DEATH IS EASY by Russell Madden   Softcover, $14.95 Hardcover, $24.95     (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $4.81.)	FREEDOM, As If It Mattered by Russell Madden   Softcover, $24.95 Hardcover, $34.95   (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $5.63.)

At first blush, the relationship between an unpleasant incident at a writing workshop and the political ills plaguing our nation might not seem obvious. But when that inestimable scribbler and rabble-rouser, Harlan Ellison -- editor of the classic anthology, Dangerous Visions -- is involved, the connections begin to fall into place.

Turning seventy next year, Harlan Ellison is best known for his science fiction and fantasy short stories. He has also long been entwined in the world of Hollywood. One of his most famous excursions into commentary via futuristic fiction was, "A Boy and His Dog." Actor Don Johnson helped bring this tale of a post-holocaust America to the screen.

Gene Roddenberry revised a script by Harlan and produced one of the best of the original "Star Trek" episodes, "City on the Edge of Forever." Ellison's short story "Soldier" along with its "Outer Limits" version and another Ellison "O.L." story, "Demon With a Glass Hand," gained additional attention in a lawsuit against James Cameron. That legal controversy resulted in Harlan receiving a film credit for "The Terminator."

As a multi-award winning writer with a career spanning nearly half-a-century, one might suppose that people would be eager to seek out this successful man's advice and opinions. One would also be wrong.

The Clarion workshop has been a fixture of the science fiction world for decades. Major writers have taught during the intense weeks of the meetings, and many of the students who emerged from those literary fires have gone on to carve prominent careers of their own.

An incident at a recent workshop involving instructor Gene Wolfe prompted Harlan to write to the online Locus. (For details of the problem that disrupted the workshop, go to http://www.locusmag.com/2003/Features/Letters07b.html.) What is of interest here, however, is less the specifics of episode than what the actions of those involved say about the state of our culture and our society.

Let Harlan speak:

"...Workshops have lost their bite. The people in charge...are frightened of their own students. They hire instructors who are timorous, who need to be loved, who want to be 'pals'...with the kids they have been hired to whip into shape.

 

"...it was the reason I absented myself from teaching at Clarion...years ago. Because I saw it was turning into a Cult of Personality, and the instructors were loath to upset anyone...staff, students, university administration. They were pale and proper, politically-correct poseurs... the students were being treated patronizingly, dishonestly, with kid gloves... Clarion was founded...to be, goddamit, a BOOT CAMP for writers. Not to make it easy, but to make it a reflection of the REALITY of what it is to work in the public marketplace. The only thing that's 'easy' is mediocrity. End-result? Today, colleges are not permitted to discuss 'failure' as a life possibility. Not to upset the ego-drenched little parvenus surfeited with their 21st Century self-pity, pointless rebellion, need to deconstruct and ridicule, not to mention their rodent-like feeling that everything and anything they want, they deserve, and they don't need to work to get it. It should just come to them, sans discomfort...

 

"I fully understand why Odyssey would never have me back...that I 'scare' potential money-units (aka 'students') away, that they're affrighted of me. I bask in that knowledge. I know how to pull the plow, how to do that job, how to make it as rough and gritty and as close to the reality of the toughest job in the world as I can when I teach... I only wish [the instructors I'd taught had] retained their passion! To instruct otherwise is to cheat, to take pay under false pretenses, to succor the talentless and time-wasting and self-indulgent, and to short-change the ones who look on the job as Art, as a Way of Life, as a responsibility to themselves, their talent, and the rest of the human race.

 

"What happened to Gene Wolfe has happened before. It will happen again. Unless the sweet little natures who have usurped control of the workshops get slapped around a little, and toughen up a lot."

All very well and good, you might ask, but what has this to do with the constricting bands the State continues to tighten around our lives?

Compare Harlan's concerns with those expressed by Claire Wolfe. In discussing what happened to a Wal-Mart cashier fired for objecting to welfare clients using their electronic food stamps (i.e., stolen money) to purchase junk food, Wolfe argues for "good" elitism:

"...those who excel and achieve have reason for self-esteem, and...we do nobody any favors by awarding good grades, high-praise, jobs, or anything else...to those whose only notable characteristic is their lack of notably fine characteristics."

And:

"All we're doing by favoring the unfavorable and promoting the worth of the unworthy is trading the elitism of ability for the elitism of those who can whine the most loudly while achieving the least. That's a tyranny it'll be hell for the intelligent or the able to live under."

These latter points were inspired by an article by Fred Reed, "The Two Cultures." In this essay, Reed tells us that: "We are doing this...so that the dull and uninterested will feel good about themselves....to conceal that some of us are better than others." "One must never, ever notice that some people are better than others." "But the lazy, shiftless, deliberately half-lettered, the feckless and socially worthless...those who have had every opportunity to better themselves but couldn't summon the effortÉfor them I cannot help feeling pity. And contempt."

A science fiction author. A cashier at Wal-Mart. A pair of libertarian writers. All decry what they see as an increasing trend: appeasement of the less worthy; a pandering to the "weaknesses and vices of others"; appealing to the self-righteously dependent and unproductive. And for what? Where is the "profit" involved in this degradation?

