Unplanned Obsolescence

(Proverbs 12:15) The way of a fool is right in his own eyes; But he that is wise hearkeneth unto counsel.  

I recently took my five year old grandson for his first library experience; it was also my first visit to a library in many years. It had been so long since I had darkened the door of a library I had to apply for a card. I wondered if the librarian thought it strange that such an old lady would be, at this late stage, applying for a library card. When she handed me the shiny laminated permit she instructed me in her serious librarian tone that I could check out two books and when I returned those, ON TIME, I would THEN be able to check out fifty books. 

You know how, when you have a huge long history that applies to a moment that could be shared but you know it's not only too long but the person you could tell it to wouldn’t care anyway, so you just smile and leave the story untold? 

I took the card, thanked her, and my grandson and I wandered over to the shelves of picture books to find his first two library books.  

My love for books began in a library that started life as an elegant private mansion in what was once an upscale area called The Heights in Houston, Texas. My memories of that building are a bundle of sensations intertwined; the visual of an elegant winding mahogany staircase leading up to thousands of books neatly lined up, spine out, on tall shelves, the distinct aroma of aging paper, binding glue and dust, the sound of a blue jay screeching outside in the shady courtyard, where I loved to sit on the cool concrete bench, book on lap. 

My long history with books includes many libraries. Locating the nearest one has always been a top priority after any move. Once I was able to shop in bookstores I began my own book collection from the markdown tables. Being able to buy books that I didn’t have to return soon overcame my frequent library visits. 

It was predictable and inevitable that one day, like most avid readers, I would want to write books and thus I have a few remnants of my book writing era in my personal library.  But what I found to be more satisfying than authoring has been during my next stage–book publishing. 

While learning the craft of writing was certainly worth the effort, acquiring the skill of turning words into a printed book has been my greatest, most rewarding creative challenge. First, I had to spend nearly two years researching the business of publishing. This was both eye-opening and disheartening to say the least. Turns out publishing isn’t the noble business I had assumed, not even close. Unfortunately I went in with stars in my eyes so my mistake was equating the glory of communicating ideas and imagery in written language with the down-and-dirty process of getting those lofty things to market. 

Okay, so I was disappointed but I sucked it up and got over it. I studied the business, the rules and the mechanics, what’s an ISBN, the how’s and why’s of the art and significance of fonts, margin width, leading, kerning and style. And then I did what I always do, cherry-picked between what I had to do, and those things I determined that I could ignore. 

Truth is, no matter how much I learned, I couldn’t have done it at all if it had not been for the advent of the digital age of publishing. 

In 2002, when I had just launched my quest to decode the mysteries of book creation, while surfing the Net, I found intriguing discussions about POD (print on demand) or digital printing. As is always the case, the vision of digitally printed books went soaring out way in advance of the technology that would eventually make it possible. And, as is also always the case, the naysayers in all areas of traditional publishing, from authors to publishers, hooted at the concept of anything ever replacing off-set printed books, loaded onto pallets and shipped to and sold at bookstores. 

I didn’t know, at the time, that Amazon had already been looking ahead even as the traditionalists were digging in and standing their ground. But I, as usual, immediately could see the future as well. Regardless what was abundantly clear for me, I quickly learned to keep my predictions to myself in the online author forums I frequented. No one agreed with me and, in fact, flamed me to a toasty crisp if I even hinted that technology would catch up one day soon. I eventually stopped participating in the writer forums because I was too busy forming my own POD publishing company in keeping with my lifelong position that those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the one doing it.

In the eight year interim from then to now, POD publishing has quickly evolved. Now the craze is for POD publishers to migrate to ebooks. TA DA! They figured out that pixels don’t have to be printed, just loaded onto readers and broadcast like web pages. While there certainly are many upsides to ebooks, thousands of titles in a light-weight hand-held devise, adjustable type size, backlit for low light reading, but, just as I could easily predict that digital printing would take over and turn the publishing world on its ear, I can see far enough ahead to make another prediction.

A few days after my library trip another grandson was sitting next to me as I showed him a book that I helped bring to life in the mid-eighties. It was a ground-breaking combination, fictional American history/craft book called The Weepeeple. It took one year and a team of us, editors, graphic designers, layout artists, a photographer, me designing/creating the dolls and G P Putnam Publishing to bring this book into being. My only copy has been sitting in my personal library un-thought about for a long time. It’s made many moves from town to town, house to house, shelf to shelf. The dust cover is worn and torn in several places but inside it’s still as fresh and readable as the day I first proudly held it. 

My grandson could not know that when I opened the front cover all the memories of those years, my “crafting” era, the creative labor pains it took to birth that book is forever captured in those printed pages. It wasn’t the first or last book I had done for the Family Workshop but I’ll always think it was the best. It has been out of print for many years but this copy still exists; it’s tangible, holdable, and unchangeable, which is not an insignificant point. 

My personal experience with this book is mine alone but the value of the book is available to anyone who might choose to open and use it. My grandson wants me to recreate one of the characters–Hugger dog–for him.

