Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 13
August 19, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "ANGEL"
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. -- Angel
I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse. -- Riley Finn
ANGEL was one of the more unlikely television shows of its time. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that the show from which it was spun off, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, was derived from a second-rate feature film of the same name, debuted almost five years after that movie had disappeared at the box office, and was itself a low-budget, mid-season replacement whose debut season totaled only twelve episodes. Hell, BUFFY was even shot on 16mm film. Nothing about it augered well for success. Life would not be worth living, however, if every long shot missed its mark, and the ultimate success of BUFFY allowed ANGEL to take wing. Before we can take this particular trip down the Lane, however, it's necessary to give some background.
BUFFY was the story of Buffy Summers, a suburban teenage fashionista with a sarcastic tongue, a big heart, and a decided taste for quirky pop culture references. By day, Buffy was a mediocre student at Sunnydale High School in Southern California: by night she was the Slayer, a supernaturally-powered warrior with the strength and skill necessary to fight the vampires, demons, witches, and various other monsters which happened to plague her adoptive hometown. BUFFY operated from the first principle that since real life high school is basically hell, Sunnydale High should would be a metaphor for this harsh reality, literally sitting on the mouth of hell itself, with the monsters metaphorically standing in for the various angsts, fears and phobias of teenagers everywhere. What set BUFFY apart from most superheroes -- Spider Man would be an exception -- was the fact that her powers did not spare her the suffering of the ordinary 16 year-old girl. She agonized about clothing choices, wept over boys, endured bullying from bitchy classmates, caught hell from her divorced mom for flunking classes. Her woes were exacerbated rather than eased by her calling as a Slayer, and she often rebelled against the constraints imposed upon her by her duties, leading to yet more groundings and embarrassing "go to the principal's office" moments. In this way, Whedon was able to create a show about a young vampire huntress which may in fact be the most eloquent comment about high school ever put on film.
As the title suggests, BUFFY balanced comedy with horror -- always a very difficult task, but in this show's case, one which was brilliantly carried off by a small team of superb writers. And these writers saw from the outset that while the attractive Buffy would naturally draw male attention, she needed one abiding love interest who could intrigue her, challenger her, and altogether beat her at her own game. His name was Angel.
Angel is introduced in the pilot as a handsome, mysterious, not terribly friendly stranger who drops in from time to time to issue cryptic warnings, make Buffy's heart flutter, and then slip off into the shadows. We later learn that he himself is a vampire originally known as Angelus, one who in his bloodsucking days was so vicious even other vampires were afraid of him, until at last he crossed the wrong gypsy, who cursed him by restoring his soul, and thus his conscience. Haunted by remorse, he now works for good, and thus befriends Buffy and ultimately falls in love with her. Unfortunately for the two of them, the gypsies wrote some fine print into his curse: if he ever knows a moment of true happiness, he will lose his soul and once again become evil. So naturally, when Angel and Buffy finally get it on is BTVS season 2, Angel becomes Angelus again, commits a bunch of horrible murders, and is ultimately sent to hell. When he returns in Season 3, soul restored once more, he realizes he can never be with Buffy, lest he risk becoming evil, and departs for Los Angeles to start his unlife over again.
Such is the in-universe backstory. In the real world, Whedon and Greenwalt had decided in Season 3 of BUFFY that David Boreanaz, the actor who played Angel, had enough charisma and acting chops to carry his own series. So they put ANGEL together, and armed him with a sidekick drawn from BUFFY's ranks: Cordelia Chase, the beautiful, bitchy nemesis of Buffy played by Charisma Carpenter, who has gone to L.A. from Sunndale to seek fame. There they encounter Doyle (Glenn Quinn), an enigmatic, offbeat Irishman with connections to "the powers that be," who guides him on his quest for redemption by showing him visions of people in distress who require his help. Angel, who is famous for brooding, sulking, and lurking in shadows, doesn't really want the job, but ultimately comes to accept it as the only possible path to redemption for all his innumerable sins. So he forms a detective agency which "helps the helpless" by socking evil, in human and demonic form, on its collective jaw. Meanwhile, he reflects on something called the Shanshu Prophecy, which hints that one day, as the apocalypse looms, he may recover his humanity, and be able to live a normal life -- presumably running off into a literal sunset with Buffy.
From the outset, ANGEL was a show of a very different character from its progenitor. BUFFY could be, and increasingly was, dark in tone as it continued its seven year-run, but ANGEL never pretended to be anything else. The comedy was always there, but the series, from the pilot onward, placed all of its Tarot cards on the blood-spattered table. On its surface, ANGEL was a sarcastic, supernatural take on Los Angeles itself: many episodes ridicule the city's traffic, its prices, and its culture, especially as it pertains to the entertainment industry. It was also a savage roast of the legal profession generally and lawyers specifically: Angel's principal nemesis is not a demon or a vampire or a secret brotherhood of assassins, but a downtown law firm called Wolfram & Hart, whose unseen "senior partner" is presumably the devil himself.
Deeper than this, however, ANGEL was a study of good and evil, specifically the similarities between the two in methodology, the way they seem to feed off of and require each other; and the emotional, physical, spiritual and psychological toll of fighting evil when evil seems to be everywhere and tireless. The existential woe that Wheedon only occasionally touches upon in BUFFY rings like a dirge all throughout ANGEL. Our grim-jawed hero is often exhausted by his ceaseless battle, and is so courageous in large part because he secretly (and sometimes openly) longs for death. Not every soul he reaches out to protect is saved or even wants to be saved, he occasionally makes huge mistakes which cost lives or damage people irreparably, and his past is continuously reaching out to haunt him -- sometimes literally. Even more, he begins to hate his enemies at Wolfram & Hart so deeply that he plays very roughly indeed with them, in one episode simply walking away while several dozen of them are slaughtered by vampires as they plead for his help. At different times he deliberately alienates or harms his friends, sacrifices innocent lives for the greater good, and causes the deaths of evildoers simply because he feels they have it coming.
Cordelia, too, undergoes a difficult journey. Vain, shallow, selfish and prone to tactless cruelty, we watch her humiliated again and again as she tries and fails to break into the acting world. Ultimately burdened with Doyle's visions, which cause her excruciating pain and threaten her life, she begins to accept her role as a "champion" of the helpless, but like Angel, she often craves release from her responsibilities, often through romantic dalliances that inevitably end in failure. And like Doyle before her, she is also called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, sacrifice is a recurring theme in the series: its fifth, final, and arguably best season, is a kind of scorched-earth campaign against the viewer, mercilessly killing off beloved characters at such a pace that it almost resembles an installment of FRIDAY THE 13TH. I am trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible, but when one lists the regular and recurring characters on this show -- and it's quite a list -- the ones who survive even to the last, very ambiguous, frame do not make extensive reading. Indeed, the show's whole fatalistic, existential tenor can be summed up in this exchange between Angel and a lawyer from Wolfram & Hart:
Angel : You're not gonna win.
Holland Manners : Well... no. Of course we aren't. We have no intention of doing anything so prosaic as "winning." [Holland laughs]
Angel : Then why?
Holland Manners : I'm sorry. Why what?
Angel : Why fight?
Holland Manners : That's really the question you should be asking yourself, isn't it? See, for us, there is no fight. Which is why winning doesn't enter into it. As a corporation, we go on... no matter what. You see, Angel... our firm has always been here on Earth... in one form or another. The Spanish Inquisition. The Khmer Rouge Genocide... one of my favorites. I personally was there. We were here when the very first modern cave man clubbed his neighbor on the head with a rock for stealing his dinner. See, we're in the hearts and minds of every single living being on this planet. And that, friend, is what's making things so difficult for you. That is the source of Wolfram & Hart's power. You see, the world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us.
Like all long-running shows, ANGEL changed course more than once. The original cast of three ballooned at times to as many as seven or eight regulars, the standalone, task-of-the-week style of the first season gradually became overshadowed by increasingly complex, season-long story arcs, and by the fourth season the show had become, in the words of one of its own characters "a convoluted, supernatural soap opera." Sometimes the darkness of the plotlines could be almost impenetrable: poor Wesley Wyndham-Price (Alexis Denisoff), who starts as a stammering bungler used mostly for comic relief, becomes unrecognizably bitter and violent, kneecapping or stabbing people who displeased him, and while it often made for great drama, it was just as often depressing. Thankfully, some budget cuts forced upon it by the network prompted Whedon and Greenwalt to course correct for what became the final season: Angel and his surviving cohorts found themselves not warring with, but in charge of, Wolfram & Hart, and joined by the insolent punk vampire Spike (James Marsters), who was always good for cutting one-liners and assorted mayhem. This also gave J. August Richards, who played the uneducated street thug Charles Gunn, a chance to do some ferocious acting when he accepts, against his better judgment, a devil's bargain "upgrade" to become a genius lawyer. Inded, the final season, even more nihilistic than the others, took on the idea of whether any compromise with evil is even possible. Its answer was emphatic, but not easy to watch. I remember finishing the series finale feeling as if I had just watched the end of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" several times over after my dog died. BUFFY's final episode was apocalyptic and bloody, but ultimately left the heroine completely in charge of her own destiny, with most of her nearest and dearest still breathing. Not this time, kid. ANGEL began on a very dark note in "City Of....", with our titular hero failing his first mission. It ended like a goddamned Leonard Cohen lyric:
You want it darker/we kill the flame
So where does that leave ANGEL, twenty years after it went off the air? What is its legacy, and is it still relevant?
I have occasionally stated that living in the shadow of BUFFY did not stunt ANGEL's growth, and this is true: at its best it was as good as its progenitor, with some episodes ("The Prodigal", "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?", " "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", "Tomorrow", "The Girl In Question") rising to truly dizzying heights of brilliance, pathos, tragedy, humor, or at least palm-tingling suspense. Indeed, the second season of the show is almost cruel in the way it increases the stakes in every episode, deftly moving from present to past as it at first sketches and then paints, in blood, the long history of Angel's relationship with Darla (Julie Benz), the beautiful, sadistic vampire who sired him centuries before. On the other hand, there is no question that the show struggled at times, and became increasingly dense and unapproachable to viewers tuning in for the first time: the fourth season is ultimately a mess, the villain was a bust, Charisma Carpenter's unplanned real-life pregnancy forced the writers to scribble in yet another supernatural baby story (the third of the show's five year run), and ultimately led to her departure after an ugly fight with producers -- the consequences of which came back to haunt Whedon many years later. It is for certain that ANGEL produced nothing like the cultural resonance of BUFFY, which not only changed the way most films and television shows are written, but also gave birth to a whole slew of imitations. ANGEL certainly did nothing of the sort. Its brooding tone and tendency to fall into moral ambiguity are common nowadays, but don't find their roots here.
This is not to say, however, that the show lacks a legacy. If BUFFY was the perfect metaphor for high school and, to some extent in its fourth season, college, ANGEL is an equally perfect metaphor for the terrible struggles people undergo in Los Angeles trying to live their dreams or find their purpose while simultaneously trying to hold onto basic values, or simply survive. BUFFY always struck me as a deeply personal show, told from the outcast's perspective: Buffy and her friends Willow and Xander, and even their stuffy patriarch Giles, are all essentially outsiders looking in, not only at normal life, but at acceptance: loneliness and rejection, both social and that brought about by duty, are recurring themes for all of them. ANGEL goes even further into this territory, as it is clearly an analogy and an allegory both. Whedon and Greenwalt are pointing at the city in which they live, the industry in which they work, the metaphorically bloodsucking lawyers and studio suits they have to deal with, and offering a kind of primal scream of existential anguish, broken up by outbursts of hysterical laughter at the absurdity of it all. Hollywood is, after all, a place where dreams go to die, and ironically, the ones that die the hardest are often the ones which come true. Every character in ANGEL -- Cordelia, Doyle, Gunn, Wesley, Spike, Fred, Harmony, Lindsey, Kate, Holtz, Lila, Darla, Drusilla, Connor, Holland, and Angel himself -- are all looking for something, questing for something, desirious of something, and nearly all of them get it. How they "get it" is another matter entirely.
If the age we live in has a central theme, it is probably cynicism, the quality of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. ANGEL is not a cynical show. It holds price and value in equal esteem, and sometimes it has to be reminded, painfully, of the former. Its hero is a vampire, but the series has a beating heart. Running from 1999 - 2004, it reflects the deeper angst of a transitional age: night was falling on the prosperous, happy-go-lucky 90s, and while nobody could see the shape of the post 9/11 future, it looked decidedly more frightening than the immediate past. Something had gone wrong with the rosy outcome we were promised and expected. Tribulations had begun, apocalypse was coming, and we would be in need of champions. But the champions would not be our father's champions: they would reflect the spirit of this new era. They would be dark, they would be brooding, they would crack jokes at inappropriate times, they would occasionally flee from their responsibilities, and often fight very dirtily indeed. They would fight this fight because it needed fighting, because it was the right thing to do, but they did not expect to win, and they did not expect to survive.
On that score alone, I would say ANGEL is more relevant than ever. Like Wolfram & Hart, it will go on...no matter what.
I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse. -- Riley Finn
ANGEL was one of the more unlikely television shows of its time. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that the show from which it was spun off, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, was derived from a second-rate feature film of the same name, debuted almost five years after that movie had disappeared at the box office, and was itself a low-budget, mid-season replacement whose debut season totaled only twelve episodes. Hell, BUFFY was even shot on 16mm film. Nothing about it augered well for success. Life would not be worth living, however, if every long shot missed its mark, and the ultimate success of BUFFY allowed ANGEL to take wing. Before we can take this particular trip down the Lane, however, it's necessary to give some background.
BUFFY was the story of Buffy Summers, a suburban teenage fashionista with a sarcastic tongue, a big heart, and a decided taste for quirky pop culture references. By day, Buffy was a mediocre student at Sunnydale High School in Southern California: by night she was the Slayer, a supernaturally-powered warrior with the strength and skill necessary to fight the vampires, demons, witches, and various other monsters which happened to plague her adoptive hometown. BUFFY operated from the first principle that since real life high school is basically hell, Sunnydale High should would be a metaphor for this harsh reality, literally sitting on the mouth of hell itself, with the monsters metaphorically standing in for the various angsts, fears and phobias of teenagers everywhere. What set BUFFY apart from most superheroes -- Spider Man would be an exception -- was the fact that her powers did not spare her the suffering of the ordinary 16 year-old girl. She agonized about clothing choices, wept over boys, endured bullying from bitchy classmates, caught hell from her divorced mom for flunking classes. Her woes were exacerbated rather than eased by her calling as a Slayer, and she often rebelled against the constraints imposed upon her by her duties, leading to yet more groundings and embarrassing "go to the principal's office" moments. In this way, Whedon was able to create a show about a young vampire huntress which may in fact be the most eloquent comment about high school ever put on film.
As the title suggests, BUFFY balanced comedy with horror -- always a very difficult task, but in this show's case, one which was brilliantly carried off by a small team of superb writers. And these writers saw from the outset that while the attractive Buffy would naturally draw male attention, she needed one abiding love interest who could intrigue her, challenger her, and altogether beat her at her own game. His name was Angel.
Angel is introduced in the pilot as a handsome, mysterious, not terribly friendly stranger who drops in from time to time to issue cryptic warnings, make Buffy's heart flutter, and then slip off into the shadows. We later learn that he himself is a vampire originally known as Angelus, one who in his bloodsucking days was so vicious even other vampires were afraid of him, until at last he crossed the wrong gypsy, who cursed him by restoring his soul, and thus his conscience. Haunted by remorse, he now works for good, and thus befriends Buffy and ultimately falls in love with her. Unfortunately for the two of them, the gypsies wrote some fine print into his curse: if he ever knows a moment of true happiness, he will lose his soul and once again become evil. So naturally, when Angel and Buffy finally get it on is BTVS season 2, Angel becomes Angelus again, commits a bunch of horrible murders, and is ultimately sent to hell. When he returns in Season 3, soul restored once more, he realizes he can never be with Buffy, lest he risk becoming evil, and departs for Los Angeles to start his unlife over again.
Such is the in-universe backstory. In the real world, Whedon and Greenwalt had decided in Season 3 of BUFFY that David Boreanaz, the actor who played Angel, had enough charisma and acting chops to carry his own series. So they put ANGEL together, and armed him with a sidekick drawn from BUFFY's ranks: Cordelia Chase, the beautiful, bitchy nemesis of Buffy played by Charisma Carpenter, who has gone to L.A. from Sunndale to seek fame. There they encounter Doyle (Glenn Quinn), an enigmatic, offbeat Irishman with connections to "the powers that be," who guides him on his quest for redemption by showing him visions of people in distress who require his help. Angel, who is famous for brooding, sulking, and lurking in shadows, doesn't really want the job, but ultimately comes to accept it as the only possible path to redemption for all his innumerable sins. So he forms a detective agency which "helps the helpless" by socking evil, in human and demonic form, on its collective jaw. Meanwhile, he reflects on something called the Shanshu Prophecy, which hints that one day, as the apocalypse looms, he may recover his humanity, and be able to live a normal life -- presumably running off into a literal sunset with Buffy.
From the outset, ANGEL was a show of a very different character from its progenitor. BUFFY could be, and increasingly was, dark in tone as it continued its seven year-run, but ANGEL never pretended to be anything else. The comedy was always there, but the series, from the pilot onward, placed all of its Tarot cards on the blood-spattered table. On its surface, ANGEL was a sarcastic, supernatural take on Los Angeles itself: many episodes ridicule the city's traffic, its prices, and its culture, especially as it pertains to the entertainment industry. It was also a savage roast of the legal profession generally and lawyers specifically: Angel's principal nemesis is not a demon or a vampire or a secret brotherhood of assassins, but a downtown law firm called Wolfram & Hart, whose unseen "senior partner" is presumably the devil himself.
Deeper than this, however, ANGEL was a study of good and evil, specifically the similarities between the two in methodology, the way they seem to feed off of and require each other; and the emotional, physical, spiritual and psychological toll of fighting evil when evil seems to be everywhere and tireless. The existential woe that Wheedon only occasionally touches upon in BUFFY rings like a dirge all throughout ANGEL. Our grim-jawed hero is often exhausted by his ceaseless battle, and is so courageous in large part because he secretly (and sometimes openly) longs for death. Not every soul he reaches out to protect is saved or even wants to be saved, he occasionally makes huge mistakes which cost lives or damage people irreparably, and his past is continuously reaching out to haunt him -- sometimes literally. Even more, he begins to hate his enemies at Wolfram & Hart so deeply that he plays very roughly indeed with them, in one episode simply walking away while several dozen of them are slaughtered by vampires as they plead for his help. At different times he deliberately alienates or harms his friends, sacrifices innocent lives for the greater good, and causes the deaths of evildoers simply because he feels they have it coming.
Cordelia, too, undergoes a difficult journey. Vain, shallow, selfish and prone to tactless cruelty, we watch her humiliated again and again as she tries and fails to break into the acting world. Ultimately burdened with Doyle's visions, which cause her excruciating pain and threaten her life, she begins to accept her role as a "champion" of the helpless, but like Angel, she often craves release from her responsibilities, often through romantic dalliances that inevitably end in failure. And like Doyle before her, she is also called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, sacrifice is a recurring theme in the series: its fifth, final, and arguably best season, is a kind of scorched-earth campaign against the viewer, mercilessly killing off beloved characters at such a pace that it almost resembles an installment of FRIDAY THE 13TH. I am trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible, but when one lists the regular and recurring characters on this show -- and it's quite a list -- the ones who survive even to the last, very ambiguous, frame do not make extensive reading. Indeed, the show's whole fatalistic, existential tenor can be summed up in this exchange between Angel and a lawyer from Wolfram & Hart:
Angel : You're not gonna win.
Holland Manners : Well... no. Of course we aren't. We have no intention of doing anything so prosaic as "winning." [Holland laughs]
Angel : Then why?
Holland Manners : I'm sorry. Why what?
Angel : Why fight?
Holland Manners : That's really the question you should be asking yourself, isn't it? See, for us, there is no fight. Which is why winning doesn't enter into it. As a corporation, we go on... no matter what. You see, Angel... our firm has always been here on Earth... in one form or another. The Spanish Inquisition. The Khmer Rouge Genocide... one of my favorites. I personally was there. We were here when the very first modern cave man clubbed his neighbor on the head with a rock for stealing his dinner. See, we're in the hearts and minds of every single living being on this planet. And that, friend, is what's making things so difficult for you. That is the source of Wolfram & Hart's power. You see, the world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us.
Like all long-running shows, ANGEL changed course more than once. The original cast of three ballooned at times to as many as seven or eight regulars, the standalone, task-of-the-week style of the first season gradually became overshadowed by increasingly complex, season-long story arcs, and by the fourth season the show had become, in the words of one of its own characters "a convoluted, supernatural soap opera." Sometimes the darkness of the plotlines could be almost impenetrable: poor Wesley Wyndham-Price (Alexis Denisoff), who starts as a stammering bungler used mostly for comic relief, becomes unrecognizably bitter and violent, kneecapping or stabbing people who displeased him, and while it often made for great drama, it was just as often depressing. Thankfully, some budget cuts forced upon it by the network prompted Whedon and Greenwalt to course correct for what became the final season: Angel and his surviving cohorts found themselves not warring with, but in charge of, Wolfram & Hart, and joined by the insolent punk vampire Spike (James Marsters), who was always good for cutting one-liners and assorted mayhem. This also gave J. August Richards, who played the uneducated street thug Charles Gunn, a chance to do some ferocious acting when he accepts, against his better judgment, a devil's bargain "upgrade" to become a genius lawyer. Inded, the final season, even more nihilistic than the others, took on the idea of whether any compromise with evil is even possible. Its answer was emphatic, but not easy to watch. I remember finishing the series finale feeling as if I had just watched the end of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" several times over after my dog died. BUFFY's final episode was apocalyptic and bloody, but ultimately left the heroine completely in charge of her own destiny, with most of her nearest and dearest still breathing. Not this time, kid. ANGEL began on a very dark note in "City Of....", with our titular hero failing his first mission. It ended like a goddamned Leonard Cohen lyric:
You want it darker/we kill the flame
So where does that leave ANGEL, twenty years after it went off the air? What is its legacy, and is it still relevant?
