Articles that start fiction ideas, #1

Not sure how many more there will be.

Look, we fiction writers are heartless evil swine, when you come down to it.  Ask the people we make up whether they wouldn't be in the real indifferent world than one in which they are created (and destroyed) solely to amuse others.   Tom Wolfe did a hilarious and true portrait in "Mauve Gloves and Madmen" of a writer who couldn't keep his mind on his own father's funeral while attending it, because he was too busy noting details to describe later.  If you write fiction well enough to get paid (or at least published by people who don't know you) you have some similar stories.

The anguish of strangers -- and friends -- is where we find interesting stuff.  (Part of why I'm addicted to advice columnists). 

That said: here's a thoughtful, powerful article that raises vital questions of many kinds, about LGBT suicide and about adolescent bullying.  People who are involved in making the world better should probably read it.

But fiction writers should definitely read it.  I see a hundred story ideas in this short piece, everything from vignettes to novels.  It's even phrased perfectly for us: "What if ...."

So, my fellow heartless evil swine, (and with a tip of the hat to Nalo Hopkinson, whose tweet led me to it) here's the first of an indefinitely long list of places to find some ideas.

Short and commercial: another short story up,which you can buy

When I have spare minutes I use Metrocles House, my self-pub operation, to put up short stories at 99 cents, which seems to be a reasonable price to a lot of people.  This one is a novellette (by 138 words) under the word count rules, but otherwise definitely a novella (my opinions about why the word count doesn't mean as much as what the words do can be found here).  It's a pretty good one and if you haven't read it, well, you should.

"Things Undone" was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, "We're One Third Of Number Two!" It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of the Year anthology. So it comes highly recommended by people who read an awful lot.

This was sort of a trial canter for several ideas that I know I'll be back to later (some of which I've been to a few times before): the mutability of memory, the awkwardness of remembering things that other people don't (or say they don't), the genuine alien-ness of people with various socially-isolating brain syndromes, are all in one complex. In particular, in most stories in which time travelers alter the past, either some time travelers are immune, or everyone's memory changes instantly; I wondered what it might be like for a mind to feel the world ghosting in over it, maybe taking months or years (an idea I sort of played with in Finity and am sure I will play with again).

Another one has been with me ever since I noticed what the copywriter had come up with for the cover of an S.M.Stirling novel: "Think about history. Imagine it's worse." That led me to an idea I'm still playing with: how much worse would history have to be for us to declare a do-over or a scrape-and-pitch, i.e. just decide, well, that was all wrong, let's do something else? Pick your favorite bit of horror out of the last few centuries, say, and imagine sending back a force whose job was to prevent or mitigate it. If it's big enough, most of us would either cease to exist or cease to exist as ourselves; but if it's bad enough, might it be worth it? And how bad and big, and what about all the people who are just blameless byproducts?

Another idea: "live and let live" is an old idea but its prevalence is very much modern. Ages ago I ran across what seems a truthful comment: if you brought a European forward from 1200 A.D. to the present, the most inexplicable thing about all our greatly expanded powers to him would be that we hadn't declared a crusade and use the atom bomb to reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. It's probably--well, definitely--a good thing that our ancestors didn't have all our capabilities; you can construct your nightmares here about what a society with airplanes, electric fences, behavioral conditioning, effective psychopharmacology, and poison gas might have done in the way of slavery or genocide, back when those were done with virtually no compunction.

What sort of modern world might grow in a society that poisonous?

And what if we were descended from them? What if we could then reverse things so we would only, in that revised world, have been as wicked as we actually have been? How many never-weres would be a fair price to move from deep to less-deep evil?

Obviously there can be a lot more than one answer to that question; this story is one of mine.

Anyway, mundane details: you can get it from my ejunkie store in either epub format (most readers including Nook and iPad) or mobi format (Kindle and a few esoteric readers), or from Barnes and Noble for the Nook, or Amazon for the Kindle.  99 cents at all such places, contracts in the business being what they are.  I hope you'll take a look!

We will shortly return you to more grumpy reflections.

Late breaking word. Theory suffers partial destruction. Word "toilet" used in title for second time in row.

This is what happens when you publish a summary of data: datapoints that don't fit come drifting in.  Turns out there was a toilet-negative review, on Guys Lit Wire, quite unquestionably male-written:  http://kris-reisz.livejournal.com/58145.html  thus putting us in the realm of stochastic rather than iron rules.

why not to have that third beer at breakfast: An earlier version of this note referred to a "negative review", which this was not.  The review was mostly positive, it was "toilet-negative," i.e. didn't like that toilet thing, but otherwise generally praised the book.  Coherence I would attempt but succeed not I would.

A day down the toilet, why boys don't read fiction anymore, and the how-to of personhood

It started with a toilet.   For those of you who have read Tales of the Madman Underground, it's that chapter titled "An Afternoon Down the Toilet."  For those of you who haven't ,  this is probably the most minor spoiler in the history of spoilerdom: Karl is a high school student in small town Ohio.  His father is dead, and he and his mother depend on the money he brings in at five different part-time jobs, because she drinks and inhales as much of her paycheck as she can.  In that chapter (last chance to avoid a spoiler, plumbing fans!) one of Karl's sometime employers, Browning, stops him on the street after school and offers him $20 to change out a toilet in the employee bathroom.  (It's 1973, so that's a pretty reasonable rate for a bit of unlicensed plumbing).  Karl does it, does an excellent job, and collects his money, which his mother steals later that night to go out drinking.  (Again, in 1973,  you could do that on $20). 

There's around a thousand words in there describing the exact, grubby, messy details of pulling out a permaclogged toilet that has been in place for thirty years, and putting a new one in neatly and correctly so that the work will stay done for decades.

So one day  I was working on something else entirely (books are like zombies,  you put them down, they get back up and come after you again, intent on eating your brain) when the phone rang, and it was Sharyn November, my editor for Madman.  "What the hell is that thousand words about a toilet in there for?" she demanded.  "Just cut to he got the job, he did the job, afterwards he was really tired and dirty but glad he got the money, and then his mother stole it and he was disappointed."

As it happens, Sharyn November is a very hands-on get-into-detail editor, which I like exactly in proportion to how smart I think the editor is, and I think Sharyn is exceptionally smart.  But in this particular case, she happened to be dead wrong in a way that, I think, will probably lead to my saying some things about the "Why don't boys read?" conundrum and maybe drifting into its wider politics too.  In my usual way I'll take a while getting there.

