Here they are. You can download a PDF score here. (Only the lyrics in the score fall under the CC license. You can modify or replace the public domain musical setting as you wish.)

1.

Our country born in harm,
In plunder by the strong,
Yet strength my stake
On weary travelers lost,
The homeless, tempest tossed,
That oceans of misfortune cross
A home to make.

2.

Keep, ancient lands, your few,
Your pride in lineage true
Of warring tribes.
Give us your tired, your poor,
Your masses yearning for
The light we shine from out the door
We open wide.

3.

Not like the realms of old
That greatness bought with gold
Or war’s dear toll,
But a new liberty,
Born of equality:
A thousand tongues in harmony
To sing the whole.

4.

So may we ever be,
In our diversity,
True freedom’s shore:
A land of pilgrims still,
A light upon a hill,
The hope of ages to fulfill
Forevermore.

Here it is paired with a public domain setting I found online, but performers can feel free to find or create their own arrangements.

I love to create a video of an appropriately diverse virtual choir singing this. If you’d like to help with that in any way (as a singer, video editor, whatever), please contact me.

The post Immigration Anthem first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

What we can do.

How America would look if we put a bunch of fascists in charge.

The post My Corollary first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

And sure enough, Democratic administrations have been much better for the economy over the last 44 years.

Here’s the infographic I ended up producing, and here is the spreadsheet with the raw data and calculations. I’ll say more about my calculations below the graphic.

My process:

1. I gathered data from official, public sources for each indicator for every year starting with 1980.
2. I started at 1980 because before then, there was a bipartisan consensus on how to best handle the economy: basically the opposite of the “supply side” economics (or, as George H. Bush put it before he had to adopt it himself, “voodoo” economics) that Reagan introduced. So it’s really only starting in 1980 that we can usefully compare the disparate approaches the two major parties are taking today.
3. For data that existed in monetary form (the deficit, GDP, and the stock market), I converted each year’s amount into 2024 dollars. Otherwise, inflation would make negative indicators like the deficit look worse than they were and positive indicators like GDP look better, since a big part of their growth over the years was just background inflation. (Of course, inflation itself is an economic indicator, and so I do handle it separately.)
4. For each indicator, I calculated the average change per year. This was important because Republican presidents served more years than Democratic presidents between 1980 and 2024, so using total amounts of change would have made the Republicans look worse on things like the deficit and better on things like GDP. It would also have made presidents that served eight years look worse on the deficit but better on GDP than presidents who served only four years.

The post Comparing the Two Parties on the Economy first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Several years ago, Republican U.S. Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate as “proof” that climate change was a hoax. This exemplified a common misunderstanding about global warming: that the entire biosphere would heat up uniformly like a cup of tea, when in reality, the global weather system is much more complex. (And even that cup of tea probably contains subtle layers and currents.)

This error of overly simplistic framing of large scale phenomena is a common thread in other cases of bad scientific thinking: such as the Truther conviction that only controlled demolition could explain how the World Trade Center towers collapsed the way they did on 9/11 (mixing up how small structures collapse vs. enormous ones), or the kindergartener understanding, based on the limited sample size of their families and classrooms, of the fixity of binary genders.

Reality at scale is always more complex.

The truth about climate change is that the Earth is retaining more and more heat, which has the effect not only of increasing temperatures overall (though even that isn’t theoretically guaranteed, as there’s a difference between heat and temperature), but of pumping more energy (heat is energy) into existing weather systems, so that we’re likely to see more extreme weather conditions and more destructive hurricanes. This is why we now say “climate change” rather than “global warming.” Temperature rise is just part of the total effect.

And we are in fact seeing an increase in the total average temperature across the globe, as well as increasingly destructive weather events. So it makes no sense to point to any particular local cooling and claim that’s evidence against the overall increase of heat retained by the biosphere.

However, don’t we progressives often point to local weather phenomena (like those very hurricanes, or record high temperatures in various regions) as evidence that climate change is true? Aren’t we making the very same mistake?

Strictly speaking: Yes! But as with many “both sides do it” situations between Democrats and Republicans, our errors are far less egregious.

Imagine we’re watching a basketball game, and Stephen Curry hits six three-point shots in a row. “Wow!” we exclaim. “He is the greatest shooter of all time.” But the fact is that no small sample of shot attempts can prove the worth of a shooter. It’s what they do with all their shot attempts that shows how good or bad they really are. Any bad shooter can have streaks of successful shots; any great shooter can have streaks of unsuccessful ones. Curry once went 0-11 on three-point attempts in a game.

So if we’re citing those six consecutive makes as proof that Curry is a great shooter, we are indeed in the wrong. But I don’t really think that’s what we’re doing. What we’re really saying is, “Steph is a great shooter, and this is yet another case of him doing what great shooters can do.” In other words, we’re not citing his streak of made baskets as proof of a truth, but celebrating it as an example of that truth. Or perhaps as legitimate evidence of that truth along with every other shot he ever took. We’re just noting that new bit of evidence being added to all the rest.

So I think, on the whole, these kinds of statements are acceptable, when made with that awareness.

But what about the reverse? What if someone, for whatever reason (maybe because they profit from a trillion dollar industry that Curry somehow puts at risk by his mere existence?) decided to prove that he was a terrible shooter, and did so by showing us a video of him missing an easy layup or series of shots? Or by cherry-picking outlier statistical anomalies in which he fares less well than certain bad shooters when looked at through a narrow and isolated numerical lens? What would we think of their efforts? Would we even believe they were being sincere in their arguments?

Both sides use the language of proof inaccurately when citing local weather conditions in relation to climate change. One side is using language naturally, in understandably loose ways, and in support of a finding that has overwhelming scientific consensus. The other side is trying to convince us that Stephen Curry is a terrible shooter.

The post Local weather as a commentary on climate change first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Here are some ideas I have about efforts that only those with power, money, or influence might be able to make. If you like any of them, share them as widely as you can, and maybe one or more of them will find their way into the hands of someone who can make it happen.

America Talking – My proposal for a new social network that incentivizes conversation between the two parties.

Engaging the Right Wing Echo Chamber – If the Mountain won’t come to Mohammed…

A New Progressive Party – The Bizarro third party we need.

Dear Liberal Billionaires – Some ideas for what they can do with their couch change.

The post Bridging the Blue-Red Divide first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Democrats are beginning to understand

There’s a lot of post mortem talk these days about how the Democratic Party could improve its policies, messaging, and candidates to do better next time, and we should by all means continue evolving our vision for the country and how we communicate it. However, no change in the party is going to affect voters who will never hear about them.

Let that sink in for a moment.

There’s an enormous segment of the electorate that will never even hear our pitch to the nation, however well we tune it. They won’t be choosing between our policies and the GOP’s; they’ll be choosing between the distortions of those policies presented to them by the voices they trust, voices that are more free than ever to lie more egregiously than ever to their audience because of how well they’ve insulated it from any other news sources.

Where does that leave us? 

It obviously depends on how big that segment is. Right now, the best organizations I know of for growing and turning out a Democratic electorate still seem to have fertile fields to work, room to maximize our advantage among voter cohorts that are still persuadable, but the 2024 presidential election, in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote for the first time in twenty years, raises the concern that this might not always be the case.

