E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I have been silent for a while, as (being high-spectrum autistic) I sometimes am. I am waiting for my Earth Day (more or less) release announcement for my first new eco-thriller in 17 years, Red Tide (stay tuned). (Full disclosure: like all of my books, it will be controversial. But more on that later. (My pen name is E.C. Ayres).) For now I am driven to write by world news: nothing new, mind you, just increasingly intensified. More and more, of late, I have been thinking--and wondering--if reason even actually exists in our world, or ever did, as a principle upon which people actually acted. I know there to be reasonable people (I like to think of myself as one) and always have been. But how many, and what do they actually control? A few small countries in Europe, I think, at most. Congress? The Military Industrial Complex? The Middle East? If ever there was a place where reason takes a back seat, it is there, where, for whatever historical reasons however historically justifie...

My oh my, so many of my worst fears coming together in Paris, in a profoundly forgettable week (if only it were so easy). So now the same pundits who've spent years ridiculing and otherwise lampooning the French (Fox News and Sarah Palin come to mind, with their 'Freedom Fries' jibes, and G.W. Bush, who just couldn't help himself and insisted "the French don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'".) So now they've somehow, incredibly done something I very much doubt our trillion dollar Homeland Security apparatus could have done, and caught two escaped mass murderers in one day. That they died in a hail of gunfire was perhaps fitting, given their Charlie victims were unarmed and never had a chance. How sad, however, that this all revolves around the apparently incompatible issues of free speech versus freedom of religion; tainted by the notion very present here in the U.S.A. as well, that when you are a True Believer, all others are suspect...