Stromata Blog

Bastiat Updated

In his classic essay, “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850), the French economist Frédéric Bastiat exposed the fallacious logic of those who imagine that breaking windows spurs economic activity.

Seeing that a careless lad has broken a shopkeeper’s window, spectators offer the consolation that the six francs spent for a new pane of glass will provide business for the glazier. Generalizing, they conclude that –

. . .it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it.

Responds Bastiat:

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented. . . .

In the former supposition, that of the window being broken, he spends six francs, and has neither more nor less than he had before, the enjoyment of a window.

In the second, where we suppose the window not to have been broken, he would have spent six francs on shoes, and would have had at the same time the enjoyment of a pair of shoes and of a window.

Now, as James B. forms a part of society, we must come to the conclusion, that, taking it altogether, and making an estimate of its enjoyments and its labours, it has lost the value of the broken window.

Let us imagine that the Parisian authorities pay no heed to such reasoning. Instead, having convinced themselves that one broken window is a boon, they conceive a scheme to multiply its good effects: They will pay shopkeepers and householders to break their own windows, in return for assignats redeemable for two francs toward the purchase of a new pane at the glazier’s.

Of course, no one will destroy a six franc window in return for two francs, but let’s suppose that Paris has a thriving trade in used glass and that it is customary, as windows age, to trade them in at the glazier’s for a new and better pane. If the trade-in value of a used window is, say, 1½ francs, everyone in the city who was planning to replace his old windows will eagerly take the two franc offer.

So certain Parisian bourgeoisie are better off, with new windows and 50 centimes extra in their wallets. Others are less well off, because their taxes have paid for the assignats and they themselves have received nothing in return. And what about those less prosperous souls who cannot afford to spend six francs on a window? Before, the glazier would sell for 2½ francs the pane that cost him 1½. Now that pane is destroyed. The workingman will have to scrape together six francs for his window, forgoing other necessities, or will keep the weather out with oiled paper.

Furthermore, the program is of no use to a poor man who already owns a window. The government has imposed two inflexible rules: The assignats must be spent on a new window costing six francs, not on a slightly better used window. And no one may buy a used window from another in order to gain the assignats for breaking it. Thus Mme. Pauvre may not sell a pane to M. Riche for one franc, after which he will break it, get two francs and buy a new one.

Substitute cars for glass, and you have an exact description of the “Cash-for-Clunkers” program that ran through a billion dollars in four days and was voted another two billion this afternoon by the House of Representatives. Of course, it is popular with car dealers and their more affluent customers, but for the economy as a whole, it is as wasteful as a hurricane.

If it were this easy to spur economic growth, why shouldn’t the government offer money for the destruction of other goods: clothing, furniture, appliances, houses? In Bastiat’s words:

[W]e arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end – To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.”

Return to the Hyatt

Fandom will not, I’m sure, be astonished to learn that, subject to negotiating a handful of tractable details, the Chicago in 2012 Worldcon bid has chosen the Hyatt Regency Chicago as its venue. That was, after all, the site of Chicago’s last three World Science Fiction Conventions. This time around, the choice was not foregone. The Chicago Hilton put in a strong competing bid. In fact, it would probably have won if the Hyatt had remained static since 2000.

As many of you may recall (I certainly do), Chicon 2000 couldn’t keep the Worldcon “under one roof”. That was possible (just barely, and for approximate values of “one”) in 1982 and 1991. By 2000, attendees’ expectations had expanded to the point that the convention utilized function space in three hotels. Most conspicuously, the Hugo Awards Ceremony and the Masquerade were relegated to the adjacent Fairmont Hotel, with not wholly satisfactory results.

Happily, the Hyatt hasn’t stood still. Chicon 7, if it comes to pass, will be able to spread out into two additional ballrooms, and a new office complex will free up the two sets of meeting rooms that Operations, Treasury and other administrative functions preempted in the past. The upshot is that, unless one of the next three Worldcons invents a space-eating, must-have event, there won’t be any need for overflow function space. It’s even conceivable (though I won’t venture to say “likely”) that overflow sleeping rooms won’t be essential either, as the Hyatt has offered a larger room block than in the past.