I have occasionally stated that living in the shadow of BUFFY did not stunt ANGEL's growth, and this is true: at its best it was as good as its progenitor, with some episodes ("The Prodigal", "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?", " "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", "Tomorrow", "The Girl In Question") rising to truly dizzying heights of brilliance, pathos, tragedy, humor, or at least palm-tingling suspense. Indeed, the second season of the show is almost cruel in the way it increases the stakes in every episode, deftly moving from present to past as it at first sketches and then paints, in blood, the long history of Angel's relationship with Darla (Julie Benz), the beautiful, sadistic vampire who sired him centuries before. On the other hand, there is no question that the show struggled at times, and became increasingly dense and unapproachable to viewers tuning in for the first time: the fourth season is ultimately a mess, the villain was a bust, Charisma Carpenter's unplanned real-life pregnancy forced the writers to scribble in yet another supernatural baby story (the third of the show's five year run), and ultimately led to her departure after an ugly fight with producers -- the consequences of which came back to haunt Whedon many years later. It is for certain that ANGEL produced nothing like the cultural resonance of BUFFY, which not only changed the way most films and television shows are written, but also gave birth to a whole slew of imitations. ANGEL certainly did nothing of the sort. Its brooding tone and tendency to fall into moral ambiguity are common nowadays, but don't find their roots here.
This is not to say, however, that the show lacks a legacy. If BUFFY was the perfect metaphor for high school and, to some extent in its fourth season, college, ANGEL is an equally perfect metaphor for the terrible struggles people undergo in Los Angeles trying to live their dreams or find their purpose while simultaneously trying to hold onto basic values, or simply survive. BUFFY always struck me as a deeply personal show, told from the outcast's perspective: Buffy and her friends Willow and Xander, and even their stuffy patriarch Giles, are all essentially outsiders looking in, not only at normal life, but at acceptance: loneliness and rejection, both social and that brought about by duty, are recurring themes for all of them. ANGEL goes even further into this territory, as it is clearly an analogy and an allegory both. Whedon and Greenwalt are pointing at the city in which they live, the industry in which they work, the metaphorically bloodsucking lawyers and studio suits they have to deal with, and offering a kind of primal scream of existential anguish, broken up by outbursts of hysterical laughter at the absurdity of it all. Hollywood is, after all, a place where dreams go to die, and ironically, the ones that die the hardest are often the ones which come true. Every character in ANGEL -- Cordelia, Doyle, Gunn, Wesley, Spike, Fred, Harmony, Lindsey, Kate, Holtz, Lila, Darla, Drusilla, Connor, Holland, and Angel himself -- are all looking for something, questing for something, desirious of something, and nearly all of them get it. How they "get it" is another matter entirely.
If the age we live in has a central theme, it is probably cynicism, the quality of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. ANGEL is not a cynical show. It holds price and value in equal esteem, and sometimes it has to be reminded, painfully, of the former. Its hero is a vampire, but the series has a beating heart. Running from 1999 - 2004, it reflects the deeper angst of a transitional age: night was falling on the prosperous, happy-go-lucky 90s, and while nobody could see the shape of the post 9/11 future, it looked decidedly more frightening than the immediate past. Something had gone wrong with the rosy outcome we were promised and expected. Tribulations had begun, apocalypse was coming, and we would be in need of champions. But the champions would not be our father's champions: they would reflect the spirit of this new era. They would be dark, they would be brooding, they would crack jokes at inappropriate times, they would occasionally flee from their responsibilities, and often fight very dirtily indeed. They would fight this fight because it needed fighting, because it was the right thing to do, but they did not expect to win, and they did not expect to survive.
On that score alone, I would say ANGEL is more relevant than ever. Like Wolfram & Hart, it will go on...no matter what.
August 17, 2023
AS I PLEASE XVII: INCHWORM EDITION
Today I reflect on a whole series of random nonsense, thus alleviating my overcrowded brain of some of its freight of thoughts, observations, woes and worries. You know the drill.
* On the way home from a hike in the woods, I discovered an inchworm on my hand. I was determined to find it a home but damn was that little guy impatient. He was crawling every which way trying to find a plant, even rearing up to look for one. At long last I arrived home, and gave him over to the potted plants by Market. He was initially unimpressed but eventually found a leaf which met his minimum standards. What a fussy little beast. Anyone else would have smashed him or thrown him out the window: I went to great lengths and some discomfort to find him a home. I suppose I am a terrible, disgusting hypocrite. I wash beef blood off counter, cook bone broth, stock the fridge with chicken and pork. All remnants of living things with at least as much a right as I have to be here, maybe more. Simply by being a carnivore I feed a system which condemns them to pain, fear, misery and death. I hate that they suffer simply so I can live. But I won't stop eating them, and assuage my conscience with small acts of mercy. Today, for example, I found a plant out back of my building, abandoned by someone who I suppose had moved out, and dying of thirst: I brought it a full glass of water. I'll bring it another tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I'll even adopt it, though I must first determine the species, because my cat likes to eat plants and if this one is toxic to felines it's a no go.
* Right there my hypocrisy is exposed again. I have had Spike the Cat for 17 years. He has received far more love, care, and attention than most human beings ever will, and the expense involved in feeding him, providing him with clean litter, shots, flea treatments, and occasional medical care must add up to tens of thousands of dollars at least. If someone tried to harm him, someone would quickly shed this vale of tears for the next plane of existence. I am certain Spike has a soul, more certain than I have one, actually. Yet does a cow have less feelings than a cat? Does a pig? I would never harm a duck, but I have often eaten duck in restaurants. It's curious, how we call ourselves "animal lovers" because we care for those few animals we don't actually want to eat, while ignoring the suffering of the rest.
* Thinking of the thirsty plant makes me remember something that happened many years ago in Los Angeles when I was temping for a dreadful company in Woodland Hills called Great American Group. I shared an office with a woman named Karen who was easygoing enough when it came to my work, but also incredibly particular about, well, everything else. One day I noticed a dying plant on one of the vacant desks in our room. I tested the soil and it was powder-dry: the poor thing hadn't been watered in weeks. I told Karen I was going to water it, and she instructed me not to bother. "We'll get bugs," she insisted. I then offered to take it into the hallway, where a large number of ferns were located and which were watered regularly by the cleaning staff. She refused this, stating "It's not your plant, you can't move it." When I asked whose it was, she said, "Some woman who doesn't work here anymore." I saw at this point she simply wanted the plant to die, or was so cold-hearted she could not be troubled to melt the occasional ice cube from her 32 ounce soda into its potting soil. Not on my watch. I lingered in the office after it closed, slipped the plant into the hallway, watered it, and then tucked it between some ferns to ensure it would recieve regularly H20. Karen never noticed. And I never forgot how a person I thought rather decent had no compunction about watching a living thing die of thirst out of sheer laziness. (Karen, who was morbidly obese and lived off soda and hot pockets, couldn't go two hours without food.)
* Speaking of food, I am now down 12 lbs after sixty-one days on my new regimen. One of the things I have learned, or rather re-learned, is how little food even an active man needs in a day versus how much we think we need. Prior to tracking my water intake, calories, macros, etc. I would estimate that I was eating at least 3,000 calories a day, probably closer to 4,000 when I was drinking beer, and was not always satisfied even with this. I now eat 2,100 or less (adjusted upwards for exercise), am more active than ever, and am only occasionally hungry, because I eat less carbs, which digest quickly, and more protien and fat, which leave me feeling full. Obesity is a huge problem in this country, but the individual is somewhat less responsible than I would have insisted just a year or two ago: the stuff we see in stores, especially convenience stores, is basically nothing but fat, salt, and bad carbs, and is heavily processed and treated with chemicals in the bargain. Why, the other day I saw a pile of half-size Kind bars on a counter. I'm not talking the full-sized ones, which are barely a snack as it is: these were half the normal size, basically stuff you could pop like candy. Each had 90 calories. I could eat an entire box of blueberries for about 120. Hell, I could eat a large grilled pork chop for 118. Things we barely think would have any calories at all are insanely rich in them. A single tablespoon of my favorite salad dressing has 100 calories, and its all fat. Who the hell puts one tablespoon of dressing on anything?
* I was once told by a boxing coach, "A boxing ring is one of the most honest places in the world. If you've done the work, it will show. If you haven't, that will show, too." It's the same with our bodies. We cannot control our genetics, whether we go gray or bald, develop certain health issues, etc., but we have a huge influence over our flexibility, strength, weight, energy level, and so on. A few months ago I ran into a man with gray hair, a craggy, double-chinned face, a medicine ball gut, and bad posture. I figured him for his late fifties, possibly sixty, but he told me he'd been born in 1971, which means he was no more than 52 years old, i.e. one year less than I, who is usually mistaken for 5 - 7 years younger than I am. Now, some of this is luck-of-the-draw genetics, but a lot of it is simply the consequences of bad choices. He smoked, he ate garbage, he drank soda and beer in quantity, and he didn't exercise. Sooner or later that kind of lifestyle catches up to you. God knows life is only worth living if you enjoy all it has to offer, and that includes cheeseburgers, brew and chocolate cake: but if you put in the same work and care on your body you do with your car, sound system, job, etc. you are bound to reap some dividends, and the older you get, the more dividends you will reap. My mum is 84 and going extremely strong, and not just because of great heredity: she walks every day, swims all summer, does yoga, reads, tackles Sudoku, teaches English to Chinese-speakers and Spanish to English-speakers. Self-care is an investment.
* That probably sounds like preaching and/or boasting on my part, so let me attack myself in various ways for your entertainment. First, I'm only on my seventh book of the year, The Rise and Fall of Stalin by Robert Payne. It's a good book, but a very thick one, and depressing, because Stalin. I promised myself I'd beat the Goodreads Challenge this year and set very modest goals, but so far I am behind schedule as I have been every year for the past, oh, four or so. If I fail again I don't know what I'll do. I can't set the bar much lower than the twelve or so books I signed up to read.
* I am further violating one of my own sacred rules by going back and forth between Cold Day, Cruel World, the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, and a black-comic WW2 novella which is going to be entitled either Blitz Baby or Capricorn Burning. Dividing creative energy is seldom a good idea and usually delays the outcome of both projects, but I can't seem to help myself. I'm alwasy preaching about discipline, so this is pretty pathetic. But I can't seem to stop myself. Like the inchworm, I am always looking for a better perch.
* On the way home from a hike in the woods, I discovered an inchworm on my hand. I was determined to find it a home but damn was that little guy impatient. He was crawling every which way trying to find a plant, even rearing up to look for one. At long last I arrived home, and gave him over to the potted plants by Market. He was initially unimpressed but eventually found a leaf which met his minimum standards. What a fussy little beast. Anyone else would have smashed him or thrown him out the window: I went to great lengths and some discomfort to find him a home. I suppose I am a terrible, disgusting hypocrite. I wash beef blood off counter, cook bone broth, stock the fridge with chicken and pork. All remnants of living things with at least as much a right as I have to be here, maybe more. Simply by being a carnivore I feed a system which condemns them to pain, fear, misery and death. I hate that they suffer simply so I can live. But I won't stop eating them, and assuage my conscience with small acts of mercy. Today, for example, I found a plant out back of my building, abandoned by someone who I suppose had moved out, and dying of thirst: I brought it a full glass of water. I'll bring it another tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I'll even adopt it, though I must first determine the species, because my cat likes to eat plants and if this one is toxic to felines it's a no go.
* Right there my hypocrisy is exposed again. I have had Spike the Cat for 17 years. He has received far more love, care, and attention than most human beings ever will, and the expense involved in feeding him, providing him with clean litter, shots, flea treatments, and occasional medical care must add up to tens of thousands of dollars at least. If someone tried to harm him, someone would quickly shed this vale of tears for the next plane of existence. I am certain Spike has a soul, more certain than I have one, actually. Yet does a cow have less feelings than a cat? Does a pig? I would never harm a duck, but I have often eaten duck in restaurants. It's curious, how we call ourselves "animal lovers" because we care for those few animals we don't actually want to eat, while ignoring the suffering of the rest.
* Thinking of the thirsty plant makes me remember something that happened many years ago in Los Angeles when I was temping for a dreadful company in Woodland Hills called Great American Group. I shared an office with a woman named Karen who was easygoing enough when it came to my work, but also incredibly particular about, well, everything else. One day I noticed a dying plant on one of the vacant desks in our room. I tested the soil and it was powder-dry: the poor thing hadn't been watered in weeks. I told Karen I was going to water it, and she instructed me not to bother. "We'll get bugs," she insisted. I then offered to take it into the hallway, where a large number of ferns were located and which were watered regularly by the cleaning staff. She refused this, stating "It's not your plant, you can't move it." When I asked whose it was, she said, "Some woman who doesn't work here anymore." I saw at this point she simply wanted the plant to die, or was so cold-hearted she could not be troubled to melt the occasional ice cube from her 32 ounce soda into its potting soil. Not on my watch. I lingered in the office after it closed, slipped the plant into the hallway, watered it, and then tucked it between some ferns to ensure it would recieve regularly H20. Karen never noticed. And I never forgot how a person I thought rather decent had no compunction about watching a living thing die of thirst out of sheer laziness. (Karen, who was morbidly obese and lived off soda and hot pockets, couldn't go two hours without food.)
* Speaking of food, I am now down 12 lbs after sixty-one days on my new regimen. One of the things I have learned, or rather re-learned, is how little food even an active man needs in a day versus how much we think we need. Prior to tracking my water intake, calories, macros, etc. I would estimate that I was eating at least 3,000 calories a day, probably closer to 4,000 when I was drinking beer, and was not always satisfied even with this. I now eat 2,100 or less (adjusted upwards for exercise), am more active than ever, and am only occasionally hungry, because I eat less carbs, which digest quickly, and more protien and fat, which leave me feeling full. Obesity is a huge problem in this country, but the individual is somewhat less responsible than I would have insisted just a year or two ago: the stuff we see in stores, especially convenience stores, is basically nothing but fat, salt, and bad carbs, and is heavily processed and treated with chemicals in the bargain. Why, the other day I saw a pile of half-size Kind bars on a counter. I'm not talking the full-sized ones, which are barely a snack as it is: these were half the normal size, basically stuff you could pop like candy. Each had 90 calories. I could eat an entire box of blueberries for about 120. Hell, I could eat a large grilled pork chop for 118. Things we barely think would have any calories at all are insanely rich in them. A single tablespoon of my favorite salad dressing has 100 calories, and its all fat. Who the hell puts one tablespoon of dressing on anything?
* I was once told by a boxing coach, "A boxing ring is one of the most honest places in the world. If you've done the work, it will show. If you haven't, that will show, too." It's the same with our bodies. We cannot control our genetics, whether we go gray or bald, develop certain health issues, etc., but we have a huge influence over our flexibility, strength, weight, energy level, and so on. A few months ago I ran into a man with gray hair, a craggy, double-chinned face, a medicine ball gut, and bad posture. I figured him for his late fifties, possibly sixty, but he told me he'd been born in 1971, which means he was no more than 52 years old, i.e. one year less than I, who is usually mistaken for 5 - 7 years younger than I am. Now, some of this is luck-of-the-draw genetics, but a lot of it is simply the consequences of bad choices. He smoked, he ate garbage, he drank soda and beer in quantity, and he didn't exercise. Sooner or later that kind of lifestyle catches up to you. God knows life is only worth living if you enjoy all it has to offer, and that includes cheeseburgers, brew and chocolate cake: but if you put in the same work and care on your body you do with your car, sound system, job, etc. you are bound to reap some dividends, and the older you get, the more dividends you will reap. My mum is 84 and going extremely strong, and not just because of great heredity: she walks every day, swims all summer, does yoga, reads, tackles Sudoku, teaches English to Chinese-speakers and Spanish to English-speakers. Self-care is an investment.
* That probably sounds like preaching and/or boasting on my part, so let me attack myself in various ways for your entertainment. First, I'm only on my seventh book of the year, The Rise and Fall of Stalin by Robert Payne. It's a good book, but a very thick one, and depressing, because Stalin. I promised myself I'd beat the Goodreads Challenge this year and set very modest goals, but so far I am behind schedule as I have been every year for the past, oh, four or so. If I fail again I don't know what I'll do. I can't set the bar much lower than the twelve or so books I signed up to read.
* I am further violating one of my own sacred rules by going back and forth between Cold Day, Cruel World, the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, and a black-comic WW2 novella which is going to be entitled either Blitz Baby or Capricorn Burning. Dividing creative energy is seldom a good idea and usually delays the outcome of both projects, but I can't seem to help myself. I'm alwasy preaching about discipline, so this is pretty pathetic. But I can't seem to stop myself. Like the inchworm, I am always looking for a better perch.
August 8, 2023
NARCISSISM: MY STORY
Today is my birthday, and I was going to use that as an excuse to once again put off my post about narcisissts and my experiences with them. It's not a fun topic to discuss, though it is a very important one given the steady rise of this particularly odious personality failing. However, I'm tired of making excuses in this department, so here we go. I'm gonna keep this short, simple, and to the point.
Like many people I thought for many years that narcissism simply meant vanity, coupled with the shallowness and self-centeredness that vanity usually brings. Had I known what narcissists really were, and the damage they were capable of doing, I'd have spared myself a great deal of suffering and pain.
Narcissism is classified as a "personality disorder" rather than a disease. It is believed to be created by environment: there is no gene for narcissism and it is not hereditary. Professionals say it is often the result of a particular type of parenting that teaches children to be entitled, to lack empathy, to crave attention and adulation, and to get what they want no matter what the consequences to others. I believe this to be true, but I also believe -- anecdotally but totally -- that it can develop in children who are excessively bullied by parents or peers (or both). As evidence of this I am going to cite just two examples from my own experience. I could use more, but I believe these two will be sufficient. And all I can bring myself to deal with today.
I met "Pamela" in my early 20s. She was beautiful, a sharp dresser, a good student, former queen bee of her sorority, and yet extremely grounded when it came to the practical details of life, hailing from a working class background. We dated, moved in together, and very nearly got engaged. The first six months of our relationship were incandescent. Even then, however, I noticed a few behavioral traits I'd never encountered before, traits that became steadily more prominent over the next two years. She sometimes spoke casually of an incdent in which she and her friends had bullied another girl so badly in high school over some minor incident that the girl had to transfer, and she related the story with faint amusement. She did not apologize for anything, ever, and when she made mistakes, immediately became angry and looked for someone or something to blame. She occasionally fell into terrible moods, especially when under pressure, and would treat me viciously during these periods: when they lifted there was never any remorse or even acknowledgment that they had occurred. She was relentless with emotional button-pushing, and would do so for hours at a time without letup: her stamina for this sort of bullying was almost without limit. And she escalated even the most minor disagreements into ugly arguments, sometimes refusing to speak to me for days over things so trivial I could barely remember what they were when the smoke cleared.
The latter half of our relationship saw this behavior increase, with additions. She was openly obsessed about appearances and how our relationship looked to others while seeming to care very little about its actual state. I began to notice that she remembered things to suit her mood, and frequently employed negation during arguments: she would deny I had done this or that thing for her, knowing that it was a lie and knowing that I knew, and doing it anyway and insisting it was true. A cycle developed whereby we would disagree over something inconsequential, an argument would ensue, it would escalate to a day or even week-ruining level, and then, simply for the sake of peace, I would apologize, and everything would go back to normal and sometimes even to the honeymoon phase. These phases were wonderful and always convinced me that our relationship was not doomed but merely undergoing all the usual frictions that occur when two people integrate their lives together. But they never lasted. And as time went on, they grew shorter.
I tried every tactic I could think of to bring our relationship to a healthier plane, including quiet, heart-to-heart talks in which I pleaded with her to get help so we could have ordinary, tension-relieving tiffs like normal couples and not turn every disagreement about who took out the garbage last into the third world war. During these talks I admitted every fault of my own I could think of (and there were many, of course) just to make sure she didn't feel attacked, and it always worked, or seemed to. She was quite adult and reasonable at these times, but they never had a sequel. They never achieved anything or had any lasting impact at all. We would once again have a brief honeymoon phase and then the same old cycles would begin once more. I was to experience this shallowness of affect, also a psychopathic trait, later, with other narcissists.
By now I was showing definite signs of psychological damage. I had so much repressed rage from the countless fake apologies I'd been forced to make over the previous years that on two occasions I exploded completely, shouting at the top of my lungs in frustrated rage like an absolute madman. I had undergone some pretty terrible bullying between the ages of 11 - 13 or so, and as a result had an incredible sensitivity toward perceived bullying as an adult: I eventually realized that I had "married" a bully as well. A woman with almost zero empathy who sometimes displayed discernible cruelty. A woman who lied and distorted reality to suit moods and her needs. A woman who was abusive in a nonphysical way but could not stand even slight criticism in return. Who did not know how to argue like an adult. Who seemed to genuinely not know the difference between truth and lies. Who had more regard for the opinions of strangers than the well being of the man she lived with, shared a bed with, said she loved. And I do think that she loved me in her way. But sadly, the emphasis was "her way" and not love.
