The Monsters Without: Chapter Two (Currently Untitled)

 Chapter Two
Currently Untitled

It was years before the next incident. Really, he’d forgotten all about the first time it had happened because of everything that happened after. Months and months of his mother being harassed by the mailman, everything from not delivering her mail to identity theft. The local postal service sided with the mailman and didn’t take any actions to stop what was going on until the mailman, emboldened, started targeting other people of color. Eventually, he went to jail, but not before Jeremiah and his mother were forced to move.

Even though his mother had never been late on a bill, even though his father had died in Afghanistan serving in the Marines, even though there was definitive proof of the mail tampering and identity theft, the only thing the creditors and companies saw was a single, black mother and wouldn’t make any allowances for the things that had happened. It all… wore his mother down. She wasn’t the same person anymore. The fight and the optimism went out of her.

The monster had been completely forgotten, even by Jeremiah, submerged in the tragedy with the mailman. His mother believed that the mailman had done something from outside the house to scare Jeremiah and cause everything that had happened. That wasn’t totally inaccurate.

Jeremiah’s new school, because he had had to change schools – it had been the desire to have Jeremiah in a “good school” that had been the reason for where they lived – was decidedly less good. You could tell because there were almost no white kids at this school, unlike his first school which was almost only white kids. The new school had no working computers in any of the classrooms, and all of the textbooks were clearly hand-me-downs from other schools. Jeremiah was more than slightly ahead of all the other kids in his classes and, so, bored. All the time.

It got him picked on. Being the smartest kid in class is never the way to make friends. But he hadn’t been the smartest kid in his first school, just in the top five or so. Here, though, he was smarter, or, at least, more learned, than everyone. Even some of the teachers. He didn’t know it, but it was that he read that set him so far apart. Reading had been highly valued at his first school, and he had developed a habit. It got him labeled a troublemaker by the administration and a know-it-all by his classmates. He hated it. Every day.

If he had known it was the books, maybe he would have quit. Maybe. But he didn’t know, and he didn’t have any friends, not really, so he read all the time. He thought the problem was with him. Something innate.

He loved science fiction the most. He didn’t know it yet because he was only 11 and not very inciteful, but it was the idea that in the future in there was no racism that drew him to it. People were just people and nothing like what happened to him and his mother could happen in a world without racism. So he loved Star Trek, and he loved books where humanity was humanity and there was nothing made of what color skin anyone had. But he didn’t know that’s what it was that he liked, not yet.

On days when he had had his book taken away by the teacher, like today, because she told him Stranger in a Strange Land was inappropriate reading – when he asked her if she had read it, she said “no” and scolded him for “talking back” when he tried to ask how she knew it wasn’t appropriate if she hadn’t read it, and sent him to the back of the room – he leaned his head against the window and daydreamed.

The glass was cool against his forehead, and he was imagining that he’d been raised on Mars and could do all of the things that Michael could do so that he didn’t have to sit in a boring classroom. He was vaguely watching out the window and vaguely watching the reflection of the classroom in the glass and superimposing the classroom being outdoors and thinking how much better it would be to be sitting outside on the grass having class out there and trying very hard to visualize everyone outside, trying so hard it made his eyes hurt and the kids in the reflection started looking funny, so he glanced into the class, turned his head just enough to see the teacher and everyone in front of him…

TVland

Ah, yes... The sun always shines on TV. Or, at least, it used to.
I'm sure no one watching Game of Thrones, right now, has any belief in this anymore.
Because TV has changed.
No longer is it an idealized land of make-believe where everything works out in the end, the bad guys are defeated, and the hero gets the girl. Or, you know, whatever version of that you believe in.
And, yes, I'm pretty sure TV did used to be that way.
Thinking back through all of the old shows I used to watch when I was a kid, stuff from the 50s and 60s, I can't think of any shows that didn't always turn out right in the end. Well, except, maybe, Gilligan's Island, because they never did get off of that thing (not until years later when they made the TV movie to get them back home again), but, then, that was the point of that show, right? Within that context, though, everything always turned out fine.

At some point, reality began to work itself into TV shows (and other media, too (I'm, of course, tempted to talk about Marvel Comics and their breaking of the CCA in 1971)) but, really, I blame the 90s. Maybe, even, I blame MTV and The Real World, not that The Real World had anything to do with reality, but I think reality television changed the way things work. Not in a good way.

It gave us Trump (#fakepresident).
More importantly (to this discussion, at any rate), it gave us his obsession with ratings.
And, man, is he obsessed with ratings. His own ratings.
Which is not new information but, you know, sometimes you know things but don't quite grok them (yeah, if you don't understand the term, go read my review of Stranger in a Strange Land, then read the book), and I recently grokked something that scared the shit out of me:
To Trump (#fakepresident), this is all just TV. The things he does, the firing people and the chaos and everything else, are because those are the things you do to keep your viewers. To keep people watching you. It's that whole "all publicity is good publicity" thing.

