14 Feb 2009. "Open the eyes of my heart ... " Happy V-Day! 
11 Feb 2009. Punchline, please ... Certainly there's something funny about this star pattern in the urinal closest to my office. Surely. 
24 May 2008. Rampike! An experimental piece I wasn't entirely certain was even publishable has just been picked up by Rampike, the literary journal of the University of Windsor. They've been at it since 1979, and have published the likes of Burroughs, Acker, Banks, Auster, Derrida, Eco, Kristeva, and many, many more. This one's the piece I mentioned that seemed to be stumping most editors thus far. "the gravity of the moment" will appear in the next issue of Rampike, later this year. 9 May 2008. Pushcart A good-news, bad-news kind of entry:
My novel manuscript, Signal
to Noise, has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Editors Award.
Which is great news, because entry requires a letter of endorsement
from a publisher who, for whateverr reason, couldn't publish the novel.
It's a pretty big compliment, really. But,
then I got a letter from the editor behind the Pushcart Award — a
polite, hand-written one, at that — informing me that the award
isn't going to be awarded this year. So I'm a Pushcart-nominates author
now without a publisher for the nominated ms. 19 February 2008. Avery Anthology! After reading some amazing reviews of The Avery Anthology of New Fiction, I decided to order a copy of their second anthology. You should, too - everyone should. This is a small-press project that is breaking the molds of traditional literary fiction. Plenty of worthwhile experimentation from a talented lineup. In particular, Dan Chaon's piece, "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily White Hands," blew my freakin' socks off. I ordered a copy of their first anthology today, and their third is accepting subs until March 1st. Check them out. Seriously. 06 August 2007. A Minor Manifesto I've been aware
of techniques such as cut-up, collage, erasure, sampling and remixing
for years as they've been applied by the postmodernists, the surrealists,
the avant garde, and others in literature and in music. In fact,
it was Dave "Rave" Ogilvie's mixing and arranging strategies, combined
with the above techniques as applied by industrial-music pioneers
Skinny Puppy, that inspired my use of those techniques from 1990-93
on my industrial/experimental music radio show, The Foundry. The
whole idea was to disrupt the idea of the song, the separation between
DJ and music, and the controlled explosion of the typical radio program.
I'd capture FM radio noise during a good summer Iowa thunderstorm,
harvest soundbites from the news, whatever movies and documentaries
I could get, toss AM Christian radio feeds into the mix live ...
the show ran with no pause to the audio from start to finish, thundering,
seething feedback juggernaut. Often a song would end with a separate
voice-over still going strong; the song would decay into the noise
mix I had going, the voice — Burroughs reading, say, or something
that struck me as compelling from CNN or NPR — continuing on
as a new song arose from the ashes of the mix. Boundaries broken.
Mission accomplished. The Foundry won the station's award for Best
Specialty Show three years in a row. 03 July 2007. The Dust Settles: *Whew!* SU's annual
weeklong, intensive Summer Writers Workshop is done, and I've spent
the past few days recovering. Man! It's a great week, a time for
so much creative energy and old-fashioned hard work on one's art,
but it's also a stringer of 12-hour days for me, and at week's end,
I'm bushed. One of the best moments for me as an instructor this
week: Maddie, a student from my section last summer, came running
up to me in a crowd of students between classes yelling a line I
shared with my class last year, but which I meant to censor from
my actual reading. Read my novel excerpt at The
Loudest Guffaw -- it's the bit about the arch of The Siren's
back. 24 June 2007. Dunce Cap Nation: The headline is
taken from the Newsweek
story that's almost too depressing to report: 41 percent of Americans
polled "still believe Saddam Hussein's regime was directly involved
in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11,
even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection." 15 May 2007. My Students Love me: It's mid-May
and the dust from the end of the school year is settling, and with
it arrives news that actually startled me. Some of my students from
Susquehanna University have started a Facebook group called "I
Heart Jonathan Lyons," where the word heart is replaced
with <3 The students in my Intro to Speculative Fiction Writing class have compiled a Bestiary comprising our own, original creations. Drop by and pet the beaties. 13 May 2007. The Loudest Guffaw: Cool news — as
I continue my campaign to find a publisher for my third novel, Signal
to Noise, I've just gotten word that a new lit zine with an emphasis
on poetry and music criticism will publish an excerpt from said novel
in their inaugural issue. The
Loudest Guffaw is the magazine — coming soon. 3 Feb 2007. My Other Vacuum is a Robot: That's my Sci-Fi Life: right now, an iRobot Roomba is vacuuming the upstairs floor of our apartment. It's kind of an amazing convenience; we set it to work, it finds its way around and under things, and the cats become suspicious. They keep and eye on it, make sure it doesn't get out of line. Teaching writing workshops in creative nonfiction and - and this was a great victory, in a way - speculative fiction, by which I mean virtually any nonrealistic mode. That class is generating a delightful avalanche of a variety of sci-fi, modern fantasy, magical realism, and the just plain weird. I'm in a visiting position at The Writers Institute at Susquehanna University, so who knows when I'll have this opportunity again, but it's fun while it lasts. And I'm the only member of faculty who has an android's-head sculpture in my office from one of my students. Top that. 2 Feb 2007. Pheobe! My long (10,000 words)
short story, "The Good Life," is out this month in Phoebe,
the literary journal from George Mason University. It's a significant
literary feather in my cap as a writer, particularly as the field
has become ever more crowded, and ever more difficult for fiction.
