40 something years

Well, nearly fifty. My radio series scripts were written in 1970. I used manual typewriters in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Allenwood, San Francisco, Sydney, Mill Valley and Cazadero, most of them little portables, a couple of Selectrics and IBM Executives on occasion. More than once, I had to use pencil and paper. Photocopiers were terrible back then, thin slick thermal paper that faded to nothing in a few weeks. Carbon paper was more durable, but you had to really bang the typewriter keys and mistakes were a tedious mess to correct with a hard ink eraser and a stiff little brush. I bought a lot of Liquid Paper. A fresh bottle was good for about a week and then it got thick and stringy, no matter how quickly you screwed the cap shut.

Useful personal computers came along in the mid-80s. Some of my best stuff at the time was written on an 8086 laptop that used floppies, no fonts, no bold, no italics. I wrote a show for IBM that was composed on an Osborne, had a dinky screen that you had to scroll left and right to see a whole line of text. The Amiga was considered a breakthrough. You could feed video through it, do captions and titles, draw stuff, animate it (sort of), and use it like a typewriter with a line printer, endless folds of perforated paper fed by a tractor. Floppies were smaller and slightly more durable, had hard shells. Still no internet. There was a tug of war between Betamax and VHS in America, plus a Philips cassette in Europe that you could turn over and record on both sides. Pro video was a chaos of 3/4" and three incompatible 1" open reel "C" formats. Studios in Australia were still using 2" quad tape. All audio was analog. I mention it because I was doing more film and video production than creative writing at the time.

Then I found myself sitting in a cubicle at Disney, spending Mickey's money to master home video product on D1 and D2, and I realized that my career in Hollywood was kaput. My movie scripts made it as far as the Development Committee at Columbia and got voted down 4-3 , vetoed by bosses at PSO, Kingman, and DeLaurentiis. Lyle Alzedo got sick and died, so my star vehicle for Lyle died, too. No matter what I pitched, the answer was always no. I decided to write books. The first one was written on an old portable Underwood by gaslight on a ranch that had no electric power. Oddly enough, it was published and did fairly well, a reference book with a humorous take on concepts and doctrines that ended in "ism." Decades later, I found a copy in a Colorado library, opened it and hung my head in dismay, wished that I had done a much better job. Writers mature slowly. My first novel took a long time to get right, twenty years from first draft to a third revision that actually makes sense, flows better.

As I became a better author, the market shrank. Book publishers consolidated or went out of business. Worse, as I gained control of my literary vision and a signature style, the world went bezerk with Political Correctness. Chicks, gays, and "people of color" were celebrated, straight white guys blackballed. I stretched my brain to grasp print on demand. My first few books covers were terrible, and I was completely baffled when it came to promotion. I sold no books. I gave up, segued to financial writing for Seeking Alpha and a business magazine in Abu Dhabi, did some writing for hire in the oil patch, helped new screenwriters at Zoetrope, self published a couple of nonfiction titles and wasted money at Kirkus and O Desk, shipped review copies hither and yon, and plugged my work on internet forums, all for naught.

Four years ago, I found a small plot of forest and pasture in the Ozarks, cleared a site at the top of a hill and built a house that my wife designed. When it was finished, I set up a little writing office in an old tin barn and began to write again, egged on by a talented novelist in New Mexico and an equally talented short story author in California, people I admired. The result was five new novels and five nonfiction titles, self published and handled with more confidence at Lulu, CreateSpace, Smashwords, and KDP. Books sales were slow, but I had forged an authorial voice that was natural to me. Fifty years of writing paid off in the sense that I could not be mistaken for anyone else, a unique storyteller, ruthless and expressive, unafraid to show and tell what happens between hard men and the women who love them. It doesn't matter, can't matter what other people write, whether I'm ignored or reviled. I'm too old to care, nearing the end of life. Fifty years of cigarette smoking has a price.

There is no undoing it. Not after such a gruelling uphill climb to a summit of my own, over a million words that had to be hammered like pitons on a sheer stone wall, no one to catch me if I fell.

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Has it occurred to anyone that the government shutdown should be made permanent?

