Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 69

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide

I can’t say I agree with everything that Christopher Caldwell says here, but his theories about the state of America’s contentious political and social landscape are fascinating to consider. The following is adapted from a talk he delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series. Caldwell is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a senior editor of the Weekly Standard. You can read more about him at the end of this post.

American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.

I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.

One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.

Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from the cradle to the grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unwed women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”

But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.

Because conventional wisdom today holds that the Civil Rights Act brought the country together, my book’s suggestion that it pulled the country apart has been met with outrage. The outrage has been especially pronounced among those who have not read the book. So for their benefit, I should make crystal clear that my book is not a defense of segregation or Jim Crow, and that when I criticize the long-term effects of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I do not criticize the principle of equality in general or the movement for black equality in particular.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These gave Washington the authority to override what Americans had traditionally thought of as their ordinary democratic institutions. It was widely assumed that the emergency mechanisms would be temporary and narrowly focused. But they soon escaped democratic control altogether, and they have now become the most potent part of our governing system.

How Civil Rights Legislation Worked

There were two noteworthy things about the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

The first was its unprecedented concentration of power. It gave Washington tools it had never before had in peacetime. It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

[image error]     Christopher Caldwell

To put it bluntly, the effect of these civil rights laws was to take a lot of decisions that had been made in the democratic parts of the American government and relocate them to the bureaucracy or the judiciary. Only with that kind of arsenal, Lyndon Johnson and the drafters thought, would it be possible to root out insidious racism.

The second noteworthy thing about the civil rights legislation of the 1960s is that it was kind of a fudge. It sat uneasily not only with the First Amendment but with the Constitution as a whole. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed largely to give teeth to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, did so by creating different levels of rights for citizens of southern states like Alabama and citizens of northern states like Michigan when it came to election laws.

The goal of the civil rights laws was to bring the sham democracies of the American South into conformity with the Constitution. But nobody’s democracy is perfect, and it turned out to be much harder than anticipated to distinguish between democracy in the South and democracy elsewhere in the country. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.

Still, no one was too worried about that. It is clear in retrospect that Americans outside the South understood segregation as a regional problem. As far as we can tell from polls, 70-90 percent of Americans outside the South thought that blacks in their part of the country were treated just fine, the same as anyone else. In practice, non-Southerners did not expect the new laws to be turned back on themselves.

The Broadening of Civil Rights

The problem is that when the work of the civil rights legislation was done—when de jure segregation was stopped—these new powers were not suspended or scaled back or reassessed. On the contrary, they intensified. The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it.

Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites. In that case, the plaintiff, Alan Bakke, who had been a U.S. Marine captain in Vietnam, saw his application for medical school rejected, even though his test scores were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. Minority applicants, meanwhile, were admitted with, on average, scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th, and 18th percentiles. And although the Court decided that Bakke himself deserved admission, it did not do away with the affirmative action programs that kept him out. In fact, it institutionalized them, mandating “diversity”—a new concept at the time—as the law of the land.

Meanwhile, other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education. Still, when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it.

Finally, civil rights came to dominate—and even overrule—legislation that had nothing to do with it. The most traumatic example of this was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This legislation was supposed to be the grand compromise on which our modern immigration policy would be built. On the one hand, about three million illegal immigrants who had mostly come north from Mexico would be given citizenship.

On the other hand, draconian laws would ensure that the amnesty would not be an incentive to future migrants, and that illegal immigration would never get out of control again. So there were harsh “employer sanctions” for anyone who hired a non-citizen. But once the law passed, what happened? Illegal immigrants got their amnesty. But the penalties on illegal hiring turned out to be fake—because, to simplify just a bit, asking an employee who “looks Mexican” where he was born or about his citizenship status was held to be a violation of his civil rights. Civil rights law had made it impossible for Americans to get what they’d voted for through their representatives, leading to decades of political strife over immigration policy that continues to this day.

A more recent manifestation of the broadening of civil rights laws is the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Obama Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2011, which sought to dictate sexual harassment policy to every college and university in the country. Another is the overturning by judges of a temporary ban on entry from certain countries linked to terrorism in the first months of the Trump administration in 2017.

These policies, qua policies, have their defenders and their detractors. The important thing for our purposes is how they were established and enforced. More and more areas of American life have been withdrawn from voters’ democratic control and delivered up to the bureaucratic and judicial emergency mechanisms of civil rights law. Civil rights law has become a second constitution, with powers that can be used to override the Constitution of 1787.

The New Constitution

In explaining the constitutional order that we see today, I’d like to focus on just two of its characteristics.

First, it has a moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics. As we’ve discussed, civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy.

But the critical question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe. Usually, when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order.

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But in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.

A moral ground for invoking emergencies sounds more humane than a military one. It is not. That is because, in order to justify its special powers, the government must create a class of officially designated malefactors. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the justification of this strong medicine was that there was a collection of Southern politicians who were so wily and devious, and a collection of Southern sheriffs so ruthless and depraved, that one could not, and was not morally obliged to, fight fair with them.

That pattern has perpetuated itself, even as the focus of civil rights has moved to American institutions less obviously objectionable than segregation. Every intervention in the name of rights requires the identification of a malefactor. So very early on in the gay marriage debate, those who believed in traditional marriage were likened to segregationists or to those who had opposed interracial marriage.