Virtual bubbly all 'round! 12 November 2006. Me: "I'm going to pair Daniel Jeffreys' new journalism piece 'Not Meant For Walking,' from America's Back Porch, with the Steve Martin gag-song, 'The Cruel Shoes,' for my nonmajors' creative writing course." My wife: "I don't know how you can call what you do teaching." 29 October 2006. My short story, "The Good Life," has just been selected to appear in the upcoming issue of Phoebe - A Journal of Literature and Art, which is produced at George Mason University. 27 October 2006. Baby steps: It's not much to brag about, but here in small-town Central PA, the students in my science fiction literature course have turned me on to Sunoco's 10 percent ethanol blends. This is a baby step away from dependence on fossil fuels and, likely, foreign oil. It's not much, but it's better than nothing; imagine the impact if we all did this -- the increase in domestic ethanol production alone would be an economic boost for our farmers and for ethanol producers, and would stop shipping our dollars to the Middle East — at least some of them. Another baby step: I was appalled when we moved out here to find that the place we'd rented was heated with heating oil — we'd be burning oil directly to heat our homes, and we had no other option. I commute between my home in Lewisburg and Susquehanna University, where I teach. A couple of weeks ago I spotted a billboard for meetbioheat.com. I checked them out, and found out that they offer a home heating oil at the same price as the stuff we'd been buying, but with reduced sulphur content and a 20 percent blend of biodiesel. So it pollutes less, and with this we buy 20 percent less fossil fuel, and probably 20 percent less foreign oil. I'm spreading the word out here; this is a simple, responsible change we should really all make, if we use heating oil. I think of these as baby steps because they're changes we can all make without any change in infrastructure. It costs us nothing to make these adjustments. Imagine what we could do if many, many more of us did this. 21 October 2006. Mid-semester and I almost can't believe we're halfway there. The courses are going well. My sci-fi lit course students are particularly raucus — which is great for a discussion-driven course. My non-writing-major creative writing students have been doing all sorts of experimentation as we hit the part of the course that deals with poetry and related forms; I've had them doing group and individual cut-ups, explored cut-up theory and the poetry of the surrealists, shown them A Humument, had guest speakers Dr. Karline McLain, on Faiz Ahmad faiz, Ghalib, and the ghazal and related forms; Betsy Wheeler, Bucknell U's Stadler Center for Poetry Fellow, who read and interacted with the students about her poetic form, the non-sonnet; Dr. Karla Kelsey, who gave a talk on concrete poetry and erasure strategies, and read from her collection, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, which we followed up with an erasure exercise using a page from Frankenstein. I never thought I'd be teaching poetry, but we all seem to be having fun, and it's quite a different mode of thinking from how I, anyway, operate when I'm writing prose. So that's fun. Up next: an excerpt from Brian Teare's heart-wrenching poetry collection, the Brittingham Award-winning The Room Where I Was Born. Karline teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Bucknell; Karla is a colleague of mine on the faculty of The Writers Institute at Susquehanna University; Brian is on the poetry faculty at California College of the Arts, where I did my graduate work. 5 October 2006. My sci-fi students got a dose of gay SF in the form of "thirteen o'clock," by David Gerrold. This story was a challenge to my students from me; it is an in-your-face first-person story from the point of view of a gay Vietnam veteran who is also something of an evolutionary leap, one of a new, telepathic population — only it takes him the entire story to figure that out. The idea presents us with an interesting problem and a solution I'm sure some of my students found profoundly unsettling: By making the reader face graphic and unapologetic homosexuality, then showing us that the narrator is part of a phenomenon that erases all boundaries, Gerrold effectively repulses at least some readers, then makes them realize that, if this phenomenon occurs, we'll all be effectively sharing the same experiences and attitudes. We will become the other he spends so much time forcing us to confront. I expected a bit of rebellion with this one, and got a little, but by and large I'm impressed with how well even sheltered and religious students reacted to the story. This one's a keeper — and I suggest that other SF instructors out there check it out, as well.It ran just this past February in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. 04 Jul. 06 *WOW!* We just wrapped up our 19th annual Summer Writers Workshop at The Writers Institute Saturday afternoon, and I'm just now able to blog about it. Imagine, if you will, more than 50 young writers, all self-selected, gathering for a week of intensive practice in their chosen art. Incredible, as experiences go. I've said this before, but when I was in grad school at California College of the Arts, I felt very much at home. I was surrounded by artists in various fields and modes, and artists are some of the most intensively individualistic people you'll ever meet. Fast forward to S.U. and the Institute: With a writing major, I have a community of young writers who are every bit as individualistic and, oddly, their creative impulse, that drive to be not what the dominant culture demands of them, but their own, unique beings, feels very much like the atmosphere back at CCA. I tend to think of this community as my Isle of Misfit Toys. Remember that old stop-action animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer holiday special, the one with the elf who wanted to be a dentist? That made that elf a freak — an outcast. All of the unique individuals who felt outcast by their boring mainstream peers wound up on the Island of Misfit Toys with the dentist elf, not misfits at all in a community of such individual cohorts. That's how I see our writing community at The Writers Institute: It is my Island of Misfit Toys. All of those brilliant, creative individuals who somehow wash ashore on that isle find a community of smart, creative individuals who are, crazy as it might sound, working to hone their art. It's amazing. And I'm told by some of them that they're planning to use a line from the section of my new novel that I read from at my reading Wednesday night as their new MySpace headline. This past week, teaching the Summer Workshops, I've had the opportunity to meet and work directly with 15 young artists who have, astoundingly, self-selected as writers at such an early age as to have the drive and determination to pursue that path years before I ever attempted to capture my stories on paper. It was amazing. I had a blast. And my students wanted to extend the courses out through the rest of the summer. (Not much chance of that; I and my fellow teaching writers just came off of a week of 15-hour days. We'd never last if it went much longer.) Back when I was at CCA, I had the privilege of co-teaching and co-developing a course on science fiction for the summer semester under the tutelege of a very popular professor, Dr. Ignacio Valero. We had a great time — and we weren't the only ones. We started with three three-hour sessions a week. Then, with the students' endorsement, we added a movie night. Every Tuesday we'd watch a sci-fi double-header in the theater at the Oakland campus. Then, when the summer semester was finished, neither we nor the students wanted it to be over. So we kept the keys to the theater, and we kept on meeting for movie night and long discussions for the rest of the summer. Of the two dozen students we had during the regular summer semester, a dozen just kept on coming. We finally, grudgingly, had to bring it to a halt when the fall semester began. My students this past week have been an inspiration, and we've spent a lot of time together. To any of them who stumble across this journal, I'll say it again: I'm glad you came to spend a week on my Island of Misfit Toys. We're all welcome here. I had a blast. * I've managed to land a position as visiting assistant professor at The Writers Institute for next year! And I get to teach a sci-fi/fantasy/fabulist section of creative writing, as well! For what it's worth, I recently has a science fiction poem published. "Chimera" was picked up by Ultraverse e-zine; it's a tanka. 16 Apr. 06 Sometimes, the picture just says it
