Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 24
December 29, 2019
NO! I'M NOT TIRED OF WINNING
2019 was not an easy year for me, but it has been extremely fertile for my children. You know, my books. Those things I write, when I'm not watching re-runs of T.J. Hooker, hiking mountains, or drinking Irish whiskey.
I may have said this before, but when you publish anything, from a short story to an epic novel, there is a sensation that is probably akin to a parent watching their child climb into the schoolbus for the very first time. You've created this thing, nurtured and guided it and fallen in love with it...and now it's time to release it into the world. A world you know can be terribly cold, indifferent, and cruel. A world where your love counts for jack-fuck and cannot prevent so much as a skinned knee, much less a catastrophe. There is anxiety, and emotion, and fear. Yes, fear....
Are the other kids going to accept yours? Are the bullies going to target them? Will the teachers be nasty? Are the bus-brakes going to fail? The anxieties are many, and the greatest of them is not the disaster-scenario per se, but rather the fear they'll simply be ignored, like that poor kid the the Tears For Fears song "Mad World":
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me...
As a parent-of-sorts, you know that even excellence is no guarantor of success. Robert Parker, the Dean of American Crime Fiction, said that All Our Yesterdays was the best book he'd ever written in his long career, yet nobody bought it. John Carpenter's version of The Thing is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, yet when it debuted in 1982, it flopped harder than a lead pancake. And who can forget Vincent Van Gogh, the all-time great artist who sold exactly one painting in his entire life?
Writers are amubulatory jars of insecurity and dread. I was not a stranger to literary accolades before 2019 showed its tricky and pugnacious mug, but while my debut novel, Cage Life, won three trophies in the first year and a half after its release, in the last year or so I had begun to feel a strange resentment toward that book. It seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen -- and sunlight -- in the room, distracting from the works that succeeded it. They weren't putting up the numbers I wanted them to. They weren't winning awards of their own. Some small part of me suspected I had become the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder.
No more.
On May 6, my short story collection Devils You Know was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.
On October 30, my second book, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
On December 24, I was informed my "long short" story, "The Numbers Game," had won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the Novella category.
On December 29, I received notice that Knuckle Down had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Suspense.
On the very same day, I was also told that Sinner's Cross, a novel I released just two months ago, had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction.
Today, I finished my fifth interview as an author, this time with the Hard Hat Book Site. Their last interview was with Bob van Laerhoven, author of the much-acclaimed Return to Hiroshima. I'm okay being placed in that company. Unlike Groucho Marx, I would definitely join a club that had me as a member. But it didn't stop there: a few weeks ago, my alma mater, York College, featured me in an article in their quarterly magazine, which gave me a curious feeling of having come home in triumph.
Yeah, 2019 was in many ways a beast and a bitch. I had more deals fall through than you would probably believe, and long stretches where I licked pencil-stubs, thumbed through dog-eared stacks of unpaid bills, and wondered how the fuck I was going to get by for another week, much less another year. I've had fights with utility companies and cable providers, and while I made quite a bit of money, relatively speaking, through my writing, the IRS is going to have a field day come tax time with all those bloody 1099s.
Such is the fate of the writer. It's either feast or famine and there is usually a lot more famine than feast. But not this time.
When Donald Trump was running for office he claimed the American people would get "tired of winning" should he become president.
Evidently he doesn't understand the American people.
We never get tired of winning.
The Numbers Game
Devils You Know
Cage Life
Knuckle Down
Sinner's Cross
I may have said this before, but when you publish anything, from a short story to an epic novel, there is a sensation that is probably akin to a parent watching their child climb into the schoolbus for the very first time. You've created this thing, nurtured and guided it and fallen in love with it...and now it's time to release it into the world. A world you know can be terribly cold, indifferent, and cruel. A world where your love counts for jack-fuck and cannot prevent so much as a skinned knee, much less a catastrophe. There is anxiety, and emotion, and fear. Yes, fear....
Are the other kids going to accept yours? Are the bullies going to target them? Will the teachers be nasty? Are the bus-brakes going to fail? The anxieties are many, and the greatest of them is not the disaster-scenario per se, but rather the fear they'll simply be ignored, like that poor kid the the Tears For Fears song "Mad World":
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me...