Joe Biden recently said: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”

Now, most Americans, probably including Joe Biden, know very little about transgenderism. But this is an assertion that Americans are not going to be permitted to advance their knowledge by discussing the issue in public or to work out their differences at the ballot box.

As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.

The second characteristic of the new civil rights constitution is what we can call intersectionality. This is a sociological development. As long as civil rights law was limited to protecting the rights of Southern blacks, it was a stable system. It had the logic of history behind it, which both justified and focused its application. But if other groups could be given the privilege of advancing their causes by bureaucratic fiat and judicial decree, there was the possibility of a gradual building up of vast new coalitions, maybe even electoral majorities. This was made possible because almost anyone who was not a white heterosexual male could benefit from civil rights law in some way.

Seventy years ago, India produced the first modern minority-rights based constitution with a long, enumerated list of so-called “scheduled tribes and castes.” Eventually, inter-group horse-trading took up so much of the country’s attention that there emerged a grumbling group of “everyone else,” of “ordinary Indians.” These account for many of the people behind the present prime minister, Narendra Modi. Indians who like Modi say he’s the candidate of average citizens. Those who don’t like him, as most of the international media do not call him a “Hindu nationalist.”

We have a version of the same thing happening in America. By the mid-1980s, the “intersectional” coalition of civil rights activists started using the term “people of color” to describe itself.

Now, logically, if there really is such a thing as “people of color,” and if they are demanding a larger share of society’s rewards, they are ipso facto demanding that “non–people of color” get a smaller share. In the same way that the Indian constitution called forth the idea of a generic “Hindu,” the new civil rights constitution created a group of “non–people of color.” It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been.

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787 that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefitted by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.

A Party of Bigots and a Party of Totalitarians

Let’s say you’re a progressive. Let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children can only have done so for terrible reasons.

You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.

But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this.

You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. Although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights.

“Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?” You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the primary goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.

And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.

If either of these constitutions were devoid of merit, we wouldn’t have a problem. We could be confident that the wiser of the two would win out in the end. But each of our two constitutions contains, for its adherents, a great deal worth defending to the bitter end. And unfortunately, each constitution must increasingly defend itself against the other.

When gay marriage was being advanced over the past 20 years, one of the common sayings of activists was: “The sky didn’t fall.” People would say: “Look, we’ve had gay marriage in Massachusetts for three weeks, and I’ve got news for you! The sky didn’t fall!”

They were right in the short term. But I think they forgot how delicate a system a democratic constitutional republic is, how difficult it is to get the formula right, and how hard it is to see when a government begins—slowly, very slowly—to veer off course in a way that can take decades to become evident.

Then one day, we discover that, although we still deny the sky is falling, we do so with a lot less confidence.

[Christopher Caldwell is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard College, he has been a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties]

Kurt Vonnegut’s Greatest Writing Advice

It’s been 13 years since the world lost Kurt Vonnegut–one of America’s greatest writers and writing teachers.  During Vonnegut’s 50-year-long career as an author, he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. Many more collections of his work were published after his death in 2007.

Vonnegut is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which was based on his own experiences as an American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany when it was fire-bombed for three days by British and American bombers in February 1945. An estimated 25,000 civilians were killed during the raids. It was an experience he never forgot.

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Here is some of his no-nonsense advice on writing–along with a bit of Vonnegut’s wry humor tossed in now and then. These bits of wisdom are gleaned from some of his essays and his many interviews. When I was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune I was fortunate to have interviewed Vonnegut. He was a self-effacing man who never took himself or life too seriously. Once, when he was asked about life, he said this: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” 

Here then, is some of his sage advice on writing for those of you who are writers and for those of you who love to read.

On proper punctuation:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. (From A Man Without a Country)

On having other interests:

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review)

On the value of writing:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. (From A Man Without a Country)

On the theory of teaching creative writing:

I don’t have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory… It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: “Don’t take it all so seriously.” (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review)

On plot:

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are [and what they want].

And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review)

On not selling anything:

I used to teach a writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa back in the 1960s, and I would say at the start of every semester, “The role model for this course is Vincent van Gogh—who sold two paintings to his brother.” (Laughs.) I just sit and wait to see what’s inside me, and that’s the case for writing or for drawing, and then out it comes. There are times when nothing comes. James Brooks, the fine abstract-expressionist, I asked him what painting was like for him, and he said, “I put the first stroke on the canvas and then the canvas has to do half the work.” That’s how serious painters are. They’re waiting for the canvas to do half the work. (Laughs.) Come on. Wake up. (From The Last Interview)

On love in fiction:

So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: “The end.” I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review)

On a good work schedule:

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work for more than four hours. (From an interview with Robert Taylor in Boston Globe Magazine, 1969)

On “how to write with style,” aka List #1

Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

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Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable—and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say. (From “How to Write With Style,” published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Transactions on Professional Communications in 1980.)