What will happen if/when the right wing media bubble grows to the point that no success we can have outside it will give us more than 50% of the vote?  At that point, we’ll have to find a way to penetrate the bubble, to inject our voices into that echo chamber, so we can pull at least some of its occupants back onto the common ground of a shared reality.

Democratic organizations, current or new–I suspect that brand new ones devoted to this specific mission will need to be founded and funded–must begin or accelerate the work of:

1. Establishing the extent, makeup, and trajectory of the right wing echo chamber,
2. Finding ways to reach that audience, and
3. Developing effective messaging that can pull them out of the bubble.

Some notes:

• Creativity and scientific testing will be required at every stage. No idea should be too wild to try, but every idea should be carefully tested before being released for general use. Testing should involve all the usual best practices of controlled experimentation. It’s essential that we find approaches that actually work, rather than blast messages that only satisfy our own need to vent (*cough* The Lincoln Project *cough*).
• Part of the scientific endeavor should be to consult what science we have about why people hold the politics they do and what makes them more amenable to persuasion, while also funding new research in that very young field. No scientific discovery should be the sole basis for putting some new method or message into wide practice–every attempt must be tested first on a small scale to see its actual effect in the real world–but known or soon-to-be-discovered science can help us devise the most promising hypotheses.
• It’s likely that no “miracle cure” (a single tactic with a big effect) will be discovered. More likely, numerous approaches will be identified that will have small but significant effects if carefully targeted to the right cohorts.
• Or it may be that we’ll discover no methods or messages that work under any circumstances, and if that’s how it ends, that will have to be accepted. However, we’re a long way from that point right now. We need to make a legitimate, systematic, scientific go of it before admitting any kind of defeat.

Finally, here are a few examples of tactics that might be developed. I’m NOT claiming there’s any evidence they’d work; I only present them as examples of how wide-ranging the attempts might be. In practice, guided by no principles beyond “whatever works”, some of the actual ideas that are found to be effective could turn out to be much more surprising and out-of-the-box than mine.

• A fun online quiz measuring fluid intelligence targeted to conservative users. Those who score high are presented with a further message: “Congratulations! You scored in the top X% of all test takers. This puts you in an elite group that studies have shown is more open to having misinformation corrected. Would you like to take a further test to find out if you’re holding any misinformation and how ready you are to correct it?”
• Some kind of campaign just to make conservatives more aware of the material differences between conservative and liberal brains. With the idea that mere self awareness might make a difference.
• Interest groups that chip away at Republican monolithic belief by celebrating the possibility of dissent and relative rationalism. (e.g. Republican Gun Owners for Common Sense Gun Safety, Republicans Against Corporate Welfare, Republicans For Diversity, Republican Cops Against Police Violence)

However we do it, we need to start thinking outside the box of conventional political targeting and messaging, because that box is getting smaller by the year.

This is one of my suggestions for bridging the Blue-Red divide.

The post Engaging the Right Wing Echo Chamber first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

I regularly post recommendations for the most effective giving we can do each election season, and more and more, my top choices have featured organizations that do their work all year round — for which, in fact, the most effective work occurs well in advance of any election.

I’m repeating those recommendations here and adding other groups that don’t just turn out existing voters to the usual contests, but also grow the electorate and expand the range of challenges we need to make to MAGA extremism at every level of government, in every locality.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any of the organizations I’m listing; I don’t gain anything from donations made to them except the satisfaction of knowing that Democratic money is being spent in good ways. 

Persuasion

These two groups perform a function that many believe is impossible: persuading voters who might otherwise vote conservative to vote progressive instead. They manage this by building relationships with individuals and engaging them in conversations about issues important to them, before they even begin to attempt any kind of political persuasion.

This community affiliate of the AFL-CIO fills an important need in this country: they serve as a virtual union for workers that don’t have unions at their jobs. Though they can’t collectively bargain with employers for their members, what they do is organize them to effect electoral changes in this country that are beneficial to working people.

Working America reaches a demographic that, frankly, the Democratic Party has not been communicating very well with in recent years, which makes their work all the more valuable and even essential.

Galvanize USA takes a similar approach to Working America: building ongoing relationships with a specific demographic by offering help and information on issues that matter to the group, in this case, “women across the country—particularly in rural, small town, and suburban communities.” 

Suburban women played a key role in Joe Biden’s victory, and will continue to be a key swing demographic in future elections.

Giving to campaigns and conventional GOTV (get-out-the-vote)

Giving directly to candidates is often an inefficient use of Democratic money because:

• Campaign spending very quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. The same money sent elsewhere would result in a bigger gain of Democratic votes.
• Excess money sent to an easily winning campaign is wasted.
• Money sent to campaigns with little chance of winning can also be wasted.
• Some contests are more important than others.

Oath does the work of identifying the campaigns where each donated dollar is most likely to make the biggest difference, and they offer a regular monthly donation option where, every month, they’ll direct your money to wherever it’s most needed at the time.

Both the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center are so effective at registering likely Democratic voters and getting them to the polls that they were ranked #1 and #2 by a Stanford-based group that took a data-driven approach to determining the most effective places to steer political donations in 2020.

Expanding the electoral battle lines

For decades, the GOP has held an advantage over the Democratic Party at the local level, but these two groups, Contest Every Race and Run For Something, are working to remedy that. They recruit, train, and support candidates to run for offices that would normally be seen as unwinnable and therefore left uncontested.

You might ask what the good is in contesting an unwinnable race, but the answers are that:

1. Some of them are in fact winnable! Both organizations boast impressive “batting averages” for winning races that would otherwise have been conceded to the GOP without a challenge.
2. Even if a local campaign doesn’t win, it can:
   • Energize voters and affect statewide vote totals for state and national offices.
   • Deliver a progressive pitch to voters who might not ordinarily hear it (or who might listen more openly when spoken by a local candidate from their neighborhood)

Finally, I’d like to make “honorable mention” of the Can’t Win Victory Fund, a group that runs candidates in gerrymandered districts where they really have no chance of winning, as a way to shine light on the problem of gerrymandering and advocate for fairer election systems. This group doesn’t really fit the criteria of these recommendations, but I include them because I was delighted to discover a group partly doing what I wrote about in this old blog post.

The power of many

I recommend that you donate to one or more of these organizations, and that you make it a monthly donation. It doesn’t have to be much. As with voting, it’s not about how much a single vote can do, but what we can accomplish if enough of us do it. There are billionaires donating millions of dollars to make the world better for themselves. How about if a million of us donate $10 a month (less than we might spend per month on coffee, a streaming service, or a single restaurant meal) to make the world better for everybody?

Volunteer work

For those who can’t afford to donate, or who want to get involved more directly, two of the above organizations, Working America and Run For Something, accept volunteers. Although I’m not as sure about the effectiveness and efficiency of their volunteer operations, I favor them because of what I do know about their work in general.

