Michael C. Goodwin's Blog

I have watched a steady flow of Marvel moves over the last 30 or more years, and in those films there were always larger than life villains who were either diabolical clever or overwhelmingly strong and unstoppable. Seeing those morality plays of good verses evil, it never once occurred to me that the end of my country would come about not by great power or evil cunning, but by utter stupidity. And then by a person so abysmally ignorant and utterly brainless and with followers that are more than an equally clueless rabble that don’t have two brain cells to rub together.

The support of this one monumentally pathetic creature is so far from the narratives of those movies that it is impossible to believe it is all actually real even though it is right in front of our faces. The cult worship is totally deranged and unbelievable in its insanity, the idea of adding his face on the 500 dollar bill or on Mount Rushmore is exceptionally laughable to the rest of us relatively normal people. And yet, as his followers are being impoverished by massive tariffs, deprived of any normal protections or life-saving health care, they will always remain fanatically loyal. And let’s pick the most horribly under-qualified people to run the various governmental functions and agencies so they can create more confusion, what a great idea!

If you can cause enough chaos and keep everything and everyone agitated, then no one is going to organize against you and stop what you’re doing. No one is going to be able to think of how to fight against a constantly changing foe. They may not always know what they are doing to themselves and everyone around them, but why would they care, everyone’s misery is not their concern, too bad for all of us poor normal people, we should have been billionaires.

(It has become clear that the primary focus of the government is now fear, pain and utter cruelty, and we are barely 3 months into this endless purgatory of misery and pain. We need a few heroic people with ability and a plan. Photo, courtesy Marvel.)

We are now witnessing the final stages of one of the longest and most successful cons in the history of the world. It has been a brilliant feat, and quite simple. We have been told that lies define our lives and they, (the ones who truly care), are helping us see those lies for what they are. Yes, the election was stolen, the deep state is controlling our lives, the immigrants, government bureaucrats and the journalists are betraying us all. (But not the billionaires). The people in this country are upset and angry and cannot trust the institutions that were designed to keep us safe, so you must believe in us, only we can fix it, join with us and we can combat all the evil facing you, there is constant chaos, only we can control it and help save you. But of course, the wall never gets built, inflation doesn’t stop growing, the government is still oppressing you, so we must destroy it for good.

Every failure of this con is just evidence that dark forces are preventing us from making real progress. There will be a great deal of pain for the average person, but we must all make sacrifices in order to move forward to greater prosperity, we will all be rich! Just wait, it is coming, be patient, have faith, the con will reward you. Your 401K will lose a lot of money, and the stock market will crash, but hey, the savvy investor will profit, too bad that you’re not one of them. Businesses will fail, farmers will go bankrupt and we the consumer will pay a lot more, but it will be worth it in the end. If you doubt and don’t trust us, you are setting yourself up for failure, keep raging, don’t believe the lies, they are your enemies. Keep supporting us no matter what, you are the hero for resisting, we are strong together, keep seeing red, it is the only way, ignore the fact that you are bleeding money, it only pays for the oppression, we didn’t cause this, perhaps, not really.

It is all about the politics of the situation, we must hollow out the government, so they can’t get you, the money must go to those that run things, prosperity will trickle down from the corporations and the billionaires. There will be nothing left for libraries, museums and the humanities. We really don’t need science, technology or health. Diseases will only wipe out the weak, the poor, the parasites. All that money that was wasted on protecting you and the environment, the food, all the products that you use, the very air that you breathe is all unnecessary. The government will still be there, somehow, but not for the people who actually depend on it, that will be gone, and it will take less time then you can possibly imagine. We must find a way to slow down or stop the grift before it completely succeeds, before we are utterly fleeced and totality ruined as a country run by decree from a demented old man who simply doesn’t care.

Who doesn’t love a rascally con man, except when we are all the victims.

The Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords, including the 171,476 words in current use, 47,156 obsolete words, and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries, (A headword is a word that begins a separate entry in a dictionary or other reference work.) I have learned a great deal of respect for words since I took up writing novels in 2007. There is a great deal of power in words, just look at the preamble to the US Constitution. It is indeed a terrible shame that these words are being trampled into the mud these days.

Trying to use words to express my displeasure as to how my elected representatives are ignoring the prospect of modern governmental Fascism, I have recently written my congressman and our newly elected senator, I got back a form letter from the senator but nothing from my representative. So I will break down what my senator has said, and it was not encouraging. I wrote to express my distress at a large number of attacks on Social Security as I am relying on it to help our household finances in my retirement, and especially since the elected officials said it would not be changed or cut. But of course, in these terrible times it is being attacked and changed on a daily basis. Certain extremely rich people have called it a Ponzi scheme and that senior citizens receiving it are parasites. (Talk about how words are being used). After going on, (predictably), how important Social Security is, (was), the letter turned to the massive federal debt, implying that we seniors are to blame for all of these problems because we are living longer. Near the end of the letter, the most telling words were, “I can say with confidence that we don’t have to fear spending discipline—we must embrace it.”

Of course he was talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare, and the greedy seniors who receive funding from what they have put into these programs throughout all of our working lives didn’t matter. Musk and his minions are now rewriting all of the computer code that makes Social Security work, not perfectly, but it does work, and like all new coding there will be problems and of course delays and even a breakdown of the system as a whole. Oops, our bad. Perhaps in a couple of months you will get a deposit or maybe not. And now we will have to privatize it in order to make it work, but that will cost a good chunk of your monthly amount and we are terribly sorry about that. But you understand, I’m sure. We are doing this for your best interests, (you poor stupid parasitical sheep and your dammed Ponzi scheme to rob the federal government). If you think I am exaggerating, just wait for a few more months. I am now desperately making plans to survive with little or no Social Security money, wish me and the rest of us sheep lots of luck, we are really going to need it.

(Some of the very best words ever set down on paper occurred nearly 250 years as the US Constitution. Words that sadly do not have much meaning to some people these days. And it also doesn’t say, We the White People, or We the Rich People, it says simply, in very large letters, We the People.)

“There are lies, there are dammed lies, and then there are statistics.”

Mark Twain popularized this phrase in the United States, using it to critique the persuasive power of statistics, even when used inappropriately. I actually know quite a bit about that. For 28 years I was a graphic artist for the local newspaper. Almost every day there was an opportunity to use statistics in a news story. Everything from rainfall totals to traffic accidents during the summer to numbers of people unemployed, there was always something that could be graphed, charted or aligned, I must have made a few thousand of them over those many years working at the paper. I often added artistic or cartoon elements to make it easier or more entertaining to look at. On occasion, the trend of the information did not match the direction of the written story. If the reporter said that auto accidents were up a great deal, but the line of the chart showed only a small increase, I could slightly exaggerate the scale. But this was always a point of contention with me and the editors.

The newspaper was a bit more careful about lies. Generally, two separate news sources were needed to verify the accuracy of any story. Often it was obvious when there were discrepancies, but when arguing for a point there are many opportunities for misinformation. In these degenerate times, it is apparently okay to outright lie when trying to put over your point. The leader of this country cannot open his mouth without telling the most outrageous lies and expects to be believed without question. (The phrase, dammed lies, come to mind). When most of the media services these days feel too threatened to actually waste time verifying the accuracy of things said, we are in perilous times indeed. Of course that is the idea, when we cannot believe anything at all, whether it is true or false, you can steal an entire country.

There are a huge number of lies being told about the departments and institutions of this country in order to create a excuse to disable or close them down, and it is succeeding. Just last week we lost the Department of Education. For Gods sake! The Department of Education! This will have a long term effect on the level of education and knowledge of the citizens of this country, and not a good effect. Programs in the arts, museums and libraries, programs in science, medicine and technology are being slashed to death. It is an attack on anything intellectual, protective or useful to help the citizens of this country. It is just the beginning of a massive, suffocating wave of fascism threatening to drown us and all our freedoms.

