The Lie Behind the Bumper Sticker

Posted on November 5th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 4 November 2014.

Last night, somebody I like said something extremely fatuous, and I find I cannot sit by and let it go without challenge.

That was, “Vote as if you’re going to get the job you want, not as if you will stay stuck in the job you have.”

Gee, that sounds great. That sounds absolutely peachy.

Except that like most bumper stickers, it is empty and meaningless at best and a pernicious evil lie at worst.

Even in the greatest economy in the world, there’s no such thing as unlimited upward mobility for everybody. There cannot be. In any office of fifty people, not everybody can be office manager. In any factory of two hundred workers, not everybody can be foreman. In any community, the “next job” for many will be public school, or retirement. Not everybody’s going to open the next hot restaurant. Some people will have to be busboys in that restaurant. Even for those of working age, most people will rise only so far, and no farther; and there will never be the magical Randian economy where everybody’s a billionaire, keeping the economy going by selling manipulated stock to one another.

What that bumper sticker says is:

If you’re in an Union and the Republicans in your state wants to take away your right to collectively bargain, you should vote as if you’re in management.

If you’re a miner and the Republicans in you state want to slash the safety regulations that help keep you alive while giving the fat guy in the front office tax incentives for doing it, you should vote as if your life doesn’t matter.

If you’re a woman and the Republicans in your State want you to continue earning 77% of what men earn for the same work, and further say that you shouldn’t be working anyway, you should vote as if you have a penis.

If you’re like my wife and your Governor has already cut your salary by thirty percent and has said that he wants to go after your retirement next, you should vote as if you’re the rich people that kind of austerity benefits.

If you’ve suffered catastrophic medical reverses and the Republicans in your state want to punish the President by blocking your insurance while calling you names and implying it’s laziness and not infirmity that makes you too sick to work, you should vote as if you’re a marathon runner.

And even if you are fortunate enough to have reasonable expectations for that magical job which will elevate you from the middle class to the ranks of the wealthy, you should vote as if all the people stuck behind you don’t matter, as if they should have the minimum wage slashed and their workplace safety gutted and their pensions raided and their Social Security privatized and so on, because your ambition should be getting to the point where you no longer have to look on them as people.

“Vote as if you’re going to get the job you want, not as if you will stay stuck in the job you have.”

The argument that the Joads should vote like the Gatsbys because they can expect to someday be the Gatsbys. Which has resulted in a couple more Gatsbys, a lot more Joads, and the steady disappearance of the Cleavers.

Great aphorism. But it’s a lie.

Tags: Ayn Rand, Barack Obama, Life Wisdom, Politics, Republicans | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics

Frequently Asked Questions: How I Decide Which Books To Review

Posted on November 3rd, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

I review books for SCI FI Magazine.

Wearing my book reviewer hat, I explain to everybody who wants to send me their books that I can only read, let alone review, only a fraction of the books that are sent to me, and that some other factors control what I review…but that is not saying no; that is insurance against the occasional author who thinks I have issued guarantees. (There was one lady who got quite irate, despite such a warning, when I never did cover her book; I ultimately told her that I *did* take the time to read the damn book and found it nothing special, and that she did not want me to say so in print.)

So how do I decide which books to review?

Well, keep in mind that this is a job, and that one key attribute of a job is that you want to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I have four book reviews to write, for the average column; I have been known to stretch a column to six, if passion for the work drives me, but four is what I am being paid for. I am no longer a fast reader, certainly not for this work. It can take me a week to finish a book. So all the reading I do, all of it, including the pleasure reading not associated with the column, which I insist on making time for, has the bi-monthly deadline lurking behind it.

So if I already know and love your work, or suspect I will, I make that book one of the four right away.

By contrast: have I been too nice to you, too recently? Have I raved about one of your books, in the last year? Multiple? Gee, I honestly don’t want to be accused of always taking the easy route. Maybe I’ll save your current one for pleasure reading.

Is your book part of a series? Is it multiple books into the series? Sorry, I have neither the time nor the inclination to catch up. And if I express confusion, as my review, explaining as my review that the book is not for those who wish to jump on midstream, I do not want to receive buckets of hate mail from fans who think I should have made a life project of educating myself enough to write a concordance, for a three hundred word review. (This happened with fans of Laurel K. Hamilton.)

I always try to put in an anthology or collection. (They are also deadline insurance; I can always say something about a collection.)

My columns tend to have a numerical male bias. They just do, unless I consciously counter it. I try to consciously counter it. I always try to include at least one book by a woman; the goal is half the column, but I have not always achieved that, and sometimes I don’t even achieve the one. So if I see a new book by a writer I have never heard of and it looks like it might be interesting, that writer has an extra plus if she’s a woman. She just does.

I am more likely to read and thus review books whose subgenres I am partial to. Horror-thrillers have a leg up, though I am aware that I cannot fill the column with them. If I rave about one, the next one needs to be extraordinary to be in the same column.

