Hating Yourself, Hating Everyone, Hating the World

"Karen Horney believes we can witness four consequences of self-hatred. One is a compulsive need to compare self with others. Typically, the result is a 'comparative inferiority.' Another consequence of self-hate is a hypersensitivity to criticism, and hence, an excessive vulnerability in our relationships. Still another consequence of self-hate is allowing too much abuse from others. The last consequence of self-hate is the compulsive need to alleviate self-contempt with attention, regard, appreciation or admiration from others."

Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky noticed that those who hate themselves hate others. Not only do they hate others, they claimed, they want to destroy the world. Neither explained why they thought as they did, so their observations I filed away in my Mental File Cabinet. At first their comments didn't make much sense to me, but I knew something would give me a clue. It always does.

In this case it was a book by William Allen called, Starkweather: a Portrait of a Mass Murderer. I had heard of Charles Starkweather, because he has become an American mythic archetype, but at first I remembered his name as Virgil. I realized the reason for it is because Woody Allen, in his movie, Take the Money and Run, named his character Virgil. That's what I mean by Starkweather becoming an archetype -- the sensitive, misunderstood rebel getting back at a society he believes is trying to destroy him.

There have been movies about him (Natural Born Killers for one), songs (one by Bruce Springsteen), books, and even Stephen King admitted he kept a scrapbook about him as a teen. That shows the fascination this man/child holds, even over 50 years after his crimes.

I picked the book up at the library, on the free shelf out in the lobby where the library and people put books so people can take them. I would have passed by the book except for two reasons: I remembered that Starkweather had gone on his ten-day killing rampage in 1958, in which he murdered eleven people, with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, and the cover of the book had a picture of Starkweather in which he was clearly trying to imitate James Dean, dangling cigarette, three-inch pompadour and everything else associated with the actor.

Starkweather, who went on his killing spree at 19, grew up short (5'5"), bow-legged, pigeon-toed, half-blind, with a slight speech impediment, and dumb. Are those reasons to do what he did? Of course not. Some people suffer much worse and don't even come close to his crimes.

He was also excruciatingly sensitive to any criticism and so imaginative he saw criticism when there was none. None of these traits excuse what he did, but they give a clue as to why he did it.

Starkweather said he hated himself because of his flaws. Those flaws wouldn't mean much except that what other people thought of him got inside his head and became part of his character. Marshall McLuhan, quoting Alexander Pope and William Blake, wrote, "We become what he behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

Starkweather was shaped by what he beheld. It's not that simple, unfortunately, because he would have to been born with certain character flaws in the first place. All of us are. However, Starkweather's probably would not have been actualized except by the society in which he raised. Society is, in a sense, a "tool," one that we are supposed to use to make our lives better. It doesn't always work that way. People shape society, and then society shapes them, according to their inborn nature, and sometimes it's not for the best.

Starkweather, born flawed, beheld what society thought of him, and was shaped by it. It brought his constitutional flaws out into the open and into play. According to him, this started his first day of school, at the age of five. The other children made fun of him because of his speech impediment, shamed and humiliated him, and after that ostracized him. He retaliated by getting into fights with the other kids for years after.

Not at all surprisingly, Starkweather blamed his self-hatred on other people. He blamed society for his problems, his humiliation, his shame, his injured pride, going so far as to claim all his murders were in self-defense. The first impulse of all people, their first defense, is to blame their problems on others.

I've lost track of how many times I written this, but blaming other people is the lesson of that ancient myth about the Garden of Eden. Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent, a symbol of envy. This story tells us that many people, if not most, blame their problems on others because of feelings of envy.

Did Starkweather feel envy? The book does not say, but suggests that he did. He was poor and nihilistic, and a rebel, and two of the people he murdered were rich. He spent a few days in their house, enjoying the luxury that he, as a garbageman, never had. That might not the main point, though. The main point is that he blamed his problems on others, and so hated them because he thought they were responsible for his hating himself. Get rid of them, he fantasized, and his problems would disappear.

He said he had fantasies of killing everyone in the world and living alone in nature with animals. Since he couldn't change himself, and blamed his problems on the world, he wanted to change the world by destroying it.

Psychiatrists judged Starkweather to be a five-year-old boy with a cap gun -- bang, you're dead. He's what was, and is called, a "character disorder," meaning he blamed his problems on others. That's the main characteristics of character disorders. We've all met them -- "You made me do it!" is their eternal complaint against others.

Starkweather said the only time he ceased hating himself was when he was with his girlfriend. She liked, admired and approved of him. It was as if she was a mirror, and he saw himself as she saw him, rather than as he saw himself.

Still, her approval wasn't enough, and his hate and rage led to his crime spree. Those killings, he said, temporarily gave him a sense of power, power that erased, again temporarily, his self-hatred. It still wasn't enough. There is an old saying, "Trauma demands repetition," and Starkweather kept repeating that trauma, although not healing it. Murder never does.

Inexplicably, Starkweather had professional artistic talent, although he never truly developed it until he was in prison. By then, it was far too late. Some paintings were left unfinished by his execution.

It was in prison, by the way, that he received so much media attention that it helped overcome his self-hated. The Horney quote above -- "attention, regard, appreciation or admiration from others" -- is exactly right.

Why the fascination even now, with Starkweather? Some people hate society, and in many ways, society deserves that hate, because of its oppression. Starkweather was a rebel against a repressive society -- an artistic rebel, of all things. He modeled himself after that most sensitive of rebels, James Dean. He made himself above the law. Do not many teenagers have such fantasies?