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was an American writer, humorist, and essayist, one of the best and most perceptive this country has ever produced.

Growing up as a child in the 50’s and as a teen in the 60’s, I lived through the worst of the Cold War, that conflict between the ideologies of democracy and that of communism. I remember the drills in my school of ‘duck and cover’, the idea of hiding under our desk in event of an atomic attack. The utter foolish stupidity of that still never ceases to amaze me, (what was going to protect me when the school was blasted to bits by a nuclear blast). I remember the Civil Defense signs on buildings indicating that there was a nuclear air-raid shelter in the most bottom parts, stocked with food, water and bedding. We were all encouraged to build a shelter in our back yard to be prepared for the end-of-the-world, which surprisingly is still very much in vogue these days. The Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the many invasions by the Soviet Union of Eastern European countries, smaller conflicts around the globe of us vs them and how just the defeat of one foreign country could lead to a domino effect ending in the fall of democracy.

In my teen years I joined the Civil Air Patrol, (a civilian auxiliary of the US Air Force). I worked my way up by a program of leadership and study to the rank of Cadet Major, and considered a career in the military to serve against the Russians. I studied all of the moves by the Soviet Union to counter all of the US democratic moves around the Earth, I knew all the statistics of aircraft, naval vessels and submarines built for our defense. I was proud to have worked at Hill AFB one summer during my college years to package military supplies and equipment for our armed forces around the world. After I got married I still kept a close watch on world events and was delighted when I got a job at a newspaper which gave me unlimited access to all the noteworthy stories happening around the globe. After the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 I was overjoyed at the end of our most hated enemy and figured that it was the end of it all.

However, at the beginning of 2000, Vladimir Putin became the president of the Russia, and a new and much quieter Cold War began, and the very worst of it all was, that we didn’t even know we were in the most deadliest fight of our lives. It all concluded a few days ago, and within six weeks of the president taking over the oval office. Our very own newly elected leader of the land surrendered to Putin and Russia, unconditionally. To say that this was a total shock to me, is a vast understatement. I cannot even begin to express the unmitigated despair I feel now. I believe I finally know how the French population felt when their country surrendered to the Germans in June, 1940. I have never felt so powerless in my entire life, this gut punch is something I don’t think I can ever recover from. The complete betrayal of my country to Russia is beyond words. After a long lifetime of opposing those forces of darkness I can not see any hope for the future of our civilization. If you think I am being unnecessarily and overly dramatic, I am in deadly earnest. God forgive those people who did this, because I never will.

(A very long time ago when I thought about a different life, but took another path).

I have often wondered about the nature of evil, particularly since the advent of 9-11, when thousands of people were indiscriminately murdered by foreign terrorists. My casual studies have yielded a few understandable concepts in that there is natural evil, which is caused by natural causes, with such events like earthquakes, fires or pandemics. The other main evil is moral evil, which is directly caused by humans on other humans with such things as murder and by deliberate actions designed to cause pain and suffering. In my long life I had never thought, in my wildest imaginations, that evil would come to my country and be delivered by my fellow citizens.

There is no softening of phrases, evil has come to America.

In the last month this evil has been gleefully administered by our own elected representatives to those of us least able to resist it. Beginning with the destruction of programs to help hungry and sick people not only internationally but here at home as well. The canceling of most all of the programs enacted to protect and regulate things that would take advantage of and harm people have been swept aside. The richest man in the world has been empowered to destroy anything that he sees as check on his power and enables him in the exploitation of nearly everything around him. There has been the indiscriminate butchering of personnel from agencies that help and protect people in the daily conduct of their lives. There has been the deliberate and hideous placement of manifestly unqualified persons in charge of our most important agencies and protective institutions. And this in only one month. It has all been done in the feeble guise of saving money, but the destruction of programs that manifestly help millions and millions of needy people will be used for massive tax cuts for obscenely rich people that will again blow up the vast federal debt of our country.