If I understand it correctly, essential services are uninterrupted, Social Security and Medicare payments continue to gush, the Treasury is borrowing and jawboning as usual, and DoD has over a million people stationed all over the world eating three squares. FBI, DEA, BATF, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are staffed 100%, and there's no question that Capitol Police and Secret Service are being paid. The Federal Government is the world's largest consumer of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, paying up to $100 a gallon to deliver it to Afghanistan. All of our MRAPs, F-16s, and ships at sea are still in business, every tank truck, barge, and escort.

It's hard to grasp how big the government is. Nine hundred thousand structures around the world, 3.4 billion square feet, 122 square miles under roof, with over two million vehicles and aircraft parked outside. Estimates of Federal employees and contractors are between thirty and fifty million, depending on how you count teachers, college professors, coaches, doctors, bankers and brokers worldwide who skim a six-figure income from Treasury debt, mortgage scalpers underwritten by Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, FHA, and Section 8 largesse.

It's dead certain that Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Raytheon would collapse without fat DoD contracts, but their national defense cash flow is contractual, immune from shutdown. If I had to wager, I'd bet that Congressional staff and travel junkets are immune, too.

I trust you know that the U.S. Government annually spends over $1 trillion more than it takes in from taxes and an infinity of fees including tariffs, asset seizures, and fines. The Feds are roughly $22 trillion in debt, unless you count unfunded entitlements of $200+ trillion. So, the obvious question is -- why not make this 25% "shutdown" permanent? It won't balance the budget or nick the ever-expanding entitlement gravy train, but it's a nice down payment.

Oooo, scary. People out of work!

I don't see why not. Every dollar the government spends on itself is a dollar taken from the private free enterprise economy, engine of all innovation and profit, minus the burden of regulatory compliance and shipping and handling by tax accountants and molasses slow bureaucrats who can't be fired or compelled to show up for work.

Returning medical practice to the doctors would be nice. When I was a young man, we paid doctors in cash like plumbers and grocers. All private hospitals did charity cases, no charge. I know it's hard to believe, but drugs were cheap. Not in some distant prehistoric time, but in the 1960s, before affordable Blue Cross was hijacked by a tidal wave of suddenly sacrosanct welfare payola, illegal aliens, and anchor babies.

I'd like to see Congress undertake a new mission, no new laws, only repeals, but I'll take a 25% shutdown gladly. Let it run a few months. Kick the tires on smaller government. Make it easier to hire people in the private sector by cutting regulations -- or furlough enforcement staff, turn off a few light bulbs and computer screens, have a garage sale and sell off some of the quarter million GSA vehicles that regulators toodle around in. It'll be difficult to retrain former government employees to do anything efficiently and cheerfully, but newspapers say that there are more jobs available than those unemployed, so a big chunk of the 800,000 out of work at Federal agencies will be snapped up in a hurry by private employers. Who knows? They might enjoy working for a living, instead of snoozing at the Bureau of Paperwork.

I'm told by NPR that vital Homeland Security operations like TSA are working without being paid. First off, pull the plug on NPR, thanks. TSA should be funded by airlines and airports and ordered to keep their hands off frequent flyers, cute chicks, grannies, and children.

Above all, bring the troops home. Not just a handful from Syria. An orderly retreat from bases in Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Bahrain, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia would go a long way toward enhancing national security, concentrating on defense of North America, patrolling our shores and borders. International trade is a stupid justification for imperialism, and there's no sane purpose in policing the Islamic world as badly as we police Chicago.

Whether private citizens want to subsidize Israel or cancer research is up to them. Voluntary associations are the whole meaning of a free society. Let freedom ring and put government on a Weightwatchers diet, shed some of those bloated trillion dollar deficits.

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The price of things

Shocking how much it cost. Forget the thousands and tens of thousands. Lots of things are expensive. But writing has mountains of constitutional and moral expense. Writers go naked in public, confess all, obvious in their ideas, in narrative, every word and glance exchanged by fictional characters. Writing careers are measured in long lonely decades of effort. I began to write over thirty years ago. It was never cheap or easy.

The fourth volume of Chris & Peachy was extremely costly in every respect. I sold my car to write The Tar Pit, destroyed my remaining credit to write Charity. But Finding Flopsie was worst of all. I gambled and lost. I liked the story well enough, but I failed to conceptually sew together a believable portrait of Peachy and her sister Kelly. Flopsie was a weepy soap opera, preposterous and overly ambitious. Chandler had similar trouble with Farewell My Lovely, one of his best, and Hammett choked with an unwieldly Dane Curse saga.