Even Stephen King, writing about his novel, The Stand, said he enjoyed destroying our flawed world and dancing on its grave. Is there not a little bit of Starkweather in him, and all of us? If there wasn't, would the story of Noah's Flood ever existed? Or the "Left Behind" destroy-the-world fantasies of our modern-day fundamentalists?

What are the lessons, even now, about Starkweather?

One: we are neither blank slates, products of our environment, or completely ruled by our genetics. Whatever exists in us is activated by society. Bad societies activate bad traits. That should be an obvious thing.

Two: people want to blame society for their problems. Since they cannot change themselves, they want to change society, even if they have to destroy it.

Three: perhaps children shouldn't start school until seven, as in Sweden, instead of five, as they do in the U.S. A lot of children are too young to start school at five. Starkweather certainly was.

Four: the public schools should be closed down. Starkweather's teachers knew something was wrong with him, but accused him of not trying in his school work. The same thing happened when I was in school, and I'm sure it happens today. The schools have had enough time to straighten up, and haven't, so I see no recourse except to get rid of them. After all, all the school shootings today happen exclusively in public schools.

Five: education is to develop childrens' talents. Did not even one teacher notice that Starkweather had professional artistic talent? If they had, would he have been an artist instead of a failure?

Six: a lot of kids are going to go through a rebellious phrase. Learn to deal with it. Society hasn't. Initiation rites help a lot. We don't have any.

Seven: societies should be set up so that it minimizes people blaming their problems on others. Ours sure isn't. We now have a professional victim culture, and it's going to lead to more kids hating themselves, hating others, and hating the world. More division, more alienation.

I find it almost surreal that Starkweather was an artist. Artists, as Ezra Pound noticed, are the antenna of the human race. In a demented sort of way, Starkweather was a precursor to our future. Look around these days, and you'll see things, in certain parts of our society, that are, in varying degrees, creating more Charlies.

I don't even have to tell you what they are, because you already know.

A Little Mythological Slice of Braveheart

You can learn more from a good movie or even a good cartoon than you can from the shambling, twitchy, semi-autistic egghead/nerds that infest and corrupt Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Someday, Ph.D.s will disappear, as will those those three colleges. Considering the horrors these reality-challenged nerdlings have visited on the U.S. -- and the world -- it will be for the better.

Think "Vietnam" and "the Best and the Brightest." Think "Iraq". . .maybe think "Iran."

Here's an example of what I mean about good movies: I used to think Mel Gibson was little more than a pretty boy with moderate acting ability. After seeing Braveheart some years ago I realized I was wrong, very wrong. He has a brain, and it's a good one, and he uses it. My opinion of him has done a 180 degree turn, and I now see him as the most impressive and culturally aware movie-maker out there.

I can't say the same for Ron Howard, not after The DaVinci Code.

Many people have complained Braveheart is in some ways historically inaccurate, and at times grossly so. The critics are right: it is. Here's one example of pure fantasy: in one scene the English send Irish conscripts charging the Scottish lines. As the Irish reach the lines, they stop, shake hands with the Scottish, then turn to face and fight the English. It never happened, and that's too bad, because the scene is one of the most important in the movie.

Why?

Because what really happened is this: the English used Welsh archers to try and mow down the Scottish.

Why did Gibson ignore what really happened and instead create a bit of mythology? Here is what I think is the answer: all tyrants use the strategy of "divide and conquer." It's why the English used Celtic Welsh archers to mow down their Celtic Scottish brothers.

What Gibson was showing us is this: in his version, while literally untrue but still showing us a higher and nobler truth, the Celtic Irish won't do England's bidding and kill their Celtic Scottish brothers. Instead, they join them to fight the English, who, being Anglo-Saxon, are German (the original British displaced by Germanic invaders now live on the coast of France, in a place called. . .guess what?. . .Brittany).

What's that old saying? "Either we hang together or we most certainly will hang separately." That's what Gibson is telling us: don't fight your brothers, stand with them against your common enemy -- or enemies. Be aware of the fact that all tyrants try to divide you so they can conquer you. Don't fall for it. Be aware of what's going on.

Gibson, who is of Celtic ancestry, clearly despises the English, even today (see his movie, The Patriot, if you want to see further proof of this). Why? Perhaps because the English king Oliver Cromwell killed or kicked out one-third of Ireland's population, almost all of them Catholic, because Cromwell thought Catholics were heretics. Gibson, as it is well-known, is a devout Catholic.

Then, of course, there were the Highland Clearances in Scotland, in which many villages were burned to clear them of their people, leading many of them to leave Scotland and be scattered around the world. After these burnings and clearings, for many years, about six families owned most of Scotland.

Had everyone -- Welsh, Irish, Scottish -- hung together, would all three countries been conquered by Cromwell? Would the genocide have occurred? I doubt it. But they didn't, and so they hung separately.

That is Gibson's message: families (ethnic families), don't fight each other. Fight those trying to divide and conquer you. If you don't hang together, then you will hang separately.

Gibson also points out who the enemies are: corrupt government, as it always is, and the corrupt, treasonous and incompetent political, economic and intellectual "elites" -- be they named George Bush or Bill Gates or Wal-Mart or David Frum or Rush Limbaugh, or Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Ted Kennedy, or John Kerry, or Al Franken.

In Braveheart, the land-owning Scottish nobles, in another eye-opening scene, purposely leave the the field of battle, refusing to support Gibson's character, the Scottish hero, William Wallace. They were corrupted by their own self-interest (which they put above their nation, and their people) and their lust for money, land and power. Instead of sacrificing themselves for their country and their people, they sacrificed their people and their country for their own narrow, deluded, short-term selfish interests.

