it will dissolve into warring tribes of variously "Pure" Conservatives who are unable to make a distinctive case to the American people about their vision for our Republic. There is a Rorschachian quality to the Tea Party movement, and much can be gleaned from any given individual's reading of its leaves.

Personally, I find that terribly exciting.

EDIT (1/14/2010) in last paragraph to make it, you know, make sense.

NIGHT MUSIC (Part Two)

As promised, here's the second installment of Night Music).It's been kind of a trip re-reading these words I wrote so long ago. I've resisted the urge to dive back in and start editing and tweaking, knowing that at some point you just have to let the work stand or fall on its own merits (or the lack thereof!).

Here's a link to the folder which I'll be populating with the installments as I put them out.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

NIGHT MUSIC (Part One)

In the Spring of 1998, I was watching an interview with noted SF author, Harlan Ellison about the process of  writing. He has this little gimmick where he sits in the window of a book store and customers drop off story ideas. He then busily types away, producing a story based on that idea within a few hours. The idea is that a writer writes, and there is no excuse for him or her to do otherwise.  I was shamed, and sat down with an image in my head (a guy maneuvering a small spacecraft in low earth orbit, while listening to Mozart), and started typing what I was determined would be a short story which would be completed within a week.

Two years later, I put the last period at the end of a 90-something page noveloid which, as it turns out, was precisely too long to publish as a short, and too short to publish as a novel. In the process of researching it, I'd read Bob Zubrin's excellent The Case For Mars, as well as a host of other books and articles, learned a lot of cool stuff, and got mixed up in the private spaceflight advocacy community. So, not wasted effort...but I was a bit bummed that only a couple of people got to read the story.

So, I've decided to post it on line and link to it here, broken up into six parts (which I'll make available approximately every week). Because I can.  Of course, in the highly unlikely event that I get a chance to publish it "for real," I'll be yanking it from here in a hot minute.

Also, I'm a rank neophyte when it comes to hosting files on the Web, and categorically refuse to pay a cent to do it. So, I'm trying a free file hosting service from Microsoft. This may change if anyone's got a better idea (...). It's in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Reader to read it (is there anyone who doesn't have that on their machine?).

Anyway, here it is. Hope you enjoy.

Night Music, Part One

UPDATE: Not unexpectedly, the Microsoft "Skydrive" annoyed me one too many times (i.e., once) by deleting my files. I have moved the file to a free box.net account. The link takes you to a shared folder which I will populate with the parts of the story as I make them available.

UPDATE 2: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Fight Fire with Cool

Via Instapundit, this outrageously gnarly firefighting recon vehicle just overloaded my Kool buffers. Practical or not (and it appears to be very much so, for certain specific applications), something this bad-ass simply needs to be photographed bounding out of some arboreal conflagration in a shower of sparks. James Cameron, take note.

Never Let Waste Go To a Crisis

Nice little piece by Nina Easton in (of all places!) Time Magazine. In it, Easton notes that, despite historical precedents which would incline one to believe the contrary, the current shambles which is the American economy has, by and large not driven vast numbers of people to seek succor at the teat of vastly increased government spending programs.

"Audacity" was a catchy campaign theme, but it's less attractive as a governing principle. The all-important swing voters who decide elections are nervous about dramatic expansions of the Federal Government--even and especially in this time of economic distress. As it turns out, this financial crisis was not the call to bold action that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said shouldn't "go to waste." Quite the opposite: if he doesn't want his presidency to be held hostage by a string of nail-biter votes in Congress, Obama needs to recognize that he overestimated the public's appetite for taxpayer-funded solutions.

 I do think Easton is onto something here. Where the New Deal and the Great Society gained quite durable (if debatably healthsome) traction by offering the promise of remedies for the common American in difficult times, the ambitious Obama agenda of pumping up government and injecting it into greater swathes of the private sector have little to offer the man/woman on the street. Quite the contrary, as Americans witness the grim spectacle of  a lumbering jobless recovery, logarithmically expanding debts and deficits, and the "promise" of inflated taxation to provide vaporware revenues in a steadily deflating currency, the thinking which underlies these practices has been losing market share rather than gaining it.

This is a point to be considered very seriously by any Democrats who hope to hold onto their majority in the upcoming midterms.  These are precisely the circumstances under which one would expect desperate people to look to their government to swoop in and solve their problems. The fact that there is a far smaller-than-anticipated appetite for such top-down solutions presents an opportunity for the Democratic party to read some pretty stark tea leaves (pun intentional) and swing toward the center as it was forced to do after its rout in 1994. However, I have no particularly strong sense that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis possesses the canny pragmatism which typified their Clintonian forebears.

