Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 22

ALL THE WAY UP: THOUGHTS ON A LIFE LIVED COMPLETE

Cohn: I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
Jake: Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

William Smith died the other day. His passing got a little ink, literal and figurative, but largely went unnoticed and uncommented upon. This is the way of celebrity, especially in Hollywood, where fame burns down to quickly-forgetten ashes; but it is even more harshly true of those in the business who are not famous, merely familiar.

You know who I'm talking about – sort of, anyway: Those actors whose names you don't know, but who seem to turn up everywhere: television shows, commercials, classic films and others not-so-classic. Except perhaps in some long-forgotten youth, they are never the stars, but move around them in either friendly or antagonistic orbits. They play bad guys, crusty homicide detectives, curmudgeonly or doting dads, stern judges, old friends, kindly uncles, buffonish politicians, shrewd reporters, irascible neighbors, mediocre generals, long-suffering bosses. There is seldom glory in their roles: if they aren't being shot dead or beaten up, they are quite frequently the butt of insults and ridicule, and when they play a good guy (or gal), they are always to the left or the right of the hero, never in the center of the frame. They carry his coat, reload his gun, jump in front of the bullet meant for his body. They wash out his mouthpiece or sign his check or light his cigar and tell him he (or she) done good.

The catch-all term for this sort of thespian is “character actor.” The term doesn't make any sense, since every actor is playing a character...but never mind that. My point is merely that character actors may make a living, even a very good living, and end up with their name in hundreds of credits and even some legendary moments in cinematic and television history; but somehow no one ever seems to know, or even care, much less recall, what their names are when they walk off the stage for the last time. I suppose there is an implication in the shortness of our memory and the disrespect that underlies it: that somehow these folks, despite all of their success, aren't really worthy of serious attention. They aren't sexy, glamorous, charismatic, or even terribly interesting – not compared to the stars, anyway. They're just there, reliably, like an old pair of boots.

I myself have always had a fascination with character actors. Even as a small child I loved the way they kept turning up in the re-runs of my youth, so familiar and yet so unknown. I noted that some tended to play a type of character while others were more diverse in their appearances. I noted as well that some were better actors or had more presence than others. But I liked and respected them all. There was one, however, who caused me more fear and awe than he did affection, and his name, I eventually learned, was William B. Smith.

Smith was perfectly engineered by nature to play bad guys. He was huge and heavily muscled, with a savage-looking face and a hoarse, growling, rusty voice; and his eyes looked as black as the devil's. There were times when he would smile at the protagonist of a movie or a TV show and it was like the smile of death, if death also happened to be a sadistic psychopath. When I was growing up, William Smith turned up everywhere, and sometimes I wondered what he was like in real life: an arrogant thug, like the characters he usually played? A tough, tactiturn professional, like Charles Bronson? A slow-witted trouper, not villainous but not so terribly bright, either?

When I took it upon myself to learn more about the life of William Smith, at first I could not actually believe what I was reading. It sounded so much like a badly-drawn hero in a badly-written movie that I had to double and triple-check my sources before I came to believe what I was reading. No human, or at any rate very few humans, could crowd so many accomplishments into the 88 years they spent turning oxygen into carbon dioxide as did this man: off the top of my head (among actors anyway) only the late Sir Christopher Lee comes to mind as a life as fully realized as Smith's was. He was not a bull-fighter, but he was damned near everything else you can think of, and contrary to what poor pathetic Jake says in THE SUN ALSO RISES, he did live life all the way up. And then some.

Most of the following information comes directly from Smith's website, but I have taken some pains to verify it, at least as much as time has permitted. Even with the occasional possible error, however, it is a staggering record of achievement, something to both humble and inspire. I do not think Smith would be offended by my plagiaristic reworking of his biography here:

Smith was born in 1933 on a ranch in Missouri. He learned to ride “almost before he could walk” and his knowledge of horseflesh was to come very much in handy in later life. When his family moved to Southern California, he ended up as a studio extra in movies like “The Ghost of Frankenstein” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He was too young to serve in WW2, but enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. It is unknown if his affinity for languages was discovered there or earlier in his schooling, but he achieved fluency in five languages, including Russian, German, French and Serbo-Croatian. He was recruited by the fledging National Security Agency (NSA), and during the Korean War, he flew secret surveillance-gathering missions over Communist-bloc nations.

After military life, Smith “continued the education he began while in the service, studying at Syracuse University, the University of Munich, the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally at UCLA where he graduated Cum Laude with a Master’s degree and worked toward a Doctorate. Bill would also later teach at UCLA.” He was not, however, merely a bloodless, ivory-tower intellectual. He was Air Force Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion, a champion discus thrower at UCLA, and a two-time 200-lb. World Arm Wrestling Champion. He was also an outstanding bodybuilder (more about that later). While living in California he volunteered as a firefighter, specializing in battling SoCal's notoriously dangerous and violent wildfires.

Smith was working toward a doctorate when he was re-discovered by Hollywood. During this early period of his acting career he was busy on many TV series, including classics like “Perry Mason” and “The Mod Squad” (and camp-classics like “Batman”), but was also very popular in Westerns, appearing in “Daniel Boone,” “Wagon Train,” “The Virginian,” and “Gunsmoke.” In 1965, he secured a starring role on “Laredo.”

During the 1970s, he transitioned from playing cowboys to playing bikers, appearing in a staggering eleven motorcycle movies, generally as a gang leader. Throughout that decade and all through the 80s he was a much-demanded bad guy on TV, appearing on “Kung Fu,” “Columbo,” “Mission Impossible,” “Ironside,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Rockford Files,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” “Police Story,” “Logan’s Run,” “Vegas,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Simon & Simon,” “Buck Rogers” and “The A Team.” He was also a regular on “Hawaii Five-O” in its final season. In 1982 he had a memorable role in CONAN THE BARBARIAN as Conan's intimidating but thoughtful father, who teaches Conan the “Riddle of Steel.” (For my money, this enigmatic speech is one of my favorite moments in cinematic history.) Other classics/notorious films in which he made his presence felt were “Any Which Way You Can,” “Red Dawn,” “Rumblefish,” “The Outsiders,” and the cult-classic “Maniac Cop.”



Smith's visible toughness was backed up by his physical prowess as an athlete. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was a black belt in Kung Fu and Karate both, and “among his outstanding feats of strength are strict reverse curl of his own body weight and 5,100 continuous sit ups.” He appeared as a cover model for numerous bodybuilding magazines. Among his various accolades:

A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Bodybuilding and Fitness (1995)
Honorary Member, Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures (2000)
Golden Boot Award in 2003 (for his contributions to the Western genre)
Southern California Motion Picture Council Award in 2005
Silver Spur Award in 2008 (again, for his contributions to Westerns)
Muscle Beach Venice Bodybuilding Hall of Fame in May (2010)

I think this would be enough for any man, but not for William Smith. Because for all the muscles, the martial arts, the growling villain roles, behind even his obviously powerful intellect, lay the soul of a literal poet. Smith composed poetry for much of his life, which he published in a volume rather prosaically entitled THE POETIC WORKS OF WILLIAM SMITH: THE WORDS AND IMAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND.

I do not yet own this book (gimme time) but I was able to peruse a sampling of his poetry via his website. Two of them struck me with particular force. The first, “Ode to a Mirror,” for its brilliant point of view: that of the mirror and not the people who gaze into it:

I know a thousand faces that don’t know me
I have seen ’em all, sad and gay, caged and free
Blue, moist eyes crying and yearning for love
Brazen, black ones glaring coldly above
Selfish, evil souls have rehearsed before me
Revealing their greedy plots to me only
So many times I’ve tried to reach out
To aide and soothe those riddled with doubt
There were those who thought they had it all
Sad, puny wretches with hearts so small
And then those poor bastards who were driven
Hoping that their sins would be forgiven
They’d cry and weep ’bout their lonely past
Swearing that their lives were pure and chaste
Yet only to themselves do they lie
And only by themselves will they die
But when out of rage they shatter me
My crumbling pieces shall set me free
Never more will I mirror their sniveling frailty
For my shards mean not seven years, but eternity

The second, “The Reaper,” affected me because I know that Smith, who shot his first movie around 1942, and his last in 2020, had thought a great deal about the decline of his body, the death of old friends, and what it meant to be in the final act of his life. In this poem he examines perhaps his own attitude toward impending doom, at once sad and cynical and jauntily defiant:

I remember when my friends and I
Thought that youth and games would never die
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
Ribald at night, meek mornings after
But now malt’s too strong and girls too young
All our stories old, our song’s been sung
We mumble in search of long dead wit
Humor now is the daily obit
Our high is sharing a friend’s demise
He was a fine lad, echo our lies
While we gloat that it’s him not me
Knowing that they always fall by three
Wallowing secure ’cause Sam was third
Surely there’s time ’fore my taps are heard
Then there’s news of the death of old Hugh
Well, hell, that clown never paid his due
Nights alone you feel the Reaper’s chill
Then at dawn there’s a fine, undead thrill
Check pulse, poke liver, no pain, no fear
Hit the bars ’cause he’s dead, you’re still here
No canes or taxis for you today
On this fine and smogless first of May
Jauntily out the door to the street
Gaily you greet all those that you meet
Then as you stroll you think of old Hugh
The wind sighs, “He was younger than you”
As a maverick tear rolls from your eye
You know you gotta laugh instead of cry
You’ve done some bad and you’ve done some good
You wouldn’t change things even if you could
’Cause through the years you’ve run a good race
The Reaper chased and couldn’t keep your pace
So toast those that live and those that die
And while you can, spit in the Reaper’s eye.

Smith passed away, fittingly, in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital on July 5, 2021. I imagine that his body, laid into a casket or committed to flames, was completely exhausted, worn out, used up – not by age, but by the sheer wear and tear of living life all the way up. And never mind the goddamned bullfights.

GUNS, BRIDGES AND LIES: THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI VS. THE GUNS OF NAVARONE

Reality, to some degree, lies in our perception of reality. We may act on false information or even a false world-view, but those actions are real, and so are their consequences. A man who believes his wife is betraying him may be merely paranoid or delusional, but if he shoots his wife as a result of these feelings, his paranoid delusions have led to a very real and tragic outcome.

This maxim applies equally to history. Our perception of it may be entirely wrong, but if we cling tightly enough to that perception, whatever lessons and morals, whatever strength, pride and identity we draw from our history becomes real in the sense that it colors who we are and how we proceed forward into the future.

I have recently had occasion to contrast two famous works of literature which became even more famous films: THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (a 1952 novel which became a 1957 movie), and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (a 1957 novel which was adapted into a movie in 1961). In reading these books and watching these films again, I have been reminded quite jarringly of the way the Second World War has been depicted by those in the former Allied countries versus the way it actually unfolded. In other words, the Anglo-American perception of the war as it is depicted in popular culture vs. what roughly might be described as "the truth." More interestingly, I have been reminded that the Anglo-American viewpoint is hardly the only one and that "the truth" tends to change when the nationality of the writer in question shifts to a country whose experiences with war, and hence their own self-perception, are different.

To begin with, let us look at THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, first as a novel and then as a film.

The novel was written -- this is very important -- by a Frenchman named Pierre Boulle. Eventually translated into English, it became a massive bestseller and has never gone out of print. Comparatively few people have read it, however, as opposed to seeing the epic, Oscar-winning film directed by David Lean, and they might be shocked to see how different the two pieces of work are, most especially in terms of their endings.

The story of KWAI is simple. During WW2, a group of British prisoners-of-war are forced by their sadistic Japanese captors to build a railway bridge over the Kwai river in Siam. The British officer in charge, Colonel Nicholson, initially refuses to cooperate because he doesn't like the way his officers and men are being treated, but proves immune to the threats, beatings and forced starvation inflicted upon him by his captor Colonel Saito. Under pressure from his superiors to finish the bridge on time, Saito eventually capitulates and allows Nicholson to more or less run the project himself any way he wishes. However, in achieving this victory, Nicholson becomes obsessed with the completion of the bridge, quite forgetting in his focused madness that it will be used to ferry Japanese troops and supplies for the conquest of Burma, i.e. to help the Axis win the war.
Meanwhile, a three-man team of British commandos has been tasked to infiltrate the area and blow up the bridge. The startling climax of the book sees Nicholson thwart the attack to save his beloved bridge, which suffers only modest damage. To make matters worse, two of the three commandos die (one at the hands of Nicholson himself) and the surviving Britisher returns to Calcutta a traumatized man, realizing that he failed his mission because he "killed the wrong colonel."

The novel KWAI is full of fascinating cultural criticism and subtext which has no place in this discussion, but its ironic outcome -- the bridge still intact, most of the characters dead, nothing really gained, and few lessons learned -- reflects in some senses the brutal experiences suffered by its author during WW2. Boulle fought with the Free French forces in Indochina and the Resistance in Vichy France and was himself made a slave laborer. He understood what it was like to be part of a defeated nation and to be put to work like a mule to serve the needs of his foreign conquerors. He also understood that war is fought on a psychological and moral plane as much as it is fought with explosives and bombs. Some of the most devastating passages of the novel occur when Joyce, the youngest of the commandos and the most inexperienced, tries to work himself up into slitting a Japanese soldier's throat with his killing knife but finds himself unwilling to do so, because the act is simply too horrible to contemplate. * Finally, he grasped that the level of righteousness of a cause has nothing to do with whether the cause itself will be successful, and that one can draw morals -- perhaps the most important morals -- from battles lost.

