Today at Writers Who Kill...

You'll find me today at the Writers Who Kill blog, talking about teaching writing at workshops and conferences and what makes a good student and helps in learning.

http://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/2013/07/workshops-and-conferences.html

The Morning After—4th of July Rant

The fools next door, across the street, and all the way down the block on both sides were bursting cherry bombs, M80s, bottle rockets, and handguns until long after 1:30 a.m. This morning, they greeted 7:30 a.m. with a handful of cherry bombs and several strings of firecrackers, just to start the day off right. It’s a good thing I’m a believer in gun control and own no semi-automatic weapon, or I might surely have committed a grave crime indeed and left the world and my neighborhood a better place for it.

Kansas City is the second biggest fireworks market after San Antonio, although all unlicensed private fireworks displays in the city limits (and most of the suburbs) are illegal. Fourth of July here is absolutely miserable for dogs, cats, and sane people. I remember one year when my husband and I were returning from a trip late on Fourth of July and the city’s skyline looked like a war zone, clouded in the smoke of battle and explosions. Kansas City offers many legal, lavish, and free public fireworks displays, but folks will insist on spending hundreds of dollars at the fireworks stands set up just outside the city and suburban limits to blast away in their own front yards and the streets outside their homes.

Every year homes burn, often to the ground, and people, often children, end up in the emergency room with major injuries from fireworks. But still, the fools buy them and set them off (while drunk) on every street in the large, sprawling metropolitan area, usually with a passel of kids running around among the minor explosives, leaving tons of fireworks trash all over the sidewalks and streets for someone else to clean up. Fourth of July is dreaded by firemen, police, EMTs, and sane people who’ve retained their hearing because of what the illegal and stupid use of fireworks brings.

I love celebrations, and picnics, family gatherings, barbecues, cookouts, and block parties are wonderful ways to celebrate Independence Day. There are ceremonies that honor servicemen and others who have served their communities and ceremonies where speakers and politicians recount our history (albeit whitewashed) as a country, praise the wisdom and courage of our forefathers, and speak to the importance of honoring our country’s ideals today. And often there are spectacular, legal, public fireworks displays put on by professionals using all the safeguards that have been developed through the years. Why can’t people settle for one or all of these ways to celebrate and leave the illegal fireworks alone?

And why, oh why must they start with the illegal fireworks in late June and run with them until the 8^th or 10^th of July? How are we celebrating the foundation of a nation of based on law when we break the law in front of our kids and encourage them to do the same? What kind of example are we setting when we do something like that? On the Fourth of July, we turn into a nation of scofflaws—and the most unpleasant of neighbors

I know I’m not the only one who hates this idiocy. My Twitter and Facebook feeds last night were both full of friends all over the country complaining about the idiots near them who were blasting away and the damage this was doing to their hearing, their nerves, and their animals. The police can’t arrest a whole city, even when the citizens are openly breaking the law. It’s a logistical nightmare. Laws and the civil society that they make possible only work when most of the citizens of a place will abide by them. As we become more lawless in this way, doesn’t it make it easier for that slide into lawlessness as a society that everyone worries about?

The best Fourth of July I ever spent was in Oxford, England. No one over there even knows the day is different, and Britain certainly doesn’t celebrate the occasion of losing its top colony. Next year, I think I’m going to have to spend Fourth of July in some other country to avoid the cretins who are wrecking it in this one.

How do you feel about all the illegal private fireworks on Fourth of July?

 

Interview Anxiety (at Stiletto Gang)

I'm at The Stiletto Gang today, talking about being sandbagged in a TV interview and tricked into a porn infomercial and how that's left me with "Interview Anxiety."

http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2013/06/interview-anxiety.html

Buenos Aires in Tumult--Guest Blog by Annamaria Alfieri

Buenos Aires in Tumult by Annamaria Alfieri

Blood Tango, my third South American historical mystery, takes place in Buenos Aires in 1945, during the most dramatic week in Argentine history.  Argentines had been protesting in the streets of their capital for more than twenty months, and by October of that year the demonstrations were reaching new heights and threatening chaos.  Think Turkey and Brazil during the past few weeks.

The country was being ruled by a military junta, and the populace both of the left and the right were demanding rule by constitutional law. Sound familiar?

On the 8th of October Colonel Juan Domingo Perón celebrated his fiftieth birthday.    He was the most powerful man in the country--its vice president, minister of war, and secretary of labor, as well as the puppet master pulling the strings of the president--General Edelmiro Farrell. As the most visible symbol of army rule, Perón was also the most hated of Argentines.

On the day after his birthday, the generals deposed him in the hopes of quelling the mobs who are shouting for democracy in the plazas. But the demands for a return to the constitution continued apace.

When, the junta went a step further and put Perón in jail, his supporters—the lowest level workers in the land—joined in with manifestations of their own, ratcheting up the noise and the stakes.  The sheer numbers of Perón’s supporters were a game changer.  Eventually hundreds of thousands of them took to the avenidas to make their own demand.  They had only one.  They wanted Perón back in power.

 Who were these men—individually powerless who combined to become an irresistible political force?

Until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the citizens of Buenos Aires had almost nothing in common with the people living in the rest of Argentina.  The porteños (people of the port) were white—the original Spaniards, more recently joined by Europeans of all sorts who streamed into BA, much as they did into New York or Boston.  They built a city very like the ones they had left behind across the ocean.  They sold the beef raised out on the Pampas back to Europe, notable to England, and they shopped it on the hoof.

The invention of refrigeration changed all that.  Meat could be shipped already packaged.  Slaughter houses (owned by Brits and Americans) were built next to the stockyards south of Buenos Aires and staffed with South American Indian men who poured into the city from the plains in search of jobs.

 

The oligarchic upper classes of the “Paris of the South” bought their labor cheap and ignored their needs, thereby creating fertile ground for the ambitious Colonel Perón.  As secretary of labor, he had taken up the workers’ cause and made sure of their allegiance by enforcing statutory wage raises, vacations, and health insurance.

The low level workers owed all their gains to Perón, and when their man was sent to jail, they decided that if the upper classes could demonstrate for their rights, so could they.  A week after Perón said farewell to his powerful position, they showed up by their hundreds of thousands to demand his return.  Blood Tango is set against this background, and the story of Perón’s fall and struggle to return to power constitutes a subplot that reads like a political thriller. 

The fictitious murder plot involves the stabbing of an Evita lookalike.  The people in power fear that Evita Duarte, a very popular soap opera actress who is Perón’s mistress, will stir up trouble among the poorest citizens of Buenos Aires.  Many people might have wanted to kill Evita to keep her from filling such a role.  Blood Tango takes up the question through the killing of a girl who could have been mistaken for Evita.  Was the crime one of politics or passion? 

The book launches this week.  You can read more about it at www.annaamariaalfieri.com