At the time, all I knew was that unlike most of Sharyn's suggestions, that one put my back way up.  After making the sort of noises that mean "I don't know why but I don't want to do this" for a while, I ended up saying, "Here's what I think will happen.  Three or four reviewers, maybe, will mention that toilet negatively, and they'll all be women who are some kind of book professionals.  But at least five fan letters from actual teenage boys will say it was cool.  You keep saying one thing you like about this book is that it's so masculine, and this is a place where it's really masculine.  Trust me.  It says M on my Driver's License and I know this stuff."

One of the many ways Sharyn is smart is that she can accept a gut check from someone else's gut, even when her gut doesn't agree.  So she muttered the usual things about fucking prima donna artiste hacks who believe themselves to be great writers, and let me leave it in.

Actual count as of this morning (SMUGNESS ALERT):  reviews mentioning that toilet negatively: 3, all by women (two librarians and an editor).  Fan letters/emails mentioning it positively: 9, all from high school boys. 

(If you were scrolling down to avoid smugness, forget it, just give up now, I shall be smug for the rest of the blog today.  Possibly longer.  It is not often I get to feel smarter than Sharyn November and I shall wring every drop from it).

So I knew something or other, and not just how to change a toilet.  And it's only taken me about this long to figure out what my gut knew back in 2008.  (My gut is large, it contains multitudes).

The gender difference is important, but so are the other two differences:

1. the age (I would guess based on the date of the MFA listed after her name that the youngest of the toilet-negative reviewers was in her early thirties, whereas all the pro-toilet boys mentioned still being in high school and hating it), and
2. the fact that the anti-toileters were writing in public, mostly for an audience of other book people, but the pro-toileters were writing privately and directly to the author in some version of the "you touched my heart somewhere that matters to me" letter that a lot of us think of as the ultimate spiritual reward for this otherwise often silly way of making a living.

So let's line those things up against each other:

Wants to read about  the boy siphoning out trap, cutting rusty bolts, sweating solder on copper pipe: teenage boy who tells the writer they don't read much or like school but liked this book.

Wants to read that the boy got tired, dirty, and sweaty, sans detail: mature woman who reads a lot and mostly talks to other women about it.

Both feel: a bitter sense of injustice that Karl's mother stole his $20.  One boy told me he was so mad he could feel his eyes watering, but the reviewers who mentioned the toilet mentioned that theft too, and were also outraged.

Here's the difference, I think.  Why did the $20 belong to Karl, and why was it wrong for his mother to take it?  Not all the reasons, but the main, emotional one.

I think for the anti-toilet* side, it's because the kid worked hard and she's his mother.  But for the pro-toilet side, it's because he did a superb job (I have him mention this more than once) and that money is his commemoration of having done it.  In public-woman-constant-reader land, Karl's mother violated what should be their relationship; in private-boy-not-much-of-a-reader land,  she not only stole but denigrated his achievement; that $20 was no longer the manifestation of a physically difficult feat done brilliantly (and praised by his boss), but just some energy and dirt from Karl to be exchanged for a chance for Beth to sit in a small-town bar and look for men to tell her she was hot.

And that, I think, is at the heart of the "why don't boys read and what can we do about it" perennial uproar.   (No, not hanging out in bars and looking hot, which I'm sure has fans of both genders.)  I mean that crucial difference between  valuing experience and relationship to other people, versus achievement and relationship to the self.  If all that hard-to-turn bolt does is make Karl strain his muscles and bark his knuckles, it doesn't really need to be in there (along with the trap and the weight of the toilet and all the rest); what matters is that he's in the role of the hard-working good guy who deserves to be treated better by his mother, and those other details are no more relevant at this point than, say, what he was wearing or what girl he likes.  But if turning that hard-to-turn bolt is the point of the whole thing – Karl experiencing himself as a good amateur plumber – and it's about not getting the proper credit for a job well done, then it's a direct attack on how Karl is allowed to see himself; his competence isn't a source of his identity, but a convenience for an aging bimbo.

Now here's a thing that my old comrade Karl Marx** would have recognized: much depends on the material conditions of life.  Think about the life of the occupationally constant reader, especially of a woman in her thirties in our society.  Mostly it's about words and relationships; who says what to whom and how,  about what other people said to other people.  Life is talk (often the cool, reflective talk of online and print) and the naming  and sharing of experiences, and satisfactory relationships (not just the classic romantic one, but also to friends, family, coworkers, etc. ) are critical in part because if the relationships are not working, there's no one to listen or talk. 

Now, when old poops (and in literature,  old poopery can be achieved at 25)  think of books for young people, the tendency is all but inescapable to think of them as recruiting devices to get the damned kids into a life something like your own.  If life is about feelings and experiences, and the relationships that contextualize them, then that's what you're going to want in your YA or your juveniles or whatever you call them.  In that worldview, the most important thing for young people to do is to achieve a good verbally expressed understanding of the importance of relationships – essentially to learn to construct good "drama" as high school and college students use the term nowadays.  Even if the book is concerned with moving into the working world, it's about finding a mentor and a vocation (i.e. a relationship and an emotional state regarding work).   Furthermore everything about that life is dedicated to its publicness (we might call it the Katie Roiphe Effect); what's important is not just to get those feelings and relationships into the right words but to share them with other people, so that the community can approve the words.  And even furtherermore, the book folk involved in this are mostly people who have already succeeded at it (which doesn't mean they're secure – it's always a very insecure existence!)

Contrast that with what a boy in traditional gender roles is brought up to be interested in: making a mark in the world, counting coup, doing something, being somebody because of what he's done.  If life (or at least life as you're trying to imagine it) is about achievements and competence,   that's what you want in your reading.  In that worldview, what's important is to do something hard well and own it.  Even if the book is concerned with that charming girl that fascinates the hero, the boy reader wants some accomplishment tied in (say, rescuing from pirates, for example).  It's intrinsically a private thing; knowing you can do something well enough is a relationship between you and your self-assessment of your own skill set, and though you may be attacked by self-doubt, you either have a pretty good idea how to pull a car out of a skid, repair a dollhouse, or cover third base, or you don't.  Furthermore, since most boys are not Jonny Quest or Tintin, for the most part the interesting competencies are not ones they've tried, but ones they'd like to imagine having.  (The classic Monty Python nudge-nudge wink-wink sketch that ends with "What's it like?" illustrates this perfectly – the real question, which every boy and ex-boy in the world recognizes, is what do you do and how do you do it and most importantly what's it like to know what you're doing?)  And the experience of knowing what you're doing means at least the mention of some things you only know if you've been there and done that -- the resistance of the rusted-in bolt, the way solder runs like water if the joint is hot enough, and so on. 