Only they didn't know this. Instead, they thought they were benefactors! As always, all tyrants think this, even today.

Nation, tribe and family, Gibon tells us, are above government and our backstabbing elites (even today, especially today) and those things are what we must rely on to repel that which threatens to destroy us. And what will destroy us are not "enemies" from the outside, but the inside.

Fixing an Epileptic Pug

I have for several years been disappointed in the hidebound State guild known as the AMA. It took years to find a good doctor. I've had much better luck with veterinarians, who tend to be more open-minded, cheaper, and less regulated.

I bring this up because I found a few months ago my now six-month-old pug puppy is epileptic. At least I thought he was, at first. I've decided that instead he is allergic to the store-bought food I had been buying him.

He'd been twitchy since the day I got him when he was ten weeks old. One of the first things he did is twitch while in my lap and fly into the wastebasket.

I didn't think much of it. I thought it was one of those quirks dogs sometimes have. I realize now he was having a petit mal seizure. Sometimes while sleeping his head would come up, his front and back legs would shoot out, and his tail would stick up and vibrate. I still didn't think much of it, until one evening he had a grand mal seizure.

He was lying on the floor at my feet sleeping when he started paddling wildly with his legs, his eyes opened and staring glassily, with foam coming from his mouth. At first I had no idea what was happening. I thought he might have been dying.

The seizure lasted about 15 seconds, then when he came out of it he was confused for several minutes. For two days he didn't act right. That night, after the first one, he had three more.

The next morning when I got on the Internet I found there were three possibilities: pug encephalitis, a brain tumor, or epilepsy. If it was one of the first two, he was going to die. The chances were it was idiopathic epilepsy, which is a fancy way of saying, "Your dog has seizures and we don't know why."

It turns out seizures are very common among dogs, and pugs are the most likely to seize. Various veterinary sites I looked at said drugs would control the seizures, or, I could change his diet. A raw food diet could often reduce or eliminate seizures. That's why I think he is allergic, rather than epileptic.

A change in diet made sense to me. Dogs, after all, are carnivores and not kibble-eaters by nature. So, I began to feed him raw liver (yech), raw eggs, and raw fish, along with some organic kibble (expensive) which I bought at a natural foods store. I also feed him bananas, which are good for dogs, unlike onions or chocolate, which are poisonous to them.

His seizures ceased almost immediately, at least the grand mal ones. He still had the petit mal, which only affected him for a few seconds and did not make him act strange for two days. Once, while walking across the floor, he simply fell over on his side like a stuffed animal that had been tipped over. Then he got back up and was okay.

Still, he wasn't acting quite right. He'd hide in the corner, or under the bed, or behind the couch. He wasn't nearly as playful as he should be. At this time I called his vet and explained the situation, and that I really didn't want to put a puppy on drugs that would affect his brain.

The vet, who was sympathetic to Norman's plight, suggested I stop by the local organic-foods store and pick up a bottle of Bach Flower Remedies, specifically one called Rescue Remedy. He said many people had good results using it with epileptic dogs.

When I stopped by the store, it had all the remedies, of which there are dozens for various ailments. Next to the display there was a free pamphlet explaining how to use them on animals. So I bought the Rescue Remedy, which was about $10 for a small bottle.

The creator of these remedies was Dr. Edward Bach, an Englishman who back in the '30s investigated the effect of different flower essences on various illnesses. He came up with 38 essences. It's not homeopathy, and it's not aromatherapy. They're flowers distilled into little bottles of alcohol, with a dropper in it.

Expecting absolutely nothing, I pried Norman's mouth open and placed four drops in it. To my great surprise, within minutes he was acting as playful as ever. He still had mild petit mal seizures, but strangely enough only during a full moon. I figure if the moon can do to tides what it does, it certainly can affect a dog's brain. After all, the word "lunatic" comes from "luna."

Later, his seizures ceased completely, except for occasionally thrashing around while sleeping for a few seconds, then going back to sleep. He doesn't even do that very much anymore. I suspect he was allergic to the grains and preservatives in his kibble, since when he once got into some bread he had seven seizures that night.

I really don't know how the Bach Flower Remedies work, but they do work. Robert Becker, M.D. author of Cross Current: the Promise of Electromedicine (a book everyone should have), claims that acupuncture and homeopathy work by affecting the electrical currents in the body and brain. Since the currents in the brain are only a millionth of a volt, it seems it wouldn't take much to affect them. The research I've seen claims the flower remedies work by affecting the currents. It's as good of an explanation as any.

I only had to use the Rescue Remedy one time to fix Norman. I don't think he's cured; I've just got his problem under control. Otherwise, he just wants to play all the time. He also wants only the raw food, and not the kibble. I have to not feed him the raw food to make him eat the kibble.

I tried the Rescue Remedy myself, to see what it did. In my case, absolutely nothing. I assume it's because I don't need it. Perhaps I'll investigate them further. Maybe I can make Norman obey me and not use me for a chew toy when I'm trying to sleep.

Excluding the food (which I had to buy for him anyway) the cost of fixing Norman was $10. Too bad humans can't be that lucky.

Science Fiction, Wars, and a Meaning to Life

When I was 12 to 14 years old the most important thing in my life was science fiction, including the original Star Trek. I literally got high off of it -- I felt what is called "the sense of wonder." I don't have to explain it to those who understand; those who have never experienced it, I can't explain it to them.

In my imagination I ranged across all of time and space -- and before them, and after them. I traveled through parallel dimensions and alternative universes. I encountered a vast array of aliens -- talking cats, winged beings, and those that lived under the sea, or in space. It was heady stuff.