It happens. Writers reach too high. They get confused about how brilliant they are. I should not have tried to write from inside a female character's head. Men can always get away with depicting how women react and behave, but not their internal experience.

I can't say that I regret writing Flopsie, win lose or draw. Without Flopsie and everything that it cost financially and spiritually, there would have been no Kyle, no Karen, no Partners, and worse, no Executive Branch. As bizarre as it sounds, my entire life was lived to write a short story about Alaska. I'm famous in Fairbanks, and it finally sunk in that Alaska is an uniquely free and independent arctic continent, totally unlike the Lower 49. It wouldn't take much to push Alaska into secession when the Lower 49 go economically kablooey, which is already baked into the political mudpie, purely a matter of time, maybe sooner than we know.

A huge expenditure, when you think of it. 68 years of life, eight novels, an enormous trail of ambition and wreckage, high water marks and penury, all the fullness of life as a confused youngster, a charismatic playboy and a serious intellectual voice, every day of it a qualifying precondition to conceive a story about Alaskan independence, a future worth winning.

Fair price, I guess.

There's a terrible truth about entertainment. You're only as good as your last show. It's an impersonal fact of nature. Same thing is true of medical practice, engineering, government, and family life. Screw up once and your career is over. That never deterred me from going forward, endeavoring to get it right at least once. The Executive Branch was a final wager at the table of history. I bet my reputation as a soothsayer and storyteller, winner take all.

People don't do that for light and transient causes.

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Conveyances

It's been an interesting life.

All sorts of cars and trucks, a fire engine, an ambulance, a bulldozer, and a betjah. Hovercraft, ferries of all sizes, outboards, rafts, the Queen Mary, a canal barge, DC-8, DC-9, 707, 727, 737, Trident, Fokker, L-1011, 747, 757, 767, 777, Airbus, Embreaer, and BAE. An ancient prop with magneto ignition, a fast Cessna turboprop, an ultralight, ATV, utility crane, go cart, sled, and horseback. A wheelchair, a Chapman, a doorway dolly, shopping cart, and handheld leaning out of a TR-3. The parlor car on the 20th Century Limited, dining car on the Hiawatha, and the rung of a freight car. Subways, buses, British Rail, moving sidewalks, steam trains, a surgical gurney, and a parade float. Memorable taxi rides, golf carts, and Town Cars. Thousands of elevator doors opening and closing, an infinity of stairs, escalators, cobbles, asphalt, gravel, concrete, cornfields, storm drains, white sand beaches, ladders, and a bicycle built for two. My favorite destination was rural Luxembourg, but Singapore was pretty damn splendid.

If I was granted a wish, Elko beckons.

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Manhood

Some are great men. Many are average Joes. I'm about the size of half a man, a physical and moral midget. It's a valuable perspective, because the scale and scope of greatness are easily discerned, just as country folk behold an amazingly tall skyscraper and say oooo! As long as I live, I will always marvel at the Bank of China Tower, elegant glass shapes rising like a frozen pillar of crystal, a work of genius. The London Gherkin not so much. In fact there's not a single decent structure anywhere in Blighty. They have a hard time doing hotel rooms, too. The Brits are a benighted race. Generous, cheerful, industrious, honest, and talented, but no sense of design. Same thing on the Continent. Comfortable and utilitarian, never stupendous, always a headache trying to get from point A to point B.

America is the only place with good transportation, Australia first runner up, but it's unfair to compare them. There's nowhere to go in Oz. I like the Lucky Country, but they have no great men. They have folklore about highwaymen versus nitwits with a Royal license to govern.

So ... what is a great man?

Raw courage certainly seems fundamental, but many have been courageous. Clever is good, but cleverness is desirable to all men, a way to earn their way in life. Writers have a lot of trouble doing that. The courageous and clever seldom read. Horrible to consider, but radio and television supply what most men enjoy, football and cricket in particular. I find both of them to be intensely boring. Greatness has to be something bigger than golf or tennis.

A great man must hold the gift of life in his hands. He could be a neurosurgeon, a commando, the commander-in-chief of a great enterprise. Every waking moment is an urgent problem in prospect, another struggle to attack the impossible and chip away at it until it's tamed. On the radio just now, Mark Steyn said that Rush Limbaugh was "the indispensible man." Nope.  He's a talented clown, maybe a clever guy with the common touch, a postmodern Thomas Paine.

