This is not normally a political blog, but as I am a citizen, there are times to speak out. The post originally scheduled to be here will appear tomorrow.

Have you ever asked yourself, “How could Germany have been fooled into following Adolph Hitler?” The answer is on your television this morning, and it is Donald Trump.

I’m not saying that Trump is a Nazi. I don’t see him as evil, merely foolish. But the techniques that have brought him to prominence are the same techniques that Hitler used.

First, appeal to a country’s deepest fears.
Second, claim to be the only one to have the answer.
Third, claim that your opponents are all cowardly and incompetent or, to use Trump’s favorite word – stupid.

The tactics are false. But the fears are real, so Trump promises his followers a wall to keep the world out. There is no wall strong enough to do it.

*****

This morning, September 15, 2015, Hungary closed its borders with a wall of razor wire. By the time this post reaches you, it will have been breached. Count on it.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 forms my first political memory. I was eight, and I remember sitting in front of the TV with my parents watching the streams of refugees escaping Soviet reprisals. Eventually 200,000 Hungarians fled. That memory makes it hard for me to watch Hungary put up a wall against Syrian refugees fleeing genocide.

Backed by Russia, East Germany built a wall across Berlin in 1961. It slowed the flow of refugees escaping from tyranny, but it did not stop them. And it didn’t stop the fall of East Germany.

There is a fence across our southern border that holds back no one hungry enough to jump it. Trump wants a wall to hold out “illegals” and a massive sweep through our country to deport the “illegals” who are already here. He wants declare that the 14th amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, in order to authorize the deportation of American citizens, born her just like you and I were.

Hitler would be proud. East Germany would understand. Russia is laughing.

*****

This poem was scheduled for a December post, but current events have brought it forward.

Poetry should stand without explanation, but, like anything else, it can be misused. So, be notified! This is not a right wing call to man the barricades to keep the enemy out, but a cautionary tale about what it will cost us if we don’t find real solutions.

Hungry

We who horde the common wealth
Upon this crowded planet,
Must look to see what lies beyond
Our barricaded borders.

The world stares back,
Unblinking eyes — prepared
To eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

                              It’s happened all before.

Once, seven in a cave drove out the eighth
With stones and fire-sharpened sticks,
Because the antlered carcass on the ground
Was not enough to feed them all.

And then in ancient days when kings and priests
Invented both religion and the law,
To fill their coffers so that they could eat
While those who raised the food went hungry.

Or yet again, when men of white
Despised the black, and black despised the gray.
And those whose colors ran together were disowned.
Color was enough to make them hate
But hunger taught them how and why
A thousand years ago.

Yet still we breed and laugh,
And play at deafness, though an angry sound
Declares the world is poised to seize its bread.

They will march like locusts through the earth,
And eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

This world is troubled. We are surrounded by people hungry for bread and freedom. Pointing a finger at them and saying, “It’s your fault!’ won’t solve our problems.

And a wall won’t do it. Never has; never will.

I grew up with my nose in a book. So did you, or you wouldn’t be reading a blog by a writer. If your father was a doctor and your mother was a lawyer, this post is not for you. If your father was a plumber or a mailman – or a farmer – you undoubtedly suffer from book words syndrome.

On the back of every Hardy Boys book was an advertisement for the Nancy Drew book The Golden Pavilion. Or, as I read it, The Golden Pav-UH-lon. I mispronounced it in my head for six or seven years before I heard it spoken and corrected myself. I carried the word a-THE-ne-um around until, at a party for newly published authors, one of my newfound peers said, with just a hint of condescension, “It’s pronounced a-thu-NE-um.”

It comes from growing up in low or middle class surroundings while reading books by first class minds. You end up carrying around thousands of words which you read and write, but never speak or hear spoken.

Dictionaries don’t help much, as I’ll explain in the next two posts.

All this doesn’t make you better than your friends, but it does make you strange. I suppose in a large school you could find others like yourself and make up your own geek clique. In my little town, I didn’t have that option so I became bilingual – book language in my mind, but Okie when I spoke aloud. When I forgot to translate, I got the strangest looks.

There is a danger here beyond simple embarrassment. Little kids with heads full of big words can become impatient with simple language. If you plan to be a writer, that can be a disaster. Writers have to get rid of book words baggage early, or they will remain erudite and unpublished.