On how to write good short stories, aka List #2:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first; great writers tend to do that. (From the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box)

On ignoring rules:

And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules. (From A Man Without a Country)

  On the shapes of stories:

Here is a real treat. Click on this URL and you will see Vonnegut himself giving a waggish four-minute talk on The Shapes of Stories. You won’t be sorry!

https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ

Coronavirus: Dos and Don’ts, from WebMD

Yesterday, I posted information on the Coronavirus from National Public Radio, the Center for Disease Control, and a couple of other health organizations. Today I am posting some Dos and Don’ts regarding the virus from WebMD. Take a look. This is all common sense information, but it never hurts to give it a look. I hope you find it useful.>

Public health officials have been urging people to prepare — not panic — for the new coronavirus (also known as COVID-19).Those calls took on added urgency as cases of the virus have started to spike in countries outside China. Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself right now:

Dos and Don’ts for Everyone


DO wash your hands for at least 20 seconds, several times a day. Use soap and water or a hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol:


Before cooking or eating
After using the bathroom
After blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing



















How to Wash Your Hands

Scrub away! There’s a correct way to wash your hands and get rid of germs.

DON’T touch your eyes, nose, and mouth. If you have somehow come into contact with the virus, touching your face can help it enter your body.

DO learn the symptoms, which are similar to flu:

Fever
Cough
Shortness of breath

Most cases do not start with a runny nose.

DON’T wear a mask unless you’re sick. Masks help protect others from catching the virus, but wearing one when you’re healthy won’t do much. Demand has been so high worldwide that shortages have begun. Leave the masks for people who really need them, like the sick or health care professionals.

DO consider taking extra precautions and staying out of public places if you’re over 60 years old, or have a condition, as you have a higher risk of developing the disease. Note that as of now, the highest-risk groups appear to be seniors and people with preexisting conditions like heart disease, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes.

DON’T travel if you have a fever. If you get sick on flight, tell crew immediately. When you get home, contact a health professional.

DO reconsider travel to affected countries. Currently, the CDC advises against all nonessential travel to China and South Korea. For people in a higher-risk group — seniors and people with preexisting conditions — the agency suggests postponing nonessential travel to Italy, Japan, and Iran as well. Find the latest advisories here.

DON’T panic. At this point, cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. number in the dozens. Only one has no clear connection to another country or sick person.

DO: Prepare by making sure you have supplies at home in case someone gets sick and needs to be quarantined. This would include prescription medications for anyone in the family, other health supplies such as over-the-counter pain relievers, and disinfectants to clean household surfaces. Studies suggest that coronaviruses can live on surfaces for a few hours or up to several days. Clean them regularly with a disinfectant to kill the virus.While COVID-19 has not yet been declared a pandemic, a government web site also suggests keeping a 2-week supply of food and water in the case of a pandemic and having copies of electronic health records.

Dos and Don’ts When You Don’t Feel Well

DO seek help early if you have a fever, cough, and a hard time breathing. But don’t just drop into the nearest urgent care clinic. Call your doctor to find out the protocol first, to make sure you won’t spread the disease to others.

DON’T go out except to see your doctor, after calling first. And if you do have to go out, avoid public transportation, taxis, and ride-sharing.

DO cough or sneeze into the crook of your elbow or a tissue, and dispose of the tissue immediately in a covered bin. (You should be doing this whether or not you suspect COVID-19 — you don’t want to spread a common cold, either.)

DON’T hang out with your family or pets if you suspect you have the virus. In order to protect them, eat and sleep separately from them, try to stay in one room, and use a separate bathroom if possible. Yes, pets are included in the recommendations. There has been one report of a dog testing positive in Hong Kong for the virus. But officials there said they are not sure the dog is actually infected. The CDC says experts don’t know for sure whether pets can catch it.

DO wear a mask properly around others if you suspect you may have the virus — the mask itself can be a source of infection if you don’t follow the guidelines. The World Health Organization has videos on when and how to use a mask.

DON’T reach for antibiotics. If you happen to have some lying around from a previous illness, you may be tempted. But antibiotics work only on illnesses caused by bacteria, and the coronavirus is — you guessed it — a virus.WebMD senior health writer Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.

A Guide: How To Prepare Your Home For Coronavirus

As a public service, I am sharing the following advice on preparing your home for the Coronavirus that I received from National Public Radio. Much of what follows comes from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, and health experts from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, Columbia University Medical Center, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Take a look. Some of this advice may be enough to keep you from coming down with the Coronavirus!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is telling Americans that they should be prepared for the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak in their community.

But what does preparedness look like in practice? The short answer: Don’t panic — but do prepare.

That “means not only contingency planning but also good old-fashioned preparedness planning for your family,” says Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. In other words, what you’d do in case of a possible hurricane or another natural disaster.

We spoke with Katz, and other health experts about common-sense things you can do to be ready should the virus hit where you live.

Soup and crackers.

Should I stock up on food and meds?

The reason to stock up on certain products now isn’t so much to avoid potential shortages in the event of an outbreak but to practice what experts call social distancing. You want to avoid crowds to minimize your risk of catching the disease. If COVID-19 is spreading in your community, the last place you want to be is in line at a crowded grocery store or drugstore.

If you take daily medications — for example, blood pressure pills — make sure you have enough to last a couple of weeks, suggests Katz, as long as you can get approval for an extended supply from your insurance provider.

Also worth pre-buying: fever reducers like acetaminophen or ibuprofen, says Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician with Columbia University Medical Center.

Think about adding enough nonperishable foods to your pantry to carry you through for a couple of weeks, adds Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security.