Now, this is hardly an original observation, so far.  Any number of editors out there have concluded that although the problem with boys not reading fiction is a hard nut to crack, the complaint that many boys don't read fiction with girl protagonists can be addressed by the same solution that addresses the irritation  of many female readers who object to all the shallow shopaholics (or clever manic pixies or wise earth mothers or all the other panoply of girly stereotypes):  create a girl who kicks butt. 

That's a good start, but only a start.

Let me suggest there's another side to it:  it matters, much more than is generally acknowledged,  exactly how butt is kicked and how the act of butt-kicking is connected to the protagonist.  If you read the classic "boys books" with vast amounts of butt-kicking, like Treasure Island, Captain Blood, Beau Geste, Captains Courageous, Huckleberry Finn,  or Have Spacesuit Will Travel, there's a surprising amount about how things are done, detail by detail.  I learned a fair bit about exactly how you use a crossbow in battle  from The Black Arrow, how a too-small crew keeps a tramp freighter running from The Sea Wolf, and the reason behind things my coaches were telling me from god knows how many Matt Christopher books, but it wasn't  the learning that mattered (that was a side benefit at best).  It was the "What's it Like?" – the vicarious experience of competence – not the MacGyver sort of "this is a genius who just makes stuff magically," but the sense that I could have that same power over my own universe and make things work when they had to.  I was fairly unlikely to have to hold Fort Zinderneuf against the Touareg,  lead a boarding party onto a hostile frigate from a rowboat, perform an emergency appendectomy on a submarine while destroyers passed overhead, or bring a Curtiss JNE in on a dirt road by moonlight, but the feeling of being up to the challenges – of knowing what it's like to be able to do what needs doing – is critical to a boy who wants to grow up to be "a good man in his world and a good enough man in any world."***

And you don't get that vicarious experience of competence just by imagining the experience of getting grubby and tired – you can do that in any sissy-ass health spa gym, and you don't have to be good at anything to do it.  You get it by imagining, step by step, doing something specific that not everyone can do, and taking pride in doing it well, whether it's changing a toilet or, Musashi-like, fighting your way out of a bathhouse with just a burning stick and a wet towel and killing the assassins sent after you.  I'm told the Buffy audience became more female with time****; one reason may have been that there was less about the mechanics of staking and more about relationships.  Maybe if we want boys to read about vampires as eagerly as the girls do, we need to stop connecting to vampires as beings with special needs,  feeling their conscience-ridden anguish, and all that, and deal with important questions like how to find the optimal point between the ribs, where you can get a sharpened wooden stake in a pinch, and just how much force you have to put on that mallet.

All of which brings us to a larger, and maybe less comfortable question.  Whether we like it or not, and I'm lazy enough that I sort of do, heavy readers are perpetual spectators in life; they spend a great deal of time thinking about other people who do things, as opposed to doing them themselves.  Nor is their relationship life a substitute for actively seeking goals in the wider world. Family and relationships are important and necessary, but they're not goals for most people, most of the time, any more than oxygen or food are. ***** 

Real goals, real attainments and achievements, sooner or later involve some form of making or doing something, rather than being or relating.  In the larger world, like it or not, it is the doers-and-makers, not the feelers-and-relaters, who make history. 

That's one reason why "well-behaved women rarely make history" – because traditional women's roles have emphasized that feeling and relating side of things, and the doing-and-making has been over in the boy's wing of society, so women have had to fight for a fair shot at it, and insisting that they are going to get in on the doing and making has often been the exact definition of not being well-behaved. 

To be clear, I'm not saying that there should be no feeling/relating/just being in books.  There's not only room for both feel/relate and do/make, and a need for both, but the interaction between them pretty much defines how you hold reader interest.  What I am saying is that  much of what's being published in contemporary YA tips very far toward the feel/relate side, and I think the reason is because many of the people who produce, promote, and distribute it lead exactly that kind of life.

Sadly, though,  a person whose life consists of reading, going to consume entertainment with other people, and talking with other, similar people about books, dates, and friends may be busy, but is not leading much of a life; that's a life on the sidelines.  That a disproportionate number of people relegated to that half-life are women is a social tragedy,  because it's a stunting of potential; that so many writers, editors, librarians, and teachers are being drawn from that twilight existence probably has a great deal to do with the lack of specificity and direct competence in so much YA literature, and with its de-emphasis where it does appear.

But specificity and competence are the hallmarks of fully experiencing life as an engaged person.  Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that when women behave like persons, they are accused of behaving like men.  Conversely, given the historic privilege of boys – they are invited to be persons unambiguously and right from the start – it's hardly surprising that it's difficult to interest them in stories that ignore or denigrate critical attributes of personhood.  People who have been conned, cowed, or pressured into a half-lived life may enjoy fantasizing about a more glamorous or emotionally satisfying half-lived life, but those who have been raised to expect to live life fully, whose culture tells them to get out and do,  are unlikely to fantasize about half-life, or to find much appeal in it no matter how well it is depicted or how exceptionally nice it is for a half-life.

I'm not sure we should worry much about why boys aren't reading the recent profusion of YA novels, as about why so many girls are tolerating so many of them (and the ones they tolerate).  People worry about why so many little boys act out and end up being medicated to make the bland stupidity of school tolerable to them,  but perhaps we should worry more about why so many little girls don't try to defend themselves against it, and will submit to it without drugs or coercion.  A girl whose fantasy life reaches only as far as being well-liked and well-dressed (or having an attractive and sensitive though dead boyfriend) does not give my heart quite the same hope for the next century as a girl who daydreams about delivering desperately needed vaccine through a howling blizzard, foiling an evil conspiracy, or flying a spaceship.

Which brings me to my last  burst of smugness. I've got a bet down on the appeal of specifics and competency. In  Losers in Space, my next Sharyn-November -edited novel,  though the viewpoint character is not only female but what most people would call feminine, she's also really good at a whole bunch of hard things that she learns how to do in dangerous situations with the clock ticking (although I don't have her changing any toilets against the clock. I have moved beyond toilets.)  I'm betting she'll have a surprising amount of boy appeal – or, calling it what it always should have been called, person appeal.  Because I don't think being a person is just for boys, anymore; I think we've  advanced farther than that, or at least the kids have, and who else would one write YA for?