Lean's epic adaptation of KWAI is quite a different picture. For starters, one of the British commandos, Shears, is now American, following the somewhat egocentric impulse of this nation to insist nothing good could happen in that war unless we were a part of it. The crucial difference, comes at the end of the story. Colonel Nicholson initially frustrates the destruction of the bridge, but at the last moment, as a Japanese troop train is chugging across the span, has a sudden moment of clarity. Summoning all his dignity, he marches to the plunger which will detonate the bridge, is hit by mortar fire, and falls dead on upon said plunger, blowing the bridge and the train to pieces.

Hollywood's interpretation of KWAI, one which ended with both a satisfying explosion and a moment of redemption for Nicholson, does not make the movie less satisfying than the book; indeed, it arguably makes it far more satisfying. But it robs the film of some of its inborn moral power and certainly of Boulle's intent, which was among other things to demonstrate the ironic, often futile nature of military and even human endeavours. It also falls much more squarely with the Anglo-American perception of our conduct during the war. In the novel, Nicholson dies seemingly without having grasped the magnitude of his treason, or even that he committed treason at all; in the film, he grasps it fully and dies the appropriately heroic-tragic death. This ending is entirely in keeping with the Kiplingesque tradition which fires his character in the novel, but which Boulle also explicitly ridicules through the voice of the surviving commando, Warden. Boulle's message has been skillfully adjusted to suit the perception audiences had of the war: things might have gone sideways here and there, and war itself might be madness, but in the end, British grit and American know-how (do I have that backwards?) always prevailed.

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE -- both novel and film -- are quite different kettles of fish from the atmospheric and thoughtful KWAI. Alistair Maclean, the author of GUNS, was likewise a veteran of WW2, but his combat experiences were at sea and quite divorced from the works for which he is most famous. As a writer, too, he was not in Boulle's league: while talented, he was something of a hack and his pulpish style -- violent, vapid and two-dimensional -- did not win him much admiration from critics. However, he did not lack for imagination in a derivitive sort of way, and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE reflects this.

In the story, a small team of Allied commandos -- British, American and Greek -- are tasked with destroying a mighty German gun emplacement on the island of Navarone in mid-late 1943. Failure to take out the guns will result in the slaughter of a British naval task force which is trying to evacuate 1,200 British soldiers from a Mediterranean island, as well as the trapped garrison itself. The commandos must evade German capture, contact the Greek resistance, and nose-out a traitor in their own ranks before infiltrating the massive gun emplacement, blowing up the guns, and making their escape.

This brief description is not meant to be dismissive. It's merely that unlike Boulle, Maclean was not really capable of either subtext or deeper characterization in his stories: the fact that this simple action novel is reputed to have "his most well-drawn characters" is rather more an indictment than a compliment. In his defense, however, Maclean was not trying to dive into the human condition or make profound statements about life, humanity or war. He was simply an author of page-turning potboilers, who understood that his audience wanted plenty of action, delivered by protagonists who were fearless, invincible and always three steps ahead of the enemy. In that regard he knew exactly what he was doing... which is why Hollywood rather fell in love with him, especially when his stories were set in the Second World War.

There is no great need to try and note the differences between Maclean's novel and J. Lee Thompson's adaptation of it for the screen, because far from possessing the differences which mark the two versions of KWAI, both the book and the movie NAVARONE are essentially the same thing. In NAVARONE, our heroes are simply men on a mission, presented with an unenviable and seemingly impossible task, which they nonetheless carry off with a great deal of aplomb, if not without some degree of loss. I don't remember the novel very well, but the film is quite vivid in my mind, and it is a very damned good one. The cast is formiddable, the action sequences memorable, and the performances are strong all the way around, most especially that of David Niven as the high-strung British explosives expert who gets all the best lines ("After examining this ship, sir, I feel compelled to tell you that I can't swim") and throws a positively epic tantrum in the film's last act.

So what is my beef with NAVARONE? Well, as one reviewer put it, "'The Guns of Navarone' concerns an island that does not exist and a battle that did not occur.'" Lost as we get in the drama and violence and intrigue of Maclean's tale, it's easy to forget that his work is not a fictional take on a historical event, but a work of complete fantasy twice over. Not only is there no island of Navarone in the Mediterranean Sea, the battle which comes to a victorious conclusion at the end of the book/movie never happened. It is based on a real one -- the Dodecanese Campaign -- but that campaign, which took place over some weeks in September and October of 1943, ended in complete victory for the Germans. Viewed through this particular lens, NAVARONE becomes part cultural curiosity, part cautionary tale. Let us tackle these things in order.

Cultural Curiosity (1): In America, one does not sell tickets by showing Allied defeats, unless -- DUNKIRK comes to mind -- they are dressed up as victories. For example, the superb epic war movie A BRIDGE TOO FAR did only lukewarm business in America (as opposed to Europe) because American audiences found the subject matter, the disastrous Battle of Arnhem in 1944, to be uncomfortable viewing. Since the war was actually a going concern, which is now more than 75 years ago, American audiences have only seen the backs of the Nazis, and indeed, watching the endless stream of flicks on this subject since about 1940, one would get the impression that the Germans never won even a single skirmish in the entire conflict. A film about a tragic, unecessary miltary fiasco simply did not compute. The inability of the American people to process defeat in almost any form, but most especially military defeat, is one of our most outstanding cultural characteristics, and has led to a number of curious psychological and social phenomena. One of these phenomena is an increasing devotion to past victories, and no past victory is as satisfying for us collectively as that in World War Two. Therefore our depictions of that war must be in keeping with our historical knowledge of it; and since Americans cannot read, our historical knowledge comes largely from Hollywood, whose perceptions of the war are simply warmed-over mid-1940s propaganda. Thus the legerdermain of Maclean, who comes in and writes an entertaining fantasy in which historical outcomes are simply reversed to suit our wishes, in much the same way Tarantino kowtowed to the Weinstein brothers and wrote a movie in which a handful of Jews (American Jews, of course!) win the entire war and kill Hitler in the bargain. This leads us directly to our...

Cultural Curiosity (2): Both KWAI and NAVARONE revolve around commandos sent to perform a very dangerous, perhaps even suicidal mission. Boulle being French, and a partisan himself, he was perhaps less enamored of such soldiers and more prone to see them for what they really were, which is also perhaps why his commandos fail in their mission end up mostly dying. But Maclean was British, and like all Anglo-Americans was positively enamored by the idea of these "special" soldiers, employing them in at least three of his novels. I am convinced that Anglo-American fascination with, and deification of, what we now call Special Forces is rooted deeply in our shared histories. The British, being for 300 years the rulers of a worldwide empire, gradually came to learn from hard and bloody experience that conventional warfare was often ineffective, and gradually aped the methods used by hostile native populations to fight back against them. By WW2, the British positively excelled at unconventional warfare, and delighted -- despite their reputation for fair play -- in using it against their enemies, cruelly and without mercy. In America, where conventional warfare had been problematic from the start, these lessons were learned much earlier and more quickly, and were a major factor in eventual American independence from Britain. Colonial Americans never really had a sense of "fair play" but embraced Native American tactics of stealth, ambush, sneak attack and everything else the Europeans considered dirty, dishonorable and underhanded. Because of this, we have always lionized the men who slit throats, shoot people in the back and stick explosives up tailpipes, far more than we respect "ordinary" soldiers, who have to fight the enemy on much more even terms. The list of "men on a mission" commando films produced in the United States since WW2 must be staggering indeed, but as they have evolved, they have become far less about overcoming impossible odds (underdog theme) than about asserting total dominance over the enemy (bullying theme). NAVARONE is a brutal and not a very realistic movie, but it is practically a documentary when compared with WHERE EAGLES DARE, a 1966 Maclean novel in which a small team of Allied agents parachute into Germany, ostensibly to rescue an American general who knows the date, time and place of the Allied landings in France. The novel's main character, Major Smith, is not only fearless but seemingly both omnipotent and omniscient: there is never a moment in the entire story in which he is not master of the situation. And yet at least in the novel he has recognizable human qualities: in one scene he saves a German soldier from burning to death in a wrecked car simply out of compassion, while in another he renders German officers unconscious with drugs rather than simply killing them, which would have been much more expedient for him.
The movie version of this novel, which debuted in 1968, scrapes both the character and the entire cast of any human characteristics whatsoever: Smith slits throats with every evidence of pleasure, shoots men in the back as casually as you'd light a cigarette, and in the film's climax, kills someone who is begging hysterically for mercy. Yet even this sado-masturbatory sequence pales in comparison with the lengthy, utra-violent escape scenes which follow it, in which four or five Allied commandos fight off at least a hundred German soldiers, killing most of them without any loss to themselves before they make their final escape. Watching the movie, I was struck by how tedious this infallibility became: endless streams of bullets endlessly missing our heroes, who themselves never miss a shot -- and never reload, either. This need not only to win, but to humiliate, to dominate, torture and destroy the enemy without harm to oneself -- in other words, to bully with impunity -- is not only bad drama, it has distinct overtones of fascism and sadism, and it is a feature of the modern American psyche. And this is doubly bizarre when one rememberes that the fascists in these movies are supposed to be the enemies.

This is bears repeating. At some point or other, there must be a code of conduct among heroes or protagonists which distinguishes them from the villains: otherwise what's the point of the story? What value is there in watching one group of morally retarded sadists slaughtering another, less capable group of the same? And whereas war movies, even silly ones, were once about "us versus them", there is now less of an "us" and more of a "him" -- "him" being the invincible archetype who goes through his movie on God mode with infinite ammo. It's no longer sufficient for a small band to defeat, or achieve a moral victory (a la the Alamo), over a much larger one; now a single man must do the work of an entire army and thus prove his superior manliness and the righteousness of his culture and cause. To observe the antics of Major Smith and his arguably even more sadistic sidekick, Lieutenant Schiffer, one is tempted to wonder why the war even needed to be fought. Just unleash these two trained animals on the bad guys, the subtext seems to murmur, and everyone else can stay home.

This brings us to the cautionary tale. There is a saying, a very recent one, that Orwell's "1984" is meant as a warning and not a manual, but it is not a saying which many Americans have yet taken heed. Our ability to not draw conclusions from specific evidence is profound and terrifying, and it extents its tendrils into many other aspects of our cultural life. We also also have a horrible power to cherry-pick the morals from stories whose entire message is pointed in a different direction ("If we'd just let the military do what it wanted in Vietnam..." is one of my favorites). In the case of KWAI, the movie producers shifted the book's events by just sufficient enoug of an azimuth to alter its meaning without changing the main thrust of the story. The result, as I said above, is more satisfying but somewhat less profound. In NAVARONE, the entire story seeks to obfuscate a humiliating a real-life defeat by replacing it with a made-up victory, thus robbing us of the lessons we might have learned by studying it.

Of course the films, and some of the books, that I have referenced are, of course, merely entertainment, but they are also propaganda of a sort, and like all propaganda is designed to argue for a particular type of philosophy, ideology or viewpoint. That viewpoint, roughly speaking, is this:

1. The Good Guys (always "we"/"us") are invincible. We are stronger, braver, tougher, more resourceful and smarter than our enemies and will always prevail in the end.

2. If history did not actually turn out the way we wanted it, then history needs to be rewritten to correspond to #1.

3. Because our enemies are evil, we are not bound by any traditional set of morals or standards when fighting them. We can violate the Geneva convention, use the white flag to commit ambushes, assassinate enemy leaders in underhanded ways, put on the enemy's uniform to spy on him, kill prisoners of war, shoot women in the back, torture people for information, mutilate corpses for purposes of intimidation, burn women alive, firebomb civilian targets -- in other words, commit every evil in the calendar, so that from a moral standpoint we are indistinguishable from the Bad Guys; yet at no point will any of these atrocities threaten our moral position. We will remain Good. Put another way -- it's not an atrocity if "we" do it.

4. The Good Guys do not win because they are good, they are good because they win. I am going to write this again in capitals: THE GOOD GUYS DO NOT WIN BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD, THEY ARE GOOD BECAUSE THEY WIN. It is not the merits of their cause or their personal codes of honor, but their might and invincibility which bestow their virtue. The behavior of the Good Guys in movie like WHERE EAGLES DARE, THE DIRTY DOZEN or INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is just as bad as that of the Nazis. There is almost literally nothing to choose between them for tactics or morality. In the end, we know who the Good Guys are because they win -- a classic Fascist position, quite literally out of Hitler's actual playbook, "Ich Kamph."

At this point it may be said that I am making (far) too much of this, but I believe a serious study of this type of film and of the literature from which it springs, along with the differences (or lack of difference) between the two, brings specific societal and cultural problems into sharp relief. The first is that we seem to be deliberately losing the moral of our stories when they are uncomfortable; the second is that we have embraced, through our popular entertainment, a Fascist outlook on life while simultaneously boasting of our victory over Fascism. And one of the central tenants of Fascism is that there is no such thing as objective truth or moral force in the world: there is only power, and the running narrative of the powers that be.