It occurred to me that this book, in hand, represents not just a rapidly passing era, but perhaps even a last gasp. But, that’s just me, always visualizing the probable and what I see is having a personal library of ten thousand titles all stored in tiny pixels ready to flood the window of a digital reader with the push of a button, but the reader is broken, the reader can’t be charged. Or, worse yet, the reader is out of date. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the new coding for ebooks will likely not work on the “old” original readers. You’ll have to buy new ones periodically to keep up to date and so you can continue to access the ebooks you bought. 

The god of down-and-dirty commerce will be fed. 

Flame me, call me names and mock me, but, mark my words, when printed books are fully replaced with ebooks, when libraries close or are converted to computers only, when bookstores transition to coffee shops with tables of ereaders, civilization will suffer from the most short-sighted application of unplanned obsolescence ever.  

And what if it wasn’t unplanned? Then I can think ahead to even worse things. 

You’ve been warned.

For Christ,

Meema

Generation OCD

(Colossians 2:8) Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ:

Auri was estimated to be a year old when my granddaughter and I found him three years ago at the local shelter. Though he definitely stood out from the other motley inmates, it was his soulful brown eyes that sucked us in and won him his freedom. He is a good dog, if somewhat neurotic, and a vigilant watch dog with a bark much more intimidating than his size. 

Auri can run like a greyhound. A primal instinct in the spaniel in him compels him to hate squirrels and when he spots one on our morning walk, he can go from zero to sixty in point five seconds. Thus the squirrels remain on high alert and scarce in the mornings until the resident terror has passed. Whoa be unto the one that forgets and finds itself stranded out in the open between two trees. Auri has never actually caught a squirrel, though there have been some very close calls. I’m not sure he’d know what to do with it if he did. Squirrels can fight back when cornered. But Auri doesn’t know this and he also doesn’t think ahead about the what ifs any more than he remembers yesterday. He’s a dog, on a mission: get small rodent with fluffy tail.

Like all dogs, Auri has basic instincts and needs. Shelter, food, water, affirmation, feral joyful running to expend natural energy, chasing squirrels up trees and playing fetch with his ball. Here’s where the neurotic part comes in. Auri is obsessed with his ball and is determined that we, his people, will also be obsessed with it. Once engaged he will not quit on his own. He brings it, drops it at the feet of his victim and then stares at the ball, every muscle tensed, tail wagging in slow measured waves. His focus is so intense, the owner of the feet has no choice but to comply, pick up the ball and throw it. Ten seconds later, the ball is dropped again, Auri back in position. We’ve never tested how long Auri would repeat this action, I personally believe it would be a marathon, possibly eligible for the Guinness Book of World Records. Alas, Auri’s fetch partner usually ends it long before Auri is ready. The only way to end it is to hide the ball. 

This type of behavior is endearing in a dog but annoying in humans. This kind of focus is referred to as OCD–obsessive/compulsive disorder. I don’t know if this is a relatively new mental problem or an old one that has only just been labeled in the modern science of human psychology, but it seems to me many more people suffer from varying degrees of OCD than ever before. OCD in its mildest form manifests most often as “selective perfectionism”. At its worst it is a debilitating, overriding autopilot that prevents the mind from thinking in any other way but closed loops. Advanced OCD renders one essentially mentally crippled and not only pre-programmed but nearly unteachable. 

In the last decade or so the identification and recognition of OCD has made it a household word–almost a joke as well as a commonly accepted character trait. Who doesn’t refer to his/her own “OCD” tendencies from time to time as the excuse for some minor obsessive behavior? I don’t know if it has to do with more people being born with mis-wired brains or if there is something in the environment that is slowly poisoning us and messing with our brain activity. 

From the spiritual side, I could take a leap and determine that what seems to be a growing physiological problem can be traced to something much more sinister. Call it a type of spiritual conspiracy theory, if you must.

If you wanted to own a population, transform it into a pliable, subservient, controllable society, the simplest technique would be to inundate the masses with exciting distractions, enticements, pandering to base desires, coaxing them into little addictions and passion for acquiring and embracing every new thing. Maintain a tight schedule of new things coming successively in short timeframes to increase anticipation to frenzy levels. Flood the populace with 30-60 second fictional vignettes 24/7, keeping these in the forefront of consciousness and embedded in the subconscious until natural attention span can be reconditioned and reduced to a minute or less which effectively short-circuits any critical thinking. 

Make idols out of beautiful delusions, disguise truth with a thin glittering layer of better-than-real lie until expectations for reality are unilaterally elevated to the newly created illusions of perfection. 

In summary, shrink attention span, unplug long-term memory, logic and reason, then exalt and idolize useless trivia and activity.

Through these strategies you can, within as short a time as a generation, redirect every brain wave in tune to the same frequency and your new pets will be sufficiently stunted, limited and compliant to whatever you wish for them to do. You need not worry that they will be able to think beyond the preoccupation of the moment. They will be so obsessed with sterile irrelevant minutia they will have no need for recollection of the past or hope for the future. 

