NPR Upholds Morlock Journalistic Ethics
Well, well. The NPR weekend show ON THE MEDIA has joined the lynch mob, and done their level best to add hysteria and contumely and smother any trace of rational dialog in the little sortie of the Culture Wars known as Sad Puppies.
They were paid for by my tax money, my dear readers, and yours.
And before you ask, no, no journalist, no editor, no one contacted me or interviewed me or made any attempt known to me to hear from the counsel for the defense. At a real witch trial held by the real Inquisition, even the devil gets an advocate and someone speaks up for defendant being accused of witchcraft.
It is a sad, sad comment on modern journalism that they are not even up to the moral and ethical standards of medieval Witch-burners.
This is the first news outlet of which I have ever heard joining the bunny mobbing of the Sad Puppies. Alas, the sharp, sharp teeth of the coneys somehow fail to inspire my poet’s heart with terror.
Note that Mr Chu claims that I am most famous for my THE GOLDEN AGE trilogy, but says my work declined in the years after that, on the grounds that in my fantasy LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS, one character supports returning to the gold standard. (If you listen carefully, you will hear the interviewer snort in disbelief. Who actually believes in sound economic policies these days? Unheard of!)
He fails to mention that LAST GUARDIAN was the first novel I ever wrote, hence the most amateurish of my published writing, and that all my novels since have had less political intrusions into the story, not more. But this would cut against the narrative, that is, the lies, he is trying to promulgate, so he says the opposite.
Mr Chu then spends the middle of the segment slandering Vox Day. As for Vox Day, allow me to quote the International Lord of Hate:
Vox Day! VOX DAAAAaaaay!
Vox Day wasn’t on the Sad Puppies suggest slate. Sorry. Can’t blame that one on us.
Well, I suppose you can, in that I demonstrated how small this most prestigious award actually is last year. Vox Day’s alternate Rabid Puppies slate was him going directly to his fan base. Looking at the numbers, and he on his own was about as successful as I was last year for SP2.
Now here is an interesting thought for you moderates out there who despise Vox Day. Above I talked about the angry reaction to SP2… Honestly, last year Fandom (capital F) insulted hundreds of outsider fans’ taste and intelligence, called them names, and basically treated them like trash (while the majority kept their mouths shut at best, or gave tacit approval at worst) and now you’re shocked when Vox Day has appealed directly to those people you mocked to vote in a manner that especially pisses you off?
Well, duh.
Mr Chu then pontification about the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement and he psychoanalyzes that movement as an Anti-Gay fear of castration. What Disco has to do with me and mine, I have not even the slightest idea.
Mr Chu called me out by name. His argument is that my work — which he has not read — is not worthy of an award on the grounds that some unnamed radio shock jock from three decades ago who hates disco, a man or men whom Mr Chu does not know and has never psychoanalyzed, allegedly has Freudian psychological problems due to neurotic race hatred and pathological fear of sodomy and castration.
It is not even a good ad hominem argument. It is not an argument at all: Mr Chu’s thoughts are not connected one to the next. His words are more like the disconnected and disjointed ramblings of a homeless beggar ejected from the madhouse found on a street corner seated in a puddle of his own spew.
Mr Chu then makes the argument that ‘golden age’ science fiction preaches that society will not change. This is too stupid to merit rebuttal. The very definition of science fiction is that it is the genre that explores how changing technology causes changes in civilization. Only someone utterly unfamiliar with the genre speaking to an audience utterly unfamiliar with the genre would even venture such an argument.
I am glad a complete stranger tells me I am motivated by the fear of being irrelevant rather than by what I have publicly and repeatedly stated my motive to be, and which even a casual onlooker can discern.
I assume this character assassin has never read even a single syllable I have written: my utter and absolute indifference to being relevant (whatever that term means) is not a product of stoic resignation but of an inability even to imagine what the hell he is talking about.
Newspaper reporting is supposed to be relevant, if that word means concerned with the here-and-now. Science fiction is concerned with the things far off and things to come.
Science fiction, for example, is concerned with topics like Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, together with his bold Waziri warriors, a crew of German airman and radio scientist Jason Gridley, using a vacuum-buoyant Zeppelin to descend through the polar opening into the hollow earth to fight the man-eating lizard men of among the dinosaur-haunted jungles of Pellicidar to rescue David Innes, adventurer, kidnapped by pirates, and meanwhile Jason can rescue Jana, Red Flower of Zoram, brave and beautiful cavegirl. This material hardly betrays an obsession with relevance nor a fear of losing it.
And this is what the foolish character assassin identifies as my main motivation? My alleged fear of losing the very thing I escape into science fiction to avoid?
Again, it is an argument only someone utterly unfamiliar with the genre would make to an audience utterly unfamiliar with the genre.
Perhaps he means something else by the word. Does he mean popular? Does he mean possessing an ability to influence the political and cultural milieu? Does he mean anything at all? Perhaps he means nothing, and selected the word for its poetic sound and cadence.
Then the two chatterers rejoice that the conservatives are on the wrong side of history. What this has to do with Sad Puppies, who are deliberately and notoriously apolitical, I cannot fathom.
The conversation degenerates into two monkeys picking lice off each other, a mutual petting spree of Marxists decrying those who oppose the revolution as reactionaries. The Morlocks rejoice in their ironclad grip on the future. Well, HG Wells reports that the future does indeed belong to the Morlocks. However, he was not proposing this as an evolution, but a devolution.
I note also that the two chattering Morlocks deny that the Sad Puppies are the underdogs here, and then chuckle and say that we are supposed to be the underdogs, and therefore it is absurd of us to claim to be the underdogs. Logic is not their strong suit.
All this happens the same week I promoted a call for mutual peace. Well, I received the answer I expected.
In order to answer the accusation of the Sad Puppies that the Hugo Award has degenerated into an explicitly political award, the mass media in lockstep rolls out its libel and slander campaign harping on one point and one point only: the composition and leadership of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies is not politically correct. That is the only thing proffered as an argument: we are conservatives ergo hatemongers.
Since I am, to my knowledge, the only actual political and social conservative in the Evil Legion of Evil, as well as the only Anglo-Saxon, I wonder at the sheer, mind-boggling stupidity of using politics, race, and sex as the tactic to disqualify our complaint that the award has been corrupted by those who subordinate literary merit to politics, race, and sex.
Granting a literary award for political purposes perverts and demeans the award.
The proper counterargument is to prove the awards have not been demeaned and ever have been awarded by literary merit. The counterargument that we accusers have doubleplus ungood politics and wrongsex and badrace supports rather than undermines the argument.
Enough. Please write to NPR, and ask all the people involved in this act of rent-a-journalist character assassination to be fired.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