The dangers of this type of thinking are not readily obvious, but they are tremendously dangerous, and history provides us with many examples of their power. After WW2 ended, a whole genre of literature emerged in postwar Germany, which today is known as Landser-hilfe. The theme of these novels was always the same, and can be summed up in the apotheosis of "Landser" novels, CROSS OF IRON: the German soldier was a tough, resourceful, ultimately honorable man, contemptuous of the Nazis and the SS but loyal to his country, unfortunately led by cowardly careerist officers and callous, high-living generals, themselves pawns, albeit willing ones, of the evil demon, Hitler. This sort of book was so popular, even with foreign readers, that to this very day there remain enormous sections of the public in every nation who believe it to be an accurate depiction, and it helped craft a narrative that allowed Germans to shift the entire responsibility for everything evil done in their name to a select few scapegoats. (A similar sleight of hand was utilized by the Nazis themselves after the First World War, when they blamed German Jews for the defeat of their country during that war.) However, this depiction was not true, and the authors of the "Landser-hilfe" knew it: During the war, the Gestapo kept a close watch on the mail sent home by German soldiers, and as late as July of 1944 concluded that loyalty to and belief in Hitler was self-evident in more than 90% of the letters they examined. The truth -- that most who served Hitler served him willingly -- was not palatable to postwar Germany, so it was submerged in a comforting lie.

Nobody likes to admit defeat, and no one enjoys the humiliation that often comes with it. On the national scale, our reluctance to accept failure as failure and shame as shame tends to lead us to try to alter history to dress up defeats as victories, and to slap gloss over our hurts until they take on an alluring luster. I am all for entertainment and escapism, and I am all for celebrating those moments of our history which brought out the best in us as a people. There is a definite place for swagger in our movies and novels about history. But there is also a place, a large and important one, for realistic and responsible takes on it, which allow us to learn from things we otherwise might want shoved under the rug.

HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES

I'll note you in my book of memory.
-- William Shakespeare

Now that I have moved back to Pennsylvania, I find it a little easier to gain perspective over the more than 12 years I spent in Hollywood, and a little easier to talk about it. Not that I found it emotionally difficult before, but for some months after I made the transition from West to East, I deliberately kept my mouth shut about my former life there. I neither wanted to seem as if I was bragging, nor start my new life on the wrong foot by nostalgifying a period which, while intensely interesting and full of dazzling experiences, does not deserve nostalgia. Hollywood, as a town, is a noisy, shabby, tawdry-looking place in which a little grandeur and glamor stand out amidst all sorts of squalor; rather like a birthday cake in pile of garbage. Hollywood, as an industry, is just that: an industry. The product it produces may be glamorous, but the process by which it is made is merely a great deal of hard work salted with a thick layer of political and personal intrigue. In other words, it's like any other profession you care to name: the only real difference being that the outside world doesn't really accept this. I know that this is true, because no one I have encountered here since arrival understands why anyone "who did that for a living" would ever leave.

In a few months, however, it will be a year since I moved East, and that is enough time for the emotional dust to settle and for me to gain some perspective on the time I spent there. And what I see is that, aside from a number of gripes and grudges I have about the way the business is run, and the sort of people who are permitted to run it, I have a trove of terrific memories I can share with those curious about how the sausage known as the film and television industry is actually manufactured.

This particular story took place in 2011. At that time I had lived in Los Angeles for four years, and had gone from the ususal temp jobs, to full-time employment with a small make-up effects studio, to semi-unemployment when that studio eventually began to circle the drain. I also worked part time in the video game industry, helping make trailers for Call of Duty, but at that point the work was spotty and inconsistent. In a constant fret about my finances, I played the ancient Hollywood game, otherwise known as "waiting for the phone to ring again." One day it did.

As you all know by now, I keep a journal of sorts. The following is taken from the entries made on February 2 - 5 of 2011. I have altered them to remove certain names, and to add information here and there to provide a little context; otherwise they are exactly as they were originally written.

"M. called today and asked me if I wanted to take three days’ work for Masters FX. He offered thirty dollars an hour, which translates to $45 and finally, $60, since a day on location is never going to be shorter than 12 - 16 hours.So, after brief consideration, during which my natural laziness and cowardice tried to override my common sense, I said, 'Hell yes.'

"I then rang G. [my former boss at the other studio] who had made the generous offer of $10/hr for two half-days this week, and told him I was no longer interested in his $80, preferring the $2,000 - 3,000 I'd probably make at the other gig. After this unpleasant little chat, I called M. again and asked for details.

"He told me that TRUE BLOOD was shooting a very expensive episode in the Palmdale desert, and he needed all hands on deck. Instead of simply working out of Masters’ shop in Arleta, I’d be at the location until Friday. So I packed my things, got a fitful sleep, and climbed out of bed around seven o’clock the next morning. [My girlfriend] brought me coffee and a bagel and packed snacks in my kit, and before I knew it I was driving north on the familiar route Hollywood –101 -170, before ending up at Master’s FX. It’s more or less the standard MUFX shop, though it has extensive office space on the second floor. I began working right away, with C., a short blond bearded guy who was very friendly and talkative. He worked usually as a voice actor, and later I discovered he’d not only studied martial arts in Japan but fought there. Our assignment was to fill innumerable syringes with two different types of silicone, one a toxic pinkish color (B), the other a purplish one (A), then tape the syringes together into “kits” of two, and box them for travel. This took about three hours. I couldn't help but notice that J.J., one of the guys who used to work with at the old shop, was also present: this is a small business. Eventually we finished, and I helped M. load his car, whereupon we headed out for Palmdale – or rather, to the desert near Palmdale, which is where the scenes were being shot.

"It was a long drive up the 5 freeway, into desert scenery straight out of the Old West or Africa – dusty flat plains, tumbleweeds, scrub-brush, tan hills spotted with brownish vegetation, snow-capped mountains in the distance. After more than an hour, much of which was spent plodding down a straight road flanked on either side by immensities of browish-tan wasteland, we abruptly came upon what was called “base camp” – a collection of trailers laid out in a row, a tent, additional trailers of various sizes serving various purposes, trucks, vans, and numerous parked cars, all forming a sort of minature town a la McMurdo Station in Antarctica, except this was desert a la North Africa. There I was introduced to many people, most of whose names I immediately forgot, except for L., a Masters’ employee who was the only other 'MUFX tech' and who therefore became my partner for the rest of my stay there. L. was a good partner to have: she’s friendly and cute, which isn’t a bad combination. The really cool thing from my standpoint, however, was that I was actually listed on the Call Sheet. This official acknowledgement of my part in the crew of television show was more than I’d ever gotten in seven months of working at the old studio.

"Anyway, we worked at Base Camp for some time, doing what I can’t recall, before heading to the hotel around five o’clock. (I say “I can’t recall” because while I was already addled from nerves and lackof sleep, I was to become increasingly so over the next few days. When you stay up without rest for days at a time, your sense of time becomes distorted. Throw in severe conditions and physical fatigue and you have a perfect storm for what I refer to as 'surreality,' a dream-like state in which many of your higher brain functions cease to operate.)

"The drive to the Palmdale Hotel was not a lot of fun. It was probably twenty-two miles from Base Camp. My GPS went in and out, and the setting sun caused me to miss at least one turn – annoying enough at the best of times, worse because L. was following me. When at last we arrived at the Palmdale, the confusing entryway design caused me to miss the turn, whereupon we squandered and additional ten minutes making a huge erratic loop back to the place. At last we checked in, and at this point I had already worked a full day…but really, the day hadn’t started. I went into the hotel lounge and saw [various big names in the effects business] ate dinner and had a few beers with L. and M. I then tried to get to sleep, and failed. This was critical, because I was already tired, and we had a 1:30 AM call for a 2:15 AM set appearance. Finally, at midnight, I simply got out of bed, washed up (forgot my toothpaste), dressed in layers, and went over to M.'s room. From there we went to the lobby, onto the bus, and back to Camp. I was surprised how bitterly cold it was, but the best was just beginning, because when we got off the bus a half hour later, I felt as if I were in Siberia, not the California desert.

"The Camp, at night, looks like an excavation site in some forbidden wilderness. Lights blaze, generators rattle and hum, trucks grundle about, and everyone is carrying equipment, or dragging it, or looking for it, or cursing it. Around this halo of light and activity is absolute blackness and nothingness – the whole world seems to have ceased to exist, and there are not even any stars. Worse yet is the intense, almost unbelievable cold. It was 22◦ at 2:15 AM, and while there was no wind, my clothing was inadequate because I had forgotten gloves – a particularly galling mistake, since I just got a new insulated pair at Christmas. Furthermore, I spent virtually the whole night and much of the morning out of doors, so while the rest of the camp was cozy in their trailer-wombs, I was shivering outside, drinking lukewarm coffee and trying not to freeze. At last a pretty-eyed P.A. named J.C. wrangled me some gloves, and I began to recover my sense of feeling. She also offered no objection when I asked if I could give her a hug of gratitude.

"I know I worked during the night, but most of what I remember was huddling by totally inadequate heating units with a few like unfortunates who didn’t merit trailers. It was unbearably cold, 17◦ to be precise, and I took to wearing latex gloves beneath my cloth ones in the hopes of making my hands sweat. This idea failed miserably.

"Come the daybreak, the temperature somehow fell another five degrees, and things became really interesting. I didn’t take proper meals, but simply snatched random items off the Craft services table, which was manned by a fiery red-faced Australian with a bristling mustache. As a result of what I ate, or perhaps what I drank – or didn’t get enough of (water) – I suffered from a temporary constipation that bloated me like a beer barrel, but my problems were minor compared to others on set, who got food poisoning from their own Craft station.

"What was happening here, near as I can recall, was preparation for the shoot. A large number of actors had to be transformed into goblins, which required extensive prosthetic application to the face and hands and exposed flesh, not to mention wigs and costumes. Even with the huge army of make-up artists which M. had assembled, who filled every station in three different rtailers, this was a tremendous task and pushed everyone to the dropping point. My main memory of the night that is not attached to trying to keep warm is running about in the fine, icy sand, carrying Supersol or 99% alcohol or Myristate or zip-loc bags full of Goblin fingers up and down trailer steps. With the sun up and glaring over the mountains, the workday simply continued as if nothing had happened, even though the goblins eventually had to depart for set. The reason for this was that once they returned, a whole equally enormous logistical task remained – removing their prosthetics without damaging them, so they could be reused at the next day’s shooting. By this time it was hard to imagine that it wasn’t the next day; we’d already been on set for six or seven hours, had gotten no sleep beforehand, and were now being sun-blasted and wind-burned as well as continuously dehydrated by the arid Palmdale air.

"As taxed as I was by this point, and by the points that came after, I kept recalling two important things. The first, from the book HARDCORE ZEN, was the principle of trying to live within the moment. The second, from the essay ACTION!, was the statement that “the margin lies between where a man thinks his limit is and where it actually resides.” I knew I was beat-ass tired, but I was also taking an odd sort of pleasure in being tested. True, the previous hours had proven I wouldn’t have lasted a half an hour on the Eastern Front circa 1941, but it was nice to know that I could still function even after 16 ½ hours at the helm when I hadn’t actually slept since Tuesday night....

"I have a jumble of context-free memories from this time: looking at the call sheet and seeing it contained advice about what to do if you were bitten by a rattlesnake; going to the Craft services table in the middle of a freezing night to grab a snack and finding the jam frozen solid, the peanut butter chilled to a spoon-snapping consistency of damp cement, and the bread slices as hard as stone; trying to remember to yell "Coming up!" as I mounted the steps of a trailer so I wouldn't get smashed in the face by a swinging door; blundering into the wardrobe trailer on some errand or other and being amazed by the staggering amount of costume clothing hanging from its racks; doing a sommersault I learned in Aikido class for the amusement of some make-up effects artists, because lack of sleep had turned me into a ten year old.

"The last three or four hours before we returned to the hotel were pretty tough. A fat, mentally deranged and extremely annoying make-up artist spent much of that time waddling after me, making shrill and unreasonable demands she had no authority to make. At last I lost my temper with her, whereupon she became all sweetness and light. But for a few minutes I was wondering if I hadn't just snapped my way out of a job.

"When at last – at long last – all the 'midground' and 'background' goblin-actors had been de-goblined, and everything made ready for the next morning’s business, we went home. That sentence, of course, fails entirely to convey the enormity of the work involved, but there it is. By this time the sun had set, and the temperature plummeted once again to below-freezing levels. L. and I were trapped on the bus (“people mover”) with a whiny stunt man. I had been warned that, contra stereotype, stunt men were inveterate whiners, but I didn’t believe it until I met this idiot, R. His whining, which had alienated the make-up artists, included complaints that 'he only had nine hours turnaround time' between going to bed and set call. Since he was getting dropped off at his own hotel first, I couldn’t help but barking to L., 'Why the fuck do we get dropped off last, when we only get four hours turnaround time?'

