Fred observes that progress no longer points forward:
Women dominate domestic politics and so we have the Fear State. With them security security security trumps liberty or taking chances of any sort, and so we must ban pocket knives. They are afraid of guns, want kids to wear helmets on bikes, and think tag is a violent and dangerous game. Yes, there are exceptions, but fewer day by day. We must fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and fear second-hand smoke and things that go bump in the night. I suspect a lot of this vague anxiety stems from the lack of a settled and satisfying place in society.
Men run foreign policy, and do it with the ardor and brainless territoriality of retarded pit bulls. We must confront The Threat—this threat, that threat, any threat in a storm. After the Soviets punked out on us, we adopted Terr, Terrace, and Tersm as interim threats until China comes online. We must Fight, we must Show Them, we must Draw the Line. All across America men with grade-school minds and beachball paunches growl that we gotta gettem before they get us, if we don’t stoppem there, they’ll land on the beaches of Peoria….
Anyhow, this division of irresponsibility leads to contradictions. In school, low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel them if they play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits these transvestite artifacts and sends them off to shoot people they’ve barely heard of. What a plan. What clarity of vision. What consistency.
Assuming, of course, that it ever did. I couldn’t help but notice how women appear to be increasing ly dominating at least one aspect of the literary world when perusing the most recent SFWA Bulletin. Every single publisher mentioned was looking for more “paranormal romance”, which apparently derives its appeal from the overweight single woman’s desire to derive sexual as well as emotional fulfillment from her cats.
There were even several publishers who openly stated that they only publish female writers. I wonder if the SFWA is as accomodating of those who won’t publish black and Jewish writers….