Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

     I’ve received a couple of questions about the neologism in the titles of these pieces. The resemblance to stigmata is deliberate. The wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion were preliminaries to His death on the Cross. The last of the stigmata, the spear wound to His side, was inflicted to guarantee that He was dead before His body could be taken down.

     My concept of schismata parallels the stigmata in that regard. The cracks in our philosophical and cultural unity being inflicted by the Left’s vanguard are preliminaries to a deathblow. They’re intended to soften us up for the kill. And they’ve been doing a bang-up job… or they were.

* * *

     As reality itself is a unity, all true wisdom is a unity as well. For wisdom is something other than material knowledge about “how things work.” True wisdom is the acceptance of reality in all its facets. The truly wise man “concedes the Tao,” as C. S. Lewis might have said. He doesn’t attempt to deny any part of it, for he knows its unity.

     Philosophy, “love of wisdom” etymologically, is a unity as well. Most peoples with a common culture share a philosophical outlook that’s seldom articulated. One aspect of that outlook is made visible in what they hail as beautiful. The architectural wonders of Europe, especially its cathedrals, testify to the esthetics of the culture that produced them. That esthetic cannot be separated from the rest of its enveloping outlook without destroying both.

     As I noted previously, that is where the Left chose to attack. No other part of the Western outlook was as vulnerable. Esthetics was uniquely sensitive because of the notion of relativism.

     In retrospect, we ought to have known better. To place the cathedrals and symphonies of Christian Enlightenment culture on a balance scale with the mud huts and grunted chants of self-mutilating savages was insane from the first. But the premise that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” rather than an aspect of reality itself, made it possible.

     The rejection of esthetic absolutes provided the ingress the destroyers needed.

* * *

     Once esthetic relativism had swept over Western culture, other aspects of the Western philosophical outlook became vulnerable. The key target was objectivity itself. Undermining the conviction that reality is real was the goal of the anti-Western forces. That could not be done by direct attack. It had to be through the promotion of non-Western outlooks, concepts of beauty, and “ways of knowing.”

     That trend began in Europe before the World Wars, but it accelerated sharply in the Sixties. That was when relativism as a philosophical primary took firm root. Millions of credulous young Westerners seized upon it. Their elders did little or nothing to correct them.

     Nonsense was promulgated as truth. Bizarre notions about reality as a plastic that individuals could reshape as they please were touted as wisdom. Relativism, already established in the arts, made it possible to introduce absurdities as acceptable alternatives to the real… and to get them accepted by millions.

     I was there. I was part of it. I remember it too well.

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

     Once, in giving a presentation to a college class in philosophy, I asked the students whether any of them had ever been interested in magic. A few hands went up...all of which belonged to persons who were somewhat reluctant to admit it. I smiled and told them not to be overly embarrassed, for magic, if it worked, would appear to be an easier way of achieving one’s aims – some of them, at least – than the alternatives. That’s its attraction.

     But magic doesn’t work. Why, then, are there persons who call themselves witches and claim to practice magic? Why are they granted the smallest amount of respect?

     If magic worked, it would be the focus of intense study and experimentation. Researchers would flock to the field, hoping to tease out the laws that govern it. Money would pour into the exploration of its limits and potential applications. None of that has happened.

     Another set of notions, similar to magic, is that of psi powers: in essence, mind over matter/energy. For a time, that was a field of investigation for some fringe researchers, but it yielded nothing and has been relegated to the mediums (not “the media”) and stage magicians. But again, there are persons who proclaim themselves to be telepaths, or clairvoyants, and make a living out of demonstrating those “powers.” Why are they accorded any respect?

     Ironically, a brilliant fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, provided a summary of the reasons:

     “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living.”

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

     But “mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness,” et cetera are not of the Tao. To compel respect for them, by whatever means, violates the precepts of rational thought. Silverberg may have known that, back in 1972 when he wrote The Book of Skulls. Indeed, a man that intelligent could hardly fail to know it. Those who sought to undermine the Western outlook – the philosophical bedrock of the Christian Enlightenment – knew it well.

     The fragmentation of that bedrock proceeded apace throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Magic, irrealism, and outright solipsism, propelled in part by the burgeoning drug plague, advanced as alternatives to reality itself. A critical moment arrived with the introduction and acceptance of a nonsense phrase: “our truth,” or alternately “your truth.” That became popular with the moral / ethical relativists, those determined to open a crack in the moral norms promulgated by Christianity.

     The assault on esthetic norms had made inroads for assaults on other norms. In large part that was through the personal charisma of the “new artistes.” It was also powered by the adolescent thrill of rebellion, flipping off the “straights” and “doing your own thing.” The cracks would soon be exploited by the purveyors of a deadly kind of magic: the “reality is plastic” notion that makes it possible to believe in impossibilities.

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

     In the kitchen, Louis took a small saucepan from the cabinet beneath the cooktop, filled it half-full with hot water, and set it on a burner. From a drawer he produced a large bulb-type thermometer, attached it to a pair of wooden grips, and passed the combination to her.
     “This is going to be a little different. I’m going to make a prediction, and then we’ll see if it comes true.” He gestured at the saucepan. “I’m going to light the stove and heat the water in the pot. You put the thermometer in and watch the reading, but don’t let the bulb touch the pan! I predict that no matter how high we turn the flame, and no matter how long we let it heat, the temperature of the water will never rise past two hundred twelve degrees. Okay?”
     “Okay.” She dipped the bulb into the pot. The reading rose to a hundred fifteen degrees. He lit the burner, turned the flame up high, and they watched.
     When giant bubbles began to rise through the water, the thermometer read two hundred twelve. She kept it as steady as she could, never allowing the bulb to touch the metal of the pan. The water level dropped and the kitchen filled with steam, but the reading stayed at two hundred twelve until Louis quenched the burner ten minutes later.
     “We’ve boiled away too much to keep going safely. So? What does that mean to you?”
     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it supposed to mean something?”
     “Well, maybe not. But what does it mean to you that my prediction came true?”
     “You knew it would be that way.”
     “And what does that mean?”
     She started to speak and stopped herself. She knew his style. There was a pattern in the sequence of apparently unrelated things he had shown her that day. He was waiting for her to see it. The Nag lent a hand.
     Limits. He’s shown you three limits. Three things that wishing can’t do anything about.
     “Water’s just that way, right? It always stops at two-twelve. You can’t force it any higher.”
     He nodded as the huge grin returned to his face. “That’s right. Not at sea level, anyway. That’s one of the unvarying properties of water.” He took the saucepan to the sink and emptied it. There was a hiss and a new cloud of steam as the water ran over the cold porcelain.
     “Scientists study the properties of things all the time.” He set the pan down in the sink and turned back to her. “They look for patterns in the way things behave, and then they test their understanding by making predictions. When their predictions work, they gain confidence that they’re on to something. When their predictions fail, they junk their theories and start over. Mostly by little steps, sometimes by big ones, always building on the learning of those that came before them, this is how scientists come to know the world.”
     He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms against his chest. There was something in his demeanor she hadn’t seen before, a kind of all-pervading delight that transformed him and made it impossible to look away from him.
     “Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
     “The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
     It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
     A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
     “The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
     He folded his hands and looked down at them.
     “Some people think it could have, Chris.”
     “Do you?”
     “No.”
     “And that’s religion?”
     He nodded.

     That was a young genius attempting to explain the impulse toward religious belief to another young but untutored genius. He’d found God in natural law. The uniformity and consistency of natural law seemed to him to mandate a single great Lawgiver. Other great minds have done the same, though not all of them.

     Yet Louis’s insight, entirely apart from its religious overtones, has another implication of critical import: All laws are one. All truths are one. They intertwine and support one another. Were any one of them to be pulled loose, the edifice would crumble.

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

     I’ve written that for an individual to accept any single fact as objectively irrefutable would compel him to accept all the rest of reality, given time. But after long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the reverse is true as well: If he could successfully deny any one objectively demonstrable fact, it would force him to deny all the rest of objective reality. He’d have to! They’re intertwined. Any one thread that’s pulled loose would unravel the whole garment.

     It may be that the enemies of the Western edifice – what I’ve called the Christian Enlightenment — are more aware of this than are most of us who strive to defend it. Their attacks have demonstrated that their tacticians have some insight. A smart tactician doesn’t pit strength against strength. He always looks for a weakness to attack.

     The weaknesses of Western civilization are those realms of thought in which we’ve entertained disputes about objective truths… including the mystifying determination of some to dismiss the concept of an objective reality entirely.

* * *

     I led off yesterday’s piece by rhapsodizing, a bit wistfully, about the Apollo 11 mission. In what probably struck many Gentle Readers as the all-time champion of jagged segues, I leaped thence into a tirade about the Left’s attack on the arts.

     By now, you know that what I do, I do deliberately.

