Sad Puppies Review Books: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

MIKE MULLIGAN AND HIS STEAM SHOVEL

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

There is a disease men get sometimes, or at least some men. Blue-pill beta cucks who have not yet learned the value of going their own way. It is called one-itis, and the women who control the media use it to foster this disease by shoehorning the same love story into every movie and TV show, telling men that there’s one woman out there for them whom they must spend all their time and energy trying to please in order to win her. There’s nothing modern feminists want more than a world where men have to see them as prizes to be won and fought over, because that is the only way they can have true power.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the story of a sad, broken little man who ultimately loses his lifelong battle with one-itis. It depicts his journey from a proud construction worker to a humble janitor, living out his last days in the dingy basement of a building that only his own honest labor made possible while the man who bested him, a powerful man who consistently demonstrates his value, lords his position over him.

The main characters in this book are Mike Mulligan, the construction worker who is led around by the nose by his ungrateful, greedy shrew of a steam shovel Mary Anne, and Henry B. Swap, a local politician who knows the importance of keeping frame.

The opening pages of the book are a sickeningly, sappy love song to the so-called “virtues” of Mary Anne. Mary Anne is so great, she and Mike Mulligan “and some others” dug the canals for the boats and the roads for the cars and the landing strips for the airplanes. This wording clearly shows us how completely our hero has succumbed to one-itis. Even when he’s participating in grand architectural projects, he only has eyes for his steam shovel, his One True Love.

For a while, he’s so wrapped up in the grand romantic fantasy of it all that it seems like they have a good life together. We’re told that he works so hard and takes such good care of her that she never grows old, but what we never hear is what she does for him. When is it her turn to take care of him? Feminists say they want equality but they have created a world in which men must labor to support them.

And even if Mary Anne looks good for her age (only because Mike supports her!), there’s still trouble in paradise because here comes younger, sexier power shovels: Diesel shovels, electric shovels, gas shovels. Men who know their own value prefer the younger models, and soon no one wants Mary Anne around except for sad sack Mike Mulligan, who can’t bear to let her go, but now can’t find the work he needs to do in order to support her in the lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed.

This is one-itis. Mike Mulligan would have been just fine if he’d been willing to say, “Later, toots!”, leave Mary Anne on the scrapheap where she belonged and started fucking one of the modern shovels instead. Or why one? He could keep a lot of them in the air until he knows he’s ready to settle down. He should be living large. Nothing demonstrates your value to women better than your willingness to keep a lot of plates spinning.

But because he has one-itis, Mike doesn’t realize that while Mary Anne cannot function without him, he can function just fine without her. Mary Anne needs Mike Mulligan inside her in order to come to life. Without him stoking her furnace, pulling her levers, and ramming pistons, she would remain cold and inert, without purpose or function. What does he need her for? To dig a little faster and a little better? I submit to you that Mike Mulligan on his own could eventually dig any hole that he dug with Mary Anne’s nominal help, but Mary Anne on her own is just a big useless thing, waiting for a man to fire her up and give her direction!

But rather than trading her in for a younger model, Mike follows Mary Anne out of the city and away from the lucrative construction jobs to a podunk town where an aging beauty can still act like a big fish in a small pond. There, desperate to be able to continue to please her like he once did, Mike lets himself be manipulated into a bet with the town’s alpha red pill selectman, Henry B. Swap: he’ll dig a cellar for the new town hall, and he’ll either do it in a single day—meaning he’ll bust his ass way harder than he needs to—or he’ll do it for free, meaning he’ll bust his ass for nothing.

Mike’s problem, from start to finish, is that he has no notion of keeping frame. Frame is how men control their interactions with the world. You, not some steam shovel you picked up, should be setting and controlling the frame in your relationships. Whoever sets the frame for any negotiation, in a relationship or business transaction, controls it.

Where Mike should have been demonstrating his power to Swap, he instead broadcast his desperation. And he gets taken advantage of, because of it. He lost frame with Mary Anne years ago if he ever had it to begin with, and he loses it immediately with Henry B. Swap, and so we’re treated to the sad spectacle of a man who once laid the foundations for skyscrapers trying to scrape out the basement for a two-story building in a single day.