"The only interesting thing this twit said was in reference to Mike Massa, who is the stunt coordinator on TRUE BLOOD. I know Massa’s work from ANGEL, where he was also a double for David Boreanaz. He said Massa was cool, which reinforced what M. later told me – that Massa is not only good at his job, he’s good to work with.

"This night – I guess it was Thursday – I actually slept. Thankfully, M. informed me as I was going to bed that crew call had been pushed to 3:36 AM, which meant an additional, and precious, two hours of sleep. Despite a bus-snafu in the morning, I was in very good spirits when we reached Base Camp, full of energy and resolve not to fuck up. This mood was enhanced by a proper breakfast served at the catering area, directly across the road from set. This catering truck, which stood next to an enormous expanding trailer (called a lunchbox trailer) set up as a restaurant, served impressive food. There were numerous meal choices as well as buffet tables and at one point, even a fellow who constructed custom-ordered smoothies. Eating there made me realize why some people live their whole lives within the movie business: it is a hermetically sealed world, a sort of iron sphere whose interior is cushioned by velvet. You work hard in short bursts, but the rest of the time the majority of your needs – snacks, water, meals, even moving from point A to point B, are taken care of by other people. Anyone inside the sphere is in, be he a lowly P.A. or a lofty A.D.; anyone outside the sphere is out, and kept out by a sophisticated, cunning and eldritch system designed to prevent any mixture between the worlds. The only way inside is to know the right person, who can navigate this complex minefield for you; once there your work-ethic, personality and skill at policraft will decide if you stay. But getting even to that perilous point is largely a matter of Who You Know. If it weren't for M., I wouldn't be here.

"The last day dawned – literally. And with the exception of the final three hours or so, it was easy. We did very close to nothing, and aside from two trips to the set, which could only be reached by chuffing my way up a steep, winding, sand-covered hill to a rocky outrcrap, and during which they were shooting rather ridiculous scenes with the goblins, I seldom had to move from the wardrobe trailer in which I sought refuge. In fact, hours were spent in the first trailer, simply jawing with various people taking their ease whilst waiting for the goblins to return. At one point about five of us were in there, talking about everything from conspiracy theories to UFOs to movie stories. I heard some really fabulous tales about, for example, James Cameron and Stan Winston. I wouldn't be me, however, if I hadn't nearly fucked myself with a classic blunder.

"From day one, I'd been warned that the 1st A.D. [first assistant director, the number two man on set] was unusually testy even for a 1st A.D., and to steer clear of him; but as I had no interaction with the man, whoever he was, I disregarded this warning. Well, on one of my trips to set, I rode over on a people mover with a guy I'd never seen before and some young women who might have been script girls or P.A.'s -- I had no idea. Punch-drunk from lack of sleep, I was in a chatty mood and rambled on about nothing while the guy next to me gave me irritated, bewildered looks, as if to say, 'Why the fuck are you talking to me?' But I kept talking, and even asked him what the weather was going to be like...because if it was shitty, no doubt the 1st A.D. would be a real monster and wreck the set. He rather peevishly told me the weather would be fine, thank you, and finally we got to set. No sooner had we climbed out of the mover than two Teamsters roared past in dune buggies. They were drag racing each other rather than doing whatever the hell they were supposed to be doing with those machines, and the guy I'd just annoyed for the past five minutes with my blather erupted in a rage, shouting that the Teamsters were idiots and possibly in need of new jobs at Wal-Mart. He then stormed off as the big, strong Teamsters sheepishly slunk away, looking like whipped dogs. I now realized, too late, that the man next to me had been the 1st A.D. and I had essentially asked him to fire me, but for some reason he had refrained. (Possibly it was like the instance back in the 15th century where the famed man-eating wolf Courtaud was confronted by a lost baby sheep who, mistaking the killer beast for its mother, cavorted happily around the monster while the rest of the wolf pack waited for their king to tear it to pieces. But Courtaud seemed to be confused by this display of affection and allowed the sheep to romp around him until it finally got bored and wandered off. Evidently blissful ignorance is a handy weapon.)

"At last we had to get up and work, which we did, frantically, 'wrapping' the trailers. This means picking them clean of equipment and cleaning them, then packing the remaining trailer with all the goods which will be used when shooting resumes on Monday at The [Warner Hollywood] Lot, Stage #4. I finished my evening scrubbing leather seats with paper towels soaked in 99% alcohol, and then, after some last-minute paperwork in the AD trailer, bussed home in an exhausted but satisfied silence. After relieving my bladder in the hotel bathroom I hopped in my car, fired up The Shadow, and blasted down the 15, 5, 170 and 101 to the Highland exit. Despite the cold air I put the top down and laughed as I swung across Hollywood Boulevard. Amidst the neon lights and flashbulb marquees were throngs of tourists and club-hoppers and wannabees, not suspecting that the unshaven, red-eyed man in the watch cap and rumpled, dust-covered clothing, driving the old Chrysler, was part of 'the glitz and glam of Hollywood.'"

All of this was ten years ago, and at the risk of failing to cliche at the right moment, it does not seem like yesterday. It seems like, well, ten years ago; but it was an important piece of personal history: my first time "on location." And it marked the point at which I began to break free of the contraints imposed on me by certain people in my professional life, who -- up 'til that point -- had successfully made me dependent upon them for work.

I confess, as I sit here tonight in my apartment in this obscure, medium-sized town, in a state nobody ever seems to think about until Election Year, that sometimes I wonder if Hollywood is finished with me, and me with it. Truth be told, I don't believe so. There are possibly -- probably? -- fresh chapters to write, a few years down the road, when whatever purpose it served to return here is satisified. In the mean time, where the industry is concerned, what I have is memories, which I am now free to share with you.

D-DAY: A STRANGE NOSTALGIA

Hiraeth (noun). A feeling of longing for a home that never was. A deep or irrational bond felt with a time or era.

Yesterday was the 77th anniversary of Operation Overlord, better known to Americans as D-Day. Coming as it does in a time of national upheaval, many look back upon this critical historical moment with a curious form of nostalgia.

They are not, of course, nostalgic for the carnage of Omaha Beach, or for the terrible fighting that followed for the next two months in the hedgerow country beyond before the breakout finally took place -- fighting that killed and wounded roughly as many men as America lost during the entire Korean War. They are nostalgic for the feeling of national unity that D-Day represented, or seemed to represent. The invasion of Normandy was a remarkable, even a staggering, military feat, one of the most logistically complex operations in the history of warfare, and as such it was an expression of the national will. Very few people in America wanted the war, but once engaged the country transformed itself into a gigantic machine whose sole purpose was victory. This is not hyperbole. WW2 was one of the very few moments in American history where focus on a single objective was achieved and, despite massive obstacles and heavy losses, maintained until the objective was taken. And I think we, as a people, miss that feeling. What we forget is that the price of near-complete unity and total focus is often strife and strain, trial and tribulation. Humans are gregarious animals by nature, but they are also quarrelsome and fractious. Our tribal groupings fight with each other, and given the absence of an external enemy, our tribes fight with themselves. And one of the peculiar features of the modern world is the capacity that social media, mobile devices and the Internet generally, to further stimulate division. As more and more identity groups form, as more and more hyphens are fixed to the word "American," so too are the reasons for people to argue. The Internet was supposed to unite us, yet the most common word associated with it is "toxic." And nobody, or very nearly nobody, really enjoys a toxic environment. Even the most loathsome internet troll is at heart not much more than a baby crying for attention. When we give up social media, the psychological boost we experience is simply the feeling that we have removed ourselves from a house divided. In our actual, non-virtual lives, all the anger and self-righteousness and reaction-baiting we experience online barely exists. People may not actively like each other, but they are fairly tolerant and civil to one another, even in traffic. Yet we know, deep-down, that to go all the way, and experience true tribal unity, requires an external threat. Something to remind us that all the hyphens, all the labels, all the ways subtle and gross humans sub-divide themselves, are really figments of our imagination. They are invisible barriers which we place voluntarily around ourselves, because there is little obvious penalty for maintaining them.

So yes, we do look back at that terrible time in history with a strange fondness, just as those of us who can remember it look back with a curious warmth on the months following 9/11, when political, racial, ethnic and economic division were forgotten in a sudden and starting display of national unity. The irony that this unity was caused by tragedy fades in and out of our consciousness. Humans tend to see the past with a rosy and nostalgic glow, but the truth is always harsher and more complicated than we remember.

In recent years, as America has become more divided and angry, or perhaps merely convinced itself that it is divided and angry -- perception is reality on the internet -- we have begun a simultaneous process of deifying those who fought in the Second World War. This is never more apparent than on the anniversaries of major battles from that war. The sobriquet we give the men and women who carried through with that conflict to its successful conclusion reflects our adulation of them: The Greatest Generation. It's not a bad handle, but like all broad brushes, it doesn't quite tell the whole truth.

The Second World War put sixteen million Americans in unform, out of a total population of 145 million. (This was the maximum force our military could actually field without causing economic collapse at home.) Of those 16 million, supposedly less than one million actually saw combat and survived, which makes some sense when you consider that a military as large, well-supplied and thoroughly mechanized as America's required a massive system of supply, maintenance, transport, logistics, etc., etc. simply to stay in the field. Infantrymen used to sneer, "One man in the line, and five to bring up the Coca-Cola." This was an exaggeration, but not by all that much. For every infantry division of 15,000 men, there were around 35,000 support troops in the immediate rear, and this figure does not touch the huge number of men and women serving in uniform who never left the United States, or who were deployed overseas in non-combat capacities. Notwithstanding that military service is arduous and hazardous by its very nature, and that accidents do kill a startling number of servicepeople even today, the vast majority of those who served in the war were not placed directly in harm's way during their term of service. Ronald Reagan, to quote one of millions of examples, spent his time in the Army making training films, because his poor eyesight disqualified him from any other type of duty.

Of those who did see battle, the figures were grim: 405,399 were killed in action between 1941 and 1945, and 671,278 combat-wounded. Another 130,201 were taken prisoner, of whom about 14,000 seem to have died in captivity. The various branches of the military also recorded 50,000 deserters, some of whom had been highly decorated before they "voted with their feet" and left the carnage behind.

I do not bring these figures up to disparage those who did not experience battle (please repeat that in your head as you read this), or to pass judgment on those who elected to walk away from it, but rather to show that even during this time of unprecedented unity, the heaviest burdens fell on a relatively small group of people...and if the truth is to be told, not everyone reacted as well to those burdens as Hollywood would have us believe. And the fact of the matter is, there is nothing new in this.

When I was growing up, my history teachers used the "thirds" example to explain the American Revolution. That is to say: one third of colonials supported the revolution, one third remained loyal to the British crown, and one third were indifferent: they simply didn't care. If those fractions are accurate, then we owe our national existence to whatever fraction of that patriotic third actually took up arms and fought, or spied on the British, or supplied the Continental armies with food, ammunition, medicine and moral support. I don't know what this figure is, but doubtless it is a hell of a lot smaller than 33%. Again, the burden was borne by a hardy few.

Likewise, in the Civil War, neither the North nor the South ever came close to putting into the field the total number of men who were fit for arms. The reasons for this were complicated, but one of the largest was simply that many men, regardless of where their sympathies lay, did not wish to fight, and chose not to. As with the Revolution, the actual number of those in the arena was equaled or exceeded by those who elected to remain in the bleachers.

The point I am driving at here is that while we, in this unsettled and divisive period, are looking more and more to the past to comfort ourselves and provide a positive example, the truth is that "national unity" is a relative term. Even among the Greatest Generation, there were half a million draft dodgers, a fact conveniently forgotten whenever the subject of draft evasion during the Vietnam war comes up. The stark fact is that while causes and wars come and go, passions ignite and then cool, nations grapple and then shake hands, human nature remains more or less unchanged. We will always wish that disasters do not befall us, and we will always take pride in the unity these disasters bring about in our otherwise fractious race. What's more, we will always overestimate the level of unity we possessed and conveniently ignore, or forget, how few people bore any share of the burden, much less its heaviest weight. The nostalgia we feel for America as a closed fist is understandable and it is partially rooted in reality, but it is perhaps very nearly equally a fantasy of our own deliberate manufacture.

NO MORE ADVENTURES?

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid. -- Q

When I was a boy, there were few television shows I admired more than TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY. The series was set on the fictional South Pacific island of Boragora in the years preceding WW2, and featured the exploits of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter. Jake, who traveled with an alcoholic mechanic named Corky and a one-eyed dog named Jack, and ekked out a living flying passengers and cargo around the Pacific islands. His cohorts included Bon Chance Louie, the island's governor and an ex-member of the French Foreign Legion; Sarah Stickney-White, a lounge singer who was really an American spy; the Rev. Willy Tenboom, who was really a German spy; and Koji, a half-European, half-Japanese princess whose lust for jake did not prevent her from threatening to kill him on a regular basis. During the series' run, Jake fought with the modern-day Samurai, the Nazis, giant monkeys, ancient Egyptian cults, slavers, headhunters, some kind of sea monster, and pretty much everything else you can think of. For me, however, these outrageous conflicts, some of which destroyed my suspension of disbelief even as a ten year old child, were not really the appeal of TALES: that rested in the way the world of the late 1930s was presented to the audience.