Room rates will be $145 for singles through quads. That represents a mere three percent compounded annual increase over the 2000 rate and, if the Fed discovers that draining excess liquidity from the economy is easier theorized about than accomplished, could be spectacularly low in 2012. It’s already less than many of us will be paying at Anticipation.

Hyatt veterans will also be pleased to learn that the hotel’s management has at long last discovered the joy of signage. I’m pretty sure that some folks at Chicon 2000 wandered for five days without ever sighting the con. There are now lots and lots of clear directions for getting from Here to There, including futuristic kiosks that will draw a map to any meeting room. The only thing lacking now is indoors GPS.

My Proposal for the Nirthers

I’ve read just enough screeds about Barack Obama’s birth certificate to see that the Nirthers are much like the folks who think that “somebody else” wrote the works of William Shakespeare. They seize on what they regard as anomalies in the “official story”, construct a fanciful alternative, and, brushing aside their own scenario’s spectacular anomalies, demand that others disprove it to the highest degree of certainty.

Let’s play along for a minute. The Nirthers claim that Baby Boy Obama’s grandparents faked his birth in Hawaii. Okay, being born a U.S. citizen in 1961 was to draw a winning ticket in life’s lottery; the Kenyan tickets were dicier. (Digression: If he had really been born in pre-independence Kenya, Barack Obama would be a British subject. Could Labour save its majority in Parliament by drafting him for Prime Minister?)

There is a problem, though. The Dunmores were, we know from their grandson’s multiple autobiographies, devoted communists with a highly developed political paranoia. They would have been acutely aware of the potential consequences of engaging in fraud and being exposed. And exposure was a serious danger if Barack’s genuine birth documents could be found in Kenya, then a well-administered colony with British standards of record keeping.

Therefore, the Dunmores could act safely only if they knew that there was no Kenyan birth certificate to contradict them. There are two reasons why a Kenyan birth certificate might not exist: (1) Barack Obama was not born in Kenya (ruled out by Nirthers a priori); (2) he was not born at all.

The hypothesis that best fits the (Nirthers’ version of the) facts is that Barack Hussein Obama was cloned, probably, given his grandparents’ political connections, at a laboratory in the Soviet Union.

I leave it to G. Gordon Liddy and Alan Keyes to pick up the theorizing from here, but I’m sure that they’ll find it congenial.

Further reading: National Review, “Born in the U.S.A.”

Professor Gates in a Parallel Universe

Black Professor’s Brush with Murder Raises Racism Fears

Cambridge, Mass., July 23, 2009 (AP) – The near-murder of renowned African-American scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is a grim reminder of America’s lingering cancer of racism. The Harvard professor was shot by intruders in his Cambridge home after local police, summoned by a report of a burglary in progress, accepted the victim’s coerced assertion that all was well and left the scene. A neighbor later found Professor Gates bleeding on his kitchen floor. He underwent emergency surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital for gunshot and knife wounds and is expected to be released early next week.

According to information gathered from police reports and an interview with Professor Gates, a neighbor called 911 on the afternoon of Thursday, July 16th, to report that she had seen two African-American men breaking into the professor’s house. At about that time, Professor Gates was returning from a trip to China. He entered his home and was confronted by two armed men. They demanded his wallet and told him to “keep real quiet” while they searched the premises.

Moments later, a police car, responding to the burglary report, pulled up in front of the house. “I though I was saved,” Professor Gates said in the interview. “The cavalry had arrived.”

But the story was not to have a John Wayne finish. “Get rid of them quick,” one of the men said, brandishing his handgun and taking up a position with a clear shot at the professor’s back but out of the line of sight from the front door.

Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley asked Professor Gates to identify himself. The professor showed his Harvard ID card and driver’s license. Asked about the burglary report, he replied that he had “lost his keys” and that he and his chauffeur had forced in the door. Sgt. Crowley thanked him and departed.