The volunteer work they ask people to do can be a little atypical. For example, Working America does a lot of recruitment of new members, and this makes volunteers feel like they’re just fundraising. But “membership” in Working America only involves a token fee that strengthens its members’ commitment turn out to the polls year after year in favor of candidates and policies that will improve their lives.

For those who want to do more conventional get-out-the-vote type work, or who want to find some local action they can join in person, here are three of the bigger organizations that coordinate volunteer efforts all over the country. I imagine that the effectiveness of these activities varies widely, but every little bit can only do good:

More…

These “what we can do” posts have usually been electorally focused, but given that we’re in for a long, hard slog, here are some additional actions you might consider:

• Pay the subscription price for a publication that does good investigative political reporting to a wide readership, like ProPublica, Mother Jones, The Guardian, or The New York Times. (I wish I could include the Washington Post as well, but…) This kind of work is essential to democracy — and therefore more essential than ever.
• Channel your consumer dollars and social media presence as much as possible away from corporations that are especially destructive to society, such as Amazon, Walmart, and Twitter. Even if we can’t exclusively patronize local, independent businesses or completely decentralized, de-commercialized social networks like Mastodon, there are corporate alternatives to each of the above that are relatively much better for the world. (For example, the online bookseller Bookshop.org, the more socially responsible CostCo, or Bluesky.)
• Read my thoughts on bridging the blue-red divide and pass them on if you like them. Or help make them happen if you’re someone with the power to do so.

The post What We Can Do first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Ng Tin Sheung (1913-2012)

On this Father’s Day, 2023, I’d like to share two excerpts from my forthcoming novel about the Chinese immigration experience through Angel Island in the early 1900’s (Bridge Across The Sky, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Fall 2024) that were inspired by memories of my father.

The opening stanza of the novel is based on the only story I ever heard my father tell about his younger days. He wasn’t in the habit of talking about his past, at least to his children, but one day, I overheard him telling a visitor about how he used to swim in a river rapid as a young man. He told the story with relish, seeming to plunge once more into the blinding whitewater as he told it.

I was amazed. It was not a side of him that I’d ever seen or suspected. He was in his 40’s by the time I was born; I’d known him only as a hardworking, cautious man of simple domestic pleasures.

When I sat down to write this novel set in 1924, my most vivid impression of life in China during those days was my father’s story about swimming that river. So I began the narrative with my teenage protagonist thinking back to his own attempts to brave chaotic waters:

I picture yesterday’s river,
outside the village that was once
my home, beyond the grove
of dove trees with their long blossoms
hanging like wrinkled paper bats,
the river our parents
forbade us to swim, where we’d plunge
into the churn, blinded by cold
and the bright froth, propelling ourselves,
crossways to the current,
to rise, arms lifted, shivering,
on the rocks of the far side.

My father was an herbalist. My strongest childhood memories involve the smell of the herbs he stocked and the teas he brewed with them, the clanking of the bottles my mother washed, filled with the teas, and then packed into paper bags for his patients, and his heavy footsteps as he walked back and forth between the kitchen and the front part of the house that he used as an office.

And the touch of his fingers on my wrist taking my pulses, his method of diagnosing a person’s health.

Early in the novel, the Chinese detainees are put through medical exams that are traumatizing to them because of how unused they are to western medical practices. In this poem, I contrast that experience with my protagonist’s memories of the doctor who served his village:

my heart

The house
of our village doctor was filled
with the dried-out smell
of root and leaf and twig,
or sometimes with steam
from the teas he brewed, bitter
with potency.

He diagnosed our illnesses
through nothing more
than his touch on our wrists
as we sat across a narrow table made
of a hard, lustrous wood carved
with designs of flowers
and dragons, fancier
than anything else
in the village, but whose fourth leg
was a plain wooden stump.

Sow Fong tells me
the exams we underwent,
the needles
and the nakedness, are just
how medicine is practiced here
and not some special torment
the pale powers reserve
for those they see
as livestock.

Not, he adds,
that they don’t
see us as livestock.

I’m lying
on my upper bunk. We’ve been
to breakfast, but I came right back
and have no wish (for now
at least, I tell
Sow Fong) to be shown
any more
of the barracks or to go
outside.

Sow Fong stands
at the very end
of the bunk. His shifting feet
come close to tripping
over mine, as he tests
how far along
the upward sloping ceiling
he can touch.

Maybe it’s for
the best, he says. It’s
probably better,
right? I’m sure
we’ll get used to it
soon enough.

I think of the man
that everyone
in the village, elder
to child, calls “Doc,”
my wrist on the worn
cloth pad he sets
on the wooden table
between us (the pad
that smells—I smelled
it once, when he
was out of the room, holding
its softness up
to my face—like
the skin and sweat
of everyone else
in my village),
and he’s asking me
how I’ve been eating,
sleeping, with utmost tact
how I’ve been shitting.

I tell him all, feeling
his fingers, soft
as a warm breeze, precise
along my veins, learning
all he needs to know
from the beating
of my heart.

The post Novel excerpts: My herbalist father first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Update 5/23/2024: Post is shutting down! So I’m replacing it with Bluesky. I’ve also ended my Haiku Diem and Trumpbert posts to Twitter/X due to its…well, Elon Muskiness.

I’m especially interested in the potential of Mastodon. You can read my thoughts about it here.

Here are all my social feeds now:

PERSONAL: Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook

HAIKU DIEM (my daily haiku feed): Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook

TRUMPBERT (my Dilbert parody that I’m starting up again in 2023): Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook

Hope to see you out here somewhere!

The post Social butterflying first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

A lot of people are looking for a Twitter replacement these days. Some have considered Mastodon, the decentralized platform that describes itself as “Social Networking that’s not for sale.” Many of those have rejected it because it’s just not as user-friendly as other possible Twitter alternatives:

• The fact that it’s hosted on servers controlled by many different parties means that users have to choose a server to join, and their username is tied to that server. (Just as with email, where there are two parts to every address: the username and the server, as in my own email address contact@AuthorFreeman.com) I can’t just be @authorFreeman in the Fediverse (the network of independent servers that all talk to each other to form one big social networking space), I have to be @authorFreeman@zirk.us, which is not as easy to convey to people casually. (“Follow me! I’m @authorFreeman on Twitter.”)
• Decentralized hosting also means that under some circumstances, following other accounts or replying to some posts might not be the one-click action it is on all the centralized networks.
• Having to choose a server to join means…having to choose a server to join, and for many, this is going to feel like a bug rather than a feature. Most potential new users will just want to get in and start following/posting. But there’s no other way to do it in a decentralized way. Once you have a single database where everybody has to register — the only way to make sure I’m the only @authorFreeman in the world — you create the potential for Elon Musk to buy it and go all Thanos on the ‘verse.
• Switching servers while still retaining all your follows and followers is not as easy — or as guaranteed to be possible — as it should be.

Despite these issues, I want to make a case for joining Mastodon, and I’ll sum up that case with these altered words of John F. Kennedy:

Ask not what social networking can do for you.
Ask what you can do for social networking.

