OK, here is another set of answers! All of these were posed by Instagram users over there. One thing that I find really interesting about social media is the way there is some overlap, but it’s definitely not 100 percent. There are people who read this blog and with whom I’m Facebook friends, there are those with whom I’m FB friends and whom I follow on Twitter, there are those whom I follow on Twitter and Instagram…and there are those I only know on one particular platform. It’s neat to see the interplay and the different “feels” of each particular arena…but generally, people tend to be nice and open-minded and of good cheer everywhere.

And now, the questions:

Thoughts on Abe Lincoln?

One of the greatest Presidents, quite clearly…and I wonder what he might have accomplished had he not been put in a position where the only real thing he was asked to accomplish was to keep things from falling apart completely. On the one hand, it took a man that great to keep things from utter collapse, but what might have happened had he not been tasked with preventing the most negative outcome? And more, what might he have accomplished had John Wilkes Booth not killed him?

I actually don’t know a great deal about Lincoln, beyond the standard “American mythology” stuff. I suppose one day I should do some reading on him, because as with all things, the truth is more complicated than the myth. However, there’s really no getting around the fact that he was in all likelihood the exact right man on the scene for the job he had to do.

Van Halen: Hagar or Roth?

It’s been said many times that you can only be one or the other…but not by me, because I love both. In all honesty, I love both eras of the band, both the harder-rocking DLR era and the more poetic sound of the Sammy period. Now, if I choose to listen to Van Halen, I’m probably going to select something from the Sammy period, because song for song, my favorites tend to come from that time. But that preference is nowhere near strong enough for me to claim an overall preference for Sammy over DLR. They’re both different. To me, it’s like making PB&J with grape jelly, versus PB&J with strawberry jam. Different experiences with a lot in common…and both favorites of mine!

Heart: Ann or Nancy?

I can’t pick one. Seriously, I can’t. I see them as an inseparable unit. The two of them together accomplish something like alchemy. I don’t think you can really have Heart without either one of them!

When did you start writing?

This is a great question, because I can read it a number of different ways. For instance, “When did I start writing” can mean, “When did I first get the sense that I might be good at telling stories?” For that version of the question, I’d say, very early on…maybe even as early as preschool. I honestly do not recall a time when I didn’t like making up tales in my own head.

There are a lot of ways to tell stories, though, so when did I start to gravitate toward this thing called writing? Sometime in grade school, I suppose. The realization that I could take those letters and numbers that I knew and use them to spin tales came quickly, and I remember writing stories as early as first grade. My favorite assignments were “write your own story” assignments, and eventually I got to the point where I enjoyed writing stuff as a hobby.

So when, then, did I start thinking that writing might be a realistic career goal? Probably the late 1990s, when I started trying to write better and when I started earlier novels. None of those works went anywhere, although I did start piling up a stack of rejection slips for my short fiction, occasionally getting a “This is really good but I still can’t use it right now” note scrawled by some editor in the margin. I’ve kept at it pretty much ever since, sometimes on an “off-and-on” basis. There were a couple of years in the mid-2000s when I barely wrote anything at all. Some of those years are a complete fog to me now, and I don’t really miss that decade.

The final way to look at this question is, “When did I realize that writing was my calling/mission in life/the thing I’m best at doing and I should really just get about the business of doing it?” That was just a few years ago, actually, when I finally decided that it was time to actually write that story I’d been kicking around in my head for over ten years, the one about two sisters who happen to be Princesses and who happen to go out into space and have some adventures. I don’t know if all writerly-types do this, but I certainly have been known to sit on story ideas for a long time, whether out of fear or some notion that maybe one day I’ll be good enough to write that idea. I finally realized I was taking the utterly wrong approach, and all the nifty story ideas in the world are no good to anyone if they’re still in my head when my own curtain comes down. I started writing Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in 2011, I think, so I might have “started writing” right about then. Or fifteen years earlier. Or ten to twenty years before that…or even earlier.

I think I’ve started writing a whole lot of times, to tell the truth.

More answers to come!

(And you know what? As of October 1, I won’t have to refer to Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in that way anymore. I can’t wait!)