Because it was the most important thing in my life at that time, it was in effect the meaning of my life. Others got their meaning from sports or music. Billy Joel, for example, once said that rock 'n' roll was as close to a religion as he had.

I am grateful that I encountered SF at the age I did. I think if I had run across it a few years later, although I would have enjoyed it, I would have never felt that intense sense of wonder. I sometimes wonder about those stuck in ancient and ossified cultures, who've never been able to feel what I did. Almost all SF --as Norman Spinrad noticed, the only visionary and transformational literature -- has come from America and England, two of the most free countries in the world.

At the same age as I began reading SF, I quit going to church. It bored me immensely. I got the awe and wonder from SF. From church I got nothing but boredom. The latter held no meaning for me. How can anything be called a religion when you get nothing but boredom and meaninglessness from it?

I have for years felt that SF was for some people a substitute for religion, or, in some cases, complimentary to it. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien exemplified the latter (although, to be accurate, Tolkien wrote fantasy.) For some people it gives community and meaning. Watch Trekkies, in which one of the characters comments, "We are always recruiting."

All people seek meanings to their lives, even if they deny there is any meaning to life. Richard Dawkins may be an atheist, but obviously his obsessive promoting of Darwinism is his meaning. People will never choose something boring for their meaning in life. It must always give them excitement and a sense of community.

People who may be a bit more sensitive, imaginative and intelligent than others may be lucky enough to encounter that "sense of wonder," what the original Outer Limits called "the awe and mystery." But what about those who aren't so lucky, who are far more limited? What do they seek for excitement and community?

Sometimes -- oftentimes -- they choose war. Although, for the vast majority of them, it does not involve personally fighting. It involves cheering from the sidelines. It's a spectator sport for them. Being cheerleaders for war gives meaning and community to their otherwise boring lives. This boredom -- ennui -- has always been considered the sin known as accidie. It's what comes from their lack of sensitivity, intelligence and imagination.

Such people mistakenly see this feeling of community and purpose as patriotism, love of country. It's anything but. Indeed, it's the exact opposite. They're nationalists, and as George Orwell noticed, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Chris Hedges understands all of this. "The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true -- it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong," he said in a speech at Rockford College, quoting from his book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. "War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss...

"War is a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning."

Robert Nisbet, an influential conservative sociologist -- and "conservative sociologist" almost sounds like an oxymoron -- wrote in his book Community and Power, "The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the 20th century. . .one of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade."

Nisbet's book, indeed all of his books, is about the alienation that comes from the loss of community. Such loss always happens with the expansion of the State. As it expands, it destroys all the intermediary institutions such as religion, neighborhoods and families. Finally, there is nothing left between people and the State. There are various names for such a condition -- fascism, communism, Nazism. The State becomes everything, and people become absorbed into it. Think of the Borg.

Writers such as Erich Fromm and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn have pointed out many people want to be absorbed into a group as an escape from their alienation. It gives them a sense of community and security. Nisbet adds there is something else -- such people don't give up their individuality in these groups, but instead exalt their selves, as they now believe they are part of something they think is much larger than they are.

They become, as I call it, "a community of gods." They believe the group itself is god-like, or blessed of God, so they partake of that "divinity" by being part of the group. They are literally worshipping their selves, a worship that always means those outside of the group are devalued into sub-humans whose murders are dismissed as "collateral damage."

As Russell Kirk noted, "the monstrous self is the source of all evil." The Nazis, the communists, and the fascists were that monstrous self writ large. I believe this is why Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote, "'I' is from God and 'We' is from the Devil." That "We" can only be of the Devil when the State destroys the intermediary institutions, and the only "We" left is the combination of the people and the State.

During long-term warfare society becomes militarized and in doing so damages, destroys or absorbs such intermediary institutions as churches. Then we end up with disgraces such as Jerry Falwell claiming "God is pro war," which of course means God supports only the wars of the United States.

"When the goals and values of a war are popular," writes Nisbet, "both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community."

In short, war can give meaning and community -- and an intoxicating power -- to some people's lives. That makes it a religion, a false one based on hubris and being drunk with power. Power does more than just corrupt; it intoxicates. In The Lord of the Rings, it was that power that turned Smeagol into Gollum. The same thing could happen to people in reality.

I believe the people who are the least liable to fall under the spell of this sense of false community and false purpose are the most intelligent, most sensitive, and most imaginative. For one thing, they can more easily see both sides of an issue. The less intelligent, the less sensitive and the less imaginative cannot. They are the ones who most easily fall under the spell of "nationalism."

They, too, get high off of their nationalism -- that "lust of the eye." But I see no awe and wonder and mystery in that lust. Obviously, some highs are better than others. Awe and love and mystery and wonder are good things. Simple excitement and a false sense of community are fleeting things, not worth clinging to.

Will people change? If they ever do, it will be as it always is -- it starts right in the human heart, the place where the only true change takes place. But until that happens, people will always take the cheap thrills, the bread and circuses over the love, the awe, and the wonder -- because they don't know what it is, and because of that, don't know what they're missing.

A Sense of Wonder

When I was 11 years old my parents and my other adult relatives would go to my grandparents' old, 1920's two-story brick home on Sunday, to play a card game with the very strange pronunciation of "pea-knuckle." Since my idea of playing cards was "Go Fish," I didn't participate. Instead, I hid. I was the only kid in a house full of grown-ups.

The main room was L-shaped, with the dining room at one end and the living room at the other. Each end was so far from the other it might as well have been two separate rooms. The adults sat at the dining table at one end, where they played that odd card game (the rules of which I still haven't learned), while I would lie on the couch at the other end of the L, in the living room, by the fireplace.