If they can succeed in these early outrages, nothing that helps people will be safe from their avarice, any social program now standing will eventually be picked clean in service to the rich and powerful who lord over us from above. The incredible suffering to come will be catastrophic, truly a monstrous evil will descend on us.

What is there, if anything, that we can do?

I have always found some solace in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien through his character, the wizard Gandalf. “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.” But is this enough in our modern times? The power of an individual is small, and against the forces aligned against us today, even the power of many individuals many not be enough. Though all of history such evil men and their power has been eventually overthrown, but often at a great price and horrible effort by our civilization. Again from Tolkien, “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” I will try to find a way myself to help combat this modern evil, I must.

(We have a small Tolkien display in our family room to remind us to do good. It includes among other things, the Gandalf quote and a marvelous bronze sculpture of a Hobbit on horseback by fantasy artist Vincent Villafranca.)

Noun: The mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, I heard a lot about the importance of developing good character. Over time, I learned that character included a wide range of personal traits that defined an individual. Among others, integrity, respect, honesty, compassion, kindness, courage and self awareness were traits that were encouraged in a person of good character. I would like to think that I learned these qualities throughout my youth from my parents, teachers, priests, coaches, scout masters and other adults and friends. But, I have also come to realize lately, that absolutely no one talks about character anymore. Is this an outdated idea, much like manners, which seems to be another thing that has completely vanished?

Old fashioned as it may seem, I had hoped that good character is something that should never be allowed to die out. So why are we so bereft of it these days? We still have good schools, churches and other institutions and people that promote what we would define as good character. Are good character traits now seen as unnecessary and a weakness? Do we need to toughen up in order to deal with the modern world. Is the struggle for daily existence something that we need to give up our good character for?

As I see it, recently, many people have now surrendered their good character to a person of no character, to someone without a single redeeming human trait and who is anxious to destroy everything that anyone with good character would hold dear. Why didn’t enough people with good character stand up and oppose this? There is now a turning point in the history of us, the moment when we of good character turned away, and decided that it didn’t matter any more. I am embarrassed and distraught that we couldn’t do more to prevent this, and horrified that we will now be living in a place without integrity, respect, honesty, compassion, kindness, courage and self awareness. It is that desolate future long predicted in dystopian literature. I used to enjoy reading about those possibilities, and to avoid them. Now, living in it will be very much less enjoyable.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. As usual, Star Trek is there ahead of us.

In 2006, our son Rob went to Japan to study at a university in Hiroshima for three months as part of his masters degree research. Later he went back to Japan and Nagasaki for nearly a year at a university there. During his spring break in February – March of 2007, we decided join him and take a tour around the country for a couple of weeks. Since we were not part of a group or any kind of organized travel, we made our arrangements and bravely set out on our own. We flew from Salt Lake to San Francisco and then to Tokyo. From there we flew to Fukuoka. Nagasaki is not a large city with regular airline flights so we had to find the railroad station in Fukuoka and take a train. Needless to say, the whole trip it took a while. But Rob was waiting for us when we arrived and we had a joyful reunion.

Nagasaki had much foreign interaction from historic times with Portuguese and Spanish explorers and was an early missionary and Catholic enclave. The city grew as an important trading center and later as a shipbuilding and industrial center. This made it a major target during WWII for bombing by the U.S. and then a target for the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. We visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum the day after we arrived and the adjacent National Peace Memorial. The museum exhibits artifacts and photographs showing life in Nagasaki before the bomb and the terrible destruction after, it also has an eye-opening exhibit hall showing the history of nuclear arms development around the world.

The nearby Peace Park has a number of memorials surrounding a broad plaza with ruins of walls from buildings that once existed there. The main peace statue is 33 feet tall and at the other end of the plaza is the fountain of peace with sprays that resemble the wings of a dove. Scattered around the park are monuments from a number of countries around the world. As with Hiroshima, it is a place of sobering reflection on the horrors of war and was well worth the visit.

