I moved to Canada to become a small farmer in Nova Scotia under the tutelage of my college roommate Charlie Daniels (no, not the singer), bringing along my bachelor’s degree in English in case the Sears catalog in the outhouse ever ran out. Today Charlie’s the chiropractor in Yarmouth, but back then he owned a spread on the Bay of Fundy, with a big garden, a couple of ducks…and a coopful of chickens who, between them, could barely muster enough intellectual wattage to make a penlight flicker. I found them outstandingly stupid—and remember, I was born and raised in New York City, where Olympic records in that category have been set. Charlie told me classic dumb-chicken stories: the ones who gaped up at a rainstorm until they all drowned, and so forth. My favorite was the cautionary tale of the breeder who’d finally developed a strain of chicken that would reliably lay at least an egg a day apiece; the only problem was, they were literally too dumb to eat. The extra egg money all went to pay for force-feeding and anorexia counseling.
If you were to test a flock of such chickens, and select the one whose mates call her “Dopey,” you’d find even she’s too smart to believe a fully-loaded twenty-four-passenger propellor-driven aircraft can possibly, conceivably, under any set of circumstances even a TV writer could dream up, sideswipe and destroy a one-man fighter jet flying at a safe distance. You simply cannot believe such a preposterous thing and be bright enough to eat. It doesn’t pass the laugh test. A pubescent pullet can see that the subsequent reaction of America has not been that of an aggressor seeking war.
Yet a large fraction of the human race is apparently either that stupid…or willing to publicly pretend they are, if that will furnish a flimsy excuse to vent rage at the capitalist barbarians who supply their Nikes, Cokes and Big Macs. Many members of the oldest and greatest civilization on this planet today seem to need a scapegoat for their own frustrations so badly they’ll publicly declare black is white, if that’s what it takes to pick a quarrel. The student quoted above knows perfectly well the world saw nothing and knows he’s heard testimony from only one of the twenty-five surviving witnesses: the officer whose clear failure to control his notorious hotdog pilot Wen Wei allowed this mess to happen.
Believing or purporting to believe that disgraced officers’s absurd self-serving account is one of the dumbest things the usually-wise Chinese people have done so far in this millennium. I believe it derives directly from the dumbest thing they did in the last one: forcibly limiting their birthrate while utterly ignoring the huge cultural preference for boy babies. As anyone could have predicted, by now this has generated an enormous cadre of combat-age males for whom there are no mates. That’s a recipe for war: the only motivations for it that make any sense to me at all are stupidity or aggressive intent.
Anyone capable of believing the Chinese government’s version of the F-8/EP-3 collision is, I submit, dumber than most chickens. And any leader who thinks inciting a few billion chickens to anger with lies is a safe or sane—much less ethical—course of action is even dumber. Start a stampede in a flock that size and the entire coop will be torn up when and if the dust ever settles.
Which brings me to Dean Ing—once a science fiction writer like me, latterly the author of bestselling high-tech thrillers. Dean’s a results-oriented man. Back around 1965, for example, he built himself a car, for fun. You can’t buy one as good today; nobody can. With a standard VW engine, the original Magnum got over fifty mpg on the highway, did fifty-five mph in first gear and featured extras like roll-cage, crash harness good to seventy gees and energy absorbing bumpers; Dean persuaded Traveler’s Insurance to give him a special rate by crashing it into a wall at thirty mph a few times for them. He’s improved it a lot, since.
I haven’t re-read Dean’s classic near-future tale “Very Proper Charlies” in twenty years, but I’ve never forgotten its magnificent premise. The leaders of the media finally agree worldwide terrorism has become such a serious threat to civilization itself that extraordinary measures to stop it are required. Better, they all figure out at long last that terrorism requires them, the news media—that it cannot work without their cooperation. So they decide not to play.
