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So today was one of those days that the Sentinel decides to run the to-date rain figures -- dog only knows where they find them stashed, because I can't find them.
24 hours ending 5 p.m. Wednesday: .18 in (.46 cm)
Month to date 7.75 in (19.7 cm)
"normal" month to date 4.65 in (11.8 cm)
Season to date 13.42 in (34.1 cm)
"normal" season to date 15.05 in (38.2 cm)
last season to date 7.87 in (19.99 cm)
Notice we've gotten more than half the rain in the last three weeks (two weeks, really).
On another front: I'm reading Cadillac Desert. It's appalling. But more than that, I'm realizing that the landscape that I've grown up with -- even in the lush strip of the central coast (including both Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay in central California, which geologists do: though I gather that SLO people barely include Santa Cruz in their conception of the Central Coast and probably would seriously balk at anything north of Half Moon Bay) -- is even more artificial than I realized, more contingent, and that in the alternate history I've been noodling about in the back of my mind, none of it would exist as I have experienced it.
I've been thinking that if the Constitutional Convention had not made the odious compromise with the slave owners, the entire history of the United States, and therefore the world, would have been different. I believe that slave economy drove westward expansion more than any other thing, once the technological advances came along that made plantation agriculture profitable. I also believe that, had the United States split at the Constitutional Convention, plantation agriculture would never have become very profitable, because Northern industrial wealth subsidized the South to a great degree. I say "I believe" because these are speculations -- "if it had not been for this, that would not have happened" is a pretty shaky thing to say even if you know much more than I do.
So,holding to my line of thinking, if the "compromise" (actually, capitulation to the slave owners) had not taken place at the Convention, one of two groups of possibilities emerge, one coalescing around versions of the states splitting, and another coalescing around versions of the federation of states holding together. In the first group of possibilities, you can either have two countries emerging or you can have some other number. The young doctor made a case for there being a northern federation and a bunch of disunified southern states. It's a possibility I'm willing to entertain.
In any case, I'm thinking that a great deal -- but not by any measure all -- of the pressure for westward expansion is removed when you don't have the boom in plantation agriculture, which you don't have, in my thinking, if you don't have the capitulation at the Convention and subsequent subsidizing of the South by the North. And with the pressure for westward expansion lessened, and no Missouri Compromise and no rush to claim this part for slave states and this part for free states -- among other things -- the map might look very different.
Because the way the western states are carved out of the continent is really strange. It's a bunch of straight lines interrupted by rivers. It's the product of hasty negotiations at the Congressional level, rather than the natural growth of communities, economic networks, transportation hubs, etc. etc. Marc Reisner drops in a side remark somewhere in Cadillac Desert that it would make more sense to define the states in terms of watersheds. Which is roughly what Brazil is: mostly, anyway, it's the Amazon basin.
So that's one thing.
Another thing: the Louisiana Purchase: the Texas crap -- all of it, including the part where slave owners moved there and promised to be loyal to Mexico, then seceded and said they wanted to be their own country, and then joined the US as a slave state: the Mexican War, California: Lewis and Clark: Mason and Dixon: all these things and more happen after my splitting point. There's no reason for any of it to go down the way it did in the real world. There's no reason for "Rain follows the Plow" and "Go West, Young Man," and Sutter's Mill and Mulholland. No reason for my life to exist at all, by the time we get this far down.
So I have an open canvas. I'm thinking there are heavy technological and economical implications, and that development in general would take a very different course.
Mostly, I think, slower. Yeah, even technology. Mostly because I'm thinking my world has less surplus value extraction going on, and therefore less capital to spend and also less pressure for it.
I'm not saying this part is a good thing. Nor am I saying that the string of early wars I think would have taken place after the Convention would be a good thing. Just -- a thing. History is a terrible thing: why should it be not terrible, if one terrible thing is removed? Maybe, on the whole, it migh9t be less terrible, but I don't think I can guarantee that.
On the other hand, because it is my alternate history, I get to choose the alternatives I wish to explore, and I'm damned well not going to explore the ones that "prove" that it would have been a bad thing overall if the anti-slavery elements of the Constitutional Convention had stuck to their principles. I don't think I'm out to prove anything, anyway, unkess it's that it's possible to write a US alternate history story which is not all about the South winning the Civil War. I'm interested in playing in a universe with certain parameters.
I'm a million miles from being able to write anything. No, not because there's a lot of research I have to do, which there is. But because I don't have a story. And that's pretty critical, don't you think? I figure that the story will come to me someday, the way stories always come to me, with a conversation between characters who have emerged from this universe of mine. And at that point, I will become more aggressive about completing the research. Because I'll have more specific questions to answer.