Bracho-Sanchez suggests having on hand your go-to sickbed foods, like chicken or vegetable broth and crackers in case of illness, as well as hydrating drinks such as Gatorade and Pedialyte for kids (though so far, kids seem less vulnerable to COVID-19). That’s because if you do get sick, you want to be ready to ride it out at home if need be. So far, 80% of COVID-19 cases have been mild. (Think cold or flu symptoms.)

Wipes

Are special cleaning supplies needed?

We still don’t know precisely how long the Coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can survive on surfaces. But Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center, says what we know from other coronaviruses is that most household cleaners — such as bleach wipes or alcohol — will kill them.

Even wiping down surfaces with soap and water should do the trick, he says, because this Coronavirus has a lipid envelope around it — like a coat that keeps the RNA inside the viral particle. And soap is a detergent that can break down lipids. “We use them to take grease and oil, which is a lipid, off our dishes,” he notes.

If COVID-19 does start circulating in your community or there’s someone sick at home, plan on cleaning surfaces that get touched frequently — such as kitchen counters and bathroom faucets — several times a day, says Dr. Trish Perl, chief of the infectious disease division at UT Southwestern Medical Center. That advice, she says, comes from studies on other diseases, “where they’ve shown that if you do clean up the environment, you can decrease the amount of virus that is on hard surfaces significantly.”

Mask and gloves

What about face masks?

The science on whether it’s helpful to wear a face mask out in public is mixed, as we’ve reported in depth. (For starters, it depends on what kind of mask you are wearing and whether you use it correctly.)

Some infectious disease experts are reluctant to recommend that people wear masks as a preventive measure because they can provide a false sense of security.

What experts do agree on is that wearing a mask is a good idea if you are sick, so you can reduce the chances that you’ll infect others, whether it’s family members at home or people at the doctor’s office if you go in to be seen. Perl says that wearing a mask when sick is especially a good idea if you live with someone whose immune system is compromised or who’s elderly, since people in their 60s and above seem to be the most vulnerable to COVID-19.

Some research suggests that wearing a mask can help protect you if you’re caring for a sick family member, but only if you wear it all the time in the presence of the ill person and if you are careful not to touch the front of it, which could be contaminated with pathogens.

Laptops

What to do about work — and telecommuting?

Now is the time to talk to your boss about your ability to work from home if COVID-19 is spreading locally, says Morse. Obviously, if you’re sick, you should stay home. But even if you are well, telecommuting makes sense in the event of a local outbreak to reduce the chances that you’ll be infected.

“That might be the prudent thing for many people to do if they’re able to do it,” he says, especially in big cities like New York, where large crowds of people are concentrated on public transport.

What’s the plan if you get sick?

If you show early signs of illness — like a fever or a dry cough — Bracho-Sanchez says you should call your doctor’s office but don’t necessarily head straight to the emergency room or urgent care, where you might infect others.

“Do you really need to come into the office? Can we work this out through the phone?” Bracho-Sanchez says. “Of course, if you’re having trouble breathing, if you’re dehydrated, that’s a different story.”

Do you have a plan for kids and older relatives?

Perl and Katz suggest you start figuring out now what you would do if daycare centers or schools start closing because of an outbreak. Do you have a backup child care plan in place?

“Having a plan for these kinds of eventualities now — instead of like it happened in China, where one-minute things were open and the next minute they weren’t — can be beneficial and a lot less disruptive,” Perl says.

“For example, for me, I’m trying to think about what if my mother gets sick? She doesn’t live in Dallas,” where Perl is. “What am I going to do? How am I going to get her cared for?”

Perl says it would be wise to reach out now to friends or neighbors who might be able to help in such situations.

Are there any habits I can practice at home to stay healthy?

Bracho-Sanchez suggests everyone in the house starts a new habit today: Wash your hands as soon as you walk through the door.

You’ve heard it over and over, but one of the best ways to protect yourself against infection from COVID-19 — or cold or flu, for that matter – is good old-fashioned hand hygiene. Washing your hands frequently, as well as avoiding touching your face, eyes, and nose, is a tried-and-true way to cut down on respiratory infections, Perl says.

Studies have shown that “good hand-washing and frequent hand-washing will decrease the risk of transmission of these viruses anywhere from 30 to 50 percent,” she says. “You can use the alcohol-based hand gels, or you can use soap and water. It doesn’t need to be any kind of antibacterial soap.” And you should scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds — about as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice.

Also, if you’re not already doing it, start practicing proper respiratory etiquette: Cough into your elbow instead of spewing virus-laden particles into the air (and wash your hands right after), and make sure to throw out your used tissues, since they might have virus particles on them.

“Those are very, very effective kinds of measures just in terms of decreasing exposure of others,” says Perl.

The Coronavirus Outbreak

What you should know

Where the virus has spread
Coronavirus 101
Coronavirus FAQs
NPR’s ongoing coverage

Subscribe to Goats and Soda’s newsletter for a weekly update on the outbreak.

Finally, if I might interject here, just use good old common sense. Avoid large crowds for a while, wash your hands often, and get plenty of sleep to keep your immune system strong. But don’t stop living. Life goes on, and so should you! 