Now, he succeeds, sort of. He succeeds because Mary Anne isn’t even loyal to him. She’s an exhibitionist. Any time a crowd watches her work with Mike, it just stokes her boiler even harder, and so they “dig faster and better” the more people are watching.

Men, if you’re ever dating an excavator, her work should be for your eyes only. She shouldn’t need a crowd watching to do her job. She should be digging modestly, in the privacy of your own home. It’s one of the simplest rules of red pill logic: sooner or later, a steam shovel that needs to dig in front of other people will want to dig with other people.

One-itis often leads to tunnel vision, and that’s the case here. Mike fulfills his beta boast, but at the cost of everything. He has literally dug himself into a corner. With no ramp to get out of the cellar, he’s stuck.

Or is he?

There’s no way to get Mary Anne out of the pit he dug, but just a few pages later, Mike’s climbing out on a ladder. It’s only his irrational attachment to her that keeps him there with her. The lesson here is that it’s easy for women to fall, but men can still just get up and leave when that happens. Mike, sadly, doesn’t learn it. A little boy suggests that if Mike is so in love with Mary Anne, he should just stay in the basement with her. If there was any doubt that Mike was a cuck of the highest or maybe lowest order, Mike agrees.

When the book closes, Mary Anne is keeping Henry B. Swap warm while Mike is still devoting his life to maintaining her. That’s the way it is. Women keep men like Mike Mulligan around only so they can leech off their beta bucks while they chase after the alphas. This book shows the entire process from start to finish in breathtaking clarity, but in an Alinsky-style propaganda twist, it puts a happy face on it, showing Mike Mulligan’s final defeat as a kind of contentment.

He’s going to live the rest of his life in that basement, because retirement would mean walking away from his “one” and if he could have done that he’d have been living the high life with a string of motor shovels up and down the coast, and we’re supposed to believe he’s happy about it. He certainly does.

Two stars.

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Want to send John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired) to WorldCon? Help Alexandra Erin get him there! For every $150 donated, we’ll post another piece like this.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Digging Deep with Mike Mulligan

With one exception (The Poky Little Puppy), every book I have chosen for Sad Puppies Review Books is one that I have strong enough memories of that I can thresh out the basic idea for the review and then go look at some combination of Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube to verify the details I was hazy about. If I know a book well enough that I can call its story to mind and come up with some angle for my red-pill-popping, reactionary right-wing reviewer to take on it, I use it.

So most of the books I’ve reviewed are ones that were favorites of mine, or favorites of one or many of the children I’ve read books to over the years. The most recent one is a little different, as it was actually a favorite of my father’s. In fact, I associate the book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so strongly with my father that I almost dedicated the Sad Puppy review of it to him, then thought better of it on the grounds that given the subject matter, it would be easy for someone who doesn’t know him to misunderstand such a dedication.

I didn’t think about Mulligan et al when I was writing the first or second round of SPRB mainly because it wasn’t a huge part of my childhood in the same way that the books I used were, but as I had also exhausted a lot of the more obvious possibilities, last night when I saw that the GoFundMe campaign cleared $150 just before I went to bed, I wound up Googling “classic children’s books” for inspiration, and there it was in the banner of examples that popped up. I was naming the books that caught my eye to Jack, who did not have the same literary upbringing I did and who had never read or heard of many of the stories I know by heart.

He asked me to tell him the story of the titular Mike Mulligan and his equally titular steam shovel, and I did, and he remarked that it seemed to him to be about the importance of not leaving your friends behind.

I think there’s definitely something to that, although it’s such an integral theme that it’s more of an axiom. The alternative never even comes up. When the new power shovels are introduced, Mike never thinks about abandoning his trusty machine. When Mike and Mary Anne dig themselves into a hole they can’t get out of, the story treats them as a unit. Mike can leave any time he wants, but the question is how to get them out. The fact that either they both go or neither one of them does is treated utterly matter-of-factly, not as some foolish stubborn stand taken by Mike. The story’s solution does not actually require that Mike stays, but the version of it where he doesn’t is never proposed.

