Category Archives: A Writing Life

692. The Space Age Begins

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The Space Age Begins

Britain measures eras by the reign of its Kings and Queens. America measures eras by Presidents. In our look at the beginnings of science fiction, we are about to enter the Truman/Eisenhower era, even though neither man will be our focus.

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Hiroshima changed everything.

Science fiction people had read Einstein, or had tried to, so they knew about nuclear fission. They knew that an atom bomb could be built, and were expecting it. A few even got in trouble because they used atom bombs in stories, when the FBI was convinced they had it locked into secrecy.

For the rest of the country, Hiroshima was a shock to the heart.

It didn’t take long for the Russians to get the A bomb. Then we got the H bomb. Then the Russians got the H bomb. Welcome to my childhood.

Suddenly the future had become the present. Everybody was still driving ancient looking cars (no cars had been produced during WW II) and dressing like people in the old movies, but their world had been ripped open by futuristic perils.

Literature reacted to the situation. The Saturday Evening Post, that bastion of American norms, broke tradition and published a science fiction short story, The Green Hills of Earth by Robert Heinlein. Colliers Weekly published Wernher von Braun’s article Man Will Conquer Space Soon.

Von Braun also partnered with Disney to produce three episodes of Disneyland (as the Disney TV program was then called). The first, in March of 1955, was called Man in Space. This was followed by Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond is later seasons. These were humorous and relied heavily on cartoon animation, but they showed American youth what the future held in store.

Eisenhower’s presidency saw a worsening of the Cold War, the rise of ICBM’s to deliver H bombs, and the development of satellites. The push for space flight had been properly begun. NASA was formed in 1958.

Space flight is key to science fiction, but it is by no means the whole of the genre. SF, by its nature, is always out ahead of contemporary science, and the giants of science fiction were producing major works during this period. The main difference from the golden age was that there were more novels, fewer short stories, and people had stopped laughing at the genre.

This was the era of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Issac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, while Robert Heinlein revised his novella Methuselah’s Children into a full novel.

This era also saw the rise of near future “science fiction”. The quotation marks are there to point out that this wasn’t really science fiction at all, because it was reacting, not predicting. Atomic power, atom bombs, jets, and rockets had been the stock in trade of science fiction fifty years earlier when they did not exist. Now they were the stock in trade of mainstream writers because they did exist.

Fail Safe was probably the most notable of these near future science fiction novels. It began as a short story in 1959 and was revised into a novel that appeared in 1962. In it, an American bomber is mistakenly on route to destroy Moscow with nuclear bombs. The American President, who cannot call back the bomber, must sacrifice millions of American lives to avert a world destroying all out nuclear war.

On the Beach was even more somber.  Years after a nuclear war, people of Melbourne, Australia wait for inevitable death as fallout from the northern hemisphere drifts down upon them.

No fun novels for a no fun time.

There were many others. Philip Wylie, who was already an established science fiction writer, turned out Tomorrow and Triumph. I read both in high school.

This new sub-genre of science fiction continued to gain readers who might never have read Clarke or Heinlein. In 1984 it reached apotheosis when Tom Clancy published The Hunt for Red October.

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Over the course of this blog, fifty year anniversaries of events from the early space program kept happening, and I kept writing about them. By the time of my covid hiatus, those posts had grown into a book to be called Brief but Glorious.

Of all the books I plan to e-publish, it is the most dubious. Not the text — that’s fine — but I want to illustrate it heavily with NASA photos, and I don’t know what kind of technical problems that will cause. I have tentatively scheduled it for October 2027, but that could change. I’ll keep you posted.

The discussion continues next week.

691. Science Fiction Begins

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Science Fiction Begins

If you don’t like that title, here’s a longer one.

Science fiction begins as literature, becomes a genre, sinks to a sub-literate state in the eyes of the intelligentsia, regains legitimacy in the Saturday Evening Post, and then consumes the universe.

I like the short one better. And by the way, this is just a quick survey. If you don’t like the way I’ve chopped up history, write your own. After all, most SF “scholars” disagree — on everything.