It’s quietly agreed that henceforth, terrorist violence will still be given major coverage as before…but the spin of that coverage will now be to induce laughter. Terrorists will always be depicted as proper Charlies: bumbling incompetents, jargon-spouting nitwits, psychotic illiterates, scruffy unlaid losers barely competent to light the fuse and retire in correct sequence. Camera angles will always be unflattering; bios will highlight the terrorists’ most humiliating past fiascos—they’ll basically be treated the way Bill Clinton was, in other words.
The beauty of it is, all Dean’s journalists actually do is tell the unvarnished truth for once: describe stupid people as stupid people. Vividly. Dean believed that since the media usually slant the story anyway, maybe we have a duty to do so ethically and not let ourselves be hijacked and coopted by would-be social hackers. C.S. Lewis said, “The Devil cannot abide being mocked.” Maybe we can best fight suicidal folly by mocking it.
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying it for the last thousand words.
And Now the News…
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 1996
IN THE EARLY FIFTIES, the great sf writer Theodore Sturgeon wrote to his friend Robert Heinlein that he was both broke and blocked; he literally could not think of a story to save his life. Robert’s reply was typical of him: a cheque…and several pages of story ideas. All of them made money for Ted—but one in particular inspired a very prescient and powerful story.
Heinlein had said, “Write about the neurosis that derives from wallowing daily in the troubles of several billion strangers you can’t help…”
From this seed, Sturgeon created “And Now The News—” (available in several collections and anthologies). His protagonist is a simple, good man with an obsessive addiction to the news—he takes every paper sold, subscribes to current affairs magazines, keeps news on the radio and TV at all times. When asked why, he quotes John Donne: “Every man’s death diminishes me/for I am part of mankind.” Over time, his obsession deepens; he makes a desperate attempt to go cold turkey…and events ensue so astonishing I honestly don’t think it’ll spoil the story for you if I give away the kicker here: In the end, the guy tells his shrink he’s finally found a viable solution to his problem: he’s going to go out there and diminish mankind right back. The last line is, “He got twelve people before they cut him down.”
This was forty years before the Unabomber.
If Earth is one big starship, the news media constitute its intercom. And almost nothing comes over the intercom but damage reports. Tragedies way over on the other side of the vessel, malfunctions in inaccessible compartments, tales of distant madness and mutiny, conflicting rumors of collision hazards in our path…and constant reminders that, first, our acceleration is increasing beyond design expectations, and second, there is no Captain, and the wheel is being fought over by vicious ignoramuses. Is it any wonder morale is so rotten on this starship?
Pessimism has become the very hallmark of sophistication. Only a dullard would go see a movie known to have a happy ending these days. Every Hollywood sci fi future is either a nightmare…or dismissed as a fairy tale. We, the richest and luckiest humans who ever got to gripe for seventy or eighty years, are coming to subconsciously expect—in some perverse way, to crave—the imminent End of All Things. And so we find ourselves obsessed with damage reports, like a man staring in fascination at the slow progression of gangrene up his leg.
No rational person can blame the media for this: we demand it of them. We won’t pay for good news. We insist on knowing the worst, even when we’re helpless to do anything about it. God knows why. Attempts have been made to establish cheerful media, which would scour the planet to tell you everything that went right today, every averted tragedy, miraculous serendipity or realized dream that might give you hope, lighten your load…and they all went belly-up. There is no m
edia conspiracy to depress people. But there is a media conspiracy to feed ourselves and our families, and that means we must sell you what you want to buy.
I don’t propose that the media lie or suppress facts or strain for Panglossian slants—but if we’re going to convey the truth and nothing but the truth, we ought to shoot for the whole truth. Every news outlet needs a regular feature, given equal weight with the day’s lead story, titled, “Silver Lining.” The massive resources of the newsgathering industry could—and should, as both public- and self-service—manage to come up with one story a day that made us feel a little less like diminishing mankind right back. And it wouldn’t hurt to quadruple the comics section, while we’re at it.