As a parent-of-sorts, you know that even excellence is no guarantor of success. Robert Parker, the Dean of American Crime Fiction, said that All Our Yesterdays was the best book he'd ever written in his long career, yet nobody bought it. John Carpenter's version of The Thing is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, yet when it debuted in 1982, it flopped harder than a lead pancake. And who can forget Vincent Van Gogh, the all-time great artist who sold exactly one painting in his entire life?
Writers are amubulatory jars of insecurity and dread. I was not a stranger to literary accolades before 2019 showed its tricky and pugnacious mug, but while my debut novel, Cage Life, won three trophies in the first year and a half after its release, in the last year or so I had begun to feel a strange resentment toward that book. It seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen -- and sunlight -- in the room, distracting from the works that succeeded it. They weren't putting up the numbers I wanted them to. They weren't winning awards of their own. Some small part of me suspected I had become the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder.
No more.
On May 6, my short story collection Devils You Know was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.
On October 30, my second book, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
On December 24, I was informed my "long short" story, "The Numbers Game," had won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the Novella category.
On December 29, I received notice that Knuckle Down had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Suspense.
On the very same day, I was also told that Sinner's Cross, a novel I released just two months ago, had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction.
Today, I finished my fifth interview as an author, this time with the Hard Hat Book Site. Their last interview was with Bob van Laerhoven, author of the much-acclaimed Return to Hiroshima. I'm okay being placed in that company. Unlike Groucho Marx, I would definitely join a club that had me as a member. But it didn't stop there: a few weeks ago, my alma mater, York College, featured me in an article in their quarterly magazine, which gave me a curious feeling of having come home in triumph.
Yeah, 2019 was in many ways a beast and a bitch. I had more deals fall through than you would probably believe, and long stretches where I licked pencil-stubs, thumbed through dog-eared stacks of unpaid bills, and wondered how the fuck I was going to get by for another week, much less another year. I've had fights with utility companies and cable providers, and while I made quite a bit of money, relatively speaking, through my writing, the IRS is going to have a field day come tax time with all those bloody 1099s.
Such is the fate of the writer. It's either feast or famine and there is usually a lot more famine than feast. But not this time.
When Donald Trump was running for office he claimed the American people would get "tired of winning" should he become president.
Evidently he doesn't understand the American people.
We never get tired of winning.
The Numbers Game
Devils You Know
Cage Life
Knuckle Down
Sinner's Cross
December 22, 2019
AS I PLEASE, AGAIN
Christmas is here, and with it the time for traditions of all sorts. I like to think that everyone has two sets of traditions, the ones we follow publicly, such as putting up the tree, hanging the stockings over the fireplace, writing cards, and so on, and the private ones, which we celebrate either alone or with only our nearest and dearest. In this latest installment of the "As I Please" column of this blog, I will discuss some of my own traditions that hit me around holiday-time, as well as any and every other goddamn thing rattling around in my skull. T'is the season for giving, so I'm gonna give you pieces of my mind.
* Today I was sitting in a diner in Toluca Lake, when I heard the man next to me exclaim to his friend, “I paid $4,250 in rent per month for that place in West Hollywood and had homeless people shitting on my doorstep.” There is a very definite moral in there if you care to look for it: suffice to say I am looking with increasing seriousness at shaking the dust of Los Angeles from my feet and finding another state in which to hang my shingle. Of course there are many benefits to living here, including some which are totally unique to this city, but we also get earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, the highest taxes in the Union, smog, terrible traffic, and, as this gentleman discovered, enormous rents which in no way guarantee that you won't step in something highly unpleasant when you leave your home.
* I have finally got round to watching DEADWOOD, the HBO series which ran for three years back in the mid-00's. I was reluctant for many years to engage with this series because, like ROME, it was prematurely canceled by that network and I was angry enough at the “fall of ROME” not to want to get my heart broken again by getting invested in something so soon doomed to die. However, the release of the DEADWOOD movie this year finally spurred me to watch, and I'm glad I did. This is terrific television. It rips all the gilding away from the Old West and presents it as it very likely was: dirty, disgusting, vulgar, disease-ridden, amoral, casually violent, brutally racist. I am particularly impressed with the performance of Ian McShane as the saloon-proprieter-gangster-pimp Al Swearegen. McShane is no stranger to me: I first noticed him in the 80s on several appearances of MAGNUM, P.I., and later as the cynical, dissolute reporter Phil Rule on the two epic mini-series THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR & REMEMBRANCE. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does cynical and dissolute like Ian McShane. I look forward to finishing the series and watching the movie.