On both sides of the fireplace were bookshelves, built into the wall. There weren't many books on them--perhaps half a dozen. All of them were Reader's Digest Condensed Books--the concept of which to this day I still don't quite understand--with the exception of one paperback, a cheap tattered copy which even then had the pages falling out of it. It was a 1963 Ace copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars ("Hidden Menace on the Red Planet!" claimed the sentence below the title. There was no exclamation point at the end, but I always see one in my mind.).

Although I had certainly heard of Tarzan, Burroughs' most famous creation, I had never heard of him. But his name was forever imprinted in my mind along with the cover of that book, which sported a glossy color painting by Roy Krenkel, Jr. It hooked me on the spot. After all these years I can close my eyes and see that cover just as vividly as if it was in front of me.

Whoa, what is this? I wondered. I had never seen anything like it. The cover had two huge moons floating in the night sky above a city of spires and towers. There were what appeared to be three huge airships floating high in the sky. In the foreground were two men, one flying through the air with a dagger in his hand, the other, with his Roman centurion-type helmet flying off of his head, turning toward his attacker with his hands coming up to defend himself. He looked really surprised, with the implication being his attempt at defense wasn't going to do him any good. Why this fight, with a knife aimed at this man's heart? If there was ever a cover that would make me open a book, that was it.

That's certainly not Earth, I thought about that cover. But it's not Mars, either. At least it wasn't the uninhabited and barren Mars I knew from school. So, then, what was this place? Lying there on the couch, next to the fire in the fireplace, I opened that copy of A Fighting Man of Mars.

It was Mars, alright, but it was a Mars that existed only in Burroughs' imagination. It wasn't called Mars, though. It was called Barsoom (Earth was "Jasoom"). At least that's what the natives called Mars, natives who happened to be green-skinned men. Well, sort of "men." The women laid eggs, which hatched little Martians. Until then, I assumed only chickens came out of eggs. But Martians? Ones that carried swords!?

There were other inhabitants--giant, vicious whites apes, ones with six arms. There were also Cackling Mad Scientists, cannibals, disintegrator ray-guns, sword fights, invisibility cloaks, huge spiders (with fangs), cruel tyrants, Damsels in Distress, and a hero with the unlikely name of Tan Hadron of Hastor (our hero's rank: a poor Odwar of the 1st Umak, although he fought in service of the Earthman John Carter, who had become the Warlord of Mars). Adventures galore, more than enough to put an 11-year-old in a tizzy. Years later I realized that although Burroughs had a workman-like style, he could by God tell a story. That's why he was as popular in his day as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are in ours.

That particular copy, which I took home, is long gone. It simply fell apart from my reading it so much. I don't know what I did with it. I probably just threw it away, I'm sure with regret that Ace put out such cheapo books (which it did all the time in the '60s). But today, I have three copies of that Ace version, which I keep in plastic wrappers. I'm scared to read them; I use a newer copy for that. And every time I find another one of those Ace F-190 40-cent copies, I buy it. Someday I'll corner the market on every existing one of them.

As best as I can remember, that was the first novel I ever read. It's hard to describe the effect it had on me. I had never felt that way before. It sure beat the hell out of "See Dick. See Jane. See Pony. Run Pony run!" Even at six years old I knew the whole concept of Dick and Jane was just plain nuts. And godawful boring, too.

I liked the feeling I got from reading that novel. Not a little bit, but a lot. To use some '60s' slang, I dug it. There was something in me that said, More! More! More Barsoom! More Tan Hadron of Hastor! More of those Kali-armed apes and enormous fanged spiders! More of that unforgettable style of "’Silence, coward!’ I commanded.” More wonder, even more of the terror!

Not long after I found that book on my grandparents' bookshelf, I discovered the term for what I felt-- "a sense of wonder." It's applied almost exclusively to science fiction, but it can apply to fantasy, even children's fairy tales. I have my own definition for it--a combination of love and awe. Awe, I believe, involves some fear, although not necessarily a bad fear. That combination of love, awe and fear can make you feel more alive. Dipping into your imagination, and fantasy, can make the real world more enchanted. Anyone who's felt it knows what I'm talking about. To those who haven't felt it, I don't know if it's possible to convey the experience.

It also involved gratitude and what I only describe as humility. The fantasy writer George MacDonald, in his lifelong quest to describe the child-like (as opposed to the immature and childish) could only describe it as humble. It's the humility that comes from feeling awe and wonder, and the gratitude from receiving those gifts, freely given. Imagination is one of the few great gifts I was given then. I didn't even have to try for it. After A Fighting Man of Mars I moved on to other books, all of them almost exclusively science fiction. That sense of wonder was very strong from the ages of 11 to 14. Even now, all these years later, I can still find it, although faintly as compared to those early years. But it's there. And Burroughs' novel will always have a special place in my heart.

I had not been a particularly imaginative kid, not that I can remember. I can only remember a few times I felt that sense of wonder, all of them only lasting several seconds, all of them from movies. One, I remember, was from watching the movie, The Colossus of New York, and once it was while seeing The Valley of Gwangi. I vaguely remember feeling that way, although to a far lesser degree, while watching such exuberant, anarchistic cartoons as "Merrie Melodies" or "Looney Toons."

But while reading that novel I found the feeling lasted for hours. Why it started at age 11, I have no idea. Reading it, I found that imagination can be as vivid, and in some cases more vivid, than reality. I was absorbed in another complete world, one whose existence I had never even suspected. Who needs drugs when you have something like I had? I am reminded of a quote from Thomas Browne: "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us."