Book words still throw me off from time to time. Ennui (internally pronounced IN-u-e, just like it looks in English) and ennui (spoken with a French flavor) floated around independently in my head for decades before Pete Hutter said, “There’s nothing like a revolution to break up the ennui of ordinary existence,” on the TV show Bricsco County Jr., and I suddenly realized they were the same word.

That doesn’t make me dumb; it’s just the curse of book words.

My reading patterns were set early, by scarcity. I spent my few quarters on Grosset and Dunlap books: Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys, and Rick Brant. Rick Brant stood head and shoulders above the rest, having a real author rather than ghost writers. There will be more on him in another post.

On birthdays and Christmas, the other presents were appreciated, but the books were devoured. Before I discovered libraries, there were never enough books, so I read and re-read the ones I had. I still do. I would be embarassed to admit how many times I’ve read the Amber, Dorsai, and Lensman books.

My grade school class – all eight of us – was the last to haunt a building that had housed three hundred before my town shrank. We discovered a disused closet that still held the books that had been the library, and there I read my first book for adults, Thomas Costain’s The Black Rose.

The county library in Claremore was where my heart and soul lived, but I also had a dalliance with the library in Collinsville. It was an old, small, red brick building donated by Andrew Carnegie. If you have passed through small town America, you’ve probably seen one just like it. Carnegie libraries all look the same.

That was where I discoved one of the great secrets of life: libraries are time machines. I don’t mean that they have books on history. I mean that they never have enough money, so they never throw anything away. In Collinsville in the sixties, the shelves were full of books published during and before World War II. Not only were they about bygone days, the books themselves were actually, physically old. Hundreds of boys, too young to fight, had sat in that library reading the Dave Dawson war books that I now held in my hands.

The same actual books. Match that, ebooks!

So I learned to re-read and to treasure books from eras past. I still read John Buchan regularly, holding my nose at his imperialism and racism. And I can lip-synch Louis Lamore.

At home, there were plenty of my mother’s romance books. Occasionally I read a paragraph or two before nausea drove me away. Then, while digging through the books at home, I found one rare treasure, Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle, published in 1911. Yes, the taser book, although I couldn’t know that because this was long before tasers were invented.

My grandfather, who lived in Florida and whom I saw only once a year, had read this Tom Swift (Sr.) book fifty years earlier, and he was the one who sent me my first Tom Swift Jr. many years later.

Wow!

I was in the shower getting ready for a day at school when my wife called to me. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I dried and dressed, the second plane had hit.

Twenty minutes later, driving to work, I listened on the radio as the towers fell.

All day long I taught science, keeping to the lesson plan. I didn’t want to teach, and no one wanted to listen, but it was necessary to keep a semblance of normalcy. Every break we teachers watched the television, but we didn’t take any news back to the classroom. Our students needed to be in their own homes, with their parents, before they began to deal with the details of America’s disaster.

At the end of the day, I drove home. I had upon me the need to write, but not of the tragedy. Others wrote that day of what had happened, and wrote well. I needed to write of love and joy and beauty – and of my wife who is all those things to me.

Poems come slowly to me; usually they take years to complete. This one rolled freely about in my head as I drove, and when I arrived at home, I only had to write it down.

There Am I

Where there is water, there am I.
In sweet, soft rain and in hard rain,
driving and howling,
or filling the air with luminescent mist.
Water is life, and there am I.

Where there is sun, there am I.
In the soft heat of morning or in the harsh afternoon,
or heavy with moisture, forcing its way through clouds,
or dry as a lizard’s back.
Where the Sun is, is life, and there am I.

Where Earth is, there am I.
Whether dark loam, freshly plowed
or webbed with fissures, hard as stone,
or sandy, or soft as moss.
Where Earth is, is life, and there am I.

Where life is, there am I.
rainforest or desert,
broad plains of grass, or brooding jungle,
Where life is, there am I.

Where She is, there is life,
and sun and rain and earth, and all good things.
Where She is, is life,
And there am I.

The “I” was supposed to be me, of course, speaking of my own love for wilderness, and “She” was, of course, my wife.

However, when it was done it felt more like a religious poem. Strike the last verse, let the “I” be God and it sounds like something written by someone with a great deal more faith than I have. Odd.

