Category: Saving Democracy

I Don’t Even Know What to Title This

This was a hell of a weekend.  I hardly feel like I know up from down right now.  Huge protests, tiny parades, political murder, American patriotism.  Personal family stuff.  A neck-snapping series of events.

Two things are staying with me this Monday night.  I don’t know if they relate, or how they do, except perhaps they show the two poles of events in America this past weekend. 

First, every time I see that video clip of the old tank squeaking down the street in Fotus’ limp-dick parade, I feel such a hot stab of mixed shame and glee that I burst out laughing – the kind of laugh that’s forced out of you as a defense mechanism. 

@omgseriouslywtf

Empty crowd at Trump’s birthday parade. All you hear is the squeaking tanks. #omgswtf #omgseriouslywtf #trumpsbirthday #parade #military #trumpsupporters #trump #lol

♬ original sound – OMGSWTF

Shame, because it hurts to see the United States Army brought that low, used like that.  Glee, because it’s exactly what Fotus deserves, a creaky-ass vintage tank creeping alone along the street, while the few people there watch in dead silence.  An absurd, pathetic failure.  Instant karma.  This is why we don’t have these sorts of parades in the United States anyway.  They’re stupid and lame. 

The second thing is the … I guess the lack of shock I feel at the political assassinations in Minnesota.  Which by any normal metric is completely shocking and beyond the pale.  A civil society with the rule of law does not use violence to resolve political disputes.  Horrifying!

But we have been beyond the pale for quite a while now.  

This is the way things are now.  MAGA has been nursing and inculcating violence, poltical violence, for ten years.  They’ve told themselves Democrats are commie devil-worshippers and deserve what they get.  They’ve postured with their guns and cosplayed as warriors when half of them are on disability.  They have actively seeded and stoked these sentiments all across the country while denying all responsibility.  

I don’t know how we put that genie back in the bottle.  I don’t know that we do, not in my lifetime.  These people have been cultivating their rage, their violence, their sense of grievance for a decade now.  It’s no surprise when it bursts out as actual violence. 

But on the other hand there were the No Kings marches, where America stood up and flipped the big double bird to our wannabee dictator.  Even in Minnesota, where the citizens had been advised to stay home because the assassin was still at large, they defied fear and showed up by the thousands.  

I hope the world saw.  All this bullshit is against our will.  The majority of America does not want this.  We want to end it.  My intuition has always been, there are more good people than bad in the world.  But the bad people do an outsized amount of damage.  Right now the bad people are very loud and violent.  But we have to remember they are a minority.  A sick, broken minority.  But this is a democracy, and we intend to keep it. 

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Why I Am a Progressive.

Photo by Charlotte Harrison on Unsplash

I was raised liberal, very liberal.  My Mom was a beatnik and my Dad was an anti-war vet.  But I was also raised to think for myself, so there came a time when I questioned what they had taught me, and had to choose what to believe. 

But even so, what I chose, was that I was a lefty.  A Democrat (back when that still meant something).  I didn’t know the word back then, but a progressive.  Because of something I saw when I was a kid. 

I was eight or nine years old, the early 1970s.  This was the era of “busing.”  “Busing” was a divisive issue that inflamed the whole country.  “Busing” came to stand in as a shorthand for civil rights, race relations, “affirmative action” and the whole freighted issue of the legacy of slavery in this country.

“Busing” was an effort to de-segregate public schools by forcibly mixing the students of schools, black and white, by yes, sending the kids by bus to other schools in their area.  Black kids got bussed to affluent white schools, and white kids to more impoverished black schools.  

Looking back as an adult, that was probably a bad idea, working out the long tail of slavery on the backs of schoolkids who didn’t even understand what was happening.  I don’t think it was very popular with anyone – kids from both races were pulled from their communities and sent to school with strangers up to an hour’s bus ride away. This happened in both the North and the South as I recall.  It was the answer to segregation and the whole country was transfixed by it.  Black parents didn’t like their kids being sent to be picked on by strange kids and teachers.  And white parents … didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids.  Yes, that was the central problem.  I know this because I saw it.