As with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the world of the 30s, particularly in areas such as South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, etc. was shown to be primitive, wild, half-unexplored, and largely lawless. Small frontier-style towns were perched on the edge of vast oceans and impenetrable jungles. Booze flowed freely. Brawls were common. Local "authorities," usually military or colonial in nature, were generally corrupt or incompetent or had a laissez-faire attitude which allowed all manner of smuggling and vice-trading to operate in plain sight. The native populations were usually depicted as either helpful and friendly or restive and hostile, but always as half-savages. Those who arrived in the islands were a mixture of greedy, desperate, or fugitive; men and women who had come to the literal end of the earth to seek fortunes or escape troubled pasts. Plantation owners in snap-brim Fedoras and white summer suits drank with dirty, grizzled prospectors with gold dust in their hair and Bowie knives on their hips: out of work mercenaries bent elbows with third-rate lounge singers too poor to buy a ticket back to civilization. Once in a while a clipper arrived, carrying sacks of mail, crates of booze, and a few mysterious new passengers. At other times a gunboat would chug into the harbor, bearing the flag of one of the colonial powers, and provoking the local spies to slink away to their hidden radio-telegraph machines to send furtive messages to their controllers. Those visits, a piano, and a working radio were the only sources of vertical entertainment: the rest was found in bedrooms or out in the jungles or upon the wild wild sea.

Notwithstanding the obvious evils of colonialism, which were not entirely lost on me even as a small boy, I cannot express how much I loved the smoky, sultry atmosphere of TALES and its disreputable cast of characters. The mere fact that an ex-Flying Tiger and an ex-Foreign Legion soldier rubbed shoulders together in the Monkey Bar every night gave me shivers. As for the idea that Jake could simply jump into his seaplane, Cutter's Goose, and fly off to an island filled with ancient gold mines, or cannibal warriors, or Japanese troops, or pirates who traded in human flesh, as easily as my Mom could take me for ice cream in our Oldsmobile, struck me as being better than any superpower.

I stress that what I am talking about here is not simply a child's love for action. If I wanted to witness action as a thing in itself, it was available to me in a dozen other different shows full of blasting guns and screeching tires. TALES offered me not merely action but adventure, which is something quite different indeed. Action works the adrenal glands, but adventure stimulates the soul. It stirs passions which are quite independent of mere thrills or simple danger. It offers us wild new experiences which we will retain long after our adrenaline high has faded and our loot spent. Action is easy to come by, but adventure, real adventure, is not, and in fact seems to be getting more elusive all the time.

Adventure, it seems, has many enemies. One of them, the foremost of them, is technology. You never saw Jake Cutter with a cell phone or a GPS system. He was often lost, and even when his aeroplane radio worked, it didn't mean anyone was listening or that help was available. Adventure requires a certain reliance on instinct and wit as well as courage -- in other words it requires self-reliance -- and one of the curious affects of technology is that it reduces our need for these things. In America, it is now very difficult to get truly lost, and one has to make an almost deliberate effort to find a spot in which some kind of help is not readily available if you really need it.

Adventure also requires ignorance. To go on an adventure is to plunge into the unknown, but we live in a world where images of every square milimeter of it is available on Google Maps,and it is now possible to get cell phone service in most of Mongolia. How do you plunge into the unknown when information and imagery on everything imaginable are available with a simple internet search? As the rain forest shrinks and roads cut their way into the most formiddable mountain chains, inaccessible places where few have tread become rarer and rarer commodities. I can't think of Indiana Jones without wondering if his modern-day counterpart might not be dismayed to find McDonald's wrappers and beer can ring tabs in what he thought was the deepest region of the Amazon or the Congo. Wherever you go, someone will have preceded you, and probably posted the pictures on Instagram.

A third enemy of adventure is government. When a new territory is "discovered" by a people, there is always a period of exploration, followed by colonization, followed by raw material exploitation, and finally, by absorption into the larger whole of the nation which discovered ("stole" or "robbed") it. Think of it as a grid. The conquering power begins with a very widely spaced net of settlements which are far-flung and have to exist largely on their own resources, without benefit (or hinderance) of real governmental power. This atmosphere invites all manner of exploiters, adventurers, criminals, speculators, prospectors, farmers, ranchers, gamblers, mercenaries, entertainers, smugglers, prostitutes, tradesmen and anything else you care to name. These folks bring much wickedness with them, but they live in an atmosphere of freedom which also allows for great adventures to take place. Over time, however, successive waves of people bring with them successive waves of governmental officers and agents; means of communication with the host nation improve; more and more control and authority are exerted and more and more laws come into effect. The successful absorption of a frontier area means that civilization has now arrived, meaning in turn that the host of adventurers who once haunted the saloons and whorehouses and docks must now either leave or "become respectable," i.e. surrender claim to further adventure. Either way, the possibility for real adventure fades as the government grid grows tighter and tighter; until at last the grid becomes a net, and one needs a permit to do anything. As the world's population grows along with knowledge, technology and the reach of government, we now face a situation where it is possible to foresee a time when the net exists everywhere, and there is a sheriff, courts, tax collector, surveillance cameras, and possibly even a goddamned HOA in Antarctica.

In a sense this time has already arrived in what we call the First World. To live a reckless, dangerous, adventurous life in a country like the United States is extremely difficult if one is not wealthy, and even then, takes on an air of poseurism, dilettanteism and fraud. What is more laughable than the millionaire who travels around the world in a hot-air balloon? We all know he simply trying to find something his money cannot buy, which is not a quest likely to engender much sympathy or inspire the broad masses. Hell, even the middle-class kid who chases adrenaline highs via sky-diving, surfing and motocross racing carries with him a whiff of desperate absurdity. He is simply manufacturing excitement for its own sake, and while there is certainly action in these activities, there is no real adventure.

Of course, it may be seen that I am no different. Everything I have done as an adult which I did not have to do, but put me at some level of physical risk, would be regarded as laughable from the standpoint of, say, a child-soldier in Africa. Dreams of adventure and even action are undoubtedly always viewed with contempt by those whose daily lives are filled with risks they have no choice but to take. And one would be well within his rights to question how much I truly want adventure or even action at this time in my life. After all, I benefit enormously from the net in which I often feel trapped. To cite one example: in my one-bedroom apartment here in large-town Pennsylvania, I have central air conditioning and heat, a dishwasher, a washer-dryer, sinks, running water, electricity, a toilet, bath and shower. And if any of this breaks down, I have only to put in a work order and maintenance men soon appear. Hell, just a few weeks ago a burner on my electric stove went out, and instead of fixing the burner, the landlord replaced the entire oven. These are some of the benefits of the net, the grid we call civilization. Yet at the same time, this cocoon of what would have been called extravagant luxury just a few generations ago is also part of the great gray force which strangles our spirit of adventure and replaces it with -- at best -- a desire for action; but even the action available to us is more and more experienced as a secondhand event, via that species of voyeurism we call television and the internet.

In writing this I do not set myself up as some kind of martyr or luddite. By and large my "conveniences" are benefits I do not wish to live without; but I am keenly aware that the effect they have on me is a softening and a diminishing one. They and GPS and Google and all the rest of it are like a comfortable straight-jacket which keeps me safe and my life orderly and comfortable, but also restricts my movements and makes my muscles atrophy. It's much harder for me to die or be wretched than it was for my ancestors circa 1560 or even 1900, but it is also spiritually rather dull.

Today I read yet another article lamenting the population decline which is occurring almost everywhere in the world. Considering that many of the newspapers that publish these articles now were at the forefront of the "overpopulation = extinction" movement which prevailed in this country for decades, I find this greatly amusing, but it speaks to my general point. Modern life, for about 1.5 billion people currently living on this planet, is a materially comfortable place, and it is precisely in the areas where life is most comfortable and safe from privations and shortages where birth rates are at their lowest point. This follows a well-known trend throughout history, which shows that birth rates automatically and steadily decrease as material prosperity rises. Human beings will not reproduce in any great numbers given the financial and technical means to avoid it.

I don't want to overreach here, but I see this as following my main point, which is that a sense of adventure is only really possible if one regards the world as a wide-open place full of exotic mysteries and exciting unknowns. Since the world is largely no longer that place, it follows that our sense of adventure has dulled. In becoming civilized and achieving the conveniences and luxuries which make life easier and less drudgerous, in reducing hunger even among the very poor, we have also freed our minds to consider the higher problems of existence. For as it has often been said, only a man with a full belly gives a damn about the higher problems of existence: the poor, hungry fellow has neither the time nor the interest. And one of the primary considerations of existence is, Why are we here? Of course there is no specific answer to that question which is not facetious, overly generalized or simplistic, but one credible answer is, "To live!" Which means in this case simply to enjoy life and not merely endure. But how is life best enjoyed? Does the washer-dryer and the 4K and the 5G equate to happiness? Not for most of us. We need something more. Like the millionaire in his hot-air balloon, we seek that which money cannot buy. We want a sense of adventure, of excitement and wonder, which is the very thing the constricting net of civilization denies us.

I don't know how this spirit can be revived in the age we live in, or whether the question is of any great importance relative to others which plague and bedevil us; but I do know I want a positive answer for my own selfish reasons, and that it is certainly important to me. To simply draw breath, take up space, and mark time until death is not enough. To simply exist in some state of comfortable material mediocrity, drawing excitement through a television screen or a monitor, is not enough. I may not be Jake Cutter, but I'm driven by the same basic forces. And they tell me that somewhere, somehow, there's a world of adventure still waiting for me. All I have to do is find it.

A VAXSPERIENCE, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR ME AND FOR THE WORLD

It's a happy memory, but I don't live there. -- Geraint Wyn-Davies

According to The Washington Post, 146.2 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine as of today. That represents 54.7% of the total population -- every other person. Me sharing my own experience in this regard may therefore seem either rendundant, pointless or just plain narcissistic; but it's my understanding, backed by considerable evidence that the effects of the vaccine vary from person to person and to some extent, vaccine to vaccine. For posterity for the hell of it, and for curiosity's sake, I am sharing my own experience here, if only to see if it provokes a few others to share their experiences with me.

In the United States, three forms of the vaccine are currently in use: Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. I received the Pfizer vaccines on 4/9 and 4/30 of this year, respectively. I would have liked to have gotten mine considerably earlier, but in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I have resided for better than half of my pandemic-era experience, I was ranked "1c" in order of vaccine eligibility. I tried and failed not to be insulted by this, given the essential nature of my work, but c'est la pandémie.

Like many people, I had some reservations about taking the vaccine even though I had been praying for the existence of one ever since the declaration of emergency early last year. AIDS, to quote a perhaps problematic example, has been a public health menace since the early-middle 1980s, and yet we still have no vaccine -- and ,according to experts, may not have one until at least 2035. It similarly took decades of continuous effort to create a safe and effective vaccine for polio, once the scourge of the First World. So the idea that, barely a year after the unwelcome discovery of Covid-19, we all ought to cheerfully allow ourselves to get pumped full of who-the-hell-knows-what in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded Coronavirus does involve a certain amount of trust, faith and, well, perhaps fatalism, too.

Armed with these things, as well as a burning desire to resume what we all refer to as "normal life," I went to a local Rite-Aid at six o'clock on Friday, April 9, 2021, to get "the jab." The line was not overly long, but it was slow-moving, and once the paperwork was completed, I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes before a tired and somewhat grim-looking pharmacist's assistant told me to roll up my sleeve. While I may box from a southpaw stance, I'm a rightie, so I elected to sacrifice my left arm to the needle. I'd been told that "you'll barely feel it" but this was definitely not the case. I have no especial fear of syringes or needles nor any especial sensitivity to them, and I have also been tattooed twice, but the insertion was surprisingly painful. The nearest analog I can come up with is being stuck hard with the neck of a broken bottle. The pain didn't last too long, but it surprised and disappointed me, as I cannot remember a vaccine ever having caused me much more than a momentary prickling of discomfort.

I waited the obligatory fifteen minutes to see if I'd have a negative reaction, and having none, drove home. Ordinarily, on a Friday, I'd have polished off a beer or two or a glass of whiskey to celebrate the conclusion of another week's work in the salt mines of the district attorney's office, but I'd been told not to take any alcohol. What's more, I'd been told to keep my body hydrated. I wasn't worried about side-effects, since the first of the Pfizer shots was reputed to have few if any. And this was indeed my experience...on Friday. The next three or four days were something of another matter.

On Saturday morning I awoke knowing I had to drive to Atlantic City. This is a three-hour drive from where I live, and I was expected around one o'clock, so I left at ten. I had no issues in the morning, during the drive or for the first hour or two after my arrival. Upon conclusion of my first meal of the day, however, I felt distinctly nauseous. It came upon me suddenly and did not last long, but when the nausea passed I found myself feeling drained and somewhat weak. This condition became more pronounced on Sunday, and persisted until Tuesday afternoon, a full three and a half days after I took the jab. I was always tired and sluggish, though my mind was clear and I did not feel feverish, sick, nauseous or in any pain. At this time I heard anecdotal evidence to the effect that anyone who'd had Covid before would suffer more from the first dose of the vaccine than anyone who had not been infected. I have no proof that I was ever infected, but I suspect that I was, early in the pandemic, albeit mildly and with unusual symptoms. If this was true, then it made more sense to me that I would be sensitive to the first dose, though again, this is mere speculation.