“There was no cause for suspicion,” the sergeant said in a statement released by the Cambridge police department last Friday. “The professor had identified himself, was in his own home, and said there was no problem.”

But others have questioned whether the police officer’s lack of curiosity had racial undertones. “He should have asked the homeowner whether anyone else was in the house, and then had him step outside,” said an expert consulted by AP. “Those are standard procedures to ensure that someone in a situation like this isn’t under a threat. I’m sure they would have been followed if the homeowner had been white. Of course, usually there’s no threat and the owner may get upset. I’ve had some yell at me so much they had to be taken in for disorderly conduct. But it’s for their own safety.”

At his news conference yesterday evening, President Obama, a personal friend of Professor Gates, said that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly”. While disclaiming knowledge of the details of the incident, the President noted the country’s long history of unequal law enforcement protection for people of different races. He attributed Professor Gates’s survival to the success of the Administration’s stimulus and health care reform plans.

Warning: This news story is copyrighted by the Associated Press. You may not quote, link, read, discuss or think about it without AP’s express permission and the payment of royalties. THIS MEANS YOU!

Update (7/26/09): A commenter thinks that it is absurd and hilarious to believe that a police officer might be concerned about the well-being of a member of the public. That is, I think, a not untypical left-wing mindset. Perhaps the President shares it. His press secretary has now let slip that he was prepared for a question about the Gates kerfuffle. If so (and one of course should not trust Robert Gibbs implicitly), his answer – taking police malevolence for granted – was just what one would expect the considered response of a radical ideologue to be. Let me emphasize, though, that a single incident can’t rule out the alternative explanation of the Obama Administration’s strange goings-on: that the President is a well-meaning man with too small a knowledge base and too high an opinion of himself.

Quote of the Day

On the day after the Moon Landing anniversary, Steve Hayward quotes pertinently from his excellent book, The Age of Reagan:

The reaction to the moon landing in 1969 is a good example of national exhaustion and liberal guilt at work. The moon landing had been set out as a lofty goal by the liberals’ hero, John F. Kennedy, and the moon landing was an occasion of national pride and celebration for most Americans. Here, amidst the rubble and gloom of the 1960s, was something that had gone splendidly right. Many leading liberals, however, could only sniff that while the moon landing was undeniably impressive, the money for the moon landing would have been better spent on social problems on Earth. The popular cliché of the time went: “Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank].” (The total cost of the decade-long moon landing project was less than three months’ worth of federal spending for social programs in 1969.) A 25 person delegation from the Poor People’s Campaign, led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Martin Luther King’s successor), came to the Apollo 11 launch at Cape Canaveral “to protest America’s inability to choose human priorities,” while Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that “The needs of the people on earth, and especially in this country, should have priority. When we solve these problems, we can consider space efforts.” Even the brother of the man who issued the call to go to the moon, Sen. Ted Kennedy, expressed weariness with the space program: “I think after [the moon landing] the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

Is it a surprise that, when President Obama received the Apollo 11 astronauts at the White House, he had much to say about the space program’s glorious past and not a word about its future?

Forty Years of Treading Moondust

Eventually, men will return to the Moon, then proceed to the rest of the Solar System and however much of the universe can be attained within the cold equations of astrophysics. When they do, and when historians record those pioneering ventures, one can’t help but anticipate that Neil Armstrong’s first step from the Apollo capsule will be noted not as the beginning but as a scene from a disconnected prologue – like the Norse settlement in America or Hero of Alexandria’s steam engine or Charles Babbage’s proto-computer.

We sometimes ponder why those precursors led nowhere, and we have inklings of answers. Vinland was thwarted by climate change. The Hellenistic world had such a plethora of slaves that mechanical labor saving devices were economically pointless. The Babbage “difference engine” demanded not-yet-existing technical skills. What will the future see as the reason for our failure to leave Earth’s cradle after so briefly stepping out of it?