One Sunday we were at my grandparent’s house for dinner in Des Plaines, IL, and I was watching the nightly news on the big console TV.  Sitting cross-legged in front of it, a little girl learning about the world.   

A segment came on about “busing.”  It was about unrest in Boston.  Busing was very unpopular there.  People were forcibly resisting it, blockading schools and busses, so the plan could be defeated by physically preventing the kids from attending.  It was a mess.   

I wasn’t old enough to understand the depth and complexity and long history of race relations.  (Even in college they didn’t teach the truth of Reconstruction as the miserable failure it was.) But I was old enough to understand what I saw before me on the TV screen.  

A florid, beefy white man in a plaid shirt standing in the door of a schoolbus in South Boston, and beating the little black kids who were trying to exit the bus, with a club.  

I will never forget it.  It is burned into my memory.  His red, screaming face.  The blue and white shirt.  The club.  The little kids, kids my age, shielding their heads from the club as they just tried to go to school.  

I had a dim understanding that he was worried about his own kids and their future.  But he was worried because they had to be in the same space as black kids.  That was what he was most worried about.  That was the chief threat.  Not the isolation from friends or peers, or the lack of extracurriculars because of the long bus rides home.  No.  The color of these kid’s skin.  That’s what he was worried about.

I saw that, and I thought, I stand against everything this man stands for and I always will.

And I had a pretty good idea, too, of what that was. “Traditional values.” The church.  Fear-mongering about commies.  Women as second-class citizens, people of color as non-people.  Bad economics and a kind of performative rah-rah “patriotism” that I already knew was bogus.  It all went together.  Hating on “busing” because you hate black people and don’t want your kids around them.  Squares. John Birchers.  Republicans.  Bad people. 

Values are very important to me.  I believe every single person has it in them to do the right thing if they look into their heart.  At any moment, you have the free will to stop and change your decision and do the right thing. 


Instead, this guy chose to beat little kids with a club.  Ten toes down, this guy went there and did that.  Beat kids.  With a club. 

So I saw real early the hate and cruelty that fueled conservative politics.  You could explain and rationalize that guy’s thinking as “economic uncertainty” or “malaise” or whatever you like, but what it led him to actually do was beat kids with a club. 

A few years later when Reagan was elected, I was horrified.  I couldn’t believe it.  Morning in America, what a bunch of bullshit.  I knew we were giving the country over to people like the guy with the club. 

Forty-five years later, we are still feeling the effects of that.  Reaganomics.  The Christian Right.  The loss of the Fairness Doctrine.  Rollbacks on civil rights everywhere, for women, for queers, for people of color.


That man is long dead now, the man with the club, but we are living in the world he fought for.  

And I still stand against him and his club and everything he believed to this day.   It’s simple to me.  It’s a matter of right and wrong.  My parents may have been eccentric hipsters, but they DID teach me right from wrong, and I will never forget. 

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This Destruction Is All for Nothing

This is one of those moments where you have to take a step back and ask—
What are we even doing?

Why is this happening?

There’s no war.
No Depression.
No invasion.
No great crisis demanding all this destruction.

We’re not reacting to catastrophe.
We’re choosing it.
Burning it all down for no good reason.

Manufactured panic.
Internet goblins.
Drag queen story hour.
Book bans.
And now, the civil service—gutted. Careers destroyed.
All for a lie.

Because some angry, scared white men would rather burn the country down that share it equitably.

I recorded this video because I couldn’t keep quiet.

Lincoln said:

> “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are.

This isn’t a righteous uprising.
It’s a tantrum.
And if we don’t say it plain, they’ll take everything with them.

It’s not about freedom.
It’s not about safety.
It’s not about survival.