James Stewart: Hollywood Legend Leads A Combat Mission over Vietnam

I am reposting a piece I received recently from This Day in Aviation. (https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/). It tells of Hollywood Legend Jimmy Stewart’s last combat mission — leading a flight of B-52’s out of Guam and over Vietnam back in 1966. I bet a lot of people have no idea of this man’s incredible military history which began in World War II. I wonder how many Oscar-winning actors today would risk their lives the way Steward and many other patriotic Hollywood legends did during World War II? My thanks to Bryan R. Swopes. Read on. 

On February 20, 1966 Brigadier General James M. Stewart, United States Air Force Reserve, flew the last combat mission of his military career, a 12 hour, 50 minute “Arc Light” bombing mission over Vietnam, aboard Boeing B-52 Stratofortress of the 736th Bombardment Squadron, 454th Bombardment Wing. His bomber was a B-52F-65-BW, serial number 57-149, call sign GREEN TWO. It was the number two aircraft in a 30-airplane bomber stream.

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                                  A Boeing B-52F-65-BW Stratofortress, 57-0144, drops bombs during an Arc Light strike. (U.S. Air Force)

The aircraft commander was Captain Bob Amos, and co-pilot, Captain Lee Meyers. Other crew members were Captain Irby Terrell, radar navigator, Captain Kenny Rahn, navigator, and technical Sergeant Demp Johnson, gunner.

Brigadier General James M. (“Jimmy”) Stewart, USAFR (center) with the crew of B-52F Stratofortress 57-149, at Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, 20 February 1966. (U.S. Air Force)

Jimmy Stewart was a successful Hollywood actor. He had an interest in aviation since childhood, and he earned a private pilot license in 1935, then upgraded to a commercial license in 1938. He owned his own airplane, a Stinson 105, and frequently flew it across the country to visit his family.

Stewart enlisted as a private in the United States Army 22 March 1941, just three weeks after winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in “The Philadelphia Story.” Military records show that he had brown hair and blue eyes, was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds (65.8 kilograms).

James M. Stewart enlists as a private in the United States Army, 22 March 1941. (Los Angeles Times)

Because of his college education and experience as a pilot, Corporal Stewart was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, 19 January 1942. He was assigned as an instructor pilot at Mather Field, near Sacramento, California.

Corporal James M. Stewart was commissioned a Second Lieutenant, U.S. Army Air Corps, at Moffett Field, California, 19 January 1942. (AP)

Stewart was promoted to first lieutenant 7 July 1942. Stewart was next assigned as a pilot at the Bombardier School at Kirtland Army Air Field, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

First Lieutenant James M. Stewart, USAAF, (third from left) as a pilot at the Training Command Bombardier School, Kirtland AAF, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1942. (U.S. Air Force) Update: The first student on the left has been identified as John M. “Jack” Drenan. 1st Lieutenant Drenan, a B-24 bombardier, was listed as Missing in Action on a mission to the Marshall Islands, 2 January 1944. Thanks to Mr. Patrick E. Freudenthal for the information.

After transition training in the B-17 Flying Fortress, Lieutenant Stewart was assigned as an instructor at Gowen Field, Boise, Idaho. On 9 July 1943, Stewart was promoted to captain and given command of a training squadron.

Concerned that his celebrity status would keep him in “safe” assignments, Jimmy Stewart repeatedly requested a combat assignment. His request was finally approved and he was assigned as operations officer of the 703rd Bombardment Squadron, 445th Bombardment Group, a B-24 Liberator unit soon to be sent to the war in Europe. Three weeks later, he was promoted to commanding officer of the 703rd.

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Captain James M. Stewart, USAAF, (standing, fourth from left) commanding officer, 703rd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy), 445th Bombardment Group (Heavy), with his squadron officers and a B-24 Liberator long-range heavy bomber, 1943. (U.S. Air Force)

The 445th Bombardment Group arrived in England on 23 November 1943, and after initial operational training, was stationed at RAF Tibenham, Norfolk, England. The unit flew its first combat mission on 13 December 1943, with Captain Stewart leading the high squadron of the group formation in an attack against enemy submarine pens at Kiel, Germany. On his second mission, Jimmy Stewart led the entire 445th Group.

 

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                                         Captain James M. Stewart, 8th Air Force, circa December 1943. (Imperial War Museum)

On 20 January 1944, Stewart was promoted to major, and served as deputy commander of the 2nd Bombardment Wing during a series of missions known as “Big Week.” He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

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Major James M. Stewart, USAAF, Group Operations Officer, 453rd Bombardment Group (Heavy), RAF Old Buckenham, 1944.

Major Stewart was next assigned as Group Operations Officer of the 453rd Bombardment Wing at RAF Old Buckenham. He assigned himself to fly the lead B-24 in the group’s missions against Germany until he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, 3 June 1944, and assigned as executive officer of the 2nd Bombardment Wing. In this position he flew missions with the 445th, 453rd, 389th Bomb Groups, and with units of the 20th Combat Bomb Wing.

After being promoted to the rank of Colonel on 29 March 1945, he was given command of the 2nd Bombardment Wing. He had risen from Private to Colonel in four years. He received a second Distinguished Flying Cross and was presented the Croix de Guerre avec Palme by France.

