I used to write lightweight little fantasy novels set in modern-day Austin, with a bit of description of the local scene and, in the background, poking a little gentle fun at the woke of this world
I don’t feel that I can do that now, because the madness has so far outstripped my imagination. When I see people criminalizing free speech and trying to destroy anyone with a dissenting opinion; when I see them not only fighting for the sexual mutilation of children, but decrying attempts to protect the children as ‘sinful’ – I don’t think they’re funny. I think that pure, unadulterated evil has contaminated our culture.
And I don’t know how to write about that.
So I’ve fled into history, reading about Restoration England. You know – the Merry Monarch, the king’s Protestant whore, the Royal Society investigating everything from vacuums to wound salve, and eventually, after the Glorious Revolution, the “King over the water.”
And what do I find? The same things I’m fleeing. Of course.
‘Servants of the crown did not refrain from searching the metropolitan coffeehouses for evidence of the circulation of Jacobite or opposition propaganda, and the keeper of a coffeehouse in which seditious works were found was liable to immediate arrest by a royal messenger. Parliament too undertook to investigate and prosecute reported cases of seditious discourse in the coffeehouses, one member declaring at the time that ‘‘people take great liberty in coffee-houses’’ and warned against showing a lack of resolve to punish such offenders. The justices of the peace and the lord mayor duly announced to the City of London in July 1689 that ‘‘many loose and disaffected persons by talking in coffeehouses and other places false newes and raising discourses against the government area very great newsance and scandall to the same,’’ a useful demonstration of their obedience to royal demands to be sure, but it was hardly effective in policing the behavior in the coffeehouses.
Thus began what was to become a pattern of essentially futile complaints by the managers of the revolution settlement against the persistence of discontent with their government, opinions labeled by the regime as ‘‘false news,’’ and exasperated attempts to goad local magistrates into doing something to stop the spread of this supposed false news.
-Cowan, Brian: The Social Life of Coffee
1689.
False news.
Look, I knew that attempted censorship is always with us, but I hadn’t expected the censors of late 17th century England to use exactly the same phrase with which they belabor us today.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
For a more cheerful ending, I’ll leave you with this pseudo-Jacobite toast (pseudo because, just like most of the good Jacobite songs, it was written long after the utter failure of the Stuart cause):
God bless the King! (I mean our faith’s defender!)
God bless! (No harm in blessing) the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King,
God bless us all! That’s quite another thing!
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “You can’t hide”
The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess.
And we all mocked Heinlein for writing about those “crazy years” because it most certainly could not possibly happen here.
“Look, I knew that attempted censorship is always with us, but I hadn’t expected the censors of late 17th century England to use exactly the same phrase with which they belabor us today.”
Umm . . . why is that so surprising? I’ve been writing about history for nearly 30 years. One thing my research shows me is that people today are pretty much the same people as they were at the time of the pharaohs and every time between then and now. Our technology has gotten more elaborate and our trappings more numerous, but the basic human at the core of it all is pretty much the same. So of course they are going to behave the same, use the same phrases and generally be the fractious souls they have always been.
Thanks for that toast — new to me!
For some reason this brought the old “Vicar of Bray” song to mind.
There is no escape. Even Middle Earth has King’s Men propaganda on Numenor in the Second Age, and Tar-Aldarion’s estranged wife Erendis badmouthing everyone with a Y-chromosome to her daughter before that, and then back in the First Age, you have the Noldor being less than honest with the Sindar about the Kinslaying at Alqualonde, and the Edain being less than honest with their Elven friends about the Fall of Man, until Finrod manages to charm it out of one of them in the Dialogue of Finrod and Andreth. And the version Andreth shares points straight back to the father of lies.
Not to mention Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman all telling a few fibs here and there that caused some trouble. Like the Sinking of Numenor among other things.
True true, though I was more leaving them on the implied side.
“When I see people criminalizing free speech and trying to destroy anyone with a dissenting opinion … I don’t think they’re funny.”
Agreed. They’re not funny. They do not appear in my books. Not even as side-issue NPCs. Whenever I need a handy villain, he’s either a pervert or a minor official abusing power. Sometimes both.
Crooked cops, bent district attorneys, high officials deep in the bureaucracy, these are the people taking it on the chin from the robot girlfriends and dragons wandering around.
Others, the Greenies, the Tranzies, the assorted race-hustlers and other activist jackasses so beloved by media these days do not make an appearance. I refuse to allow them a place in my little made up world. They are roundly ignored.
Media do get mentioned occasionally, the sneaky robot ninjas spend a lot of time tripping media minions, and a dragon eats a “woman on the scene” reporter (Janey Jones, Eye Witness News!) but spits her out again because she’s wearing polyester. The misfortune of the media is a recurring comedy routine. Slapstick, because mockery is better when you mock them for stepping on a rake.
The full-sized ass kicking is reserved for people who deserve it. North Korea gets a special visit from the Machine Empire, certain hidden mandarins from Communist China receive the attention of “super villains”, the Valkyries casually punch the odd official in the face, that sort of thing.
They’re not funny. They deserve the finely honed edge of my imagination thinking up their just deserts, and not a damn thing more.
It was the political mess of the last few years that got me started in writing.
At a family dinner a couple of years ago, we had been talking about how certain miscreants were planning to screw over the country generally, and Texas in particular. I started thinking about what things would be like if Texas had never joined the U.S, and before I knew it, I was saddled with a plot bunny and a muse who had studied under Tom Clancy and David Weber. :-).
That turned into ‘Texas at the Coronation’, and a new career, or at least a side hustle, was born.
Mine was a fight in the cafeteria of Westchester Community College. Moron kids were brawling over a poker game. I sat there, grown-ass man of 40 some odd, wondering what it would take to make those imbeciles sit down and shut up.
20 years later, I finished “Unfair Advantage.” Yes, I’m a little weird. And slow. ~:D