(Top left, my photographs of the peace statue and a small shrine nearby, Bottom left, a marker showing the hypocenter of the atomic explosion and one of the many other peace monuments.)

Yes, the universe is trying to kill you. As the tagline on my most recent book reads, ‘Five Smart Students, One Hostile Universe.’ My five graduate students are tossed into one dangerous situation after another from the beginning and are left to fend for themselves throughout the book. So, why did I write it that way? Now that the novel is quite finished, I can look back and ponder my reasons for doing it the way I did.

Set in 1973, it is, of course, an adventure, so naturally a lot of things are going to happen. It is also a science fiction book, so my characters are confronted with a large number of things quite detached from their daily routine. They are constantly trying to use their knowledge and experiences to deal with the unexpected that keeps coming at them, and that drives this story. My favorite SF books have always been adventures of people dealing with the difficult, unexpected and wondrous.

A writers workshop that I once attended had this advice, put your characters up a tree, and then throw rocks at them. I have followed this idea and in my book I sought to put my characters in a difficult place and then make it worse. As for pacing the action, I decided to go slow and work up to a point where things get really rough. An old writer friend advised against what he called information dumps. Don’t throw a lot of information all at once at the reader, they will forget it and become confused later trying to remember what is supposed to happen. Build up the situation one step at a time and finally get to a place where it becomes OMG, how did we get into this mess, and more important, how do we get out?

Some modern writers are of the school that they have to write a surprise or plot twist in almost every chapter. I’m afraid that I‘m the plodding kind of writer that takes his time getting to that surprise or twist, I find it much more satisfying that way. It also prevents plot whiplash, trying to keep up with the constant changes. You don’t have to throw different things at your readers all the time. I have found that if you keep the story moving forward with occasional hints that something is building up to a conclusion and a reveal, that is pretty much what most people expect from an author. Or at least that was my process, so we shall see how that works out.

(Since I am also an artist and designer, I thought that I would do my own book cover. Here are a few of the most interesting design ideas.)

When I began to write, I had very few advantages. I had no experience constructing long passages and none in designing a story line. My grammar was bad, and I kept repeating a lot of negative words and phrases in the text of my story, and my sentence structure would have made my high school English teachers blush with shame at their failure to properly teach me the basics of writing. However, you learn by doing something and keep on doing it. Fortunately, computers are great at going back for rewriting things and you learn a lot from trying out different ways of descriptive writing. If you ever stop to listen to a conversation, it is never straightforward. It twists and turns this way and that, so sometimes you have to edit the direction and clean up all the nonsense that people say.

However, there was one small advantage that I did have, and that was being an artist. I could see things. The only problem was that I am inexperienced in translating that into words. But it didn’t stop me from the occasional sketch which helped in visualizing a scene. And since I had some experience in theater, It was kinda like setting a stage, where people were, what they were doing and saying and what was happening around them. Also, if you are going to write about a real place, there is plenty of information and photos on line of said place. Unfortunately, part of my writing was about an ancient place that was 5,000 years old and there wasn’t much left to see there. Good thing about that visualization thing, I could pull it up and work from it anytime.

My imagination was always much better then my writing, though, by the second book, things were coming along. In the second book there were some battle scenes, where the action got hot and heavy. I was tentative at first, but as I continued writing, I found that I was more than adequate to the task. Thanks to all those historical war movies I have watched, those images served to boost my descriptive writing. Since I had also written cartoons in the past, my humor would show through on occasion which helped keep things lighter when it needed to be. Life is not always serious all the time and people like to take breaks from the daily grind of their existence. Besides, when the universe is not actively trying to kill you, it can often be quite amusing.

(Below, a hodgepodge of ideas, reference photos, sketches and roughs for various parts of the book and its cover.)