Popularlity cannot be measure of a great man. Jesus is popular, a free Get Out of Sin card, no thought necessary. Negro athletes are popular, no thought possible. Politicians are popular enough to win election with swing votes and massive media buys, one slogan per cycle. Hope and change. Make America great.

Hmm. It occurs to me that the measure of greatness is how much sorrow a man can carry, how great a burden his life becomes, embracing it as a challenge to his character. That was Lincoln in a nutshell. Davy Crockett at the Alamo. One of the most misunderstood men in American history was Jay Gould. He started with nothing, taught himself to be a road surveyor. At the end of his life he was feared, hated, sick, and friendless. Gould's crimes? -- the Union Pacific combine that stretched in all directions, Western Union, the first transatlantic cable, arbiter of a Wall Street panic. Many great men in the Gilded Age -- Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Firestone, Westinghouse, Edison. Their lives were difficult. They stood strong. Even the politicians had character, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Leland Stanford.

Most of the Civil War generals were great men, Union and Confederate. Most of the men who served in World War II were called to greatness and answered to the limit of their endurance. Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. William Wallace.

Oooo, wait a minute. Stop the presses. There was an American hero who inspired me more than all the others combined. An utterly tragic life, but pivotal in American political history, First Father of American Independence. His name is lost, no longer mentioned. A lawyer. Who cares about colonial lawyers? Did he say something important in a Crown court and be beaten so severely by tax bailiffs that he never recovered mentally, had to be replaced by Sam Adams?

"An act against natural equity is void." (James Otis)

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Liberty and force

I recently recorded a video and wrote a companion short story concerning the Executive, by which I mean a professional military compatible with anarchist theory, the rule of law, and competitive free market private enterprise.

In simple terms, the Executive is a traffic cop backed by nuclear weapons. Someone should possess the awesome power to deter aggression. I propose to make it a private firm owned by money center banks, insurance companies, pension funds, lunatic billionaires and other financial heavyweights, combined in a privately held consortium with periodic cash calls to fund national security in a fully free financial Wild West.

Ooooo! -- sounds dangerous all of a sudden. Free market capitalism, no regulators. Investors would probably go for it, let Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan direct the military and pay for it. I'll bet $100 to a donut that UBS and Deutsche Bank will want a piece of the action, too. There are numerous institutions who are hungry for freedom and prepared to pony up.

The price of civil liberty is small. A free society must have a judiciary to settle disputes and to control civilian police charged to investigate and deter street crime and murder. Matters like fraud are common law wrongs, often entailing class action and restraining orders to stop the looting and freeze funds. Money damages are the only remedy in common law jurisdictions. Shareholder suits are common. If our laissez faire judiciary is fair and objective, big financial institutions will be drawn irresistibly. Banks thrive in orderly, stable legal relationships. Every financial instrument, derivative, option, mortgage, share of stock, life insurance policy, and pension benefit is a contract. Why write bogus paper? Nothing but problems, wreck the firm and lose everything. Wall Street is loaded with lawyers to make sure that financial contracts are fair, valid, and enforceable. There are trillions of dollars backing those agreements.

Those trillions are thirsting for real security. A free society and its courts must be domiciled somewhere in the physical world. Court costs are pennies compared to national security. For instance, the Executive handles air traffic control, suppression of piracy and terrorism, armed defense of a geographic territory and sufficient clout to deter aggression by hostile foreign governments, of which there are many today and will be for the foreseeable future. Getting along with them financially involves project finance and all sorts of tax gymnastics that will remain worthwhile for traditional players like HSBC and sovereign wealth funds. Many states detest the idea of freedom, especially China, Russia, Britain, France, USA -- the permanent members of the Security Council and insatiable tax leeches. Not one of them is financially solvent or efficiently managed. Their idiotic plan for global progress is to "save the planet" and shuffle additional tens of millions of penniless migrants to Europe and America.

The Executive Branch handles immigration in a free society, requiring passports, a plausible purpose to enter the market, and enough money or sponsorship to find a place to work and reside. No special status for diplomats or divas. Common law means common law in all of the Executive activities at territorial borders, airports, seaports, etc.