Love, and awe. It's why I grokked that book so much. Or maybe I should use a term Theodore Sturgeon created--"blesh." To blend and mesh. I became One With the Book. In a sense, I "lost" my self--I became less aware of "me." When reading the novel, if someone had called my name from around the corner in that room, I doubt I would have heard them. And if I had, I would have been very annoyed at the truly amazing spell being broken.

That's what it was--a spell. A spell of wonder, of love and awe and fear. "Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men," says J.R.R. Tolkien. The purpose of such a spell--it's a good spell (which means there are bad ones)--is to create what Eugene Ionesco called a "world of miracle and wonder...utterly new and fresh and astonishing." He also said, "The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us."

I wasn't exactly a child when I encountered that book. If anything, I was heading out of it. But what I felt then, I still feel today was somewhat of a miracle. It was astonishing. I feel a bit sorry for people who have no idea what it's like, people who lack imagination. Stephen King wrote he considered such people to be in a mental state akin to color-blindness. I understand what he means.

A certain kind of person thinks that imagination is merely day-dreaming, a running away from the world. It is an escape, but it is much more than that. Tolkien said that imagination was "the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality." He believed there was a link between imagination and the final result, sub-creation. His term "sub-creation" meant that Man, to him and many others now and throughout history, shared the ability to create with God, the Creator. Imagining a fully realized world is, in Tolkien's opinion and mine, Art.

When you draw away from this imaginative world, when you return to the "real" world, you can, if you're lucky, return to it with a gift--you sometimes see everything in a different, and better, light. You can see the ordinary with wonder, with what that old scary TV series The Outer Limits called "the awe and mystery." And that, to me, is without a doubt a component of sanity. G.K.Chesteron noticed this when he wrote, "The Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity."

I am also reminded of some of the sayings of Jesus: "Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." The humility of which he spoke, I see as opposed to the arrogance so often found in those adults who I can only describe as crackpot realists, the ones who are convinced they know the hard-headed truth about life, but who in reality know only a small part of it.

I don't mean to imply people should live exclusively in their imaginations. That's a bad thing. There has to be balance. But when people can't escape into their imaginations, that's a bad thing, too. For one thing, it's nearly impossible to create anything. When Robert Fulghum wrote, "Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life--learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some," he was exactly right. Such balance makes you "whole"--and is it any surprise the word comes from the same root as "holy"?

It would be, well, wonderful to live every second of your life in that state of love and awe. Ray Bradbury, who knows what he's talking about, wrote, "Stuff your eyes with wonder ... live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

Bradbury's asking a lot, and I don't know if it's possible to live every second of your life like that. Perhaps it is. Some very rare people appear to have found the way to it. But I do know it requires accepting everything in life, the good as well as the bad, the terror along with the wonder, the gigantic fanged spiders along with rescuing the Damsel in Distress--the whole complex and violent thing. That's why it's bad, again as Tolkien noticed, to bowdlerize fairy tales--or any story--clean for "the sake of the children." Or even for the adults.

Robert South said, "Wonder is from surprise, and surprise stops with experience." That's true. But it's possible to go from innocence to experience and on to something that encompasses both of them. It's a state to which those very rare people have somehow wandered. They've returned to the child-like wonder and wonder, humility and gratitude.

"The moment one gives a close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world unto itself," wrote Henry Miller. A blade of grass is pretty mundane, really. That's what our experience tells us. But in reality it's more than that. It is, as Miller and others have noticed, an entire world--an entire universe--all in itself, full of awe and mystery and wonder. It is possible, as William Blake wrote, to see a world in a grain of sand.

After all, I found awe and love and mystery and adventure and wonder in a cheap paperback book that was falling apart as I read it. Aren't there such stories even in a blade of grass or a grain of sand, if we only listen to them?

Burroughs' novel wasn't sanitized and tidied up. Had it been, A Fighting Man of Mars would have been one boring book, one certainly not worth reading. It might as well been called, Dick and Jane and Spot and Pony on Mars.

Yet, for all the horror and terror that can be inherent in this fallen world, there is still that wonder and love and awe. One of the main purposes of the latter is to not only learn to accept the former, but to also push it back. Tolkien called this "consolation" or eucatastrophe, i.e., the happy ending. It is the moment of joy at the deliverance from evil. Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic, related this happy ending to Christian theology, specifically the Resurrection, or the overcoming of death. To him that was the greatest eucatastrophe of all.

I occasionally wonder what the world would be like without imagination and fantasy. I know it'd be an awful place, something the old East Germany. I am reminded of those shuddery, grit-your-teeth places like Brave New World, or perhaps even more horribly, 1984. It would be a world with little wonder, little awe, little creation. Einstein was right on the mark when he noted, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Knowledge is important, but imagination more so.

Personally, I prefer not only Burroughs' Mars, but better yet The Circus of Dr. Lao, where you if look at it in the right way, the whole world is a circus, and where a handful of dust is not just dust, but a mystery and a marvel.

How Science Fiction Saved Me From Hell - I Mean Jr. High School

"The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal."-- Henri Frederic Amiel

I had a pretty good time in 6th grade, especially the last half. Being only 11 years old, I naively assumed there would be a linear progression. If 6th grade was this good, then 7th grade should be even better. And 8th grade, still better. And so on.

Was I shocked when I got into the 7th grade. One of my friends, raised 300 miles from me, once asked me, “Was 7th grade a kind of hell for you?” Yes, it was, and I couldn’t figure out why. Compared to 6th grade, it was a sheer drop straight down, like one of those fjords in Norway.