Twitter was once the default online public square. Maybe it still is, despite Musk’s impressive efforts to destroy it. Maybe some other commercial enterprise will replace it, sooner or later. But no matter which commercial service becomes the next default online public square — and one of them will, as they’re all bringing massive development and financial resources to bear on that goal — they will still suffer from these weaknesses of any for-profit venture:

• Profit, not the common good, will be their ultimate goal. (And rightly so, as for any business.)
• No matter how well they balance profit against the common good, they will always be subject to takeover by the next Elon Musk, who, like the next Donald Trump, could well turn out to be much less of a self-defeating blunderer.

Instead, at this moment in history, we have the opportunity to take control of the default online public square, to make it truly public.

Is Mastodon the perfect way to do this? Probably not. But it’s the tool most ready to hand.

Therefore, I’m issuing my call. But just as becoming a Mastodon user is not as simple as becoming a user of well-oiled commercial machines like Twitter or Facebook, this call is going to be a little more complicated. It’s going out to four distinct groups.

If you like, you can expand just the ones that apply to you:

Here we are, at a possible inflection point in the history of social networking, with a chance to make a big and enduring change. Do we have sufficient will and the right tools to make this change at this time? I don’t know, but I think we should give it a try.

My Mastodon accounts: Personal, Haiku Diem, Trumpbert.

The post The Proto Elephant in the Cloud first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be making about how political positions we hold compare with the policies of the other countries of the world. Often, the propaganda of the political parties within this country can give us a distorted view of what’s normal, and the “echo chambers” that we create for ourselves through our social media circles and our choice of news sources can distort that view even more. Sometimes, it can help to step back and take in a wider view of things: what are other countries saying about these issues we’re debating within this one, and what do we think about the countries that tend to agree with our positions? (i.e. the company we keep.)

The first issue I’m tackling will be abortion, for obvious reasons. Here’s a list of the top 25 other nations of the world by population that either largely allow or largely prohibit abortion. (Based on UN data from 2017.)

Whichever side you’re personally on, what do you think of the company you’re keeping?

Here’s how I arrived at these lists:

1. I started with a United Nations spreadsheet detailing abortion law in all the countries of the world as of 2017.
2. I used two columns from that spreadsheet: whether abortion was legal by request and whether abortion was allowed due to socioeconomic factors.
3. The countries in the Allowed column above had either two Yeses or one Yes with the other answer not available, while The countries in the Allowed column above had either two Nos or one No with the other answer not available. Countries with one Yes and one No or with no available answers didn’t make either column.

You can find the spreadsheet I used to make these calculations here. It also includes, as a secondary sheet, the original UN spreadsheet. If you find any errors in the formulas or in my methodology, please let me know. If you want to play around with the data yourself, you can easily make an editable copy of the spreadsheet through the Google Sheets “File | Make a copy” menu item.

The post The Company We Keep: Abortion first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

What do I mean by “not legitimate?” Not that the contest organizers broke any laws, or that winning wasn’t an achievement to feel good about. I’m sure the contest judges did their best to fairly evaluate the submitted books. (After all, it’s in their interest that the winning books be the best ones they can find. Just as authors and illustrators can benefit from the light the award shines on their books, the contest benefits from the light cast on it by its choices of winners.) And I do believe my book deserved to win.

What, then, is my problem?

It’s that the contest organization seems to exist solely to run the contest. They are not sponsored by some industry group or literary organization doing work in the world beyond the staging of contests. Furthermore, everything about the contest seemed designed to optimize profits:

• A fairly high entry fee.
• Many different categories (to attract more entries).
• Acceptance of self-published books. (I have nothing against self-publishing — I’ve self-published many books myself, and have continued to do so even after I began getting published traditionally — but it’s odd for a contest to accept them right along with traditionally published books.)
• Acceptance of books published in any year, even though it’s an annual contest.

Googling the name of the award, I found only mentions by people who had won them, mostly authors and illustrators but a few agencies and small presses as well. But no major publishers, and no mentions of the award by news sites, especially publishing industry news sites like Publisher’s Weekly.

I could stage such a contest myself. I could create the website, accept entries, process fees, and select winners. I could even have certificates and seals printed up (quite cheaply!) for the winners to hang on their walls and slap on their books. But will any of this help the winners’ sales or reputations?

You could argue that it might. Maybe your social media posts about winning the award might spread a little further than your other posts about your book. Maybe seeing that your book was an award winner might tip the balance for an undecided buyer. Maybe the publicity that these contests promise to their winners really is significant.

I’m skeptical, particularly about the last possibility. At least for the contest my book won, my googling didn’t turn up any evidence that the outside world was aware of the contest and its winners at all. And I think there’s a real possibility that winning certain dubious awards can hurt your reputation with people who really know the industry, such as booksellers and reviewers. But even if, on the balance, the potential benefits of entering a contest outweighed the costs and risks, I’d suggest that we writers should refrain from entering such contests on principle.

These contest organizations are trying to create something out of nothing. They appear out of nowhere with a claim of industry authority and promise that if you pay their exorbitant entry fee, they’ll reward some number of you with an edge over the rest. If they can get enough people to buy in for enough years, they can even attain a patina of industry authority, even though it came from nowhere.

They’re like lotteries in that respect, except a ticket costs much closer to $100 than $1 and the grand prize is maybe a couple of thousand dollars at best, plus debatable publicity.

I think we should resist the proliferation of this business model. We should defend the health of the literary Commons.

If you agree, then ask these questions every time you’re presented with a literary contest:

• Does the entry fee seem high? Small handling charges are fine, but higher fees are a sign that the fees are what the contest is really about. (As a reference, here are the entry fees for four legitimate book contests my latest book was submitted to: $0, $45, $0, and $0. One of the no-fee entries was for the Caldecott medal. The $45 fee was for a contest run by a public library system.)
• Are the judges respected authorities on the subject? (Are the identities of the judges even disclosed?)
• Does the contest organization seem to exist only to conduct the contest, or are they primarily doing some other good work in the world, which the contest merely enhances?
• Does the contest seem designed to maximize the number of entries, for example through a surprising number of awards, in a surprising range of categories, with surprisingly low entry standards?
• Can you find any mention of the contest organization or its awards in serious news sources, especially industry sources?

The writing life is tough, and dubious contests promise both emotional affirmation and material sales boosts, but I believe that the latter is largely illusory and the former can be obtained from better sources.

The post Beware the Award-Industrial Complex first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

The invasion sequences were created by Gopro Yeonwoo.

The music is based on “Secret Agent Man” by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri

The post Invasion Man first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Other than that, all the other rules of the game stay the same, so these problems still feel like normal chess problems. They just involve these two extra rules dealing with the new situations that can arise when you have two kings:

1. The only way to checkmate a player is to checkmate both kings simultaneously.
2. If one or both of a player’s kings are put in check, and it’s only possible to get one of them out of check, the game is a draw. (Basically, the player is not checkmated, but has no legal moves, which can be seen as a more general formulation of the existing stalemate rule.)

And that’s it! But rule #2 is tricky, and so might be worth some clarification:

• If both kings are in check and there’s no move that gets either king out of check, then that is simply checkmate, according to rule #1 above.
• If the opposing player can get both kings out of check (for example, by capturing the piece that’s checking both kings) then the game simply goes on.
• Conventional stalemates, in which neither king is in check but there are still no legal moves, still count as draws.