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Science fiction has been around for a long time, although the early stuff is hardly recognizable. You could make the argument that it truly began when writers started using machines instead of supernatural beings to do marvelous things. That is why we look to H. G. Wells instead of Charles Dickens for the beginning of time travel stories.

Scrooge visited the past, present, and future, but it took three spirits (plus Marley) to pull it off. Wells did it with a time machine.

Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) are a good enough place to start looking at science fiction. Both were considered literature from the beginning. Verne’s writing style was held up for emulation by the French establishment. H. G. Wells was a respected social commentator. In that same era, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a call for society to perfect itself — science fiction ideas spoken by the voice of the elite.

But what if you are an outsider, with a coarser voice?

Later, rougher, more exciting writers of science fiction didn’t fit the proper mold. They were frequently not all that interested in uplift, they just liked the idea of the future. Their characters were more likely to carry a ray gun than to address Parliament. Through the early decades of the twentieth century a whole generation of young men (and a few young women) found excitement in reading this kind of science fiction presented in the form of short stories in inexpensive specialty magazines.

This period, beginning in the thirties and lasting until roughly World War II, was often called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. (Remember, golden ages are always in the past somewhere.) A great deal of high quality science fiction was produced, along with the usual kinderdrivel. Science fiction had left the mainstream and become a niche interest, ignored or derided by most people.

Science fiction also acquired its own name. The Time Machine was just called a novel when it was published, but now science fiction had become a genre. Calling it sci-fi was forbidden by those who loved it. Everybody else just considered it cheap trash.

I wasn’t there for all that. For most of the Golden Age, I wasn’t born yet. I saw the science fiction of the golden age when it was reprinted in the paperback books published in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

My actual connection with Golden Age magazines was brief but exciting. A few of them were still around when I began writing, and my first publication was in Galaxy. It was a novella called To Go Not Gently, and the cover of Vol. 39, No. 6, 1978, showed my character Ram David Singh walking uneasily down the Avenue of Abominations in New Bombay. I was over the moon.

It was also the last issue of Galaxy, although there were later attempts at resurrection.

So science fiction began as just a part of normal literature, then went on the gain an intense fan base as well as the disdain of everyone else. Heinlein and history were about to change that.

The discussion continues next week.

690. Fighting Stupidity With Stupidity

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Gavin Newsom

Fighting Stupidity With Stupidity

The cliché is “fighting fire with fire”. Sometimes it makes sense to fight fire with fire. Sometimes it doesn’t.

This time the cliché should read “fighting a danger to our democracy with another danger to our democracy”, which explains the title of this post.

I’ve been giving President Trump a hard time and I plan to continue to do so, but he isn’t the only politician endangering our system of government, and they aren’t all MAGA. My home state of California has come up with a plan to counter the Trump agenda which is as dangerous as anything Trump is doing.

It’s called Prop 50. It’s all in the news here, but if you live in Paducah or Peoria, it may be new to you. When Texas, following Trump’s call, unfairly redistricted its congressional map, Democratic leadership in California, following Governor Gavin Newsom, followed suit. Before I can tell you exactly what they did, a little background will be needed.

Since 2010, California had done its redistricting through the Citizens Redistricting Commission, a balanced panel of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four members unaffiliated with either party. This board was brought about the people through Proposition 11, and later modified by Proposition 20. Its redistricting map is probably as fair as anyone could expect.

Now the Democratic leadership has produced Proposition 50 which throws out the CRC redistricting map in favor of one which completely and openly favors Democrats. They make no apologies, but call it a necessary reaction to the unfair actions of the State of Texas. The Citizens Redistricting Commission is not disbanded by Prop 50; it will draw the 2030-2040 map after the 2030 census, but the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections will be skewed Democratic. Deliberately. Openly. Nakedly. And without apology.

Since this is a proposition, it will be up to the people of California to vote this in — or not.

I suppose the California Democrats who wrote Prop 50 will call this fighting fire with fire. I agree, if they mean, “You Republicans set fire to one end of the Constitution, so we Democrats are going to set fire to the other end.”