Years later, I realized what the problem was: I was unusually intelligent, imaginative and sensitive. So why was I in classes with kids whose IQs were 100? And sometimes maybe less? When I was in 8th grade the boy behind me was 16 years old. He dropped out soon after the school year started.

I had nothing in common with almost all of the kids in class. I didn’t want to be friends with them, and the schoolwork bored me so badly I ended up being one of those boys with low grades and high standardized test scores.

I consider public (read government-run) schools to be a modern version of the Greek torturer Procrustes. He had a bed, and those who were too short to fit, he stretched; those who were too long, he chopped. Everyone fit, but nearly everyone was mutilated.

When I was 12 or 13 I sneaked into my file at school and saw a special notation: “IQ 126.” No genius, but an IQ of 125 is the mean average for doctors and Ph.D.s. Even now I remember the surprise I felt: I had no idea I was so smart. Not a clue. After all, hadn’t all my grade-school teachers put comments on my report cards about what a bad student I was?

Of course, every teacher and administrator in my entire school career completely dropped the ball in my case. They didn’t have a clue, either. They assumed I should make good grades. I didn’t.

In their minds, a high IQ automatically meant good grades. Not once in my entire public school career did any teacher ask, “Why is someone so smart doing so poorly in school? Is there something wrong?”

Something wrong? Yes. I remember one of the greatest shocks I ever got in school was when a guidance counselor told me, “According to your test scores, you could go to Harvard or Yale.” Who, me? The idea had never entered my head.

To me, especially with boys, a high IQ, coupled with imagination and sensitivity and somewhat of a desire to take risks (in other words, me) is a sure-fire recipe for poor grades. The teachers and administrators were supposedly the adults, and I was 12 years old. They didn’t know what they were doing, and I was the one who paid for it.

So what got me through junior high school? One thing: science fiction. The feeling I got from it is called “the sense of wonder,” and the dilemma is that if someone hasn’t experienced it, I cannot explain it to them, and if they have, there’s no need for me to.

To me, that feeling is composed of wonder, amazement, imagination, absorption, and even a kind of love—what the introduction to the original Outer Limits called “the awe and the mystery.” I got that feeling only from science fiction: I did not get it from school, or church, which I ceased attending when I was 12, being bored nearly to tears by it.

Why I got that feeling, I don’t know. Why any boy gets it (and it generally tends to be boys), I don’t know. But whenever I see a kid reading a science fiction book, I know that kid is different, what most people consider an oddball. I don’t. It’s other people I consider oddballs, the ones who lack imagination and intelligence and sensitivity.

The writer Stephen King, writing about growing up, said he considered people without imagination to suffer from “a kind of colorblindness.” I believe the same: to me they are missing out on an infinite world that goes from the beginning to time to the end of it, from one side of the universe to another.

I realize now my disillusionment with junior high forced me into being lopsided: for close to three years I lived almost completely in my imagination. That’s not a good thing. While I did do such early teen things as roller- and ice-skating, and attending an occasional party, for the most part I lived in my imagination. For me, it was an escape from school. Being an escape, it was also a consolation.

I went from being an extroverted and funny 11-year-old to an introverted 12-year-old. I didn’t start to get back on track until 10th grade. My transformation had nothing to do with anything except junior high school. And it happened within a month of starting 7th grade.

I knew I would be considered so weird in school I never mentioned my reading habits. A perfect example of what I would have encountered was when some adults entered my room at home, saw my library of perhaps 100 books, and exclaimed, “Have you really read all those!?” Now if I had had 100 albums, it would have never occurred to them to say, “Have you really listened to all those records!?”

I still remember the names of all the authors I read: Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, A.E. van Vogt. Alfred Bester. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I still have some of the original paperbacks books I had when I was 12: Keith Laumer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Galaxy, Clifford D. Simak’s All the Traps of Earth, and Rudyard Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast. I have four copies of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars, the ACE 1963 version with drawings by Roy Krenkel, Jr. I plan on cornering the market.

I was especially fond of Asimov and Ellison, not so much because there was anything special about their writings, but because they wrote about their personal lives. I felt I knew them. Ellison, in a collection of his short stories, wrote an introduction titled, “How Science Fiction Saved Me from a Life of Crime.”

I knew what he meant. “There’s someone out there who’s like me,” I remember thinking, even though he was old enough to be my father. It was like being on a deserted island for years and suddenly seeing fresh footprints.

Things picked up for me in high school, when I was 15 and a sophomore. If I could have gone from 6th grade straight to 10th grade, things would have been fine. Of course, it’s not possible to skip from being 11 to being 15. For me, and I’m sure many others, that’s an unfortunate thing.

In high school there were parties, girls, drinking and drugs. I had a blast, although that blast was always on weekends. We also swam, sailed our Styrofoam Sea Snark sailboat, rode horses and mini-bikes, and in general lived a life that was a cross between Animal House and American Graffiti. Why could this not have happened when I was 12?

What I learned, I taught myself. I learned grammar from the back of a dictionary when I was 12 and 13. I still have that dictionary: “The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition.” The copyright is from 1950. Yet, in school, I simply could not pay attention in English class. I had to do it myself, at my own pace.

Once thing I noticed, even in those days, is that upon entering high school my reading of science fiction almost ceased. Not totally, but by about 90%. I had other things to do, just as fun. But I still occasionally had that desire to withdraw into myself. It’s a desire I have, even today.

Without a doubt, there is something wrong with our schools, and has been for a long time. This wrongness is so pronounced I have for years believed the public schools should be closed down. When my junior high years consisted of living in my imagination, and my senior high ones consisted of beer and wine and rolling joints, clearly there is a problem. A big problem, one that affected not just me but many other kids.

