[Note from Steve: I’m posting this article to both my blogs because it’s about politics as well as reading and writing. If you object to that, you don’t have to read it!]

Although I’m sure the neo-Nazi and white supremacist MAGA maniacs and their fascist fuehrer, Donald J. Trump, don’t give a rat’s ass about Hispanic heritage (not to mention all those other bigots, haters, and general assholes who supported him in this last election, some even Hispanics!), I want to write first about our US immigrant heritage in general.

Let me say this to a lot of dumb SOBs out there: The only native Americans are Native Americans (and even they came over that land bridge from Asia to America long ago!). We’re all immigrants! There were waves and waves of immigrants to the New World. (I suppose today the FPA—that’s the “Fascist Party of America,” once was the Republican Party until Trump turned it into the FPA—would call all immigrants “evil migrants” today.) Yes, they came to our shores in waves and waves—Europeans in the east, fleeing wars, famines, and religious persecution; Africans in the south, most unwillingly as slaves, to maintain an evil way of life by making it economically feasible; and Asians in the west imported to work essentially as slaves to America’s robber-barons, themselves the sons and daughters of immigrants, to connect east with west. (Yeah, you might think that’s a “woke” statement. Tough!)

All the while, Americans methodically killed, enslaved, and “resettled” tribes of Native Americans, destroying their culture and civilization in the process. Let’s remember, though, that this also occurred elsewhere in the American continents at the hands of European invaders. Many of them were Portuguese or Spanish. Those decades of exploitation couldn’t stop the wonderful blending of Portuguese and Spanish colonists’ cultures, at least their positive parts, with those of America’s indigenous people, leading to what we now call Hispanic culture.

All that great Latin American diaspora has now settled into our country is the latest wave of decades of immigration to the US that is still going on, so for the bigots, haters, and racists of the FPA, they’re the obvious ones to take on the role of scapegoats for all the problems people believe they have, making them targets of their ire.

Hitler and Stalin had the Jews; American Nazis at the end of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth had the Irish, Italian, and other more recent immigrants from Europe; fascist leaders in Africa now go after gays, sentencing them to death; Jews in Israel are out to exterminate all Palestinians; Russians call Ukrainians, who are led by a brave Jew, Nazis; etc., etc. But in the US, the FPA has decided to use Hispanics as their scapegoats and has done so ever since 2015 when the Donald came down that escalator at Trump Tower. That was the first sign that things were going horribly wrong in America. “Hispanics are rapists and murderers,” that new presidential candidate said. He’s never stopped saying it!

Unfortunately, even many Hispanics have betrayed their heritage and moved to support that “f$#%ing moron” (that’s a quote from ex-SecState Tillerson, whom Trump fired in his first term) and Trump’s planned pogrom to be launched against their people. Is this cultural suicide and death wishes on their part? It sure looks like it! Gone will be any appreciation for the literary Hispanic heavyweights of Isabel Allende, Luis Borges, Leon de Greiff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Vargas Llosa, and so many others. Gone will be the wonderful dance and musical tradition of cumbias, bambucos, rancheros, tangos, vallenatos, and other musical forms of greats like Carlos Gardel, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and so many others. By destroying an entire people, America’s dictator and his crazy followers will destroy a culture just because American fascists need scapegoats to survive like Hitler and Stalin did. Fascist movements everywhere need people to blame. America’s Hispanics were the obvious choice for them, in their minds’ eyes a worthless minority everyone will love to hate.

If the internment and deportation program is successful (that mostly means that fascists will be willing to spend billions of your taxes on paying for it!), the fascist bigots, haters, and racists will get their wishes granted at the expense of killing American democracy. American fascists need a hard lesson of woke and DEI: America will die if it closes its borders to immigrants, and it will be a death by many cuts. Immigrants have always come to America to start new lives in the land of opportunity and have always contributed to building a stronger America. (Do you remember that Neil Diamond song?) The FPA and its fuehrer only want to tear America down. They even call themselves “disrupters”! Which future for America do you prefer? One controlled by the bigots, haters, and racists?

Like many others who have studied in detail at America’s current political disaster and its origins, something now so awful that the country looks like 1930s’ Germany, I’ve often thought of going elsewhere. During the Vietnam war era, I considered Canada. After all, I can live abroad and did so for more than a decade in Colombia, South America. Europe looks more sane too. But despite my age now that makes such a decision more difficult (although I’d like to leave the sinking ship because I know that, except for supporting their aging fuehrer, the FPA doesn’t care about the elderly—will Dr. Oz to offer euthanasia as a Medicare option?), all I can do is fight against fascism and for democracy in America with my writing during the years I have left; that includes my two blogs. That’s a promise I’ve made to myself. Won’t you join me?

Age of Grievance. Frank Bruni, author (2024).