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As usual, I got some political questions this time out, and also as usual, I’m putting them below the fold, so if you don’t want to go down my own personal liberal rabbit-hole, you don’t have to! And remember, if you want to ask something, please do!

Roger asks: Is the problem with the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision that it restricted birth control to women, or that it reaffirmed the personhood of corporations?

Both.

The idea that an employer should be able to require his or her employees in any way to abide by their own personal religious views strikes me as deeply odd, and I’m reminded in any event that Hobby Lobby actually did cover the contraceptives to which they “deeply objected” for years, until the Affordable Care Act specified that they had to. Yes, I question the sincerity of their religious beliefs, and I also deeply object to their ill-informed and unscientific view that those particular contraceptives are de facto abortion pills.

Likewise, the fact that their objections only went as far as female contraceptives is pretty telling. I always have a hard time with people who object to contraception on any kind of basis regarding sexual morality, and yet who also seem to have no problem at all with treatments for erectile dysfunction. There’s a weird kind of cognitive dissonance here: we need to be able to help men have sex, but not women, but we also object to men having sex with each other.

Equally bad, though, is the idea that a corporation as a single entity has Constitutional rights. Where does this concept end? Can a corporation “bear arms”, and if so, what would that look like? Can a corporation require every one of its employees to carry (or at least own) a gun? Can a corporation vote? This kind of ruling constitutes a starting move on a path toward what seems to me a deeply flawed manner of thinking. A corporation’s “religious beliefs” is a concept that makes no sense at all — can a corporation be Catholic? How would that corporation take Communion? Does a corporation have a soul? What is so special about a corporation that gives it rights that, say, a club doesn’t have? If a corporation gets bought by a larger corporation, what happens to the smaller corporation’s rights? If Hobby Lobby gets bought by Procter and Gamble, whither Hobby Lobby’s deeply-held religious principles?

I noted an article that said that the US was one only a handful of countries that doesn’t provide maternity leave. Why do you think that is, not just on this narrow issue, but on so many topics from health care to the metric system, that American exceptionalism means that the US takes exception to what everyone else does?

I struggle with this, and I honestly don’t get it. America is the shining beacon, modeling democracy and self-government for all to see across the globe…and yet, we’re told that our government is incompetent and can’t do anything at all right. Well, that’s just embarrassing, isn’t it? Why can France and Germany and every other less-wealthy country on the planet get a lot of these things right?

I simply do not believe, for one second, that these types of things wouldn’t work here. These types of predictions are never true. We don’t lose millions of jobs every time the minimum wage goes up, and yet, every time someone proposes raising the minimum wage, that’s what we’re told will happen. Never does, but we always believe it. National healthcare will be a disaster that will ruin everything…and yet, we have quite literally dozens of other countries as counterexamples. The implication seems to me that they can do something we can’t — and yet, make that suggestion in other regards, and you might as well be questioning the cuteness of puppies.

When so many other nations are doing something different and better than we are, I stop paying any attention at all to people who argue that it can’t work here. Sure, America is different in some key ways, but there is nothing so unique about this country as to make the United States a total and complete outlier to any reasonable expectation based on results elsewhere.

So what’s the deal? Well, frankly, America’s libertarian leanings are holding us back. I find that frustrating, but it’s basically the way it is. I find it deeply saddening that the richest country in the history of the world is so behind the times in so many ways, and when libertarians tell me that a national healthcare system somehow represents a loss of “freedom”, I just shake my head. This is no kind of “freedom” that has any referent point in my mind. I have no idea how a Canadian citizen of similar economic status as myself is “less free” than I am, because he has his country’s healthcare system.

These questions tie together interestingly, because it seems that while we as a country don’t want government doing anything because it somehow infringes on our “freedom”, we are entirely willing to let our corporate bosses encroach on our “freedom” in ways that are more real and more limiting than anything government is trying to do. I, for one, am not interested in a concept of “freedom” where the degree to which one is “free” is directly proportional to one’s socio-economic status or position on the management chain.

OK, that’s all the politics this time out, huzzah!

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