Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I was talking to Thomas Kendall (Yes, I know, I should give it up, it just makes me think and we all know where that leads) and he was on a lovely rang (just before he sent me the lovely rant that took up yesterday) and he blew up to the tune of “the problem is that the establishment—well, all of the establishment—got rid of our kind, if they could find us, and now they’re trying to replicate our creativity. And what we get is fifty seven genders and a dog named Binny, all of it so boring you fall asleep after the first two paragraphs.”

When I was done laughing, I joined the amen chorus, which is par for the course, but also part of a thesis I’ve expanded here in the past.

Look, creativity is weird.

No, I mean, really weird.

If you can create—really create, not just make the same thing but in black, or with more post-modernism, or more irony or whatever—and particularly if you have to create, you are by definition an Odd.

This never occurred to me, till I was in my teens, because of the family I came from. Part of the reason we might have been “poor as Job” (to quote my brother) but never noticed it, is that the family was creative. By which I don’t mean we were artistic. Oh, sure. The art was there, and some generations would go that way. My mom’s parents met on stage. My paternal grandmother’s father was a sculptor and also a singer (besides being a cattle drover in between. Don’t go there. Yes, Great grandfather was a proto-hipster.) And there painters, and poetry reappears again and again, like a recursive genetic illness. BUT–

But mom designed (and often made) clothes, and dad wrote (or declaimed off the cuff) poetry, and grandma made up stories to tell me, and both my grandfather’s were carpenters, but more importantly and above all else, we were good at “making.” Which meant if someone had an expensive whatchamacallit and we couldn’t afford it, and either wanted or needed it, we took scraps and bits, and a ten cent of nails, and we made it, by gum. Like mom seeing an expensive rack/shelf set to store fabric and thread, and making herself one from used cheese crates begged from the merchant across the street. Or the fact that my crafting as a kid often involved hand tinted paint, from discarded leftovers someone was throwing away. Or—You get the point. The family’s way of getting by was: get creative. Spending money only came if the creative didn’t work.

I was used to people extemporaneously creating whatever was needed, sometimes to imitate what we couldn’t afford, and sometimes dreamed up out of whole cloth. I THOUGHT all humans were that way.

Then when I was in middle school, we were given an assignment, to write a made-up legend. And all my classmates did was retell the last legend we’d read. AND THE TEACHER DIDN’T NOTICE. Worse, she looked at what I’d done, and accused me of plagiarism. Because it was so different from everything we’d studied and yet so well written/plausible, that she couldn’t believe I created it.

Took me some years to figure out that some people are not just stunningly non-creative. They don’t believe that anything new CAN be created.

Then there was the writing, where I had to reign in and bring it back to “what people expect” before I could sell. Not complaining about that. writing exists within certain boundaries.

Of course, when I did that, I felt like I was being stunningly uncreative, until a friend in the field told me I couldn’t write normal Urban Fantasy because I couldn’t create normal ANYTHING.

Took me even longer to figure out what she meant was that I was creative in a way she didn’t get. Which since this came from a creative professional was…. weird.

But most creative professionals aren’t that creative. Yes. Most of them are leftist too.

In fact, the fact leftists and “progressives” took over creative fields means that it’s almost impossible for really creative people to get in.

The idea that creative people are leftists, or primarily leftist is deranged. It’s born of the idea that leftism is somehow “rebellious.” Only of course, it’s not. Hasn’t been since FDR. In fact, that entire fable is one of those long-running-cons society has accepted.

Am I saying that politics flow from a certain political viewpoint?

Well, no. But I’m saying that creatives aren’t in general conventional anything.

Some of them are “leftist” in the sense they haven’t thought about it, and they get all their news from the MSM. Not in any other sense.

Those who parrot or ARDENTLY follow the ever changing party line can’t be creative. They can’t be creative because if they were they would occasionally accidentally create something that got them cancelled.

So, the creative fields, in the hand of the totalitarian group-thinkers, has slowly blackballed and pushed out any creatives.

Yes, there are exceptions. I might have found one of them in mystery. I’m listening, stunned they haven’t been blackballed. (They because it’s a team effort.) But they’re very rare.

Mostly, having run out all the Odds, and everyone consumed by the fires of creation, they’re left with people who have no idea what “creating” means, and dutifully invoke all the shiboleths of the sacred writ of Marx, then run it by the sensitivity reader. Yes, indeed. Fifty seven genders and a dog named Binny.

I mean, we’re talking about people who can make hot and heavy erotica BORING.

And now they’re in charge of everything else, including our economy and government.

This is bad. Of course it is. It’s very bad.

They don’t believe in creation, which is part of their devotion to redistribution.

But it is also an opportunity.

You see, they can’t create, they hate creation, but most of all, they don’t realize that people can create, or use things for …. um… off label uses, shall we say? And I’m not talking drugs.

We can. We Odds can’t avoid doing it. Kind of like my family when I was growing up, we create with careless largesse and without realizing it.

The hard thing is to stop us from creating.

…. they’ve tried. Oh, Lord they’ve tried.

Only it hasn’t worked. And we keep…. slipping through my fingers.

Therefore my friends, in this lethal pause between boxes? Let’s get creative.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for September 8, 2021