*Let me get this on the record:  I just want credit for not having used dozens of other possible names for the factions, such as anticrappers, propotties, and so on.  Including not having worked in any way to talk about a middle position between pro and anti being mesopisseristic, until this footnote.

**Karl (Marx, not Shoemaker) and I go way back.  We share being bearded,  spending too much time writing and thinking, getting irritated about injustices that everyone tells us can never be righted, and disagreeing with many Marxists.

***Raymond Chandler, if you're trying to place it; The Simple Art of Murder.  It's familiar because it comes along later on in that famous quote about going down these mean streets.

**** not individually, I don't think.

*****though there are a large number of people obsessed with finding and eating exactly the right things and a smaller number who have become obsessed with various systems for better breathing, and you may have noticed that those people are even more annoying than the ones who can only talk about their relationships; and of course if you really deprive someone of them, they become goals until they are re-attained or restored, e.g. if someone is squeezing your neck your life goals will probably involve oxygen.  But these are exceptional cases. 

I Hate Snark

I hate snark. 

I hate snarkiness, snarkitude, snarkishness, and every other thing in the world for which the name is snark-derived. 

It's galling that some of my favorite characters and literary works – particularly ones by me – have  been described as snarky or having a great deal of snark to them, and even more galling that it has sometimes been done with approval,  but then I suppose I can console myself that describing snarky people well is really just a useful literary skill, like describing serial killers, street corner petition circulators, and people who leave their gum under theater seats well, and probably there are enthusiasts for all of those somewhere too. 

Most galling of all is occasionally catching snark in my work when it is not the character speaking, but me (or the 'implied me'); it's like discovering a cruel or stupid streak I didn't know I had.

The snark I hate is something highly specific.  There are people out there who refer to anything that is not Pollyannically upbeat and naïve as snark, which is linguistically parallel to the people who call anything with a string section classical, anything with pages between covers a novel, and anything with noodles and tomatoes  'talian sketties.  (The last of those may be excused if they're still young enough to be cute).

By snark I don't mean just any old negative attitude.  Negativity comes in many flavors, some of them wonderful at the right time in the right place, others at least occasionally worthy as a dash of flavoring in a complex attitude: anger, bitterness, bitchiness, bloody-mindedness, brutal honesty, calumny, contumely, cynicism, despair, depression, ennui,  envy, fucking bloody-mindedness, ferocity, gibes, gracelessness, hatred,  hatefulness, harassment, insult, intemperance, ingratitude, incredulity,  irony, and that's all the farther I want to go until we get down far enough into the alphabet to find snark (it's somewhere between skepticism and snobbery).  Snark is the one that is truly good for absolutely nothing and should be considered grounds for putting people on the list, in preparation for crossing them off.

What list?  Oh, a little one I have.  (They'll none of them be missed).

For a long time I couldn't  put my finger on what snark was.  Despite the fact that it made my blood boil whenever I heard a definite case, I couldn't come up with any rule of snarkiness or any measure of degree of snarkitude.  It was like pornography, reckless driving, or douchebaggery; I knew it when I saw it in particular, but I didn't know how I knew it in general.

I knew when people were wrongly calling things "snark" that were actually sarcasm or bitter realism or fucking bloody-mindedness.  Whether the subject was Batman,  Tolkien, or the price of eggs, I knew snark when I heard it, and not-snark, but I had no idea what was really the difference. 

All I knew was that when people were sarcastic about Batman they sometimes made me smile: "Yeah, and like, nobody ever notices that Robin turned up right after Bruce Wayne got a live-in ward?"

And when people were bitterly realistic about Tolkien, I could shrug because it seemed beside the point: "Well, how could it not sell?  It's all the greatest stories in Western civilization in one tasty goulash! Of course people think it's magical, your childhood home is always magical!"

And yes, you can be fucking bloody-minded (which is different from being bloody-minded) about the price of eggs:  "Have you noticed that eggs are almost two dollars a dozen?  How are poor people -- "

"Fuck your shit-eating eggs, nobody fucking cares, you fucking imbecile.  Let's grab some poor people and ram eggs up their butts till they bleed."

Fucking bloody mindedness is not my favorite conversation gambit, I hasten to add, now that I no longer go to holiday dinners at my mother's, but  at least there's no problem with identifying it.

But snark …

"Oh, yeah, Batman, homoerotica for ten year olds that are too small to play football."

"Tolkien, yeah, the best reason ever invented for loser chicks to talk all cosmic, put on a dress with a lot of cleavage, call themselves something ending in –el,  and get seduced by some puppy-dog-eyed hairy fanboy in pleather that calls himself something ending in –mir."

"You know it's probably like big banks or organized crime manipulating the price of eggs so that poor people can starve, which means at least they won't be so fat."

Those are sorta-verbatim quotes from moments when my snark bell went off.

But for ages I thought, what is this snark that so chafes my spiritual bung?

And slowly the clues drifted in, and now, fellow snark-haters, I think I've got it figured out. 

The first big  clue was in Michael Kelly's seminal article in the Atlantic,  which pointed out this useful idea,

"Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless."

By knowingness Kelly means that pose that you can find in even the otherwise nicest and most pleasant teenagers, of having seen the world and knowing that everything is bogus; at that age it's a temporary, healthy defense against being shoved out into the world with severely limited experiences and a badly-explained incomplete set of inaccurate directions.  Knowingness is expectable as temporary armor when a sixteen year olds are forced to talk about the world as if it made some sort of sense to them; if they just parrot what adults are saying, they'll sound like parrots, and if they admit they don't have a clue, they'll sound like a person who doesn't have a clue. 

Knowingness at twenty-five, however, is habitual laziness; it's the guy who thinks he's a polymath because he has two dismissive sentences about every subject.  It's the woman who couldn't follow the story of the movie, so she nods and says, "Great cinematography."  It's people called upon to be brave,  compassionate, or kind who aren't, and afterward explain that they could have been but they weren't going to let authority pressure them into it.

It's Bart Simpson, without the saving grace of Matt Groening's contempt.  (Ever notice that, by the way?  The number of characters transparently created to be objects of contempt  or loathingthat are adopted as heroes?  Bart Simpson, Archie Bunker, Beavis and Butthead?  The number of people who root for  S.M. Stirling's Draka?)

And snark has a great big element of knowingness to it.  Ever seen a serious comics geek spend five minutes explaining something complex and wonderful about some obscure title or artist, only to have someone in the crowd who  probably has trouble figuring out how to read comics right side up take a verbal dump on him and in that moment remind you that the speaker is Above it All because he doesn't know crap?