all: 13 Apr. 06 Books/Publications read during this sabbatical semester:
There's more. You should see my To Read stack. I am convinced right now that Tin House is the most important voice for new American fiction around (though here in Central PA I can't actually buy much in the way of literary publications). The Magazine of F&SF is a good source for new speculative literature, but its contents are pretty hit-and-miss, for me. It's also a prime source of new literature in a field/genre I teach, and its inclusion of fantasy helps me keep up-to-date with new high fantasy lit for my upcoming course in sf/high fantasy/the fantastic/speculative fiction creative writing. From what I've heard from students salivating for the course, I expect to wind up with plenty of high-fantasy fans. The latest issue of the Mag of F&SF has a fantasy piece, "Bea and Her Bird Brother," by Gene Wolfe, which I'm going to pair with the legendary Gabriel Garcia Marquez magical realism tale, "A Very Old man With Enormous Wings," to give my young writers a sense of the difference between high fantasy and literature of the fantastic. The New Yorker's publishing-industry-driven fiction selection has started to bore the hell out of me; half a dozen Haruki Murakami stories in the past year, while literally thousands of fiction writers are dying to get their work into the magazine's pages, seems a disservice to the fiction community as a whole. I don't think they're so far gone that I'd abandon them altogether — plenty of good stuff from Jonathan Lethem, Tobias Wolfe, Thomas McGuane, and plenty of others; it's just that I see trends in The New Yorker's fiction selections that put me off. And they in no way got toe-to-toe with Tin House. I can't recommend the books from Karla and Tom and Tom highly enough. 29 Mar. 06 I wanted to take a few minutes to write about the state of the fiction publishing industry today. The picture isn't pretty. When a legend like Annie Dillard, one of my literary heroes, publicly bemoans the difficulty with getting fiction published, things are not all Halcyon and sunshine in Pleasantville. Here's what Annie has to say about things:
There's a consensus on this. The literary journal Orchid now routinely tells fiction writers:
As one of my grad school profs told me, no one should ever expect to make a living as a fiction writer. Not on the revenues from the fiction alone, anyway. The market is just not letting that happen today. And that's from a guy who has a New York Times bestseller (a nonfiction book on 9/11, though — not fiction). So what's a fiction writer to do? What's a fiction writer need to survive and make it? Tenacity and a tough hide. That's what experience tells me. The single most valuable thing I tell people entering their first fiction workshop is that a fiction workshopper needs not only talent as a writer, but the ability to take criticism, along with just enough of a dose of megalomania to take a hard look at the criticism you receive when your work is being critiqued, not take that criticism as a referendum on you, discern which people get what you're trying to do, and decide from that reduced pool of comments which might actually improve your work. Decide for yourself, but take the advice, thus whittled down to what's useful, seriously. And I think all of us in the fiction market can benefit from similar advice: Expect rejections. Lots of 'em. We all get them. Don't let them discourage you. Keep the encouraging personal notes you get, because they're a signal that you're getting close. Shoulder those rejections, and trudge on. It's that kind of market. 23 Mar. 06 As I mention on my News & Reviews page, I've had a poem published in Ultraverse Magazine. It's a sci-fi tanka called "Chimæra." So far, it looks as though I'll be teaching my Science Fiction Foundations Seminar at Bucknell in the fall, and a couple of Writing and Thinking courses at Susquehanna. What's also really cool is this: I'll almost certainly be teaching a sci-fi & fantasy Creative Writing course through Susquehanna in the spring (which will come as good news to any of my former Creative Nonfiction students; they really wanted that class on the books when i asked them, and the dept. let me pitch it. 11 Feb. 06 I've been a bit quiet on this journal for the past few days. What's happened is that I've decided to do my more political blogging on DailyKos . That frees this journal up for other subjects. Life in the U.S. today is inextricably intertwined with politics, though, so I'm sure a political thread will still run through this journal. I've received my instructor evaluations from my students at both schools, and it looks as though both classes had a great time. I dragged them all through some deeply challenging material, so I'm glad to hear that, as they did all semester, they rose to the challenge once more. I had a blast teaching those courses, and look forward to teaching some more! 24 Jan. 06 Gen. Michael Hayden, the nation's No. 2 intelligence official, speaking to the New York Daily News, repeated the administration's neocon claim about the Bush people's warrentless wiretapping of Americans: "Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the al-Qaida operatives in the United States. " That's a flat-out lie: "The NSA, with full knowledge of the White House," began warrantless domestic spying shortly after Bush first took office, in early 2001, long before September 11. The Bush people are also telling us to trust them, telling us that they are only spying on suspected al Qaeda militants. That, also, is untrue: Mother Jones reported back in 2003 that: "Under a Justice Department training curriculum, police are taught to pay attention to citizens' political affiliations and ... directed to collect information on the 'structure, philosophy, number of members, [and] locations' of groups including 'the Green Movement,' which is defined as 'environmental activism that is aimed at political and social reform with the explicit attempt to develop environmentally friendly policy, law, and behavior." So if you care about the environment and have said so in any public way — such as, say, signing a petition here and there in support of the environmental movement — the Bush people think you're a threat, and may be watching you. Recently, the mainstream media caught up with this story. Now the dangerous ones, according to the Bush people, are vegetarians, peace activists, and civil rights advocates. People like me. Why? What makes a peace activist more important to watch than an actual militant bent on taking American lives? What makes a vegetarian more dangerous than a suicide bomber? How can the administration justify spying on civil-rights activists? Trust us, the Bush people tell us. After all, when have they ever lied to us before?21 Jan. 06 It has come to this: The Bush Administration not only turned around and left bin Laden when our toops had him hopelessly cornered; they not only then lied frequently, repeatedly, stridently, to fake our troops into an undeclared war in whhich we are rightly viewed as occupiers; but now they have also brought our intelligence community's attention to bear on the ELF and ALF, groups that do property damage, and this at a time when bin Laden and his sympathizers are bent on taking American lives. Ask yourself: Who's more dangerous? Groups trying their damnedest to kill us, or groups trying to get us to pay attention to the problems caused by gas-guzzling, disproportionately polluting, rollover-hazard SUVs, and who do not target people? I know what this administration thinks about that. How embarrassing must it have been to have officials using their press announcement of the arrests to assure the public that the ELF and ALF people they'd taken really were terrorists, somehow? Our government does us an insulting disservice by putting protection of property before protection of human beings. 17 Jan. 06 Finally. 52% of Americans polled favor the impeachment of George W. Bush over the no-warrant wiretapping of Americans. Finally. As only 43% oppose impeachment, there's a solid majority of Americans who want to see Bush pay for at least some of his criminal actions. A shame the deaths of more than 100,000 people couldn't jar the public awake enough for this. Add to the impeachment poll the fact that the warrantless wiretapping scheme netted no al Qaeda cells within the U.S., and "virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. " 12 Jan. 06 From the SF Chronicle : "[Alito's] claimed lack of recollection of his membership in
the Concerned Alumni of Princeton -- which he highlighted in a 1985
job application with the Reagan administration -- defies credibility.