[Note to readers from Steve: This might be the most unusual book review you’re ever read! It’s in the format of an email because my intention was to send it to Mr. Bruni, which turned out to be impossible. (Mr. Bruni’s website, www.FrankBruni.com, doesn’t have a contact page.)]

Dear Professor Bruni,

After your appearance on Jake Tapper’s “The Lead,” my wife, bless her, decided that gifting me your book The Age of Grievance for Father’s Day would be an appropriate addition to my to-read-list of non-fiction books (I keep them on my shelf afterwards too…as references). In retrospect, I dare say that “appropriate” is quite an understatement! It jumped to the top of my reading list. You sir have put into words many of my own worries about our troubling times.

As one of the first baby-boomers, I grew up amidst the euphoria, hope, and optimism for a better world after World War Two—we’d been able to defeat fascism around the world, after all!—and despite the glitches like we had with the Korean and Vietnam Wars, all occurring before my first graduate degree, I felt like the far horizons for a better America were now nearer and reachable, the race to the moon and fall of the Soviet Union adding to that feeling.

In your book, you explore the broad changes in the psyches of the American public, many of them not at all positive, but you rarely mention how twenty-first century events have changed the minds of the US and world’s youth, replacing that euphoria, hope, and optimism with depression and frustration. This has long been a concern of mine as well. As much as I could, I fought the good fight, but today’s youth will need to have more mettle to continue the fight. Fascism is on the march again, and now it has better tools even if it lacks better leaders.

I was lucky enough to teach college courses and learn something from my students (not what I was teaching, of course) while doing some research in both the US and South America (Colombia, to be specific), and this ennui among today’s youth was already apparent in both groups of students. This isn’t completely attributable to imagined grievances nor immaturity. (I’ve found college students, especially juniors and seniors, to be quite mature until events like those at Columbia University and UCLA occurred.) As a retiree, I’ve become more of an observer of the human condition to facilitate my fiction writing, and all this has indicated that the situation is worsening.

You’re in a position where you can offer some suggestions to these lost generations. For health reasons, I can only do that now through my fiction, mostly via my young adult sci-fi mysteries, but those are read more by adults who are young at heart than young adults (my book events have provided that evidence).

One thing that seemed to work well in my old day-job with young employees and interns on my research teams was for us to chat about things—better stated, take advantage of their desire to talk about things and my willingness to listen to what they said. Reading your book, I felt you were doing that with me: You seem to be able to offer a sympathetic ear in your op-eds and in your book. May I suggest you write another one especially for today’s youth?

I apologize for bothering you with all this, but your excellent book got me thinking.

Take care…and please keep writing.

r/Steve Moore

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Other non-fiction. For an unusual book review, why not an unusual ad? See my “Steve’s Bookshelf” web page for a list of other recommended non-fiction books. (Of course, the fiction books listed there are damn good too!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas! 

I gave my newsletter subscribers a little spiel about the importance of education this month, so I thought I’d elaborate on it a bit more. While most of us might recognize the importance of both formal and informal education, I haven’t used education as a major theme in my novels, or educators, for that matter.

Sure, Detective Castilblanco takes his Buddhist lessons from his mentor, and STEM student Kayla Jones has an early school friend in Billy, but my novels don’t take place in a classroom. Gail, one main character in Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, and her new lab assistant, Jeff, who’s the other, work at a small college outside Philly, but I only use that setting at the beginning of the novel to joke around a bit about weird professors (I once was one). Using only my stories, you might conclude I don’t value formal education very much (I do).

I think education is important, formal or otherwise. I would have discovered books without it (I basically did, and I certainly read some that wouldn’t have met the approval of my teachers). Yet I probably wouldn’t have had a decent day-job without my formal education. Now it allows me to write my stories without worrying very much about the financial aspects of publishing.

My father, an excellent artist who was also a gruff old fellow with a heart of gold, often said, “Children should be seen, not heard.” The same can be said about education. I don’t mean we should take it for granted, far from it. Rather, it’s such a basic necessity and right that we shouldn’t have to think about it very much. It’s like air: We need it and should maintain its quality, but we generally don’t think about air with every breath we take—that’s automatic. I don’t discuss air in my books much (except for a few scenes in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion), and I don’t discuss education that much either.

Yet there’s a subtle sidebar here: My novels often treat profound and serious themes (even a sci-fi rom-com like Time Traveler’s Guide) that they can be considered educational because of those themes. You might say they educate by example. Or, by simply exposing readers to issues they might not otherwise think about. I know some readers don’t like that. All I can say to them is that there’s plenty of fluffy, formulaic novels out there to keep them happy.

We can learn from reading books, fiction included. Maybe books where that can be done aren’t bestsellers or become blockbuster movies, but I can’t lower myself to write simple novels. Or read them, for that matter. I need to continue learning about life and this world and others, a continuing education about the human (or ET) experience. I find this informal process, reading fiction, an important part of my education. I hope you do too.