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Lieutenant Colonel James M. Stewart, USAAF, executive officer, 2nd Bombardment Wing, post mission, 23 July 1944. (U.S. Air Force)
Lieutenant General Henri Valin, Chief of Staff, French Air Force, awards the Croix de Guerre avec Palme to Colonel James M. Stewart, USAAF, 29 January 1945. (U.S. Air Force)

Following World War II, Jimmy Stewart remained in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a Reserve Officer, and with the United States Air Force after it became a separate service in 1947. Colonel Stewart commanded Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Marietta, Georgia. In 1953, his wartime rank of colonel was made permanent, and on 23 July 1959, Jimmy Stewart was promoted to Brigadier General.

During his active duty periods, Colonel Stewart remained current as a pilot of Convair B-36 Peacemaker, Boeing B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress intercontinental bombers of the Strategic Air Command.

“Actor James Stewart, (right), a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve, arrives at Loring Air Force Base, here on July 8th, for his annual two-week tour of active duty. Stewart is being greeted by Brigadier General William K. Martin, (center), Commander of the 45th Air Division. While at Loring, the actor will be given a pilot refresher course in flying the B-52 heavy bomber.” (Bettman/CORBIS)

James Stewart was one of America’s most successful film actors. He made a number of aviation films, such as “No Highway in the Sky,” “Strategic Air Command,” “The Spirit of St. Louis” and “The Flight of the Phoenix.”

James Stewart on the set of “Strategic Air Command” at Carswell AFB, Texas, 1955. Stewart, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, portrayed “Colonel Dutch Holland,” a reserve officer recalled to active duty with SAC during the Cold War.

During his military service, Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with one oak leaf cluster (two awards); the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters; the Distinguished Service Medal; and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme (France).

General Stewart retired from the U.S. Air Force on 1 June 1968 after 27 years of service.

Jimmy Stewart died of a heart attack at his home in Beverly Hills, 2 July 1997, at the age of 89 years. He is buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

© 2019, Bryan R. Swopes

How not to fight Chinese propaganda

I spent about 17 years of my life as a correspondent in Asia, some of it covering China. During that time I learned that the Chinese government is adept at controlling the flow of information and strewing propaganda.

I saw the Chinese propaganda and disinformation apparatus in action during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and we are seeing it again today operating at warp speed as the Coronavirus spreads from China to the rest of the world.

We may never know just where in China the Coronavirus originated. Some reports say it may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program. Known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses. Few experts believe it originated from “bat soup” served at a so-called “live animal market” in Wuhan.

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According to some sources, there are at least 100,000 Chinese citizens infected with the dangerous virus, but the government in Beijing is refusing to tell the world just how bad the outbreak is. The Chinese government has accused the United States of causing “panic” in its response to the coronavirus outbreak. The accusation comes after the US declared a public health emergency and said it would deny entry to foreign nationals who had visited China in the past two weeks.

All of this is by way of an introduction to an article in the most recent edition of the Columbia Journalism Review that looks at China’s most recent propaganda efforts and how to combat them. Take a look:

Columbia Journalism Review

JOURNALISTS WORKING FOR China’s state media in the US and around the world are paid to report the news as Beijing sees fit. They underplay China’s challenges and extol its virtues. They publish Chinese government press releases disguised as news stories to undermine US positions, including the defense of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

They inform the Chinese people through their news outlets, but also provide specialized and secret dispatches to senior Communist Party officials. Some working Chinese reporters have been credibly accused of engaging in espionage.

Despite this record, Chinese journalists in the US operate with freedom. Meanwhile, the Chinese government actively restricts the work of US reporters, monitoring their movements, controlling their travel, and intimidating their sources.

It’s an infuriating situation, and so it was not entirely surprising that the US State Department announced Tuesday that it has designated five state-run Chinese media entities as “foreign missions.” Because the five news organizations have been deemed to be “substantially owned or effectively controlled by a foreign government,” they will now be required to provide the State Department with the names and personal information of all of their staff and also to declare any real-estate holdings. In applying the foreign mission designation, the US appears to be on solid legal ground. But that doesn’t make it a good idea.

While the designation is unlikely to have a material impact on reporters working for Chinese state media in the US—they will still be able to travel freely and interview whomever they wish—Beijing has reacted angrily, calling the move an example of “ideological prejudice and Cold War zero-sum game mentality.” The risk is that the Chinese government will take reprisals against reporters working for US media outlets in China, further restricting the flow of information in the midst of a global health emergency, the spread of COVID-19.

In fact, on Wednesday, the day after the US made the announcement, China ordered the expulsion of the three Wall Street Journal reporters, a move the Foreign Correspondents Club of China called “unprecedented.” While the Chinese Foreign Ministry ascribed the expulsion to anger over an offensive headline in a Journal opinion published earlier this month, the timing seems like more than a coincidence.

All three Journal reporters—Deputy bureau chief Josh Chin and reporters Chao Deng and Philip Wen—have covered sensitive but vitally important stories, including official corruption and the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang. Deng is currently in Wuhan to cover the COVID-19 outbreak.

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The expulsion of the Wall Street Journal reporters comes amidst a sweeping effort by the Chinese government to manage and control reporting on the outbreak, undermining public trust and confidence at a critical moment. The lack of accurate and timely information has also fueled wild rumors, forcing the World Health Organization to clarify on its website that you can’t get the coronavirus from your pet.

Chinese authorities initially sought to suppress news, delaying a response that might have slowed the spread of the disease. Many experts continue to believe that China is underreporting the number of infections. Several bloggers and activists who have criticized China’s response have been detained or gone missing.