This was not an obscure club, but a group that was attracting national
attention with its assertion that the university was lowering its
standards in admitting more women and minorities -- and fewer children
of alumni. Does anyone really believe that an alumnus as astute as
Alito would be oblivious to its activities, or the message its inclusion
on a job application might send? The most frightening thing about all of this, to me, is this: Americans, by and large, do not seem concerned with the Orwellian Trojan Horse Alito represents. Again, women will lose. Again, the poor, nonwhites, those who give a damn about the environment — again, we who give a damn about each other and the world around us — lose. 5 Jan. 06 Crooks: "From the Oval
Office to Capitol Hill, prominent Republicans are scrambling to shed
campaign contributions linked to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff,
as his guilty pleas in fraud and corruption cases opened a painful
debate within the party over its leadership and direction. There's really no end to the totalitarian, money-grubbing, backroom-dealing, unconstitutional spying lengths of corruption this administration will go to. The executive branch is now in a clear power struggle with the judiciary and legislative branches, insisting that it has the right to do pretty much whatever it wants, the laws of the land be damned. This is a dangerous time for America. Also in the news, we learn what anyone who's been paying any attention at all already knew: SUVs are not safer than other vehicles. So let's tally the cons: SUVs roll over onto their roofs and kill their occupants; they guzzle gas; they pollute disproportionately; most drivers simply do not know how to drive them safely; their headlights are so high they blind drivers from front and behind; they are disproportionately dangerous to other drivers and passengers when involved in a wreck; they are, in short, an obnoxious, foolish choice for nearly everyone. Most people driving them make no use whatsoever of their hauling capacity — most commute in them, using the multi-ton death machines to ferry one person to and from work. Their position as some sort of deranged status symbol is no excuse. It's time for SUV culture to peter out, no matter how cool and popular you might think you look driving one. 21 Dec. 05 Wow. A highly improbable (250 million-to-one against) election result favoring Bush in Ohio. Torture at Abu Ghraib. Torture at secret CIA prisons outside the U.S. Indefinite imprisonment for those thought — not proven to be, not even charged with being, merely thought to be — terrorists. The FBI spying on groups to the left of the neocons. And now, wiretaps against Americans, without seeking the required warrants from a court that has declined this request once in the past 30 years. And Bush lied about it, outright lied, on camera, with that condescending and profoundly irritating grin he puts on when explaining a position, speaking to a roomfull of White House journalists as though talking to second-graders. I wonder, now, whether we're entering the post-American era. This Orwellian state of affairs is certainly nothing like what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they risked their lives to escape the absolute, crushing power of King George. (Ironic, that: A country founded in opposition to one King George, now soiled by the criminal actions of another one.) Bush let Cheney insinuate himself into the vice presidency because Bush either knew no bette or simply did not care. That's the choice we have with judging Reagan's reign. Now an out of touch, impatient, aloof, unitelligent, incurious, and arrogant man who tells his staff specifically not to bring him bad news (!!!) and who does not watch the news and who does not seem to mind being the puppet whose strings are pulled by monsters such as Cheney and Karl Rove, and who had to be dragged out of his power-drunk indifference to even notice what was happening in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina tells us to simply trust him. He's only using this un-Constitutional power, this law-breaking, Big-Brother-esque surveillance, this Soviet-Era, KGB-like, unlimited, do-whatever-we-want, totalitarian rule to spy on a LesBiGay anti-"Don't Ask Don't Tell" kiss in, the Pentagon labelling it a credible terrorist threat. They watch us vegans. They call the Catholic Workers neo-communist, and watch them, too. Think it's worth it? Heed the words of Benjamin Franklin: "People who are willing to give up freedom for the sake of short term security, deserve neither freedom nor security." Is this the end? This certainly isn't the America I learned about growing up; certainly not the one I honored in Cub Scouts and, later, Boy Scouts; certainly not the America my uncles served in Vietnam, nor the America my grandfathers served in World War II to protect. It seems, instead, to be beginning to resemble to totalitarian regimes we have so often railed against, as a nation. But that was then. I keep wondering why the neocons don't mind the loss of our freedoms. I keep wondering why they don't mind being lied to so obviously and so frequently. Clear Skies Initiative, an Orwellian name for legislation that allowed MORE air pollution. The Patriot Act, which imposed un-American surveillance upon us citizens and thumbed its nose at our Constitutional protection against arbitrary search and seizure. And now, no-warrant wiretapping of Americans, conducted exclusively within the Executive Branch. The judge who was supposed to be the Judicial Branch's oversight in that affair just resigned in protest, because the Bush Administration wasn't even trying retroactively to get court approval. That means that the Executive Branch is now in conflict with both the Legislative Branch (Congress, for breaking laws, ignoring the Constitution, and refusing to consult with them on this issue), and the Judicial, for thumbing its nose at even the pretense of consultation with that branch. This is a Constitutional Crisis Bush-Cheney have foisted upon us, and I wonder just how bad things will get. 9 Dec. 05 Teaching this semester has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I've been fortunate to have bright, engaged, thoughtful, participating students who are curious about the world around them and the subject matter I've been fortunate enough to teach. In particular, I must say I've met some astoundingly talented young writers at Susquehanna's Writers' Institute. My thanks to them, and to my departments, for this semester.