Ever watched two musicians locked in a conversation about a point of technique interrupted by some clever sort who has decided to ask, over and over,"But can you boogie to it?"

Ever been among the global warming deniers during a  spring snowstorm?  (We have a lot of both of those in Colorado, so I've had that experience a time or two too many). 

But there's more to snark than just knowingness.  Watch the recent remake of Footlose  (I do recommend it, by the way, and don't pay attention to the critics who say it's an almost shot for shot refilming; they weren't watching the story or the characters, who are mostly much more interesting this time around exactly because they're handled with some sincere complexity).  Ren pulls knowingness constantly – what else can he do?  He's a fish out of water and in a very disorienting way – but he's almost never snarky (and he drops the knowingness at a couple of critical points in the story, indicating among other things that he's growing up, and more importantly wants to grow up and accepts growing up, although he's going to dance while he can). 

So knowingness is part of that snark I hate but it's not the whole story.  What's the rest?

Let me recommend a really hard book; hard partly because it's the translation is only serviceable, and it's hard to translate, but also hard the way a math book is hard: the density of ideas per sentence is pretty high.  The book is Chaim Perelman's The Realm of Rhetoric, and several times I pushed college freshmen through it, an experience as salutary as calculus or training for a marathon and for similar reasons. 

There's a lot in there, and I'm only going to talk about one little corner of it, so do not pretend you've read it just because you've read what follows; you've read the equivalent of maybe five out of its 140-some pages, and every one of those pages is a fair bit of work if you really read it, okay?  Don't be one of those phonies you meet at science fiction conventions who pretends to know Dr. Samuel Johnson because he knows Heinlein didn't like him, Shakespeare because he looked through Asimov's silly compendium in the bookstore, and quantum physics because he bought the DVD of Quantum Leap.  So this is an idea that's well-expressed in Perelman, and elsewhere,  but it's not Perelman any more than Hobbes is "the war of each against all," "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," and "sudden glory,"  your political philosophy professor's description of him as a guy who lived a long time when that wasn't easy, or a stuffed tiger.

The particular point in Perelman that I wanted to bring up is his attack on one way that rhetoric has been taught, historically: the idea that you can divide up the world of arguments and reasoning into the eternal truth of formal logic, the empirical approximation to it in informal logic, and all those bad deceptive (often self-deceptive)  tricks called fallacies.  Perelman points out that apart from pure math and pure taste, there are just an array of tactics, some of which are relatively more honest or fair in some circumstances.  To attack a mathematician's proof because he's an adulterer is silly, and what we call an ad hominem; to attack a candidate for State Treasurer's campaign because he's a convicted embezzler is a valid indexical argument, prudently inferring present character from past behavior.  To suggest it's a bad idea to start smoking because it is hard to quit and you may not be able to even after severe health problems appear – that you may become one of those pathetic people alternating drags off a cigarette and an oxygen tank – is a reasonable argument from causality, whereas arguing that the moral degeneration that begins with skipping church will lead you to becoming a mass murderer is a slippery slope, but the difference isn't in the structure of the arguments or the reasoning process – it's a question of probabilities: one happens pretty often with tight, visible causal links and the other very rarely with wobbly, unprovable causal links.

Now, one such maneuver that is widely used in modern  argument (Perelman borrows and slightly modifies the ancient term "enthymeme" for them) is reduction in place of refutation.  That is, rather than refute what the other side has said, you show (or try to show) that they are saying it for discreditable reasons, and thus the argument need not be refuted because it is just a ruse to be used against us.  Reduction is often a great time saver and in some circumstances is absolutely the tool to use.  For example, when someone tries to talk you into multi-level marketing schemes, it doesn't really matter whether they tell you "no, this isn't MLM, I wouldn't be involved with MLM, MLM is wicked", or they tell you that the way the math doesn't work is irrelevant because "you can prove anything with numbers but you can't argue with results," or they tell you it's just a modern way to bring distribution and marketing into the social media age.  The correct answer is always "You are saying that because if I sign up, you get some of the money I pay in, and you would like to have some of my money."  Don't refute the argument; reduce it to the expression of a hostile or exploitive intent. That's a reduction, which is more than appropriate if you really do know the intent is hostile or exploitive.

When the pedophile lobby launches into "it's just one more sexual preference," or "what about the rights of the children to voluntarily have sex with adults" or "in many cultures things are different" or whatever, the right answer is not to sit down and dissect their arguments; the right answer is "you can shut up now, because you are a sick fuck who wants to screw kids."  (There can of course be reasonable arguments about ages of consent, age difference v. absolute age, and ten million public policy issues, but via reduction we may dismiss any argument in which a full grown adult asserts a right to have sex with pre-pubescents).  Again, that's a valid use of a reduction.

On the other hand, reduction is often a dodge away from dealing with what may be valid on the other side.  Reduction got going as an argument in the twentieth century with Freud ("you refuse to believe in the unconscious because you were weaned too early") and Marx ("you value property rights because you are a prisoner of the ruling ideology"), jumped over to the conservative side with Milton Friedman ("you only worry about the poor because silly irrational Keynesians keep you from seeing how free it makes them to choose to be poor") and defense-geekery ("the only reason you criticize using this weapon to massacre civilians is that you don't know its rate of fire and where it fits into tactical doctrine"), and can today also be found in the arts ("you're just throwing paint at canvas because collectors pay money for that" and "you put sex in there to sell more copies") and even in some of the sciences ("you only think that idea because you have the meme for it.")  It's certainly overused and often dishonest; for a long time it has been hanging out on the bad end of that continuum between fallacy and valid enthymeme that Perelman pointed to.

There are more complex cases where refutation and reduction are both needed: when Republicans tell you that cutting taxes on the obscenely rich increases government revenues,   one should acknowledge that a couple of times when there has been a broad, across-the-board lowering of marginal tax rates, it has been followed by an economic boom that did replace a large part of the lost revenue (though the last three times it's been tried, emphatically including the Bush II cuts, it was a revenue disaster), but there's a necessary reduction that has to be added:  "You are saying that because you are a sock monkey on the fist of your major donors."