Welcome to 2025. If this had happened any other year, I would have suspected I was reading a script from Saturday Night Live, but apparently this is the way we do things now.

We shouldn’t.

Our country is in serious trouble and it needs serious leaders. It needs people in office who trust the Constitution. It needs Democrats who do not simply copy what the MAGA Republicans are doing and call it justified.

You shoved me, so I’m going to shove you is not a reasonable political philosophy.

He did it first, is not an excuse for violating responsible political behavior.

The only good thing that could come out of this would be a sound defeat for Prop. 50. I expect it to go down, because I trust the people of California.

As always, folks, its all up to you.

689. Birth of a Blog

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I started the blog you are reading on the twenty-ninth of August, 2015. I took a hiatus in 2020, because of covid. Here is what I said that day.

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Yesterday, here in California, the Governor requested that all people over 65 self-isolate. That makes sense to me, and I passed that milestone seven years ago, so my wife and I are going to hunker down and become temporary hermits. That isn’t too much of a hardship since we live in the country and keep a well stocked larder anyway.

This change shouldn’t bother my blog, but it does. I’m not worried for my wife and myself, but worrying about the rest of the country and the world beyond weighs on me. It has also been getting harder lately to come up with new things to say, especially on subjects that don’t call for hours of research for a post that will be read in three minutes. This is post 678, after all.

— << >> —

Actually, A Writing Life had more than 678 posts. From day one it was a double effort, a website called A Writing Life with almost daily entries in a blog of the same name (causing some confusion) and a secondary blog on the same website called Serial which provided many of my fiction writings in serial form.

According to WordPress who handles my blog and keeps track of such things, I had 1280 posts when I restarted this blog.

During the hiatus, seven posts trickled through, so make that 1273 posts in less than five years. I know I was working my tail off during that period, but it still boggles my mind.

I made a lot of friends during that period, but after six years off most of them probably don’t even know I’m still alive.

I am.

I disappeared but I never went away. During those years I finally put the last period on a five book series of novels I have been working on since 1972 called The Menhir Series (fantasy). I completed two new novels The Cost of Empire (alternate universe) and Like Clockwork (time travel), and am fighting with another called Dreamsinger, a sideways sequel to Cyan which won’t quite come to heel yet.

You will be seeing all my works, old and new, in e-book format in the next few years. The Cost of Empire and Like Clockwork won’t be published for a while, so I won’t name their release dates. Too many possibilities lie between now and then.

688. Another Assassination

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Another Assassination

9/11 was last week. Most years I have at least acknowledged the event in this blog, but life moves forward. I had a blog in the can for last week, and was working on others that will appear around the New Year, when another event took over the news too late for me to have anything to say. I had a different post planned for this week, but it will have to wait.

On September 10 Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So much for leaving politics aside for a while.

The truth is, I had never heard of Kirk. He was deep in the MAGA movement and I am not. If I knew more about him, I am sure I would disagree with much of what he believes. I would probably agree with a lot as well.

If you are deep into MAGA, you don’t have to think a lot. You may — but you don’t have to.

If you are a committed liberal, you don’t have to think a lot. You may — but you don’t have to.

In either case, if you are far to the left or far to the right, you would never vote for the other guy, even if you didn’t like your own guy. I’ve been voting for over five decades, and I never felt like that — until Donald Trump came along.

When Biden came slowly to the podium in the infamous debate, my heart sank. He was clearly unfit for the office, and everybody knew it. But I would still have voted for Biden because Trump was also unfit, and evil besides.

Evil is a word that requires explanation, and I will do that in a moment.

Since I live in California, I already knew Kamila Harris from her debate on the way to winning a Senatorial seat. I was not impressed then, and that never changed. But I still voted for her because of Trump.

I called Trump evil. Evil is losing a Presidential election, lying about it, fomenting rebellion, and attempting to overthrow the Constitution. Evil is the attack on the Capitol. Evil is pardoning the guilty. Donald should have — and still should — stand trial for treason because of those actions.

But he should not be assassinated. And neither should Charlie Kirk.