It is hardly a matter of money. For the amount spent on the useless Obama Stimulus, spread over ten or twenty years, the United States could not just establish a base on Mars but begin settling the asteroids. Nor is our society’s excessive risk aversion entirely to blame. By any reasonable measure, space travel has been quite safe. It’s true that every accident sets the program back disproportionately, but isn’t that because there is no strong desire to continue under even the best conditions? Is it really likely that we’d be a lot further along, had Challenger made its final flight safely?

It’s true that nobody has a good plan for making lots of money from space travel. That’s why private enterprise hasn’t taken over – not why the government steadily cuts NASA’s budget. Our future space historian will sniff that bureaucrats ought to have taken to heart Benjamin Franklin’s (or Michael Faraday’s) question, “What use is a newborn baby?”

It’s fatuous, too, to put great weight on choices of launch vehicles, the details of mission plans, and the like. If people wanted a thriving space program, the problems of the space shuttle would merely be an obstacle to be swept aside, not a motive for retreat.

To anyone who remembers July 20, 1969, the ensuing four decades of sloth are inexplicable, as if the sequel to Pearl Harbor had been the triumph of American pacifism. Back then, astronauts were heroes; lunar colonies were on the horizon; our children would be able to vacation on Mars.

As Jerry Pournelle put it, “I always expected to see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I’d see the last.”

Charles N. Brown (1937–2009), R.I.P.

Charles Nikki (“Charlie”) Brown, who died in his sleep last night, is the only person for whom a Hugo Award category was created.

In 1968 he co-founded Locus, a tiny zine intended to disseminate news about the science fiction world in general and the Boston in 1971 Worldcon bid in particular. The Worldcon came and went, but Locus didn’t depart with it. Charlie kept it going, with expanding frequency and coverage, the opposite of the normal fanzine trajectory. In 1970, it got a Hugo nomination for Best Fanzine. In 1971 it won, and in 1972 and 1976, and then in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981. . . .

The victory streak wasn’t unprecedented. What did have no parallel was the obvious mismatch between the winner and the also-rans. By the late 1970's, Locus was the indispensable news source for fans, writers, artists, publishers, in fact for everybody who wanted to keep up with what was happening in literary SF. Monthly issues, crammed with data, appeared on time and on newsstands. In short, while Charlie was clearly a fan, and his intention was to serve a fannish need, his enterprise was to a fanzine as Napoleon’s Grande Armée to Frederick Jahn’s anti-French gymnastics clubs.

No one (well, almost no one) wished to deprive Charlie of the opportunity to win Hugos. Fandom sensed that this incentive was one of the spurs that kept Locus going. On the other hand, its only likely competition came from other zines with similarly serious and responsible outlooks. “Best Fanzine” would be an odd name for a category in which no guy cutting stencils in his basement had a chance to win.

Thus was born the awkwardly named “Semi-Prozine” category, first presented in 1984. The criteria for semi-pro status were designed to fit Locus. Other publications fell into it, too, a couple in deliberate imitation, so it wasn’t just a “Best Charlie Brown” Hugo. Against reasonably stiff competition (such as Andy Porter’s late, lamented Science Fiction Chronicle and, more recently, Interzone, The New York Review of Science Fiction and Ansible), Locus won 21 times. Naturally, it’s on this year’s ballot, which means that it could win the very last Best Semi-Prozine Hugo; for a WSFS constitutional amendment to abolish the category passed its first reading last year and is up for ratification at the Montreal Worldcon.

Any marketing consultant could have told Charlie that he was doing everything wrong. All that Locus purveys is information, crowded into dense pages of type, whereas the cognoscenti know that the contemporary reader yearns for flashy graphics, stylish layouts, breezy prose, and only those facts and figures that he can easily digest. The marketer would have recommended something on the lines of People, Sci-Fi Edition. That’s a couple of parsecs from what Locus offers.

Over the past several years, as he grew older and less mobile, Charlie, by his own report, delegated more and more of the day-to-day work on the magazine to his staff. He remained active, however, both as a publisher and as a fan. It was fitting that he died while returning home from a science fiction convention.