Here’s an example of a Twin Monarchs checkmate:

Both black kings are in check and neither of them can escape.

Here’s an example of a Twin Monarchs stalemate:

Both black kings are in check, and while either of them could easily escape it, both can’t at the same time.

Finally, here’s another way to stalemate twin monarchs:

Only one king is in check, but it can’t get out of check without exposing its twin to a check.

Got it?

As you work on my problems, I’d love to get your feedback on the following questions:

1. Did I make any mistakes? Do any of these problems have extra, unintended solutions (a “cook”) for example? I had them checked by John Bartholomew, a strong International Master and popular Twitch streamer and YouTube content creator, but he is, of course, only human, and he couldn’t double-check his checking by running these problems through an engine.
2. Is this a kind of problem that already exists? John said he’s seen some double-checkmate problems before, in the book The Soviet Chess Primer, but at the time the original Russian edition was written, there were no chess engines, and so the problems would have just been fun oddities with no special advantage over regular problems. Now, though, a type of chess problem that exercises the same mental muscles as regular problems but can’t be solved by engines could be a valuable thing. (At least until someone modifies Stockfish with my new rules!)
3. How good can problems of this type get? I’m just a casual player with zero experience composing problems, so my compositions below are not that hard and have all kinds of aesthetic flaws, but I wonder what a real composer could do in this domain. I think my Twin Monarchs stalemate rule — which is maybe the real advance here — offers lots of fertile ground for creative problems, but will the need to mate both kings at once limit the possibilities for Twin Monarchs checkmate problems?

And here we go:

White to play and mate in two
__________

White to play and draw

You can email me at contact@AuthorFreeman.com for the solutions.

The post Twin Monarchs Chess Problems first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Photo by Flickr user Paul Swanson (CC BY-ND 2.0)

This is a list of all the biggest petitions I can find related to saving the Post Office from GOP attacks that Donald Trump recently admitted (in another of those classic blurts that must make his team cringe) are intended specifically to suppress the November 2020 vote.

Please sign them all, and let me know if I missed any.

Another good idea I’ve seen passed around is to directly support the USPS by buying stamps. (This would be like when Trump’s father bailed out his foundering casino by buying $3m worth of chips that he never intended to play or cash. Except it would be legal.)

Finally, it’s looking like the most effective way to balance making sure your vote is counted against pandemic safety might be to request a mail-in ballot (if your state allows it) and hand-deliver it to an election office drop-box, if your county has them. I’m trying to find a good online resource where you can easily look up your state’s mail-in ballot rules and your county’s ballot drop-boxes. This is the best I’ve found so far, and here’s another one, but I’d love to find something with more explicit drop-box info.

Update #4 (8/18/2020): Partial Victory

The USPS has announced that it will postpone policy changes that would have suppressed the November vote. However, there are no plans to restore it’s not clear whether this will include restoring mailboxes and sorting machines that have already been removed, or if the change in postage for mail-in ballots from bulk rate to first class will be reversed. And these changes are still scheduled to happen after the election. (Update, 8/20/2020: DeJoy is refusing to restore the removed sorting machines, most of which were removed from battleground states.)

Update #3 (8/17/2020): A Day of Action

A number of progressive organizations, including the NAACP, MoveOn, the SEIU, and Indivisible, are organizing a day of action on Saturday, August 22, in support of the postal service. Please consider joining it!

Update #2 (8/16/2020): Targeted Removals?

A Twitter user has posted this map (a graphically edited version of this map) correlating the ongoing removal of sorting machines from USPS offices with the Electoral map from 2016, and it seems to suggest that Democratic-leaning counties are being targeted. I’ll be continuing to look into the accuracy of this, but at this point, I’ve decided it’s important and trustworthy enough to add here.

Update #1: But First

Please call this number — (844) 942-2935 — in order to ask your senators to pass the Heroes Act, the COVID relief bill passed by the House more than two months ago, which also provides funding to the Postal Service for it to handle the 2020 Election.

When you call, you’ll be asked to enter your zip code and then asked which of your two Senators you’d like to speak with. (So you’ll need to do this twice to go on the record with both.) This is especially important if you live in a state with Republican senators, as they are the ones blocking passage of the act.

I feel this is now a more important action than signing any of the petitions below, as there have been signs that some members of the GOP are breaking from Trump over this latest outrage.

The Petition List (finally!)

Change.org: “Save the USPS”

Common Cause: “Save the U.S. Postal Service”

MoveOn.org: “Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service: Remove Louis DeJoy”

MoveOn.org: “Fully Fund the United States Postal Service”

Resist.bot: “Save The Post Office”

RuralOrganizing.org: “INVESTIGATE THE TRUMP SLOWDOWN AT THE UNITED STATES POST OFFICE”
Note: This last one (RuralOrganizing.org) was just started, so it’s not very big yet as I write this, but it seems important because it’s addressed to the Postal Service Inspector General, and it will probably grow quickly, as it’s being promoted by MoveOn.org.

And here are the email addresses of every member of the USPS board of governors. Email them to demand the removal of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and a halt to the GOP attacks on the mail service.

Mduncan@inezdepositbank.com
Roman@rmiv.com
Barger.jm@gmail.com
Lee.moak@moakgroup.com
Ron.bloom@brookfield.com
Directoraccessmailbox@cigna.com

Finally, here are some other general actions we can take.

The post All the USPS petitions (and more) first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Police kneeling with protesters in Miami-Dade County (photo by Miami- Dade Corrections)

In the course of the protests sweeping our nation, police in many cities transformed potentially incendiary standoffs into powerful visions of unity and hope by kneeling, marching, and mourning with the protesters they swear to serve and protect. Not all of them maintained that stance, but many did. I’ve written this anthem to celebrate the moments they created. It can be sung to the tune of our national anthem.

I’m licensing this text with the Creative Commons BY-SA license, which means you can:

• Reproduce it and share it and perform it in any form
• And even modify it
• And even use it for commercial purposes

as long as you:

• Credit me as the original author
• And license any modified versions of it that you create using the same Creative Commons license.

Thanks!

And many thanks also to the friends who helped me shape this in the course of a frenetic burst of writing.

The post That The Power Might Take Knee first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

Hunt Those Anomalies!

The American election system is inexcusably random, rickety, and run by amateurs. And this is good news for you! Out of this thicket of unpaid poll volunteers, unsecure and outdated equipment, and diverse voting methods, it will be child’s play to pluck (or should I say, “cherry-pick”) the low hanging fruit of Election Fraud evidence. Because in all this mess, there’s bound to be a box of uncounted votes discovered in some county, or a set of malfunctioning voting machines in another. All you need is an army of motivated crowd-sourcers to go out into those fields to bring in the sheaves.

Just be careful to ignore any errors that favored your side. Your opponents will want to pick those in the event they lose the election.

Misuse Existing Data!

If you can’t find enough data supporting your theory, simply misuse existing data.

For example, exit polls are routinely conducted in conjunction with major elections, and here’s the great thing about them: they aren’t designed to accurately predict what the final vote will be!