Even if you honestly believed Saddam Hussein had somehow managed to get nuclear arms and an unmanned drone technology that could deliver it across the Atlantic, to us — a technology even we don't have; even if you believed that Dick Cheney's special intelligence-filtering office on the grounds at the CIA wasn't cooking the evidence to fake up a case for pre-emptive war; even if you believed the neocons when they told us we could do this with so few troops; even if you swallowed the entire, sublime, treacherous lie, you have to know by now that you were lied to, repeatedly, and that with Iraq's government and opposition parties asking us to pull out, Rep. Murtha is right. It's time to get our troops, seen as occupiers now, not liberators, redeployed in a systematic way that lets Iraq become its own nation once more. This administration waves flags and thumps its chest about how it supports our troops, all while somehow not managing to give them enough water (they get two liters in desert conditions); to give them enough body armor; to give them enough vehicle armor — failing even to give them a clear mission or enough troops and resources to do the job. That's not support. That is a humiliating abuse of our fighting forces, and a disgusting refusal to help them readjust to civilian life after serving multiply-extended tours in this war we're waging on Bush's whim. All this from an administration stocked with chicken hawks — that is, people who used family influence to dodge the draft in Vietnam. And George W. Bush has ordered his staff not to bring him any bad news, and Iraq isn't generating much in the way of good news. That head-in-the-sand indifference to the truth might be behind his ability to proclaim "amazing progress" in a civilization that is now engaged in a bitter civil war because of us. He probably just doesn't know the truth. If he does, then I'd say his ability to inflate the size of the lies he's willing to tell indicates just how under fire this detached White House really is. Either way, it's a no-win scenario for both us and the Iraqi people. Because the amount of oil we're taking from Iraq remains a state secret, I can only conclude that it's likely that oil is the primary reason we have no exit strategy. (Frank Herbert, of course, predicted this whole murderous mess in Dune.) I don't see any reason to mince words or censor my thoughts on all this, and I wish that the mainstream newsmedia and the Democratic Party would find their spines and do the same. The Dems should shut boring, mild, inelegant-speaking and, frankly, too-conservative John Kerry away from the spotlight and let someone like Howard Dean speak up, someone with enough courage to speak out on what's actually happening here. 18 Nov. 05 When we lived in Austin, just before this immoral, undeclared disaster of a war on Iraq, I recall a counter-protester heckling anti-war protesters at the UT-Austin campus. He held aloft a sign proclaiming that he was looking forward to the cheaper gas prices neocons expected from the seizing of Iraq's oil supplies. But that didn't happen. As Big Oil reaps record profits, we're all expected to pay significantly higher heating bills this winter. Gas prices have skyrocketed. And I wonder: How can anyone be surprised by this? W is an oil man. Big Oil sat in on Dick Cheney's energy policy meetings while conservation-minded groups were left out. And now the White House is keeping the amount of oil we're looting from Iraq a state secret. Why aren't we allowed to know this? Why is the extent of our theivery kept secret from us? If we found out, would we be appalled? Bush was never, ever in this for the people; he was in it for Big Oil. And now that Big Oil is sucking away at Iraq and price-gouging us Americans, all the while reaping record profits, his pro-corporate, pro-oil, anti-individual leanings stand naked, crystal clear before us. What did you think would happen? Did that idiot back in Austin really think Bush's oil war and Cheney's back-room dealings with the fossil-fuel industry were really meant to help him? Drive your gas-guzzlers, they told us, the American people. Consume in gross, disproportionate, greedy gluttony. It's the American Way, ex-White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer told us. This while Bush was conflating the terms freedom and free market, pretending that the two are interchangeable. My fellow Americans, you have been lied to, and you have been screwed over, we have all been had. 12 Nov. 05 So now "President" Bush is lashing out at those questioning White House manipulation of the intelligence used to drum up a case for war. He's calling them revisionists. He's angry, and he's running out of people to tell him what to do. He and his presidency and his voluntary, undeclared war are miserable failures. Unmitigated disasters. Period. And the revisionism charge? In a word, it is bullshit. In early 2002, when we lived in India, I was keeping up with world news via the Internet. On the New York Times' home page, a news analysis article laid out, step by step, how the administration was going to create a weapons-inspection crisis. Front page. Everyone on Earth should have been howling to their leaders and the skies and the gods to make it not happen. Instead, the vast majority of us went about our business, refusing to give enough of a damn to inform ourselves. Then, as the Bush administration followed the plan laid out in the Times, step by step, the American people seemed genuinely surprised. They didn't mind the Bush people insinuating Hussein and Osama bin Laden together — far from it. They swallowed the whole, enormous lie hook, line, and sinker. Many — far too many — still believe it. A lack of critical thinking allowed the American public to believe in the lie of a Hussein-bin Laden alliance. I hear the extremists on AM hate radio still clinging to this claim, but they really shouldn't; even the Bush people now distance themselves from that lie, claiming that they never said there was any connection. Sure, the "president" has mired the two together in dozens of speeches, and sure, far too many Americans — more than 45 percent at one point — just accepted the lie, but the fact of the matter is that there was no such alliance. Hussein and bin Laden hated each other. If the Bush Administration can admit that, hiding behind lies that they never said or implied that, why can't the legion of spitting-mad hate radio right-wingers do so, as well? And I am tired of hearing Democrats go on CNN and claim that they really, really believed that Hussein had nukes and a sort of ultra-long-range unmanned drone, the likes of which even we didn't have, to deliver a nuke across the Atlantic. I knew that was bullshit when the Bush people were claiming it; why didn't the Democrats? Maybe they should get outside the D.C. bubble a bit more. For five years they have refused to show any spine, to act in any way as an opposition party, to know what so many of us knew in 2002: that the case for war was based on a raft of enormous, obvious lies. Seeing a little spine and opposition from them now, finally, brings at least some minor relief. But it is also, to me, too little, too late. Some counts place the Iraqi civilian death toll over 100,000. Why did the Democrats ever swallow such huge, obvious falsehoods? When I saw Senator Diane Feinstein on CNN wringing her hands and telling the American public that she had sincerely believed in the nukes and the super-drone from Iraq, I simply did not believe her. John Kerry either. I don't believe them because they have no excuse not to know what I knew just from keeping up with the news. Why weren't they suspsicious of Cheney setting up an intelligence-spinning office at the CIA? I was. Why didn't they know the Niger uranium memo and deal were not just bad intelligence, but bad fakes? The memo itself was riddled with typos and supposedly signed by people out of office long before the memo was supposed to have been created. Plenty of us knew just from reading the news. Senators: We do not believe you. "President" Bush: We do not believe you. Your bumbling has cost lives in the six-figure range, the lives of people who did nothing to you or me and did not deserve to die so that you could settle your dad's old score. 