Once the side-effects faded, they were gone and I went about my life until last Friday, when I returned to Rite-Aid for the second jab. This time there was no line and almost no waiting. Nor was there any appreciable pain from the insertion of the needle, a fact I found most curious because the same woman who'd dosed me the first time dosed me on this occasion as well. Different needle? Different technique? Different mood? I have no idea. I waited the perscribed ten minutes to check for a bad reaction, and then, having none, drove home.

This time the effects were felt the same night as the jab, but they were very different than I had expected. Many had said the second dose was a real bastard, and would leave me flat on my ass for as long as three days, wracked by chills, fever and body aches. In point of fact, what I experienced was a feeling strongly reminiscent of my time on Oxycontin. I felt warm, sleepy, and completely at peace with the universe. This sensation grew more powerful as the night wore on, and I went to bed and slept quite well for a good eight or nine hours. I awoke in the same "morphine-high" state and found it very difficult, not to get out of bed, but to want> to get out of bed. Indeed, the entire morning, I felt as if the physician's assistant must have screwed up and shivved me with the wrong syringe. Clearly, instead of Pfizer #2, I'd gotten some kind of happy juice. The only negative effect was quite a sore arm. But when you've blocked as many punches as I have with your shoulder, one more owwie doesn't make much difference.

Around noon, the effects of the happy juice began to wear off. I remained sluggish, but my skin, especially along my back, took on a raw feeling, as it does when I have influenza or use the wrong detergent. I also noticed a throb over my left temple which eventually graduated into a full-blown headache. A friend of mine and I went for coffee, and I felt curiously cold despite modest temperatures, and very, very tired. In fact I had difficulty staying awake and had to rest my chin in my hand to support my head. Later, my headache got worse, necessitating a pill. I continued to drink lots of water as everyone had cautioned me to do, and I did notice a higher level of thirst than usual considering my lack of exercise; but whether this helped or not I have no idea.

In the evening, I went to dinner with two friends. At first I had no appetite at all, a condition which had affected me all day, but as I began eating I found I was somewhat hungry and cleaned my plate. My headache grew worse but then gradually recded, due to the pill or the food or something else -- human contact? -- I don't know. By the time we finished and said our goodbyes, I actually felt much better. It had now been somewhat more than 24 hours since I took the second dose, and I was cautiously optimistic that the worst was behind me and had not been very bad. Indeed, I felt a little restless and wished I could get some exercise, though I decided against it, just as I had decided against drinking any alcohol during my meal.

I went to bed that night as per usual, reading a book (The Bridge over the River Kwai) , and slept well. In the morning -- we're at Sunday now -- I felt perfectly fine. Just a bit wrung out, the way you feel the day after, say, a long day of travel. I got up, went through the normal morning routines, and then for coffee. Occasionally I felt a touch feverish but it caused me no distress. It's now been 36 hours or better since I had the shot, and there is nothing more to report. Unless I get clobbered out of the clear blue by more symptoms, I can report that I am now fully on the other side of the line drawn more than a year ago.

I set all of this down because the Pandemic is one of a small handful of events which have forcibly reshaped the world during my lifetime. I am just old enough to remember, as a small child, the enormous lines for gas during the Oil Crisis of the late 70s. I remember the Cold War and its climax, the Gulf War, and of course, 9/11 and its seemingly endless aftermath. When the Pandemic initially struck, I remember feeling as if I were experiencing either an extended bad dream or the business end of one of those end-of-the-world mini-series (you know, like The Stand). Shit like this, I assured myself, only happened in the minds of (ahem) overheated television writers, not in the actual world, and especially not in what we refer to as The First World. And once reality sunk in, once masks and social distancing and lockdowns and Zoom everything became the new normal, I felt a sulky, entitled, furious impatience with that monolithic body we simply refer to as "Science." Surely "Science" would get off its collective ass and deliver us a cure so we could go back to a time when masks were for Halloween and the thought of going to a concern or a movie theater didn't fill us with trepidation and dread.

Well, Science has done its job, and in record time, too. I can't think of any human endeavors, except the development of the atomic bomb in the early-mid 40s, and the space race of the 50s-60s, which saw such concentrated effort upon a single daunting task, and ended with such decisively affirmative results. Doubtless this first wave of vaccines are primitive, rather like the fighter planes and tanks our factories churned out in huge numbers immediately before and in the opening stages of World War Two; doubtless booster shots and 2.0 and 3.0 vaccines will emerge in the coming years, and we will all have to submit to further "jabs" as Science and the Virus battle it out for the lead spot in this particular race. This is not really what people want to hear, but the "novel coronavirus" is not going anywhere. Like influenza, it is now a part of human life and we will have to deal with it as we deal with the flu and the common cold. ​But we seem, for the moment anyway, to be getting a handle on the bastard. And having gotten that handle, it's only normal to want to return to normal life. But -- and I must stress this fact -- there will be no actual return. As Herman Wouk pointed out, wars draw dividing lines through history and separate one era from another. But "war" is a curious thing and not always fought on a military plane. Any great struggle can constitute a war. The Great Depression killed the Jazz Age. World War Two killed the Depression. The Oil Crisis ushered in a whole new polito-economic reality for the First World. The end of the Cold War altered the very raison d'etre of the post-WW2 "free world" and destroyed an entire political system and ideology which had ruled a huge part of the planet for 70-plus years. 9/11 maked a sea change in America's relationship with the world and itself. And this Pandemic will alter many aspects of our ways of living even after it itself is just a bad memory. Many of the "temporary" changes, like having people work from home and employ Zoom or Microsoft Teams to do their jobs, are hardening into permanency already. Brick and mortar offices are now taking the same hit that brick and mortar buildings have been taking since Amazon became the dominant retail force in this nation. Carrying a mask -- something literally everyone hates or at least dislikes doing -- will now probably become as normal as having a cell phone on one's person: we may not use them, but we will probably feel we have to have one handy for years to come.

The future that is coming is different than the one we imagined in 2019, and in some ways very much more unwelcome. In a macro sense, are reaping what we -- ourselves, our forefathers -- have sewed since industrialism began. This virus was one manifestation of our environmental policy as a species, which is to plunder and rape everything in sight for short-term gain without thought of future consequence. We have been at this for 200 years or more, and the world is finally telling us, in its own ways, that it has bloody well had enough. Those who insist everything will return to "normal" in 2022 or 2023 might want to consider that there is at present no vaccine for the huge fires, sweeping droughts and destructive storms of every type which have now become normal features of weather in much of the world. There is no vaccine for crop failure, shortages of fresh water, spiking cancer rates. We all want, on some level or other, to live a life of comfortable materialism on the one hand, and on the other, know that "nature" is out there for us to play with when we're in the mood to get our feet dirty. That was the world we grew up in. But it is not the world we live in, as anyone who lives in California or the Midwest, or the Gulf Coast now nows. You can now get a jab for Covid, if you want it; you cannot get a jab for 110 degree temperatures in November.

My point here is that life's insistence on changing, on taking our familiar ways and traditions and sense of normalcy and smashing them or twisting them into something still recognizable and yet definitely different, is never going to be easy to swallow. The folks who lived in the Jazz Age and were of the economic class which was capable of enjoying that decadence to its fullest, were no doubt dismayed to see it all fly to pieces in 1929. I know that September 11, 2001 put a definite and terrible end to my belief that 80s-90s prosperity could be sustained indefinitely, or that democracy had already won the worldwide struggle against totalitarianism and religious fanaticism. The truth is, we all have a peculiar and particular definition of "normal life" and "the way things ought to be," and this viewpoint colors much of our conduct and attitude, even in daily life. But life by definition is unstable and constantly attacks and chips away at our sense of normalcy. We can only shift our slang, our clothing style, our technology, etc., so much before daily life becomes an exasperating game of musical chairs and we begin to experience waves of nostalgia for the past -- waves which, if they crash into us enough, tend to lead to a type of social and sometimes a political conservatism. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is not the issue: the issue is that outward change creates inward change, often whether we want it or not. In the end, our success as human beings -- success meaning happiness, not material wealth or social position -- rests largely on our ability to adapt. And this, in closing, brings me back to the virus.

The success of viruses on this planet is not merely due their genetic simplicity (many scientists do not consider viruses as living things but rather organic androids, since they do not meet hardly any of the critera we assign to life), but their propensity for mutation. As the animal body adapts its defenses to kill an invading virus, the virus shifts its own genetic definition and becomes something else, something against which the animal has lesser defense. The immune system then adapts in turn, or tries to, and a game is inaugurated which is in a sense without an ending. And this grim contest is a microcosm of our human lives. Life keeps chucking changes at us, large and small, welcome and unwelcome and ambiguous, and we keep trying to come to a sense of normalcy amid the hailstorm. It ain't easy, but neither is staying alive and sane and happy; so when someone comes along with a needle and a solution, however stopgap and temporary, it's best to take a moment to be remember how adaptable our species truly is, and what remarkable feats we are capable of achieving if only we'd stop fighting each other and, like Gatsby, looking backward into the past.

As I Please V: Neurodivergent Edition

Probably the greatest thing about owning and operating your own blog is the absolute freedom involved. In terms of literary spaces, there is none so like the Wild West as a blog -- and not only is it the Wild West, you are free to play the outlaw if so you choose. In almost every other area of my writing life, there are some rules, even if they are only self-imposed. In other words, there is a sheriff or town marshal stalking about the town somewhere with a scowl and a scattergun, sure to make trouble with me if I violate an ordinance. That sheriff might be called Contract or Deadline or even Lazy Writer With A Bad Conscience, but as I just said, if I want to cheese him off I can do so by simply placing the black hat of outlaw upon my head, and fucking off in any direction I like, sunset or no.

You see, when I write in other mediums, from novel to short story, novelette to screenplay, poem to essay, I am doing so with very definite objectives. I may be trying to frighten the reader, or to make him think, or to make him angry or thoughtful, or to experience a certain atmosphere, or simply to entertain him for the short period in which he happens to be reading my story. I might fail miserably in my goals, but the objective is clear to me even if the path to it is not, and to reach that objective I have to follow certain obvious rules of structure and logic: a horror story, for example, should be frightening and not amusing, nicht wahr? Likewise, if I am writing an essay, I must have a point, and must take steps to make that point in a way that will hold up under hostile examination. But in a blog I am free to say whatever the hell I want, whenever I want, in any style I so choose. Conversely, I can say nothing at all, and almost nobody will care, and I don't have to care if they do.

Maynard James Keenan, who among many other things is the lead singer of the bands Tool, Perfect Circle and Puscifer, was once asked at the curiously undefined, nebulous nature of the latter band's sound. He responded that Puscifer was "simply a playground for the various voices in my head...a space with no clear or discernible goals, where my Id, Ego, and Anima all come together to exchange cookie recipes."

This quote struck me enough that I wrote it down as soon as I heard it, for I am a firm believer that everyone needs a playspace within one's own mind which has no clear or discernible goals; which exists for its own sake. For me, blogging is one such playspace. It gives me the chance to escape rules, logic, discipline, deadlines and the strictures of contracts and handshake deals, and simply do what I want as the impulse strikes me.

I mention this because the time has come for yet another installment in the As I Please franchise -- that branch of Stone Cold Prose which allows me to demonstrate what having a neurodivergent mind is really like.

* I've often railed in these pages, and on social media, about the extreme difficulty of getting reviews on Amazon (not sales, mind you, but reviews, either positive or negative). Recently I decided to conduct an experiment to prove that even greater exposure does not yield more reviews. For the first time ever, I temporarily made a large portion of my catalog of fiction available for free download on Amazon. Though response was initially slow, before long I was hitting 200 downloads a day, and one of my books, Devils You Know briefly became an Amazon (irony alert) best seller in three different categories. For all of this, I noted -- after a suitable waiting period -- only three or four new reviews on various stories. If I didn't know almost every other writer out there was suffering the same fate, I would find this humiliating: instead it is merely a source of frustration. So please, folks; the next time you read anything, leave a review. It doesn't have to be good: even a bad review has value so long as it demonstrates some level of intelligence. It's chic to support local businesses, why not independent authors?

