Flag Day 2024
It’s a topic, the unending battle on the human battlefield, with which any good novelist must deal. On a personal level, the novelist most likely has had more than anyone’s share of dealing with good vs. evil. This novelist has consistently engaged in it, sometimes mentally garbed in full battle dress uniform.
For many years, decades, in fact, I was not aware that I am a fighter. My warrior-self is inborn, and, early-on, she probably expressed herself in ways that I didn’t fully recognize, usually until it was too late. There were always others around me who were extremely willing to let me do the fighting for them, and then somehow forget to thank me. Truth to tell, those moral cretins would turn around and blame me for any undesirable consequences from my having fought their battles for them.
I didn’t expect gratitude from them, but I certainly did not anticipate being blamed for the unavoidable results of their cowardice. I’d shake my head in disbelief, and then simply go on my way, which wasn’t so simple because a good soldier never leaves the wounded behind. I’d wait, do my duty, and, then, vacate the spent battlefield, licking my wounds if need be.
That survival-plan of action became fairly routine for me by the age of twenty-five. By thirty, I was a seasoned veteran of unknowingly undertaking and winning conflicts. I had yet to comprehend the supreme levels of my commanding skills, as well as the implications, fallout, and aftermaths of them. I seemed to have been unaware that a loser is a coward who will backstab the winner from a covert corner, or hire others to do his, or her, bidding.
It was a naïveté for which I paid dearly, in many ways. After my marriage, but before I committed myself to bearing and rearing children, I determined that such a weakness had to be strengthened; otherwise, my ignorance of my own self could, and would, injure, wound, and cause undue harm to my children and husband. And so I set out to fortify, toughen, and anneal those vulnerabilities within myself.
One completely unexpected result of those exercises in self-awareness and self-discipline was that I grew to become a novelist. From the harms of my past, I realized goodness.
My Dear Friend once asked me, during her work with me on THE DAWN, if I thought that our children, who chronologically had just entered adulthood, were too good for their own good.
I replied that I don’t think there is such a thing as being too good for your own good, but there is a definite divide in their age group between the Givers and the Takers, with the Takers vastly outnumbering the Givers.
That viewpoint on what has since become label-fixated as The Millennials was, and remains, accurate. It caused My Dear Friend no end of anxiety. I tried to allay her sense of horror over this state of current affairs by saying that it was no different when we were adolescents being forced to be adults before our times — except our adolescent-children are frightened of becoming adults because of What’s Out-There during their times.
The Takers way-back-then were fairly easy to spot, at least they were for me. The Takers of the 2000s comprise the Daycare Portion of the Millennial group. They prematurely and avidly rushed into “adulthood” after having experienced what I call a hideous and dangerous combination of any upbringing:
emotionally neglected and materially spoiled.
Those non-nurtured, swollen-headed brats had become very savvy and cleverly armed with their almighty Digital Devices, to help them in camouflaging their devious, piggish selves. The swinish, self-absorbed “geniuses” producing, promoting, and peddling I-world, Fake-book, and that bird-brained twitter-nest found their perfect moron-market with those malleable urchins. From there, we were all off to the races.
Those races involved the feckless, fraudulent people rabidly hiding their real selves; and the people of conscience, trying, some almost desperately, to figure out the truth about those “real” selves. The past twenty years have passed by in a sort of huckster-haze, as electronic technology encroached more and more upon the way that we, and don’t do things.
The Digital Kingpins behave as if they rule the world, and can use their ether-sphere to wipe out un-wanted businesses, unacceptable industries, undesirable persons, inappropriate thoughts, improper wishes, non-approved ideas, unapproved words. The Thought-Police, attired in message tee-shirts, dredged up, for me, the insufferable Hippies, who’d become the grandparents of these appallingly ignorant know-it-alls!
There were times during those times when I felt as if I were back in my childhood in Prospect Park, N.J., dealing, once again, with the imperious perpetrators of a fetid social order that allowed no breathing room for any deviations from their norms which, I gotta tell ya, were not normal.
The elders of that little town had stayed too long in their cocoons of hypocrisy, mouthing meaningful platitudes but not living by them. To say that I grew up in a little Peyton Place is an understatement. Re-experiencing it, in the America of Silicon-Valley Diktat, brought out the warrior in me, and the novelist!
The grimness of purpose of these narcissistic, lazy prigs, with their banal, stifling dis-information superhighway, is matched only by the Victorians. The Victorians, however, were amazingly productive, driven by a passionately sincere desire not to passionately desire, yet again!
It might not have started out this way, but cyberspace soon became, to use an overused term, weaponized. Yet the computer is a tool, not a weapon. The computer is a device, not a dominion. Because of their fascist attitudes and actions, and their slimy skulduggery, the new-age puritan punks of 1s and 0s, those dark-web exhibitionists, unintentionally exposed themselves during the past decade.
The jig is up. And once it’s up, it ’s up! There are no downloads on this dossier!
Think of Henry Ford who, after having played his vital part in developing the internal combustion engine, inventing the V-8 engine, and spear-heading the method of assembly-line production of automobiles —
then uses those profitable engines to wipe out any competition, to demonize any industry perceived as a threat to his assembly-line factory supremacy, and to lobby-buy Congress to provide him with a virtual monopoly, thereby killing off any chance of future innovations — thereby nipping in the glutton-bud any future growth in his , or any, capitalist enterprise.
Henry Ford was many things, but he wasn’t a greedy socialist pig!
The opposition of good versus evil is a real-life drama. It plays itself out every day before our eyes; we need not turn on the boob-tube, or fire up the widescreen. Any fiction pales in comparison to the real thing.
Perhaps one reason why there currently exists a dreadful dearth of good, enjoyable, wholesome, accurate, enlightening and inspiring celluloid products is because the industry financiers, honchos and players are too cozy with evil to be able to correctly draw that line between those two realities, good and evil. Those freaks inhabit a world where Judeo-Christian morality does not exist, never has, never will. Ergo, the assaults upon us, We the Patriots.
The assaults upon the patriots, of any nation, are, in a weird way, a tacit acknowledgement by the globalist snoops and thugs that we do, indeed, exist. A decade ago, we were mere specks of social protoplasm to be treated as manipulatives or, in the event we did not kowtow (an act of prostration in Imperial China, and in present-day King Xi-land), we got memory-holed in web-world.
That grotesque world of amorality and quick crypto has very little in common with the real world. The Techno Titans; their minions, the Media; and their co-cabalists, the globalist pols, they’ve all embalmed themselves in ideas, thoughts and phrases that are so out-of-date, those ghouls must hire The Experts to give them a clue as to where the next money-gusher will be coming from. Their virus-pharma-bonanza carried with it those side effects and unintended consequences — of global proportions.
The pompous pagan fat cats do not know they’re coming a cropper, from harvests that were ill-conceived, ill-gotten, ill-willed and just plain ill, or, uh, sick.
In the long ago, people in a sane and God-fearing society shunned the wicked. Nowadays, it’s the wicked who shun the sane and the God-fearing among us.
This too shall pass, but the warrior in me has experienced much impatience in my march toward the future. I try to let her listen to the calm, composed voice of my colonel, mon colonel, Arthur Boucher Carmichael.