Similarly, I hope that Republicans, reflecting on the party's loss of focus after the "Contract With America," will look very carefully at the calls for a "big tent" approach which would have them compromise too strenuously on matters of leaner government and fiscal conservatism. While the idea of an ideological "Purity test" makes me uneasy as a goal state for the GOP, the fact of its proposal can and should serve as an important call to action for a party which has ceded far too much political territory to the centralizing, tax-and-spend philosophies of its adversaries.

While the Tea Partiers and Libertarians may push the envelope a mite too far for my tastes (and they surely do), they offer unmistakable evidence that a continued blurring of the lines between the Republican and Democratic parties will not be tolerated. Rather than the "civil war" and "fracturing" of the GOP which so many Liberals so gleefully declare, I see this as a healthy dialogue taking place within the ranks of those for whom free markets and free people can offer a legitimate alternative to the central planning. It is a conversation which will, it is hoped, delineate the degree to which the GOP chooses to stake its claim to a true and valid antithesis to the thesis that government-controlled "fairness" is a viable organizing framework for a liberal, mercantile republic.

If Easton's observations are as on-target as I suspect that they are, then there is fertile ground in the American electorate for the synthesis which could emerge from this process.

Counter-Counterinsurgency

Obama's speech at West Point, and the politically calculated half-measures it proposed, are the occasion for the latest spot-on post by "Doctor Zero" over at Hot Air. Counterinsurgency is a Long Game, a dogged demonstration of dedication and integrity which is meant to woo a population from the camp of our foes to the circle of our friends. The President's dismal delineation of time-tables and "exit strategies" (Gods! How I have come to detest that phrase) signals the very antithesis of COIN's spirit. His short-changing of troop levels and characteristically naive reliance on NATO commitments (oxymoron spoken here) to make up the difference is nothing short of a declaration that victory (perish the thought that he should ever utter that word) is a long shot against which to hedge, rather than an unconditional prerequisite for joining the fight.

But, as Doctor Zero articulates with the usual blistering clarity, such is the monotonic tenor of the Obama presidency:

Every moment of the “historic” Obama presidency has been wrapped in the rhetoric of failure and decline. A nation slipping into endless debt, to buy off the social concerns of the moment, cannot help but feel helpless and doomed… because it wouldn’t be so quick to mortgage a future it believed in. To accept the leadership of Barack Obama, either in Afghanistan or at home, is to accept that triumph is a fantasy, and achievement is a relic of the past, so the only rational course is carefully managed decline.

 Indeed. Whether it is the ham-handed intrusion of government into the auto industry and banking system, or  the on-going attempt to effect a fateful phagocytosis of the health insurance market, this administration has broadcast with unerring consistency the message that the proper management of our lives and resources are so far beyond the ken of the "average" citizen that nothing short of Central Planning stands the faintest chance of achieving the goals of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Doctor Zero quite rightly makes the analogy between the confidence and vigor of a civilian population, and the morale of a military force. Per Obama, both are in need of careful control from the top, so as to achieve the ultimate goal of an orderly and placid mediocrity. Try as I have (and I have tried mightily!), I can find no evidence that he believes this Nation can or should aspire to anything higher.

Needless to say, I disagree. And, as should be abundantly clear by now, I have officially abandoned the effort to give this administration the benefit of the doubt.

A properly resourced and inspired COIN force can achieve wonders, once it has shown itself willing and able to accept elevated risk, and to "walk the walk" for the sake of a host nation's population. An under-resourced and ambivalent COIN force sends the message to would-be insurgents and collaborators that they had best keep their powder dry, against the day of their inevitable abandonment.

So it goes with a people and their president. Tell us, in a host of ways, that we are ineffectual and in need of paternalistic control, and you offer us a choice: bow low before the beneficent State and accept its putative boons, or be moved by the affront to reclaim our dignity and repudiate your condescension. This American "insurgency" has taken the form of Tea Parties, raucous town hall meetings, and a rapidly growing grass-roots movement, self-organizing around the reclaiming of the muscular and pragmatic optimism which lies at the heart of the American consciousness. I live in hope (the real kind) that this insurgency will triumph at home....and in dread that its dark counterpart will do the same in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.