Most weeks at A Writing Life you will see posts Monday through Thursday with Friday off. This week I am skipping Thursday to place a special post on 9-11.  SL

Last post left me standing in the middle of the Claremore Public Library, age 12, in a shock of rapture.

The nice lady librarian typed up a temporary library card and told me I could only have one book the first time. She would be a big part of my life until I left for college and I still remember her face, but I never knew her name.

My mother was waiting, so I quickly picked up a book. It was the last time I had to rush; afterward she dropped me off, did all her shopping before picking me up, and I could be sure of an unhurried hour and all the books I could carry.

Readers today are contemptuous of Tom Swift and his kind, and with good reason. I had loved those books up to my first day in the library because they were all I had. They had filled lots of hours with lots of entertainment, and had opened me up to worlds beyond the farm.

Now, I took home Star Man’s Son by Andre Norton, and things would never be the same. Here was a real writer; she had something to say, and she said it with grace and style. Ultimately, I would find Heinlein, Zelazny, Dickson, Le Guin, and hundreds of others beyond science fiction. But Norton was the first and she taught me how to write. Fifty-five years later I still hear the faint echo of her style in my writing.

Forty years later, the school where I was teaching had a special day in celebration of reading. My friend Crystal invited several of us to talk to her class about our early reading habits.

I went to the local library here in California and found an original copy of Star Man’s Son still on the shelf. Thank God for libraries that never throw anything away. When my turn came, I was able to hold it up and say, “Here is the first book I ever checked out.” Then I could hold up copies of Jandrax and A Fond Farewell to Dying and say, “And here are the books I’ve written, because long ago I learned to love to read.”

I was born on a faraway planet called Oklahoma in the fifties. Stranger still, I grew up an only child on a farm three miles outside the nearest town, and that town had a population of 121 people. Actually, that probably counted the surrounding countryside. I was never sure.

We had no plumbing for the first seven years of my life, and a salt water well that produced only a trickle until I was in my teens, but this wasn’t poverty. This was normal life at the edge of the world on the edge of the modern era.

Don’t get me wrong; this is not a “my pitiful childhood” story. I loved life on the farm.

I learned to read from Little Golden Books. They were cheap, available at the local dry goods store (local means twenty miles away), and Dr Seuss wasn’t writing yet. When I was about ten, my grandfather sent me a copy of Tom Swift Jr. and his Outpost in  Space for my birthday. I was instantly hooked.

We lived midway between three towns, and we went to one of them at least once a week. If you farmed in the fifties, you spent half your time farming and half your time fixing broken machinery. That takes parts, and that means a trip to town.

Every time we went to town, my great-grandfather would give me a quarter. Tom Swift Jr., the Hardy Boys mysteries, and Rick Brant adventure books all cost a dollar each. I bought a book every fourth trip.

When I was about twelve my mother dropped my father off at the John Deere dealer, drove to the other end of Claremore (about eight blocks), and took me to the county library. I had never seen a library and was barely aware that they existed. I almost fell out of my work boots. It was a big room with tables down one side, and ten double shelves of books down the other.

I had found heaven. More next post.

By the time you get to the end of this post, you will see its connection with Labor Day.

There are six libraries within driving distance of my home; I use two of them frequently and the others on occasion. There are five used book stores, and another five have come and gone in the last few decades. I have access to others through the internet, and to a major remainder house through mail-order.

It isn’t enough for a truly herbookverous beast.

I recently stopped at a yard sale and browsed through boxes of books. It was a good find, full of the books I like best, old ones with hard cloth covers and faded spines. One was The American by Howard Fast.

Would-be writers, hear me! When you can write like this, heaven will open before you.

I found I’d read the book before, decades ago. It is the story of John Peter Altgeld whose later career as a Progressive governor of Illinois gained him the hatred of the upper crust for championing those who were demonstrating for an eight hour day.

I first flipped open to Altgeld in his young manhood laying down rails. It is an old story, celebrated in folktales, of the opening of the west. But as told here, it becomes a tale of corporate greed that turned the growing tracks into killing fields, where the immigrant workers were used up, destroyed, and cast aside.

Then I returned to the opening, and lived with young Altgeld through his childhood and youth, to his entry into the Civil War. He was isolated in the newly settled forests of Ohio, tied to a desperate father who beat him unmercifully. He was young and strong; he was driven to work, and the work made him stronger. He was driven by vague dreams, and he spent his youth planning his escape.