     Though I know that there are people who claim that the moon landing was faked – that men have never crossed that divide – only they take themselves seriously. They’re in a special category of naysayers, along with the flat-Earthers and Man Will Never Fly Society. But the naysayer, a.k.a. the skeptic, is an important creature. Provided that he is honest, he assists the rest of us in answering questions about natural laws. The honesty part is not optional: he must be willing to concede when he’s been proved wrong by objective means.

     The nature of objectivity is a tender point in the Western psyche. It’s unprovable, because proof is inapplicable to things that cannot be categorized. Objectivity isn’t a concept; it’s reality itself. To deny objectivity is to deny that the world we perceive is anything but a figment of our imaginations.

* * *

     I feel no need to go into the solipsist or social-constructionist fallacies today. Suffice it to say that these are the end states of the denial of objectivity. They who strive to destroy the Christian Enlightenment don’t want to go that far. They want something like this:

     ’There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ’Repeat it, if you please.’
     ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
     ”Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
     Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ’yes’ or ’no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
     O’Brien smiled faintly. ’You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ’Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
     ’No.’
     ’Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
     ’In records. It is written down.’
     ’In records. And- ?’
     ’In the mind. In human memories.
     ’In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
     ’But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ’It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
     O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
     ’On the contrary,’ he said, ’you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

     If all of reality is truly a unity, then successfully attacking it at one weak point offers the best chance of destroying the acceptance of reality itself – that is, reality as objective, ontologically prior to perception, statement, theory, and opinion. The weakest point was in esthetics, the special province of the human activities called the arts. Accordingly, that was where the destroyers struck.

     “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” ran the old saw. Nothing that blatantly false has ever received as much deference. Beauty – esthetic Quality, as Pirsig would say – inheres in the object itself. We perceive it, call it beautiful, and think that in doing so we’ve rendered a personal judgment, but in point of fact we are merely recognizing a fact – something prior to our perceptions; something that simply is. The artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras accepted that without bothering to debate it. Their works exemplify their acceptance.

     As usual, C. S. Lewis had something to say about it:

     She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else—perhaps—she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea—a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation—it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity—that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others.

     If yesterday’s piece didn’t make sense to you at first reading, perhaps it will today.

* * *

     I try not to go on at great length here. This is one of my longer pieces, yet it’s composed principally of citations of other works. In the next segment I’ll attempt to solidify the connections between the attacks noted here and the pillars of our intellectual realm.

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 1

     Depending on what time zone you were in at the time, either today or tomorrow, in the Year of Our Lord 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the Moon. For many, that moment was the high-water mark of Western Civilization. In the person of an American astronaut, Mankind had escaped its womb and begun its journey to the stars.

     But the matter was far from settled. “Those who have not joy” (C. S. Lewis) immediately began to denigrate or cast doubt on the achievement. Some were blatant, others subtle. A number strove to recast the Apollo landing as somehow tainted by slavery, “imperialism,” or whatever else they could conjure up. A few tried to reduce its significance by stressing that the Moon is “conveniently close,” which makes getting there “no big deal.” Others pointed to the competitive, quasi-combative aspect of the “Space Race.” Had it not been for the Soviets’ early lead in space travel, they claimed, America would never have cared about a Moon landing. And so on, ad nauseam.

     We ought to have paid more attention to the denigrators and naysayers. They were the point of an invisible spear aimed at America’s heart. There was significant pressure behind that spear. It had already made an inroad into our national psyche. It penetrated ever more deeply as the years rolled past.

* * *

     The Sixties, for all the hype that’s been lavished on them, were the beginning of America’s decline. Those who sought to destroy us knew that you don’t start at the top. To bring down a society, you locate its foundation and work to undermine it. The foundation stones of the extraordinary achievement that Robert A. Heinlein called “the Renaissance Civilization” were all but invisible to the great majority of Americans. In consequence, we failed to recognize their attackers or grasp the aim of their efforts.

     Rather than follow my usual practice, I’ll cut to the chase:

The foundation of the United States of America
Was made from Christian ethics and political freedom.

     Those aren’t things that would yield to the first blows of the chisel. They are – or were – too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to be quickly shattered. So deeply, in fact, that the average American of the first decades after World War II never thought about them. They were omnipresent, like air. More, we had inherited them from prior generations. It was easy to believe that that’s just how things are and always will be.

     We never thought about why we believed that. That made it easy for the underminers to chip away undisturbed.

* * *

     It was the Sixties in which the attacks on our foundation became generally visible. Conspicuous socialist and communist movements began to proliferate in “centers of higher education.” Those things are inherently opposed to both freedom and Christianity. Their purveyors were clever; they aimed first at cultural targets: the arts. They strove to displace the esthetics that ruled music, painting, sculpture, dance, fiction, and entertainment. For they understood, as many of us did not, that those things reinforce a people’s sense of themselves and their achievements.

     Ironically, those who railed against the new, anti-Christian esthetics were beaten back with a weapon that baffled them: artistic freedom. That was presented to us with the implication that the nouvel artiste has an affirmative right to stand alongside traditional practitioners. It occurred to very few that freedom includes the freedom to condemn.

     Collectivist nostrums would soon infiltrate the educational system. Clouds began to form around basic concepts such as rights and justice. The arts had lifted the tent flap and made it possible. Eastern European intellectuals had embraced the Gramscian prescription and brought it to receptive American “scholars” who were looking for something “new.”

     First in the arts, then in “soft” studies such as psychology, sociology, and economics, American universities became battlegrounds between the Left and the Right.

* * *

     This is really an introductory piece. I can’t finish it in one Sunday; there’s too much ground to cover. (Besides, I have laundry to do, a cat room to clean, and meatballs to make.) I wanted to introduce the idea and ideas of the Sixties, “the Summer of Love,” as the appropriate starting point for examining the attack on America’s conceptual foundation.

     It’s time for the gloss that’s been smeared over that decade to be wiped away, in the interests of clearsighted understanding of our plight and its roots.

The Unique Product

     States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay. – Walter S. Landor

     Incentives and disincentives determine everything.

     Yes, I know that’s too strong a statement. But to put it that way makes it memorable, a mantra for the armchair analyst. He can chant it as he strives to understand some process that at first looks baffling.

     Franz Oppenheimer divided human action in pursuit of a goal into two categories: the economic means, which is characterized by production and peaceful trade; and the political means, whose determinant is the use of coercion: i.e., force and intimidation. For most of the past century, the economic means has steadily if grudgingly given way to the political means. This deserves to be studied far more deeply than it has been to date, for the political means is inherently parasitic. It does not produce; rather, it feeds on the production of others.

     The organization of the political means is the institution we call the State.

     The specifics of how States originate have varied across the millennia, but the conditions required for its persistence have always been what they are today: It must possess both the tolerance, however grudging, of the subject populace, and the acceptance of all forces sufficiently powerful and proximate to challenge it. I’ve written about the latter requirement on several occasions. Today, my focus is on the former one: specifically, what might cause a State to lose the tolerance of its subjects.

* * *

     The detail questions behind subjects’ tolerance of a State are simple:

1. What “product” does the State offer us?
2. Can we afford it?
3. Is it “good enough?”
4. If any of the answers to the above questions are negative, what would it cost to oppose and perhaps ultimately topple the State?

     The answers to those questions are never uniform and never static. They change according to time, place, and the identity of the person answering them. When the answers begin to coalesce in the negative direction, the State is at risk of rebellion.

     States claim to offer their subjects many things, but beneath them all is an offer of justice. Give the State the monopoly power to define and enforce justice, and thereafter the State will see to those duties. Those who seek to offend against justice will be pursued and punished; when possible, their victims will be made whole. That offer is the State’s basic product.

     In the usual case, subjects are not permitted to refuse the State’s product. Penalties are imposed upon those who try. The State is therefore not only a monopolist, but one that can enforce the acceptance of its product. That brings the price and quality of the product to the forefront. How good is the State’s justice, and how expensive is it over the long term?

     In the marketplace, vendors compete through price, quality, and their reputations. That allows many vendors to sell products that perform the same or greatly similar functions. The State’s product is qualitatively different.

     Competition is anathema to the State, for it must involve the loss of the State’s monopoly over the use of coercion. When a competitor arises, the State immediately moves to crush it. Should it succeed in doing so swiftly and without greatly disturbing its subjects’ tenor of life, it would represent its action as justice. Otherwise, the applicable terms would be insurrection, rebellion, or civil war.

     But a competitor to the State can only be potentially viable if it can outperform the State at its own game: justice. That is the incentive for the State to deliver on its promise of justice. The open and obvious non-provision of justice by States around the world is a curiosity of note.

* * *

     Inasmuch as States have been notably deficient in providing their subjects with justice, they must defend themselves from potential competitors who are willing and able to do the job. There aren’t many ways to pre-squelch competition. Probably the commonest approach is to deny potential competitors the means by which to compete: i.e., to outlaw the possession of weapons by anyone but agents of the State. It’s been widely tried, but it’s seldom worked.

