Robert emails: Dear Mr. Ford,
Ethnic Conflict: If I correctly understand you, you are arguing for a sober and grounded acceptance of ethnic conflict as simply part of the human condition. With that I concur fully, because I believe that widespread acceptance and acknowledgement would help keep it under control.
Neocons and Russia: It is said that many of today’s prominent Neocons started political life as Trotskyists. Now Trotskyism may be heresy by the lights of Marxist Holy Sees, the late Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic, but it is still Marxism, even if only in lineaments of bones printing through flimsy “conservative(?)” clothing. Granted this is a leap to a conclusion, but I suggest that much Neocon animus against Tsar Vladimir’s Russia is the anger of someone who has still kept even only part of the Faith, against the out-and-out apostate — alongside historic bad blood between the Russian and the Jewish Peoples.
Science Fiction writers’ predictions: In 1977, I had concluded that the Body Politic of the United States is “circling the drain;” but that the end will come neither with a bang nor a whimper, but rather with the many soft hisses of air escaping through micro-pinpricks in the skin of an inflatable mannequin in process of slow collapse. Following that conclusion was a morbid turn in literary tastes, in which I revisited some old acquaintances I had hitherto thought too morbid.
– SILVERBERG, Robert: Hawksbill Station locates a “never-ending depression” in the time-frame immediately after the turn of the twenty-first century. After this has dragged on for a while, America wakes up to the collective dictatorship of a “Council of Syndics.” These disappear their political opponents by throwing them into a time machine which sends them into prehistoric times, males in one slot, females in another.
– HEINLEIN, Robert A.: He created a future-history timeline for a string of novellas and short stories; he professed to do this by extrapolation from trends he observed. In that timeline, the time-frame we currently occupy is the Crazy Years, in which the deliquium of the Republic becomes too obtrusive to escape notice.
– BRUNNER, John:
-– Stand on Zanzibar ;
–- The Jagged Orbit;
–- The Sheep Look Up;
–- The Wrong End of Time.
– FARMER, Philip Jose: Riders of the Purple Wage predicted the massification of government transfer payments to dependents, the proliferation of obesity, the further emergence of “bizarre ‘sex,’” and injection of Arab immigrants into Beverly Hills. Yes, there is more that I have not mentioned; but I recommend this as a ROFLOL read.
At seventy-two years of age, without progeny nor siblings, I have a unique freedom, namely to watch the forthcoming general election without skin in the game. I know this country, in which I had mal-invested a painfully large deposit of faith, is in process of degringolade (slow slithery decomposition), and I know there is nothing I as a solitary commoner can do about it. However I also know I approach an age-range in which it is common to discarnate (i.e.: Die, if you do not accept reincarnation as an hypothesis about the adterlife). When that happens, given that what is left behind is only a soulless and inanimate cadaver, that which is the kernel of “I” will be elsewhere.
“To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: One must be both — a philosopher.” NIETZSCHE, Twilight of the Idols.