20 Oct. 05 When everyone who's told W what to say and do is led away in chains and manacles, will he freeze up, as Reagan did when his teleprompter went out as the then-president addressed British Parliament? 20 Oct. 05 Poor Karl Rove. Poor Scooter Libby. Poor Robert Novak. It's getting to the point where you can't commit treason in this country without someone raising a fuss. And poor Tom Delay. Laundering money and conspiracy are the least of that thug's crimes. 19 Oct. 05 Man, has teaching kept me busy! Bright, dedicated students keep me going. I cannot believe the demands they make of themselves. Hurricane Wilma — the last name they have for the hurricane season, meaning that we've exhausted the list and are about to begin naming tropical storms with letters from the Greek alphabet — is now the strongest hurricane on record. It's feeding on tropical waters warmed by global climate change, just as we've known for 30 years would happen. Our unelected president's fossil-fuel addiction is here to haunt us. I wonder: Now, will the people who hope to bark global climate change out of existence listen? The anything-to-avoid-doing-anything-about-it argument had better die soon; it's certainly killing plenty of us. With Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Dick Cheney in line for indictments, and several state GOP bigwigs in prison now for a variety of corruption charges, I wonder who'll be around to tell George No. 2 what to say and do? 23 Sept. 05 The catastrophic American situation we find ourselves mired in today is simply stupid. Period. We have known for more than 30 years that if we did not adopt alternative energy sources, increase fuel efficiency, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we could expect to be crippled again by another fossil fuel crisis, and we could expect more frequent and more devastating hurricanes. Now they're both here, and the politicians who did nothing, the politicians and hate radio performers and people who ignored the existence of global climate change, just keep saying that no one could have predicted this storm season or the damage it has caused already. Well guess what? That's a lie. Plausible deniability won't get anyone out of this one. Environmental scientists have been telling us that this - exactly what is happening now - would happen. And for the morally impotent reason of politics, people ignored the science. They claimed to doubt it. They pretended it was some vague political notion they could just ignore, just yell at until it went away. Now we reap the crop of the ignorance we have sown. One Republican senator still has a sign up in his office about global climate change. It reads: "It's a hoax!" Oust these idiots, these charlatans, these big-money corporate lapdogs. Throw them out before we lose any more coastal cities, any more American lives, before we throw any more wars for oil and oil companies and Halliburton, before we kill any more citizens of sovereign countries so we can steal their resources. All it would have taken was new sources of energy, getting us off the fossil fuel habit; greater fuel efficiency; and stronger environmental protections. What did we get? Grossly obese SUVs and Hummers that get as little as 8 mpg. Hell, the Model T got 25 mpg. That was 100 years ago. Don't tell me we can't do it. They already do in the EU. Bush could have done something about this; instead, he openly sided not with us American people, but with big oil and big corporations. So long, New Orleans. So long, Houston. So long, Galveston, so long Gulf Coast. Clinton could have done more to stop this, too. And the first Bush, and Mr. Plausible Deniability himself, Reagan. Jimmy Carter tried to get Americans thinking about the oil crisis that struck on his watch. He advised Americans to conserve, to set thermostats at 65 degrees in wintertime. And he led by example, setting White House thermostats accordingly and wearing a sweater in the Oval Office. People dispised him for it. The message since then has been grim: Americans have been told that gross overconsumption of fossil fuels is "the American way." Ex-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that. Those advocating alternative sources of energy have been cast in the media as distainable hippies. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that the hole in the ozone layer was a liberal NASA hoax. He and his hate radio brethren first told their flocks that global climate change wasn't real, so we didn't have to do anything. Then some of them were forced to admit that that was a stupid position, as nearly every scientist on the planet disagreed with them. It was an issue they couldn't just yell at until it went away. So they decided to insist that humankind had nothing to do with it, ignoring the scientists and their warnings again. So, they said, we don't have to do anything about it. That stupidity has come home to roost. 17 Sept. 05 Sometimes, someone steps up and says it better than anyone else. Bill Maher on Bush: "Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished. "Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote. "But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes. "On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. "So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.'" Want to know what kind of man we're dealing with? Check out Maureen Dowd's Sept. 14 column. 13.Sept.05 President Bush says that pudgy, wealthy, and white buddy Trent Lott, one of whose properties was destroyed in the hurricane, will get the aid he needs to rebuild. This while hurricane victims in New Orleans faced their fifth day of subhuman living conditions thanks to federal inaction. Keep this in mind: Only a few days earlier, he was full of blame-the-victims bluster, vowing "zero tolerance" for looters. Oh — and the federal government wasn't sending any food or supplies, either. Oh, and armed local law enforcement wasn't letting those impoverished black hurricane victims cross a bridge on foot to the neighboring Jefferson Parrish, which had running water and power, either; these people didn't have any chance of escaping and surviving these horrors. Barbara Bush thinks that the evacuee victims are better off now because they were impoverished before anyway. It all reminds me of the time the first President Bush went on a PR visit to a supermarket to show the world what a regular guy he was. It backfired, of course. George H.W. Bush had no idea that we in the regular America he never experiences can buy our bread sliced. And he'd never seen a bar-code scanner in a check-out aisle before. What we have here is a consistent pattern of a removed, aloof, wealthy Bush and Co. hopelessly out of touch with the real world