If I am not grabbed by your book within twenty pages, it goes on the discard pile. I am aware that some books have long entrance ramps. The entrance ramps need to be interesting too. LONESOME DOVE has a very long entrance ramp, but grabbed me in the first paragraph, when Gus told the pigs that if they were going to go eat that rattlesnake, they should take it under the porch — and they listened. That book had me at hello, dammit. Have me at hello. I don’t have the time to not be interested while I read your book. I have too big a pile to get through.

Very long books are occasions for dismay. I love John Shirley. I will review a John Shirley book in a heartbeat. I have a massive bound trilogy by him. It is on my shelf to be explored someday. I did not have weeks to read it. For the same reason, Ian Banks has multiple epics on my shelf, for someday. I have and will review doorstops, I am not saying I won’t. Their presence on my bookshelf torments me. But the time investment does enter into my calculations. How soon is my deadline? Can I read two shorter books in the same amount of time, and finish the column? Do I have to schedule a stand-alone novella published in chapbook as one of my reviews, to make time for the behemoth?

Have you been an asshole to me, or to people I care about? Three or four people are on this list. One guy I won’t touch. Sorry. He tried to do me damage. I won’t read his books, however acclaimed. Nor will I review books by the guy I consider a racist.

How much lead time are you giving me? If, like Subterranean Press, you mail me everything months ahead of time, there are multiple columns where the review can appear. If, like many publishers, you get the bright idea of sending me your books a month or so after publication — well, I do try to review new books; the more antiquated your product, by deadline, the more unlikely coverage becomes. Subterranean almost always gets a review. They just do. Their product is fine, but their treatment of reviewers sterling.

Finally: I tend NOT to review more than one book by a single publisher within a column. I will break this rule when I have to, but there have been occasions where I had to restrain myself from just reviewing four Sub Press books in the same column, because I had them handy and they were all sent to me with months of lead time.

These are all factors.

Tags: horror, John Shirley, Lonesome Dove, writing | Category Blog Business, Books, Frequently Asked Questions, Life Wisdom, Uncategorized, Writing

SICARIO (2015)

Posted on October 31st, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Today’s drug-trade thriller seen theatrically: SICARIO (2015), starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio del Toro, with supporting work by Daniel Kaluuya, Victor Garber and Jon Bernthal, is one of the best movies of the year and would be one of the best movies of any year, but I need to prevent disappointment among some eager moviegoers by first explaining what it is not, while making sure that this remains a relatively spoiler-free review.

To wit: Emily Blunt, who outright stole the movie that began life as EDGE OF TOMORROW and became LIVE DIE REPEAT from Tom Cruise as a female action hero, is the lead of this one, and so the movie has been anticipated by some as another chance for her to kick ass.

The impression that this might be what you are in for, going to see this one, is only increased by the intelligence that the filmmakers were offered a much bigger budget if they replaced Blunt with a male lead and that they quite rightly stuck by their guns and kept her.

So what you need to know is this: while the movie establishes right away that her character is a highly competent law enforcement professional and that she is many ways more formidable than some of the males around her, she is almost immediately drafted into an inter-agency task force where she is the junior partner, and where she gets to do very little that distinguishes her as a hero.

She is in over her head, ethically and procedurally; she doesn’t have the experience to navigate these waters, and the movie rides largely on whether the moral swamp she has entered by agreeing to this assignment will, or will not, destroy her. She is the lead; the drama plays out on her face. But don’t expect her to headline any action set-pieces beyond the first five minutes. That’s not what this movie is about.

Not that it’s short on thrills. There’s that opening action set piece. There’s a Mexican border crossing that is a long, agonizing wait for something terrible to happen – which is not a mystery; it will. There’s another setpiece set in a smuggling tunnel. There’s Josh Brolin as the head of the operation, who is just a little too jokingly casual about matters of life and death. And there’s Benicio del Toro, as the world-weary participant who takes a shine to Blunt’s character but just might be more dangerous to her than he seems.

So, yeah, the female lead is forced by design to be somewhat more passive than her instincts would allow, but again, the drama plays out on her face, on the eyes that never stop looking, the soul that is steadily more wounded and appalled. Blunt gives what is likely the best actress performance I have seen this year.

It is a great film. Possibly even a capital-G Great Film. But if you’re looking to see an action heroine take charge and kick butt, it is not in this movie. It’s a much different dynamic, and not a less powerful one.

For those who wanna know if it’s big-screen material (and Oh God, I hate that), the aerial photography and the wide-open but still claustrophobic streets of Juarez absolutely are, and the tension that plays out absolutely is.

SICARIO is starting to disappear from theatres, to make way for the bigger fall releases, but is very much worth the trip.

Tags: Benicio del Toro, Edge of Tomorrow, Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Movies, Sicario, Thrillers, Tom Cruise | Category Movies