As any good polling organization will tell you, it’s incredibly hard and expensive to conduct a representative poll. Because of this, exit polls are really only used by responsible parties (and the press) to get a rough sense of who voted and why they voted the way they did. These needs can be met quite adequately without the precision that would be required to accurately project the vote itself, and so that extra effort is simply not made.

Therefore, it is inevitable that you’ll be able to find polls where your candidate seemed to do better than he or she did in the actual election! Especially if your supporters are more likely to agree to be questioned at the polls in the first place. There will, of course, also be exit polls that overly favor your opponent, but again: leave those for them to pick, in case they end up losing and need to build a case for Election Fraud themselves.

Jump to Conclusions!

In 2016, the running vote tally for one of the primary candidates in a certain a state went down rather than up, and that candidate’s supporters immediately sent up a collective roar of socially networked outrage. It was good that they acted so quickly, because, as it turned out, the drop was because one county decided it needed to conduct a recount, and so temporarily withdrew its counts from the state totals. Every vote was eventually restored when the recount had been completed — the recount confirmed that the original count had been correct — but not before the noble case for Election Fraud had been furthered.

This item could also fit under the next category.,..

Misunderstand the System!

Running for office is a bureaucratic nightmare. Between a candidate and all the places they need to be — the ballot, the debates, the evening news — lies a gauntlet of spoken and unspoken, rational and irrational rules much more complicated than, “they’re all against you.” And then there’s the challenge of getting your supporters to the right place at the right time to do the right thing to register their votes. This is especially true of presidential primaries, where the rules differ by the state.

My advice to you is to try understanding as little of this as possible. That way, when your candidate fails to appear in all the necessary places or your voters don’t manage to get their votes counted, you can blame the system rather than your own lack of preparation.

Interpret Everything in the Worst Possible Way!

If a box of votes is discovered to have been uncounted after an election, always assume that every vote in that box was for your candidate. If X number of voters failed to make it to the caucus or voting place by the publicly announced deadline, assume that every one of them was planning to vote your way. Usually, this won’t even affect the final result of the election, but it will definitely increase your outrage at having been cheated.

Ignore the Biggest Data!

Ignore the fact that repeated, reputable public opinion polls showed your candidate trailing by the same margin by which he or she eventually lost. Since you believe that the vast majority of the public is clearly on your side, and that the only thing holding back your cause is the Establishment conspiracy against it, none of these results could possibly be true.

Embrace the Biased Data!

Conversely, seek out every unscientific poll or survey that you can. (That favors your side.) Every reader survey conducted by your favorite journal or website, every Twitter poll by a political commentator you follow, every like by every person in your social media circle.

This can also apply to legitimate polls. For example, suppose a reputable polling organization surveys just the members of your party about some issue and finds 60% of you to be in support of it. This is a clear license to act as if 80% of the general public agreed with you, and to treat any election result to the contrary as the certain result of Election Fraud.

A final variation of this technique is to interpret legitimate polls about very general subjects as being favorable to your specific candidate. If you phrase a poll question generally enough, you can easily get a majority of Americans to voice abstract support for most of the major impulses of either party, such as lower taxes or healthcare for all.

Once you begin to get more specific, though, by asking about particular plans or revealing more about their details or their costs, support can plummet as your poll respondents move from an ideal to the actual, practical world.

So don’t do that.

Confirm the Biases!

Treat all your 51% victories as if you’d won by 90. Remember all close losses as “near victories.” Call all significant losses “election fraud.”

Don’t actually care about Democracy

This has been a short list of the most common and obvious techniques for conjuring Election Fraud out of nothing. I’m sure that motivated reasoning will spur you to discover ever more subtle and powerful methods. The great thing about living in a democracy is that we are all free at any time to dismiss the will of the majority of our fellow Americans.

But seriously…

There are in fact two sadly real methods of rigging elections that are in widespread use in America today: voter suppression and gerrymandering. In fact, the real tragedy of the bogus claims discussed in this post is that they divert our attention and our energy from fighting these legitimate threats to democracy.

Two organizations currently conducting these fights that are worth supporting are Flippable and Fair Fight.

Finally, nothing in this post should be taken to suggest that we don’t have a mess of an election system or that we shouldn’t try fixing it. A uniform, secure, and competently administered voting infrastructure would have numerous benefits, not the least of which would be to reduce the number of future election fraud claims.

The post How to prove election fraud first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

If anyone’s confused by Trump’s behavior in the face of the Coronavirus threat, here are the three keys for understanding anything he does:

1. He only ever acts in his own interest.
2. He’s too dumb to think in terms of his long-term interest.
3. Even when his handlers manage to convey something of long-term importance to him, he lacks the impulse control to consistently act on it.

Initial statements

Trump believed (rightly, at least in the short term) that a virus outbreak would hurt his approval ratings, and so he began by lying about the seriousness of the threat. It didn’t occur to him that that would only hurt him in the long run, and even now, when he’s trying to say the right things, he can’t help sporadically lying about things like the availability of tests.

The travel ban

First of all, the ban didn’t include countries where he owns financially struggling golf courses, but that’s just a small and (sigh!) now routine feature of his Presidency. The really profoundly self-serving aspect of the ban is that he reframed a public health issue as an immigration issue, reinforcing a xenophobic framework that will always benefit him electorally.

Testing

Maybe it’s mostly incompetence (and earlier policy blunders such as closing the White House’s pandemic response team) that led to the disastrous lack of testing we’re now facing, but it’s also true that Trump must be of two minds when it comes to testing. One the one hand, he can’t enjoy being blamed for the lack of testing — though he did recently declare that he would not take responsibility for that — but on the other hand, the result of more testing would undoubtedly be more cases being discovered, and he hates the idea of those numbers going up.

Yes, the numbers will almost certainly go up even more without proper testing now, but that’s a long term concern. Right now, Trump doesn’t want to see the numbers — which are supposed to have already diminished to zero by now, according to one of his earliest lies — go up in the short term. Remember him lamenting how allowing a cruise ship with sick passengers to come to port would bump those numbers?

Hoax-mongering

Trump is in an impossible situation, torn between the short term and the long, but the bright side for him is that it simply might not matter, that all his worries about his approval rating are unfounded, because his base will believe anything he says no matter what. The best case scenario for him would be if his base continues to believe his lies about the virus being a hoax perpetrated by his enemies while all the sane people in the country expend their energy doing the right thing to mitigate the virus’s effects. We’ll be draining our resources preventing the virus from damaging Trump as much as it might, while he whips his base into a delusional fury to sweep him into office a second time.

There is, of course, nothing we can do about this, as we’re bound to decent and rational behavior in ways that Trump and his people are not.

Not-So-Strongman

So far, Trump’s approval rating is holding steady at the low end of the narrow range it’s occupied for pretty much his entire Presidency. His core followers are swayed by very little. But things have not yet gotten as bad as they almost certainly will, despite all our efforts to suppress the spread of the virus. (The scientific consensus seems to be that all the social distancing and sheltering in place that we’re doing will only flatten the rate of infection, actually extending its length, but critically lowering its peak, so that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed to the point that doctors will have to make life or death decisions about which patients will get to use the ventilators and which will die.) Then we may see some cracks start to appear.