For some businesses, it is money. After all, our culture informs us with sickening regularity that those involved in business are corrupt, unworthy, and exploitative. At best, they are the equivalent of herd or pack animals, a convenient means to supply the populace with their "needs" and desires. What does it matter then whether such beasts of burden obtain dollars tainted by the coercive and stained hands of the State? As Ellison points out, he scares away the "money-units." No different in principle than the managers at Wal-Mart who feared that a cashier who "offended" a college student purchasing junk with her food stamps might take her stolen lucre elsewhere.

Politicians, on the other hand, are more interested in keeping those sucking on the government teat happy and willing to vote for the suppliers of that milk. While the pols are quite accustomed to squirreling away large sums of money for themselves, they are often less motivated by what they could obtain in the private sector and more addicted to power, and, more specifically, coercive power: what better high than to decide for millions of citizens what they may or may not do? To be treated as special, almost a kind of homegrown and privileged royalty?

But like Gail Wynand in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, these statists who thirst after power are paradoxically under the collective thumbs of the very people they rule. The politicians emphasize that they are "honored" to "serve" the public at the same time they are pickpocketing the gullible. They humble themselves before the electorate while wallowing in their own dominance. They defile their humanity by praising the character of the spoiled masses. They tell the fickle voters what those dependents what to hear lest the next election sends the leaders packing.

Others who pander to the whims of the weak, the hypersensitive, the self-proclaimed victims truly believe they are inferior to their inferiors. The social metaphysicians whose raison d'etre are the opinions of others -- any others -- are simultaneously the most fearful of what "others may think" and the most strident in seeking diligently and obsessively for real or imagined sleights, slurs, and insults to their nonexistent honor. These thin-skinned charlatans, these claimants to undeserved restitution and apology are torn between their self-identification with undifferentiated others and a guilty desire to assert themselves. Hence, we are treated to the sorry spectacle of the richest and most productive achievers apologizing for their accomplishments and desperately buying the blanket approval that they must have to survive psychologically.

Worse, those thirsty for the accolades of the depraved are not content with bastardizing their own existences. They will not be content until everyone whose life is self-sustained, whose self-esteem is intact, whose integrity is unbreached, until these affronts to their own abased selves are brought low. Egalitarians are never proponents of equality in values. The only equivalence they will accept is the warped perversion of parity in poison. What they cannot achieve through redistribution of income they push for via "redistribution of virtue."

These panders will never accede to the proposition that virtue is achievable by all. Better, they believe, to tear down what is objectively valuable and transfer that virtue to those who least deserve it.

Denounce the productive. Worship the moochers.

Castigate the brave who are willing to defend their lives. Applaud the fearful who cower at the sight of a gun.

Accuse the responsible able to protect their own health of heartlessness. Bless the negligent who refuse to care for their own bodies: the obese, the lazy, the dissolute.

Brand the inquisitive who desire only to direct their own education as ignorant. Celebrate the mindless cattle who accept whatever State-mandated garbage is shoveled into their minds.

Censure the creative. Endorse the dullards.

Demonize the lonely few seeking to uphold the moral autonomy of all. Ennoble the criminals who prey on all and demand the booty as theirs by right.

Boycott, damn, excoriate, prosecute, rebuke, revile, smear, stigmatize, and vilify the individuals who unflinchingly defend freedom, who stand up to the agents of the State, who refuse to accept a single chain around their necks, who want only to live their lives in peace, to make their own decisions, keep their own money, form their own relationships, practice their own careers; heroes, large and small, famous or obscure, who cannot fathom the mentalities, the souls of those who salivate at the prospect of intimidation, of control, of power over their neighbors.

Do anything and everything possible to ensure that the damaged, the impaired, the adulterated and the diluted are the ones to receive the judgment of "virtue," a virtue stolen from those who truly deserve such an evaluation. Worry over the opinions of the "talentless," the "self-indulgent," the time-wasters. Let the mediocre dictate to the good how they must be treated. Place the lives, the careers, the judgments of the superior in the clumsy fingers of the ignorant, the failures, the usurpers.

Rather than require that the unhappy whiners leave their betters alone and ignore behaviors they dislike, our society has entrenched the notion that those upset with someone else's peaceful actions can insist that they offenders cease such activity under penalty of law. From verbal sexual harassment defined by the "victim" to civil "rights" bills that deny our rights to property and association to "gun" control laws that banish our right to self-defense, our country is being run for those who could never gain ascendancy or recognition as "noble" without the iron fist of the coercive State.

The panders of the world must be exposed for what they are, and virtue restored to those who actually earn it.

Anything less is a self-betrayal unworthy of a real human being.

Fred Reed. "The Two Cultures: With All Due Respect." LewRockwell.com. 8-18-03. http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed8.html

Tracy Saboe, "Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life." LewRockwell.com. 8-18-03. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/saboe1.html

Claire Wolfe. "Wolfesblog." Entry for 8-18-03. http://www.clairewolfe.com/blog.html