* In 1977, my father took me to the Uptown Theater in Northwest D.C. to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. In 2019, I accompanied my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew to the Arclight Cinema in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. I don't know what feelings I have about the film just yet, except to say that it is much better, or much less awful, than its two predecessors, but I think it only fair I take some notice of the fact that seeing this particular movie, which supposedly brings the entire story to a close (it doesn't: Disney will kick that fucking pinata until there are no more coins), also brings to a kind of close a chapter of my life that began when I was an awestruck five year-old, watching Darth Vader emerge through the smoke.
* With Christmas nearly upon us, it's time for me to do the things I always do at Christmastime just for myself. The first is to watch the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1985), which is not only the best of all the Scrooge movies I have ever seen, but in my estimation one of the greatest movies ever made. After this comes Bob Clark's “A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983), a film that hardly needs an introduction. I then watch the “Silent Night” episode of MAGNUM, P.I. and the two episodes of M*A*S*H that have the most moving Christmas themes: “Dear Sis” (7x15) and “Death Takes a Holiday” (9x5) [“Twas the Day After Christmas” (10 x 10) and “Dear Dad (1 x 12) also qualify.] The BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode “Amends” (3 x 10) is also very good Christmastime viewing.
* This particular Yuletide is also the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. It's very difficult for modern Americans to grasp the immensity or the savagery of that battle, so I'll try to put this in perspective. In the Iraq War, the United States lost 4,497 killed over a period of 8 ¾ years. In the Afghanistan War, we lost 2,216 over a period of 18 years. In the Battle of the Bulge, the we lost 19,000 dead in one month. Another 23,000 were reported “missing” (presumed dead or captured) and 47,500 more were wounded. Thus, approximately 89,500 men were killed, wounded or captured between December 16, 1944 and January 16, 1945. Some of the heaviest fighting occurred between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
* Speaking of Christmas, I have just completed watching the brooding, beautifully shot, darkly unpredictable Chris Carter show MILLENNIUM, which ran from 1996 – 1999. This series featured two Christmas-themed episodes of surprising beauty: “Midnight of the Century,” in which the show's hero, Frank Black, tries to mend fences with his estranged father, played by Darrin McGavin (“A Christmas Story”). The other is “Omerta,” in which Frank and his daughter Jordan deal with a repentant mobster played by John Polito (“Miller's Crossing”). It's very difficult to “do” Christmas without sinking into a swamp of saccharine emotions and Hallmark-channel pathos, but MILLENNIUM pulls it off with imagination and flair.
* One nation which knows how to do Christmas right is Great Britain. Just about every television show on the BBC turns out a Christmas special each year, but it was only in 2019 that I realized one of my all-time favorite television programs, SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 – 1994) had produced such a special. It's a silly little thing, hardly worth mentioning, but it led me to a second, greater discovery, not Christmas-relayed directly but a kind of Christmas present. In 1992, the British channel ITV debuted a special program called “The Four Oaks Mystery” which featured “a four-part sequence of stories featuring the stars of four ITV detective shows of the time all separately working to solve the same mystery.” One of those four shows was SHERLOCK HOLMES. I had never even heard of this “sequence of stories,” but courtesy of YouTube, I was able to catch a “new” episode of a show that had been off the air for 23 years.
* I forgot to mention that the SHERLOCK HOLMES episode "The Blue Carbuncle" is another staple of my Christmas-themed TV watching. It's a terrific, touching tale that has the normally ice-blooded detective working overtime to save both a former jewel thief wrongfully accused of stealing a precious stone...and the bumbling amateur thief who really did nick it.