Our breakup was every bit as bad as you would expect. She initiated it because I lacked the courage, all of mine having been systematically destroyed over the previous four years. And yet once she started the process, she could not seem to go through with it and hopes of reconciliation were constantly dangled before me. (Years later, I heard she blamed this on me, too, saying, paradoxically, if only I'd moved out sooner we might have salvaged everything.) Curiously enough, at one point, after a great deal of suffering that dragged on for months, we made a reasonable peace. I moved out. We stayed in touch to discuss practical matters and even just to say hello. And then, for no reason I could discern, she turned vicious once again over the matter of some shared property: a computer I believe. I knew she didn't give a damn about it: she could barely type. It was just a pretext to fight, to blow the already charred bridge to bits. I didn't know it at the time, but this apocalyptic sort of behavior, burning everything to the ground and salting the earth after, is characteristic of narcissists generally, both in moments of absolute victory and absolute defeat. When they win, they rub it in endlessly, so as to cause the loser maximum pain and humilation. When they lose, they wreck everything in sight, like a child knocking over a game board. They cannot endure failure.
It's worth noting that "Pamela" did not grow up in a Trumpian environment of power, wealth, and privilege. Quite the contrary. She was, however, subjected to a great deal of bullying from her father, some of which I witnessed firsthand when visiting her home. And I believe the traits which were inflicted upon me during our relationship were a direct result of this bullying: those attacked unjustly can develop a sort of violent, emotionally allergic reaction to criticism, even if it is mild and delivered diplomatically and with love, seeing it simply as a form of attack. They can have serious issues with anger, especially the expression of anger in appropriate, healthy ways. They often compensate for being made to feel worthless, ugly, stupid, etc. by adopting self-aggrandizing behaviors such as never being wrong, and by lying about the past when it is too embarrassing or painful to remember: also by being obsessed with appearances and the opinions of others, including people they scarcely know. They manipulate others out of percieved self-protection, and most sadly, they often imitate the behaviors of those who tormented them, most notably bullying others, especially those closest to them.
Many years after "Pamela" had mercifully left my life, I was living in Los Angeles and working in the make-up effects industry in various flunky capacities. A friend of a friend hired me to work in the video games industry on the side, and this side gig rapidly began to consume more and more of my time. It was there, working for a very successful trailer house, that I encountered "Mr. Jayne," who held the august title of "director" although his job, boiled down to its essence, was to pull footage of free or scripted gameplay and then edit it into video game trailers. Unlike "Pamela," "Mr. Jayne" did not make a favorable impression. Indeed, the one really redeeming quality he possessed was that his cards were more or less on the table from the start: he was cold, rude, self-absorbed, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, malignant, treacherous, and as abusive as he could get away with. The test for classic narcissism is in fact as follows:
Sense of self-importance
Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success
Entitled
Can only be around people who are important or special
Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain
Arrogant
Lack empathy
Must be admired
Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them
Of the nine points of this "SPECIALME" scale, Mr. Jayne hit on eight. He did not need to be around people who were important or special. Quite the contrary. He hated any sign that colleagues or underlings had any personality or ability at all. He sought total subservience, total obedience. He wanted the crew to do exactly as they were told, keep silent unless asking or answering a question, eat when he was hungry, and go home when he himself was tired. I have worked on sets, on locations, in make up effect studios, and in seven different trailer houses, and I never met anyone with less concern for his crew's physical needs -- food, rest, bathroom breaks, comfortable chairs, reasonable temperatures. On a number of occasions he was reprimanded by his boss for suggesting he be allowed "to fire someone at random the first day of a shoot, so the rest would fall into line," but the reprimands had no effect and he never stopped making suggestions of that type.
Of course, Mr. Jayne's desires and reality did not generally correspond. His co-workers hated him and did him as much dirt as they could, though in the habit of narcissists, he seemed to be better at kicking it. He even went into his colleagues offices at night to secretly look at their work, which he would then criticize in private e-mails to the bosses, suggesting they be fired or demoted or have work taken away from them so he could work more. And indeed, he probably put in 100 hours a week, year in and year out, mainly because by the time he was at double overtime, he was making something like $140/hr.
His crew, meanwhile, was an uncontrollable, loud, vulgar, boisterous, undisciplined, semi-anarchic mob who pushed back and sometimes shouted back when he became intolerable. I myself had to be restrained from hitting him at least once, and after some years I was blacklisted by him in punishment, a blacklist which held until he himself was fired, whereupon I returned to spit on his figurative grave. Working with him for those years, however, was very nearly unendurable. Jayne, a glorified footage-puller, seriously believed himself a director on par with Scorsese or Spielberg. He must have known how loathed he was, and there were times I actually pitied him because his suffering in this regard was visible and even sad: but his behavior never improved. He was forever driving us, exploiting us, denying us credit, and treating us as if we were service robots rather than human beings. At one point he created his own team of silent, spineless minions to work on his projects: these guys were the absolute pick of the litterbox, without personality or fire or even intelligence, qualified only in that they were utterly subsurvient. To his dismay, however, he discovered what many a narcissist before him has discovered, if not necessarily acted upon: that surrounding himself with mediocrity only hindered his insatiable ambitions. He had to weigh his fear of being outshined or pushed back upon with his need to have people around him who could actually do their jobs. It must have cost him some sleepless nights, trying to grapple with this self-created problem. I suppose narcissism, in its way, is its own form of purgatory: the way out is clear, but they can't or won't take it.
Jayne, like all bad pennies, turned up at another studio with a long list of demands in one hand and a blacklist in the other, and Hollywood, which rewards behaviors punished almost everywhere else in the Western world, including prison, caved in to him. I mercifully never encountered the man again, in large part because I was on that blacklist, but I heard that he brought a level of toxcicity to his new employer no one there had ever experienced before. As with the previous company, he managed to destroy the morale of everyone he worked with, without any real consequences to himself. And in fact, whenever his name comes up among old co-workers of mine, "toxic" and "toxicity" are two of the words which are unfailingly employed: "radioactive waste" was my favorite, however, because it was accurate.
Working with "Jayne" was a nuisance and often a nightmare. I was spared deeper trauma because it was a work situation and as a freelancer in a very loose, undisciplined environment, I was able to give him enough shit to visibly hurt or anger him on many occasions and thus keep my self-respect, which I had once lost for a time thanks to "Pamela." But my victories over him were always fleeting and without lasting affect. He did not learn lessons from failure. He did not draw conclusions from defeat. He simply kept on keeping on. Even his superiors usually crumpled before him. The sheer tenacity of narcissists, the stamina they have for argument and vendetta, is well beyond that of the ordinary person. Because they lack shame, because they are self-obsessed, because they equate accepting even a miniscule criticsm as a reflection on their worth as a person, because they see being hated and raged against as a form of attention not much less valuable than being adored or loved, and because they are emotionally retarded and primitive, they can persist in their game of checkers long after you have resigned your game of chess. In a sense, the only way to truly win an argument with a narcissist is to get in the last word and then knock them unconscious, something I often contemplated in "Jayne's" presence. It would have been enormously pleasurable to do so. But it would not have changed anything. Narcissists can perhaps help themselves if they are not too far gone to do so, but it requires an understanding that they are defective human being, and that they require outside help, and these are two things most of them will never do.
In the age we live in, where people with seriously defective personality traits have normalized those traits through the internet, more people than ever are suffering from the trauma narcissists inflict. Everyone reading this has encountered their share, and some have been seriously harmed by the encounters. I submit this mainly because I have only very recently come to an understanding of what narcissism is, and how it effected and affected me: if I'd been able to spot the red flags, I might have spared myself some serious pain. If this can help even one person escape a bad situation before it really gets hold of them, it was worth the discomfort of breaking open the box that reads "Memories: Do Not Open."
Like many people I thought for many years that narcissism simply meant vanity, coupled with the shallowness and self-centeredness that vanity usually brings. Had I known what narcissists really were, and the damage they were capable of doing, I'd have spared myself a great deal of suffering and pain.
Narcissism is classified as a "personality disorder" rather than a disease. It is believed to be created by environment: there is no gene for narcissism and it is not hereditary. Professionals say it is often the result of a particular type of parenting that teaches children to be entitled, to lack empathy, to crave attention and adulation, and to get what they want no matter what the consequences to others. I believe this to be true, but I also believe -- anecdotally but totally -- that it can develop in children who are excessively bullied by parents or peers (or both). As evidence of this I am going to cite just two examples from my own experience. I could use more, but I believe these two will be sufficient. And all I can bring myself to deal with today.
I met "Pamela" in my early 20s. She was beautiful, a sharp dresser, a good student, former queen bee of her sorority, and yet extremely grounded when it came to the practical details of life, hailing from a working class background. We dated, moved in together, and very nearly got engaged. The first six months of our relationship were incandescent. Even then, however, I noticed a few behavioral traits I'd never encountered before, traits that became steadily more prominent over the next two years. She sometimes spoke casually of an incdent in which she and her friends had bullied another girl so badly in high school over some minor incident that the girl had to transfer, and she related the story with faint amusement. She did not apologize for anything, ever, and when she made mistakes, immediately became angry and looked for someone or something to blame. She occasionally fell into terrible moods, especially when under pressure, and would treat me viciously during these periods: when they lifted there was never any remorse or even acknowledgment that they had occurred. She was relentless with emotional button-pushing, and would do so for hours at a time without letup: her stamina for this sort of bullying was almost without limit. And she escalated even the most minor disagreements into ugly arguments, sometimes refusing to speak to me for days over things so trivial I could barely remember what they were when the smoke cleared.
The latter half of our relationship saw this behavior increase, with additions. She was openly obsessed about appearances and how our relationship looked to others while seeming to care very little about its actual state. I began to notice that she remembered things to suit her mood, and frequently employed negation during arguments: she would deny I had done this or that thing for her, knowing that it was a lie and knowing that I knew, and doing it anyway and insisting it was true. A cycle developed whereby we would disagree over something inconsequential, an argument would ensue, it would escalate to a day or even week-ruining level, and then, simply for the sake of peace, I would apologize, and everything would go back to normal and sometimes even to the honeymoon phase. These phases were wonderful and always convinced me that our relationship was not doomed but merely undergoing all the usual frictions that occur when two people integrate their lives together. But they never lasted. And as time went on, they grew shorter.
I tried every tactic I could think of to bring our relationship to a healthier plane, including quiet, heart-to-heart talks in which I pleaded with her to get help so we could have ordinary, tension-relieving tiffs like normal couples and not turn every disagreement about who took out the garbage last into the third world war. During these talks I admitted every fault of my own I could think of (and there were many, of course) just to make sure she didn't feel attacked, and it always worked, or seemed to. She was quite adult and reasonable at these times, but they never had a sequel. They never achieved anything or had any lasting impact at all. We would once again have a brief honeymoon phase and then the same old cycles would begin once more. I was to experience this shallowness of affect, also a psychopathic trait, later, with other narcissists.
By now I was showing definite signs of psychological damage. I had so much repressed rage from the countless fake apologies I'd been forced to make over the previous years that on two occasions I exploded completely, shouting at the top of my lungs in frustrated rage like an absolute madman. I had undergone some pretty terrible bullying between the ages of 11 - 13 or so, and as a result had an incredible sensitivity toward perceived bullying as an adult: I eventually realized that I had "married" a bully as well. A woman with almost zero empathy who sometimes displayed discernible cruelty. A woman who lied and distorted reality to suit moods and her needs. A woman who was abusive in a nonphysical way but could not stand even slight criticism in return. Who did not know how to argue like an adult. Who seemed to genuinely not know the difference between truth and lies. Who had more regard for the opinions of strangers than the well being of the man she lived with, shared a bed with, said she loved. And I do think that she loved me in her way. But sadly, the emphasis was "her way" and not love.
Our breakup was every bit as bad as you would expect. She initiated it because I lacked the courage, all of mine having been systematically destroyed over the previous four years. And yet once she started the process, she could not seem to go through with it and hopes of reconciliation were constantly dangled before me. (Years later, I heard she blamed this on me, too, saying, paradoxically, if only I'd moved out sooner we might have salvaged everything.) Curiously enough, at one point, after a great deal of suffering that dragged on for months, we made a reasonable peace. I moved out. We stayed in touch to discuss practical matters and even just to say hello. And then, for no reason I could discern, she turned vicious once again over the matter of some shared property: a computer I believe. I knew she didn't give a damn about it: she could barely type. It was just a pretext to fight, to blow the already charred bridge to bits. I didn't know it at the time, but this apocalyptic sort of behavior, burning everything to the ground and salting the earth after, is characteristic of narcissists generally, both in moments of absolute victory and absolute defeat. When they win, they rub it in endlessly, so as to cause the loser maximum pain and humilation. When they lose, they wreck everything in sight, like a child knocking over a game board. They cannot endure failure.
It's worth noting that "Pamela" did not grow up in a Trumpian environment of power, wealth, and privilege. Quite the contrary. She was, however, subjected to a great deal of bullying from her father, some of which I witnessed firsthand when visiting her home. And I believe the traits which were inflicted upon me during our relationship were a direct result of this bullying: those attacked unjustly can develop a sort of violent, emotionally allergic reaction to criticism, even if it is mild and delivered diplomatically and with love, seeing it simply as a form of attack. They can have serious issues with anger, especially the expression of anger in appropriate, healthy ways. They often compensate for being made to feel worthless, ugly, stupid, etc. by adopting self-aggrandizing behaviors such as never being wrong, and by lying about the past when it is too embarrassing or painful to remember: also by being obsessed with appearances and the opinions of others, including people they scarcely know. They manipulate others out of percieved self-protection, and most sadly, they often imitate the behaviors of those who tormented them, most notably bullying others, especially those closest to them.
Many years after "Pamela" had mercifully left my life, I was living in Los Angeles and working in the make-up effects industry in various flunky capacities. A friend of a friend hired me to work in the video games industry on the side, and this side gig rapidly began to consume more and more of my time. It was there, working for a very successful trailer house, that I encountered "Mr. Jayne," who held the august title of "director" although his job, boiled down to its essence, was to pull footage of free or scripted gameplay and then edit it into video game trailers. Unlike "Pamela," "Mr. Jayne" did not make a favorable impression. Indeed, the one really redeeming quality he possessed was that his cards were more or less on the table from the start: he was cold, rude, self-absorbed, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, malignant, treacherous, and as abusive as he could get away with. The test for classic narcissism is in fact as follows:
Sense of self-importance
Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success
Entitled
Can only be around people who are important or special
Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain
Arrogant
Lack empathy
Must be admired
Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them
Of the nine points of this "SPECIALME" scale, Mr. Jayne hit on eight. He did not need to be around people who were important or special. Quite the contrary. He hated any sign that colleagues or underlings had any personality or ability at all. He sought total subservience, total obedience. He wanted the crew to do exactly as they were told, keep silent unless asking or answering a question, eat when he was hungry, and go home when he himself was tired. I have worked on sets, on locations, in make up effect studios, and in seven different trailer houses, and I never met anyone with less concern for his crew's physical needs -- food, rest, bathroom breaks, comfortable chairs, reasonable temperatures. On a number of occasions he was reprimanded by his boss for suggesting he be allowed "to fire someone at random the first day of a shoot, so the rest would fall into line," but the reprimands had no effect and he never stopped making suggestions of that type.
Of course, Mr. Jayne's desires and reality did not generally correspond. His co-workers hated him and did him as much dirt as they could, though in the habit of narcissists, he seemed to be better at kicking it. He even went into his colleagues offices at night to secretly look at their work, which he would then criticize in private e-mails to the bosses, suggesting they be fired or demoted or have work taken away from them so he could work more. And indeed, he probably put in 100 hours a week, year in and year out, mainly because by the time he was at double overtime, he was making something like $140/hr.
His crew, meanwhile, was an uncontrollable, loud, vulgar, boisterous, undisciplined, semi-anarchic mob who pushed back and sometimes shouted back when he became intolerable. I myself had to be restrained from hitting him at least once, and after some years I was blacklisted by him in punishment, a blacklist which held until he himself was fired, whereupon I returned to spit on his figurative grave. Working with him for those years, however, was very nearly unendurable. Jayne, a glorified footage-puller, seriously believed himself a director on par with Scorsese or Spielberg. He must have known how loathed he was, and there were times I actually pitied him because his suffering in this regard was visible and even sad: but his behavior never improved. He was forever driving us, exploiting us, denying us credit, and treating us as if we were service robots rather than human beings. At one point he created his own team of silent, spineless minions to work on his projects: these guys were the absolute pick of the litterbox, without personality or fire or even intelligence, qualified only in that they were utterly subsurvient. To his dismay, however, he discovered what many a narcissist before him has discovered, if not necessarily acted upon: that surrounding himself with mediocrity only hindered his insatiable ambitions. He had to weigh his fear of being outshined or pushed back upon with his need to have people around him who could actually do their jobs. It must have cost him some sleepless nights, trying to grapple with this self-created problem. I suppose narcissism, in its way, is its own form of purgatory: the way out is clear, but they can't or won't take it.
Jayne, like all bad pennies, turned up at another studio with a long list of demands in one hand and a blacklist in the other, and Hollywood, which rewards behaviors punished almost everywhere else in the Western world, including prison, caved in to him. I mercifully never encountered the man again, in large part because I was on that blacklist, but I heard that he brought a level of toxcicity to his new employer no one there had ever experienced before. As with the previous company, he managed to destroy the morale of everyone he worked with, without any real consequences to himself. And in fact, whenever his name comes up among old co-workers of mine, "toxic" and "toxicity" are two of the words which are unfailingly employed: "radioactive waste" was my favorite, however, because it was accurate.
Working with "Jayne" was a nuisance and often a nightmare. I was spared deeper trauma because it was a work situation and as a freelancer in a very loose, undisciplined environment, I was able to give him enough shit to visibly hurt or anger him on many occasions and thus keep my self-respect, which I had once lost for a time thanks to "Pamela." But my victories over him were always fleeting and without lasting affect. He did not learn lessons from failure. He did not draw conclusions from defeat. He simply kept on keeping on. Even his superiors usually crumpled before him. The sheer tenacity of narcissists, the stamina they have for argument and vendetta, is well beyond that of the ordinary person. Because they lack shame, because they are self-obsessed, because they equate accepting even a miniscule criticsm as a reflection on their worth as a person, because they see being hated and raged against as a form of attention not much less valuable than being adored or loved, and because they are emotionally retarded and primitive, they can persist in their game of checkers long after you have resigned your game of chess. In a sense, the only way to truly win an argument with a narcissist is to get in the last word and then knock them unconscious, something I often contemplated in "Jayne's" presence. It would have been enormously pleasurable to do so. But it would not have changed anything. Narcissists can perhaps help themselves if they are not too far gone to do so, but it requires an understanding that they are defective human being, and that they require outside help, and these are two things most of them will never do.
In the age we live in, where people with seriously defective personality traits have normalized those traits through the internet, more people than ever are suffering from the trauma narcissists inflict. Everyone reading this has encountered their share, and some have been seriously harmed by the encounters. I submit this mainly because I have only very recently come to an understanding of what narcissism is, and how it effected and affected me: if I'd been able to spot the red flags, I might have spared myself some serious pain. If this can help even one person escape a bad situation before it really gets hold of them, it was worth the discomfort of breaking open the box that reads "Memories: Do Not Open."
August 3, 2023
BAIT AND SWITCH BLOG: MY WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY (PART I)
Last night I promised to write a blog about my personal experiences with narcissism and what I had learned from them. However, the subject proved considerably more complex -- and painful -- to write about than I expected. It is going to take me some time to organize and set down my thoughts and feelings on the subject, so in the mean time allow me to bait-and-switch, and talk about my weight.
This is not quite as self-involved and pretentious -- dare I say narcissistic! -- as it sounds. The obesity rate in North America for whites hovers from 39.8% - 44.3% in the age range of 20 - 60. It does not improve much over 60, either, with 41.5% of older adults now classified as obese. For Latinos it is worse yet, and worst of all for blacks, at a hair below 50%. The CDC lists obesity as "the leading cause of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, and one of the leading causes of preventable, premature death." It also effects the quality of a person's life in every measureable way and many which are not measureable but not less important for being so.
I am, of course, a writer, and as such live a partially sedentary life, both by virtue of writing and by the fact my job, while not a desk job per se, does involve many hours of sitting at desks or in cars or courtrooms. I am also a person who has a long history of eating for the sake of eating, though I am also someone who takes great pleasure in food for its taste and the emotional effect eating good food produces. On top of this, I am combined-type ADHD and perhaps as a way of unconsciously self-medicating this, have a long and troubled history with drink, itself a gateway to unwanted weight gain.
As a small boy, I was highly active and perpetually outdoors. In addition to a bicycle addiction, I was on two swim teams and played many a season of MSI soccer. I ate garbage and drank too much Coke, but so does every American boy. Then, when puberty struck, things changed. I gained a lot of weight, lost interest in exercise -- in being outdoors, actually -- and became extremely lazy, my main pleasures being food, soda and television. I suppose I started to get porky around the age of ten, and by twelve was heavily overweight, though not actually fat because my growth spurt put me in the 95% percentile of height. This tubby, out-of-shape period lasted until the age of fifteen, when I was at Martha's Vineyard on a family vacation, spied a beautiful blonde twentysomething in a candy-striped bikini, and said to myself, quite literally, "If I ever want one of those, I'm going to have to lose weight."