     In one of the most dramatic cases of competition in the provision of justice, the Cosa Nostra, deeply analyzed in this essay, has evolved an approach of unsurpassed competitive effectiveness. In parts of Italy it commands more respect than the State. Yet the Cosa Nostra is more voracious than the State, and even more ruthless. Russia’s Bratva is organized along similar lines, and is similarly voracious and ruthless.

     Many States have been baffled by organized crime. They recognize the threat and move against it, but without much success. That they’re being out-competed and could redress the problem simply by fulfilling their promises of justice at a modest cost to their subjects seems not to occur to them. At least, that’s the gentlest explanation.

     Justice is a unique product. The State inevitably insists on being a monopoly provider, then proceeds to underperform ever more visibly as time passes. That incentivizes the emergence of competitors.

     When several organizations in a given locale simultaneously offer to provide justice, violence won’t necessarily produce a victor. Even the most powerful State can fail to maintain its monopoly. Sometimes the only possible resolution is a fragmentation into separate territories – “turf” is the usual term – involving agreements not to compete across territorial borders.

     This is the process that has produced our current world order, in which States compete with one another for territory and population. It also accounts for how and when new nations are born. That having been said, I shall leave all further inferences to my Gentle Readers.

A Reissue

     As of this morning, a new, illustrated edition of The Warm Lands is available at Amazon:

     The world of Aeol is dying, and no one knows why.

     The mana conduits that once sustained all life on the continent have shifted. Rivers of ancient power that flowed north to south for centuries now run east to west, drawn toward a single destination no one can explain. Gregor of Serebal, a journeyman sorcerer tasked with charting these invisible currents, has crossed the lifeless wastes of the Great Waste alone. He has seen entire civilizations reduced to scattered pockets of desperate survival. He is not easily shaken.

     But nothing prepared him for Anam.

     Laella was born gifted, touched by magic she never asked for and had not learned to control. When that magic made her a virgin mother, her village turned against her. Her son was executed by the ruler who feared what she represented. She was left with nothing: no family, no home, no future. When Gregor arrives, she is a woman already stripped of everything.

     What grows between them in the wasteland is not a fantasy romance. It is something quieter and more lasting than that. Two people, each carrying damage the other cannot fully see, choosing each other anyway. Walking west together toward a mystery that will demand more from them than either imagined possible.

     The Warm Lands is a standalone literary fantasy built entirely around its characters. There are no doorstop sequels, no sprawling cast, no magic system explained in appendices. There are only Gregor, Laella, and the world they must save at the cost of everything they have fought to build together.

     For readers who have been searching for a fantasy that takes them seriously.

     Scroll down a bit and you’ll find the three-minute video trailer I’ve commissioned for it.

     Yes, I’ve raised the price. I hope to recoup some of the $4800 I’ve spent on the new cover and the illustrations. The C.S.O., ever the accountant, shrugged and said “You have to spend money to make money.” We shall see!

     There will be a companion paperback edition in a few days as well.

Applause From An Old Man

     Once in a great while, an essay comes my way that leaves me speechless from its insight. I’ve just received such an essay from Haretina Kukuri. It’s so penetrating that all I can do is applaud.

     Haretina brilliantly traces the lineaments of the world order from the days when what mattered above all else was force and geographic hegemony, to today, when finance matters as much as arms and armies.

     Within the aggregate of maneuvers and operations we call “finance,” there is always a foundation stone. When the currencies of great nations were redeemable in specie, that stone was gold. But the wars of the Nightmare Century gave the great powers the opportunity they sought to forsake specie redeemability. But a foundation stone was still required. The Bretton Woods system implied it; Haretina makes it visible:

     The order that resulted rested on a distinctive synthesis: American predominance supplied the material foundation; multilateral institutions supplied procedural legitimacy. Together they produced stability and integration without precedent — trade expanded dramatically, investment accelerated, Western Europe and Japan rebuilt into industrial prosperity. But the system’s true foundation was neither treaty nor institution.
     It was confidence: confidence that obligations would be honoured, currencies would hold, rules would bind, and institutions would function under strain. Trust was the invisible infrastructure. Central banks accumulated dollars because American markets combined depth, liquidity and legal certainty no competitor could match; investors accepted modest Treasury yields because institutional credibility reduced uncertainty more effectively than higher returns elsewhere.

     Once again, hearken to the great Benjamin M. Anderson:

     There is no need in human life so great as that men should trust one another and should trust their government, should believe in promises, and should keep promises in order that future promises may be believed in and in order that confident cooperation may be possible. Good faith -- personal, national, and international -- is the first prerequisite of decent living, of the steady going on of industry, of governmental financial strength, and of international peace. -- Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914 -- 1946

     Gold maintained a shadow presence in international finance even after the Bretton Woods agreement. But in truth, what mattered above all was the other parties’ confidence in American financial strength and the trustworthiness of American traders and markets. That confidence has waned somewhat this past half-century, though not to the point of revoking the dollar’s status as the world’s “reserve currency.”

     In her conclusion, Haretina tacitly invokes one of the key insights of cybernetic analysis, The Law of Requisite Variety:

     The Law of Requisite Variety (coined by cybernetician W. Ross Ashby) states that to successfully control or adapt to a complex system, the internal complexity and behavioral flexibility of the controller must be equal to or greater than the complexity of the environment it faces.
     Also known as "variety absorbs variety", this First Law of Cybernetics essentially means that the entity with the most available options, responses, and adaptable behaviors will dictate the system's outcome. If an environment throws a highly unpredictable set of challenges at you, a rigid, inflexible set of responses will eventually fail.

     In Haretina’s words:

     The four-phase framework proposed here is not a rigid periodisation but a way of seeing a single transformation whole. Across two centuries the instruments changed relentlessly — sovereign loans became development finance, banking missions became multilateral institutions, fixed parities dissolved into integrated capital markets, and competition now runs through payment systems, reserve currencies, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, critical minerals and regulatory authority. The continuity lies beneath: states converting financial capability into political influence while economising on coercion.
     Military power remains indispensable, and negotiation remains essential. But neither now determines the structure of international order by itself. Order increasingly depends on who designs the institutions through which capital moves, liquidity is created, payments settle, technology is financed and confidence is sustained.
     The next chapter of international politics will not be written primarily through territorial conquest or ideological confrontation.
     It will be written through competing financial architectures.
     The decisive question is no longer who possesses the greatest wealth.
     It is who organises the networks through which the world’s wealth circulates.
     That is the diplomacy of finance.

     I told you to keep an eye on this young woman. She’s going places.

Because That’s What They Do

     First, Happy Bastille Day. If your schooling didn’t include the details of the French Revolution of 1789, you can read about some of the more prominent ones here. Even if their reasons differ, mobs storming prisons have taken Bastille Day as their model ever since.

     Second, Long Island is about to be broiled once again, which may force me into our basement for the duration. Yes, we have central air conditioning, but the system starts to struggle when the outdoor temperature exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Fortunately, there are two more computers down there… but there are also a large TV, a comfortable recliner, and several hundred movies on DVD. Which of those will command my attention is always a crapshoot.

     Third – here we are again, Gentle Reader – a news item that slipped past me a few days back has been brought to my attention:

     Alarming new satellite images show signs that the Iranian regime appears to be rebuilding its suspected nuclear facilities at Pickaxe Mountain and Parchin.
     Footage of both areas – which sustained extensive damage during US and Israeli-led bombing campaigns that began in late February – reveal “major signs” of activity, according to CNN, which obtained images from private firms.
     Such construction likely runs afoul of the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran and US negotiators reached last month during a cease-fire that President Trump called “over” this week following Iranian attacks on shipping vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

     Are there any Gentle Readers who didn’t expect that? Who sincerely expected the ayatollahs to abide by the MoU? That could only be due to a severe case of wishful thinking. Imagine me tut-tutting and waving an index finger.

* * *

     Long ago, I wrote:

     Possibly no novel in history has excited as much admiration or discussion as J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Lord Of The Rings. If you're one of the three remaining English-speakers who has yet to read this extraordinary work of the imagination, it's essentially the tale of the final conflict between the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, belatedly come together in a defensive federation, and Sauron the Dark Lord, the superhuman embodiment of evil, who seeks to enslave the entire world, simply because that's what he does.

     Enslaving others makes Sauron happy. Perhaps he could also get some use out of them – as soldiers against Gondor, for example – but even if he could not, enslavement is his supreme temporal aim.

     For Islamists worldwide, the supreme temporal aim is the destruction of all competing creeds. The destruction of all Jews must come first, for it was Jews who first defied Muhammad. No agreement struck with another power will change that. Their creed – I refuse to call Islam a “religion” – demands the death of all Jews everywhere. The concentration of Jews in Israel and Israel’s geographic placement make it Islam’s foremost target.