where we, the people who supposedly voted them into power, exist. And while the current George Bush (George H.W. Bush was the earlier iteration; George P. Bush is being groomed for office in the wings) insists that there is no racial motive in his administration's inaction, his own words from the 2000 presidential campaign would seem to contradict that. Recall that when asked whether the U.S. should have intervened to stop the genocide in Rwanda, George W. Bush said that no, we should not have helped save those impoverished black people from the horrors of genocide and terror. Why? Because, he said, Rwanda held no economic motivation for us to intervene. And his supporters cheered. They cheered for his position refusing to lift a finger against the genocide. I wonder, who was cheering as the Bush Administration let those impoverished black people in New Orleans wade in sewage for days, let them starve and die, let them be victimized by criminals, let their dead bodies lie unattended, to be eaten by rats in the streets, all while New Orleans Mayor Nagin repeatedly begged, demanded, and publicly pleaded for federal assistance? We are, after all, talking about a president who told his staff in no uncertain terms not to tell him bad news about Iraq. The result is clear: George W. Bush and his people live in a reality removed from ours. Is it any wonder they did not notice the death cries of those impoverished black victims in New Orleans? And the same in-your-face corruption marches on. Halliburton and other Bush-connected corporations are getting big-money sweetheart deals to help with the recovery. Limbaugh stabs a chubby finger at the refugees and insists that they are not refugees, using a minor and technical issue to further blame the victims. (What could he possibly hope to gain by this tactic?) And, when CNN transformed itself into an independent mass-media hurricane aid resouce, heroically filling as much of the void left by federal inaction as they could, Fox "News" invested its energy in having a former NYPD guest blame New Orleans for not planning well enough for this, and has its morning talking heads complaining about the mayor and governor — both Democrats. ("Don't play the blame game," huh guys?) And on top of it all, Bush himself has assailed the poor and working-class again by using the disaster as an excuse to force down wages . As the saying goes, "If you're not infuriated, ... " 7.Sept.05 So, "president" Bush is going to personally head the inquiry into what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina, huh? Is there anyone on Earth who thinks he'll find himself and his administration negligent? This guy smoothes over photographic evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib — further humiliating us as a country. This whole thing reeks of whitewash and an appalling, disconnected lack of concern. Bush smiling that air-headed, condescending smile as he stands among pudgy, wealthy, white GOP lawmakers, all slapping each other on the back for this disgusting failure to give a damn, and Bush promising poor pudgy, wealthy, white GOP lawmaker Trent Lott, one of whose houses was damaged in the hurricane, that Lott would get a grand new house on the site. While rats ate at corpses left rotting in the street by this administration's inaction, Bush smiled that air-headed, condescending smile and told Lott he'd like to join him on his new porch. Yeah, George, y'all done a good job here. Just cue up that Sherriff Roscoe B. Coltrain laugh and that fake Texas accent and above all don't worry . This all goes to the heart of this administration's starve-the-beast, the-government-shouldn't-solve-people's-problems attitude, and it has had a substantial hand in the deaths of 10,000+ Americans. When you assume that all federal assistance programs are unnecessary, when you decide that any attempt to take care of people via the government is socialist and, therefore, you automatically stamp it with a label that reads "EVIL," you set yourself up for exactly this kind of catastrophic loss of life. I am appalled. I am embarrassed and humiliated at the Third World conditions this administration's inaction and that attitude have forced on us here, in the wealthiest coutry in the world. Even Africans accustomed to humanitarians can't believe what this administration has done to the us through its inaction. After all, how can the federal government respond credibly when it does not believe that the federal government should be the solution? Do I sound angry? I hope I do. And you have no excuse not to. Thousands of people, mostly poor, mostly black, already beneath this administration's focus on giving more money to people who already have plenty, were ignored to death in this disaster. And in the aftermath, the Bush Administration serves up a generous helping of spin. How heartless is it to complain to the media about these refugees and insist that they aren't refugees at all? How heartless is it to roll out the propaganda machine, insisting that no one play "the blame game"? (A sure sign, at least, that they are worried.) How smug is it to mug for the camera and act as though you, our pudgy, wealthy, white president, are so out of touch with the situation that you, personally, will find someone else to blame for this? 2.Sept.05 There is absolutely no excuse for the Federal Government's impotent response and foot dragging in Louisiana. These people — the vast majority of them black people — have been without food and water since Monday. We must air-drop food and relief supplies; right now, as Bush smiles that condescending smile and talks to CNN as though the newsmedia just don't understand the stunningly simple things he's saying, Americans are dying, wading in sewage, and starving to death. Looks to me as though E.L. Doctorow was right. This is madness. 31.Aug.05 "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." — Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004. Has this vountary, pre-emptive, under-soldiered, under-armored, corporate war for oil (see this also) and for Bush's ego cost us enough yet? We were lied to by Bush and the administration and tens of thousands of people are dying because of it — many of them Americans. When will the cost be high enough for us to stop snubbing the notion of fuel efficiency, or of alternative sources of fuel? Scientists and environmentalists have been telling us for 30 years that global climate change would dramatically increase the strength of hurricanes and worsen our worst weather. And guess what? We lost New Orleans — the whole thing, along with a lot of its population, and several other cities — to a freakishly violent storm. And not just New Orleans, either. I've heard an adage about what it would take to get people to alter their behavior: Catastrophe. Something that impacts people directly. Is this enough? Is the death of Casey Sheehan and 2,000 other troops in the blazing wreckage of Iraq enough? Iraq, incubator for an Islamic republic that will despise us; the nation we destroyed, but refused to commit the resources to rebuild; the place where so many of Louisiana's National Guard are serving, making it necessary for our badly overstretched military to call in National Guard troops from Texas and elsewhere to help Louisianans survive this. Was it worth it? Are gas-guzzlers worth it just because ex-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer called the gluttonous consumption of SUVs and Humvees "the American Way"? How Orwellian is the