My initial battle with fat was the first time in my life I began to exhibit adult characteristics. By "adult" I mean that having come to a conclusion, or an epiphany, about myself, I then came up with a plan to lose weight and executed it ruthlessly, undaunted by seemingly endless discouragements. This was 1987, after all, and there was no internet for me to do research on weight loss. Even I had been able to access the information available, I'm sure it would have been contradictory and full of errors, for the food industry still had an iron, claw-like grip on the public imagination, and things like "the four food groups" and "the food pyramid," all creations of the industry designed to get people to eat large quantities of things they didn't need, were taken as gospel. There also existed at that time this piece of nonsense known as the "well balanced diet," much advocated by doctors who could not define it at all, except to say you shouldn't eat too much or too little of any one food group. They left out the part where a lot of the things in said food groups were not only unhealthy in and of themselves, but terribly fattening. But hey, if you "balanced them well," you were golden. Thanks, doctors.
Despite my ignorance, which was appalling even by the standards of the day -- when I was twelve I believed fat loss was achieved by sweating -- my struggle to slim down was a complete if extremely slow and hard-fought success. Between the summer of 1987, when I made my pact with myself to become thin and thus desired by blonde bikini babes, and some point in late 1989 or so, I dropped from 184 lbs to a rain-thin 155 lbs. In practical terms, this meant that in the very early 90s, when I found some old but perfectly preserved jeans from 1985 or so in a closet, I was able to wear them quite comfortably: a college sophomore wearing jeans he'd stretched to the bursting point as a seventh-grader.
I achieved this loss through brute starvation. In high school I seldom ate anything, except perhaps an apple, a slice of bread, and some Tic Tacs, between seven in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon. (Yes, I was intermittently fasting decades before it became popular.) I would allow myself a single sandwich and a Coke when I got home, and then one more piece of bread, if needed, before dinner, when I ate what I wanted. But this "food window" was perhaps four or five hours at the maximum. The rest of the time, I starved.
Added to this starvation regimen was a lot of walking. My senior year of high school I refused to take the bus even though I had no car. I'd get dropped off in the morning, and walk home in the afternoon, a distance of three and a half miles. Oftimes it was horribly hot and humid, and I'd come home drenched in sweat as well as hungry, but I rather enjoyed the feeling of sweating after spending the ages 10 - 14 or so in a state of complete and utter inertia.
In college I was rail thin for two years, before incessant drinking and the usual collegiate diet of subs and pizza rendered me soft once again. This period of softness was the second half of a pattern which has repeated itself throughout my entire life. I'm thin, get fat, and then batter myself back to thin again using this or that diet or lifestyle change: calorie counting, ketogenics, Whole 30 diet, low-carb, high-protien, starvation, increased cardio, weight training, etc., etc. Each state holds for several years, only to be surrendered to the other as the sun yields to the moon and back again. The one qualifier was that, up until 2013 -- in other words, when I was forty -- I never had any great difficulty shedding the pounds using my own crude methods.
After forty everything changed, in that with the exception of six months on a hard-core ketogenic diet, during which I lost 11 lbs and kept it off six months until I quit the diet, I was unable to lose any weight or, if I lost it, to keep it off even for a few weeks. I kept applying my old, tried-and-true methods, and kept failing miserably. This went on for ten years, ten years in which I exercised far more than is the average for an American male, and ate a much healthier diet -- soda, for example, I had almost completely eliminated in 2000, and fast food not much later than that. I didn't keep junk food in the house, and curbed my sweet tooth with remarkable effectiveness. Yet when I turned fifty I got on the scale and saw I was 207.5 lbs. To put this in perspective: I'm 5'10" 1/2. The recommended weight for someone in my height range and age bracket is 149-183 lbs. And while my muscles are much denser than most men's and I therefore lean toward the heavier side of this scale, well, there's leaning, and there's falling over.
What has changed in the last few months is that I have finally adopted the mind-set of the alcoholic and applied it to my weight. I simply surrendered to the fact that I was powerless to lose weight myself in a post-40s state of being. Through my health insurance provider, I enlisted the aid of a "weight management specialist," i.e. a Nurse Practitioner, with whom I meet electronically once every few months. Truth be told, most (not all) of what she told me I already know by virtue of decades of experiments, successful and otherwise, but it would be selling her short to leave it at that. What she primarily offers is accountability and moral support, the import of which I will discuss shortly.
Now, because I know many people who read and write also grapple with their weight, I'd like to share what I have learned, re-learned, or just rededicated myself to doing. This will not be helpful to all, especially to vegetarians or vegans, but I offer it simply as the benefit of my own experience as a 50 (almost 51) year-old man who tries to be as active as possible but also sits on his ass much of the day -- like now, for example. Ready? Here we go.
1. Eat more protien. I try to eat, with every meal, a portion of animal protien about the size of my palm.
2. Drink more water. Like most people I do not drink nearly enough H20 and now make a point of drinking between 45 - 70 ounces a day.
3. Cut down the carbs. Notice I didn't say "eliminate." We need carbs to think -- literally. But you can get what you need from vegetables. Keep the grains -- rice, cereal, crusts, noodles, bread, pasta, etc. -- to strictly controlled minimums. (When you eat grains, even though they are fatless, your body responds by producing insulin, which converts the calories to fat.)
5. Get more sleep. Easier said than done? Not really, if you budget your time (see below). If I hit the rack by 1030, I wake up much, much better rested than if I wait just one additional half-hour. No mystery there. REM sleep tends to occur in the first and the last 30 minutes of your sleep cycle. That's where the real rest is achieved.
5. Budget your day. I'm an anarchic, Bohemian procrastinator by nature ("writer"), so planning ain't my strong suit. But I've found that by sharply dividing work, play, exercise, creartive time, etc. I can get a hell of a lot done in the same amount of hours as before, when I was achieving precisely jack and shit. I also know when to say "Fuck the schedule" and have some fun.
6. Track your food. There are many means by which to count calories, calculate macros, monitor water intake, and generally just keep track of what you are putting into your body. I personally use My Fitness Pal and link it to the dedicated step-counting app in my Android phone. It's a pain at first, but becomes reflexive and even addictive in a short time.
7. Invest in yourself. When I started my "lifestyle change," I bought a good electronic scale (Amazon, about $30) and also a medical scale ($127 on some medical website). I didn't like parting with the cash, but I was determined to prove to myself that I was serious about this change, and I wanted the right equipment to calibrate both my weight and my BMI and body fat percentage. Now I don't have to guess at my progress.
8. Live. Most attempts to lose weight fail because they are miserable and overly restrictive. When I was trying to slash pounds on my own, I allowed myself 1,750 calories a day, and was always "hangry" and sometimes weak and even faint. My N.P. started me on 2,100 calories, which is far more humane, and which I have not needed to adjust further downward. I still eat dark chocolate, whipped cream, some (homemade) fried food, drink a little beer and whiskey, etc., etc. I just don't go crazy with this stuff, and if necessary I'll skip one of the three traditional meals. Again, if you budget yourself, you can make room for the fun stuff, and you may surprised how little you need.
9. Adapt -- and overcome. Many people, myself included, use sick time, vacations, or just plain old bad days as a reason to give up and resume their crappy habits. There are days even now when I go over my calorie limit and get no exercise at all. I just say, "I had X good days this week, minus one bad. That's pretty good math." And keep stepping. Also, when on vacation, or in a hotel with no gym, you can still get in a few YouTube workouts, or just avoid Uber and walk everywhere possible. I was just in Quebec for a week, eating and drinking as I liked, and lost two pounds.
10. Go easy on the sauce. Alcohol is a genuine pleasure in life, at least for many, and it is not without some health benefits, but it is also an inhibitor of good sleep and a huge potential source of calories and sugars. Stick to straight hard liquors without sugar (no rum), and lite beers, of which there are endless numbers. Avoid mixed drinks, and keep wine to a single glass, no more than one a day.
11. Stimulate the muscles. Cardiovascular exercise is great in any form, including walking, but it can be overdone, stimulating cortisol (stress horomone) production, and can also fuel chronic injuries. Lifting weights, even light weights, or performing isotonic or isometric exercises (planks, push ups, etc.) builds and strengthens muscle, the existence of which burns fat, in addition to lookin' pretty damn fine.
12. Read before bed. Huh, what, you say? It's a proven fact that staring at electronic computer screens, especially cell phones, overstimulates the brain and makes sleep difficult. Put away your phone a solid hour before bed, and pick up a book. Books engage a different part of the mind entirely and can often facilitate sleep. And sleep is at the core of losing weight, since proper rest lowers stress which in turns lowers fat-boosting hormone production.
13. Stretch. Tai chi, quigoing, or just plain classic stretching exercises you can pick up off any of 10,000 YouTube channels are great for increasing your flexibility and improving posture. They can fix plantar fascitits, ease compressed vertebral pain, reduce sciatica, assist blood flow, and just generally help you everywhere. (The glutes exercises I perform almost every day have unexpectedly done wonders for my hamstrings.) Though not tied to weight loss per se, they improve the body's ability to exercise, which sure as hell don't hurt.
14. Be accountable. It has long been known that having a gym buddy increases by about 50% or more the likelikhood that you will exercise regularly. It is the same with weight loss. I have a nurse practicioner to hold me accountable for my choices and give me advice. You may not need a professional, but if you don't use a personal trainer or some other type of paid advisor, you should at least enlist a lover, friend, relative or co-worker to join you in your quest to change your life.
15. Be kind to yourself. People who are obese, fat, overweight, chubby, flabby, round, big-boned, and "zoftig" all have one thing in common: they live in a society that laughs at them and devalues them as human beings. Fat people are encouraged to laugh at themselves, and not in a kindly way. If you've let yourself go, it's enough to recognize the fact. You can stop there. There's no need to indulge in self-loathing and no use in giving in to despair.
16. Be strategic. Sit down before you even begin your journey, and ask yourself exactly -- EXACTLY -- what you are trying to achieve. Visualize what success looks like, feels like. Understand clearly what your goal is, and then craft a strategy not only to reach the goal, but to....
17. Maintain victory. Losing weight is only part of your battle. Once you've arrived at your target, you damn well want to stay there. So have a second strategy to prevent yourself from slipping back into bad habits. Remain accountable, humble, adaptable, and smart. (This is often the point at which exercise begins to come into play as a tool of weight maintenance, rather than weight loss -- exercise is, believe it or not, a totally inadequate method of achieving weight loss [by itself.])
18. Be realistic. If you want to shed 5 lbs, you can probably do that in a couple of weeks without any drastic changes at all. Walk a little more, eat a little less and better, drink more water, bam, you're done. On the other hand, if you need to shed 50 lbs, or 150 lbs, you are in for a haul, baby. And that's okay. The greater the task, the greater the reward. You just need to be realistic about the timeframe, and learn patience. Many initially successful people fail because they grow discouraged at the pace of things. They want to be thin, now. It doesn't work that way. So...
19. Set short-term goals. I set for myself a series of weights I was trying to reach, one after the other and shoved the main goal into the background, where I could see it but not be intimidated by it. I also looked forward to such things as: adjusting belt notches, wearing clothes that had been too tight previously, comparing "old me" photos to new ones, etc. In this way one of many flaws, impatience, was continuously being rewarded.
20. Don't get stuck in a rut. Most people take some comfort in routines, but the deeper a grove gets, the closer it becomes to turning into a rut which bores you and ultimately drives you away. Experiment with different forms of exercise, stretching, and food. Experiment with healthier snacks and desserts. Reward yourself in small ways for successes, and punish yourself in small ways for failures. Keep it interesting.
Now, my results are follows, after 46 days:
Sunday, June 13: 207.5 lbs
Thursday, August 3: 196.7 lbs
This is a loss of 10.8 lbs in 51 days, or about a pound and a quarter or so per week. This is a healthy, safe, generally sustainable weight loss: I know that much from experience. In addition, I've cut 1.9 off my Body Mass Index and 1.4% of my body weight. I still have quite a long way to go. I'd like to settle around 187 lbs and then assess how I look and feel, whether I want to go further or maintain, whether I want to start lifting weights again or perhaps increase cardio by boxing regularly. But for now I am extremely happy. Everything is going in the right direction, I'm not starving or hangry or weak or faint, my clothes fit better and my self-esteem is inflating like a balloon. And a healthy self-esteem tends to reap dividends in every other aspect of life.
As I said above, you probably already know most of this, and may disagree with some of it. You may be a vegan or a vegetarian and not wish to consume animal protiens. You may drink soda or alcohol fairly heavily and be unwilling to reduce your intake, or you may not drink at all and find these injunctions redundant. That is not an issue. It's just a question of synthetizing together a system of points that works for you, accepting what is useful and rejecting what is useless or harmful. And while I may once again seem as if I am brutally overstating the obvious (my besetting sin), I think it manifest that much of what I listed here is not obvious, given the terrible statistics for obesity in North America. There is a vast difference between merely having knowledge and putting oneself in a mental, spiritual and psychological position to act upon that knowledge in an efficient, effective way. For many years, I was that difference: I lived within it, a double-chinned denizen of the ivory tower, ever the theoretician and ne'er the practicioner. What I offer here I offer humbly in the hopes it might be of some use.
This is not quite as self-involved and pretentious -- dare I say narcissistic! -- as it sounds. The obesity rate in North America for whites hovers from 39.8% - 44.3% in the age range of 20 - 60. It does not improve much over 60, either, with 41.5% of older adults now classified as obese. For Latinos it is worse yet, and worst of all for blacks, at a hair below 50%. The CDC lists obesity as "the leading cause of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, and one of the leading causes of preventable, premature death." It also effects the quality of a person's life in every measureable way and many which are not measureable but not less important for being so.
I am, of course, a writer, and as such live a partially sedentary life, both by virtue of writing and by the fact my job, while not a desk job per se, does involve many hours of sitting at desks or in cars or courtrooms. I am also a person who has a long history of eating for the sake of eating, though I am also someone who takes great pleasure in food for its taste and the emotional effect eating good food produces. On top of this, I am combined-type ADHD and perhaps as a way of unconsciously self-medicating this, have a long and troubled history with drink, itself a gateway to unwanted weight gain.
As a small boy, I was highly active and perpetually outdoors. In addition to a bicycle addiction, I was on two swim teams and played many a season of MSI soccer. I ate garbage and drank too much Coke, but so does every American boy. Then, when puberty struck, things changed. I gained a lot of weight, lost interest in exercise -- in being outdoors, actually -- and became extremely lazy, my main pleasures being food, soda and television. I suppose I started to get porky around the age of ten, and by twelve was heavily overweight, though not actually fat because my growth spurt put me in the 95% percentile of height. This tubby, out-of-shape period lasted until the age of fifteen, when I was at Martha's Vineyard on a family vacation, spied a beautiful blonde twentysomething in a candy-striped bikini, and said to myself, quite literally, "If I ever want one of those, I'm going to have to lose weight."
My initial battle with fat was the first time in my life I began to exhibit adult characteristics. By "adult" I mean that having come to a conclusion, or an epiphany, about myself, I then came up with a plan to lose weight and executed it ruthlessly, undaunted by seemingly endless discouragements. This was 1987, after all, and there was no internet for me to do research on weight loss. Even I had been able to access the information available, I'm sure it would have been contradictory and full of errors, for the food industry still had an iron, claw-like grip on the public imagination, and things like "the four food groups" and "the food pyramid," all creations of the industry designed to get people to eat large quantities of things they didn't need, were taken as gospel. There also existed at that time this piece of nonsense known as the "well balanced diet," much advocated by doctors who could not define it at all, except to say you shouldn't eat too much or too little of any one food group. They left out the part where a lot of the things in said food groups were not only unhealthy in and of themselves, but terribly fattening. But hey, if you "balanced them well," you were golden. Thanks, doctors.
Despite my ignorance, which was appalling even by the standards of the day -- when I was twelve I believed fat loss was achieved by sweating -- my struggle to slim down was a complete if extremely slow and hard-fought success. Between the summer of 1987, when I made my pact with myself to become thin and thus desired by blonde bikini babes, and some point in late 1989 or so, I dropped from 184 lbs to a rain-thin 155 lbs. In practical terms, this meant that in the very early 90s, when I found some old but perfectly preserved jeans from 1985 or so in a closet, I was able to wear them quite comfortably: a college sophomore wearing jeans he'd stretched to the bursting point as a seventh-grader.
I achieved this loss through brute starvation. In high school I seldom ate anything, except perhaps an apple, a slice of bread, and some Tic Tacs, between seven in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon. (Yes, I was intermittently fasting decades before it became popular.) I would allow myself a single sandwich and a Coke when I got home, and then one more piece of bread, if needed, before dinner, when I ate what I wanted. But this "food window" was perhaps four or five hours at the maximum. The rest of the time, I starved.
Added to this starvation regimen was a lot of walking. My senior year of high school I refused to take the bus even though I had no car. I'd get dropped off in the morning, and walk home in the afternoon, a distance of three and a half miles. Oftimes it was horribly hot and humid, and I'd come home drenched in sweat as well as hungry, but I rather enjoyed the feeling of sweating after spending the ages 10 - 14 or so in a state of complete and utter inertia.
In college I was rail thin for two years, before incessant drinking and the usual collegiate diet of subs and pizza rendered me soft once again. This period of softness was the second half of a pattern which has repeated itself throughout my entire life. I'm thin, get fat, and then batter myself back to thin again using this or that diet or lifestyle change: calorie counting, ketogenics, Whole 30 diet, low-carb, high-protien, starvation, increased cardio, weight training, etc., etc. Each state holds for several years, only to be surrendered to the other as the sun yields to the moon and back again. The one qualifier was that, up until 2013 -- in other words, when I was forty -- I never had any great difficulty shedding the pounds using my own crude methods.
After forty everything changed, in that with the exception of six months on a hard-core ketogenic diet, during which I lost 11 lbs and kept it off six months until I quit the diet, I was unable to lose any weight or, if I lost it, to keep it off even for a few weeks. I kept applying my old, tried-and-true methods, and kept failing miserably. This went on for ten years, ten years in which I exercised far more than is the average for an American male, and ate a much healthier diet -- soda, for example, I had almost completely eliminated in 2000, and fast food not much later than that. I didn't keep junk food in the house, and curbed my sweet tooth with remarkable effectiveness. Yet when I turned fifty I got on the scale and saw I was 207.5 lbs. To put this in perspective: I'm 5'10" 1/2. The recommended weight for someone in my height range and age bracket is 149-183 lbs. And while my muscles are much denser than most men's and I therefore lean toward the heavier side of this scale, well, there's leaning, and there's falling over.
What has changed in the last few months is that I have finally adopted the mind-set of the alcoholic and applied it to my weight. I simply surrendered to the fact that I was powerless to lose weight myself in a post-40s state of being. Through my health insurance provider, I enlisted the aid of a "weight management specialist," i.e. a Nurse Practitioner, with whom I meet electronically once every few months. Truth be told, most (not all) of what she told me I already know by virtue of decades of experiments, successful and otherwise, but it would be selling her short to leave it at that. What she primarily offers is accountability and moral support, the import of which I will discuss shortly.
Now, because I know many people who read and write also grapple with their weight, I'd like to share what I have learned, re-learned, or just rededicated myself to doing. This will not be helpful to all, especially to vegetarians or vegans, but I offer it simply as the benefit of my own experience as a 50 (almost 51) year-old man who tries to be as active as possible but also sits on his ass much of the day -- like now, for example. Ready? Here we go.
1. Eat more protien. I try to eat, with every meal, a portion of animal protien about the size of my palm.
2. Drink more water. Like most people I do not drink nearly enough H20 and now make a point of drinking between 45 - 70 ounces a day.
3. Cut down the carbs. Notice I didn't say "eliminate." We need carbs to think -- literally. But you can get what you need from vegetables. Keep the grains -- rice, cereal, crusts, noodles, bread, pasta, etc. -- to strictly controlled minimums. (When you eat grains, even though they are fatless, your body responds by producing insulin, which converts the calories to fat.)
5. Get more sleep. Easier said than done? Not really, if you budget your time (see below). If I hit the rack by 1030, I wake up much, much better rested than if I wait just one additional half-hour. No mystery there. REM sleep tends to occur in the first and the last 30 minutes of your sleep cycle. That's where the real rest is achieved.
5. Budget your day. I'm an anarchic, Bohemian procrastinator by nature ("writer"), so planning ain't my strong suit. But I've found that by sharply dividing work, play, exercise, creartive time, etc. I can get a hell of a lot done in the same amount of hours as before, when I was achieving precisely jack and shit. I also know when to say "Fuck the schedule" and have some fun.
6. Track your food. There are many means by which to count calories, calculate macros, monitor water intake, and generally just keep track of what you are putting into your body. I personally use My Fitness Pal and link it to the dedicated step-counting app in my Android phone. It's a pain at first, but becomes reflexive and even addictive in a short time.
7. Invest in yourself. When I started my "lifestyle change," I bought a good electronic scale (Amazon, about $30) and also a medical scale ($127 on some medical website). I didn't like parting with the cash, but I was determined to prove to myself that I was serious about this change, and I wanted the right equipment to calibrate both my weight and my BMI and body fat percentage. Now I don't have to guess at my progress.