But lately, as in the last couple of decades,  reduction has been subject to very mediagenic abuse.  It is more interesting to reporters to cover climate-change deniers calling their opponents socialist traitors who want everyone to freeze in the dark as part of an elitist conspiracy, and green activists declaring that the skeptics are, every single one of them, stooges of the oil companies – more interesting because the reporter gets livelier quotes and more screams of outrage (while expending less effort on understanding what anyone is saying).  Certainly it is easier and more entertaining than covering the complicated problem that if we are to detect  serious climate change in time to do anything effective and affordable about it, we have to process some really cruddy just-barely-significant data, that the cruddiness and borderline detectability of the data is probably intrinsic to the problem, and that it can be solved but not easily, and  is apt to lead to harder choices than most people have thought about.  There's a really interesting intersection of science, statistics, politics, and economics here, in which scattered people of good will are trying to figure out what's going on and sizable numbers of people have pre-committed to answers with inadequate evidence rather than asking how much we can know how soon and whether it will be enough.  But interesting though the real argument is, it makes shitty television next to people accusing each other.

Now, you may recall that I started off with snark, and here we are at comparative enthymemics, and you may be wondering if I'll ever end, and indeed I am wondering that myself, but here goes at a conclusion:

Snark is a dishonest reduction expressed with knowningness.

In real,  true snark, the teeth-gritting irritating behavior that its practitioners so pride themselves on , the accusation of self-interest, psychological acting out, sock-puppetry, or justifying one's vices is made by adopting a knowing pose and not speaking it.  Whatever the target is, whether it's awe-inspiring or charming, insightful and difficult or light and merry, the snarkist simply poses as the person who always already knows that it is "really" an evil scam, a symptom of mental illness, or a mark of being duped or intimidated, and need not explain how.

Snark is the universal solvent of cultural conversation.  Someone mentions Hemingway; you mention cross-dressing, drinking, and short choppy sentences.  Not only did you not have to read Hemingway, you have one-upped the other person by not having read it; you know more about it than they do because you know the important thing, that Hemingway doesn't need to be read.  Star Wars has a plot straight out of a comic book, the indescribable beauty of an athlete's best moment is just ritualized combat, any given religion is a collection of three or fewer especially silly-sounding superstitions, all academic subjects are useless hazing intended to keep the wrong people from being hired, all peace protestors are just trying to get on television and soldiers are all unemployed hillbillies whose masculinity feels threatened so they've enlisted for a chance to commit war crimes.  Occupy Wall Street is rebels without a clue (itself a plagiarized phrase), the Tea Party is scared old people, and nothing in the wide world matters compared to the general wonderfulness of the observer. 

Compress any of those thoughts into a single brief sentence: "She's a pro-lifer because if anyone ever fucks her she wouldn't want to jeopardize her paternity suit."  "She's a vegan and in PETA, must have seen Bambi too many times."  Knowingness – the implication that you know everything about your target – and reduction – there is a single discreditable reason behind this.

What is snark for?

It's a currently fashionable powerful rhetorical weapon that allows the uninvolved and the never-to-be-involved to discredit people who do, or attempt – anything at all.  Not just those who compete or create or dream or make or struggle in the larger world, but even those who merely try to understand or happen to feel some appreciation.  The composer was a hysterical queer and that's why it's so loud and discordant, the conductor is a tax-gobbling dilettante who couldn't get a real job and that's why he keeps trying to get people to listen to all that music theory bullshit he makes up, the whole orchestra is only there because they can't make enough giving band instrument lessons to the dumb little dorks that took band, and the audience is suburban clowns showing off how much culture they have.  And anyone who buys the recording is someone who is so stupid he's impressed with everyone else.

Snark is most appealing to bright articulate young people (or to bitter has-been middle-aged people who used to be bright articulate young people) because it lets them use their greatest and most already-developed talent, i.e. their articulate sense of irony, to prevent any serious commitment – even just serious articulate spectatorship – for any other purpose.  It takes what are potentially good minds and parks them forever in the bleachers of the great game of discourse, muttering negative little shots at not just the people who are playing the game, but the people on the bench waiting to get into it, the people in the crowd who are following it, the people selling hot dogs, the people who will clean up afterwards, and about the very idea of anyone having anything to say… it's a peculiar mental poison that isolates and sidelines what should be the best minds of any generation.

A few ages ago, Allen Ginsberg started off Howl by noting that he had seen "the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," as if someone might care about the best minds of a generation.  By the 1990s Lisa Simpson was uttering a parody about "the best meals of my generation" – and thus signaling to everyone that we all know, really, that Ginsberg is just a silly old man raving, nothing to worrya bout, isn't it great to be here with our friends, undisturbed?   No danger that we'd be starving (and uncomfortable), hysterical (chill, dude!), or naked (like, hello, does anyone see creepy sexuality here?)  Isn't it funny – in a pathetic kind of way – that some people get to be starving and hysterical and naked?  Thank god we never will, because we've learned to snark about it the moment we see it.

That's the essence of snark: making sure that everyone carries around an amusing little culture-proof barrier so that no culture ever gets in.

Snark: the condom of intellectual and artistic intercourse.  Completely and impenetrably surrounds and covers; prevents actual interchange; people tell you it feels just like it's not there, and only people who have never experienced actual contact believe that; allows you to get very near the source of pleasure without having to develop trust, and thus without any real intimacy. 

And yet, somehow, when you add up your whole acquaintance with it, it's very hard not to think the word scumbag. 

If only it were as easy to discard snark.

Save the stats! Heavy on the SAUS!

Some of you may be aware that I blog occasionally at a couple of marketing research sites, mainly about fairly esoteric marketing research issues.  As it happens, this is of a more general interest: the abolition-in-progress (but there's still time to reverse it) of the Statistical Abstract of the United States.  Professors and reporters have already rightfully fulminated on the subject; here's my take on it from my admittedly small corner of the noosphere.

Assuming, of course, that a sphere can have a corner ...

(A P.S. side note: I turned on the "adult content" doorway that makes you say Yes, I know Mr. Barnes might use some naughty words or talk about fucking or something  mostly so I can be comfortably profane and/or obscene as I please, and those not pleased can go back to their fluffy bunnies, and do whatever unspeakable thing it is you do with those.  But it particularly pleases me that people have to go through an adult content warning to find a pointer to an article about restoring the Statistical Abstract of the United States.  Somewhere out there, there are either some seriously disappointed pervs, or some really perverted ones.

Hornets, bulls, technai, and 2012

One of the reasons I drifted into the life I live is that I am excessively fond of stories; stories tend to mean more for me and do more for me than just about any other genre of communication. So let me start with the story of how I became aware of what I wasn't aware of, and then wander off into what I think it all means, and then maybe spin you a story about the future. This might be a long one.