     But Islamists know that destroying Israel will require nuclear weapons. They also regard agreements struck with “unbelievers” as to be dismissed when doing so would bring “advantage to Islam.” Thus, their creed makes it next to obligatory for them to enter a “peace agreement” fully intending to violate it. The MoU, in which Iran’s rulers supposedly agree to abandon the quest for nuclear weapons, was signed under the falsest of pretenses, for they intended to violate it from the start.

     I can easily imagine how President Trump, a consummate deal-maker, feels about this. To Trump, keeping one’s given word is a matter of honor and respect for the other party. While Iran’s violation of the MoU is consistent with the behavior of Islamist rulers, it must surely enrage him. We must hope that fury won’t lure him into a ground war, an outcome few Americans would approve.

     Yet what the Post reports is just what Islamists do. They always make such a promise with their fingers crossed.

* * *

     There is no Last Graf. Given prevailing attitudes and America’s experiences with 21st Century warfare, we must not expect an American expeditionary force to invade Iran and topple the Islamic regime. President Trump would resist the idea fiercely, and the preponderance of our citizenry would support him. If the Post’s report of Iranian duplicity is confirmed, the most likely consequence would be the resumption of bombardment of military and political targets within Iran.

     It’s a bleak prospect, but the alternatives are unpalatable.

A New And Vital Voice

     For some time now, I’ve been casting about for “new voices” to whom the beleaguered of our era should pay attention. In the process, I’ve encountered a lot of pompous asses – hey, a man should recognize his kind when he meets one, shouldn’t he? – and no small number of persons who parade erudition in place of insight. What’s missing from most discourse offered to the general public today is something I’ve prized lifelong.

     In Three Days of the Condor, one of the most impressive movies of the Seventies, director Sydney Pollack includes a thematic snatch of a conversation between CIA Director Wabash, played by John Houseman, and Assistant Director Higgins, played by Cliff Robertson:

Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after The Great War, as we used to call it. Before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action, sir?
Wabash: No… I miss that kind of clarity.

     Clarity is the most underappreciated virtue in the discourse of our time. It has often seemed to me that many writers treat it as an enemy – something that could get in the way of achieving public acclaim, or a position in the State Department. You might easily conclude that such a writer isn’t willing to say what he means and stand his ground when confronted about it.

     Clarity makes demands of both the writer and the reader. A clearly written opinion / analysis piece leaves the reader in no doubt about its contentions. It requires the reader to engage with it open-eyed. A lot of readers aren’t happy about being compelled to do so. They need the cushion of periphrasis to keep their sensibilities from getting scuffed up. But readers who matter – readers who reach definite conclusions and base their subsequent decisions on them – love clarity.

     I do.

* * *

     This era might one day be called the Age of Orwell’s Lament. There is so much that’s “plain as a fart,” staring us right in the face, that millions are unwilling to confront. That unwillingness is fundamentally defensive, as Orwell himself was at pains to tell us:

     ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten….
     ‘The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
     One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

     Yet there is a hunger for clarity among Us the People. It accounts for the elections of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s style may be extravagant and occasionally self-glorifying, but he is nevertheless clear. He makes no secret of his intentions, and the common citizen loves him for it.

     The new voices that will command popular sentiment will be champions of clarity. They won’t hide. They may strut, as Trump does, but no one will be able to justly say that they weren’t clear about what they planned. Aspiring opinion-formers – I hear they’re called “thought leaders” these days – should take note and act accordingly.

* * *

     To those Gentle Readers who’ve been asking “But what’s the point?” I must admit to a bit of lede-burying. Yes, there is a new voice to which attention should go. She’s a young woman of conspicuously clear vision, high intelligence, and hard sense. I encountered her by chance at X, where so much is said to so little effect. I hope she will be heard.

     Her name is Haretina Kukuri:

     Haretina Kukuri is a strategic consultant operating at the intersection of commercial brokerage, geopolitical intelligence, and cross-border market navigation.
     Her practice is built on the understanding that the most consequential business decisions are never made in a vacuum. Markets respond to politics. Politics responds to power. And power rarely announces itself in advance.
     Working across emerging and frontier markets, Haretina advises clients who need more than analysis — they need actionable intelligence integrated directly into their decision cycle.

     Miss Kukuri first impressed me with a statement of convictions at X:

Hello. I’m Haretina. 25. Born in Greece

I’ve studied tourism management, criminology, and business with finance. I’ve lived in five countries. I speak five languages. I write about geopolitics, markets, power, and history.

I believe in common sense, which has quietly become a… pic.twitter.com/AnZQ1z0g3K

— Haretina (@HaretinaK) July 5, 2026

     If you want a dose of clarity about important matters, including many that other commentators are loath to address, read Haretina’s whole tweet. Follow it into the comments.

     Europe needs this young woman. Indeed, the whole world needs insight and forthrightness of her caliber, but Europe is dying from the lack of it. Her penetration and clarity are conspicuous in the essays at her website as well.

     Haretina Kukuri is a vital voice for our time, and for times to come.

Context Matters Part 2

     The talk about Citizen Vigilante continues hot and heavy. There are critical voices in the mix. Some consider the film dangerous, while others cheer for the Michael Sanders character and express a yearning that someone make him real. It’s perfectly clear what sensibilities and spirit the film has tapped.

     The facet of the film that’s excited the most negative comments is the scene in which Sanders, enclosed in a steel box, must shoot it out with two dozen SWAT team members. “He didn’t have to do that!” shriek the critics. And indeed, they’re right: he didn’t. But once they had confronted him and made it plain that their mission was to cut him down regardless of the consequences, the moral choice became too clear to avert.

     What did it say about the priorities of those police and their commanders that they would bring seemingly overwhelming firepower to the task of killing Michael Sanders? When rape and murder are running riot throughout Europe? When those same police have been told to treat violent savages as if they were made of spun glass? When justice has become the bitterest word in any language? What did it say about their commander that after the first wave had been eliminated, he sent a second wave, no better prepared, to the same fate?

     It may strike even some who see the matter as I’ve delineated it above as unfortunate, unnecessary to the movie and preferably to be omitted. I disagree completely. I find it to be the element of the film that cuts through all the noise:

The State’s highest priority is always to assert and preserve the supremacy of The State.

     Michael Sanders gave those SWAT members a chance to back away. He allowed that “You’re only doing your jobs,” but followed by telling them what “doing your jobs” – i.e., following their commander’s orders – would bring about. Their commander, a loyal State employee who mouthed “democracy” as if that shibboleth could excuse the complete abrogation of justice, sent them forward into withering fire.

     It had to happen. It was entirely in keeping with both the context of the film and the nature of the State.

* * *

     The question must be posed: Are matters in Europe – or anywhere else – really that bad? Would a real-life Michael Sanders who committed himself to delivering justice to proven criminals be acclaimed by Us the People? Would the minions of the State do their level best to cut him down, while ignoring the savageries being perpetrated by those criminals? And would Sanders’s acclaim among common people have any effect on State priorities and practices?

     Apart from the occasional reportage of some immigrant atrocity, I haven’t really kept track. But it does seem that Europe, which has admitted millions of Third World immigrants to its shores, is trending in that direction. Indeed, matters aren’t that much better in North America.

     Let it be said outright: the majority of those immigrants are Muslims. They were schooled in the most aggressive and violent “faith” the world has ever known. That faith tells them that it’s quite all right – indeed, it’s their duty to Islam — to rape and murder the “unbeliever.” Many of them cannot read the Koran that exhorts them to those deeds. Few have anything to “contribute to society,” even if they have the potential.

     They’ve behaved as the soldiers of a savage conquering army have always done. As their numbers swell, so will their crimes… perhaps faster, at that.

     I’ve written elsewhere that justice in this world is a human artifact. The concept of justice is one of Mankind’s highest intellectual creations. Men have tolerated States among them in the hope that an entity supposedly dedicated to the maintenance of justice would improve upon “nature red in tooth and claw.” The challenge of our time is to read the news and evaluate the validity of that hope.

Which Way, Indies?

     The question of the hour among those of us who write and self-publish fiction is what to do about piracy… if anything. Here’s a typically impassioned statement on the matter:

Do not pirate books. Respect the work of the people who spend hundreds to thousands of hours writing, refining, rethinking, and revising their work—and especially those trying to create something different. pic.twitter.com/ta5rpf4VLg

— DanNeo S.S. ✮ 𓂃🖊 (@DanNEO_SS) July 8, 2026

     Piracy is indeed dismissive of the author’s work and rights. But there are other perspectives, chief among them this one:

Would you rather make money or be read?

     And it is not to be fliply dismissed.

* * *

     When I started writing fiction, I had a spread of reasons, including the need to know whether I could do it. But paramount among those reasons was this one: I had stories to tell that I felt deserved an audience. Whether I could tell them effectively, affectingly, was to be determined.

     Now, a story worthy of adults’ attention must involve things adults care about. Were the stories in my head of that sort, or were they inane juvenilia fit only for children? (Let’s leave out that a lot of them have adult characters doing adult things.) There was only one way to know: I had to write them and find an audience for them.