I suppose I could break this all down and go point by point, but I don't think I need to do that and am not feeling compelled to do so. All of this came upon me because I was listening to one of his associates, someone who has been with him for decades, describing his "style," this style that he's had for, well, decades. A style he developed because of his reality show, evidently, and I had one of those... moments. An "Oh, shit! He thinks the presidency is TV!" moment. It's just to keep eyes on him and keep him in the news and people talking about him.

So, you know, if we end up in an actual war, say, with Iran or China, just know that it's because war is good for ratings.

Fuck this shit.
The sun has gone down.

Stranger in a Strange Land (a book review post)

I feel like I'm a little late to the Heinlein game.
Which is silly.
But, for someone who grew up reading all the sci-fi/fantasy he could get his hands on, it makes me feel like I'm late.
What makes it silly, though, is that even if I'd read this when I was a teenager, I would have been reading it decades after it was originally published. Can you really be late to the game with fiction? Unless you're trying to be in on the cultural zeitgeist game, but that's a totally different thing.

At any rate, I'm not sure reading this when I was younger would have necessarily been a good idea. I was a pretty hard-line Fosterite all the way through my 20s. Oh, wait, I mean Southern Baptist. Not that Fosterite equals Southern Baptist specifically, but it certainly equates to any of the Evangelical denominations. Probably all the Protestant denominations. There's every chance I would have dismissed the book as blasphemous and been done with it.

Or, maybe, it would have helped to yank the stick out of my ass.
I guess we'll never know.
"Waiting is...," as Mike would say it, and I think I've read it at a fairly appropriate time in my life.

What I want to say about Stranger in a Strange Land is that it's barely science fiction, but that's not really true. To paraphrase Mary Doria Russell's response when her book, The Sparrow, was referred to as not really being sci-fi, "It has spaceships and aliens!" And so Stranger does have spaceships and aliens. But the sci-fi wrapper is to cover the philosophy underneath. Which is, actually, totally okay. Asimov said something about sci-fi being the perfect genre in which to write about anything.

Or, in this case, everything. Almost everything. It's a philosophy of... the world. A view of how things could be if we could just... get along? Love each other? His name is Valentine, after all. I don't want to be spoilery and say what kind of figure Michael Valentine Smith is, so I'll say, instead, that the first thing I thought of, the other first thing I thought of, was Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy Budd and Smith are very similar figures, at least in my vague memory of Billy Budd, which I haven't read in decades. Since most of you probably haven't even heard of Billy Budd, I'm not really spoiling anything, right?

But did I like it? I'm sure that's the question you're all dying to know the answer to, probably in some very human rushed sort of way, wanting me to get on with it. But that's not very Martian, you grok?

Yes, it's a very interesting and engrossing book.You can tell by how quickly this review is following after my last review. [And shut up to you people who are pointing out that it's been a full month since my last review! For me, especially recently, I flew through this book!] It's good. In fact, it's very good. I especially enjoyed the character of Jubal Harshaw; I suspect he's a personification of Heinlein himself, though I don't really know anything about Heinlein so that supposition could be completely baseless.

That said, the book does have a few issues, the first one being the way the lead female character is referred to by the male characters early in the book. They pretty regularly call her "little girl" or "baby girl," something which made me extremely uncomfortable. And, like I said, I'm completely unfamiliar with Heinlein, this being the first book I've read by him, so I don't know if this is a Heinlein issue or not. Or it could have been purposeful and for effect since the main male characters quit that behavior as they... well, as they become more evolved due to their experience with Smith. So is it an issue? I don't know, but I bet he wouldn't write it that way if he were writing it today.
Or would he..."

The real issue I have with the book, though minor, is a story issue. And this is what you could call mildly spoilery, so you've been warned.

Mike grew up on Mars. On Mars, dead Martians hang around after they're dead and, really, control everything. They're the Old Ones and are considered all-wise. But, when your soul gets to hang around for... forever... I guess it gives you a different view on things. If you got to hang around after you died, wouldn't you want tell people what to do?

At some point early in the book, we get a snippet from the perspective of the Old Ones. Which was fine. That's part of the sci-fi. Martians aren't the same as humans. The issue is that Mike spends a good portion of the book wondering about the human "Old Ones" and how to get to talk to them, which is also fine... right up until we hit a point where Heinlein gives us some point-of-view from a dead human. That part just didn't work for me.

Heinlein spends a fair amount of time discussing, through Jubal, how it is that we can't actually know the truth about religion, especially in a world where everyone insists that they know the one and only truth. That he later breaks that wall by giving us a view of what happens after death, at least from his perspective, undermines his point about that sort of truth being relative. Fortunately, there's not a lot of that in the book, because that would have had the potential of ruining the story.

All of that to say, if you're a sci-fi fan and pretty flexible minded, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're not a sci-fi fan but, still, pretty flexible minded, i.e., you enjoy hypothesizing about the state of the world, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're ultra-religious or think you have everything figured out, unless you have happened to figure everything out in the same manner as Jubal, you're going to want to throw the book against the wall and burn it. Or, maybe, it will help you get the stick out of your ass.