* In my latest appearance on the LCS Radio Show, we were discussing "fun" bad movies, and the bad movie I selected for us to watch was BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, a God-awful knock-off of STAR WARS which appeared in 1980. This movie is really, really bad, but for some reason it triggered within me a certain nostalgia for 80s cinema of all kinds -- especially forgotten or just plain awful 80s cinema and television. I came away from this orgy feeling a bit shaken. Some of the flicks I'd witnessed (MEGAFORCE, for example) were gut-wrenchingly, almost surpasseth-understanding terrible, while others (RUNAWAY, BLUE THUNDER) were surprisingly engaging despite obvious flaws. Likewise, the mid-to-low-range television shows, shit like MATT HOUSTON, T.J. HOOKER and THE FALL GUY, are both simultaneously: objectively bad, yet strangely fun. What struck me, however, was the spirit of cheerfully cheesy innocence which marks so many of them. In these shows and in many of the films, at least the PG-rated ones, the heroes operated by strict and almost unwavering codes of honor; they were never tempted by villainy and if they were, they always managed to emerge unsullied and stronger than before. Likewise, even a show as dedicated to exposing problems and injustices within society and "the system" as something like QUINCY, M.E. placed all of its faith quite firmly in both: the idea was to remind us to live up to our societal ideals, not that our ideals were wrong; to trust that "the system" would work if only we would fully participate, not to junk it altogether. I don't remember precisely when the tone of movies and television began to darken into cynicism, moral ambiguity and "Realism" in the old, brutal German sense of the word, I imagine the process was quite gradual, but the fact remains that it did, and there is zero sign of any desire by the big public to set the clock back. From a qualitative standpoint this is a good thing, but I'm not so sure that cheesy, family-friendly shows with hammer-heavy moral and patriotic messages becoming as extinct as triceratops will do us much benefit in the long run. The idea that evil and corruption will always be defeated, that the good guys ought to win and do win more often than they lose, that not everyone is tempted by flashy objects or power for its own sake, is one that deserves a hearing.

* Having re-entered the criminal justice system, I am once again reminded that its depiction by television and film is so far from anything which might be called reality as almost to constitute an act of fraud. Much of television is devoted to the idea that courtrooms are inherently dramatic places, and on the surface of things this would seem to be a no-brainer. Drama is conflict, and courtrooms are intrinsically adversarial systems -- you literally cannot have a trial, even a civil trial over a trifling issue, without conflict. Yet anyone who has ever sat through an entire trial can testify (pun intended) at how miserably, almost paralyzingly boring time in a courtroom can be. Many years ago I attended a trial of bank robbers who shot a police officer while trying to escape; I even knew the officer, who was present in court. And yet after about an hour or two of observation I was bored stiff. Nothing much has changed. There are moments of great tension and suspense, sharp exchanges between individuals, even humorous little asides, but by and large the wheels of justice grind slow, fine and dull as hell.

* One of the most interesting battles of World War 2 is also almost completely unknown. The Dodecanese Campaign, which lasted from September 8 - November 22, 1943, saw the British, acting on their own and without any American support, try to seize a string of islands off the Turkish coast from German and Italian control. For the lover of military history, or for those passionate about the political and economic forces which shape and drive military campaigns, this battle has absolutely everything: political infighting, military treachery, side-switching, code-breaking, airborne and amphibious assaults, naval battles, air attacks, commando raids, massacres of POWs and civilians, the debut of new technology, and a whole slew of tragic friendly-fire incidents, some with five-figure death tolls. The only thing it seems to lack is a happy ending...for the Allies, anyway. The battle was a tremendous German victory. It kept Turkey, who was Hitler's only supplier of chrome, from joining the Allies, and ensured that the Spanish would also continue to supply vital tungsten to the Nazi war effort: it also prevented the Allies from sending war supplies through the Dardanelles Strait to the USSR. Its failure weakened Churchill's already wobbly position vis-a-vis Roosevelt and Stalin and had an effect on postwar Greek politics. It also led to the near-extermination of the Jewish populations of the islands after the battle, when they transferred from Italian to German agency. No doubt the unhappy conclusion is why it has little to no place in the history books or popular culture: indeed, the sole movie I can think of which references this phase of the war is The Guns of Navarone, a story which has absolutely no basis in reality: not only the fabled guns but the island they reside upon never existed. The novel simply the attempt of a feisty hack writer with curiously fascist emotional leanings to slap a happy face over a bitter, humiliating defeat in which the Germans inflicted anywhere from 5 to 50 casualties for every one they sustained. Ditto the admittedly entertaining film. I tell you this: WW2 war may be over, but the rug under which all the costly blunders and defeats have been swept is very lumpy indeed, and one is tempted to wonder what is really served by editing our history in this way. It is grossly disrespectful of those who did not die in glamorous victories, yes, but there is a larger issue at stake. Defeat teaches us more than victory, and the Dodecanese Campaign could teach today's world political leadership a great deal about how not to fight a battle -- something they sorely need.

* I am once again doing the Whole 30 cleanse, in which, for 30 days, I eat only fruit, nuts, meats and vegetables, and drink only water and unsweetened coffee or tea. No sugar. No dairy. No alcohol. No processed foods. And no grains of any kind. This cleanse is a huge pain in the ass and every time I do it I wonder why. A particularly horrible feature is something called the "keto flu," which is an early and temporary side-effect of going off sugar and bad carbs. Your body is used to fueling itself with that crap, so when you take said crap away, it doesn't know how to draw energy from the food you do ingest, and has to re-learn the skill. This period of learning is known as the keto (ketogenic) flu, and can last several days or longer. During the period, you suffer from a tremendous sense of physical fatigue, and find yourself weak, apathetic and prone to sighing a lot for no goddamned reason. In my case it seldom lasts longer than 36 - 72 hours and never returns, but those 36 - 72 hours suck. And just generally speaking, the diet is a pain in the ass and a bore. On the other hand, it does a great deal to clear up the skin and reduce inflammation (especially around the lower belly). The first time I did it, I went 32 days without any booze, sugar or bad carbs, and my skin had a positive glow when I finished. I also dropped 4 lbs, despite eating like a pig the entire time.

* When I was living in California, I seldom wore anything dressier than a sports shirt and rarely more than shorts and flip-flops. I spent months in tank tops and often whole seasons with a baseball cap wedged firmly upon my head. Shaving was a ritual engaged in at my whim, and I went intervals of seasons without a haircut. "Work clothes" meant a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Now that I reside in Pennsylvania once again, I wear suits, vests, watch-chains, and have two tie racks and will soon need two more. Indeed, I have an entire walk-in closet devoted to suits and suchlike. I'm not sure that's progress, but it is an enormous change and reflects a certain change in outlook as well. One of the main benefits of life in SoCal is that it is essentially an endless summer, a retreat into a permenent state of late adolescence. On the other hand, this is also one of the main drawbacks. When it is summer, no one thinks about tomorrow; when it is always summer, tomorrow never comes. There is no desire to plan, no urge to grow up or accept responsibility. A major advantage to the rhythm of seasons is that they remind us that life is not eternal, that youth cannot be clung to infinitely, and that in one form or another, the school bell will ring come September.

* One of the major differences between what we call "the left" and what we call "the right" in this country is in how they deal with internal party strife. You may know the left by this sign: when one of their own fucks up, be it Joss Whedon, Al Franken, or Andrew Cuomo, he is torn apart so quickly and violently by his own kind it is rather akin to watching a side of bloody beef being dipped into a shark tank. When a rightie screws the pooch, a la Marjorie Green, the worst they can generally expect is a knuckle rap, after which the entire Republican establishment will circle the wagons, load up the rifles, and prepare to die in their defense. Without getting into morality, ethics or psychology, it's a fascinating phenomenon and probably bears further study.

FEAR, PARADOX AND PROPHECY

I woke up this morning in a contemplative mood, and the thing I am contemplating is the paradox of fear.

Fear is probably the keenest-felt of all human emotions. Neither love nor hatred achieves such a sense of absolute immediacy, and with good biological reason: fear keeps us alive. Our ancestors survived long enough to evolve into us because they took counsel of their fears. You are reading this now instead of occupying a few cubic feet within a coffin, or a few cubic inches within an urn, because the region of your brain which periodically causes you to feel afraid has by doing so, also prevented you from dying prematurely on countless thousands of occasions. In a less dramatic sense, you have probably gone farther in your life than you might have, had not fears of a less visceral variety dictated a more sober course of action than you actually wanted to take. The jobs we do, the relationships we enter into and maintain -- or don't -- and the daily lives we lead, down to very fine particulars, are all dictated to some extent by generalized fears which prevent us from behaving stupidly or destructively. To be successful in modern life, one must have a healthy and well-developed sense of fear, and if our fears today are not the fears of our ancestors 300 or even 30,000 years ago, well, the tent of fear is a large one. We may not have to worry much about being eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore, but modern life can still devour us easily enough, albeit in different ways.

Viewed through this lens, fear, like pain, is a useful necessity. But in modern life, fear is also a strangely inhibiting and dangerous thing. It can be dangerous to us physically, and it can most definitely be dangerous to us mentally and spiritually.

As I said above, fear at its core is a very simple thing. It's a sudden rush of chemicals which punish risky behavior with negative emotion while rewarding us with enough adrenaline to escape sudden danger. But fear, like everything else, has evolved with time and become complex. It has spawned children, among whose names are anxiety and dread. Anxiety, by my own personal definition, is fear spread out over time, spread like a film over daily life, so that one is constantly dealing with stress on the body: adrenaline trickles. The heart beats too fast. Concentration is difficult. Temper is short. Sleep comes poorly. As for dread, what is that but a pervasive sense of impending doom? A sense that, metaphorically speaking, the lion in the tall grass is getting closer and closer? One suffers from dread as from a low-grade but chronic ailment: it poisons everything, makes nothing seem worthwhile, inhibits pleasure, contentment, and joy. Indeed, it makes the act of simply being alive a contest of endurance. To exist in a suspended state of dread is to long for escape -- even if it means dying. The irony of this is too obvious to merit much comment, except that there is a deep, foul bitterness in the idea of the thing which keeps us alive making us feel as if life itself is unbearable.

The life we lead nowadays as a species is not the life evolution designed us for. Fear was intended to be a very powerful burst of emotion and sensation which produced a single end: protection of the human who felt it. But in modern, "first world" life we no longer need fear being eaten by bears or poisoned by snakes or clubbed to death by rival tribes. Our glands no longer explode into action and then fall into dormancy. They are awake at almost all times, steadily pumping chemicals into our bloodstream that tax our bodies and make us unhealthy. The matrix we have built, civilization, has elminated one set of well-defined fears but replaced them with a much larger, much less dramatic set of fears which we have proven incapable of managing. Fear of debt. Fear of joblessness. Fear of homelessness. Fear of societal ridicule and alienation. Even fear of old age -- a problem our ancient ancestors didn't have, but probably wanted. The result is a crisis of mental health problems, drug use, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and suicide. But less dramatically, it has led to a different sort of crisis. The fear of living. Of actually being alive.

The fear of living is something I noticed at a relatively young age, when I was also noticing that I had different dreams than those around me. Most kids in my age group had specific desires for what they wanted to be -- firemen, astronauts, etc. As we grew up a little into our teenage years, our ambitions matured and crystalized. You'd hear someone say she or he wanted to be an interior designer, or an environmental lawyer, or go to Wall Street or medical school or what have you. I myself never harbored any of these ambitions. From the time I was ten years old, possibly even younger than that, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create imaginary worlds full of imaginary people which and who would seem more real to the reader than the things and people in their actual lives. I wanted to create things and bring them before the masses. More vaguely, I also wanted to be a part of Hollywood: exactly what part varied from year to year, but the general goal was to be involved in the making of the same type of movies and television shows I myself liked to watch. In the broadest sense, I wanted to entertain people, and, I suppose, gain attention and praise for myself.

Some years later, I found myself, as most later twentysomethings do, in the "real world." It is worth noting here that the phrase "real world" always connotes an atmosphere of unpleasantness, harshness, disappointment, and even menace. The implication is that the life you've led from birth until the age of about 21 - 22 or so was to some degree or other fake; a warm, pleasant illusion cast by loving parents and reasonably forebearing teachers, neighbors and lesser relations. Once in the "real world," however, the spell was broken, as a deep, contented sleep might be broken by a bucket of cold water. Suddenly life, which was aglow with rosy optimism, was now a loveless, comfortless environment in which dreams were quickly and messily put to death, and all sorts of cruel, jarring realities came knocking on the door with knuckles of spiked brass.

The general tenor of the gospel of "the real world" is this: "Childhood is over, kid. Time to put on the big-boy pants. Nobody loves you out here, and your folks can't protect you. This world is full of sharp edges and damned few safe spaces. From this point on, you're on your own, and you've got to bring home the bacon or starve. Put away your dreams like they were Star Wars toys, because from now on its alarm clocks, commutes, water-cooler politics, 1.9 kids and a mortage."

For someone like myself, whose goals were unrealistic from the gitgo, and who had little interest in a conventional life, "the real world" was a horrific experience. I was surprisingly successful at navigating it, but I enjoyed none of the process and was plagued from ages of 23 - 31 with an almost continuous sense of deep unfulfillment. Sometimes this sense was unendurable: I began to experience anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and other physical symptoms of depression including migraine headaches. These things, I realize now, were my body's way of telling me that I was, to quote Orwell, outraging my true nature by harnessing myself to "the real world." I was experiencing a midlife crisis while still a young man, and the crisis was brought about by fear. Not fear of death, but fear that one day I would die without having done those things I was put on Earth to do. Nobody, literally nobody, wants to depart this vale of tears with their music still inside them, and the knowledge that I was chugging steadily toward this grim fate plagued and haunted me.