     In my review of Martin McPhillips’s brilliant first novel Corpse in Armor, I wrote:

     Many fiction writers claim to write for the sheer pleasure of it. Some claim they only write for the revenue – "to buy groceries," as the late Robert A. Heinlein put it. But all of us, without exception, write to be read. Anyone who claims otherwise deserves no more of your time.

     And so it is. Yet the tension between wanting one’s book to be read – or at least, wanting to believe that one’s book is being read – and the desire for a tangible return from all the effort that went into it can be agonizing.

     I have no idea how other writers feel. Why do I write? See previous answer. Why do they write? You’d have to ask them. I haven’t done much of that. But I’d bet heavily that it does a lot for them when a reader writes to thank them for their books. It’s more or less what I live for.

     What’s noxious is when other people manage to profit from the writer’s efforts. I don’t know how many book pirates manage to do that. I doubt there are many; if we indies can’t pull it off, why would anyone else be able to manage it? Yet the problem is not illusory; piracy is rife.

     Can anyone think of a way to poll book pirates for their motivations? Has anyone ever buttonholed a book pirate and tortured an answer out of him? If any of my Gentle Readers can think of a way, please let me have it! After all, there might be a book in it.

Context Matters

     It was a long time ago that I first heard the following instructive exchange:

P1: I saw something disturbing today.
P2: What was that?
P1: An old woman was walking down the street when a young man rushed at her, knocked her down, rolled her along the ground, and slapped her all over her body.
P2: Horrible! How could anyone treat a defenseless old woman that way?
P1: Wait, did I mention that she was on fire?

     Little details such as that one matter a lot. Yet a great part of what passes for journalism today consists of concealing certain details to ensure that the story being told conforms to “the narrative,” or at least doesn’t damage it. This is also true for a lot of public rhetoric. If you tell the story just right — tell just enough truth, then shut up – you can enlist your audience in its own deception.

     Activists tend to omit details in the stories they tell, too. Smith is homeless, living on the street and begging passers-by for food? Very sad. But how did he get there? Drink? Drugs? Drawing to an inside straight? Unwise moves in the commodities markets? Give us the process, not just the consequences.

     The technique makes use of prevailing assumptions about what isn’t said. The young man in the opening vignette could be anyone, and the context could be anything. But it’s highly uncommon for young men to attack old women. It’s also uncommon for old women to be publicly on fire… in the literal sense, at least.

     Good people tend to assume the goodness of others: i.e., that unless it’s made explicit that this is not the case, other people share their ethical basis. That’s our inheritance as members of a Christian-Enlightenment culture.

     Prevailing assumptions prevail because they’re correct more often than not. Yet even when society is at its most uniform, there will be exceptions to them. More critical yet, in a society that’s losing uniformity, those assumptions will develop an increasing number of exceptions. This is especially important in a society which, for whatever reason, is shedding its cultural cohesion.

     Many First World countries are losing their cultural cohesion today. There are several reasons, which apply differentially according to the country under discussion. Rather than go into yet another tirade about immigration, I’ll say simply that as largely uniform populations become ever less uniform, the prevailing assumptions in those nations will become ever more dubious.

     Street violence? It might not be a failure of the “forces of order.” After all, certain ethnicities concentrate their numbers geographically. There are only so many police. Besides, some ethnicities regard the police as their enemies and would turn from whatever animates them to attacking the men in blue. There are a lot of guns out there, y’know.

     Open, blatant shoplifting? Don’t we teach our children not to do such things? Of course we do… some of us. Others tell their kids that “The Man” has been holding them down, and that the only way to “get a little back” is to grab it and run away. Or swagger away, if the shopkeeper is a tiny Asian man and you’re Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri.

     Idleness and shiftlessness concentrated in particular demographics? Ain’t no jobs, bro! Besides, who would hire one of us? Never mind that there’s a national labor shortage. And while it’s true that most employers would hesitate to hire one of you, don’t you think there might be reasons for it – and that you might want to put some effort into being an exception?

     The disintegration of a First World society into increasingly insular, increasingly mutually hostile subcultures makes it vitally important to be alert for exceptions to our assumptions. Maybe they’re becoming less reliable than in seasons past. As for the implied importance of preserving a common, Christian-Enlightenment culture, I trust that no more need be said.

Egocentrism: A Few Kind Words

     The title subject is much on my mind, for reasons partly derived from fiction. One of my fiction gurus, Robert A. Heinlein, early in his career produced a stunning short story titled “They.” It was an exploration of a species of madness… or so it seems at the start. In his anthology The Dark Side, Damon Knight introduces the story thus:

     This brilliant and compact story has the hallmark of great fiction: you will never be quite the same again after you have read it.

     The story reaches for the heights of solipsistic paranoia when its protagonist says this to his therapist:

     “All of these creatures have been set up to look like me in order to prevent me from realizing that I was the center of the arrangements. But I have noticed the key fact, the mathematically inescapable fact, that I am unique. Here am I, sitting on the inside. The world extends outward from me. I am the center…”

     What makes this story so compelling is that each of us sees things exactly the same as its protagonist. Berkeleian subjective idealism arises from that fact. In its collectivized version, it becomes the social construction of reality.

     And we can never wriggle completely free of that wholly individual viewpoint. You can’t really “see it the way he does” unless you are “he”… and you’re not.

     That this is “built in” to the human psyche is one of the downsides of individual consciousness. Heinlein wasn’t the only great writer to use it. Judith Guest employs it in her first novel, Ordinary People, in building up the ultimate rift between Calvin and Beth Jarrett.

     Each of us is the center of his own universe. Maturation is in part the process of learning to accept others’ equally egocentric viewpoints. He who cannot do so is unlikely to have a good time in society.

     A great deal of social strife arises from certain persons’ inability to allow others to believe what they wish. The difficulty of accepting other people’s convictions as beyond your power to change moves some to embrace force and fraud as their methods. Think a little about politicians and you’ll see the causal chain at once.

     But none of this is really news. It’s just that it’s seldom addressed openly. Even the word egocentric has been shorn of its etymological meaning. Today it just denotes the attitude of someone you wouldn’t want to be around. That’s because he’s an egotist. He’s on an ego trip. In other words, he’s not you.

     Ayn Rand did some good and some harm by emphasizing egoism in her novels Anthem and The Fountainhead. Ethical individualism is a vital stance, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with a genuine egotist. In social dealing, the practicing egotist tends to evoke the egotism of others. The consequences are seldom pretty.

     The challenge for public discourse is to assert the rights of the individual while remaining untainted by the accusation of egotism. That is, we who champion the individual must strive to uphold the political implications of our egocentric nature without allowing the promoters of collectivism to claim that “you only care about yourself,” as they so often do. For that reason, the defense of egocentrism must be coupled to the promotion of Golden-Rule-patterned behavior and the rejection of self-absorption in all its forms.

I Hadn’t Planned To Post Today

     This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

     For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

     You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

     Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

     I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

     I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Geo. Washington

     Somewhere in the afterlife, the ghost of The Father of Our Country is nodding and smiling.

Rather Than Repeat Myself

     – which is what you expected from me on America’s 250th Independence Day, isn’t it? – allow me a few thoughts snatched out of the luminiferous ether, and a handful of links.

     First, Happy Independence Day. The United States has survived quite a lot, especially if you count all the hubris-powered blunders American politicians have produced. Part of the reason is Americans’ resilience: our stubborn habit of growling at our troubles, bearing down, and pushing through. Not to put too fine a point on it:

1. The politicians fuck things up,
2. Disaster ensues;
3. Ordinary Americans take care of business.

     It would be nice to think it’s ingrained in us, but the developments of the post-World War II decades suggest that it’s not ingrained in all of us. An increasing number of our people believe that “our” governments really are “here to help.” Worse, those folks think they have a right to be bailed out of their own, homemade troubles, whenever, wherever, and to whatever depth.

     I could go on about that, but I’ll spare you. Celebrate what we’ve been through as much as what we have.

     Second, beware. The forces hostile to freedom are more numerous and more active than at any previous time in the nation’s history. While some of those forces are essentially mindless, others are quite purposeful. The men who guide them know what they’re doing.

     There are convulsions on the horizon. The first of them will arrive with the midterm elections, which are certain to be infected by every sort of fraud. If the pattern of previous years is repeated, those who have supervisory authority over those elections will either wring their hands and moan, or will be found complicit in the fraud.

     Third, remember this above all else:

Freedom is not given.
It is not granted.
It is not “voted.”
It is taken.

     In the usual case, it’s taken by force of arms. The oppressed must rise up and defeat the oppressors. If you’ve wondered why half a billion Europeans, the stock from which most Americans are descended, can’t seem to throw off the yokes “their” governments have fixed upon them, reflect on how completely they’ve been seduced by welfarism on the one hand, and disarmed on the other.