8. Live. Most attempts to lose weight fail because they are miserable and overly restrictive. When I was trying to slash pounds on my own, I allowed myself 1,750 calories a day, and was always "hangry" and sometimes weak and even faint. My N.P. started me on 2,100 calories, which is far more humane, and which I have not needed to adjust further downward. I still eat dark chocolate, whipped cream, some (homemade) fried food, drink a little beer and whiskey, etc., etc. I just don't go crazy with this stuff, and if necessary I'll skip one of the three traditional meals. Again, if you budget yourself, you can make room for the fun stuff, and you may surprised how little you need.
9. Adapt -- and overcome. Many people, myself included, use sick time, vacations, or just plain old bad days as a reason to give up and resume their crappy habits. There are days even now when I go over my calorie limit and get no exercise at all. I just say, "I had X good days this week, minus one bad. That's pretty good math." And keep stepping. Also, when on vacation, or in a hotel with no gym, you can still get in a few YouTube workouts, or just avoid Uber and walk everywhere possible. I was just in Quebec for a week, eating and drinking as I liked, and lost two pounds.
10. Go easy on the sauce. Alcohol is a genuine pleasure in life, at least for many, and it is not without some health benefits, but it is also an inhibitor of good sleep and a huge potential source of calories and sugars. Stick to straight hard liquors without sugar (no rum), and lite beers, of which there are endless numbers. Avoid mixed drinks, and keep wine to a single glass, no more than one a day.
11. Stimulate the muscles. Cardiovascular exercise is great in any form, including walking, but it can be overdone, stimulating cortisol (stress horomone) production, and can also fuel chronic injuries. Lifting weights, even light weights, or performing isotonic or isometric exercises (planks, push ups, etc.) builds and strengthens muscle, the existence of which burns fat, in addition to lookin' pretty damn fine.
12. Read before bed. Huh, what, you say? It's a proven fact that staring at electronic computer screens, especially cell phones, overstimulates the brain and makes sleep difficult. Put away your phone a solid hour before bed, and pick up a book. Books engage a different part of the mind entirely and can often facilitate sleep. And sleep is at the core of losing weight, since proper rest lowers stress which in turns lowers fat-boosting hormone production.
13. Stretch. Tai chi, quigoing, or just plain classic stretching exercises you can pick up off any of 10,000 YouTube channels are great for increasing your flexibility and improving posture. They can fix plantar fascitits, ease compressed vertebral pain, reduce sciatica, assist blood flow, and just generally help you everywhere. (The glutes exercises I perform almost every day have unexpectedly done wonders for my hamstrings.) Though not tied to weight loss per se, they improve the body's ability to exercise, which sure as hell don't hurt.
14. Be accountable. It has long been known that having a gym buddy increases by about 50% or more the likelikhood that you will exercise regularly. It is the same with weight loss. I have a nurse practicioner to hold me accountable for my choices and give me advice. You may not need a professional, but if you don't use a personal trainer or some other type of paid advisor, you should at least enlist a lover, friend, relative or co-worker to join you in your quest to change your life.
15. Be kind to yourself. People who are obese, fat, overweight, chubby, flabby, round, big-boned, and "zoftig" all have one thing in common: they live in a society that laughs at them and devalues them as human beings. Fat people are encouraged to laugh at themselves, and not in a kindly way. If you've let yourself go, it's enough to recognize the fact. You can stop there. There's no need to indulge in self-loathing and no use in giving in to despair.
16. Be strategic. Sit down before you even begin your journey, and ask yourself exactly -- EXACTLY -- what you are trying to achieve. Visualize what success looks like, feels like. Understand clearly what your goal is, and then craft a strategy not only to reach the goal, but to....
17. Maintain victory. Losing weight is only part of your battle. Once you've arrived at your target, you damn well want to stay there. So have a second strategy to prevent yourself from slipping back into bad habits. Remain accountable, humble, adaptable, and smart. (This is often the point at which exercise begins to come into play as a tool of weight maintenance, rather than weight loss -- exercise is, believe it or not, a totally inadequate method of achieving weight loss [by itself.])
18. Be realistic. If you want to shed 5 lbs, you can probably do that in a couple of weeks without any drastic changes at all. Walk a little more, eat a little less and better, drink more water, bam, you're done. On the other hand, if you need to shed 50 lbs, or 150 lbs, you are in for a haul, baby. And that's okay. The greater the task, the greater the reward. You just need to be realistic about the timeframe, and learn patience. Many initially successful people fail because they grow discouraged at the pace of things. They want to be thin, now. It doesn't work that way. So...
19. Set short-term goals. I set for myself a series of weights I was trying to reach, one after the other and shoved the main goal into the background, where I could see it but not be intimidated by it. I also looked forward to such things as: adjusting belt notches, wearing clothes that had been too tight previously, comparing "old me" photos to new ones, etc. In this way one of many flaws, impatience, was continuously being rewarded.
20. Don't get stuck in a rut. Most people take some comfort in routines, but the deeper a grove gets, the closer it becomes to turning into a rut which bores you and ultimately drives you away. Experiment with different forms of exercise, stretching, and food. Experiment with healthier snacks and desserts. Reward yourself in small ways for successes, and punish yourself in small ways for failures. Keep it interesting.
Now, my results are follows, after 46 days:
Sunday, June 13: 207.5 lbs
Thursday, August 3: 196.7 lbs
This is a loss of 10.8 lbs in 51 days, or about a pound and a quarter or so per week. This is a healthy, safe, generally sustainable weight loss: I know that much from experience. In addition, I've cut 1.9 off my Body Mass Index and 1.4% of my body weight. I still have quite a long way to go. I'd like to settle around 187 lbs and then assess how I look and feel, whether I want to go further or maintain, whether I want to start lifting weights again or perhaps increase cardio by boxing regularly. But for now I am extremely happy. Everything is going in the right direction, I'm not starving or hangry or weak or faint, my clothes fit better and my self-esteem is inflating like a balloon. And a healthy self-esteem tends to reap dividends in every other aspect of life.
As I said above, you probably already know most of this, and may disagree with some of it. You may be a vegan or a vegetarian and not wish to consume animal protiens. You may drink soda or alcohol fairly heavily and be unwilling to reduce your intake, or you may not drink at all and find these injunctions redundant. That is not an issue. It's just a question of synthetizing together a system of points that works for you, accepting what is useful and rejecting what is useless or harmful. And while I may once again seem as if I am brutally overstating the obvious (my besetting sin), I think it manifest that much of what I listed here is not obvious, given the terrible statistics for obesity in North America. There is a vast difference between merely having knowledge and putting oneself in a mental, spiritual and psychological position to act upon that knowledge in an efficient, effective way. For many years, I was that difference: I lived within it, a double-chinned denizen of the ivory tower, ever the theoretician and ne'er the practicioner. What I offer here I offer humbly in the hopes it might be of some use.
August 2, 2023
A QUICK NOTE BEFORE I SLEEP
I was planning on a post about narcissism tonight. No ivory tower egghead perspectives: my personal experience in both relationships and business, and what I learned from it. I think it's worth discussing in detail, given the age we live in: but an old buddy of mine gave me a call tonight, and as I don't think we've seen/spoken to each other more than twice in the last year, the inevitable happened: three hours of what my fictional creation from Texas, Sgt. Ed Tom Halleck, would refer to as "jawjackin'." Now it's eleven o'clock and I need to go to bed. So the purpose of this post is to tell you that...I will be posting tomorrow, when I have a chance to sit down and really give this subject the attention it deserves.
In a semi-related note, I know my posting schedule has been way off of late, and I'm sorry. However, I think I can be excused this because in the past two months I've had five criminal trials to deal with, gone to Canada for a week, had my person car totaled in a hit and run, had my rental car stolen off the streets of Montreal, and gotten a case of shingles. And that's just what I remember offhand. Here's to slower days as my 51st birthday approaches. Dear God. Fifty one. Kinda tough to wrap my head around. But that's a subject for an entirely different blog.
In a semi-related note, I know my posting schedule has been way off of late, and I'm sorry. However, I think I can be excused this because in the past two months I've had five criminal trials to deal with, gone to Canada for a week, had my person car totaled in a hit and run, had my rental car stolen off the streets of Montreal, and gotten a case of shingles. And that's just what I remember offhand. Here's to slower days as my 51st birthday approaches. Dear God. Fifty one. Kinda tough to wrap my head around. But that's a subject for an entirely different blog.
July 27, 2023
AS I PLEASE XVI: I RESOLVE TO HATE RESOLUTIONS
I hate resolutions. New Year's Eve or otherwise. There is something ritualistically foolish in the idea of making drunken promises to yourself you have no intention of keeping. I can't remember the last time I myself made one, or if I have ever made one at all. On the other hand, if you swap "resolution" for another word -- "intention," for example, or "will," or even "plan" -- my opposition dissolves, and I can give you reams of examples of, uh, desires I've had for the future, and whether or not I satisfied them. Such are the power of words.
This year I...intended, willed myself, and planned to achieve certain goals and accomplish certain things. We are now past the halfway mark and that is about where I am in the success department regarding said intentions. Here we go.
* As I am now fifty years of age, I wanted to make sure I kicked off the decade by getting back into the same kind of shape I was at forty. The year did not begin auspiciously, but when, like an alcoholic I admitted I was powerless to achieve this goal by myself and enlisted help, specifically a Nurse Practictioner who specializes in weight management, my long-standing frustrations in this department crumbled. Turns out what I needed was not discipline or knowledge but accountability. I got on the scale this morning and was greeted with the figure of 198.8 lbs. This means I've lost 8.7 lbs in exactly 40 days. Since I started at a porky 207.5, I still have quite a ways to go, somewhere between ten and fifteen pounds. But the trend is definitely in the right direction.
* I also intended to cure myself of my dopamine addiction, i.e. my incessant habit of looking at my phone at all times and situations. In this I failed miserably. I'm disgusted with myself, because most of the time I had a cell phone I used it mainly for calls, texts and GPS, but in the last few years I've become an app addict and I don't like it. I know the cure: delete every unncessary app, ignore the phone when I'm not using it for a definitely necessary purpose, and keep it where I can't reach it when I'm driving. I'm just unwilling to do this right now. I don't concede total defeat, but my army definitely ran away from its first battle.
* My epic horror novel Something Evil took me an agonizing 2,418 days to complete. That's six and a half years exactly. Guess when I finished it? 2023. This is not really anything to crow about, as it should have been completed at least three years earlier; nevertheless, crow I shall. I wanted that millstone cut from my neck this year and cut it I did. Man, did that feel good. It's amazing how oppressive it is, mentally and spirituially, to have a huge unfinished creative project looming over you.
* I have heard porn addiction is a real thing. To test this theory, I decided to go 100 days without any. Guess what? I didn't notice. Or care when I did notice. Covid isolation made porn a reflex-action for many men and a surprising number of women. Turns out, it's not only not an addiction, it's not even really a habit. It's basically the equivalent of flipping channels. You do it because. Not because you need it or even want it. Just because. I wonder how many of the things we do in modern life fall into this dismal category?
* Traveling is important to me. Not because I enjoy traveling -- I hate traveling -- but because I like being at the destination. More than that, I like having the experiences that come with it all to reflect upon later. I have long believed Jung was right when he said that the people who did things were happier than the people who owned things. But Covid locked me down for two years, which was unacceptable, and I resolved (sorry) to change that. So far, this year, I've spent time in Dallas, Montreal and Quebec City, none of which I had ever set foot in before. And I plan on making at least two more trips before the year's over. I'm working deeply in the red here, and must make up for stolen time.
* My friend "Marie" once told me that she felt every year, the amount of sex a person should have ought to increase. I'm not going to go there in this blog, but I will say that as a writer, every year, the amount of writing a writer does should also increase. In addition to putting a stake in my horror novel, I also banged out Exiles a second entry in my "Chronicles of Magnus" series, which is itself a full-length novel. After much debate and many false starts in different directions, I also began Cold Day, Cruel World, my third CAGE LIFE novel, and my first visitation to that world since I published the second book in 2016. It was sort of like coming home, and I've enjoyed working on it so far. And I "resolve" to finish it in 2023.
* This was also the year I was going to revisit the world of traditional publishing. The jury is still out in this department, but the signs are not terrible. That's about all I can say right now, except that tonight I am sending a book proposal to my editor, and from there, to an agent of our mutual acquaintance. (If anything moves on that front, this forum will be the first to hear the news.)
* I tried to quit caffeine this year. Boy did I fail in that department. Turns out a love coffee more than I hate paying for anxiety. Lesson learned.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I could not bring my library with me. This caused a downturn in my reading output for the first time in many years. I started substituting the time I used to spend reading watching TV, or screwing around on the interwebs, or playing video games, or even exercising. I tried and failed several times to hit the Goodreads Challenge goal I set for myself. Last year I failed by only one book, but I still failed. This year I'm a book behind schedule, but have already begun #7, a biography of Stalin written by Robert Payne. I can, I must, I will meet or exceed the pathetically modest goal of twelve new books consumed in 2023. Really, I will. Truly.
It's my...wish.
This year I...intended, willed myself, and planned to achieve certain goals and accomplish certain things. We are now past the halfway mark and that is about where I am in the success department regarding said intentions. Here we go.
* As I am now fifty years of age, I wanted to make sure I kicked off the decade by getting back into the same kind of shape I was at forty. The year did not begin auspiciously, but when, like an alcoholic I admitted I was powerless to achieve this goal by myself and enlisted help, specifically a Nurse Practictioner who specializes in weight management, my long-standing frustrations in this department crumbled. Turns out what I needed was not discipline or knowledge but accountability. I got on the scale this morning and was greeted with the figure of 198.8 lbs. This means I've lost 8.7 lbs in exactly 40 days. Since I started at a porky 207.5, I still have quite a ways to go, somewhere between ten and fifteen pounds. But the trend is definitely in the right direction.
* I also intended to cure myself of my dopamine addiction, i.e. my incessant habit of looking at my phone at all times and situations. In this I failed miserably. I'm disgusted with myself, because most of the time I had a cell phone I used it mainly for calls, texts and GPS, but in the last few years I've become an app addict and I don't like it. I know the cure: delete every unncessary app, ignore the phone when I'm not using it for a definitely necessary purpose, and keep it where I can't reach it when I'm driving. I'm just unwilling to do this right now. I don't concede total defeat, but my army definitely ran away from its first battle.
* My epic horror novel Something Evil took me an agonizing 2,418 days to complete. That's six and a half years exactly. Guess when I finished it? 2023. This is not really anything to crow about, as it should have been completed at least three years earlier; nevertheless, crow I shall. I wanted that millstone cut from my neck this year and cut it I did. Man, did that feel good. It's amazing how oppressive it is, mentally and spirituially, to have a huge unfinished creative project looming over you.
* I have heard porn addiction is a real thing. To test this theory, I decided to go 100 days without any. Guess what? I didn't notice. Or care when I did notice. Covid isolation made porn a reflex-action for many men and a surprising number of women. Turns out, it's not only not an addiction, it's not even really a habit. It's basically the equivalent of flipping channels. You do it because. Not because you need it or even want it. Just because. I wonder how many of the things we do in modern life fall into this dismal category?
* Traveling is important to me. Not because I enjoy traveling -- I hate traveling -- but because I like being at the destination. More than that, I like having the experiences that come with it all to reflect upon later. I have long believed Jung was right when he said that the people who did things were happier than the people who owned things. But Covid locked me down for two years, which was unacceptable, and I resolved (sorry) to change that. So far, this year, I've spent time in Dallas, Montreal and Quebec City, none of which I had ever set foot in before. And I plan on making at least two more trips before the year's over. I'm working deeply in the red here, and must make up for stolen time.
* My friend "Marie" once told me that she felt every year, the amount of sex a person should have ought to increase. I'm not going to go there in this blog, but I will say that as a writer, every year, the amount of writing a writer does should also increase. In addition to putting a stake in my horror novel, I also banged out Exiles a second entry in my "Chronicles of Magnus" series, which is itself a full-length novel. After much debate and many false starts in different directions, I also began Cold Day, Cruel World, my third CAGE LIFE novel, and my first visitation to that world since I published the second book in 2016. It was sort of like coming home, and I've enjoyed working on it so far. And I "resolve" to finish it in 2023.
* This was also the year I was going to revisit the world of traditional publishing. The jury is still out in this department, but the signs are not terrible. That's about all I can say right now, except that tonight I am sending a book proposal to my editor, and from there, to an agent of our mutual acquaintance. (If anything moves on that front, this forum will be the first to hear the news.)
* I tried to quit caffeine this year. Boy did I fail in that department. Turns out a love coffee more than I hate paying for anxiety. Lesson learned.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I could not bring my library with me. This caused a downturn in my reading output for the first time in many years. I started substituting the time I used to spend reading watching TV, or screwing around on the interwebs, or playing video games, or even exercising. I tried and failed several times to hit the Goodreads Challenge goal I set for myself. Last year I failed by only one book, but I still failed. This year I'm a book behind schedule, but have already begun #7, a biography of Stalin written by Robert Payne. I can, I must, I will meet or exceed the pathetically modest goal of twelve new books consumed in 2023. Really, I will. Truly.
It's my...wish.
July 23, 2023
LETTERS: A CHARACTER STUDY
I have returned from Quebec, and while events prevented me from even thinking about blogging for a week, I haven't forgotten the task I assigned myself before I left, which is to use this platform to explore the craft of writing. To that end I would like to analyze an episode of television which, in 26 minutes of actual airtime, serves as a masterclass in character study. I have long maintained that radio and television scripts are a superb place to study character dialog, but I also maintain that the built-in brevity of the form is also a great way to learn the ratio of force to space -- in other words, to pack the most punch with the least number of words. Novelists would do well to study these different but related mediums. So let's get started.
"Letters" is the second episode of the ninth season of M*A*S*H, (actually the show's 200th episode). It was written by Dennis Koenig, and originally aired on November 24, 1980. Before I jump into the story, I will briefly summarize the TV show in question for those of you who might happen to be unfamiliar with it due to your tender years. M*A*S*H was a hit series which ran from 1972 - 1983, chronicling the lives of a group of Army doctors and nurses at a mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War. It is regarded as the first television "dramedy," meaning that it began as a normal situation comedy but the storylines became increasingly dramatic over the years, until the blend of comedy and dramatics was roughly even. It had a large ensemble cast of extremely distinct characters, and at the time "Letters" aired, it consisted of the following:
Hawkeye Pierce: The chief surgeon of the hospital, a wisecracking, Martini-guzzling, skirt-chasing pacifist, drafted unwillingly into military service, who hates the Army and war.
B.J. Hunnicutt: A skilled surgeon who is a devoted husband and father, he harbors great resentment and anger at being forced away from his family by the war.
Sherman Potter: The commanding officer of the 4077 MASH, the folksy, fiery Potter is an old career soldier, a wise country-style doctor, also a gifted commander, who understands how to manage "civilians in uniform."
Charles Emerson Winchester III: A brilliant surgeon hailing from immense wealth, Charles is also a pompous, mean-spirited snob, obsessed with his own pedigree, yet capable of decency if sufficiently moved.
Margaret Houlihan: The camp's chief nurse is a career soldier from a military family who takes her job with religious seriousness. Tough as nails and possessing a hair-trigger temper, she is also a deeply passionate, and compassionate, human being.
Francis Mulcahy: A kind-hearted but scrappy chaplain who struggles with feelings of uselessness in the face of the war, he serves as the informal "camp counselor" to the 4077, be they religious or not.
Max Klinger: The long-suffering company clerk. Once obsessed with getting out of the Army on a psycho discharge, the ever-scheming Klinger is now resolved to performing his duties, but never the Army way.
To cases.
"Letters" opens during a rainstorm which has been going on for days, leaving the men and women of the 4077 restless, bored and depressed. They have nothing to do but complain about the food and the mud. At breakfast one morning, Klinger appears with an enormous sack of mail for Hawkeye, who announces that a friend of his from his hometown has instructed her fourth grade class to write the personnel of the MASH. He distributes batches of letters to each of his comrades, instructing them that each must answer the letters they are given, no swapping; everyone cheerfully accepts, with the exception of Charles, who sarcastically states he doesn't need to correspond with children as he already lives with one...Pierce.
The episode then tracks each character's attempt to answer the questions posed to them by the children of Crabapple Cove, Maine. Father Mulcahy is asked if he has ever saved a life. Distressed by the question, he tries to pawn off the letter despite Hawkeye's injunction, but Col. Potter reminds him that he did indeed perform this task. Mulcahy then recounts how he cured the liquor-guzzling camp mutt, Irving, of his rampant alcoholism, thus saving him from a premature death. This opening bid in the script is a light touch which demonstrates both the humor and the compassion of the popular priest.
Klinger is asked by his correspondent if the Army pays well. Klinger responds by detailing the rise and fall of his latest get-rich-quick scheme, raising chinchillas for their fur. When Winchester sarcastically points out Klinger has purchased two male chinchillas, Klinger's dream dies. He informs the child that he is now investing his capital in a school for bowling alley pin boys. This aside is another comedic touch, one which shows Klinger's disdain for the army and his addiction to scams, dodges and hustles, all of which end up exploding in his face.
Things turn serious when Margaret is asked if she ever gets close to the patients in the hospital. Writing through tears, Margaret recounts comforting a dying soldier for hours, asking him about his girlfriend and his plans for home, knowing -- as he does not -- that he has only a few hours to live. Weeping, she tells the tot that there are some patients she will never forget. This scene reveals the deep compassion which lies beneath Margaret's disciplined, hot-tempered surface.