The people spoke in 2016. They spoke again in 2020. They spoke yet again in 2024. The people decide.

So much for Donald Trump, in my opinion. Insurrection is unforgivable.

But that doesn’t make Charlie Kirk evil, and it doesn’t make any of Trump’s other followers evil. It doesn’t make them crazy. It doesn’t even make their ideas wrong.

I can understand why people follow Trump, both Republicans and Independents. He is persuasive, despite his lies. And he is just humorous enough to pass his lies off as exaggerations. He is also the first Republican president since Bush Two left office in January of 2009. That counts for a lot.

Extreme Republicans will vote for a Republican he doesn’t like before he will vote for a Democrat. Even though I am independent, I get that.

Extreme Democrats will vote for a Democrat he doesn’t like before he will vote for a Republican. I get that, too.

The people who voted for Trump — with the possible exception of very young voters — already had their opinions long before Trump came down the escalator. Most of them were already conservative. Most believed in limited government. Most of them believed that America was going to Hell.

(Actually, most people over 50 have always believed that the country is going to Hell. Liberals and conservatives just think it is true for diametrically opposite reasons.)

When Trump started selling MAGA hats, most of the people who wore them hadn’t been converted to anything. They were just following a man who seemed to be saying what they already believed.

There is no excuse for insurrection. Beyond that, if somebody is doing something you hate, then organize, protest, file a lawsuit, or scream at the top of your lungs.

But assassination? No. Never.

As for me, I am wringing my hands and grieving for America. Again.

— << >> —

That is not all I have to say about assassination. Science fiction uses assassination as the starting point for a lot of stories, particularly ones in the alternate timelines sub-genre. It will be coming up again when we talk about that in a few weeks.

687. Irritated Independence

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WELL, I’M BACK.

This renewed version of A Writing Life will primarily be about supporting the publication of my novels, giving hints to young writers, and telling my story. But nothing in 2025 can avoid politics.

If I am also going to complain about the new iteration of Donald Trump — and I am — I have to declare my place in the argument for those who don’t remember me. Anyone who reads what I write deserves that much.

I am not a liberal, particularly. I am not a conservative, particularly. I listen to both sides and find both positions full of wisdom and stupidity. Most of the time, it’s about a fifty-fifty toss-up.

I was raised to be a proud and loud Republican. Like many other things my father taught me, it didn’t take.

I didn’t become a Democrat in reaction either. When I first registered to vote, I chose Independent. Or, as they call it here in California, “no preference”. I hate that term. I have a preference on pretty much everything. My preferences just don’t line up with everybody else’s.

I am fully in favor of a woman’t right to abortion. I am equally supportive of the gun rights spelled out in the second amendment. If I tried to join either party, neither one would want me.

On the liberal side, political correctness seems to have been pushed to the point that telling the plain, unvarnished truth is out of fashion. Not quite illegal, but not acceptable in polite company. I’ve had enough of that.

On the conservative side — actually I don’t know. Where have the conservatives gone? I can’t find them anywhere.

Trump isn’t a conservative. He isn’t a Republican, either. None of the conservative Republicans of my father’s generation would have accepted him. None of the Republican former Presidents support him, and the dead ones are turning in their graves.

And yet he won the last election. We’ll have to talk about that — even though we will talk mostly about science fiction and why it is so hard for writers to get published.

They say we live in unprecedented times. Maybe, but American politics has always been a liar’s game, so that overworked word unprecedented doesn’t quite fit. It’s just that Trump is just so damned convincing that it changes the whole situation.

But mostly this blog is going to continue to be about writing.

686. It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

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It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

If you are my age, music from Sergeant Pepper just popped into your head in honor of that title. But you probably aren’t my age — 77 — so it probably didn’t.

Today, I’m throwing myself a digital anniversary party. I’ve earned it.

Today is September 2, 2025. It’s also the day after Labor Day.

In 1975, on the day after Labor Day — also September second — I sat down at a home-made plywood desk, in the tiny back bedroom of a rented house, in front of an electric typewriter to try something new. I was going to find out if I could write a novel.