A “Golden Age” of Fantasy?

Like you, I pretty much gave up on “High Fantasy” after dozing through the tenth or twentieth Tolkien knock-off. Similarly to their earlier cognates, the medieval romances, these books grew longer and drearier every year.

But perhaps the genre isn’t doomed. At least, Orson Scott Card, no mean judge, thinks not. Au contraire, he avers, “the creative energy of speculative fiction has been migrating from sci-fi to fantasy”. He has some particular commendations:

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is new but complete, so there’s no waiting to get the end of the story. The motley cast of talented misfits is trying to bring down a thousand-year empire (try to avoid thinking “reich”), but the heroes discover to their dismay that, bad as the empire was, it was holding back something even worse.

Or if you want to get in on the ground floor, look at Sanderson’s newest hardcover, Warbreaker — a whole new magic system, with graustarkian intrigue at the highest level.

Patrick Rothfuss creates a fascinating bildungsroman with his The Name of the Wind. It is extravagantly a “tale told in an inn” — each volume in the series is one night’s storytelling by a hero who insists he has retired from the business.

Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, begins with what looks like a nuclear explosion that destroys an entire city. Only one survivor walked away — a mechanical man named Isaak. He has no memory of what caused the explosion, but in the turmoil after the destruction, he becomes an observer and a participant in all the politics and warfare and magic. He begins to discover the secret behind all the magic — including his own existence.

These are merely some of the most recent. Once you realize how much excellent literature is scattered between the reefs of vampire novels in the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore, you’ll enjoy prowling through the backlist.

Well, I can’t say whether these encomia are well deserved. I do, however, stand in awe of OSC’s ability to absorb vast numbers of words. What these volumes, and most of those that he recommends from the “backlist”, have in common is length. I wonder how many of them need all those words to tell their stories.

J. R. R. Tolkien had a reason – or two reasons – for taking three volumes to tell The Lord of the Rings. First, he didn’t care much whether it pleased anyone but himself. Second, he had spent his entire life “sub-creating” Middle Earth. He knew all about its lands and seas and cities and peoples, along with their myths, legends and history. What he wrote down, abundant as it was, was just a fraction of what was in his mind.

Is the same true of any contemporary trilogist? The longer the tale, the greater the proportion that runs the risk of being mere generic padding: the same old highways and inns and mountains and villages and wizards and maidens and battles that one has seen a score of times before. Will an enterprising publisher offer talented young writers this deal? Turn in a complete story 256 pages long, and we’ll double your royalties. The idea would be to distill rather than dilute. I’d like to see what Messrs. Sanderson and Rothfuss and Scholes could do under that regimen.

Quote of the Day: From the Mouths of Feminists

If it weren’t for Instapundit, I would, let me admit frankly, never have heard of “Reclusive Leftist” and would not have been tempted to read her. (Not that I’m against reclusive leftists; the more reclusive, the better, I say.) Luckily, Professor Reynolds took note of her, and I urge everyone with the slightest interest in the soon-to-be ex-governor of Alaska to read “Feminists and the Mystery of Sarah Palin”, from which I extract just a few paragraphs:

But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen. . . .

I know for a fact that the feminists spreading the lies about Palin knew they were spreading lies. Not to tell tales out of school, but: they knew. They were supplied with the correct information, and they chose to lie anyway. Why?

Was it just about electing Obama? Were feminists simply willing to commit any slander necessary to elect the Chosen One? That’s a likely explanation, but here again: we’re talking about feminists. Feminists doing this — slandering a woman, and doing so in unmistakably sexist terms. After all, caricaturing Palin as a purity queen (Bible Spice, Sexy Puritan) is just the flip side of caricaturing her as a porn queen. As I’ve said before, it’s like the NAACP sponsoring a lynching. The mind boggles.