Charles, who initially refuses to bother with the letters, is ignited by one which BJ reads allowed, saying the child is envious of Army life "because you get to camp out every night and eat Army food." He writes a wittily insulting response, which delights him and causes BJ to remark that Charles is the world's first "poison pen pal." Delighting in his own cruelty, Charles continues taking letters, lambasting each of his correspondents.
The flow of the narrative is interrupted when Hawkeye reads a letter that upsets him enormously:
"Doctor, My brother was a soldier in Korea. He got hurt, but some doctors fixed him up so he could go back and fight some more. Then he got killed. Now I'll never see Keith again. You doctors just make people better so they can end up dead. I hate you all. Signed, Ronnie Hawkins."
Hawkeye is badly shaken by the epistle. "What do I say to this kid?" He plaintively asks BJ. "I mean, he's...He's kind of struck a nerve. We've all sent boys back to the line and then had them end up dead. What do I say to him?"
While Hawkeye grapples with a response, BJ recounts to his own pen pal, who asks if it takes a long time to become a doctor, how the Army sent the 4077 a replacement surgeon who turned out to be a lawyer, and how he and Hawkeye used the attorney to assist in surgery, much to Margaret's displeasure. He then offers Hawk help with his answer, but Hawkeye refuses, only to visit the chaplain. The following scene ensues:
MULCAHY: So this letter has triggered a crisis of conscience for you.
PIERCE: A crisis of guilty conscience. Essentially he's saying I'm a very large cog in the war machine. I'm not sure he's wrong.
MULCAHY: Hawkeye, do I need to point out that you don't take lives, you save them.
PIERCE: I'm also in weapons repair. I fix people up so they can go out and get killed. Or kill other people. I can't deny that. And I can't live with it either.
MULCAHY: How can I help you?
PIERCE: Answer this letter for me, okay?
MULCAHY: All right, Hawkeye. I'll help you by not answering the letter.
PIERCE: Huh?
MULCAHY: Well, you did say no trading.
PIERCE: Oh, come on, Father. This is serious. Come on.
MULCAHY: I am serious. This letter has stirred up some very deep feelings in you, Hawkeye, and you're going to have to deal with those feelings whether you answer the letter or not. It seems to me that the problem isn't just what you tell him. It's also what you tell yourself. Perhaps you can find an answer that will satisfy both of you.
This conversation not only shows a much deeper, stronger and more complex side to the priest than was revealed by his harmless dog anecdote, it also lays bare the writhing mass of doubts, insecurities and guilts that exist beneath Hawkeye's glib, Martini-swilling exterior. A committed pacifist who once told Colonel Potter, "I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash-and-carry, carry me back to Old Virginie, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun," he lives in a state of often self-righteous denial about the fact he nevertheless is part of the Army and therefore part of the machinery of warfare whether he personally takes life or not. When he remarks that he "can't deny it, and can't live with it, either," he is expressing the increasingly violent internal dissonance which eventually causes his character to break down completely during the opening of the series finale several years later.
More nuances now exhibit themselves through Charles. The show's principal antagonist following the departure of Maj. Frank Burns, Charles is altogether a different character. Unlike Burns, who was a psychological junkyard with almost no redeeming qualities at all, Charles' imperious, self-serving, disdainful nature masks a sensitive soul, one which is capble of great compassion. It is a peculiar quality of the character that he views this compassion as an embarrassment and hides it whenever possible. Thus, when he discovers the leaf of a birch tree pressed into a little girl's letter and is profoundly moved by the memory of Autumn in New England (he's from Boston), he dismisses it verbally as "more childishness" but then responds to the child with a lovely letter:
"Dear Virginia, It is with indescribable joy that I accept your gift. It is indeed testimony to the beauty that exists in all creation, but perhaps nowhere more than
in a young girl's heart."
The two acts -- responding with such beautiful sentiments while simultaneously hiding them from his tentmates -- sum up the character of Charles in a single scene.
The tone shifts back to comedy when Colonel Potter recounts to his own correspondent how he tried to break the all-time record of consecutive baskets (31) but failed by one shot, succumbing to the pressure of an expectant crowd. When he chokes, the crowd drifts away in disappointment, and Potter formally relinquishes his nickname, "Hoops." He jokingly advises the child to take up an easier sport, like horseshoes.
At last a patient is brought into the hospital, a girl with a severe concussion who needs surgery. BJ and Hawkeye perform an operation to relieve the pressure on her brain, and the incident gives Hawk the impetus he needs to finally answer Ronnie's letter:
"Ronnie, it's not a good idea to take the love you had for your brother and turn it into hate. Hate makes war, and war is what killed him. I understand your feelings.
Sometimes I hate myself for being here. But once in a while, in the midst of this insanity, a very small event can make my being here seem almost bearable. I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you, Ronnie... except to suggest that you look for good wherever you can find it."
As Hawkeye learns the girl will survive, it also finally stops raining. He opens the door, is flooded with sunshine and hears birds singing. "Well, what do you know," he murmurs. "A break in the gloom."
The final scene in the episode occurs some time later, when replies to the replies have arrived at the camp, and Klinger upends a huge bag of letters in the Swamp, the tent where Hawkeye, BJ and Charles live. As the men discuss the letters, Potter bursts in, drenched in sweat and carrying a basketball, "Hot sausage!" He shouts. "Thirty-two!" Though thrown in for comic relief, this moment sums up the proud and fiercely competetive nature of the colonel perfectly: his inability to live with defeat (and take his own advice) puts a marvelous finish on a remarkable story.
"Letters" is a classic example of what can be accomplished when a writer understands a) his characters, b) how to get the most out of them using the smallest number of words, i.e. by demonstrating character through action as much as through well-crafted dialog. We are not told "Father Mulcahy is compassionate but isn't afraid of tough love," we are shown two examples of this, first in the way he "cures" the dog of his alcoholism by allowing him to drink to the point of sickness (a play on Pavlov, one might say), and then, more dramatically, by forcing Hawkeye to answer the letter which is troubling him. Similarly, we are shown Margaret's tenderness, Klinger's penchant for harebrained schemes (and his inability to learn from their inevitable failures), and the complexity of Charles' character. But most importantly, Hawkeye's internal struggle plays out through a series of actions and small but extremely effective set-pieces, and the answer he provides Ronnie, while only a half-answer, it is the best Hawk can give, because no better answer exists. The problem is soluble only in the sense that the cog in the war machine must accept that he is a cog, and in the meanwhile continue to fight what the by-then departed character of Radar O'Reilly described as "the war against the war," i.e. the struggle to stay sane in an insane situation.
My editor is fond of telling me that "character is action." He is right. A writer must always strive to tell his audience as little as possible while showing them as much as he possibly can: some exposition is unavoidable in storytelling, but usually it can be minimized by contextualization (i.e., we don't tell the audience that Igor is the cook: we show him in his hat and apron, holding a ladle; we don't tell the audience Charles is often a jerk, we show him writing poison pen letters to children and relishing the experience.) M*A*S*H, at its worst, had an aggravating tendency to preach to its audience, usually through Hawkeye, and then to compound the sin by often failing to have other characters push back against his self-righteousness and hypocrisy. At its best -- and I think "Letters" is a fairly good representation of the show firing on every cylinder -- it allowed for nuances and uncomfortable truths. It showed its characters as what they were and what they were meant to represent: ordinary humans under extraordinary pressure, dealing with their traumas and challenges according to their personalities, and entertaining us enormously in the process.
"Letters" is the second episode of the ninth season of M*A*S*H, (actually the show's 200th episode). It was written by Dennis Koenig, and originally aired on November 24, 1980. Before I jump into the story, I will briefly summarize the TV show in question for those of you who might happen to be unfamiliar with it due to your tender years. M*A*S*H was a hit series which ran from 1972 - 1983, chronicling the lives of a group of Army doctors and nurses at a mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War. It is regarded as the first television "dramedy," meaning that it began as a normal situation comedy but the storylines became increasingly dramatic over the years, until the blend of comedy and dramatics was roughly even. It had a large ensemble cast of extremely distinct characters, and at the time "Letters" aired, it consisted of the following:
Hawkeye Pierce: The chief surgeon of the hospital, a wisecracking, Martini-guzzling, skirt-chasing pacifist, drafted unwillingly into military service, who hates the Army and war.
B.J. Hunnicutt: A skilled surgeon who is a devoted husband and father, he harbors great resentment and anger at being forced away from his family by the war.
Sherman Potter: The commanding officer of the 4077 MASH, the folksy, fiery Potter is an old career soldier, a wise country-style doctor, also a gifted commander, who understands how to manage "civilians in uniform."
Charles Emerson Winchester III: A brilliant surgeon hailing from immense wealth, Charles is also a pompous, mean-spirited snob, obsessed with his own pedigree, yet capable of decency if sufficiently moved.
Margaret Houlihan: The camp's chief nurse is a career soldier from a military family who takes her job with religious seriousness. Tough as nails and possessing a hair-trigger temper, she is also a deeply passionate, and compassionate, human being.
Francis Mulcahy: A kind-hearted but scrappy chaplain who struggles with feelings of uselessness in the face of the war, he serves as the informal "camp counselor" to the 4077, be they religious or not.
Max Klinger: The long-suffering company clerk. Once obsessed with getting out of the Army on a psycho discharge, the ever-scheming Klinger is now resolved to performing his duties, but never the Army way.
To cases.
"Letters" opens during a rainstorm which has been going on for days, leaving the men and women of the 4077 restless, bored and depressed. They have nothing to do but complain about the food and the mud. At breakfast one morning, Klinger appears with an enormous sack of mail for Hawkeye, who announces that a friend of his from his hometown has instructed her fourth grade class to write the personnel of the MASH. He distributes batches of letters to each of his comrades, instructing them that each must answer the letters they are given, no swapping; everyone cheerfully accepts, with the exception of Charles, who sarcastically states he doesn't need to correspond with children as he already lives with one...Pierce.
The episode then tracks each character's attempt to answer the questions posed to them by the children of Crabapple Cove, Maine. Father Mulcahy is asked if he has ever saved a life. Distressed by the question, he tries to pawn off the letter despite Hawkeye's injunction, but Col. Potter reminds him that he did indeed perform this task. Mulcahy then recounts how he cured the liquor-guzzling camp mutt, Irving, of his rampant alcoholism, thus saving him from a premature death. This opening bid in the script is a light touch which demonstrates both the humor and the compassion of the popular priest.
Klinger is asked by his correspondent if the Army pays well. Klinger responds by detailing the rise and fall of his latest get-rich-quick scheme, raising chinchillas for their fur. When Winchester sarcastically points out Klinger has purchased two male chinchillas, Klinger's dream dies. He informs the child that he is now investing his capital in a school for bowling alley pin boys. This aside is another comedic touch, one which shows Klinger's disdain for the army and his addiction to scams, dodges and hustles, all of which end up exploding in his face.
Things turn serious when Margaret is asked if she ever gets close to the patients in the hospital. Writing through tears, Margaret recounts comforting a dying soldier for hours, asking him about his girlfriend and his plans for home, knowing -- as he does not -- that he has only a few hours to live. Weeping, she tells the tot that there are some patients she will never forget. This scene reveals the deep compassion which lies beneath Margaret's disciplined, hot-tempered surface.
Charles, who initially refuses to bother with the letters, is ignited by one which BJ reads allowed, saying the child is envious of Army life "because you get to camp out every night and eat Army food." He writes a wittily insulting response, which delights him and causes BJ to remark that Charles is the world's first "poison pen pal." Delighting in his own cruelty, Charles continues taking letters, lambasting each of his correspondents.
The flow of the narrative is interrupted when Hawkeye reads a letter that upsets him enormously:
"Doctor, My brother was a soldier in Korea. He got hurt, but some doctors fixed him up so he could go back and fight some more. Then he got killed. Now I'll never see Keith again. You doctors just make people better so they can end up dead. I hate you all. Signed, Ronnie Hawkins."
Hawkeye is badly shaken by the epistle. "What do I say to this kid?" He plaintively asks BJ. "I mean, he's...He's kind of struck a nerve. We've all sent boys back to the line and then had them end up dead. What do I say to him?"
While Hawkeye grapples with a response, BJ recounts to his own pen pal, who asks if it takes a long time to become a doctor, how the Army sent the 4077 a replacement surgeon who turned out to be a lawyer, and how he and Hawkeye used the attorney to assist in surgery, much to Margaret's displeasure. He then offers Hawk help with his answer, but Hawkeye refuses, only to visit the chaplain. The following scene ensues:
MULCAHY: So this letter has triggered a crisis of conscience for you.
PIERCE: A crisis of guilty conscience. Essentially he's saying I'm a very large cog in the war machine. I'm not sure he's wrong.
MULCAHY: Hawkeye, do I need to point out that you don't take lives, you save them.
PIERCE: I'm also in weapons repair. I fix people up so they can go out and get killed. Or kill other people. I can't deny that. And I can't live with it either.
MULCAHY: How can I help you?
PIERCE: Answer this letter for me, okay?
MULCAHY: All right, Hawkeye. I'll help you by not answering the letter.
PIERCE: Huh?
MULCAHY: Well, you did say no trading.
PIERCE: Oh, come on, Father. This is serious. Come on.
MULCAHY: I am serious. This letter has stirred up some very deep feelings in you, Hawkeye, and you're going to have to deal with those feelings whether you answer the letter or not. It seems to me that the problem isn't just what you tell him. It's also what you tell yourself. Perhaps you can find an answer that will satisfy both of you.
This conversation not only shows a much deeper, stronger and more complex side to the priest than was revealed by his harmless dog anecdote, it also lays bare the writhing mass of doubts, insecurities and guilts that exist beneath Hawkeye's glib, Martini-swilling exterior. A committed pacifist who once told Colonel Potter, "I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash-and-carry, carry me back to Old Virginie, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun," he lives in a state of often self-righteous denial about the fact he nevertheless is part of the Army and therefore part of the machinery of warfare whether he personally takes life or not. When he remarks that he "can't deny it, and can't live with it, either," he is expressing the increasingly violent internal dissonance which eventually causes his character to break down completely during the opening of the series finale several years later.
More nuances now exhibit themselves through Charles. The show's principal antagonist following the departure of Maj. Frank Burns, Charles is altogether a different character. Unlike Burns, who was a psychological junkyard with almost no redeeming qualities at all, Charles' imperious, self-serving, disdainful nature masks a sensitive soul, one which is capble of great compassion. It is a peculiar quality of the character that he views this compassion as an embarrassment and hides it whenever possible. Thus, when he discovers the leaf of a birch tree pressed into a little girl's letter and is profoundly moved by the memory of Autumn in New England (he's from Boston), he dismisses it verbally as "more childishness" but then responds to the child with a lovely letter:
"Dear Virginia, It is with indescribable joy that I accept your gift. It is indeed testimony to the beauty that exists in all creation, but perhaps nowhere more than
in a young girl's heart."
The two acts -- responding with such beautiful sentiments while simultaneously hiding them from his tentmates -- sum up the character of Charles in a single scene.
The tone shifts back to comedy when Colonel Potter recounts to his own correspondent how he tried to break the all-time record of consecutive baskets (31) but failed by one shot, succumbing to the pressure of an expectant crowd. When he chokes, the crowd drifts away in disappointment, and Potter formally relinquishes his nickname, "Hoops." He jokingly advises the child to take up an easier sport, like horseshoes.
At last a patient is brought into the hospital, a girl with a severe concussion who needs surgery. BJ and Hawkeye perform an operation to relieve the pressure on her brain, and the incident gives Hawk the impetus he needs to finally answer Ronnie's letter:
"Ronnie, it's not a good idea to take the love you had for your brother and turn it into hate. Hate makes war, and war is what killed him. I understand your feelings.
Sometimes I hate myself for being here. But once in a while, in the midst of this insanity, a very small event can make my being here seem almost bearable. I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you, Ronnie... except to suggest that you look for good wherever you can find it."
As Hawkeye learns the girl will survive, it also finally stops raining. He opens the door, is flooded with sunshine and hears birds singing. "Well, what do you know," he murmurs. "A break in the gloom."
The final scene in the episode occurs some time later, when replies to the replies have arrived at the camp, and Klinger upends a huge bag of letters in the Swamp, the tent where Hawkeye, BJ and Charles live. As the men discuss the letters, Potter bursts in, drenched in sweat and carrying a basketball, "Hot sausage!" He shouts. "Thirty-two!" Though thrown in for comic relief, this moment sums up the proud and fiercely competetive nature of the colonel perfectly: his inability to live with defeat (and take his own advice) puts a marvelous finish on a remarkable story.
"Letters" is a classic example of what can be accomplished when a writer understands a) his characters, b) how to get the most out of them using the smallest number of words, i.e. by demonstrating character through action as much as through well-crafted dialog. We are not told "Father Mulcahy is compassionate but isn't afraid of tough love," we are shown two examples of this, first in the way he "cures" the dog of his alcoholism by allowing him to drink to the point of sickness (a play on Pavlov, one might say), and then, more dramatically, by forcing Hawkeye to answer the letter which is troubling him. Similarly, we are shown Margaret's tenderness, Klinger's penchant for harebrained schemes (and his inability to learn from their inevitable failures), and the complexity of Charles' character. But most importantly, Hawkeye's internal struggle plays out through a series of actions and small but extremely effective set-pieces, and the answer he provides Ronnie, while only a half-answer, it is the best Hawk can give, because no better answer exists. The problem is soluble only in the sense that the cog in the war machine must accept that he is a cog, and in the meanwhile continue to fight what the by-then departed character of Radar O'Reilly described as "the war against the war," i.e. the struggle to stay sane in an insane situation.
My editor is fond of telling me that "character is action." He is right. A writer must always strive to tell his audience as little as possible while showing them as much as he possibly can: some exposition is unavoidable in storytelling, but usually it can be minimized by contextualization (i.e., we don't tell the audience that Igor is the cook: we show him in his hat and apron, holding a ladle; we don't tell the audience Charles is often a jerk, we show him writing poison pen letters to children and relishing the experience.) M*A*S*H, at its worst, had an aggravating tendency to preach to its audience, usually through Hawkeye, and then to compound the sin by often failing to have other characters push back against his self-righteousness and hypocrisy. At its best -- and I think "Letters" is a fairly good representation of the show firing on every cylinder -- it allowed for nuances and uncomfortable truths. It showed its characters as what they were and what they were meant to represent: ordinary humans under extraordinary pressure, dealing with their traumas and challenges according to their personalities, and entertaining us enormously in the process.
July 12, 2023
SHOWING UP FOR MYSELF
Friends and neighbors, I am exhausted. The last few weeks have been all gas, no brake, and your humble correspondent is running on fumes and momentum and precious little else. I had in mind a very detailed blog about how to pack the maximum amount of character expression in the smallest possible space, using the M*A*S*H episode "Letters" as an example, but I'm too tired. It will have to wait, and probably a couple of weeks, because the pace of my life is only going to accelerate in the short term.
This is a good thing. Granted, it's not an easy thing, but it is a good one. I'm getting back into the mainstream publishing world, I moved over 5,000 copies of Wolf Weather, Devils You Know, Sinner's Cross, The Very Dead of Winter, etc. in a couple of weeks, hit #1 on Amazon several times, and I'm soon leaving the country for a well-deserved vacation. My work as an advocate for victims of crime is never easy at any time, but that too has flipped the nitrous oxide switch, and frankly, I'm growing as a result. We always grow when we're tested. And I have always been fascinated by the idea of being tested. Of being pushed. Of actually showing up to this curious mix of horror and wonder that is life. A recent review of The Very Dead of Winter made a penetrating remark which I will share with you now:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state.
I am a writer, and like most writers, tend toward laziness, distraction, procrastination, introversion, and catastrophizing. Writers already have the best possible reason to sit all day, so rationalizing eating Cheetos, drinking beer and watching re-runs of Charmed when we ought to be accomplishing things is not difficult. If we are not careful, our entire lives become a sort of fishbowl experience, in which we live safely and comfortably behind glass, never really going anywhere or accomplishing anything. Covid gave me a concrete-lined rationale for making this line of thought a lifestyle, but in the last few months I have been systematically breaking out of it. It feels good, and it hurts. It's frightening, and it's also exhilarating. Showing up for yourself is always a mixed bag. On the one hand, you know it's what you need to be doing. You know it's the answer to literally all of your problems. On the other hand, the couch is so much more appealing. The television, the box of Triscuits or the bag of weed, the "mobile device" with its endless capacity for scrolling and swiping...tempting. All the time, tempting you to show up for someone else: the corporations who profit from you getting fatter, drunker, sadder, softer, unhealthier than you were before.
I don't believe that there is a resolution to this tension, other than surrender. One can achieve a state of peace by chucking away all dreams, hopes, and ambitions for one's personal, professional, and romantic life, or one can go to war, daily, for one's own interests and risk failure, humiliation, fright, and pain, with absolutely no guarantee of victory, or even short-term pleasure. Like everyone else, I often wave a white flag, and like most people who want to show up for their own lives, I usually take it down and get back to the business of living. Honest to God, it's a sonofabitch. But when I'm on my deathbed, assuming of course I have the privilege of laying upon one, I'd rather be battered, used up and worn out, than bloated and unscarred.
Goodreads is a haven for people who live within their imaginations, and in many ways there is no sweeter or more rewarding pleasure than doing just exactly that. Which of us who belongs to this site hasn't willingly disappeared into fictional realms, often for days, weeks, months at a time? Who doesn't consider certain characters who are nothing more than ink on paper to be more real than those we meet on the street? Who doesn't use books as a refuge from, and a shield against, the world? But amidst the pleasure we take from this uniquely human power, we must not forget to live. We must not forget to show up for ourselves by putting our bodies into motion, and coming into contact with everything that made us take refuge in the first place.