We need a lot more freedom in schools, and a lot less bureaucracy. That means waving bye to the government, and don’t let the door hit you in your butt on the way out. And don’t come back, ever.

Why are kids in school for 12 years, anyway? What does it take 12 years to learn? Ben Franklin, at the age of 12, was an apprentice making soap and candles. He didn’t turn out too badly, as did neither Thomas Jefferson nor George Washington. Or any of the other Founding Fathers, none of whom spent ages five to 17 in public schools.

When I graduated high school I couldn’t do much that was useful. I could mostly build a house, but that was because my father was a general contractor and I had helped build houses since I was 12. I couldn’t work on a car, something I taught myself when I was 20. For all practical purposes, I could do almost nothing.

What exactly did I or anyone else learn in those 12 years? Nothing, really, besides learning to read and write, and some arithmetic and math. And all that was before 4th grade. My whole time is summed up by the movie, Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, when the kids are staring dully at Ben Stein, as he drones, “Anyone? Anyone?” No one knew the answer, and neither did I.

Something certainly needs to be done for the more intelligent, the more imaginative, and the more sensitive. They need to be scooped up and sent to live with their own kind. As things stand now—and as they stood in my time—they’re just very irregularly shaped pegs that are supposed to fit in some very square holes.

Libertarian Novels

For some reason which I don't understand, the worst writers, like Karl Marx, are leftist, the best, such as Conrad and Dostoevsky, are conservatives, and the anarchist/libertarian ones write science-fiction, fantasy and horror. Even Tolkien, who wrote of a Stateless Shire in his first novel, The Hobbit, described himself as an "anarchist."

As an example, nearly every libertarian I know has been profoundly affected by the writings of the late Robert Heinlein. It wasn't just the libertarian world he portrayed in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but also the fact he portrayed the characters in nearly all of his stories as competent, can-do people. It's obvious that Tom Clancy was greatly influenced by him, too.

Myself, I found A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher an eye-opener. It portrayed the importance of an armed citizenry against the eternal depredations of the State. How many other novels written in the '50's were so sympathetic to the importance of the Second Amendment? I can't think of any.

Others were influenced by Eric Frank Russell's story, ". . . And Then There Were None" (part of his book, The Great Explosion), about a society which had discovered a foolproof way to remain completely free and at the same time make itself unconquerable.

Today, there are three well-known libertarian science-fiction writers -- L. Neil Smith, James P. Hogan, and F. Paul Wilson. All have huge followings.

Probably Smith's most famous novel is his first one, The Probability Broach, written in the late '70's but just recently reissued as a superb graphic novel. It's the story of one Win Bear, a detective who ends up in an alternate libertarian universe in which monkeys and dolphins talk, and Ayn Rand was President. And everyone is armed. (Obviously, there's not much crime. As Heinlein pointed out, "An armed society is a polite society.")

James Hogan is not so explicitly libertarian as Smith, but he, too uses the convention of alternate universes to fashion freer worlds than our own. I am especially fond of Bug Park, a "hard science" novel about a young boy and his adventures with tiny, remote-controlled robots. This one, even though for adults, has Heinlein "juvenile" written all over it, and would make a wonderful movie.

Then we have F. Paul Wilson and his "Repairman Jack" novels (The Tomb, Conspiracies). Jack, who is a combination of the Equalizer and Fox Mulder, has decided he wants to live off of the grid, completely away from the prying eyes of the State. He deals only in gold and cash, has no Social Security number, no ID. He also has a flame-thrower, bought from a weapons shop which has the same motto as the one in The Weapon Shops of Isher: "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." The name of the shop is, of course, Isher.

Jack "fixes" people's problems when they have no one else to turn to. He is equal parts Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. His adventures run from dealing with rakoski -- walking, talking Great Whites who just happen to be human -- to the Men in Black (who really aren't from here).

All of these writers are great fun, and all are illustrations of Tolkien's comment that we have the Primary World (the one in which we live), and then we have Secondary Worlds -- the ones writers create. There are an infinite amount of them.

If a writer has enough skill to create a fully-realized Secondary World, and readers enough imaginative muscle to suspend their disbelief, they can actually "live" for a while in that Secondary World.

What an awful world it would be if there were no Secondary Worlds. It would be the world of 1984, of Brave New World, of Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind.

Certainly, Secondary Worlds are an escape. But they are more than that. As Richard Feynman so perceptively noted, ". . . there are new generations born every day . . . there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."

It is through stories -- through those Secondary Worlds --that those ideas are passed from generation to generation. Without those Secondary, imaginative worlds, you can start saying goodbye to the collected wisdom of humanity, passed from old to young. As Richard Weaver wrote in his book of the same title, Ideas Have Consequences.

One of the curious differences between the Primary World and Secondary Worlds is that the first is inherently imperfect (in religious terms, "fallen"), while Secondary Worlds are not necessarily. What this does is give the readers an idea of what better worlds might be like, in the safety of their imaginations.

Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, for two examples, spent their lives imagining fully-realized libertarian worlds, and wrote about them in the hope others would read of them and be convinced of the truth of their positions. Both were showing people better worlds.

A libertarian world, for example, is as close to an ideal world as there can be. However, being an ideal world, it doesn't (as of yet) exist totally in the real world. It does exist in bits and pieces in reality. It is a Secondary World that someday might be completely implemented in the Primary World.

All of the aforementioned writers, and their books, are about what America could have been, and what it should be. What the world should be. The books are about the writers and readers using their imaginations to see what the world would be like if the switches were set right, ones set wrong a long time ago.

Such things would be all for the good, for everyone.