Even more mind-boggling are the attacks that don’t even bother with false claims about policy or beliefs, but just go straight for free-floating misogynistic rage. Ridiculing her hair, clothes, makeup, voice, body, womb. “Sarah Palin is a [sexual vulgarism deleted]” — good one! Calling her a bimbo — good one! Calling her a [sexual vulgarism deleted] whore — good one! Fantasizing about her being gang-raped — good one! And all this from feminists. Forget the NAACP sponsoring a lynching; this is like the NAACP ripping off their masks to reveal that they’ve been replaced by white supremacist pod people. . . .

One other observation, and then I’ll quit: it is striking to me how much of the political discourse in 2008 revolved around people who don’t exist. The main players last year, if you recall, were Obama, the genius messiah whose perfection and purity would save the planet; Hillary, the evil racist lesbian who killed Vince Foster with her bare hands before plotting the Iraqi invasion and then attempting to have Obama assassinated; and Sarah Palin, a crazed dominionist who hates polar bears and personally arranges for Christian girls to be raped by their fathers just so she can charge them for their rape kits.

None of these characters are real, of course. Yet, weirdly, people were much more interested in these fictional beings than they were in the real individuals who were vying for political office last year. There were times in 2008 where I felt that the entire national discourse had become one of those scripted faux-reality shows, where nothing is real and the producers edit everybody into barking stereotypes. And the people at home just watch and point and snicker. We’re actually having an election here, I kept wanting to say. These are the people who want to run the country. Don’t you want to know who they really are? [All emphasis in original]

As Jonah Goldberg, has observed about Governor Palin, “It certainly is true that nobody in public life in recent memory has been as shabbily treated as she has.” I don’t expect a lot of the non-reclusive leftists to notice – or care.

Bits and Pieces from Westercon

Westercon, the movable west-of-El-Paso-east-of-the-Pacific regional, no longer draws a couple of thousand fans on Independence Day weekend, but a lot of the attendees (about 700 this year) are people I know, and in programming, parties and SF gossip it remains in the convention Big Leagues.

Tempe is very hot and not as dry as advertised. The convention venue, the Mission Palms (to be the site of the North American Discworldcon over Labor Day weekend), offsets the heat with ferocious air conditioning. It is located in the middle of a restaurant-dense downtown area. On the night of the Fourth, the pool deck offered a splendid view of Tempe’s forty-minute fireworks show.

To start with unhappy news, I learned that Khen Moore, a Southern fan best known for his incredible art collection, died a few days ago. He had been ill for a long time, suffering the effects, sadly, of inveterate alcoholism. While I didn’t know him well, we had a few pleasant chats, and he thoughtfully pointed out to me where I could buy a print of an Alan Clark painting that he had commissioned and I had admired. It’s not clear yet whether he left a will and made arrangements for the disposition of his paintings. If he didn’t, I’m much afraid that Tennessee probate costs will lead to distress sales and the effective loss of a number of excellent pieces of art. (Let that be a warning to all of you who keep putting off will making till the Greek calends.)

Worldcon bidding has not emerged from its lull. Reno, unopposed for 2011, threw a couple of nights of reasonably good parties. Chicago, unopposed for 2012, had a bid table but no party. Texas will announce a 2013 bid at Anticipation; the city is a secret (at least from me). I predict San Antonio, which was a delightful site in 1997. Also on the verge of announcement is a British bid for 2014, reportedly for the London dockyards (overbuilt for the 2012 Olympics and therefore cheap). San Diego has made noises about 2015, though I’ve heard nothing new for several months and am told that there is local skepticism. Japanese fans have politely informed reliable sources that they’d like to bid again in 2017 and establish a once-a-decade tradition à la Australia.

And that’s it. No year has more than one likely bid, and the out-years are not promising. I’d bet a great deal that Los Angeles will pounce on 2016, or on 2015 if San Diego looks shaky. If anyone in Boston is currently enthusiastic about campaigning for any year, he, she or it is keeping very quiet. Philadelphia is equally mute. Balto-Wash will surely bid someday. Alas, the local fans seem to be waiting for the D.C. city council to give the go-ahead for a hotel adjoining the new convention center. Cargo cults will have their prayers answered more quickly.

