That leaves the question of why I'd get banned, especially now. About the last thing I posted on FB was a link to this story, "The Thirtieth Amendment", a bit of science fiction flash fiction I dashed off lately. It's topical in that I make the gun-control proponent a young numbskull, though the real concept of the story isn't tied to the gun issue in particular. As I see it, it's more about the way strident politics is splitting our society into partisan factions that would rather separate than come to a compromise, and the likely result of allowing the most intolerant elements to leave and set up their own separate "safe space".
It ain't Shakespeare, but would such a story get me banned? Maybe. One thing that makes the Left so prickly, I believe, is their belief that they are "on the side of History": in other words, they take it for granted that the future belongs to them by rights. This is why so many on the Left have descended into gibbering madness at the election of Donald Trump, as so many did also at the election of George W. Bush. They can't stand the thought that their way of looking at things might lose.
And this in turn is why writing and reading science fiction that presents our vision of the future is so key: because the Left has been cranking out theirs for decades, and has taken enough control of publishers and networks and studios that the future where the Left has already won, where there are no more conservatives, no more libertarians, no more religious believers of any sort, but especially no Christians or Jews, or at least none whose religion is the most important part of their life: this becomes the standard way for many people to think about the future.
I don't mean that we should be writing "our own propaganda", that actively argues for our beliefs. I mean, unless we feel like doing that. But mainly, I mean that we should write stories where the future contains people who believe as we do, where religion is not presented as a ridiculous or despicable thing. As a dry little joke I once tweeted, "Oh, I remember this episode of Law and Order: it's the one where the fundamentalist Christians turn out to be the bad guys." I could multiply examples of the Leftward bias in SFF, but it hardly seems necessary... I remember, for instance, reading a story in one of the science fiction magazines set in a dystopian future where enemies of the state were taken off in police vans that the author called "ashcrofts", after a Republican then serving as attorney general. It was a completely gratuitous, unfair and unnecessary slam. Similar zingers, always aimed rightward, are what turned me off mainstream SFF for twenty years.
Simply writing stories that give religion, or businessmen, or patriots, or veterans, or conservatives, or Republicans a fair shake is mischievous enough to shake up the Left's monopoly.
And if they're set in the future--and if it turns out that conservative ideas have become the norm in the future--that's icing on the cake. Good stories with such backdrops are what I want to do as a writer.
I haven't tried getting back into Facebook. But it has given me an idea for a cartoon that I don't have the talent to draw. Perhaps someone else would care to. It goes like this:
First panel: Two guards in uniforms with the Facebook "f" on them are hustling a frightened-looking fellow forward, roughly holding an arm each, coming through an institutional corridor. There is a poster on the wall captioned "BIG ZUCKER IS WATCHING YOU", with Zuckerberg's face staring out. Word balloons: "That's enough out of you!" "It's off to Facebook Jail with you!" "B-but, guys, can't we talk about this?"
Second panel: They throw him through a barred door. "We don't have to explain anything to the likes of you!"
Third panel: They walk off laughing, the prisoner holding the bars, looking after them. Main word balloon: "W-wait! Wait! At least tell me--" Very small word balloon, from off to the right behind the bars, a musical note. A thought balloon with a question mark to the prisoner.
Fourth panel: The viewpoint pans far back to the right inside the "cell", and we see that it is not a cell at all: the "prisoner" is standing in an outside courtyard, open to the sidewalk and the street, where people are walking dogs, children are playing, etc. The prisoner is dumbfounded, his hands still on the bars of the door locked before him, which we now see leads to the inside of a prison.
Fifth panel: the viewpoint pans still further back and upward, and we see that the prison is a building shaped like a Facebook "f", and the "prisoner" is now running toward the street along the right crossbar.
Sixth panel: Back inside the jail, the two guards are intimidating another frightened person, who was just putting something up on a bulletin board, maybe with a heading like "New Facts About Benghazi!" Word balloons: "Hey, you! Yes, you! You better take that down if you know what's good for you!" "Yeah! You don't want to wind up in Facebook Jail like that other guy!"