Just after Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, a couple of people on Facebook got the idea that they wanted to protest that particular piece of ugly shit in the rest of the country, and not having put together a protest before, and being young with all the insane confidence of youth, they just kind of suggested that some people might want to get together with some signs and banners that weekend at their local city halls, wherever those might be. Others picked it up and in about five days, something above 100,000 people—possibly as many as a quarter million—nearly all without parade permits or any formal organization to speak of—converged on around a hundred city halls in the United States.

I became aware that this was going on about two days after it started, i.e. with four days to go till the demo. Now, back in my younger days, I had worked at a large number of demonstrations, mainly anti‑nuclear‑weapons as I have always been opposed to being blown up for other people's causes, but also civil liberties, various civil rights/racial issues, pro‑union, economic justice and a number of other usually left causes as well, plus a couple rallies for gun rights and one against turning productive forest into a playpen for rich kids, which I guess you could either regard as balancing my personal budget or just having really liked a parade when I was younger. I knew some things about what goes into a successful demonstration—or thought I did.

For many demonstrations, I'd been on security because I'm large, scowl and glower well, and generally look like I am not to be fucked with, and was therefore suitably intimidating to counter demonstrators, but can manage to say Don't be an asshole in a pleasantly indirect way to our own side.

So when I looked over the plans for the anti‑8 rally in Denver and saw that it looked utterly, totally, completely like the biggest mess of an amateur hour I'd ever seen, I went looking for the organizers to volunteer for security. The cause was certainly worthy, I was deeply pissed off about Prop 8 for a lot of reasons, but the whole thing looked so inept to my experienced eyes that I had visions of all kinds of crap breaking loose, and I thought they needed help.

I finally found a very pleasant guy who was putting together security, contacted him, and discovered, on the day of the rally, that we had nineteen people to keep some kind of order in a demonstration and march that had about 1100 people by my rough statistician's count‑noses‑and‑multiply methods. As a security detail, that's maybe a third of the number I'd think were optimal for a well‑organized regulated political parade and rally, and this wasn't meaningfully organized at all.

It was an interesting afternoon. The protest went well, making appropriate noises where and when it was supposed to. The counter demonstrators were sparse and not terribly noisy, but that was where I got my first inkling that today was going to be different from many similar days in my past. A self‑identified gay filmmaker was there to take advantage of the presence of the counter demonstrators—apparently she was working on some project about anti‑gay hatred—and simply pushed through the little group of us separating them from the demonstration, creating a platform and a speaking space for them (local TV followed her in and filmed some of that over her shoulder).

Naturally we asked her not do that. Her response was to shrug and tell us not to interfere with her work.

And there was absolutely nobody for either her or us to refer to about it. We'd have felt absurd trying to shut out a lesbian filmmaker at a gay rights rally, and anyway we had a lot of other crap to attend to. As far as she was concerned, she'd rarely have such a good collection of Christish cuckoo birds to collect interviews from again. Like it or not, it was do your own thing day.

In fact, a couple of blocks into the march it was becoming clear that with nobody in charge, nobody was going to pay much attention to the arm banded security people, not even for such things as our trying to keep street crossings safe and keep the group together. One guy who might have been off his meds, had brought a bullhorn and attempted to lead the crowd in incomprehensible cheers; another buttonholed everybody who looked like a reporter to explain that this event was just the beginning of a movement against oppression that began with his expulsion from a Madonna concert.

And yet it really didn't matter. I have seldom felt quite so irrelevant (and as a science fiction writer and a theatre historian, I can compare that afternoon with many other experiences of feeling irrelevant). The crowd was big enough that it just forced its way across streets, traffic or no, and would mill around in the street while stragglers ran to catch up, an invitation to get busted, but the police chose not to—maybe because there was no predicting how that crowd might react, and no one around who could effectively say "be cool". The lunatic chanter wandered away somewhere in the middle of the march, once everyone had seen him and decided to ignore him. The Martyr of Madonna eventually was trailing along with the stragglers, chatting pleasantly, having found an approximation to sympathetic friends.

We finished up at the same park which was more recently the site of an Occupy Denver encampment, and as we few pathetic security folks—nearly all of us veterans of demonstrations going back decades—gathered , our sort‑of leader shrugged. "It looks like it's turning into a big party; I don't think we could clear them out if we wanted to, and anyway since we never had a permit in the first place, there's no deadline to disperse by." We just took off the armbands and disbanded. As we were doing that an older cop came by and said, "Well, that was scary, but I guess it came out okay." Apparently he'd seen enough demonstrations to think he knew, like we thought we knew, what too many people , too few security, no authority anywhere, might mean.

We thought we knew, the cop and us, but the more I have thought back to this, we didn't know crap. We were there at the birth of something new, which is probably going to matter a great deal, and we missed it all because we were old hands and we were looking to see what we'd seen before.

That night, nationwide, the center‑right news media (what the righties call the liberal or mainstream media) reported that a bunch of overdramatic gay lovers of street theatre, excitable teenagers with a thing for the '60s, and some mildly photogenic regular people had acted up a bit but the show was now over. Fox News, as is their wont, insisted it was the work of a sinister cabal trying to push the homosexual agenda—the idea that there was any leadership with any agenda made me laugh. And in the couple weeks that followed some minor lefty papers printed stories claiming that this marked some kind of turning point in historical something or other. (Including a couple that said it wouldn't matter in the long run because it was all so badly organized, and urged us all to get back to the vital function of building a mass movement). Commentators on all sides both deplored the absence of a program, the to‑them random wish list comments of the randomly interviewed participants, and the failure to bring forth a leadership to "consolidate the gains" and "strategize to pursue the goals" that they had just finished saying we didn't have.

They missed it too, but unlike my companions and that cop, they missed it willfully and aggressively.

What we all missed was the new world that had already arrived: not only leaderless resistance that self‑organized (the world has seen that since, probably, the first food riots in the first Neolithic settlements) but resistance that resisted having a leader. And in the new interwebz world, that's not just a slogan or an ideal; it's a practical option for popular resistance.

A few months later the Tea Party erupted; more recently Occupy Wall Street and its many offspring have burst onto the scene. And as much as possible, the political class and the journalists who cover it have gone on missing the point.

This new way of non‑organizing popular resistance—whether it's a right or left leaning population that's doing the resisting—is a techne. (Tech knee, if you're a in‑your‑head pronouncer. The plural is technai, tech nigh).