Over the next week or two, I hope to be able to share some word-pictures of my life on the road, my break from the admittedly curious routines of my everyday existence. I am going to show up for myself and, I hope, for you, too.
This is a good thing. Granted, it's not an easy thing, but it is a good one. I'm getting back into the mainstream publishing world, I moved over 5,000 copies of Wolf Weather, Devils You Know, Sinner's Cross, The Very Dead of Winter, etc. in a couple of weeks, hit #1 on Amazon several times, and I'm soon leaving the country for a well-deserved vacation. My work as an advocate for victims of crime is never easy at any time, but that too has flipped the nitrous oxide switch, and frankly, I'm growing as a result. We always grow when we're tested. And I have always been fascinated by the idea of being tested. Of being pushed. Of actually showing up to this curious mix of horror and wonder that is life. A recent review of The Very Dead of Winter made a penetrating remark which I will share with you now:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state.
I am a writer, and like most writers, tend toward laziness, distraction, procrastination, introversion, and catastrophizing. Writers already have the best possible reason to sit all day, so rationalizing eating Cheetos, drinking beer and watching re-runs of Charmed when we ought to be accomplishing things is not difficult. If we are not careful, our entire lives become a sort of fishbowl experience, in which we live safely and comfortably behind glass, never really going anywhere or accomplishing anything. Covid gave me a concrete-lined rationale for making this line of thought a lifestyle, but in the last few months I have been systematically breaking out of it. It feels good, and it hurts. It's frightening, and it's also exhilarating. Showing up for yourself is always a mixed bag. On the one hand, you know it's what you need to be doing. You know it's the answer to literally all of your problems. On the other hand, the couch is so much more appealing. The television, the box of Triscuits or the bag of weed, the "mobile device" with its endless capacity for scrolling and swiping...tempting. All the time, tempting you to show up for someone else: the corporations who profit from you getting fatter, drunker, sadder, softer, unhealthier than you were before.
I don't believe that there is a resolution to this tension, other than surrender. One can achieve a state of peace by chucking away all dreams, hopes, and ambitions for one's personal, professional, and romantic life, or one can go to war, daily, for one's own interests and risk failure, humiliation, fright, and pain, with absolutely no guarantee of victory, or even short-term pleasure. Like everyone else, I often wave a white flag, and like most people who want to show up for their own lives, I usually take it down and get back to the business of living. Honest to God, it's a sonofabitch. But when I'm on my deathbed, assuming of course I have the privilege of laying upon one, I'd rather be battered, used up and worn out, than bloated and unscarred.
Goodreads is a haven for people who live within their imaginations, and in many ways there is no sweeter or more rewarding pleasure than doing just exactly that. Which of us who belongs to this site hasn't willingly disappeared into fictional realms, often for days, weeks, months at a time? Who doesn't consider certain characters who are nothing more than ink on paper to be more real than those we meet on the street? Who doesn't use books as a refuge from, and a shield against, the world? But amidst the pleasure we take from this uniquely human power, we must not forget to live. We must not forget to show up for ourselves by putting our bodies into motion, and coming into contact with everything that made us take refuge in the first place.
Over the next week or two, I hope to be able to share some word-pictures of my life on the road, my break from the admittedly curious routines of my everyday existence. I am going to show up for myself and, I hope, for you, too.
July 8, 2023
SATURDAY: SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE SOLDIER OF ORANGE
The more I think about it, the less pleased I am that I let a perceived necessity force me into rambling about my political beliefs. I grasp that escape from politics is virtually impossible in the world in which we live, and that it is probably irresponsible to try: that doesn't mean I have to add darkness to the sum of darkness already overflowing this planet. So I would like to finish my Saturday contribution to this blog by steering away from the subject entirely, and get back to the business of rambling about everything else. Specifically a movie I just watched: A SOLDIER OF ORANGE (1977), directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbe.
I found this early effort by the Dutch director, who also helmed ROBOCOP, BASIC INSTINCT, STARSHIP TROOPERS, and TOTALL RECALL, among others, to be a remarkable film in the literal sense. It takes a subject which has been much romanticized and distorted and places it under an uncomfortably close lens: specifically, what life was like for those under Nazi occupation, and the choices those who had to endure it were forced to make.
[Warning, ahead there be spoilers.]
The movie opens in 1938, and follows a group of friends -- six young men and a young woman -- living in The Nethelerlands in the idyllic years before the outbreak of WW2. Rutger Hauer is Erik, a scrappy but socially ambitious fraternity pledge; Krabbe is his suave fraternity president; Alex is the handsome son of German Dutch parents; Robby is the brainy, nervous type, engaged to Susan, who is Jewish and can't choose between him and Erik and sleeps with both; Jan is an aspiring boxer who is also Jewish; and Jacques (Jack) a bland but hard-working student. All of them assume the Netherlands will stay neutral in the coming war, and are shocked when the Germans invade in 1940. Two of the men, Alex and Jan, volunteer to serve in the Dutch army, and are dismayed when the country surrenders to the Germans. It is here and now that their paths begin to diverge.
Erik, Guus, Jan and Robby are all attracted to the amateurish but passionate Dutch resistance movement, but have -- to say the least -- different experiences as a result. Erik's initial encounters, including capture, cause him to abandon his role as a resistance fighter, only to change his mind later and flee to England with Guus, where they are trained by the British to perform spying and commando work. Jan is captured by the Nazis, subjected to torture, and finally executed by firing squad. Robby is captured as well, but turns coat and serves the Germans as a double agent when they threaten Susan with deportation to a concentration camp. Jacques, meanwhile, lives a quiet life as a student, neither collaborating nor resisting. Meanwhile, the war goes on -- for the Dutch population, seemingly without end.
Unlike most movies I have seen on this unpleasant subject, A SOLDIER OF ORANGE does not shy away from the complexities of life under a brutal military occupation. Erik, the titular hero, leaves the Resistance when he gets a taste of Gestapo accomodations, and has to be coaxed back to the cause. Jan, a tough as nails Jew, refuses to break under excruciating torture (look up "salt water rectal rehydration," if you dare) and dies heroically, but in a sense, he is the character with the least amount of choices: collaboration, or even passive co-existence, was never an option. Susan, a Jewess, is simply trying to survive, and overlooks the fact that Robby is now a German spy: at the end of the war she has her head shaved, and her house ranscaked, as punishment for collaboration.
Robby, on the other hand, is sincere and brave, but when caught, has to make a choice between the movement and his girlfriend, and chooses his girlfriend: he pays for this decision with his life, when Guus, realizing he is a traitor, tracks him down and kills him. Guus, brave and devoted though he is, nevertheless seeks life as a spy when service in the British army proves too dirty and disagreeable, and one is tempted to wonder what his final thoughts were, when his tongue is shot with novocaine because his German captors tire of him screaming, and he is dragged to the guillotine to face beheading for killing Robby.
The character of Alex is perhaps the most interesting if one of the least explored. Alex fights the Germans when they invade, but is deeply angry at the treatment meted out to his German parents, and hurt by the coolness with which his freinds regard him, being of German blood. He ends up joining the Waffen-SS as a foreign volunteer, becomes a big hero in Russia, and accidentally reunites with Erik, who he suspects is in the resistance but does not denounce. At a party, the two dance a mock tango while subtly taunting each other over their respective choices: it is an unforgettable scene, at once comic and dramatic, fraught with tension that is almost sexual but also tinged with sadness, as at this point both men are irreconcilable enemies regardless of how they actually feel about one another. (When Erik escapes to England, Alex sends Erik postcards with swastika flags upon them, which Erik hangs on the cockpit of his bomber, promising himself to "drop a bomb on Alex's head.") Alex is ultimately killed in Russia, as much a victim of circumstance as everyone else.
The final character, Jack, is actually the most understandable. Reunited with Erik at the end of the film, he explains how he quietly, patiently worked his way through school to get his degree during the war. He expresses neither embarrassment for his failure to resist the occupation nor the faintest trace of pro-Nazi sentiment. He is simply the ordinary man, neither a fighter nor a collaborationist, neither a coward nor a hero...like the great mass of any people suffering under similar circumstances. And that is what really makes this unususal, sometimes overly facetious movie so unforgettable. It does not present the usual ivory tower, debate-society arguments about good vs. evil and the "duty" of ordinary folk to resist oppression, which are so tedious because they are inevitably asked by university professors or Hollywood producers, neither of which have ever had to make a choice more difficult than "croissant or scone?" in their entire lives. No. It simply presents each of its characters with the brutal question: "The Nazis are at the door. What are you going to do?"
And indeed, SOLDIER OF ORANGE had me asking that question myself. Watching the torture sequences, or the psychological games the Nazis play with their captives -- cooperate and you live and can even prosper, defy us and up your ass goes this hose until your bowels explode -- I had to ask myself whether I would have been able to associate even tangenitally with the resistance movement. And my answer was: most likely, no. I believe I could fight in uniform, under at least the theoretical protections offered to POWs if captured, but not in a situation where torture followed by equally grisly execution were the only alternatives to active collaboration with the enemy. It is simply too much to ask of a human being to make such choices. Robby's capitulation is understandable, as is Susan's deliberate naivete. Likewise, if I were Alex, how hard would I resist the blandishments of the Nazis when my own parents were being mistreated by the Dutch government and its people? Why fight for neighbors who curse your for a spy and a traitor even after you took up arms in their defense?
As I said above, what I enjoyed about the film even more than its perspective was way it provoked thought...and the way it withheld judgment, leaving it up to the audience to decide how to feel about its characters. I also admired it, despite its occasionally clumsy emotional tone, for the way it presented the war as a tragedy in a highly personal sense: these are people who, but for Hitler, would have lived out ordinary lives and remained friends. They were forced into circumstances no one should have to face and make choices nobody should have to make. And this, of course, is the essence of war, a phenomenon I write about but have never experienced. But A SOLDIER OF ORANGE definitely left me with a better understanding of the practical consequences.
I found this early effort by the Dutch director, who also helmed ROBOCOP, BASIC INSTINCT, STARSHIP TROOPERS, and TOTALL RECALL, among others, to be a remarkable film in the literal sense. It takes a subject which has been much romanticized and distorted and places it under an uncomfortably close lens: specifically, what life was like for those under Nazi occupation, and the choices those who had to endure it were forced to make.
[Warning, ahead there be spoilers.]
The movie opens in 1938, and follows a group of friends -- six young men and a young woman -- living in The Nethelerlands in the idyllic years before the outbreak of WW2. Rutger Hauer is Erik, a scrappy but socially ambitious fraternity pledge; Krabbe is his suave fraternity president; Alex is the handsome son of German Dutch parents; Robby is the brainy, nervous type, engaged to Susan, who is Jewish and can't choose between him and Erik and sleeps with both; Jan is an aspiring boxer who is also Jewish; and Jacques (Jack) a bland but hard-working student. All of them assume the Netherlands will stay neutral in the coming war, and are shocked when the Germans invade in 1940. Two of the men, Alex and Jan, volunteer to serve in the Dutch army, and are dismayed when the country surrenders to the Germans. It is here and now that their paths begin to diverge.
Erik, Guus, Jan and Robby are all attracted to the amateurish but passionate Dutch resistance movement, but have -- to say the least -- different experiences as a result. Erik's initial encounters, including capture, cause him to abandon his role as a resistance fighter, only to change his mind later and flee to England with Guus, where they are trained by the British to perform spying and commando work. Jan is captured by the Nazis, subjected to torture, and finally executed by firing squad. Robby is captured as well, but turns coat and serves the Germans as a double agent when they threaten Susan with deportation to a concentration camp. Jacques, meanwhile, lives a quiet life as a student, neither collaborating nor resisting. Meanwhile, the war goes on -- for the Dutch population, seemingly without end.
Unlike most movies I have seen on this unpleasant subject, A SOLDIER OF ORANGE does not shy away from the complexities of life under a brutal military occupation. Erik, the titular hero, leaves the Resistance when he gets a taste of Gestapo accomodations, and has to be coaxed back to the cause. Jan, a tough as nails Jew, refuses to break under excruciating torture (look up "salt water rectal rehydration," if you dare) and dies heroically, but in a sense, he is the character with the least amount of choices: collaboration, or even passive co-existence, was never an option. Susan, a Jewess, is simply trying to survive, and overlooks the fact that Robby is now a German spy: at the end of the war she has her head shaved, and her house ranscaked, as punishment for collaboration.
Robby, on the other hand, is sincere and brave, but when caught, has to make a choice between the movement and his girlfriend, and chooses his girlfriend: he pays for this decision with his life, when Guus, realizing he is a traitor, tracks him down and kills him. Guus, brave and devoted though he is, nevertheless seeks life as a spy when service in the British army proves too dirty and disagreeable, and one is tempted to wonder what his final thoughts were, when his tongue is shot with novocaine because his German captors tire of him screaming, and he is dragged to the guillotine to face beheading for killing Robby.
The character of Alex is perhaps the most interesting if one of the least explored. Alex fights the Germans when they invade, but is deeply angry at the treatment meted out to his German parents, and hurt by the coolness with which his freinds regard him, being of German blood. He ends up joining the Waffen-SS as a foreign volunteer, becomes a big hero in Russia, and accidentally reunites with Erik, who he suspects is in the resistance but does not denounce. At a party, the two dance a mock tango while subtly taunting each other over their respective choices: it is an unforgettable scene, at once comic and dramatic, fraught with tension that is almost sexual but also tinged with sadness, as at this point both men are irreconcilable enemies regardless of how they actually feel about one another. (When Erik escapes to England, Alex sends Erik postcards with swastika flags upon them, which Erik hangs on the cockpit of his bomber, promising himself to "drop a bomb on Alex's head.") Alex is ultimately killed in Russia, as much a victim of circumstance as everyone else.
The final character, Jack, is actually the most understandable. Reunited with Erik at the end of the film, he explains how he quietly, patiently worked his way through school to get his degree during the war. He expresses neither embarrassment for his failure to resist the occupation nor the faintest trace of pro-Nazi sentiment. He is simply the ordinary man, neither a fighter nor a collaborationist, neither a coward nor a hero...like the great mass of any people suffering under similar circumstances. And that is what really makes this unususal, sometimes overly facetious movie so unforgettable. It does not present the usual ivory tower, debate-society arguments about good vs. evil and the "duty" of ordinary folk to resist oppression, which are so tedious because they are inevitably asked by university professors or Hollywood producers, neither of which have ever had to make a choice more difficult than "croissant or scone?" in their entire lives. No. It simply presents each of its characters with the brutal question: "The Nazis are at the door. What are you going to do?"
And indeed, SOLDIER OF ORANGE had me asking that question myself. Watching the torture sequences, or the psychological games the Nazis play with their captives -- cooperate and you live and can even prosper, defy us and up your ass goes this hose until your bowels explode -- I had to ask myself whether I would have been able to associate even tangenitally with the resistance movement. And my answer was: most likely, no. I believe I could fight in uniform, under at least the theoretical protections offered to POWs if captured, but not in a situation where torture followed by equally grisly execution were the only alternatives to active collaboration with the enemy. It is simply too much to ask of a human being to make such choices. Robby's capitulation is understandable, as is Susan's deliberate naivete. Likewise, if I were Alex, how hard would I resist the blandishments of the Nazis when my own parents were being mistreated by the Dutch government and its people? Why fight for neighbors who curse your for a spy and a traitor even after you took up arms in their defense?
As I said above, what I enjoyed about the film even more than its perspective was way it provoked thought...and the way it withheld judgment, leaving it up to the audience to decide how to feel about its characters. I also admired it, despite its occasionally clumsy emotional tone, for the way it presented the war as a tragedy in a highly personal sense: these are people who, but for Hitler, would have lived out ordinary lives and remained friends. They were forced into circumstances no one should have to face and make choices nobody should have to make. And this, of course, is the essence of war, a phenomenon I write about but have never experienced. But A SOLDIER OF ORANGE definitely left me with a better understanding of the practical consequences.
A GO AT THE RIGHT
In Wednesday's blog, I promised I'd "have a go" at the political Right, if only to prove what I have so often claimed in this forum: that I am basically a centrist, with zero devotion to any party. It would be understandable if you thought me a liar in this regard. I so often "have a go" at the Left that you might think me one of those fakers who insists they don't drink anyone's Kool Aid while secretly guzzling the stuff by the gallon. The stark fact is that I rubbish the Left more often than the right out of sheer selfishness: as a writer, and as someone who respects art in all of its mediums and forms, I sense more of a danger from said Left than I do from the Right. I truly believe, and have argued at great length, that it is Wokeism which remains the most imminent threat to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, without which art cannot exist. I am well aware, however, that to many millions of people, the politics of the Right are more threatening and also pose greater immediacy. And regardless of this, I'm also aware that the Right, in its present form, is terribly dangerous to everyone, including its most fervent adherents.
I am fifty years old, which is old enough to remember a very different political landscape. In the 1980s, for example, "Conservative" and "Republican" were not synonymous. The Conservatives were a wing of the Republican party, which also included Moderates and even a hefty proportion of people who identified as Democrats but agreed with the Right on foreign policy and certain other specific issues. (My father, a lifelong journalist who covered the White House for many years, called such people "Truman Democrats.") But regardless of what you called them, they existed, and in great numbers.
The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan had an ideology which was easy to identify. It favored a very tough foreign policy in regards to the Cold War, heavy military spending, and a sharply limited, hands-off Federal government. It was pro-business, anti-regulation, and socially conservative, and in this ideology it had been consistent for decades. It was, however, very much part of the "establishment" of American politics, in that it was effective in neutralizing its more radical elements -- keeping the fanatics and outright nuts in the basement, as it were, where they could not alienate the ordinary voter. It was also very hardheaded and realistic beneath its bluster. Reagan once famously retorted to someone who asked him why, since he didn't believe in abortion, he didn't do more to have it abolished, with the words, "Because I'm not insane." He understood -- the whole leadership understood -- that there were some issues near and dear to Conservatives which, if he pressed them in the legislature, would only lead to his political destruction. Reagan was smart enough to understand that he needed the Reagan Democrats, and could not afford to alienate them. Put another way: he was a politician, and knew how to deliver on his promises when it served his purposes, and to promise without delivering when it was good for him and his party. He had the sense to see there was a sharply drawn line between politics -- "the art of the possible," which require cold calculation and good sense, and ideology, whose chief appeal is that it requires neither.
The resurgence of the Republican Party after Nixon, which led to Reagan's ascendancy, owed a great deal to the fact that they were seen as the tougher and more ruthless of the two choices Americans had at the ballot box. Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was taken out of an unwanted semi-retirement to basically run the United States Navy during WW2, noted that he owed the resurrection of his career to one brutal truth: "When the going gets tough, the send for the sons of bitches." The demise of the Soviet Union and most of its vassal states ended the Cold War, and with it, the need for those Sons of Bitches, the Republicans, who at least knew how to play rough. Bush the First's administration was essentially a momentum presidency, and lasted only a single term, and Bush the Second's presidency, which followed Clinton's tenure, did not really reflect the wishes of the American people. W.'s victory in the first election was questionable at best, and even this outcome was really the result of the fact he ran against an equally unexciting candidate in Al Gore. His re-election was due almost entirely to the fact he was a wartime president, and Americans strongly dislike changing their leaders in mid-conflict. He was never a darling of the Right, being viewed, like so many in the Party, as RINO's, opportunistic con men who really didn't give a damn about ideology, only power, and had long ago surrendered on key policy issues as well as the burgeoning culture war. These people talked the talk, but they did not walk the walk.
And what was the walk? A friend of mine who was active in the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s expressed it thusly: "We want Republicans who will actually DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration, governmental, regulations, abortion, political correctness, taxes, and gun control." This is by no means a comprehensive definition of the movement, but it is probably representative of how many others who supported it felt, and it was astonishingly successful in suddenly and radically reshaping the Republican party's leadership from that of smiling, smooth talking car salesmen into firebrands and idealogues who either believed in what they said or were faking it so well, through their actions, that it didn't make a difference.
And this new Republican party, being born in frustration and anger, made that frustrated anger central to its identity. For this we can largely thank Newt Gingrich, who decided in the late 1970s that the real problem in Washington was civility and compromise. He didn't want Elephants and Donkeys playing basketball together in the Capitol gym, or eating lunch at the Ebbit Grill, or drinking beer in Adams-Morgan, which had always been the custom of these supposed mortal enemies when off-camera (I saw it myself). So throughout his political career, he worked tirelessly to draft a new playbook in which the goal was victory by scorched earth and not a handshake agreement. And he succeeded. The increasing temperature of political rhetoric, and the Republican voters' eagerness -- not willingness, eagerness -- to tolerate that rhetoric, made for a very different atmosphere in American politics. Of course, the Left had been radicalising by degrees for many years, but the Right was radicalizing like a pot of water placed on a burner turned all the way up. The fanatics and crazies who Reagan would have deftly locked in the hold were now threatening to run the ship. The trouble was, they lacked a leader. The Republicans eyeing the office during Obama's tenure were all professional politicians, and no matter how loudly they bleated their commitment to the new Republicanism, they still looked, and felt, like insiders.
Then, along came Donald Trump.