     The great majority of White Americans are too proud to accept government handouts. That’s admirable. But a growing fraction of our people do accept them, and would regard anyone opposed to those handouts as an enemy. One of the best things anyone can do in the cause of freedom is to help others toward self-reliance. Every mendicant removed from the State’s teat is another potential freedom fighter.

     Then, after you’ve got him to stand on his own feet like a proper American, take him to the shooting range! Let the sound of freedom ring in his ears, and yours. Then get him heeled up, which really should be regarded as every able-bodied American’s civic duty.

     Fourth and last, a few links:

• For Independence Day
• For Independence Day Part 2
• For Independence Day Part 3: When It Came
• Two For Independence Day
• From My Cold Dead Hand

     Now enjoy the weekend. I plan to do so. I’ll see you on Monday.

The Sport

     [A short story. I wrote it some time ago, yet it retains a certain relevance, especially in light of the controversy over allowing transwomen into women’s sports. – FWP

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     You've gotta love 'em. They're the biggest bunch of crybabies, narcissists, and all-around scum you could find this side of a coke dealers' convention, but they think we're the worst vultures and fiends in creation. Miss one syllable of theirs, and they scream about being misquoted. Quote 'em accurately, and they yell about being taken out of context. If you catch one of 'em doing somebody a favor, you can be sure the favor's owed. If you catch him treating someone with what looks like respect, you can bet the debt is money. Big money.
     Money's the only thing that gets their undivided attention. Which is why, when I spotted one who didn't seem to care about money, he got mine.
     Truth be told, he would have gotten it anyway.
     They have to register their contracts; it's league and union policy. The union is protecting its CBA, and the league is enforcing its salary arbitration system. The rule couldn't be tougher if they had an actual cap. And there has to be a contract. The date on the contract is what determines eligibility to play.
     It's not unusual for a new guy to get the minimum. Hell, I wouldn't complain about it; the minimum is twelve times what I get for more or less honest work. A thirty-seven year old no-name should count himself lucky to get a shot at the majors, even with a going-nowhere expansion team like the Olympians. But when June starts to fade and the guy is 14-0 with twelve complete games, a no-hitter, and a 0.31 ERA, and he's still getting the minimum, you start thinking about alien invasions and sanity hearings.
     And feature articles. Not Page One above the fold, but top, front and center of the Sports section, with your byline in bold, and serious prospects for TV spots and panel shows.
     Not only was he getting the minimum salary permitted to a major leaguer under the CBA; he wasn't spending it. The money never hit his checking account at the team's bank.
     As far as I knew, I was the only hack who'd noticed. I had to conceal the discovery. I wanted an interview with Conrad Bearing -- who didn't -- and the money angle was my crowbar, but I had to let him know what I knew without spilling it to my competitors.
     We are a bunch of vultures. Vultures that will snatch up meat that's still breathing, if there's no carrion to be had.
     With reporters all over him before and after every game, I had to slip him the hook in a way the others wouldn't snag. It was going to be a challenge. But if I couldn't find a way, I wouldn't get the scoop.
     I wouldn't deserve it.

***

     He didn't finish his fifteenth, but he won it. It would have been a shutout, but the reliever gopher-balled the Twins' number-one RBI man with one out in the ninth. Still, 4-1 wins just as well as 4-0, and the reliever got the earned run. Bearing's ERA was down to 0.30, and his statistics were screaming Cy Young and MVP. It would be the first time ever in the history of the sport, but if he finished the season the way he'd started it, no one in America could deny it to him.
     The usual horde was besieging him. I was part of it. As he dressed, he answered the shouted questions, no matter how pointed or personal, the same way he always had: with silence and a shake of the head. He didn't look up but twice, both times with the same stony face he showed to opposing batters from the mound. His teammates, knowing they wouldn't get two seconds' worth of any of us while he was around, faded away without a word.
     I'm used to pro ballplayers. I know why they all look older than their ages. But I'd never gotten over how old he looked. You could have convinced me that he was fifty. His hair was solid gray, his face was deeply lined, and I'd swear he had liver spots on his hands. He was fit and trim at six feet and one-eighty, but there was a suggestion of a stoop to him, even when he sat, that suggested that just maybe, the years on his face weren't just from sun and wind.
     The other hacks were half-crazy. None of them had turned up the first thing about him. They knew his name, and his face, and his incredible pitching, but not one damned thing more. He saw no one but his teammates, and them only in the locker room, the dugout, and the clubhouse. He made no phone calls and received no mail. Nothing about him had turned up on the Web. Despite offers in six and seven figures for the beginning of a clue to who he was and how he'd risen from nothing to the top pitcher in the game -- in the history of the game -- no one had stepped forward with the smallest morsel of fact about him.
     A man who arrives at training camp as a free agent, has never played pro ball before, then wins fifteen consecutive starts in sixty games has no business being anonymous. Maybe he wasn't doing it to spite us, but that was the effect it was having. At first, they just wanted to know who he was. Now they wanted to get him.
     I had him. It was time to land him.
     I held my tongue until the rest of the pack had stopped baying. I wasn't going to shout. Not likely he would hear me clearly over the rest, even if I did shout. But if I waited until the din died down a touch, and caught him looking my way, I could mouth what I had to say. Eyes like his would catch it.
     They did.
     His eyes caught mine. He looked about as if he were still attending to the others, but never more than a few degrees off our personal line of contact. I stayed stock still, hung back as unobtrusively as I could until the locker room cleared. The five seconds before the door swung shut behind the last of my colleagues were the longest of my life.
     He turned to face me squarely, clapped his hands against his thighs, leaned forward and murmured, "What was that about my salary?"
     Even his voice sounded old. I looked him in the eye. "You've barely spent the first dollar of it."
     "And you know this...how?"
     I smiled and said nothing.
     He grimaced. "What are you angling for?"
     "A scoop, of course."
     He looked away. His hands clenched, relaxed, and clenched again.
     "All right," he said. "You get an interview. Twenty minutes, right here and now. But strictly about baseball. Nothing personal. And only on the condition that you stop looking into my private affairs, permanently."
     He sat back, plainly expecting me to start into a conventional sports interview. When I shook my head, his face fell.
     "Then what do you want?" he said.
     "The same thing everyone wants: to know who you are and where you came from. To know where you got that fastball, that curve and that control. To know where you're headed next, since a pitcher that good isn't going to stay with an expansion team for the minimum two years running." I pulled my cassette recorder out of my jacket and pushed the RECORD button. "Give me that if you want me to lay off your finances and your miser's ways."
     He glared at me as if I'd hit a grand slam off him the inning before. I just smiled. But my smile faded when he chuckled.
     "I don't know which of us is more ridiculous," he said. "You for overplaying such a weak hand, or me for taking you seriously. You lose. Take your best shot and we'll see what you can learn on your own hook. I won't try to stop you."
     He rose, hefted his duffel, and left me there gaping at his back.

***

     Yes, sports hacks socialize. Professionally, we'd cut each other's throats given half a chance, but we can be pals after curfew. After all, who wants to drink alone?
     The Tenth Inning was its usual noisy post-game self. No major-leaguers, but a few triple-As and the customary swarm of collectors and jock itches. Most of them were there in the hope that a utility infielder might wander in, susceptible to a plea for an autograph or the offer of a bed partner. The hacks were there...well, why were we ever there? It was the boozery nearest the stadium, and we all had expense accounts, so why go anywhere else?
     Besides, there was always a chance he might wander in, even if he never had before.
     "What gets me," Mitch Rainier said, "is the endorsements."
     "What endorsements?" Cal Martinez said. "He won't even do a no-lines spot for a soft drink."
     "Right." Mitch flashed his one-sided grin. "Fifteen-and-oh with the All-Star break still three weeks away, he could probably pull down twenty million in spots this year alone, but none of the flacks have gotten within a county of him. The doormen at his hotels are all given instructions to pitch them into the street."
     He's not interested in money, I thought. But why else does anyone play this game?
     "He won't keep them at bay forever," Martinez said. "They'll hook him. They hook everybody sooner or later. Who was the last big guy said he wouldn't do a spot for anything?"
     "Guidry," I said.
     Martinez nodded. "And they got him, didn't they? They used a Cause. Once they found out he had a thing for dogs, he was meat on the table."
     "So," I said, "if they find out he has a soft spot for dogs, or old buildings, or alcohol-soaked hacks, they've got him, eh?"
     "Right. Of course," Martinez said, grinning, "that first step is a doozy." He hefted his glass and squinted down into it. "Who buys the next round?"
     I was about to own up when Floyd Whiggins slouched through the front door. He scanned the bar, saw us and headed for us, and I nodded in his direction.
     "He does."