24 hours ending 5 p.m. Wednesday: .18 in (.46 cm)
Month to date 7.75 in (19.7 cm)
"normal" month to date 4.65 in (11.8 cm)
Season to date 13.42 in (34.1 cm)
"normal" season to date 15.05 in (38.2 cm)
last season to date 7.87 in (19.99 cm)
Notice we've gotten more than half the rain in the last three weeks (two weeks, really).
On another front: I'm reading Cadillac Desert. It's appalling. But more than that, I'm realizing that the landscape that I've grown up with -- even in the lush strip of the central coast (including both Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay in central California, which geologists do: though I gather that SLO people barely include Santa Cruz in their conception of the Central Coast and probably would seriously balk at anything north of Half Moon Bay) -- is even more artificial than I realized, more contingent, and that in the alternate history I've been noodling about in the back of my mind, none of it would exist as I have experienced it.
I've been thinking that if the Constitutional Convention had not made the odious compromise with the slave owners, the entire history of the United States, and therefore the world, would have been different. I believe that slave economy drove westward expansion more than any other thing, once the technological advances came along that made plantation agriculture profitable. I also believe that, had the United States split at the Constitutional Convention, plantation agriculture would never have become very profitable, because Northern industrial wealth subsidized the South to a great degree. I say "I believe" because these are speculations -- "if it had not been for this, that would not have happened" is a pretty shaky thing to say even if you know much more than I do.
So,holding to my line of thinking, if the "compromise" (actually, capitulation to the slave owners) had not taken place at the Convention, one of two groups of possibilities emerge, one coalescing around versions of the states splitting, and another coalescing around versions of the federation of states holding together. In the first group of possibilities, you can either have two countries emerging or you can have some other number. The young doctor made a case for there being a northern federation and a bunch of disunified southern states. It's a possibility I'm willing to entertain.
In any case, I'm thinking that a great deal -- but not by any measure all -- of the pressure for westward expansion is removed when you don't have the boom in plantation agriculture, which you don't have, in my thinking, if you don't have the capitulation at the Convention and subsequent subsidizing of the South by the North. And with the pressure for westward expansion lessened, and no Missouri Compromise and no rush to claim this part for slave states and this part for free states -- among other things -- the map might look very different.
Because the way the western states are carved out of the continent is really strange. It's a bunch of straight lines interrupted by rivers. It's the product of hasty negotiations at the Congressional level, rather than the natural growth of communities, economic networks, transportation hubs, etc. etc. Marc Reisner drops in a side remark somewhere in Cadillac Desert that it would make more sense to define the states in terms of watersheds. Which is roughly what Brazil is: mostly, anyway, it's the Amazon basin.
So that's one thing.
Another thing: the Louisiana Purchase: the Texas crap -- all of it, including the part where slave owners moved there and promised to be loyal to Mexico, then seceded and said they wanted to be their own country, and then joined the US as a slave state: the Mexican War, California: Lewis and Clark: Mason and Dixon: all these things and more happen after my splitting point. There's no reason for any of it to go down the way it did in the real world. There's no reason for "Rain follows the Plow" and "Go West, Young Man," and Sutter's Mill and Mulholland. No reason for my life to exist at all, by the time we get this far down.
So I have an open canvas. I'm thinking there are heavy technological and economical implications, and that development in general would take a very different course.
Mostly, I think, slower. Yeah, even technology. Mostly because I'm thinking my world has less surplus value extraction going on, and therefore less capital to spend and also less pressure for it.
I'm not saying this part is a good thing. Nor am I saying that the string of early wars I think would have taken place after the Convention would be a good thing. Just -- a thing. History is a terrible thing: why should it be not terrible, if one terrible thing is removed? Maybe, on the whole, it migh9t be less terrible, but I don't think I can guarantee that.
On the other hand, because it is my alternate history, I get to choose the alternatives I wish to explore, and I'm damned well not going to explore the ones that "prove" that it would have been a bad thing overall if the anti-slavery elements of the Constitutional Convention had stuck to their principles. I don't think I'm out to prove anything, anyway, unkess it's that it's possible to write a US alternate history story which is not all about the South winning the Civil War. I'm interested in playing in a universe with certain parameters.
I'm a million miles from being able to write anything. No, not because there's a lot of research I have to do, which there is. But because I don't have a story. And that's pretty critical, don't you think? I figure that the story will come to me someday, the way stories always come to me, with a conversation between characters who have emerged from this universe of mine. And at that point, I will become more aggressive about completing the research. Because I'll have more specific questions to answer.
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