Fear Death, Fear Meaningless Death, Watch the News

Analysts of media have long tried to come up with some explanation for the fear-mongering success of FoxNews, and the general malaise of an older, angry crowd spurning things like women being awesome in public, and the stories of minority authors or actors. I see the latest, inevitable flare-up in SFWA in very simple terms, related to the way FoxNews toys with the psyche of the elderly and the fearful. 

People who are afraid of death look out at a world that does not resemble their sense of identity, their sense of what things are in their own lives. The things the people were building towards with their own life and work spilled out far beyond their own control in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. The fear of death they feel means they see the loss of their own identity and place in the world-at-large as a kind of death. To stave off death, assertion comes of their own sense of identity and culture contrary to what is present in the name of preservation or something.

What's truly amazing is that the accusations of PC-policing are very ironic, and the people shouting about it don't see the irony. It is political correctness that allows the angry and the old and the anti-feminist a voice at all when their voices are so angry and toxic. It doesn't really matter if it is FoxNews' Tea Party fanatics or a few crusty, old bearded-men in grey, insular fandom: That there is a voice at all from them in the public sphere with such a toxic message; it is a testament to freedom of speech and PC-policing that such cruel and senseless stupidity is permitted in public spaces.

Fear death, I do. But, I do not presume to think that the world is going to shape itself in my little image. I don't feel the need to push my fear of the loss of my conscious self out onto others, to recreate my own image and self-image over and over in every corner of the nation and oversoul of man.

The parts of us that are eternal are generally not the parts of us that we want to be eternal. 

Genre has entered the mainstream, and it will fade out as the communities of genre disperse with all that hatred in the air, all those angry people shouting at each other. Abandon ship.

Motown is a sound that everyone knows, but it is no longer a movement. It entered the mainstream, and the artists toured the world, got caught in their moment in the light. Then, the energy of Motown dispersed. Artists of subsequent years may fall in and out of the "Motown-sound" but there is nothing new and innovative coming from it that isn't just an occasional influence of subsequent artists. SF looks like it's moving in that direction. Talented authors may pick up the sound of SF for a while, then dance away from it later. It's moving, and mainstream, and the energy that was built up in all those decades is rippling out in a splash. 

Fox continues on, fomenting a rebellion that will never truly come. What good is that soil? What good comes of telling people how awful they are all the time, fomenting all that fear?

The people that built something, once, are angry that they don't own it anymore, perhaps. Generations come. Generations pass. The past, and them that profit from it, are angry that the world is changing. They are angry that their energy is dispersing beyond what they know. The work will always become obscure. The great, heroic things, the glory, the fame, they are just dust passing away. 

We are soil with legs. Be good soil and build good soil. But, we don't control what grows in the field after we fade away. Let the world go when the time comes and find peace.

I'm poking around for publishers on this thing I wrote. I'm not really looking for a genre one. I'm really looking for someone that dances in and out of the genre, out of the mainstream where that outsider energy is building up and building up...