There are moments when I muse that we ought to give up selecting cities and vote instead for con committees, leaving it up the winner to come up with a place. I look forward to the epic battle of Yalow vs. Standlee.

Westercon bidding is tame, too. Glenn Glazer’s San Jose bid won unopposed for 2011, and Seattle has announced for 2012. If chosen, it will use either the Marriott or the Hilton at SeaTac airport.

Those looking for a contest may have to be content with the NASFiC. Raleigh has been running all alone to host the North American regional in 2010, when the Worldcon will be held in Australia. Since the filing deadline has passed, it ought to be a shoo-in, but late word is that next year’s Westercon (Pasadena) is launching a write-in bid to add the NASFiC to its banner. If the effort is serious, it will be interesting. Having good friends on both bidcomms, I am going to declare my strict neutrality and tell no one (maybe not even myself) how I vote.

I’d have more to say about the program – one of my retirement resolutions is to attend panels rather than simply look at them in the program book and intend to show up – but I found myself preoccupied with finishing my Hugo reading. (The voting deadline was Friday night, so, if you didn’t cast your ballot, it’s too late now and you have no right to curse the idiots who picked the winners.) For various reasons, I’d put this task off. Hence, I absorbed in a short time what some subset of fandom thinks were the best works of 2008.

This concentrated reading left one particularly strong impression: Our contemporary writers are fascinated by bold new ideas but not too interested in making them into genuine stories. I’ll single out one especially blatant example, Robert Reed’s Best Novella nominee “Truth”. The concept is fine: a lone time traveler who, wanting to destroy Western civilization, arranges to be captured shortly after 9/11, pretends to be one soldier in an army invading from the future, and tricks his too-clever interrogators into taking the counterproductive actions that will bring about his goal. In precis, it sounds like a great story, and a sufficiency of nominators must have seen its potential. In fact, however, we are never told how the saboteur carried out his mission, and its unraveling is heavier on atmospherics than ratiocination. In the end, the tale remains potential rather than realized. It is not alone among the nominees.

One program item that I will mention is the panel on “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?”, where Rick Foss found himself moderating between two anti-Stratfordians. Since one of them was Eric Flint, the session was basically a monologue. Mr. Flint, who doesn’t pretend to be a deep student of the “authorship question”, declared his support for the fatuous idea that a whole bunch of playwrights used “William Shakespeare” as a handy pseudonym. (Yeah, if I wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, I’d let some angel take the credit, too.) His “decisive” argument against Shakespeare of Stratford’s having been the sole author (making allowances for occasional collaboration, as with Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and with Middleton on Pericles) was that “he retired permanently to Stratford in 1604” – a “fact” about which his certainty was unshakeable, even though there’s not a shred of reason to believe it. For the rest, he expounded some of the standard anti-Stratfordian delusions, e. g., that Venus and Adonis is exceptionally learned and that the Stratford Man made his money as a “grain trader”. To give credit where it’s due, he also had the good sense to knock down some of his own side’s stale chestnuts; as an author himself, he knows that Shakespeare didn’t have to visit Italy in order to use it as a setting.

Oh, I mustn’t overlook a personal milestone. At the Westercon business meeting, I spoke on the prevailing side on a motion. That hasn’t occurred at any business meeting at any convention (including the mock business meeting at the Colorado Springs SMOFCon) since 1986.

To conclude, it was an enjoyable Westercon, arguably the most satisfactory in several years. My hope is that this, the oldest of continuous science fiction conventions after the Worldcon itself, is now on an upswing.

On Dune and Headland Sinks the Fire

Compuserve, on whose forums so many fannish flame wars were fought out, is no more. Truly, the Cretaceous Era of the Internet has ended.

Revolution or Independence?