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Comments are always welcome.

Two more “Esther Brookstone” novels. Did you miss them? Maybe you thought Esther’s adventures ended with the story of her honeymoon with Bastiann, Death on the Danube? No, there are more adventures involving crimes back in merry old England after the couple returns home. In #4, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, they befriend an American artist, only to find there’s a lot more to her troubles than expected. In #5, Leonardo and the Quantum Code, everyone wants to steal new algorithms for quantum computers based on ideas of Leonardo Da Vinci. If you love the idea of 21^st versions of Miss Marple (Esther) and Hercule Poirot (Bastiann), don’t miss any of the books in this series.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Those who are accustomed to my blog posts—minimally, an op-ed comment on current events on Tuesdays and something on reading, writing, or the publishing business on Thursdays—might find it strange that I’m placing this post here on a Tuesday. There’s a simple explanation: reading and understanding what we read are building blocks in the democratic foundation of our country.

A dear friend and I were talking over the holiday about reading “popular science” articles. These are supposedly designed so that an “intelligent layperson” can develop some understanding about an esoteric bit of science or technology. I complained about Scientific American’s overly detailed articles in fields I’d like to learn more about for my sci-fi writing. “Don’t worry about it,” said my friend. “They’ve dumbed down the articles now.”

Some translations are in order. First, there’s no such thing as “popular science” anymore. Science isn’t popular, from outright attacks on it by religious fanatics and politicians who are sycophants for Corporate America, unwilling or otherwise, to teachers telling students that they should study something else because science is too hard (especially egregious when a male teacher adds “…for girls”). In all age groups, many consider science and technology to be the root of all the problems society faces, and there are many others who encourage such an opinion.

Second, “intelligent layperson” is all too often another oxymoron nowadays. I’m not speaking to the obvious cases where someone believes dinosaurs and human beings coexisted and the world with all its wonderful diversity of flora and fauna was all created six thousand years ago. I’m talking about the average Joan or Joe who reads something but can’t understand what they’ve just read. Call it what you will, it’s an indictment against popular culture. At the critical lower levels in our educational systems, teachers over-emphasize getting through the words—understanding is secondary. Certain content is emphasized; there’s not much practice analyzing and digesting new content. Too many people read something that’s devoid of facts but don’t have the background or even common sense to know better.

Third, “dumbed down” is a nice way of saying that essay and book writers know all about the problems mentioned above and bend over backwards to compensate in order to get their message across. The latter is a struggle that’s becoming increasingly difficult, even for fiction writers, where “dumbed down” has destroyed serious literature.

Even if we get people to read with all the other distractions they have—streaming video, social media, video games, and so forth—getting them to understand what they are reading is a high hurdle to jump over. I’ve often read a review of a “popular science” book and asked myself, “Did the reviewer read the same book I did?” That would probably happen with fiction too, but I don’t bother to read those reviews unless I’m making excerpts for the PR and marketing of my own books.

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When you get to be my age—old but young-at-heart—you start wondering if you had to do it all over again, what different choices would you make. Life is about choices, of course—choices covering an entire spectrum, from small to big. You might have some regrets too. That’s only human.

I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my personal life. Given the same circumstances, I’d make the same ones. I wouldn’t have minded if some of them had turned out differently—I’d like to decrease the bad experiences and amplify the good ones—but I generally wouldn’t change the choices I made that led to these experiences.

I started publishing my fiction 10+ years ago (the first edition of my second novel, Full Medical, was published in 2006). At an early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’m a practical person, though, so I made the choice to become a scientist, figuring that being a successful writer was too much like winning the lottery. It is, no matter what some authors or writing gurus say. Don’t give up on your day-job just yet. I think Dean Koontz’s wife gave him a year or so to achieve success. That’s unheard of nowadays, unless you win the lottery like Hugh Howey, J. K. Rowling, or Mark Weir. Writing good fiction is a necessary condition; there are no sufficient ones.

Science might not seem like a career that forms a basis for writing success (except maybe for sci-fi—many successful sci-fi writers are ex-scientists). One can wonder what careers are best for that. A love of languages has always accompanied my love for writing. I have a modest ability with languages. Given other circumstances, I might have become a linguist. That seems to be a fulfilling career for putting food on the table while you write stories and wait for some modicum of success. Probably not as lucrative as hard science and technology, though, which everyone calls STEM nowadays. While a journalism degree is probably better than an MFA (the former produces more understanding of and exposure to the human condition), the study of languages is undeniably related to what a writer does all the time: putting ideas into words and choosing the right words and logic to do so.

Of course, any writing career does this, even writing verses for Hallmark. But the study of languages goes far beyond writing skills. Understanding the linguistic history and structure of languages, especially one as dynamic as English, offers the future and present writer an incredible base for the logical choices s/he must make in her or his writing.