I didn’t doubt my intellegence, nor my skill with language. What I doubted was whether I could sit down day after day and think of enough interesting things to say to fill up a novel.

I was going to give it my best shot.

At the time, I was reconsidering my plans. I had always intended to be a scientist, initially in ecology. The problem was that I was a decade too early. No one had heard of ecology in 1966. Michigan State University had only two classes even close to the subject when I arrived and they were both in Fisheries and Wildlife, not Biology.

I switched to anthropology and spent five years pursuing that goal. I loved it as long as I was studying work done by other anthropologists, but the idea of field work (sitting in a mud hut recording local gossip, to be snarky about it) did not appeal.

I had never considered writing novels. I had started a dozen, just for fun, but inspiration always ran out about page ten. Now,  I had a little time on  my hands, so . . .

To my amazement, between September and Christmas, I turned out a novel. It was simple and short — a hunter gets lost in the wilderness and, after many adventures, finds his way back to civilization. I used the local Sierras which I knew well and kept my hero so lost that I never had to worry about absolute accuracy in describing his surroundings.

It was unpublishable, but that isn’t unusual for first novels. The important thing was that in four months I had neither stalled nor stumbled as I worked my way through 45,000 words, which was just long enough for a novel in 1975.

I could write a whole novel! Who knew? Certainly not me.

After Christmas I started doing the research and world building for a novel of science fiction. It was finished by the end of 1976, sold by 1978, and published in 1979. The title was Jandrax, from Ballantine under the Del Rey imprint.

Now I was a published writer. Who would have believed it. Certainly not me.

I’m still working at my trade after fifty years, so it’s happy anniversary to me.

I am also using this anniversary as the starting point for a rebirth of my blog A Writing Life. Keep coming back, mostly on Wednesdays — we still have a lot to talk about.

685. Dear Joe

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Monday brought the decision from the Supreme Court on Presidential immunity. Now everything now lies in the hands of the voters.

Actually, everything lies in the hands of Joe Biden.

Less than a week ago I watched the debate. When President Biden walked out, moving so tentatively, I said to my wife, “Trump just won the election.” That was before Biden opened his mouth.

There is a long history to this, which I will talk about soon, but today I want to keep things short.

For the second time in three presidential elections, the people wish both candidates would just go away. Most of them – and not just independents – will vote with a feeling of distaste, or will vote in protest for a third party, or will just stay home.

Until the debate, the coming election was a tie between Trump’s lies and Biden’s age. That tie is now broken. Against Biden, Trump will win. All the special pleading by Democrats can’t change what the American people saw.

The day after the debate, surrogates said that Biden had a bad day. No one in America believes that. Old is old. Too far gone is too far gone, and we all saw it.

I am 76. I know old. I know bad days.

There are times when I stare at a blank computers screen and wonder what I was going to say. I leave spaces in sentences for words I’ve known all my life, but which just won’t come to me. I go back later and fill them in.

I know bad days, and when things get really ugly, I turn off the computer, go watch re-runs on TV, and pet the cat.

The President of the United States can’t do that.

Joe, maybe you can be competent and effective with plenty of time to think, while safely in the oval office surrounded by you friends. Maybe you could act effectively is a short term crisis.

Maybe.

But you could not survive a long term situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis. We know that now. You should know it. You should have known it for months.

The Supreme Court isn’t going to help. Donald Trump is not going to keel over with a heart attack.

Half the country believes Trump’s lies. Most Democrats before the debate, and every Democrat now, knows Biden’s frailty.

Against Trump, now that we have seen the debate, Biden will lose.

Absolutely. There is no question.

But any one of a dozen younger Democrats could still win, if Biden were to go gracefully and support their candidacy.

It’s up to you, Joe. Release your delegates and save the country. Or stay in the race, and all Hell lies before us.

684. Bible in Schools

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I am not really back, but I never really went away. You can expect to hear from me more regularly sometime in the near future, but today I have to respond to something in the news.

Before the Biden-Trump debate stole all the bandwidth, a seemingly minor story crawled across the bottom of our TV screens.

Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters orders schools to teach the Bible.

This is not new, as I can tell you from personal experience.

I was in high school in the mid sixties, in a small town in Oklahoma. Once a year a local evangelist named Reverend Heck was invited to our school. No, that was really his name. For an hour, the auditorium was turned into a church. Attendance was mandatory; respectful silence was also mandatory. No one complained; no one mentioned the constitution. No one asked to be excused. We all knew that the weight of community opinion would fall upon us if we did.

If you are not a fundamentalist Christian, or if you are Buddhist, Muslim, Jew or other non-Christian, I don’t need to convince you that this was not right.

On the other hand, if you are a Christian and you think that Superintendent Walters might have the right idea, you are the person I want to talk to.

Let us reason together. (Isaiah 1:18)

My childhood world consisted of two tiny communities, populations of 121 and about 300, with a consolidated school. There were five churches in the two communities, all Christian, all more or less fundamentalist. Belief that dancing was a sin was so strong that there were no proms. Do you have the picture?

Now fast forward to my adulthood. For twenty-seven years I taught middle school in a small community of a couple of thousand people. The composition of my new community was roughly half Mexican-American Catholics and half White Mormons. This community was in California, not Oklahoma, but I know it well, so I plan to use it in my comparisons.

Superintendent Walters wants the Bible to be taught. Let’s see how that would work.

If my California community were in Oklahoma, would Walters also call for the teaching of the Book of Mormon? He calls the Bible a historical text; the book of Mormon has been around since 1830, just under two hundred years. That’s just 42 years less than the Constitution. You can’t get more American than a Holy Book which was found (or ghost written, you decide) here in the U.S.A.

My childhood community would not stand for Mormonism being taught in the schools. They barely tolerated Catholics.

Speaking of Catholics, how would Superintendent Walters teach Matthew 16:18? It says (King James Version, according to my father the only version authorized by God for speakers of English):

And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

It’s in the Bible, and if you are part of a Bible Church, you have to believe it. But what does it really mean?

To Catholics, it means that Peter (a name meaning rock) was the first Pope and that Jesus appointed him in this verse. By extension only Catholics are true to God’s teaching.

See how well that goes over in my old home town. Or teach it the opposite way, and see how that goes over in Catholic Oklahoma.

Those are the first two problems that come to mind, but there are hundreds of differing opinions among Christians, even in Oklahoma. Most of the people I knew as a child thought that those holding other opinions had been deluded by the Devil. And those other people probably thought the same about my people.

Be careful what you ask for. God may be on somebody’s side, but is it yours? Are you absolutely sure? Do you want to bet your freedom to worship as you please on it?

There is one more thing to consider. How much do you trust the government?

Not much, you say; that’s what I thought. So why do you think they are going to get this right? That they will teach the Bible as you think it should be taught, not as some (insert the group you hate the most) would do it?

Good luck, friends. If you go down this road, you’re going to need it.

Once you have the Bible being taught in school, it won’t be long before the courts insist on fairness. You might find your children being taught Christianity, probably by religious liberals, on Monday and Wednesday while the rest of the week they are being taught the Koran, the Mahabharata, the I Ching, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Daozang, the Gathas, the Mahayana Sutras . . .

And so forth. The list is very long.

There is an alternative. Accept the first amendment. Accept that all those other people who aren’t as smart as you are, have the right to go to the Devil in their own way. Accept that the only way to ensure your freedom is to let them have theirs – all outside of the schools.

It has worked for 248 years.

683. Dry Oklahoma

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Greetings. I have been gone a long time and I did not intend to come back now, but a weird thing happened. Just before covid struck, I had finished two posts; when I decided to bow out for a while, I reset them for a month later than their original posting date. Then again, then again, as the year rolled on.

Then something else weird happened. WordPress completely changed the way posts have to be written. I opened it up one day and couldn’t make heads or tails of what was on the screen. Clearly I had to completely relearn their system, but there was no hurry, since I didn’t plan to post for a couple more months.