Independence Day calls to mind the question, Why did the American Revolution usher in an era of unprecedented liberty, while most other revolutions (Cromwellian, French, Russian, Chinese, etc.) have led only to tyrannical rule? The war between the American colonies and the British Crown was not, needless to say, low-key and bloodless. The losing side suffered, often severely. (One of my own ancestors died in a rebel prison.) It was, however, vastly less bloody and brutal than the upheaval in France, and it did not throw up either a military dictatorship or a schism in civil society that lingered almost to the present day. (Hillaire Belloc noted once that, while Jacobite songs were often heard in English homes, he had been warned by the gendarmerie for intoning “Vexilla regis” on a beach in Brittany.)

One does not wish to oversimplify history, but the best answer to our question is, I think, the simplest: The American Revolution was not a revolution in any meaningful sense. It was a war for independence that upheld rather than subverted the colonies’ political and social traditions.

As an example of the opposing view – that a genuine revolution took place – libertarian Ilya Somin will serve:

[T]he American independence movement was . . . revolutionary in the sense that it sought to institute a radically new political system. The revolutionaries certainly were not trying to gain independence simply for the purpose of establishing a smaller country with a political system that largely copied Britain’s. For example, the rebels sought to create a polity with far stronger protections for individual freedom, no hereditary aristocracy, and a much more democratic political system than existed in 18th century Britain (or any other European state).

That is true if one compares post-war America to Britain. But the pertinent comparison is with the pre-war colonies, where the hand of the government was comparatively light, hereditary aristocrats were absent (only one English nobleman, a mere baron (Thomas, Lord Fairfax), ever settled permanently over here, and he left no descendants), and the franchise extended to most white males. The Revolution changed none of that to any marked extent. At most, the departure of many well-to-do loyalists for Canada or the mother country opened niches for ambitious men of the middling order to move into.

Then, too, the governments that the newly independent colonies set up didn’t diverge dramatically from the British model. Every State – and the United States after the adoption of the Constitution – had a monarchial executive and a legislature elected at frequent intervals. The major breaks with colonial practice were that the State governors were elected for a limited term rather than appointed by a distant King and the judiciary was independent of the executive. The latter was probably the biggest alteration, yet contemporaries barely noticed it, presumably because interference with judges and juries had been a constant colonial complaint; the new arrangement was seen as no more than a rectification of a longstanding grievance.

All in all, after 1783 the same people, espousing the same political principles, governed America in pretty much the same way as before 1776. The handful of real revolutionaries, of the Thomas Paine stripe, moved elsewhere to seek their utopias. For that matter, the defeated loyalists turned out to disagree with their rebel brethren on fundamental questions less sharply than one might have anticipated. Those who later took part in English politics tended, like the great guerrilla leader Banastre Tarleton, to ally with the “advanced” Whigs, who in turn looked to America as an inspiration.

At the time of Independence, pessimists abounded, afraid that the overthrow of the constituted authorities would set in motion a landslide descent into anarchy, followed by repression. Within a few years, the French experience would show that it was not irrational to be afraid. Happily, our revolution was conservative and organic, from which other countries and generations ought to have learned the blessings of continuity and prudence. Unluckily for them, many did not.

A Note to Alaska Political Fundraisers

Anybody who runs against Lisa Murkowski can count on a contribution from me. The candidate can be Republican, Democrat, Green, Independence, Libertarian, Communist or Fascist. Just not being Lisa is sufficient.

I make this ecumenical offer, because no one with Senatrix Murkowski’s lack of grace deserves to hold public office. Her comment on Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as governor was as classless as they come, to wit, “I am deeply disappointed that the Governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded.”

Sure, she was “disappointed”. And, sure, stepping down from office is akin to “abandoning” the State.

I don’t imagine that Governor Palin has much of a political career ahead of her. She’ll be popular, at least for a while, on the right-of-center speaking circuit, but it’s not likely that she’ll escape the “quitter” label, and in time other conservatives will edge into the spotlight. The Republican Presidential nominee in 2012 will be either Mitt Romney or somebody who isn’t yet on anyone’s list (and will, I fearlessly predict, carry forty or more states). At best, Sarah Palin will be Secretary of Energy in his administration.

By then, I hope, Lisa Murkowski will be a private citizen in Anchorage. I’ll do what I can to help her get there.