re-appropriation of the phrase "the American way" to suit big oil and gluttonous consumption? Is it worth out troops' lives to not stabilize Iraq, to not give them the resources they need to do so, to set up an Islamic state that will fall to civil war the second we leave, and to foment hatred for the U.S. worldwide? Keep in mind, Iraq had no involvement in 9/11, there were no WMDs (and there's plenty of evidence that the administration knew that months before we sacked Iraq), there was never any chance that "the smoking gun might arrive in the form of a mushroom cloud," as Condoleeza Rice just kept on repeating. When will the cost be high enough? Science fiction, of course, predicted much of this. John Brunner's prophetic 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up predicted that resistance to environmentalism would degrade into neocons believing that if they politicized an issue and yelled at it loud enough, it would just go away. AM hate radio couldn't say "liberal claptrap" enough about "The Day After Tomorrow." My first novel, Burn, predicted a partially immersed and abandoned New York City and the slow dimming of light reaching the earth., all the result of global climate change. It wasn't prediction, so much as extrapolation from what we've known for decades, but for some reason, as a species, we refuse to acknowledge. 26.Aug.05 Wow. Pat Robertson endorses murder, lies about it, then, after intense public criticism, reverses himself. Kinda goes to show that what his critics have said about him all along — that he is a dangerous religious extremist — is actually true. While he's busy putting a target on the head of a sitting, democratically elected president, I wonder whether the parallels between his fatwa and the one issued by Iran's religious fanatics against author Salman Rushdie years ago are lost on him. Why does Robertson get to ignore the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill"? But let's ask the most important question: Is this what you want some self-appointed religious authority teaching your kids? Or your countrymen, for that matter? There's a reason the world recoiled in disgust when Iran called for Rushdie's death over his novel, The Satanic Verses. It's precisely the same reason that the world is recoiling from Pat Robertson now. All of us, that is, except for the Bush administration, which refuses to condemn the call for Venuzuelan President Hugo Chavez's assassination. All of this has me thinking of Margaret Atwood's amazing novel, The Handmaid's Tale, in which an ultra-right-wing Christian theocracy has become the governing force in America, and, thanks to an epidemic of infertility, abortion becomes a crime with a sentence of sexual enslavement, duly supported with quotes from the Bible. Why am I thinking about this? Because of Robertson's closeness to this administration. Because the Bush people refuse to denounce his demand for murder. Because we live in an era in which an astounding number of people do not even know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, that they were lied to in the run-up to this undeclared war, or that our troops, repeatedly screwed over by the administration and the GOP, are not being given the resources and troop levels they need to win. I don't get the voting patterns of members of the military and their families, either. They vote Republican, they get sent to war on a raft of lies about WMD, mushroom clouds, ultra-long-range, nuclear-armed drones, and other nonsense. They vote GOP and get their benefits cut. They vote GOP and get their tours extended indefinitely, often just as they are about to depart for home. They vote GOP and the GOP tells us that we cannot even chronicle in pictures the caskets of the war dead coming home. So why do they vote GOP? 17.Aug.05 Getting quite excited about the courses! Everything seems to be coming together, prep-wise. I keep thinking of this guy I saw on the news when we lived in Austin; he was at an anti-Iraq-War demonstration, counterprotesting. He held up a sign that said: "I Support The War. Looking Forward to Cheap Iraqi Gas!" Gotta admire him for his honesty; most war supporters weren't so crass — most denied this as a motivation. But then, this guy was from Texas. And with the administration wink-nudge linking Iraq to 9/11, a lot of people felt the attack genuinely just, even when Bush himself admitted during the debates that Iraq had not attacked us on 9/11. I bet that guy back in Austin is having a fun time filling up his Humvee or SUV now. Bet that hurts. It goes to show that this was never about 9/11, or about faked-up WMD and the clear and present mushroom-cloud danger Iraq supposedly posed to America. It was about getting Iraq's oil and settling the Bush family score with Hussein. Cheap gas was an appalling reason to support the war. That it has not materialized is just. Unfortunately, it's also beginning to cripple the world economy. Right now, with an undeclared war and no draft, the average American doesn't feel the pain and strain of war personally very often. That breeds complacency. I know people who aren't even aware that we still have a troop presence in Afghanistan, let alone that we did such a poor job in our rush to redeploy to Iraq that we're still battling the Taliban — and losing control of some regions while we're at it. Dean Whitlock wrote an amazing story in the January 1987 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. That story, "The Million-Dollar Wound," was about a complacent public barely aware of the war their administration was carrying on. That complacency arose from sci-fi-level increases in military physicians' ability to patch up wounded troops and send them back into combat, and innovation that meant no more need for a draft. 10.Aug.05 Novelist E.L. Doctorow puts it in plain English. While you're at it, check out novelist John Shirley's excellent resource, johnshirley.net. John is the author of the uniquely and inventively bizarre novel City Come A-Walkin', among many others. I met John at San Francisco's annual Litquake a few months back. I'll be teaching a classic short story of his, "Wolves of the Plateau," this fall. 5.Aug.05 Jesus Christ, people, wake up. We only have this one planet. • Ice
shelf collapse biggest in 10,000 years; piece of ice the size of
Luxembourg cleaves off It takes a profound stupidity to ignore the scientific evidence and, solely for the sake of arguing with the rest of the world, pretend that this whole crisis is just someone's political opinon and can, therefore, be barked out of existence. Even with all of this happening before our very eyes, Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., supports the head-in-the-sand school of denial with a sign in his office that says of global climate change: "It's a Hoax." Fiddling while the planet burns, the Bush Administration/neocon War On Science marches on. It makes me wonder whether these people all suffered a tragically similar childhood event in which they were surrounded by people wearing pro-green t-shirts and pummeled with Greenpeace signs. What does it take to turn someone into an envirophobic lunatic? John Brunner predicted quite a lot of this back in 1972, in his novel The Sheep Look Up. From the neocon anti-environment bluster, to air quality so poor that it's dangerous, to the denial that anything is wrong at all, Brunner predicted a great deal that has already come to pass. More in The Archive.
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