Then this morning, I saw that I had posted yesterday. My pushing the dates forward on those two old posts had caught up to me. Since I don’t really know how to post in the new fashion, and the other old post (this one) is scheduled out in three hours, I decided to just add this explanation and let things go. I don’t even know if these paragraphs will be added to the Dry Oklahoma post.

If you don’t see this information, ignore it.

=========================

I grew up during prohibition.

If you are mathematically challenged or historically challenged, that statement might seem possible. Otherwise, you have already calculated that this statement makes me over a hundred years old, which I’m not.

A lie? No, the twenty-first amendment did not end prohibition everywhere. States had the option of continuing it, and Oklahoma did until 1959 when the consumption of alcohol was made legal, but only under stringent conditions. For two and half decades, the Kansas-Oklahoma border was the starting line of a nightly race between bootleggers and the Highway Patrol.

That’s all behind us, right? Not quite. Today the Kansas-Colorado border straddles pot highways, but this time the product is flowing into Kansas. The history of Oklahoma as a dry state in a wet nation might be useful in 2020.

As for my tiny part in the story, when I was five years old our house was fifty feet from Highway 169 which ran from Coffeeville, Kansas down to Tulsa. As I watched the cars go by, many of them were carrying booze for personal consumption, and some of them were carrying booze in bulk for resale. Tales of high speed chases and big busts were common.

There was no checkpoint at the border. Bootlegging was as simple as buying a bottle of whiskey legally in Coffeeville, driving home, and drinking it illegally in your living room. And there were plenty of bootleggers who were willing to save you the trip, for a profit.

Oklahoma was dry. Okies weren’t. Local humorist Will Rogers said that Okies would vote dry as long as they could stagger to the polls.

All this started before statehood and continued until 1959. When national prohibition came along in 1919 with the eighteenth amendment, it only cut off the source of liquor from surrounding states.

During national prohibition no one in America got all that thirsty. There were always stills, along with mass smuggling from Canada and Mexico, and rumrunners on all three coasts. From 1919 to 1933, America was dry, but Americans weren’t. With the advent of the twenty-first amendment, the rest of America could legally drink again. Okies could not, but it didn’t even slow them down.

Actually a few other states also remained dry. Mississippi was dry longer than Oklahoma, and many counties remain dry or moist today. Moist means consumption is legal but only under severe restrictions.

Consumption of alcohol finally became legal in Oklahoma in 1959, fifty-two years after statehood, but only with great restrictions. For example, you could buy beer, but only with 3.2% alcohol or less, and only at room temperature. Cold beer could not be sold. The idea was that you had to take it home to refrigerate it, and then consume it in the shameful privacy of your own house.

So what does this have to do with pot in 2020?

Beyond the obvious issue of people from Kansas having to drive to Colorado to get pot, and bringing it home illegally, there is the issue of why prohibitions get overturned, and how wide is the overturn.

People in Oklahoma were convinced to overturn dry laws in part because of all the tax revenues they felt they were losing and because the cost of enforcement. That should sound quite contemporary.

Of course there was a lot of home brew being made and a lot of stills that went right on selling their wares after 1959 so drinkers could avoid the booze taxes.

The snarky part of me also wants to wonder if the booze tax revenue after 1959 in Oklahoma made up for the gas tax revenue that all those bootleggers were paying, but never mind . . .

In a similar way, there is still a thriving business in illegal pot in California today, causing disappointing tax returns on legal pot. What a shocker! Remember all those million dollar busts of pot in the old days? That was based on street prices. Once pot becomes legal, the street price goes down. Legal pot sales go up, but they never match those old inflated revenues. No problem, raise the pot tax. But then people go back to buying illegal pot, because it is cheaper.

Funny how politicians never think of that until it happens.

Also, to say that pot is legal in California is not quite true. It can still be made illegal county by county and city by city. In Calaveras County, near where I live, it is currently illegal to cultivate pot, illegal to manufacture (which I assume means process) it, but legal to sell it retail. There was a recent battle to change the local laws, with billboards for and against. The argument against was “keep out crime”. The argument for was “tax revenue”.

This should all seem familiar.