Trump’s base has an authoritarian bent that leads them to seek out a strong leader to mindlessly follow, but his waffling between short term and long term concerns is making it harder and harder for them to avoid significant cognitive dissonance.

The stakes

Let’s never forget what the reelection stakes are for Donald Trump: If he doesn’t get reelected, he probably goes to prison. If he gets another four years of immunity from criminal prosecution, he probably outlasts the statute of limitations on his past crimes. (As long as he doesn’t commit any more in the future.) We need to take this into account in every evaluation of how far he might be willing to go to win in November.

The future

I won’t be surprised if he attempts to leverage the virus into some form of voter suppression, perhaps finding a way to make voting even harder for minorities or the young, or even postponing the election, depending on the state of the virus and the polls at the time.

The post A Trump-Coronavirus Primer first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

At the very end of a series of amendments offered by the Democratic House Managers seeking subpoenas of various individuals and documents (all of which were voted down along party lines) a final amendment was offered that was unlike any of the others. This 11th amendment of the long day would have given the judge presiding over this trial the power to rule on the relevance of any witnesses or documents that either side might wish to subpoena.

On the surface, this might seem to be such a natural way of handling subpoenas that it shouldn’t even have required an amendment to the original rules. After all, isn’t it always a neutral legal expert like a judge who determines whether witnesses or evidence in a trial is admissible and relevant, or whether subpoenas are valid? Wouldn’t it be crazy if it were, say, one of the attorneys, either for the defense or the prosecution, that had total control over what testimony and other evidence got to be presented in a trial?

But even more surprising than the fact that such an amendment was needed, was who offered it: the Democratic House Managers. Why was that surprising? Because the judge in this case is John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — and a conservative Republican who was appointed by George W. Bush and almost always votes on the side of the 5-4 conservative majority on the court.

The debate over witnesses has not been a simple one because it’s not just a question of who has the power to say yes or no. That question has a simple answer: the Republicans, who control the Senate, can strictly do whatever they want. The complications arise because they have to be careful about how their actions will affect public opinion. If they could have followed their immediate impulses, there wouldn’t even be a trial right now. They could have dismissed the whole thing from the start. But then what would the public think? How would that affect the reelection chances of some of their more vulnerable members, not to mention their President?

Likewise, the Democratic House Managers know they’re going to be outvoted at the end, but their hope is to present as compelling a case as they can to the American public.

For both sides, the appearance of fairness is critical.

Given that reality, why were the Democratic House Managers willing to put their fate into the hands of a Republican judge? If they just let the GOP outvote them over every single witness and document, then they can at least claim that they’ve been railroaded. The public would witness one 53-47 party line vote after another, and some moderates or independents might be swayed toward the Democratic side by the clear significance of that pattern of votes. But if it’s the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court striking down your desired witnesses, it’s much harder to claim it’s a partisan power play. No GOP senator would need to go back to their home state at election time and explain why they voted No on any given witness or document.

So why did the Democratic House Managers invite that scenario? Because they didn’t believe Roberts would rule against their witnesses and allow the GOP witnesses, even though he’s a Republican. They honestly believed in the facts and legal principles behind their case, and even though they disagreed with Roberts’ politics, they still believed him to be an honorable man and an expert in the law who would make his rulings in an unbiased way.

(And I think we should just pause a moment to appreciate the value of that gesture in this period of such extreme partisan rancor. The Democratic House Managers might not think much of the President’s attorneys or the GOP senators, but they respect John Roberts.)

The GOP, however, despite the P.R. cover it would have given them, voted this amendment down unanimously, adding to the day’s glut of party line votes. Why did they do this?

Because they knew that, despite the fact that Roberts is a Bush-appointed conservative Republican justice who has voted on their side in the vast majority of cases that have come up in the Supreme Court, he was not going to vote on their side in this trial, because their case was based entirely on power and not on truth. (As expressed earlier in the evening by Trump attorney Pat Cipollone’s angry snarl at Democratic House Manager Jerry Nadler, “You’re not in charge here!”) They knew that, as much as Roberts might want their side to win, for partisan purposes, he would not compromise his legal judgement to help that happen.

John Roberts was the only honorable Republican left in that courtroom, which made him unfit for current Republican politics.

The post The “Roberts Gambit” and what it revealed first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.

A long time ago, in an age of craftsmanship that seems far, far away, a trilogy of movies blazed into existence like a hypergiant star, burning briefly bright and then hinting all too soon at its own eventual demise. The first was revolutionary not in any of its content but in its form: its gritty, realistic sets and models, and its elevation of Velocity into an aesthetic all its own. The second was perhaps the most well constructed movie in the eventual series, with strong character arcs and clean, compelling storylines and a perfect flow and balance between slow scenes and fast. None of the three made for great cinema, but all were competently made entertainments, the products not of a lone genius pursuing a personal artistic vision, but of a collaboration between creator, writers, producers, and director: not, as it were, a dictatorship, but a mature democratic republic, a system that blended strengths and limited harm by distributing power, all in the service of the common good.

It was in the third installment of this initial trilogy that the first hint of the Republic’s eventual fall appeared: the first rumors of corruption within and barbarism — by which I mean commercialism — at the gates. The franchise, like any movie franchise, had always been a commercial venture, but this was the first time (it seemed to many of its fans) that artistic decisions were made for purely commercial considerations. But the whiff of decay — a cute cadre of seemingly innocuous, undoubtedly market-tested furries — was brief, and the franchise ended this first phase of its life with vigor that promised a fruitful middle age and crowning elder days to come.

Alas.

In the second phase of the franchise’s life, its beloved First Citizen decided that he preferred the role of Emperor, taking too seriously the view of many of his fans that he was a god. This was not necessarily a bad idea in principle. A lone genius can reach greater heights of artistic accomplishment than any committee — democracy, we might recall, is the worst form of government — but it turned out that this Emperor had no clues. 

The resulting movies contained some interesting scenes and ideas, but they were thrown together with little craftsmanship, and there were many outright bad ideas that went unchecked by any Imperial Senate. The franchise’s new god had plenty of thoughts both heavenly and hellish, but turned out not to be very good at actual creation ex nihilo.

The third phase of the franchise began with Revolution, not just internally but in the real world around it. Cultural change can take time to filter into our entertainments, and can take even longer when an authoritarian ruler closes the national borders, and so, after the Emperor was persuaded to swap the stressful job of rule for a luxurious retirement, his people discovered that many of their customs and fashions that once seemed quaint at worst suddenly felt crude at best.

We are living through a period of greater focus on the profound demands — and, to some, the frightening threat — of true egalitarianism. Our discourse is uneven, unfruitful, and polarized. Under such conditions, it’s inevitable that the franchise’s final reintroduction should be tentative, having to play catch up with a culture that had changed at near-light speed. Unfortunately, as things turned out, every movie in this final trilogy had to play a kind of catch up, for reasons I will describe.

