My fellow band of damned creative brothers:

Once more I come to beg you with tears in my eyes: Stop lending credence to the leftist lie that the right isn’t artistic or creative.

That lie, which I’ve fought against for the last 20 years, the poisonous lie circulated to hide their brutal cancellation of dissenters and promotion-for-ideological agreement, which even ten years ago was widely believed even on the right, is crumbling now.

It is crumbling under the assault of indie writers, indie artists, indie everything who have fearlessly stridden through the wild frontier of the internet to get their work before people.

Okay, visibility and publicity still sucks, but there are enough of us to deal a mortal blow to both the traditional market and the assumption that they’re the only creative ones.

And then Conservative Inc. And VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE got in. And they’re harrumph harrumph lecturing those d*mn kids who are doing unauthorized creative things — gosh darn it — and not at all creative or for that matter since they mostly do Harry Potter fanfic. And not conservative at all. They don’t take time every twenty lines to thank Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And how VERY dare write two young people sparking each other and yearning and maybe getting a little risky. THAT’S NOT CONSERVATIVE.

Every time these people get going, they almost convince ME that all conservatives can produce is those boring church movies from the seventies, where Jesus had carefully combed beard and hair, and spoke only in the approved way, etc. (People. He has a sense of humor. No? Look at the plight of Anthony WEINER. No, really. I was in Portugal, and explaining to my parents why I was laughing like a train engine. He’s an Author and not subtle at all. Less subtle than Terry Pratchett.)

Most importantly, those church movies were boring. Guys, they managed to bore the kids for whom any kind of picture with the lecture was so exciting that a slide show was a reason to come to a lecture.

But apparently the equivalent of that is all I should be allowed to write if I want to rebuild the culture.

So let me take a deep breath and instead of screaming give you a little lecture. The reason the left ever got a leg up, let alone the overwhelming advantage they got over the culture to where they COULD pick and choose who made it in writing and movies and all creative endeavors, is because of stuff like this. It’s because the right was playing the same kind of stupid games as the left, but in the service of “We want only wholesome things. WHOLESOME.”

Look, I came from a different culture, yes. But you know, I made money while in college (including the money to fly to the US and get married which was a lot at the time) by tutoring young women who were failing high school.

Almost every one of them who came to me was only allowed by her parents to read “wholesome” literature. Which mostly consisted of “Lives of Saints” and instructional literature on how young women should behave. All of which I read (including Grandma’s stash of books for young women which were Victorian and simultaneously sanctimonious and horrifying.) BUT it wasn’t the only thing I read. These young women saw absolutely no point in reading. And thereby their first step into academic excellence was thwarted. Yes, okay, I did introduce them to reading for fun. Look, guys, though I never gave them those — weirdly super-clean — even bullfighter romances were better than a steady diet of reading the lives of saints.

People know when they’re being lectures, and they don’t wish to do it for fun. And most people read or watch movies for fun.

Which is why if the right insists on doing only the equivalent of the lives of saints, it leaves the field to the left, which not only does give them power, but gives their messages power.

And their messages are unmaking Western society. Yes, I could easily explain how they got there. Maybe next week.

But the point is at this point the left stuff is boring and repetitious and not-even-appealing. To the extent it finds a home is because people have to read and/or watch SOMETHING.

They’re ripe for pushing over.

But you’re not going to push them over with Jesus with combed hair, or romances that stop every three pages for the characters to pray. You’re not even going to push them over with shouting Libertarian slogans every three pages.

You attract more flies with sugar than with vinegar, but more important to our matter, you attract more people who think and read and are interested in life with complex plots and unpredictable stuff that is wildly entertaining.

Besides, kindly, as my friend M. C. A. Hogarth would say “All artists are cracked.” This includes, yes, those of us on the right.

So while No Man’s Land might puzzle the heck out of you because why would any artist to the write of Lenin write a book where the main character is gay and the entire rest of the cast (just about) are gengineered hermaphrodites?

Well, because I’m cracked. And that world has been in my head since I was 14, and not letting it out was poisoning my writing.

OTOH you know, in the current environment you can’t talk about things like being baby-positive or the roles of women and men openly. You just can’t. The whole discourse has been poisoned. But come at it sideways from a perspective of “But these are people who really have only one sex” (Or both in an individual.) And it’s different, and will hopefully cause people to think.

If we get them to think, we have them. Because the left’s entire effort is anchored in getting people not to think past their loud, contradictory shibboleths.

So the respectable people on the right should remember artists are cracked. And that the ultimate beliefs of the artist come through.

So leave us alone to do the thing we know how to do. The indie life (and fan-ficcer life) is hard enough without you piling on.

Go and yell at the left and leave us to Yearn for Freedom.

Thank you.