On February 6, Chen Qiushi a freelance video journalist who reported via video that local hospitals were struggling to handle the large number of patients, disappeared. He is likely in Chinese government custody. China is also engaging in widespread Internet censorship, disrupting the flow of critical information to those in need.

Alarmingly, the Chinese government’s approach—attempting to control and manage information—is spreading around the world as its own kind of virus. In Malaysia, authorities criminally charged a journalist who posted alarmist information on her Facebook page.

The Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha threatened to arrest any journalist who spread “fake news” about the illness.

Iran arrested several social-media users for “spreading propaganda to scare public opinion” before finally admitting this week that several cases had been detected inside the country. Even in Nigeria, where no known cases of the virus have been reported, five television journalists were arrested and held for several days on incitement charges.

Chinese media both inside the country and around the world serve a propaganda function and it can be frustrating to see journalists working for state media in the US enjoying the legal protections extended to a free press. Yet seeking to regulate or control Chinese state media in this country is likely to be counterproductive because it turns journalists into diplomatic pawns and provides a framework that favors Chinese censors who are already seeking to control the work of the international media.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the expulsion of the Journal reporters on Wednesday, noting “[m]ature, responsible countries understand that a free press reports facts and expresses opinions. The correct response is to present counter-arguments, not restrict speech.”

 

Welcome to Day 7 of the “SMOKE ROSE TO HEAVEN” Blog Tour! @SarahAngleton @4WillsPub #RRBC

Today it is my pleasure to host and introduce author Sarah Angelton during her “SMOKE ROSE TO HEAVEN” Blog Tour.  Sarah writes Historical Fiction novels and is a member of the Rave Reviews Book Club. ForeignCorrespondent is all yours, Sarah. 

The Making of a Writer

Mrs. A’s voice boomed through the entirety of South Elementary School. I’m not exaggerating. The whole building consisted of one hallway of classrooms, which led to an office, a gymnasium, and a cafeteria. Sixth grade stood at the distal end from the office and Kindergarten at the closest, placing third grade somewhere in the middle of the line of classrooms. Mrs. A. taught third grade and her yelling echoed through the hallways striking fear into the hearts of students.

I’m pretty sure I was trembling that first day I entered her classroom as a brand new third grader. I studied her skeptically when she explained that she got so excited while teaching that she tended to speak loudly and get a little carried away. Sometimes, she acknowledged, that gave her a bit of an unfair reputation among the younger students.

Fortunately, this turned out to be true. I’ve had a lot of great teachers, but Mrs. A. in third grade remains one of the best, not only because of her infectious enthusiasm for learning but also because of her high expectations. It’s true that she is the reason I still recite a little poem in my head to remember how many days are in each month and that I can’t spell the word “enough” without imagining the sound of an old-fashioned car horn (E-noooou-gah!), but it’s also because of this wonderful teacher that I started writing stories.

I loved to read, every bit as much as I do now, but the thought of writing something of my own, to possibly have that work scrutinized and criticized by readers, was completely terrifying. I am convinced I would have never entered the Illinois Young Authors Contest if I hadn’t been forced to do so by my boisterous, wonderful, terrible teacher.

Contest entry in Mrs. A.’s class was a non-negotiable requirement. And so, with trepidation, I poured my heart into producing a tale of adventure and mystery and treasure, got a little help from my mom with the big words, and submitted the story that probably determined my career path.

To my great surprise and delight, my story won first place on the regional level, garnering me an invitation to a writing conference for children hosted at Illinois State University. I was hooked.

I’ve written a lot of stories since then and sent many of them into the world to be scrutinized and criticized. My triumphant third-grade story is sadly lost to time, but I do have a new novel that I think is also pretty good.

The book is called Smoke Rose to Heaven. It’s the coming-of-age-story of a 19th-century girl figuring out how to develop a precious gift of her own and it’s about an important historical secret she stumbles upon along the way. It’s a tale of adventure and mystery and treasure.

And I owe a loud and enthusiastic thank you to Mrs. A.

  Book Blurb:

New York, 1872.

Diviner Ada Moses is a finder of hidden things and a keeper of secrets. In her possession is a lost manuscript with the power to destroy the faith of tens of thousands of believers.

When a man seeking the truth knocks at her door with a conspiracy theory on his lips and assassins at his heels, she must make a choice.

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Spurred by news of a ritualistic murder and the arrival of a package containing the victim’s bloody shirt, Ada must either attempt to vanish with the truth or return the burden she has long borne to the prophet responsible for one of the most successful deceptions in US history.

Protecting someone else’s secret may save Ada’s life, but is that worth forcing her own demons into the light?

Author Bio:

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SARAH ANGLETON is the author of the historical novels Gentleman of Misfortune and Smoke Rose to Heaven as well as the humor collection Launching Sheep & Other Stories from the Intersection of History and Nonsense. She lives with her husband, two sons, and one loyal dog near St. Louis, where she loves rooting for the Cardinals but doesn’t care for the pizza.

  Social Media Links:

https://twitter.com/SarahAngleton

https://www.facebook.com/sangletonwrites

https://sarah-angleton.com

  Purchase Links:

Amazon

https://amzn.to/2t7RS9g

Barnes & Noble

http://bit.ly/2U9pwXk

Sarah is giving away 5 e-book copies of SMOKE ROSE TO HEAVEN and all you have to do for a chance to win a copy is to leave a comment below.