At the same time, I had a different fear: the fear that if I chucked up my job and went after my dreams of being a novelist and a Hollywood player (of however modest a caliber), I would fail miserably...and be seen to fail, be cataloged as a failure. Whenever I incautiously mentioned my dreams to others, I almost invariably was either laughed at to my face or grimly questioned as to the practical consequences of defeat. I won't say I got no encouragement, but I can say that my e'er-supportive Mom aside, most of the encouragement I got was either tepid and qualified, or came out of love for me rather than a belief that "going for it" was the right thing for me to do.

But the bitterest attacks against me all came from people who, I realize now, were themselves afraid. They were not afraid that I would flop, but rather that I wouldn't. Any success I had at chasing the brass ring would simply touch the open would they nursed within their own souls, the wound left by their own practical, perhaps cowardly, choice not to seek a ring of their own. There is no hater so fiery, so full of energy, so relentlessly vicious and inventive with viciousness, as one who knows that he or she lacked the courage to go for it when it mattered...and must now watch as you possibly succeed where they most definitely failed.

The fear that I was wasting my life and talents had all but paralyzed me, and this paralysis led to greater and greater fear as the months went by. The other fear, that if I did act on my ambitions I would fail in spectacular and humiliating fashion and have to come "crawling back" to my old life in two years time, paralyzed me further. I didn't want to fail, but I really didn't want to be humiliated.

You see what I'm driving at here. The natural, healthy instinct of self-preservation had turned, curdled somehow, and become an inhibiting force in my life. It had trapped me in misery, an act which only increased that misery. A cycle had been created and to break it I would have to overcome my fears. I would have to embrace risk -- the thing fear is designed to avoid. In short, I'd have to pull a kind of George Costanza and do the exact fucking opposite of everything my fear-glands were telling me to do and not to.

If you're reading this, you already know what I did, and the successes (and setbacks) I had a result. I have often likened the period between my choice to quit my profession and chase down all my ambitions, and today, when I am now balancing both "the real world" and my dream life, to a bareknuckle boxing match of infinite duration. There have been times when I was on the ropes. There have been times when I was down, dazed, and listening to the count. There have been moments when I was spitting blood and broken teeth into the bucket while my trainer jammed smelling salts beneath my busted conk. But there have also been moments of tremendous, validating triumph. I won't bore you with a list of accomplishments, any more than I will torment myself with a litany of missed opportunities, near misses and failures, but I will say this: Lawrence Sanders was right when he wrote, "Nobody wins the final decision, but with luck we can pick up a few rounds."

At this point you may be wondering why I placed "Prophecy" in the title of this epistle along with fear and paradox. The answer is that the one leads to the other and to the other still. Fear leads to the paradox that the very thing which was designed to keep us alive kills us spiritually and even physically if we give it too much heed; this paradox leads to prophecy of a self-fulfilling nature. The coward -- and we all have one inside of us -- will always look at someone who took a chance and ended up on his or her ass and say, "I told you that would happen." And indeed the coward did. As the saying goes, the view is good from the cheap seats and the coward always occupies the cheapest seats of all: the peanut gallery. From this inexpensive but lofty vantage, he can see everything, especially negative outcome. But he does not look with the purpose of navigating around those outcomes. He looks with ways of surrendering to them, or worse yet still, avoiding them entirely by demanding that you take no chances at all. He is a gray and timid soul who wants all souls to be gray and timd lest he stand out for what he is. That is his special fear, the fear of the hater, which in this case is the self-hater: that he will be exposed. That his reasons, his arguments, his sober observations and heartfelt warnings will be rightly appraised as his fear of daring, of failure, of climbing down from the gallery and into the arena where the real men and real women fight to see their dreams come true.

Looking back, I can see now that every time in my life when I lost, or deliberately ignored, the line between healthy, reasonable fear and the self-restricting, self-defeating, self-destructive kind preached by my own inner coward and those around me who did not have my interests at heart, I not only disappointed myself, I lost some sense of who I was as a human being. Unhealthy fear is like a fog that makes navigation difficult or even impossible, and triggers an instinct to kill the engines and lower the anchor. But there is no safety in immobility, because there is no safety in "the real world." Life is degrees of risk. The only question you have to ask yourself is which one you wish to take.

AMBITION: OR, THE CRIMES OF ICARUS

When I was growing up, "ambition" was a dirty word. Or at least television and film worked very hard to make it so. I cannot tell you how many times, in soap operas, melodramas, mini-series, sit-coms, prime-time TV hits, and feature films, the word "ambition" was used either as an insult -- it seemed to denote an unscrupulous lust for power -- or as a kind of warning, as in "Look out for Susan...she's ambitious.". I observed this phenomenon so many times that, when I became older, I began to wonder if it wasn't a deliberate act. If Hollywood, or rather the wire-pullers who run Hollywood, hadn't decided the best way to safeguard their position and power was to enure following generations regarded ambition as a crime.

The textbook definition of ambition is "a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work," and it has often been noted that tyrants, who rise by ambition, fear it in others and try to discourage it in the broad masses. But in politics, even non-tyrants are known for crushing ambition in those around them: witness such politicians as Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump, neither of whom could abide anyone whose personal desires rose far above licking their master's boots (or pumps -- whatever).

I don't know if Greek mythology is still taught to children today, but my own teachers seemed obsessed with it. To this day, I can rememeber the exhaustive thoroughness with which we studied the Greek gods and the Greek myths, and as late as high school we were still chewing through Homer. One of the most arresting stories, and one hammered into our brains repeatedly, was the story of Icarus. It may be remembered that Icarus was imprisoned in the Labyrinth, but given wings of wax and feathers that he might escape. However, having taken to the sky, he became exhilarated by his own power and flew too close to the sun: the wax soon melted and he fell to his death. More than one modern cultural anthropologist has made a point of telling us that Icarus stood as a deliberately chosen warning about the perils of, yes, you guessed it, ambition. Icarus wanted to fly higher than was better for him, and death was his reward. Indeed, most of those damned Greek myths seemed to be about punishing those who grew too big for their britches. The lesson was clear: the gods are jealous, they believe in caste systems, and punish without mercy those mortals who want more than they have or try to rise above their station.

I was a strange and difficult child, but I had a gift for seeing through smokescreens, and even then I recognized that the criminalization of ambition was not a beneficent act. Those teachers, preachers, parents and Hollywood types who encouraged us to aim low were doing so with the intention, the very conscious and deliberate intention, of closing our horizons. The child who believes ambition is a sin is not likely to threaten the power structure as an adult. And indeed, it was not until I was an adult that I learned the tale of Icarus as it was told to me was missing an important part. Deadalus, the designer of the wings and Icarus' father, did indeed warn his son not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax melt: but he also warned Icarus not to fly too low, lest the ocean soak his feathers. He understood the capabilities of the wings he had created and wanted his son to heed them, but the boy, being young and reckless, got caught up in the thrill of the moment. It was not ambition that leads to Icarus' destruction, it is simply a mistake in judgment.

Some time ago I had occasion to take umbrage with an actress who complained on social media that she did not want to be described as "aspiring" but simply as an actress, despite her lack of actual acting credits. I pointed out that she was indeed an aspiring actress, and that there was no shame in her aspirations: having a goal is the first step to achieving it. Why not own that and be proud of it? I don't regret what I said, because I am sick and tired of words like ambition and aspiration being used as code for hubris, power-hunger, Machiavellianism, or some species of greed.

I am an ambitious person by nature. I have hardly achieved all my ambitions or even most of them, but they are largely what keeps me going in the face of endless discouragements. I have a strong desire to achieve certain specific things and those things all require discipline and hard work. And I am not afraid of either one...provided they serve my ambitions. If they don't, it is very difficult to exert myself, and such exertions as I can muster leave me exhausted, bored and depressed. On the rare occasions I mention this I am often called selfish. Most people, I have come reluctantly to understand, not only inculcated the lesson that ambition is a character defect when not wedded to some one else's ambitions (e.g. "it's okay to have the ambition... to serve the company, church, country, etc...just not yourself personally"), but maintain a low-grade hostility to those who try to achieve their own. Perhaps in their hearts they despise themselves for giving up their own dreams. Perhaps the success of one who is personally ambitious threatens their decision to tuck their own interests away and play it safe. In any event, I no longer have time even to pay lip service to such gray and timid souls. Such people are inevitably on the sidelines when anything happens: always the spectators, never the performers.

In my studies of revolutionaries, it struck me that nearly all of them came from what could roughly be described as the middle class. From Hitler to Castro, from Lenin to Mao, from George Washington to Simon Bolivar, the men who spearheaded violent overthrows of existing systems hailed from the middle strata of society. Some were in the upper middle class, to be sure, but even Napoleon descended from very minor Italian nobility of paltry means. There is, of course, a very definite reason for this. If one accepts Orwell's theory that the human race can be divided into the high, the middle and the low, it naturally flows that the high, being high, have no ambitions but to retain their power, while the low are too exhausted by physical labor and hunger to try and achieve power. The high eventually stagnate, ossify and lose their vitality through decadence, while the low are too inert, uneducated and distracted to effect change, though they are a fertile source of cannon fodder for those who will. That leaves the middle, who have education, covet what the rich have, and fear what the poor are. Everyone knows that Marie Antionette said, "Let them eat cake," but it is seldom considered that those who baked that cake (and all the others) were neither poor nor rich, but in the lower middle class. And they were the same people who later dragged her to the guillotine.

Ambition is at the root of all change. In order for change to occur, one must conceive of a different situation for oneself than presently exists; then one must come up with ideas for how that situation might be brought about; and then, of course, one must act upon those ideas. Reality is a certain way; desire is another way. But reality bends to desire. This is the nature of ambition, and it is also what separates the sheep from the goats. And if I may bring this thought back to its start-line, it is in the nature of the high, those who have power, to encourage the sheep to be a sheep. Why not? Sheep do not threaten. They bleat. They herd. They give up their wool, their milk, and eventually, their lives if need me. Rams are a different story. They are restless. They challenge the fence. The yearn to roam and run free...and will fight if caged. Which is why the sheep-hearders try to cut off their balls.

Reader's Favorite's verdict: 5 Stars for SINNER'S CROSS

Now that 2020 has mercifully met its end, we can begin the long process of digging out from the rubble of its unment expectations. That is at any rate what I am endeavouring to do in this newly-minted year of 2021.

If you are one of the (coughs) elite thousand or so who read this blog on a regular basis, you already know that in addition to all the other monkey wrenches 2020 chucked into my own personal gears, it managed to jam, for no less than six months, all my attempts to promote my most recent novel, Sinner's Cross. As Frank Burns said in M*A*S*H, I don't chew my cabbage twice, so don't fear a repeat of any earlier whining you may have overheard. I simply say this to let you know that I am now once again both willing and able to put the word out about what I consider the best thing I have ever written.

At the very end of that year whose name we won't mention, SC was named a finalist in the Independent Author Network Awards. It also got a very favorable notice from Writer's Digest:

"This expertly crafted historical fiction takes readers into the trenches of WWII—and into the minds of soldiers on both sides of the war. With careful attention to the psychological impact of battle, the author gives voice to men in the impossible position of carrying out orders that disregard human dignity, including their own. This book is not a comfortable read. It begs questions about who really wins when the fighting is over. While there is an ever-present sense of futility in each episode, the reader will not be left feeling he has wasted his time on a morbid retelling of history, but rather given the opportunity to ponder anew the excruciating sacrifices soldiers make during wartime, and whether they are worth it."

These accolades come on the heels of it winning the Best Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction (2019), the Book Excellence Award in the category of Action (2020), and the Literary Titan Gold Medal (2020). However, on New Year's Day, I woke up to see that it had also been reviewed by Reader's Favorite -- specifically by Grant Leishman, author of The Second Coming, Rise of the Antichrist, and The Photograph. Mr. Leishman gave the book five stars and wrote:

Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.

"Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal 'hot zone' of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it."

Now, contrary to what you might think, since I so often use this blog for publicity, I do not actually enjoy boasting or even bringing attention to myself. That is to say, I do like attention, and am among the very few who enjoy public speaking, but certain childhood incidents have left me with an almost morbid fear of being being scrutinized by large groups of people. When I decided to put my fiction out into the mass market, where it could be exposed to criticism online, I knew I was, as the saying goes, dropping my pants in public and inviting all and sundry to judge what they saw. So far the judgments have by and large been flattering, but this doesn't mean I haven't heard my share of boos. A writer, especially an independent one, must do everything in his power to attract attention, even if the act of attracting attention is distasteful to him. And as I have recently discovered, even a rising profile in the literary world has its own pitfalls. I cannot run a search on myself without discovering a new pirate book site which features my complete works. Honest to God, I wouldn't mind the fact that people are stealing from me if only there were some way of monitoring the traffic to let me know just how many thieves there are. If I could prove, for example, that for every sale I make, 3 people (or 30, or 300) were illegally torrenting my novels, it would go a long way to establishing further credibility as an author. In the mean time, hope you will I hope forgive me if I occasionally use this platform as little more than a bully pulpit for my own propaganda.

Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War