Most the Executive's power is held in reserve to deal with the unexpected. There is an air force and a navy, a professional nucleus of army officers and troops, security men to guard the Commander-in-Chief and military sites. Not a penny more than essential facilities and trained personnel. That's the beauty of private funding by cheapskate bankers, who will try to trim every national defense line item, but provide enough dough to protect their golden goose, a free market without financial regulation. A good rule of thumb is 1% of GDP for national security expense including procurement and maintenance. That might translate in the financial sector to a 0.05% annual haircut, the highest "tax" rate on earth, but they get to vote as shareholders, choose directors, set policy, and control what the Executive does.

Civilian control of the military is a natural condition. Private enterprise is the engine of all value creation and free cash flow. Finance fuels the market and connects entrepreneurs to capital investors, lenders, and insurers. Successful enterprises pay the freight for national security. As old stodgy companies are displaced by new high tech market entrants, shares in the Executive might change hands. National security might grow or shrink, depending on the tenor of the times. It's impossible to predict how long freedom and security would exist, if young Turks refuse to fork over funds. No one can be compelled to support the Executive.

The one thing that threatens a free society most of all is NAP, the idea that military force is wrong, no matter what the mission or legal basis. The same complaint can be levied against law courts, police, private property, and a currency of paper bank notes. It doesn't matter what folks think or say about the use of force. War is hell. It destroys homes and factories, breaks things and kills people. No one really wants war, except the masses whipped into a frenzy by a charsimatic fool. I recommend using a weathervane. If the Commander-in-Chief starts making bizarre televised speeches about patriotism, that's the time to skeedaddle.

In modern America, we've been led by aristocrats, community organizers, schoolteachers, spooks, and jovial showmen who were democratically elected one man one vote. Every one of those plebeicites increased the size of government and waged wars. That's why I'm quits with voting. I'd rather give the job of control to a board of directors representing financial interests. No banker on earth would agree to war if he had to pay for it in cash, scarce capital squandered on destruction, markets monkeywrenched by fear.

Meanwhile, don't cross the Executive's red lines. No terrorism. No threats.

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Not notable

Easy to say, difficult to digest. I'm not notable. The term has specific meaning at Wikipedia. There is no Wikipedia article about Wolf DeVoon, and I very much doubt that my death will be noticed, except by the nice old lady who runs the general store. I owe a hefty balance.

My latest opus was issued in the size and shape of a child's coloring book, that's how little it mattered. Self-published books are invisible. I've written 23 of them. Web content doesn't count in terms of notability. I can't guess how many forum posts and blog posts I authored. Published magazine articles, radio interviews, and videos don't count, either. Wolf DeVoon won't be notable until SOMEONE ELSE decides to say something about me in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ or Advertising Age. Colin Kapernik was celebrated by all of them, and he made the cover of Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Time, despite being one of the worst quarterbacks in NFL history, eleven losses before he got fired for being incredibly stupid and vain.

Doesn't seem fair. I'm just as stupid, equally vain.

Politicians get noticed. Mass murderers and evangelists get noticed. It's a coin toss whether a scientist might be notable, unless she's a guru of climate change and gender fluidity. Now that I think about it, it might be felony sexual harrassment to review a straight male novelist, universally shunned by agents and publishers. Chicks and queers rule the book trade.

I hit a million words recently, decades of effort, much of it writing full-time, because I have to have solitude, months at a stretch to conceive and execute and polish something as huge as a novel. I laugh about it some times. Facebook decided that I was a "public figure" with zero Likes and no Talking Abouts.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week is discount balogna, slivers of onion, and mustard. I have one pack of cigarettes left, one pack of Ol' Roy soft food for my dog. He can't eat cheap kibble or defend himself because he lost half of his teeth to a lunatic vet. I lost half of mine over the years, so we're symmetrical, old and unable to do much except to gum soft balogna and dream of boiled eggs, sharp cheddar, fried chicken, Dewar's on the rocks, hot rib eye.

Gracefully surrender the things of youth?

Okay, I suppose that my creative work was juvenile. I stood up for masculinity and gorgeous women, outlandish love stories in outer space and on the hot filthy streets of Los Angeles. I had them chase each other in Central Java and Oud Loosdrecht and Columbus Circle, places that were familiar to me, the plumes of another life, all six continents when I was young and handsome and daring. All that's left is daring to claim that what I wrote was important.

Not notable, just important. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.

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