You will have created Generation OCD, that, like Auri, just wants to play fetch over and over and over until you, the master, finally decide when to hide the ball. 

For Christ,

Meema

Failing in his frontal attacks upon the child of God, Satan often turns to more subtle means of achieving his evil purpose. He resorts to devious methods in his attempt to divert the Christian from carrying out the task God has committed to him. He often succeeds by involving the saint in some other lesser occupation and so distracting him. ~ A. Tozer

Chasing Truth - Part Four - White Lies, Black Truth and Other Fiction

All successful writers know there is a standard formula for crafting a good story. This includes, but is not limited to, developing at least two believable characters who are diametrically opposed to each other. 

This has been the way of yarn-spinning since mankind began making up stories, but I’ve noticed a subtle disturbing change in the dynamics of modern fiction. More and more often it seems the “hero” or protagonist is a bad guy to begin with–a thief, a liar, a criminal. This type of hero, usually a social misfit and/or part of a group of misfits, find themselves at odds with an even more fiendish bad guy, (usually someone who is mega rich), and are compelled to rally to the cause of bringing justice to the world by doing in  him and his evil minions. 

We, being programmed to root for the protagonist of the story, regardless how questionable of character he/they might be, do our part and align with and cheer for what is tantamount to nothing more than the lesser of two evils. What good is splitting hairs about the dubious character of our hero when the REALLY bad guy needs to be exposed and punished post haste? 

This is indeed an interesting twist on a very old technique but it is also an ominous sign of the times. Those who claim that there is no empirical evidence that points to movies, books and video games as being influential to culture, are usually those who make their living off said products.  To know the truth of it, one simply has to follow the money. 

Billions of dollars to be had will always trump what might be bad for society in the long run. But money is one thing, there is another, darker, spiritual side to all this–less obvious, of course. 

Professional liars, thieves, murderers and other psychopaths, who have no conscience, who do not care what happens to others so long as they get what they want are, by their nature, unable to be genuine heroes in real life. The old saying there is no honor among thieves is actually a fact. Experiments have been tried, during war, to put criminals into dangerous combat zones. As soon as they were able, they bolted, never to be seen again. This is what happens in real life, but through the medium of fictional writing we have been convinced that those who are good at lying, cheating, stealing, murdering and otherwise committing crimes against others are just using acceptable means so long as the end is perceived to be good.  This is simply a very ingenious way to embed new definitions of good and evil into society’s collective psyche. The result is that deception is deemed fine and, in fact, expected so long as it is for a good cause.

This gentle, diabolical technique has finally, effectively blurred the lines between good and evil, what is acceptable and not. We used to know better who or what made a hero and a villain. We used to understand the difference between honor and dishonor–clear  were the definitions of morality, integrity, and honesty. We used to be able to recognize who was wearing the white hat and who was wearing the black hat. Suddenly, it seems there are no white hats. White hats are passé, old-fashioned and out of date. We have come to prefer our heroes a bit more rough around the edges, a tad bit tarnished, way less shiny and, well, let’s say it–more like us. So, instead of seeing heroes as those with traits we would like to rise up to, we bring our heroes down to our level. 

There is an inevitable consequence to this new cultural model of idolizing bad behavior as heroic and it seems that we are rushing to the climax of this ongoing story of good against evil. In fiction, evil is always presented as knowing it is evil and is proud to be; the antagonist/villain/bad guy rubs his hands together and laughs BWA-HA-HA, celebrating his beautiful evilness. But evil in real life is not a fictional character, it’s a genuine villain who prowls and seeks to destroy whomever he can while he still can. He  is somewhat more clever than fictional villains though, preferring to make those whom he has garnered to his side believe they are good and right because he knows the best way to suck in more victims is to create the illusion of good and to look good one must believe one is good. These minions speak black truth instead of white lies. They say, “Believe me, trust me, Honest, I am speaking truth!” 

The diabolical part is that they have been deluded, by the author of lies, to believe their own words because unlike a white lie, where the speaker knows it is untrue, a black truth becomes real to the person who has crafted it. It is a created reality for this person so it presents itself real enough for others to be convinced as well. Whole belief systems are often founded on nothing more than a single individual’s black truth. 

So, how does one recognize black truth in a world where the lines between right and wrong are fuzzy?  Where white lies, black truth and real truth are in the final conflict for the souls of men? The answer is as old as storytelling itself: When in doubt of the veracity of the sayer, pay more attention to what one does than what one says. 

To that I must add, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, measure that action by the Word. 

For Christ,

Meema

(Ezekiel 33:30) And as for thee, son of man, the children of thy people talk of thee by the walls and in the doors of the houses, and speak one to another, every one to his brother, saying, Come, I pray you, and hear what is the word that cometh forth from the Lord.  (33:31) And they come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but do them not; for with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth after their gain.  (33:32) And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument; for they hear thy words, but they do them not.