***

     Bearing was Torre's immediate choice to start the All-Star Game. It's not like he had to think hard about it.
     The Olympians wouldn't have anyone else on the squad, but their star was enough for the whole league. Everyone in America wanted to see him pitch. Hell, there were hacks advocating rescinding the rule against more than three innings per pitcher just to see what he could do against the National League's finest.
     Thing is, he didn't want to play at all.
     Day after Torre announced his picks, Bearing made his first phone call that year. Hell, maybe the first of his life. He called Torre and asked to be removed from the squad, completely.
     I hear the call lasted for nearly an hour. Torre finally persuaded him to play. It was close, but that's why Joe's a great manager. The manager's job is to get your lazy ass onto the field and goose it into performing no matter how sick or tired or hungover you might happen to be, and Joe is the best manager in the game. Ask any of the primadonnas he's had to coddle.
     The game was special. First baseball game ever to out-draw a Super Bowl, and Conrad Bearing was the reason. Two days before, he'd won his twentieth straight game. Another complete game shutout.
     He sauntered out to the mound as if he had nothing much to do that day, just crank up the windmill, throw a few balls, then go back to Spokane, win, lose, or draw. But I'd caught a glint in his eye and a hard line along his jaw as he warmed up. He wasn't happy to be there, but as long as he was, he was going to show us his best.
     I didn't know that we hadn't yet seen his best.
     The National League owns all the slugging records these days. They grow 'em big over there. But they also grow 'em quick. Every man in their starting lineup had an average of .320 or better. Some of those guys could hit Nolan Ryan's best fastball all the way to Paris.
     Bearing peered in at Alec Altman -- .365, 22 homers, 76 RBI -- and whipped a fastball past him that practically fried the Jugg gun. It was right down the cock, a perfect hitter's pitch, but it clocked in at 115 miles per hour. Altman's mouth sagged open and he called for time. The ump, whose mouth sagged just as loosely, gave it to him. It didn't help.
     Bearing threw two more whizzers, same place, same scorching speed. Altman swung at the last one, God knows why. Up went the thumb.
     He threw three curves to Edgar Kretgen. Real yellow hammers. All three looked to be high and away. All three nicked the low-inside corner of the zone. Another thumb.
     Juan Gottfried came to the plate holding his bat like a truncheon. A lot of the pre-game chatter had been about whether he could handle Bearing. He'd blasted the best pitchers in the NL all year long: thirty-six homers in eighty-one games. It seemed they could only keep the ball in the park by plunking him, and a lot of them did. His glower said he knew he had something to prove. He practically dared Bearing to throw at him.
     Bearing didn't take the bait. He cocked and threw, and I gasped.
     The ball seemed to float through the air like a dirigible. It was the fattest-looking pitch I'd ever seen. I was certain Gottfried would put it into orbit.
     Just as it closed on the plate, the ball sank three feet. Gottfried missed it by two.
     Bearing threw two more, and Gottfried could come no closer.
     Nine pitches, three strikeouts.
     He did it again in the second inning, and once more in the third. When he stepped off the mound at the end of his stint, the thunder could have cracked the world.
     He looked up at the stands, and his face, for three innings a stone mask, melted into a sunny, boyish smile. He doffed his cap and waved, and the applause seemed to redouble.
     When the hacks went looking for him after the game, he was nowhere to be found. Torre told us he'd left the stadium as soon as he was off the mound, and caught an early flight back to Spokane.

***

     The Olympians weren't going anywhere. Expansion teams never do, Their team batting average never broke .220, and they didn't have a certified power hitter anywhere in their lineup. Their fielding was no better. Except for their star, their pitching frankly stank. Only Conrad Bearing could get them near to respectability, and he only played one game in four.
     But every game, they played before a capacity crowd. Only the size of their piddly-ass beer-baron's stadium limited their gate. They could have packed the Grand Canyon.
     It wasn't dreams of the postseason. It wasn't that there'd been an untapped market for baseball in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't clever marketing or promotional days. It was Conrad Bearing. Whether he was slated to be on the mound or not, the people of Spokane wanted to be near him.
     The hacks and the flacks continued to pursue him. There wasn't a reporter in the game who wouldn't have sold his children into slavery for five minutes of his time. There wasn't a corporation in America that wouldn't have given him a controlling interest for five words of praise for their products...and a replay of that All-Star smile.
     He kept taking the mound every fourth day. He kept winning. He was even more unhittable after the All-Star break than before it. Game after game, he mowed down the American League's best as if they were toddler league scrubs. But the smile never returned.
     I could learn no more about him. None of us could. Not that any of my colleagues would have shared even the smallest tidbit. Hell, just learning whether he liked his socks to be wool or nylon would have been a million-dollar scoop. It didn't matter. He revealed nothing, and no one could unearth anything. All we knew of him was his name and his prowess on the mound.
     For the sportswriters, it was an agony of agonies. For the city of Spokane and baseball fans the world around, it was more than enough.

***

     The season is long. Players tire, even the ones who keep up their conditioning regimens and scrupulously avoid the bars and the Baseball Annies. It's simple physics. We all knew that Bearing had to lose a game eventually.
     Except that he didn't.
     He won his thirtieth straight game on August 8: his second no-hitter. He threw not a single gopher ball. His ERA sank to 0.28. From the All-Star Game onward, he was never taken off the mound before the end of the game.
     He just kept on, looking as strong or stronger each day than the previous one. And the crowds kept flocking to see him.
     Fans have always preferred free-hitting games. There's more color to them. More seems to be going on. Paradoxically, because they demand less attention, they hold your attention better. The history of the game seems to bear it out. Back in the late Sixties, when hitting was on the skids and titans like McLain and Gibson ruled the field from the mound, attendance and viewership hit their postwar lows. So why did this unhittable pitcher command such adulation and love? Wasn't he doing exactly what the fans should have resented: taking the action out of the game?
     I couldn't fathom it, any more than I could fathom him.
     He kept accepting the minimum, and none of it ever reached his checking account.

***

     Bearing was scheduled to start against the Angels on the last day of the season. His record stood at 40-0. He hadn't allowed an earned run since late July. As usual, the stands of Olympus Field were packed.
     As he took the mound, Cal Martinez nudged me and murmured, "Think he'll go out undefeated?"
     "What else would you expect?" I said. "Has anyone laid a bat on him this whole year long?"
     "First time in the history of the sport," he said.
     "First time for everything, pal." I settled back and propped my steno pad on my knee as the ump yelled "Play ball!" and the first Angel batter stepped to the plate.
     Bearing didn't hew to the practice he'd followed the whole year long. He didn't concentrate immediately and wholly upon the batter. Instead he put his hands on his hips, scanned the stands from end to end and back again, and nodded as if he'd come to a decision. Catcher Roy Wriston started to rise from his squat, but Bearing waved him back down, peered in for the sign, wound up and threw.
     The ball smacked into Wriston's glove with a clap so sharp I'd have sworn it could be heard in Canarsie. The catcher reeled backwards as the digits on the Jugg display whirled, slowed, and finally settled on their verdict.
     128 miles per hour.
     Right down the cock, yet completely unhittable. The crowd shouted in amazement.
     Bearing nodded, wound up, and did it again.
     And again.
     And again.
     Is there really a first time for everything? How would I know? Or anyone else, for that matter? As the game progressed, it dawned on me that never in the history of the sport had a pitcher eliminated his opponents without ever allowing the ball to touch their bats. It was inconceivable, a degree of dominance no player had ever achieved in any sport. But as Conrad Bearing strode out to the mound at the beginning of each Angel half-inning, it became ever clearer that I was witnessing exactly that.
     After six innings he'd thrown exactly fifty-four pitches. After seven, exactly sixty-three. After eight, exactly seventy-two. All strikes. All about as hittable as a rifle bullet.
     The crowd went by stages from amazement to hoarsely screaming delirium.
     When he took the mound at the top of the ninth, I was no longer able to sit. I could hardly breathe. Martinez was apoplectic beside me. He'd been screaming along with all the others. The wonder of the game had flensed him of his sports hack's veneer and left him to stand without disguise, as the fan he really was. As all of us who cover this sport have to be.
     I couldn't imagine what the hacks in the TV booths were saying, to their viewers, to one another, or to themselves. I couldn't imagine what I would have said in their place.
     We were witnessing a miracle, a new definition for "the perfect game." It was draining us of words, the stuff of our trade.
     In that time and place, Conrad Bearing had stripped us of our defenses. We jaded and cynical ones, too worldly wise to admit to our childlike devotion to a childish game, had been reduced to the same openmouthed state of awe a small boy feels in the presence of his hero, or a man feels at the discovery of his one true love.
     We knew he had perfection in him. We'd seen eight innings of it. We were desperate to see him end as he'd begun. He did not disappoint us.
     Three whizzers down the cock to Berglund. Three curves that seemed to swerve around the bat of Sant'Angelo. Two sinkers to Petrovich that looked like they'd dropped all the way to China.
     He saved his best for last.
     When he wound up, you could see him marshaling his forces for the pitch, a service that would ring all the bells in America. When he let fly, I half-expected his arm to catch fire.
     Petrovich swung...about half a second after the ball reached Wriston's glove.
     144 miles per hour.
     "Yerrrrr...out!"
     The crowd went mad.
     His teammates converged on him at a sprint. Before they could reach him, he held up a hand in the universally understood sign to halt. They did. The stands fell immediately silent.
     He stood there on the mound, scanned the stands end to end once again, and smiled: the supremely sunny smile from his All-Star appearance.
     "Thank you," he said, and walked off the mound toward the dugout.
     By the time Martinez and I got to the locker room, he was gone.