It’s all for nothing.

This was hard to record.
But I had to say it.
The video’s below.

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In Praise of Public Service

It’s not easy to get a federal job. My husband Sam tried for years. The positions are highly competitive, requiring aptitude tests, education, and experience. These are not people who just stumbled into a cushy gig. They are professionals. They are competent. And they have dedicated themselves, often quietly, to the running of our society.

The Civil Service Bloodbath

Mass firings. Loyalty tests. Lifelong careers destroyed overnight. I have words about the current DOGE bloodbath in the Federal Civil Service.

It’s being handled very cavalierly by Elon and his crew of coding dweebs, and by the national press. Let me set the record straight.

The current concept of the “deep state” is either a mass of dead-eyed zombies nursing a paycheck, or a cabal of evil conspirators who are behind everything bad. But no, these are ordinary people, doing their jobs, usually for way less money than they would get in the private sector, because they care about it. Because they want to be of service.

Why Public Service Mattered to Me

My career in the public library mattered to me because it was about helping people and just giving them information, when it seems everything else in society is trying to restrict it. And it didn’t answer to the almighty dollar. It wasn’t about money. Because not everything is reducible to the bottom line. Government is not a profit-making enterprise.

Who Gets Hired and Why

There’s not much deadwood in the Federal civil service. Those are desirable jobs, even if they don’t pay as much: job security, retirement, healthcare. You have to be trained, educated. Know your shit. And you have to be prepared to wait a long time for your job application and hiring process to grind its way through the bureaucracy.

And they offer something else the private sector doesn’t: the opportunity to be of service. The Forest Service, the Postal Service, farm inspectors. There are a fair number of military veterans in the Federal ranks, because they want to continue to be of service. And they are non-partisan. Parties in power switch back and forth, individual workers have their own personal beliefs, but the work still goes on. The mail still has to be delivered. Farms still have to be inspected. The National Weather Service predicts storms. Who’s in the White House doesn’t change any of that.

Bureaucracy: The Hidden Backbone of Society

It’s human nature to bitch about how slow and useless the bureaucracy is – but when it stops working altogether: when the water stops flowing, when FEMA doesn’t come, when another salmonella outbreak occurs, people start screaming. These services are the scaffolding of modern civilized life. I think it’s better they are run by people who aren’t trying to make a profit.

How Public Service Changed Me

My time as a civil servant in the public library made me both a more compassionate and tougher person. More compassionate, because I came to see how ruthlessly human beings are used by “the system” here in the USA. Drained of their economic productivity and cast aside. And how so many people start and live their lives behind the eight ball for absolutely no fault of their own, just bad luck. Public services are supposed to help those people, not further exploit them.

But also tougher, because I needed a thick skin to embody the institutional authority that made people abide by the rules. Enforcing those rules made me more of a hardass, not less – because I came to see how enforcing “the rules” was actually the best way to ensure all the resources the library has to give were shared as equitably as possible. Everyone thinks they’re special, an exception to the rules. But if everybody’s special, nobody is, and human affairs descends into a morass of whimsy and favoritism. I feel that strongly. (The exception being those cases of actual humanitarian need. No, you can’t use the phone, but the little kid who needs to call his Mom to come get him, can.)

DOGE Firings Are an Attack on Civil Society

Look at the chaos going on with DOGE now. The propaganda is that Elon is only firing “probationary employees,” a bunch of noobs who aren’t needed. But any time you get promoted or change jobs in the civil service, you go back on “probation” for periods as long as two years. The effect of these mass DOGE firings has been to kneecap the federal civil service at every level and across the country, to disable its ability to resist Trumpian autocracy. And to rob a lot of people of their beloved careers in which they had worked decades, with no warning and for no good reason. In fact, bad ones. To consolidate personal power. Replace bureaucrats with Trumpian loyalists. Undermine public trust in the government and institutions.