This final phase of the franchise did see a return of sorts to the democracy of the former Republic, but in a chaotic, populist form in which barbarian blood (by which I still mean commercialism) mingled freely with the noble blood of the citizens. For the Emperor had given way, not to anything like the former collaborators of the Republic, whose primary goal was a normal and happy life for itself and its citizens, but to an Empire that claimed to be the happiest place on Earth, but was only interested in happiness as a tool of conquest.

The resulting movies were uneven, unfruitful, and polarizing.

The first movie in this final trilogy juggled two tasks: the aforementioned cultural catch-up and the need of its corporate master to re-secure the brand loyalty of consumers who might have been alienated by the antics of the former Emperor. So we were given a pair of main characters that didn’t look like any Star Wars heroes of the past, and watched them overturn conventional genre tropes like the man pulling the woman along behind him as they fled some danger, but as the movie went on, it began to feel like we were being pulled along what felt less and less like a movie and more like one of those immersive amusement park “experiences” that lets you be a Jedi hero or an Imperial Storm Trooper. (In 3D with tactile feedback!) We shouted from our seats as the sights flew past us, “Look, there’s that guy! Look, there’s that thing!” as the Surround Sound and nostalgia washed over us.

Uninterrupted by any rebellion, the concluding trilogy might have continued in this vein, with the movies getting smoother and better as the tasks of cultural catch up and audience re-assimilation progressed and required less of a given movie’s resources, leaving more free for the movie’s own needs. Those who initially panicked at the new diversity and gender equality of this world would have calmed down, and we would all have continued to enjoy the spectacle of our favorite icons from the past being paraded before us once more. And I’m sure there would have been a suitably grand conclusion. 

Instead, we got Episode 8.

Episode 8 is my favorite movie of the series, for the following reasons:

First, it’s the only installment since that blazing first movie to make a legitimate cinematic mark. A lightspeed collision between a fleeing spacecraft and its pursuer is one of the most poetic effects sequences of all time. A series of scenes involving a mental connection between the two main characters imparts a remarkable texture to the film. (Just compare them with how flat they come out in Episode 9. Clearly, there’s some kind of directorial magic at work in the Episode 8 scenes that the Episode 9 director had no ability or desire to recreate.) Finally, a scene in which a character confronts herself in an underground cave reverberates with visual and narrative complexity.

Then, there are the performances. The aforementioned scenes of mental connection are not just standard genre movie exposition. They are genuinely engaging encounters, brimming with feeling and subtext, that might be found in a much more serious non-genre film or stage play. And my favorite movie critic, while giving the movie itself just a middling rating, called the acting job of the returning elder star the first tour-de-force performance of the entire movie series. 

When the movie decides to indulge in nostalgia, it does it better than any of the others. Its portrayal of a beloved former master is a wonderful evocation of everything that was truly endearing and enduring about that character, far more powerful than any scene of him engaged in action hero battle or infantilized into a thoroughly marketable (and, in this new age, meme-able) cutesy.

The director of Episode 8 could have taken these strong elements and woven them into a conventional Star Wars narrative that I firmly believe would have delighted all the franchise’s fans and all but guaranteed a successful conclusion to the series. Instead, he decided it was time (perhaps in conjunction with the cultural catch-up that had already begun in the previous episode) to incinerate the sacred texts. 

He begins subtly, by adding a third vector to a couple of traditional Star Wars dualities. Behind — or is it beyond? or beneath? or beside? — the usual opposing armies of Good and Evil, he injects an amoral (or is it: thoroughly immoral) stakeholder only interested in profiting from the struggle between the two sides. And the evil antagonist is granted a third option beyond the simple two that the virtuous protagonist (thinking only, it may be, of past Star Wars paradigms) had assumed were the only possibilities. 

The Episode 8 director then went further, subverting a central pillar of the franchise’s mythology.

Episode 7 had raised a question about parentage that had fans of the franchise wildly speculating about divine bloodlines, like medieval nobles during a crisis of succession. Episode 8’s answer shocked the well-heeled court. (For all its bluster about battling empires and emperors, the Star Wars franchise is really quite royalist in spirit.) 

Finally, this penultimate installment of a great sci-fi/fantasy franchise then proceeded to question the very foundation of movies in which the forces of good battle the forces of evil. The bold plan hatched by the hero trusting his own instincts in defiance of his stodgy superiors does not, in fact, save the day. The plucky band of infiltrators fails to implausibly penetrate all of the enemy’s security to destroy or disable the technological juggernaut from within. The brave martyr is prevented from sacrificing his life for…for…realistically what? And finally: even the very idea of defeating the enemy is questioned.

What possible final episode could live up to this impossible setup? I had no idea, but I knew I wanted to see it tried. Even if it ended in laughable failure, I would still have commended those involved for seeking what I believe only a few sci-fi/fantasy franchises have attempted and none have achieved¹: a unimaginably grand finale in which the franchise transcended itself, waking from the twilit dreams of its mythology into the complex light and darkness of our world as it is.

I longed to finally see a geek franchise grow up.

Instead, we got Episode 9.

Episode 9 was not a very good movie, as it had to bear the burden of putting down the rebellion before it could resume the Empire’s former agenda. There were dramatic moments, emotional utterances, and attempted jokes in Episode 9, but they all fell flat, as if the director were too busy with these other concerns to properly shape the flow of the scenes around those peaks. And, following the best practices of most authoritarian regimes, he also engaged in historical gaslighting, revising the truth concerning past events to suit his present needs. Suddenly, the hero did have a significant parent. Suddenly, the most quietly powerful scene in all the movies, the final scene of Episode 8, was jettisoned like so much garbage.

The conclusion of this final installment, involving a “crossing of the streams,” could have been an entirely satisfying (if not revolutionary) grand conclusion to the series, if only all three movies in the final trilogy had been shaped from the start to support that arc. But Episode 8 had its own ideas about what the concluding arc should be, and because the director of Episode 9 had to spend precious resources putting down that rebellion, he was not left with enough to properly close his own in the one movie that remained.

I will therefore always think of the series as incomplete. Episode 8 will always be the latest movie in the series for me, raising its tantalizing possibilities of true democratization that will never be fulfilled by a proper final installment.

You might ask me how I can even imagine the franchise’s imaginary universe continuing once such a radical change has been made, how there can be any specifically Star Wars heroes or any kind of an action movie plot at all after that, and I’ll answer honestly that I have no idea. That’s what I was looking forward to learning. And there would be no need for further stories, in any case, because that would have been the final episode of the series. 

Except, of course, that it would not have been the final episode of the franchise, which is now much more than just the originally conceived trilogy of trilogies. There are now other Star Wars movies and TV series, all owned by a vast media conglomerate that intends to live forever and continue collecting rents from all its properties throughout that dismal eternity. That’s why Star Wars couldn’t be allowed to change so radically, though I’ll be eternally grateful that one man tried.

For the briefest moment, the time it takes to retract a lightsaber or remove a life-preserving mask, to touch hands across a gulf or reach for a broom, my true Star Wars hero, Rian Johnson, managed to turn the franchise away from the Dark Side. 

And then the Empire struck back.

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The post Crushing The Rebellion: my Star Wars review first appeared on Author Freeman Ng.