To follow along with the rest of her tour, please drop in on her 4WillsPub tour page.

If you’d like to take your book or books on a virtual blog tour, please visit us at 4WillsPublishing.wordpress.com and click on the VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR tab.

Thank you for supporting this author’s tour and also the blogger of this post!

 

Welcome to Day 10 and the Final Day of the #RWISA “REVOLUTION” Blog Tour! #RRBC @JohnJFioravanti #RWISARevolutionTour

Welcome to Day 10 and the final day of the RWISA “REVOLUTION” Blog Tour!  We’d like to introduce you to an amazing supporter and RWISA member, Author, John Fioravanti.

We ask that you click on the author’s RWISA Profile below and visit all of his profile pages – some offering more insight into the member and others showcasing the author’s writing talent.

Lastly, we ask that you support this member as well as the host of this blog, by sharing this page and the author’s profile pages across all your social media platforms.

RWISA Profile

What John has to say about RWISA…

John has a book he’d like to introduce you to:

“REFLECTIONS” 

Now, we’d like to give you a chance at some of this awesome promotion for yourself!

Have you written that book or short story you want the whole world to know about? Are you looking for a great way to promote your creative endeavors? Perhaps you’re seeking to add some prestige to your body of work! If this sounds like you, we invite you to come on over to RAVE WRITERS – INT’L SOCIETY OF AUTHORS, otherwise known as RWISA.

At RWISA, we invite and accept into membership only the very best writers the Indie community has to offer.

If your work is exemplary and speaks for itself, stop by the RWISA website today at RaveWriters.wordpress.com and find out how you can submit your sample of writing for consideration.

We’re an exclusive bunch but we’d love to have you join us!

NOTE: If you’re looking to improve your writing while taking another route to membership into RWISA, while you’re at the site, visit RWISA UNIVERSITY!

Thanks for dropping by and don’t forget to leave us a comment and a “LIKE” below!

WELCOME TO THE FINAL DAY OF THE #RWISA “REVOLUTION” BLOG TOUR! @JOHNJFIORAVANTI #RWISAREVOLUTIONTOUR

Welcome to Day 10 and the final day of the RWISA “REVOLUTION” Blog Tour!  We’d like to introduce you to an amazing supporter and RWISA member, Author, John Fioravanti.

We ask that you click on the author’s RWISA Profile below and visit all of his profile pages – some offering more insight into the member and others showcasing the author’s writing talent.

Lastly, we ask that you support this member as well as the host of this blog, by sharing this page and the author’s profile pages across all your social media platforms.

RWISA Profile

What John has to say about RWISA…

John has a book he’d like to introduce you to:

“REFLECTIONS” 

Now, we’d like to give you a chance at some of this awesome promotion for yourself!

Have you written that book or short story you want the whole world to know about? Are you looking for a great way to promote your creative endeavors? Perhaps you’re seeking to add some prestige to your body of work! If this sounds like you, we invite you to come on over to RAVE WRITERS – INT’L SOCIETY OF AUTHORS, otherwise known as RWISA.

At RWISA, we invite and accept into membership only the very best writers the Indie community has to offer.

If your work is exemplary and speaks for itself, stop by the RWISA website today at RaveWriters.wordpress.com and find out how you can submit your sample of writing for consideration.

We’re an exclusive bunch but we’d love to have you join us!

NOTE: If you’re looking to improve your writing while taking another route to membership into RWISA, while you’re at the site, visit RWISA UNIVERSITY!

Thanks for dropping by and don’t forget to leave us a comment and a “LIKE” below!

WELCOME TO DAY 9 OF THE #RWISA “REVOLUTION” BLOG TOUR! #RRBC @HEALTHMN1 #RWISAREVOLUTIONTOUR

Welcome to Day 9 of the RWISA “REVOLUTION” Blog Tour! We’d like to introduce you to an amazing supporter and RWISA member, Harriet Hodgson.

We ask that you click on the author’s RWISA Profile below and visit all of her profile pages – some offering more insight into the member and others showcasing the author’s talent.

Lastly, we ask that you support this member as well as the host of this blog, by sharing this page and the author’s profile pages across all your social media platforms.

RWISA Profile

What Harriet has to say about RWISA…

Harriet has a book she’d like to introduce you to:

“THE GRANDMA FORCE”

Now, we’d like to give you a chance at some of this awesome promotion for yourself!

Have you written that book or short story you want the whole world to know about? Are you looking for a great way to promote your creative endeavors? Perhaps you’re seeking to add some prestige to your body of work! If this sounds like you, we invite you to come on over to RAVE WRITERS – INT’L SOCIETY OF AUTHORS, otherwise known as RWISA.

At RWISA, we invite and accept into membership only the very best writers the Indie community has to offer.

If your work is exemplary and speaks for itself, stop by the RWISA website today at RaveWriters.wordpress.com and find out how you can submit your sample of writing for consideration.

We’re an exclusive bunch but we’d love to have you join us!

NOTE: If you’re looking to improve your writing while taking another route to membership into RWISA, while you’re at the site, visit RWISA UNIVERSITY!

Thanks for dropping by and don’t forget to leave us a comment and a “LIKE” below!