Respect the Work, Defend the Workers

See the DOGE foolishness for what it really is – an attack on civilized society. On the people who keep the gears of the country turning. You don’t notice those gears when the machine is working. But when it breaks – when the roads wash out, the checks stop coming, you want us bureaucrats there, doing our jobs in service of you, the American people.

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Art as Resistance: Writing in Troubling Times

I’m doing good work on Majestic Seventeen, my current project. Creeping forward 500 words at a time. “The End” has assumed the nature of the horizon: an abstract concept that recedes before you, never attained. It’s a big book!

But I write because I don’t know what else to do.

When the World Feels Like It’s Burning

It’s hard to articulate even to ourselves how bananas and terrible everything is right now. Oligarchs crashing the entire world economy to enrich themselves further. Law-abiding people being detained and disappeared. A dipshit narcissist tech nerd chainsawing the federal government for no good reason as far as I can see. Meaning and reality themselves totter under the weight of lies and conspiracy theories. And that doesn’t even touch on the endemic problems that fester in the background — climate change, inequality. The wheels are just coming off our civilization.

This is why I write speculative fiction. To try to imagine something different, something better. Hope arising in the ruins, from lost Atlantis, from America. I have personal experience with that, rising from ruins. Hurricane Katrina. This year is the twentieth anniversary. It always shows up in my work and it will show up in a big way this year.

I watched this ruination for a while. My entire career. Public librarianship gives you a raw faceful every day of the structural injustice and endemic heartlessness of our society. You work with people who have been failed by society in every possible way. Deliberately, methodically. Then kicked when they’re down. The “digital divide” just exacerbated that over the last thirty years. Requiring computer literacy and expensive technology from people who were functionally illiterate, the first of the many ways society failed them. Having to go online to apply for a job at Walmart. It isn’t right. The public library has been the finger in the dike of that flood of injustice all along.

The year of the pandemic, I had a health crisis of my own, and when early retirement was offered as a cost saving measure for city government, I took it. So I could turn my attention to writing. Before I died.

Art Is Not a Luxury. It’s a Spell.

I pulled an Oracle card today, from the World Shamans Oracle, and the card was Orpheus. The tragic, mad poet-sage who could move the stones to weep with his song. Appropriate since I was going to work on this very blog post. The guidebook says, “Poetry is a form of shamanism that takes place in language; each word acquires value in the verses and has the power to re-enchant the world.”



That’s what I’m trying to do, why my writing feels as much a spiritual practice to me as creativity. Re-enchant the world. Western culture is absolutely desperate to re-enchant the world. I state that in my Artist’s Statement: I write “pulpy, entertaining speculative fiction that also advocates progressive values, and interrogates structures of power and belief. My goal is to entertain people by telling tales of other worlds, which help them think how we could manifest a better world here and now. ”

In times like these, art is not just entertainment or a luxury. Not an escape. It is resistance. It is survival. Do you remember how desperately we clung to art through the Covid pandemic lockdown? It was the only thing that got us through. Shows, comedy, music. Even baking bread like it was a blessed sacrament. That is what I learned from the pandemic: art is non-negotiable.

Art is life.

The Power of Naming

If shamans are healers, I’m not a healer of bodies, but of meaning. Telling stories that help bind up the wounds of civilization. The Pono Way is about solarpunk, DIY resistance to imperialism and the dangers of xenophobia. Even people who don’t like the book get the message. Daughter of Atlas is about the collapse of imperialism and the danger of ecological destruction. Majestic Seventeen is turning out to be about facing down systems of power, control, and belief. Yes, they’re all adventure speculative fiction, but I hope they’re more than just that.

My Lane is the Highway

I reference this more in my post My Lane is the Highway. I don’t need to write to put food on the table. I can let my ideas expand, experiment with different forms, different shades in the prism of speculative fiction. I write to entertain people but also make them think. Before anything new arises in the world, someone has to imagine it. I can do that.