I’ve experienced five decades. With all its plagues, wars, disasters and injustices, the one just past (in which computers got friendly, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union peacefully folded its cards, nuclear apocalypse receded for the first time in my life, smallpox was annihilated, Mr. Mandela walked free, perfect music reproduction became trivially cheap, Geraldo’s nose was broken on camera and the Beatles put out two new singles) has been hands down the best. Yet it was back in 1965-75, a decade when just about everything that could possibly go wrong did, that a significant fraction of us last seemed to believe we could change the world.
Hope—belief in the possibility of beneficial change—is a scarce and precious resource and has been throughout history; every society that ever ran out of it died. Our hope is battered daily by the barrage of bad news and by the defeatist attitude it engenders: the cynical compulsion to deconstruct every comforting myth, to find (or if necessary invent) feet of clay for every hero, to explain away every hopeful event as a cursing in disguise.
Granted, we can’t hide our heads in the sand. It is my obligation as a crewman of Starship Earth to listen to the intercom regularly. But it’s also my obligation to turn the damn thing off when it starts to impair my morale. That means triaging my newspaper, removing CNN and Newsworld from my remote-menu and zapping the network news fungus whenever it appears. (You’d be surprised how little you miss that way: after a dogged, relentless effort to ignore the OJ Simpson story, I find I still know far more about it than the jury was allowed to.) It’s possible to have too much information to do your job.
Fear is a subtle and potent drug, and it has its uses. Daily news is civilized man’s analog for the exhilaration of facing the sabertooth: a daily hit of bracing fear. But dosage is crucial: at high concentrations (particularly if mainlined: taken by television), evil side effects start to set in. You cannot kill the sabertooth. There is nothing one can do about any of the horrors in the news (purely local bunfights excepted), except fret…and at some point panic, yield to despair. And when there are enough panicked, despairing people on the starship, the Crazy Years come.
Time we all turned to the funny pages. It’s important to remember something else Robert Heinlein once said: “The last thing to come out of Pandora’s Box was Hope.”
Substance Abuse
Bean Counting
FIRST PRINTED JULY 2000
STEP RIGHT UP—I’m going to make you rich!
Or at least offer you the opportunity to make yourself rich, and maybe part of the Third World as well—and I mean rich enough to influence the planetary economy, change the destiny of nations and seriously impress Bill Gates. I’ve been granted one of those sudden flashes of stupendous insight that used to hit Nikola Tesla2 like a meat hammer between the eyes at regular intervals…and I’m going to give it to you! And all I want in return, for my commission, is enough cash to buy back the Northern Songs catalogue from that treacherous (but probably not pedophilic) little rat-bastard Michael Jackson as a birthday present for Sir Paul McCartney.
I’m not saying it’ll be a cakewalk. Some trivial developmental work still needs to be done, I admit, before you can start soliciting investors and planning your IPO. Minor engineering details, really—I’d take care of it myself if I weren’t so busy just now. But basically the plan is sound, and most of the really hard work has already been done since World War II.
Want to hear about it?
A brief preliminary lecture is necessary, and forgive me if I go on a bit, because—now that I’ve quit tobacco for good—I’m speaking here of my number one all-time favorite legal drug. A jones I share with billions of humans—and nearly all writers. I’m using it as I type this…and almost wish, as I have almost wished for twenty-seven years, that I had some sort of IV setup to drip it directly into my veins and spare me full use of my hands. (But I don’t really wish that…because, as with most addictions, the ingestion ritual is more than half the fun. That’s exactly why my idea is worth gigabucks.)
Perhaps you use the stuff yourself: coffee, it’s generally called. We junkies refer to it as “black gold,” “java,” “jamoke,” “joe” or “that which makes life endurable.” I once had to quit a perfectly good spiritual commune because I was unable to persuade my fellow hippies that coffee is in fact Far Out. Keep your kensho and leave me my Kenya AA!
Okay, I’ll stop rhapsodizing. I forgot: you’re waiting to get rich.
All coffee trees belong to the genus coffea. There are many species of coffea, but most authorities will assure you there are only two of any significance: coffea arabica and coffea canephora.
Both, unfortunately, are a real bitch to grow.