I don’t own many print books now. Although I have enough to keep bookshelves sagging, I generally find ebooks more practical—they’re easy to read, very accessible, and don’t take up any physical space beyond my Kindle. But there’s one print book on my reference shelf that I greatly value, David Crystal’s The Stories of English. Even if you ignore current dialects and regional variations, English is a complicated amalgam of many bits and pieces that has seen a dynamic and rapid development. The Spanish reader can still read Cervantes; we struggle with Shakespeare. And these men were almost contemporaries (Shakespeare died one day after Cervantes).

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Writers tend to be introverted, so I have no problem working mostly online. (As you get older, it’s harder to be social in the conventional sense—many of your friends and colleagues have passed on, after all. The crowds in the pubs are younger; if you go to church, you only see irascible oldsters like yourself worrying about their mortality; and so forth) But three news items from the business world caught my attention recently. First, venerable Macy’s is closing a slew of stores. Second, bookstore-barn-giant B&N just fired their CEO. And third, the Trump casino in Atlantic City will file for bankruptcy. What do these news items have in common? Their cause, the internet. At least partially. Let me explain.

People are spending more time online, whether via smartphones or computers (their distinction is only semantical now), and whether buying, playing, or socializing.  All department stores from Macy’s to Wal-Mart have been affected by online buying. People don’t go out and buy as much anymore.  And if people get out to shop in these hectic times when you might not be sure you have a job next week, they often don’t buy; they just look (window-shopping is the old descriptor), assess their options, and go home and order the goods online. Some pundits call this the Amazon effect, usually in a pejorative sense, but that gives that retail giant way too much credit.

B&N bookstores’ problems are just bigger ones that every bookstore shares and are comparable to the department stores’—online buying is preferred by many customers. The B&N bookstores are big barns for books; the department stores are big barns for clothing, home furnishings, and other goods. The merchandise is different, but the effects of the internet are the same. There are other effects, of course. B&N has been in a downspin since they spun off the Nook business. Macy’s has been hurt from the top and the bottom—your elite stores like Nordstrom’s and Lord and Taylor’s pretend to have better quality merchandise and your Targets and Wal-marts the same products at better prices. And then there’s Amazon.

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In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

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[This series started last week.  If you haven’t already done so, you might want to read Part One.]

Have I convinced you book reading America is in trouble?  There’s another chapter in this story.  No, it doesn’t have anything to do with traditional publishers and their writers trying to kill indies.  For the most part, readers can ignore that problem (unless they’re also authors).  Moreover, I’ve dealt with that enough in this blog as have many other people (Joe Konrath, in particular).

No, in this second part, I claim what few avid readers are left are spoiled.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Authors and publishers should spoil their readers (something traditional publishing fails miserably at).  Authors produce the raw product—think of bananas—and readers eat it up.  We’d have no market for the raw product if they didn’t do that.  (Traditional publishing adds a new wrinkle.  Like a certain banana company responsible for even the overthrow of governments, traditional publishing represents the middle people who exploit their workers, the writers, and exploit their consumers, the reading public.)

I want to spoil my readers with entertaining, meaningful stories, though.  Genre fiction writers are like the bards of old, providing entertaining stories at reasonable cost (indie writers, at least).  Maybe all writers fit into that role.  We should value every reader we have.  A satisfied reader will come back to buy my bananas.  A satisfied reader will tell other readers I sell good bananas.  Such a reader won’t like everything in my books (I don’t even like everything in my books, but I need to release my bananas or they’ll spoil).  Such a reader should complain to me about what s/he doesn’t like—I listen.  I might change my way of growing bananas.  But maybe not.

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I made some comments over on Scott Dyson’s blog.  (Scott’s post is the genesis for these ideas.)  I’d like to amplify on them here and next week.  To summarize bluntly: reading in America is in trouble.  Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it’s clear that we’re in trouble here.  Let’s consider some numbers.

I’ve upped my presence on Goodreads lately.  Forget Facebook; Goodreads is where the readers are.  Authors too, but they’re second-class citizens for the GR team, and justifiably so.  My goal is to entertain readers.  To the extent that authors are also readers, I can entertain them too, but my goal is to reach out to readers.  (Warning to authors: All those writing groups you belong to won’t help you find readers.)

I can’t help but notice the numbers on Goodreads.  Three of the groups I belong too are huge!  Goodreads Authors/Readers has 21,534 members last I checked (why isn’t it Readers/Authors?); the Mystery, Crime, and Thriller Group has 12, 682; and the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club has 14,187.  Given that there’s probably some overlap (me, for example), those numbers represent a PR and marketing teams’ dream.  (Warning to them: PR and marketing efforts are frowned upon in GR and are generally relegated to only certain sections of a group’s list of discussions…and justifiably so.)

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Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

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