The world we have now didn’t arise from natural selection or the invisible hand of the market. It was deliberately made, and it is working as intended. Extracting wealth and blood from the masses to gorge the billionaires. It can be unmade. All this suffering isn’t necessary. We can do better.

A Closing Incantation

So I write, because it is one thing I can control, and contribute, when the world is collapsing around me. Even at the end of empires, life still goes on. People still work and earn money. They still need entertainment. Spec Fic has always been a Trojan horse to sneak in new ideas, on the pages of pulp magazines and the panels of comic books.

My pen is my wand. My book is my spell. I sing for a better world. Creating something when the world is falling down is an act of defiant hope.

So what do you sing? What is your spell? How are you going to re-enchant the world? It needs you to dream a new dream, now more than ever. Join me.

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That’s My Dad

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head, so I’m getting it down.

I’m sure you’re aware of Gus Walz’s big moment at the Democratic Convention:

A young man, overwhelmed with love and pride as his dad accepts the Vice Presidential nomination. It was a beautiful moment, pure emotion. Pure love. M heart squeezed as I watched.

So I knew instantly MAGA was going to come for him.

The leading edge haters did — Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza (who is a convicted felon by the way). The usual bottom feeders, calling him “a puffy beta,” “weird” and a “soy boy.” Just mocking and dragging this young man for loving his dad. He’s only 17.

But they were quickly checked by people pointing out Gus is neurodivergent. He has a learning disorder and anxiety. Mocking the disabled is still too much for rank and file MAGA, although their Dear Leader. can do it with impunity.

Remember this?

Some MAGA complained that they were “tricked” into mocking Gus. Because they “didn’t know” he was disabled. Like this fine specimen.

The Walz family has spoken publicly about Gus’s challenges and how they help him navigate them. It took a lot for him to be there in that huge stadium full of screaming people at all — as someone with anxiety as well, I know. I would have melted down. With fear, not happiness.

But here’s the thing — it doesn’t matter if Gus is neurodivergent OR NOT. Being overwhelmed with love for your father at his proudest moment is PERFECTLY NORMAL HUMAN EMOTION. There is nothing strange or unnatural about it. We should all hope to be so loved.

And you just don’t mock people like that. You just don’t. * It’s cruel. It’s small. It’s ugly.

All sorts of grown-ass people who should know better mocked a teenage boy publicly on the Internet. For *showing emotion.*

This is the worldview MAGA and Project 2025 want to bring us. This kind of “Biblical man- and womanhood.” I’m horrified by the vision of human relations they espouse. Where men are supposed to be some kind of emotionless brutes who only speak with their fists or their dick. The only acceptable emotions are rage and lust.

And women are — well, property, basically. Livestock. Breeders. Look at the landscape post-Dobbs: women who could have a brief, safe medical procedure and go on to live their lives and have more children, are dying or having their fertility forever destroyed. The right fetishizes baby-making, but don’t care if women are killed and mutilated when it goes wrong. Why do they hold our lives so cheaply?

Trump and Co. will strip women of the right to vote if they can. They flat-out say so. Peter Thiel, Posobiec, Fuentes. It’s in there.

Black men will be next.

This is the world a vote for Trump will bring us. Shitty little white men imposing their thwarted desires to be “strong” and “powerful” on the whole nation, by color of law if they can. By force if they can’t.**

These people are not mentally healthy. My husband laughed at me when I implicated “abusive parenting,” but Google “blanket training” and see if you agree with him, or with me.

Emotionally mature and stable people know, like Vice President Harris said, that leadership is truly marked not by who you beat down, but who lift up. VP Harris and Coach Walz have lifted a lot of people in their lives.

We can’t let these broken people, who can’t even recognize real love when they see it., run the country. Vote for Gus’s dad and his running mate on November 8.

*Except fascists. Mocking them is essential.

**Expect violence leading up to and on the Election Day. That’s a whole separate thing.

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