Techne is the Greek word from which we get both technique and technology, a craft or way of doing or method. It was the center of a big argument between Platonists and Aristotelians, about whether rhetoric was an art (i.e. a path to the truth itself, like geometry or astronomy), or just a techne like weaving or military strategy—a way to achieve an effect that worked equally well for any purposes, good or bad, truthful or deceitful, cruel or kind.

There are many technai for conflict. T.E. Lawrence, a right winger if ever there was one, figured out that you could bleed a great power by forcing it to expend resources keeping basic services functioning, and invented the modern resistance movement; that techne was applied by everyone from Ho Chi Minh to the Nicaraguan contras, against every power big enough to bleed, ever after. In the 1930s, Charles De Gaulle published a book describing the techne we now call blitzkrieg, which was read assiduously in Russia and Germany; the war began and ended in a series of blitzkriegs from all sides, which worked equally well for any side that applied them, however good or bad its purpose. The technai of nonviolent civil disobedience were used to liberate India, interfere with Western development of nuclear weapons, desegregate the American South, and overthrow Communism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and are being used today by the Occupy movement and the pro‑lifers. No techne belongs to one side or another, at least not permanently.

But technai have consequences and implications, regardless of who uses them.

Let's look at this self‑organizing anti‑organizational internet‑driven techne of resistance a little farther. Try this analogy: traditional power and traditional freedom have somewhat resembled living in the same meadow with a large, dangerous bull. If you come to his attention in an unfavorable way, the bull will fixate on you and try to trample or gore you, and it's very difficult to stay out of his way once he's decided you need trampling or goring. But most of the time you get your freedom from the fact that the bull mostly ignores you; he just wants to have the sunniest spot in the meadow to himself, receive gestures of respect, never be startled or inconvenienced, and of course leave piles of bullshit everywhere. (That being his freedom).

I presume the analogy to traditional leadership—known to the Tea Party as "the elites," the Occupiers as "the 1%" and to most of us as "they" (as in "they would never let people do that", "it would make sense but they won't ever do it," etc.) is reasonably clear. Power derives from the ability to rip any one thing apart and then squish it absolutely flat, but that power requires not having to deal with too many things at a time; freedom comes from not annoying the bull, or being the bull.

Now consider these new movements, which are more like hornet swarms. If a hornet walked up to a bull on the ground and said, "hey, bull, this is bullshit, get it out of my meadow"—squish. In a hooking, goring, trampling contest, I think we can fairly say the bull would win. Over any distance he runs faster than the hornets fly, too.

But if you have ever seen what happens when a bull accidentally knocks down a hornets' nest, you know who wins anywhere near the nest. Notice that there are no hornet generals, admirals, CEOs, facilitators, nest organizers, or hornet resource directors. (No hornets in armbands keeping order, either). Every hornet is just flying out to find her way to something that seems to be responsible for the unpleasantness to hornet‑kind, and do what harm she can to the nearest apparent culprit.

Frankly, bulls don't know what to do about hornets. They know what to do about rival bulls (usually ritual combat, but if necessary, a real fight to the death). They know what to do about disagreeable little creatures with whom they share the meadow (either ignore if they're not too annoying or gore, trample, etc. if they are). But these hornet things hurt and there are a lot of them and some of them are clever and go up your nose or sting you in the balls, and they keep coming even after you make an example out of one of them by squashing her into hornet goo.

So, getting even more anthropomorphic about this, the bulls do what any authority does when it can't do anything: they call names. These are not real hornets, these are astroturf hornets, who are being financed by a rival bull. The hornets have no program and if they ever want to run the meadow, they are going to have to learn how to charge, hook, and trample. The hornets are just irresponsibly saying that we can't do ordinary things that everyone needs for the good of the whole meadow, like rubbing our backs on trees and knocking down hornets' nests. Anyway the hornets are of no importance because it's just a temporary fad thing, you know how hornets are, they like getting upset for a short period of time. They'll disappear in the winter and never come back. Why is everyone so interested in hornets anyway when the bull has a job to do?

In fact let's just knock down another nest and squish a few hornets to teach those bastards a—ouch. Ouch. My nose. My balls. Now that's just irresponsible. I really, really hate hornets.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Yes, you read all this way before it got interesting. Might as well finish now ….

Hornet swarms form and fight near their nests, i.e. their vital interests. OWS was recently extremely active because it looked like the inside‑the‑Beltway bulls (the best meadow there is) were cutting a deal about the deficit, which is a classic insider issue that actually doesn't matter very much in the lives of ordinary people most of the time, mostly concerned with being nice to big banks, and that deal would almost certainly involve cutting the living hell out of programs that many people depend on; it would make life on the economic fringes and margins much worse in order to win the moral approval of the people who brought you the bailout. Their nest was kicked over, in other words. The Tea Party got its knickers in a knot almost entirely over the health care proposal, because one sharp and deep status division in the United States is the one between people who have health care coverage and people who don't , and it was going to spoil the club, both by somewhat reducing the absolute privileges of the people already in, and by allowing all sorts of riff‑raff in.

At the moment OWS is noisy and the Tea Party quiet because one nest is being disturbed and the other is not. But we're coming up on an election year. One of the traditional ways for the two bulls to fight it out is seeing who can spread the most bullshit on the meadow, and in our polarized team‑spirit polity of today, that means promising to take away the unjust privileges of the other bulls' followers.

In other words, both bulls are going to kick over a lot of nests next year, whether they want to or not. For the first time since the phenomenon appeared, the meadow is going to be full of swarming hornets.

Maybe that means nothing; bulls will just develop thicker hides, learn to wear facemasks and cups, and so on. Maybe it will just be a distraction: bulls will spend a lot of time chasing hornets instead of battering each other, the ground will get torn up more and there will be more motion, but nothing that really matters will change.

But maybe … hornet swarms in conflict might well devolve into millions of individual hornet‑versus‑hornet struggles. What might that look like? Arguments on the street and in bars (also known as democracy)?

Or Beirut or Belfast?

Once two bulls lock horns, it usually goes on till one realizes he can't win and gives up in some dignity‑saving (if possible) way. There's a way out of a bull‑to‑bull conflict.

When bulls fight hornets, the bull eventually gets out of it by moving far enough away from the nest and staying there.

And when hornets fight hornets …. does the newly developed techne even apply? What new ones might be about to be invented?  Will it look like some hapless old-style demonstrators trying to get cooperation from a filmmaker … or like the Johnson County War or the Hatfield-McCoy feud?

I guess we'll find out.