It felt completely familiar and completely different. My father never beat me; he hid his desperation as best he could through drought and storm, usually behind crusty humor. My father worked me hard, but he worked himself harder. Algelt felt like a slave. I felt like a man, a working man at twelve, and I was proud of my contribution. Altgeld, overworked, was driven to the ground. My work was long, but light enough to allow for dreaming. Work was the best part of my childhood.

Today we have the eight hour work day, but with wage levels that frequently leave full time workers in poverty. We have a nation full of hungry men and women for whom there is no work, or not enough work, and hungry children for whom there is not enough food and often little hope. It is a new-old story; completely familiar and completely different. Some of them will find their escape. Some will not. And for those who fail, society will point judgmental fingers and say, “You didn’t try hard enough!”

I was a teacher for twenty-seven years, but it took about twenty years before I admitted it. Until then I said that I was a writer with a day job. Eventually it became obvious that I was going to retire from my “day job”. I had become both a writer and a teacher.

During the thousands of gab sessions in the break room, one theme recurred regularly. Whenever the television or newspaper would report a teacher who turned out to be a sexual predator, one of my colleagues would say, “How could a teacher do that?”

I heard it on the TV news and I heard it from my non-teaching friends: “How could a teacher do that?”

If you have said that, let me suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If a person had the urges that would lead him to become a sexual predator of children, what jobs would he chose? Teacher? Boy scout leader? Youth minister? If you are a pedophile, practicing or potential, you would go where the opportunities are.

Most police officers are there to protect the public, but if you only want to drive fast and shoot people, what job would you choose? Cops or robbers – take your pick.

Even if 99% of soldiers are right thinking patriots, there will be some who joined so they can rape and kill, and get paid for it. Where else could they find a job with those benefits?

It seems to me that teachers and cops and soldiers don’t usually go bad. The bad ones start out bad, then blow their cover.

There is a flip side to all this. Kids lie. Kids make things up. Not every teacher (or cop or soldier) who is accused of a crime is guilty of that crime.

In education today there are strict, formal procedures for reporting misdeeds or suspicions. This is designed to assure that every suspicion is reported, but is then investigated by an agency set up for that purpose, not by the accused’s colleagues. It provides protection for the accuser and the accused alike.

I don’t see any better solution, and when I can’t see a simple cure in the real world, I write a novel.

In the late eighties, I wrote Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel in which a teacher whose life has been disrupted by false accusations has to begin again in a new school. There he discovers that when one of his students seems endangered, he believes her without question, just as others had believed the student who accused him falsely.

I will say more about Symphony in a later post.

I feel guilty of bait and switch. This post isn’t about the Beatles, or Sgt. Pepper, or the Summer of Love. It actually was forty years ago today that I first sat down to see if I could write a novel.

Would-be writers should take note. This was a controlled experiment. I wasn’t writing from the depth of my soul, nor writing the books that had been burning a hole in my brain for years. That came later. This was simply to answer a single question – could I sit down every day and write, or would my well run dry after the first week.

September 2, 1975 was the day after Labor Day that year, and I was at loose ends (see yesterday’s post). My wife and I were had just rented a tiny house in the poorest part of town; she had a new job as a picture framer. She proved to be very good at it, and ended up managing the gallery for most of the next decade. If my writing experiment hadn’t worked, I would have reapplied to graduate school.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know – could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week.

I needed a no-research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

GPS? Cell phone? Don’t be silly; this was 1975, when lost meant lost.

That was the setup. Here is the payoff – I wrote the novel. There is nothing exciting to say about sitting down every day and pounding the keys of a typewriter. (1975, remember; no computers.)

There were no exciting stories to tell my wife at the end of the day, but inside my head I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, and every night I could go to my comfortable bed while my protagonist tried to sleep on the frozen ground. I was hooked. I never went back for my Ph.D..

I did go back a few years later for a second BA and MA in History, while I was writing, but that’s only because I love learning almost as much as I love novels. It had nothing to do with career plans.

The novel, Spirit Deer, was only 141 pages, far too short to publish. It turned out better than I had expected, and its core story was not age specific. A few years ago I got rid of Tim’s wife, his best friend, the forest ranger, the old hunter, and even Tim’s last name, and turned Spirit Deer into a young adult novel. It’s looking for a home. When it finds one, I’ll let you know here.