***

     Time warps the memory. Things once bright and clear grow dim and indistinct. We illuminate the high points and efface the drudgery and drear. The lucky ones among us retain their "signposts:" the events that mark their transitions and achievements, and gave color to their undertakings.
     I will never forget that last game. It would be the last game Conrad Bearing would ever pitch. He did not return for the following season. The Olympians' public relations office gave no explanation.
     I thought I understood it. By baseball standards, he was an old man. He'd had a season to eclipse every other season any pitcher had ever played. Likely it would never be surpassed. Why return? Why show the fans he'd thrilled so completely anything less than that pinnacle of performance? It was obvious he didn't care about the money. He was letting us remember him at his peak.
     It was several years before I discovered how wrong I was.
     His departure from the game was as sharp as his arrival. Not only didn't he turn up on anyone's roster; he didn't turn up anywhere. No sportscasting billet; no endorsements; no appearances at charity events. No one had an inkling of where he'd gone or what he was doing. Conrad Bearing had absented himself completely from the public eye.
     When I stumbled into him in a department store in Seattle, it took me a moment to recognize him for who he was.
     I wasn't at my sharpest. I was sorting through flannel shirts and thinking about the mass of yard chores I'd been putting off all spring. He was passing behind me when an old woman lurched into him and knocked him into me. He was steadying her on her feet when I turned and registered his face.
     "My God!" I said.
     His eyes caught mine, he smiled meaninglessly, and tried to pass on. I grabbed him by the arm -- that incredible baseball machine -- and held him there.
     "Where have you been?" I murmured.
     He essayed another meaningless smile. "Excuse me? I think you might have mistaken me for someone else." He tried to pull away. I didn't let him.
     "Oh, I don't think so, Conrad." I pitched the name so that only he would hear it. "I still want that interview, you know. And don't try to give me the slip or I'll call out your name, here and now."
     "It's George," he hissed. "George Matulovich. Now let go!"
     I shook my head. "Maybe that's what it is now. Your car or mine?"
     He tried to stare me down, but I wasn't about to relent. I kept my grip on him and waited. Presently he conceded defeat.
     "All right. Yours."
     That must have been hard.

***

     "What do you do now?"
     "Not much. Until last year, I was a mailman."
     "So why did you retire?"
     "I got bored with delivering mail."
     "No, from baseball!"
     "I always wanted to be a mailman, and I didn't want to lose my last chance."
     "Come on!"
     He shrugged. "Don't you have a theory?"
     I scanned his living room. It was as ordinary a place as I've ever been. Moderately used mid-grade sofa, recliner, and tables. Two bookcases filled with popular novels in paperback, plus two portrait photos of a handsome older woman. A small television propped on a homebuilt redwood stand. It was a modest house, in a modest rural neighborhood well removed from the clamor of city life. A retired mailman's house.
     "At first," I said, "I figured it was that you wanted to go out at your peak. That would have been natural, so I believed it for a while. But then I realized that it would have been the only natural thing about you. So no, I don't. Would you tell me, please?"
     He stared at me in silence for a long interval.
     "George," I said, the name strangely ill-fitting in my mouth, "I'm as far out of the game as you are, now. I don't have a byline any more." I spread my hands. "No steno pad. No tape recorder. I don't want to sell you to anyone. I just want to know."
     He rose from his recliner and paced the little room, hands in his jeans pockets.
     "Who would believe me anyway?" I said.
     "It's not who would believe you," he said. "It's whether I can get you to believe me."
     I started to protest, thought better of it. If there'd ever been a figure to challenge credulity, on the field or off, it was he.
     He stopped before one of the bookcases and caressed the photo it bore.
     "Your wife?"
     He nodded without looking at me. "She passed away six years ago."
     I counted backwards. "Right after...your season?"
     Another nod.
     "Then you retired to be with her?"
     "You could say that." He closed his eyes. There were tears at the corners. Presently he opened them and returned to his seat. I inched forward on mine.
     "Doris was...very sick when I joined the Olympians. Pancreatic cancer, one of the worst forms. She had very little chance to live, and all of it depended on a treatment we couldn't afford. I had to raise a lot of cash very fast, and baseball was the only legal way to do it."
     What?
     "Are you telling me," I said slowly, "that you did it for the money?"
     He frowned. "Well, of course! Why else would anyone play pro baseball?"
     "Uh, never mind. But...you took the minimum! You never haggled, never tried to renegotiate, never threatened to, uh, strike. If it was all about money, why didn't you press your advantage?"
     He looked at me as if I'd started babbling in tongues. "I made what we needed. We didn't need more. Why should I have demanded more?"
     "But..." I fell silent. There are some things you don't probe. It took me two divorces and a catastrophic career collapse to learn it, but learn it I had.
     It took me a moment to realize that I hadn't asked about what I'd always wanted to know. He'd startled the question right out of me with his revelation about money.
     "George...the why makes sense, but I have to know about the how." He grimaced. I could see him casting about for a credible lie. I held up a hand. "No evasions, now. No one else will hear."
     He hunched forward, dropped his eyes to the floor, and sat silent for a long interval. Finally, he rose and headed for the back door.
     "Come with me."

***

     He had a spacious back yard, well maintained. It sported a large barn and was surrounded on three sides by a split-rail fence. Along one run of the fence were propped a quartet of sheet-steel plates. The first three were irregularly perforated with ragged circular holes about a baseball's size. The fourth was unmarked.
     "I used to stand over there," he said, pointing to the opposite run of the fence, "and throw baseballs at plates just like those until I could exactly control which hole it would go through. I did it for hours at a time, day after day, until it was almost a bore. Then I started experimenting with curves, screwballs, and sinkers. I got so I could make the ball do whatever I pleased, and still make it go through whichever hole I chose. It was mostly a way of passing the time, but I never completely outgrew it."
     I squinted at the plates. "What made these holes?"
     He shrugged. "A baseball."
     "What? Are you telling me --"
     "Want to see me do it right now?" He had a baseball in his hand.
     "Uh, no.“
     The far fence was about a hundred fifty feet away.
     "How old were you when you...developed your skills?"
     "About ten." He smiled. "I've always loved baseball. The sport, not the professionalized entertainment spectacle and scandal factory."
     "And you kept on at that for twenty-seven years, until your wife's illness made you decide to cash in?"
     He pursed his lips and turned away.
     A retired mailman.
     "George, how old are you?"
     He hesitated. "I'll be sixty next month."
     "You were...fifty-three the year you played for the Olympians?"
     "Fifty-four, actually."
     I was six years his junior.
     "What's the matter, son?" He grinned. "Do you think I needed more seasoning?"
     I barked a laugh, halfway between absurdity and pain.
     I'd have given everything I've ever had and everything I've ever been to play even one game in the majors. I'd never gotten beyond single-A, and I knew early on that I never would. He'd disdained it for fifty years, and turned his back on it once it had served his need.
     He sensed my anguish and laid a hand on my shoulder.
     "You're thinking I wasted something priceless, something you'd have given your soul to have," he said gently. "But think about that last game, the one where I let it all out. Suppose you were a freak like me. Suppose you could have done that, not once, but every game you played, once every four days, even into your sixties. What would that have done to you? What would it have done to the sport you love?"
     I could not reply. He nodded and squeezed my shoulder.
     "A sport like baseball is only worth playing if there's a rough equality among the players. Oh, some will always be better than others, no denying it. But for one player to be an order of magnitude better than all the rest, able to have his way with them whenever he pleases, would belittle the sport itself. Whenever he was on the diamond, it would be no fun at all, even for him."
     "Are you saying it was no fun for you? All that ability and you didn't even enjoy it?"
     His grin was rueful. "Very little, son. Until the very last game I had to hold myself in check, as much as morally possible. Except for the All-Star Game, of course."
     "So you never gave the team your best, then?"
     His eyebrows rose. "What I gave the Olympians won them forty-one of the sixty-five games they did win. What point would there have been in humiliating the rest of the league even further?"
     "But that last game..." I misted up at the memory. He smiled.
     "Yes, that day I let it all out. I had to know just how good I could have been. I told myself the sport wouldn't suffer too much from that one indulgence. Was I wrong?"
     "No."
     He hefted the baseball, loped to the opposite end of his yard, and tossed it at me. I caught it automatically, started to throw it back, and stopped.
     "You do love the game, don't you?" I called.
     He nodded. "Almost as much as I loved Doris. About as much as you. You just going to stand there, or are you going to throw that thing?"
     We played catch for the rest of the afternoon.

==<O>==

     Copyright © 2005 Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.