The Way the Future Blogs

 

The first sign of something called “Occupiers” was in an ad in a little Canadian — that’s right, Canadian — magazine called Adbusters and published in Vancouver, British Columbia. It displayed a picture of the bronze figure of a bull which decorates Wall Street, with a ballet dancer posed on it. The only text said, “What is our one demand? Occupy Wall Street. September 17th, Bring tent.”

And on September 17th, a hundred and fifty people showed, then each day more and more until it peaked at 20,000 physically present on Zuccoti Park in lower Manhattan, and similar demonstrations were spring up all over the country — indeed in other countries, too. What do these crowds do at these meetings? Many of them listen to speeches. Who are the speakers? Anyone who wants to. If you are standing in the crowd for a while and have a sudden urge to support — or opp — something that’s been said, you go to the “stackkeeper,” who adds it to the stack of those who got there before you. When all of them have said their piece, you get to climb up onto whatever they are using for a soapbox.

That is the freest of free speech, but there are handicaps. The police won’t allow electronic microphones. Therefore, when you speak you have the same range as the famous orators of Athens and Rome, and not an inch more. What the Occupiers do when technology is forbidden and the crowd stretches more than a couple of yards away is to use the same technology as was available to Marc Antony eulogizing Caesar. That is, the human voice. Those nearest the speaker turn around and repeat what he said, then the job is repeated by those farther away. It isn’t perfect. People in the fringes are unlikely to get a reliable understanding of what some of the speeches are about. But it is certainly democratic and the police can’t take it away.

The tents and sleeping bags were hauled away in a midnight raid, so that technically the NYPD is not violating the Bill of Rights’ Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, though clearly the police are going out of their way to make it tough. Still, New York police have been markedly less hostile than those of, say, Berkley, California, where one policeman was filmed strolling down a long line of seated and unresisting Occupiers and methodically directing his pepper spray into their eyes and faces.

(Simultaneously, though not connected, FBI agents in Connecticut moved in and arrested four local police, allegedly for discriminating against Latin-Americans. The policemen were described as “bullies with badges.” Some police certainly deserve that name.)

(Most of this data was gleaned from reports published in the monthly newsletter The Washington Spectator. Each issue features a different subject. $18 for a year’s subscription, at The Public Concern Foundation, P.O. Box 241, Oregon IL 61061.)

Cyril Begins to Blossom

When Cyril’s bad luck dumped him into the Infantry just when Hitler caught the American Army with their pants down in the Battle of the Bulge, he became a machine-gunner. What happened with him in that worrisome period before Patton, plus thousands of fresh reserves, kicked Hitler’s troops back into Germany I don’t know, because Cyril refused to talk about it. The end result, though, was that he got two things from that period of service. One was a Bronze Star. The other was a bad case of what they called severe essential hypertension, which was Army talk for heart trouble.

For a time after the war Cyril dealt with that situation by ignoring it. At some point he had married Mary G. Byers, the Ohio femmefan he had smuggled into New York City over the efforts of the uncle who, as her guardian, had done everything he could to prevent it. When Cyril’s draft number came up (I believe from things Cyril said), they were married.

While Cyril was serving in Europe, Mary was (again, I understand) alone, and not doing well. I believe that was when her drinking problem first surfaced; but when Cyril came home, he entered the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill and, at least for a time, things went well for both of them, especially after he took on a part-time job working for the newswire service, Transradio Press.

That job he got by invitation of our mutual old Futurian friend, Dick Wilson, who got there a little earlier than Cyril and had already become head of Transradio’s Chicago Bureau. (I must write something about Transradio some time, because it loved hiring Futurians, including, occasionally, me. But not now.)

Cyril had stopped by New York before moving on to Chicago, and he and I had kept in contact. I was then operating the Dirk Wylie Literary Agency, helping Dirk to make it a career (his own war injuries having made it impossible for him to hold a normal job.) When Cyril began writing, and selling, an occasional postwar sf story again, I coaxed him to do more.

He ultimately gave in, quit Transradio (and quit the university too) and moved back east. I think, again from things Cyril said, that part of the reason for leaving Chicago was because Mary was involved in some drinking there. I know (from Mary herself) that Cyril tried really hard to help her quit, including some pretty harsh measures.

He and Mary set up housekeeping near where I was living with my family in Red Bank, New Jersey. For the next few years Cyril-the-writer was not only vastly productive but getting better and better at it, almost by the day. That’s when he was producing such winners as “The Luckiest Man in Denv,” “The Silly Season,” “The Little Black Bag” and many more. Cyril had a nearly in-born gift for graceful writing and excellent spot-on characterization. His only real weakness was in plotting. By then he had taught himself — maybe with a little help from those Futurian writing orgies — plot structure for short stories and, soon thereafter, novelettes and novellas. Some of his work from that period I would match against almost anybody’s best stories ever, including “The Marching Morons,” “Two Dooms” and a good many others. (The intelligent folks at NESFA have put all those stories in a single volume, entitled His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth.) None of them won any Hugos or Nebulae. The reason was just some of Cyril’s bad luck. The awards hadn’t been invented yet.

Apart from the writing, Cyril’s life was unusually ordinary — that is to say, mostly quite apparently happy in those years. He and Mary shared many interests, not least the two sons, John and David, that Mary gave him in those years. Fatherhood, I must say, revealed a side of Cyril that I had not suspected to exist. He was an archetypal proud papa, he worried seriously when John developed some problems that none of their doctors seemed able to cope with (but which, apparently, the boy ultimately outgrew). From outside, even a quite close outside, the ultimate cynic seemed to have transmuted himself into a perfectly normal young married.