And so just like that, I had my hook for the review. The sort of men who fuel campaigns like the Sad Puppies and Gamergate will eat up a story like that… when it’s about a bond of friendship between two men. Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel is given a feminine name and personified as female, though, and any kind of story of sacrifice or even mutual support and respect between a man and a woman is cast down as being emasculating feminist propaganda.

When two presumptively straight guys make it clear that they will to the mat for each other every time, when they say things like, “If you want me, you’re going to have to go through him.”, when they make it clear that if it’s the two of them against the world, you should think twice before betting on the world, they… and, frequently everyone else… will eat it up with a spoon. But make one of those characters female, and suddenly she’s a gold digger, she’s an albatross, she’s using him, she’s manipulating him, etc.

Even people who get lumped into the “SJW” side of things will get in on the act under the guise of praising the woman for being “better” or “stronger” than the narrative that shows the man supporting her. Few people in the audience asked why Bucky Barnes even needed to be saved if he’s so great, or why Cap would be willing to tear the team apart to do so. But replace him with a woman… particularly, replace him with a woman of color or most particularly a Black woman… and people who celebrate the Bucky/Steve dynamic whether as an embodiment of masculine love (whether platonic or not) will excoriate the whole thing.

Men who stick by their (implicitly male) friends through thick and thin are seen as being noble. Men who fight and die in futile causes as part of a band of brothers even more so. But put a woman in the mix…

Just think about how many times on a TV show, aimed at people of any age, you’ve seen the lesson aimed at boys that they have to stand by their friends. Think about how often we see the lesson that women should stand by their men. And think about how often the lesson is, “All this, just for a woman?”

The “character” of Mary Anne the steam shovel is only incidentally female. She’s only mildly anthropomorphized in the art and narration, has no lines of dialogue and never acts on her own. She’s female because that’s the way we speak about vehicles and vessels. But for whatever reason, she is presented to the reader as female and Mike Mulligan’s bond of loyalty to her is shown as that of two old friends who rely on each other, and I think that’s important.

Of course, there are people who will look at this and say that I’m reading too much into this, that I shouldn’t be trying to politicize children’s books. But at its core, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the story of a Depression-era laborer who is pushed out of the job market by changing technologies, and what he does to survive: first by finding a niche that the emerging big players aren’t ready to address, then by working harder and better than they will, and then finally by changing in the face of a changing world.

John Henry, the subject of a similar story, worked himself to death trying to prove that his labor was not made obsolete by a steam-powered device. Mike Mulligan pilots such a device, and its fall into obsolescence in the face of newer machines is what motivates him to work himself up into such a frenzy that he winds up trapped. Whether or not this story was meant to have political meaning, it reflects a reality that is in part political in nature.

Now, critics of this kind of discourse say things like, “But you can read any message you want into a story!” And you know what?

To a point, they’re right.

We could say that Mike Mulligan whitewashes and sanitizes the John Henry fable, by replacing the freed Black man with an Irish laborer, making his Phyrric victory non-fatal, and showing society making a place for him and his steam engine. Or we could say that they’re just different stories in the same mold, and that the author did not necessarily have John Henry in mind at all when she wrote it, that she was merely drawing from the same well.

We could argue that Mike’s final fate being far kinder than John Henry’s shows that society has progressed over the decades, or that it at the very least reflects the author’s optimism that it could do so. Or we could say that Mike’s ability to go the suburbs and win over the town and carve out a life for himself there is emblematic of the growing social capital and access to white privilege of Irish laborers in the early 20th century, something John Henry wouldn’t have had been able to do, if he had been a contemporary of Mike’s also pitting steam power against internal combustion and electric power.

If I say that these arguments all have some value, critics of such critical discourse (the critical-critical, we might call them) would no doubt seize on this as an admission that this kind of examination serves no point except to undermine the value of meaning and truth. If everything is true, then nothing is true, and anything can be true! Subjectivity run amok! Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!