Arabica yields by far the best-tasting coffee…and is one of the most feeble, finicky crops on earth. It wants steep slopes at least one or two thousand meters above sea level and no more than twenty-five degrees north or thirty degrees south of the Equator, with plenty of rainfall (though not enough to wash it away), but lots of sunshine too. As if that weren’t enough, the damn plant is susceptible to about a zillion parasites, diseases and blights. But it produces superb cherries: small, and with a distinctly pleasant aroma even before they’re dried and roasted. But “small” is the point to remember.
Canephora, commonly called “Robusta,” is, as that name implies, hardy…but only in comparison to Arabica. You can get it to grow below a thousand meters—in rare cases, even at sea level—but it’s still finicky, and vulnerable to all sorts of things. And its beans are far less valuable: suffice it to say they use Robusta to make—shudder!—instant coffee. (Or to mix Arabica with, for a cheapo blend.) About a decade ago a coffee-grower in Queensland, Australia, explained to me why this is so.
Gebhardt Keyserlingck is an infuriating genius who lives in a castle he built for himself and his family in the bush just outside of Daintree in northern Queensland. He’s a genius because he somehow managed to raise a couple of acres of Arabica coffee trees there, at sea level, on a gentle slope—which any expert will tell you is quite impossible. Some of the best coffee I ever tasted, too. The infuriating part is that he refuses, for philosophical reasons I just don’t grok, to ship so much as a bean of it to anywhere, at any price: if you want Geb’s coffee you must go to Daintree and buy it from him. I haven’t had a sip in ten years, damn it!
Anyway, he keeps a couple of Robusta trees to help him lecture tourists, and once he showed me Arabica and Robusta cherries side by side I understood why they use the latter for instant (and for even lesser uses like “coffee” flavoring for ice cream, etc.). The Robusta coffee cherry is huge. The ones I saw ranged from grape to walnut size. Dried down to beans, they’d be at least twice as big as the coffee beans you’re used to seeing.
Perhaps you grasp the problem. When you roast a Robusta bean, by the time the inside is done, the outside is burnt. It just plain has to produce a coffee that’s inferior in taste and aftertaste.
That’s why almost nobody ever even talks about the third most common species of coffee: coffea liverica, or Liberian. Its cherry is even bigger than Robusta’s.
A shame…because Liberian coffee will grow just about anywhere it’s warm, at any altitude, under any conditions, despite drought or neglect.
In fact, it more or less insists on doing so. In Liberia
(after which it’s named), for instance, it’s considered a damn nuisance, a weed to be fought, about as popular as kudzu is in the southern US. Liberian coffee grows wild in many countries—on the Ivory Coast, throughout Equatorial Africa, in Cameroon—and these happen to be some of the very poorest places on this planet.
Think how wonderful it would be if you could somehow make coffea liverica commercially worthwhile. Coffee’s one of the biggest, most lucrative legal industries there is. It’s presently owned by a few incredibly rich men who seized control of it from the starving peasants who actually grew the stuff long before modern education and communications technology gave said peasants even a hope of negotiating on a level playing field. If Liberian coffee suddenly became valuable tomorrow, perhaps the Liberian growers would be more sophisticated than was poor old Juan Valdez—enough to retain a measure of control, this time.
Ah, but the damn Liberica bean is even worse than Robusta—just way too big for conventional roasting methods. Roast the outside properly: the inside is underdone. Roast until the inside’s done: the outside’s burnt. Try and compromise: get a cup of mud…
I see that this is running long—and worse, I’m out of coffee. So on reflection, I think I’m going to just give you a single word, and then leave the rest as an exercise for the student. I realize this one word is not by itself the full answer, that it raises almost as many problems as it solves. But I believe those problems are all quite soluble, if you imagine my scheme in combination with conventional methods. And I do think this one word should be sufficient to show you where I’m going, point you in the right direction. If you can’t take it from there yourself…well, maybe you don’t really deserve to be one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
The Crazy Years Page 3