Trump ignited the great mass of deeply frustrated Republicans with his now-infamous "build the wall" speech -- a promise, incidentally, he never delivered upon or even came close to delivering upon. By and large the platform he put forth was incoherent, inconsistent and incomplete, but it hit the right buttons. The Tea Party had identified the source of the discontent: Trump drove a spike directly into its taproot, releasing the pent-up sap of frustration. He quickly grasped that what he was running on was not a policy but emotions and feelings. Some Americans were deeply alienated by "politics as usual" and shifting cultural winds. Many Americans were tired of political correctness. Most Americans were sick of "the Establishment." So Trump threw a harness over the restless bad temper of the masses and rode it into office. And fair play to him for utilizing this energy. It existed for a reason, and the incompetence and neglect of the Right's old leadership was only part of that reason. The Left was doing its absolute best to estrange everyone by increasingly allowing its own culture warriors to dictate both message and policy. The white working class, 75 million strong, used to reside largely in the back pocket of the Democratic Party, who were generally union-friendly. The ceaseless "straight white male bashing," the aggressive environmentalism conducted without suitable propaganda to help ease down the bitter pill to people like coal-miners (whose institutions were being wiped out by change), coupled with a bizarre streak of anti-Americanism -- rather a curious feature of an American political party, nicht wahr? -- drove millions away from their tickets. Their defeat in 2016 was a deserved defeat, all the moreso because they failed to immediately diagnose the cause: their own ideology would not let them accept that what they were cookin', not everyone wanted to eat.
But we are discussing the Right, and while it took the White House in 2016 and for a time held both houses of Congress, too, it showed almost immediately why it was, and is, completely unsuited for power -- why it will always be unsuited to and unworthy of power, so long as it retains its present shape.
The old Right was many things, but it was not intellectually bankrupt. Men like William Safire, George Will, William F. Buckley and even Pat Buchanan were among those who nurtured the intellectual roots of modern conservatism. Who crafted arguments and wrote position papers, speeches, and books in support of conservative and libertarian ideas, and who lent credence to Republican policies.
In addition to its intellectual bedrock, the old Right was also quite efficient -- sometimes brutally efficient -- at maintaining order and discipline within its own ranks. It was efficient because most of its leadership understood how to wield the power they had, and how to compromise when that power was lacking. And because it respected tradition, because it respected decorum, it was able to restrain some of its own worst impulses toward the acquisition of power. Even someone as dimwitted and morally compromised as George W. Bush grasped that the president was not a king, and should not want to be a king, even though, in the modern era, there is very little preventing any president from effectively becoming so.
It is hardly a coincidence that the entire intellectual wing of the Republican Party went into revolt the moment Trump emerged as frontrunner for the nomination: indeed, almost the whole of the Never Trump movement is made up of intellectual Republicans. They knew brain death when they saw it, and they judged -- correctly -- that in addition to being almost incredibly uninformed and ignorant about everything a president needed to know to govern effectively, or even to qualify as a human being, Trump was also completely unteachable. His party was to be a party of anti-intellectualism, in which science was laughed at, critical thinking was abolished and "expert" became a dirty word (unless of course it was Trump claiming the expertise). And it is this culture rather than Trump's own semi-willful stupidity that makes it so dangerous. To gain traction in the party nowadays, it is necessary to emulate Trump, and to emulate Trump, one must either hide one's intellectual capacity or lack any to begin with. Politicians on the Right are judged solely by the intensity of their rhetoric and unwillingness to compromise, not by their brains. In the technological age, such a stance is ruinous.
Another feature of the modern Right is its astonishing incompetence. This is a result of both the innate corruption which emanates from Trump himself (itself just the apotheosis of the besetting sin of Republicanism: blind greed), and the fact that like all autocratic personalities, he is jealous and insecure and cannot abide strong, independent, capable subordinates. Mediocrity is threatened by genius, and Trump, who must be the strongest and smartest in the room, crushed, drove from the ranks, or suborned anyone in the leadership who could think for himself. The cult of anti-intellectualism at the core of the new party favors cringing, servile, boot-lickers who must simultaneously demonstrate their loyalty to Trump at all times, yet remain sufficiently unthreatening to him to remain in his good graces. This is not a recipe for effective leadership, especially since Trump cannot abide criticism, even well-intentioned criticism, which to him is indistinguishable from attack. This means course-correction is impossible. Anyone who watched the election of Kevin McCarthy to the speakership bore witness to a party unable to govern itself, much less a country. It is worth noting that Trump lost the house, the senate, and then the presidency, all in the space of four years, a feat of ineptitude unequaled in American history, and one which is a direct result of Trump creating an intellectual desert at the top of his party.
The second most fatal of the fatal flaws of the new Right is, of course, its moral bankruptcy. This is peculiar because the Right generally claims to be the stronghold of "traditional family values" and there is some substance to the argument that it has in fact been just that. Republicanism is by its nature literally conservative, conservative meaning a dislike of change and a reverence for the past, and there is great strength in such a position, especially during an era when America is plainly fragmenting and in decline. But modern Republicanism is a reflection of Trump himself, and Trump's outstanding characteristics are his selfishness, his cruelty, his contempt for the truth, his greed, his need for attention, his and his complete lack of anything resembling ethics, morals or scruples. Trump has normalized behaviors which the party of Reagan would have rightfully abominated, and it is no use to say that all politicians are equally sleazy with the shades pulled down: paying homage to tradition, civility, established norms of behavior and standards of common decency, even if they this is entirely pro forma and constitutes nothing more than lip service and pantomime, are crucial behaviors in public officials. They are crucial because they set the tone for the rest of the country. Leaders lead not by their words but by example. Trump's behavior has consistently been petty, vulgar, mean-spirited, vindictive, and completely lacking in any kind of self-awareness. He is frightening not because he has these qualities himself but because he has normalized them, and encouraged and empowered millions of others to do as he does. The phrases "post-truth world" and "alternative facts" are outgrowths of Trump's own view of life, which regards objective truth as whatever he needs it or wants it to be.
You will notice at this point that I am scarcely distinguishing between The Right and Trump himself. This is intentional. They are impossible to separate at this juncture of history. And this is especially important because it brings us to the final, fatal, disqualifying flaw: the lust for power for its own sake, and the desire to keep it all costs, even if it means annihilating cultural norms, American traditions, and the law itself.
The new Right, post-Trump, has had a taste of what real power, unfettered by democratic checks and balances, is actually like. They found it intoxicating and the saliva running from the jaws of men like Ron De Santis is quite terrifying to witness. They see in Trump a crude blueprint for how to transition the presidential swearing-in ceremony to a coronation, whereby the president becomes king in everything but name, above the law, able to rule more or less by fiat. I am not quite sure whether the new Right is in effect a monarchist party at heart, or whether they prefer a kind of Christian nationalism of the sort Spain experienced when Franco took power, or whether the ultimate goal is a harder fascism of the Mussolini type, which openly made the state the tool of corporate power. What I am sure of is that they have deliberately attacked the foundations of democracy for years and continue to do so with brutal vigor. This is not a party dedicated to saving America, as they claim, but to destroying America and recreating it in the image of Putin's Russia.
By this time, if you lean to the Right politically, you have either walked away in disgust or are deeply offended. And of course this is why I dislike talking about politics in the first place. I cannot open my mouth about either group without alienating people, including people who might otherwise be interested in my work. But the fact remains that we do live in a political age, and it is naive in the extreme to believe that we can ignore the harsh reality that both the choices we have in this country are bad ones, because both parties in question have allowed the nutters and mental defectives, the con men and grifters, out of their asylums and prisons and let them grasp the levers of power. It would be irresponsible and cowardly for me to pretend that I don't see a threat in this, and since I regularly "have a go" at the Left I felt incumbent to stick that same dagger in the soft white underbelly of the Right. I do this without feelings of rancor to those who identify with Right-wing politics: as James O'Brien says, "Contempt for the con man, compassion for the conned."
George Orwell once lamented that religion and international socialism proved to be "as weak as straw" against the flame of fascism. He was within his rights to make this complaint, because he understood that a large segment of the human population is disinterested by nature in what the Left has to offer them. I understand these people because I used to be one of them, and in some ways remain so: I will always be vulnerable to simple answers to complex questions, to appeals to nationalistic fervor, to those who stoke fear and nurse dislike of change. I will always have a deep reverence for my country's past, even when I know that past has many dark chapters, and harbor a belief that things were "better back when." Beyond that, I understand that the Right is in fact right on some issues, and that the Left is wrong on quite a few indeed. But I'm not blind to what the Republican party has become, or to its ultimate goals, which are un-American and antidemocratic. If the Right cannot come back to sanity and integrity, if this malarial fever called Trumpism is a permanent condition, that it has forfeited not only my vote, but my respect. Forever.
I am fifty years old, which is old enough to remember a very different political landscape. In the 1980s, for example, "Conservative" and "Republican" were not synonymous. The Conservatives were a wing of the Republican party, which also included Moderates and even a hefty proportion of people who identified as Democrats but agreed with the Right on foreign policy and certain other specific issues. (My father, a lifelong journalist who covered the White House for many years, called such people "Truman Democrats.") But regardless of what you called them, they existed, and in great numbers.
The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan had an ideology which was easy to identify. It favored a very tough foreign policy in regards to the Cold War, heavy military spending, and a sharply limited, hands-off Federal government. It was pro-business, anti-regulation, and socially conservative, and in this ideology it had been consistent for decades. It was, however, very much part of the "establishment" of American politics, in that it was effective in neutralizing its more radical elements -- keeping the fanatics and outright nuts in the basement, as it were, where they could not alienate the ordinary voter. It was also very hardheaded and realistic beneath its bluster. Reagan once famously retorted to someone who asked him why, since he didn't believe in abortion, he didn't do more to have it abolished, with the words, "Because I'm not insane." He understood -- the whole leadership understood -- that there were some issues near and dear to Conservatives which, if he pressed them in the legislature, would only lead to his political destruction. Reagan was smart enough to understand that he needed the Reagan Democrats, and could not afford to alienate them. Put another way: he was a politician, and knew how to deliver on his promises when it served his purposes, and to promise without delivering when it was good for him and his party. He had the sense to see there was a sharply drawn line between politics -- "the art of the possible," which require cold calculation and good sense, and ideology, whose chief appeal is that it requires neither.
The resurgence of the Republican Party after Nixon, which led to Reagan's ascendancy, owed a great deal to the fact that they were seen as the tougher and more ruthless of the two choices Americans had at the ballot box. Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was taken out of an unwanted semi-retirement to basically run the United States Navy during WW2, noted that he owed the resurrection of his career to one brutal truth: "When the going gets tough, the send for the sons of bitches." The demise of the Soviet Union and most of its vassal states ended the Cold War, and with it, the need for those Sons of Bitches, the Republicans, who at least knew how to play rough. Bush the First's administration was essentially a momentum presidency, and lasted only a single term, and Bush the Second's presidency, which followed Clinton's tenure, did not really reflect the wishes of the American people. W.'s victory in the first election was questionable at best, and even this outcome was really the result of the fact he ran against an equally unexciting candidate in Al Gore. His re-election was due almost entirely to the fact he was a wartime president, and Americans strongly dislike changing their leaders in mid-conflict. He was never a darling of the Right, being viewed, like so many in the Party, as RINO's, opportunistic con men who really didn't give a damn about ideology, only power, and had long ago surrendered on key policy issues as well as the burgeoning culture war. These people talked the talk, but they did not walk the walk.
And what was the walk? A friend of mine who was active in the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s expressed it thusly: "We want Republicans who will actually DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration, governmental, regulations, abortion, political correctness, taxes, and gun control." This is by no means a comprehensive definition of the movement, but it is probably representative of how many others who supported it felt, and it was astonishingly successful in suddenly and radically reshaping the Republican party's leadership from that of smiling, smooth talking car salesmen into firebrands and idealogues who either believed in what they said or were faking it so well, through their actions, that it didn't make a difference.
And this new Republican party, being born in frustration and anger, made that frustrated anger central to its identity. For this we can largely thank Newt Gingrich, who decided in the late 1970s that the real problem in Washington was civility and compromise. He didn't want Elephants and Donkeys playing basketball together in the Capitol gym, or eating lunch at the Ebbit Grill, or drinking beer in Adams-Morgan, which had always been the custom of these supposed mortal enemies when off-camera (I saw it myself). So throughout his political career, he worked tirelessly to draft a new playbook in which the goal was victory by scorched earth and not a handshake agreement. And he succeeded. The increasing temperature of political rhetoric, and the Republican voters' eagerness -- not willingness, eagerness -- to tolerate that rhetoric, made for a very different atmosphere in American politics. Of course, the Left had been radicalising by degrees for many years, but the Right was radicalizing like a pot of water placed on a burner turned all the way up. The fanatics and crazies who Reagan would have deftly locked in the hold were now threatening to run the ship. The trouble was, they lacked a leader. The Republicans eyeing the office during Obama's tenure were all professional politicians, and no matter how loudly they bleated their commitment to the new Republicanism, they still looked, and felt, like insiders.
Then, along came Donald Trump.
Trump ignited the great mass of deeply frustrated Republicans with his now-infamous "build the wall" speech -- a promise, incidentally, he never delivered upon or even came close to delivering upon. By and large the platform he put forth was incoherent, inconsistent and incomplete, but it hit the right buttons. The Tea Party had identified the source of the discontent: Trump drove a spike directly into its taproot, releasing the pent-up sap of frustration. He quickly grasped that what he was running on was not a policy but emotions and feelings. Some Americans were deeply alienated by "politics as usual" and shifting cultural winds. Many Americans were tired of political correctness. Most Americans were sick of "the Establishment." So Trump threw a harness over the restless bad temper of the masses and rode it into office. And fair play to him for utilizing this energy. It existed for a reason, and the incompetence and neglect of the Right's old leadership was only part of that reason. The Left was doing its absolute best to estrange everyone by increasingly allowing its own culture warriors to dictate both message and policy. The white working class, 75 million strong, used to reside largely in the back pocket of the Democratic Party, who were generally union-friendly. The ceaseless "straight white male bashing," the aggressive environmentalism conducted without suitable propaganda to help ease down the bitter pill to people like coal-miners (whose institutions were being wiped out by change), coupled with a bizarre streak of anti-Americanism -- rather a curious feature of an American political party, nicht wahr? -- drove millions away from their tickets. Their defeat in 2016 was a deserved defeat, all the moreso because they failed to immediately diagnose the cause: their own ideology would not let them accept that what they were cookin', not everyone wanted to eat.
But we are discussing the Right, and while it took the White House in 2016 and for a time held both houses of Congress, too, it showed almost immediately why it was, and is, completely unsuited for power -- why it will always be unsuited to and unworthy of power, so long as it retains its present shape.
The old Right was many things, but it was not intellectually bankrupt. Men like William Safire, George Will, William F. Buckley and even Pat Buchanan were among those who nurtured the intellectual roots of modern conservatism. Who crafted arguments and wrote position papers, speeches, and books in support of conservative and libertarian ideas, and who lent credence to Republican policies.
In addition to its intellectual bedrock, the old Right was also quite efficient -- sometimes brutally efficient -- at maintaining order and discipline within its own ranks. It was efficient because most of its leadership understood how to wield the power they had, and how to compromise when that power was lacking. And because it respected tradition, because it respected decorum, it was able to restrain some of its own worst impulses toward the acquisition of power. Even someone as dimwitted and morally compromised as George W. Bush grasped that the president was not a king, and should not want to be a king, even though, in the modern era, there is very little preventing any president from effectively becoming so.
It is hardly a coincidence that the entire intellectual wing of the Republican Party went into revolt the moment Trump emerged as frontrunner for the nomination: indeed, almost the whole of the Never Trump movement is made up of intellectual Republicans. They knew brain death when they saw it, and they judged -- correctly -- that in addition to being almost incredibly uninformed and ignorant about everything a president needed to know to govern effectively, or even to qualify as a human being, Trump was also completely unteachable. His party was to be a party of anti-intellectualism, in which science was laughed at, critical thinking was abolished and "expert" became a dirty word (unless of course it was Trump claiming the expertise). And it is this culture rather than Trump's own semi-willful stupidity that makes it so dangerous. To gain traction in the party nowadays, it is necessary to emulate Trump, and to emulate Trump, one must either hide one's intellectual capacity or lack any to begin with. Politicians on the Right are judged solely by the intensity of their rhetoric and unwillingness to compromise, not by their brains. In the technological age, such a stance is ruinous.
Another feature of the modern Right is its astonishing incompetence. This is a result of both the innate corruption which emanates from Trump himself (itself just the apotheosis of the besetting sin of Republicanism: blind greed), and the fact that like all autocratic personalities, he is jealous and insecure and cannot abide strong, independent, capable subordinates. Mediocrity is threatened by genius, and Trump, who must be the strongest and smartest in the room, crushed, drove from the ranks, or suborned anyone in the leadership who could think for himself. The cult of anti-intellectualism at the core of the new party favors cringing, servile, boot-lickers who must simultaneously demonstrate their loyalty to Trump at all times, yet remain sufficiently unthreatening to him to remain in his good graces. This is not a recipe for effective leadership, especially since Trump cannot abide criticism, even well-intentioned criticism, which to him is indistinguishable from attack. This means course-correction is impossible. Anyone who watched the election of Kevin McCarthy to the speakership bore witness to a party unable to govern itself, much less a country. It is worth noting that Trump lost the house, the senate, and then the presidency, all in the space of four years, a feat of ineptitude unequaled in American history, and one which is a direct result of Trump creating an intellectual desert at the top of his party.
The second most fatal of the fatal flaws of the new Right is, of course, its moral bankruptcy. This is peculiar because the Right generally claims to be the stronghold of "traditional family values" and there is some substance to the argument that it has in fact been just that. Republicanism is by its nature literally conservative, conservative meaning a dislike of change and a reverence for the past, and there is great strength in such a position, especially during an era when America is plainly fragmenting and in decline. But modern Republicanism is a reflection of Trump himself, and Trump's outstanding characteristics are his selfishness, his cruelty, his contempt for the truth, his greed, his need for attention, his and his complete lack of anything resembling ethics, morals or scruples. Trump has normalized behaviors which the party of Reagan would have rightfully abominated, and it is no use to say that all politicians are equally sleazy with the shades pulled down: paying homage to tradition, civility, established norms of behavior and standards of common decency, even if they this is entirely pro forma and constitutes nothing more than lip service and pantomime, are crucial behaviors in public officials. They are crucial because they set the tone for the rest of the country. Leaders lead not by their words but by example. Trump's behavior has consistently been petty, vulgar, mean-spirited, vindictive, and completely lacking in any kind of self-awareness. He is frightening not because he has these qualities himself but because he has normalized them, and encouraged and empowered millions of others to do as he does. The phrases "post-truth world" and "alternative facts" are outgrowths of Trump's own view of life, which regards objective truth as whatever he needs it or wants it to be.
You will notice at this point that I am scarcely distinguishing between The Right and Trump himself. This is intentional. They are impossible to separate at this juncture of history. And this is especially important because it brings us to the final, fatal, disqualifying flaw: the lust for power for its own sake, and the desire to keep it all costs, even if it means annihilating cultural norms, American traditions, and the law itself.
The new Right, post-Trump, has had a taste of what real power, unfettered by democratic checks and balances, is actually like. They found it intoxicating and the saliva running from the jaws of men like Ron De Santis is quite terrifying to witness. They see in Trump a crude blueprint for how to transition the presidential swearing-in ceremony to a coronation, whereby the president becomes king in everything but name, above the law, able to rule more or less by fiat. I am not quite sure whether the new Right is in effect a monarchist party at heart, or whether they prefer a kind of Christian nationalism of the sort Spain experienced when Franco took power, or whether the ultimate goal is a harder fascism of the Mussolini type, which openly made the state the tool of corporate power. What I am sure of is that they have deliberately attacked the foundations of democracy for years and continue to do so with brutal vigor. This is not a party dedicated to saving America, as they claim, but to destroying America and recreating it in the image of Putin's Russia.
By this time, if you lean to the Right politically, you have either walked away in disgust or are deeply offended. And of course this is why I dislike talking about politics in the first place. I cannot open my mouth about either group without alienating people, including people who might otherwise be interested in my work. But the fact remains that we do live in a political age, and it is naive in the extreme to believe that we can ignore the harsh reality that both the choices we have in this country are bad ones, because both parties in question have allowed the nutters and mental defectives, the con men and grifters, out of their asylums and prisons and let them grasp the levers of power. It would be irresponsible and cowardly for me to pretend that I don't see a threat in this, and since I regularly "have a go" at the Left I felt incumbent to stick that same dagger in the soft white underbelly of the Right. I do this without feelings of rancor to those who identify with Right-wing politics: as James O'Brien says, "Contempt for the con man, compassion for the conned."
George Orwell once lamented that religion and international socialism proved to be "as weak as straw" against the flame of fascism. He was within his rights to make this complaint, because he understood that a large segment of the human population is disinterested by nature in what the Left has to offer them. I understand these people because I used to be one of them, and in some ways remain so: I will always be vulnerable to simple answers to complex questions, to appeals to nationalistic fervor, to those who stoke fear and nurse dislike of change. I will always have a deep reverence for my country's past, even when I know that past has many dark chapters, and harbor a belief that things were "better back when." Beyond that, I understand that the Right is in fact right on some issues, and that the Left is wrong on quite a few indeed. But I'm not blind to what the Republican party has become, or to its ultimate goals, which are un-American and antidemocratic. If the Right cannot come back to sanity and integrity, if this malarial fever called Trumpism is a permanent condition, that it has forfeited not only my vote, but my respect. Forever.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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