There was one small puzzle. One time when he and I were in my car, on the way to the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, our conversation got much more than usually personal. And when, leaping from earlier remarks between us, I asked Cyril what he would most like to change about himself, he clenched his teeth and, “I wish I were less cruel.”

I didn’t ask him any questions about that remark, but I did give it a lot of thought for a long time.

More coming along as soon as I find time to write it.

 
Related posts:

• Cyril Kornbluth,Part 1, Part 2
• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

TAD says he’s tired of getting up-to-date scientific and political news from this blog, and can I recommend other sources?

I can tell you what I read every week, which is five weekly publications: Science, New Scientist, The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times and Newsweek.

Science is mostly pretty technical. New Scientist is an English magazine and fairly expensive in the U.S., but you can read much of it online, and maybe some nearby public or college library gets it and will let you read it. (If not, get on the one most likely to listen to you and tell them they should.) If I could subscribe to just one magazine, this would be it.

The New Yorker may sound like a lightweight choice but its articles in depth can’t be beat, and often they are on scientific subjects. (They also have great cartoons and much else.)

I also read about a dozen other periodicals and miscellaneous other stuff, but far the most of what I know and keep replenishing is from these five.

Every newspaper in America, if not the world, gave the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of half a dozen other people by a creep named Jared Loughner page 1 coverage. However. the specific tool that Loughner used for his work of killing. was less widely reported.

He got them all — and wounded a dozen more — with his 9-millimeter Glock.

What is a Glock, and what is it designed to be used for? It’s a rapid-fire weapon that can accommodate a 30-bullet clip, and it has only one real use. It’s of very little value for hunting or for Grandma to keep under her pillow to repel burglars. What it is good for is the killing of groups of human beings by a single shooter, and for nothing else.

For that reason, it was outlawed by federal statute until 2004, when that law expired and our Congress, cowardly as it always is when it comes to offending the National Rifle Association, failed to renew it.

Since no conventional rifle or pistol could have murdered so many so fast, it is entirely due to the work of the National Rifle Association that most of this current crop of victims are dead.

I think it is self-evident that Jared Loughner did not particularly wish to kill, for example, Christina Taylor Green. After all, she was only nine years old and could have done little to offend him. The only reason she was in the group that Loughner fired into was that she had just been elected to her third-grade student council. She wanted to see how politicians operated.

I don’t know how many readers of this blog belong to the NRA, but if any are present now I’d like to ask a question:

Are you proud of yourself today?

Pres. Barack Obama on “The Late Show” with David Letterman.

As you all well know by now, one of the subjects that I spend a lot of time thinking about is politics. What I think about I write about; it’s the way I’m constructed. And what I write about, I am more likely than not to publish somewhere or other, sometimes including this blog.

So I give you warning. This is my notion of what I would like to see in a New York Times op ed, which is to say that it is wholly political. If you have not yet reached the conclusion that politics is our only way of getting good government, you don’t have to read it.
 

Dear Mr. President:

As you know, you are well and truly hated by the people FDR’s generation called “the malefactors of great wealth.” They have found ways to divert an appallingly large fraction of our nation’s treasure to their pocketbooks and they are afraid you won’t let them go on doing that.

These are not decent, honorable people, Mr. President. Your one great mistake since you were elected was believing that they might be, and that once they were saved from Perdition they would help others. They don’t do that. They are busy pumping tens of millions of dollars into spreading fears, worries and outright lies about you into the media., trying to persuade the American people that you are a foreign-born Moslem who is laughing up his sleeve because he’s getting away with stealing the country.

Why don’t you talk to the people, Mr. President?

I don’t mean make a speech. They’ve been inoculated against that. I mean the kind of thing you came close to doing when you were visiting the talk shows. There you did very well, coming across as smart, funny and likable.

The only thing wrong with that is the American public didn’t hire you to be good on talk shows. They hired you to get us out of the nearly hopeless mess a Republican President, a Republican Congress and a Republican Supreme Court dumped us into.

So here’s an idea. Let’s say that next time you hold a news conference, you start out by giving a little civics lesson. You say something to your immediate audience like, “Friends, I’ll try to take all your questions, but this time I want to start by answering two that come from the people I work for. One is from Sam Brown in Pocatello, Idaho. He says, ‘The famous Bill Mediaman (choose examples from your daily mail, Mr. President. These are illustrative only) said on the radio that you weren’t born in America. Is that true?”

“No, it isn’t true, and Mr Mediaman knows that it isn’t because he has seen the proof. Therefore Mr. Mediaman is a deliberate liar. You must do as you think best, but I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the time of day.

“Then there’s this from Leota Durcher, in Schaumburg, Illinois. ‘I am 54 years old. I have cervical cancer and they say that under your plan I can get health insurance, but I have to wait until 2014 to get it. Why did you put that delay into the plan?’

“I didn’t put it there, Mrs. Durcher. Let me explain how a bill becomes a law in our country. The printed copy of the bill, as drawn up by its sponsors, is circulated to all the senators and they are asked to vote for it. Then each senator has a right to ask for some kind of change in the bill in return for voting for it. In this case, three senators got together to require the four-year delay. Since without those three I didn’t have enough votes to pass the bill in the first place, I had no choice but to accept it. So if you want to know why this is in the bill you must ask those senators.

“Thanks. And now, friends let’s get on with business.”

Same thing when you go on a talk show. Tell them you first need sixty seconds to answer a letter from a voter. And repeat as often as necessary.

You did promise transparency in your administration, did you not, Mr. President? Did you mean that kind of letting Americans into the real facts about why all our laws look like Christmas wish lists for very rich people? If so, when does that kind of transparency start?