To the critical-critical, the only point of such examination is criticism in the most negative sense, and the only point of criticism is to prove that something is bad or wrong in order to destroy it. If we talk about the socioeconomic reality behind Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, that means we are coming for it, and if we’re not stopped when we come for Mike, then who knows what we’ll come for next?

In a very real sense, I wound up choosing Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel for my next review because of two men whom I know are willing to do the hard work and stand by the women in their life with the same valor and honor that society says men should stand by each other, men for whom sacrificing for their partners is not even seen as a sacrifice or a question. When I compare them to the fearful, fretful men who inspired the content of the review… well, there’s no comparison.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Acknowledging an elephant standing awkwardly in the same room with my big plans.

The flipside of my new and growing confidence is that I am sitting on months… possibly close to a year… of unanswered and even unread email from the depths of my anxiety. There are people who sent me questions and inquiries, people with whom I had begun collaborations, people I was in the midst of doing business with when things went downhill and I just sort of snapped and lost all of my ability to deal with my normal channels of communications.

I’m sorry to those people, both the ones I know about and the ones I don’t. Knowing that I completely disappeared without a word from the ConCom mailing list and did none of the work I had been prepared to do for this year’s con is giving me a mounting of sense of dread about showing up at WisCon next week, and I’m not sure what to do about it, especially since I still feel massively unprepared to look at, sift through, or respond to my work email.

This is the kind of thinking that keeps me in the hole once I fall into it. Knowing that’s what’s happening helps a little, but it doesn’t end the effect.

I saw a great stream of tweets by Ashley C. Ford (@iSmashFizzle on Twitter) that talked about this. I’m going to quote her here:

“How come people think your depression isn’t real if it doesn’t look or manifest itself like theirs? What a strange barometer.

What people think you shouldn’t be able to do when you’re depressed is not an actual barometer for how depressed you are. It just ain’t.

When I’m depressed, I can still get up and go to work, but I get easily overwhelmed by email. I can tweet, but I can’t talk on the phone.

We need to do away with the idea that because you see someone casually interacting online they must be in great mental health.

I think this is how some people slip through the cracks even though we’ve seen people tweet, update & publish blogs right up until the end.“

There’s more in the same vein, but that’s the crux of it. It made me feel better to read someone else writing about it, about the exact situation I’ve been in and the exact way I’ve been feeling. This was the real single largest roadblock on finishing Angels of the Meanwhile, but also the hardest thing to explain because “I am afraid of my email and I can only even marginally function if I continue to ignore it” sounds, as Ford notes later in the stream, like an excuse to anyone who doesn’t feel it.

I know that I’m going to have to take responsibility, clear out the mess, and make what amends that I can. Part of my action plan for June is to spend some time each day… at the end of the day, so I can face it after I’ve accomplished my other goals for the day and am riding high… and clear out a hundred email messsages (most of which, I know, will inevitably be junk mail, automated updates, etc.). At that rate, it will take me about a month and a half to get through it.

As part of that, I will be making personal apologies as appropriate. Until then, if you were waiting on replies or actions from me in the past year and have been sitting here going, “Why is she talking on her blog and Twitter about all the awesome things she’s going to do if she can’t even reply to me?”, please know that I understand the position I have left you in and that I am sorry.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Make America Better Shirt

So, I was on Twitter (drunkenly) explaining the history of the CIA (again) when something about the “Make America Great Again/America Was Never Great” hat war crossed my eye.

I said, “Do you know what hat I want? Make America Better.” Because you can’t argue with that. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to believe that we can do better.

Well, I thought about it a little and realized I don’t really have the head for baseball caps, but I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world, so I decided to try my hand a third Teespring campaign. The first two struck out… didn’t get enough minimum orders to go to print. This one is nothing but simple, sharp lettering, though, which apparently comes with a few perks, like a minimum order of 1. So by ordering one of these babies for myself, I fulfilled the minimum and guaranteed that anyone else who wants one can have one.

http://www.teespring.com/makeamericabetter

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.