* One of the first things I noticed when I moved to California, in November of 2007, was the gung-ho, balls-out attitude everyone seemed to have toward Christmas and the holidays generally. Every other house was decked in lights, festooned with decorations and in some cases, with elaborate displays both traditional (the manger) and silly (enormous lighted blow-up dolls of Snoopy in a Santa hat). Jewish families often did “Kosher Christmas” by putting up trees festooned with dradels, Stars of David and blue tinsel and decorating their houses in blue and white lights with manorahs in the window. It took some getting used to, seeing “snow” made of cotton on front lawns, plastic icicles, and palm trees strung with Xmas lights, but I soon began to realize that the very climate here, which precludes most of what people think of as “winter weather,” also forces people to improvise. And while some dismiss it as another facet of the make-believe atmosphere which pervades this town, I admire the spirit: if you don't have it, fake it.
* I was planning a separate blog for this subject, but what the hell: my novel KNUCKLE DOWN: A CAGE LIFE MYSTERY was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Awards for 2019. The review of the book is excellent and I will be sharing it here, but for now, I just want to crow a little, and remind y'all that it would make a great Christmas gift, as would its x3 award-winning predecessor, CAGE LIFE.
And that, my friends, just about empties the bucket for this evening. No marbles left, except the one that says, “Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.”
* Today I was sitting in a diner in Toluca Lake, when I heard the man next to me exclaim to his friend, “I paid $4,250 in rent per month for that place in West Hollywood and had homeless people shitting on my doorstep.” There is a very definite moral in there if you care to look for it: suffice to say I am looking with increasing seriousness at shaking the dust of Los Angeles from my feet and finding another state in which to hang my shingle. Of course there are many benefits to living here, including some which are totally unique to this city, but we also get earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, the highest taxes in the Union, smog, terrible traffic, and, as this gentleman discovered, enormous rents which in no way guarantee that you won't step in something highly unpleasant when you leave your home.
* I have finally got round to watching DEADWOOD, the HBO series which ran for three years back in the mid-00's. I was reluctant for many years to engage with this series because, like ROME, it was prematurely canceled by that network and I was angry enough at the “fall of ROME” not to want to get my heart broken again by getting invested in something so soon doomed to die. However, the release of the DEADWOOD movie this year finally spurred me to watch, and I'm glad I did. This is terrific television. It rips all the gilding away from the Old West and presents it as it very likely was: dirty, disgusting, vulgar, disease-ridden, amoral, casually violent, brutally racist. I am particularly impressed with the performance of Ian McShane as the saloon-proprieter-gangster-pimp Al Swearegen. McShane is no stranger to me: I first noticed him in the 80s on several appearances of MAGNUM, P.I., and later as the cynical, dissolute reporter Phil Rule on the two epic mini-series THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR & REMEMBRANCE. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does cynical and dissolute like Ian McShane. I look forward to finishing the series and watching the movie.
* In 1977, my father took me to the Uptown Theater in Northwest D.C. to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. In 2019, I accompanied my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew to the Arclight Cinema in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. I don't know what feelings I have about the film just yet, except to say that it is much better, or much less awful, than its two predecessors, but I think it only fair I take some notice of the fact that seeing this particular movie, which supposedly brings the entire story to a close (it doesn't: Disney will kick that fucking pinata until there are no more coins), also brings to a kind of close a chapter of my life that began when I was an awestruck five year-old, watching Darth Vader emerge through the smoke.
* With Christmas nearly upon us, it's time for me to do the things I always do at Christmastime just for myself. The first is to watch the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1985), which is not only the best of all the Scrooge movies I have ever seen, but in my estimation one of the greatest movies ever made. After this comes Bob Clark's “A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983), a film that hardly needs an introduction. I then watch the “Silent Night” episode of MAGNUM, P.I. and the two episodes of M*A*S*H that have the most moving Christmas themes: “Dear Sis” (7x15) and “Death Takes a Holiday” (9x5) [“Twas the Day After Christmas” (10 x 10) and “Dear Dad (1 x 12) also qualify.] The BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode “Amends” (3 x 10) is also very good Christmastime viewing.
* This particular Yuletide is also the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. It's very difficult for modern Americans to grasp the immensity or the savagery of that battle, so I'll try to put this in perspective. In the Iraq War, the United States lost 4,497 killed over a period of 8 ¾ years. In the Afghanistan War, we lost 2,216 over a period of 18 years. In the Battle of the Bulge, the we lost 19,000 dead in one month. Another 23,000 were reported “missing” (presumed dead or captured) and 47,500 more were wounded. Thus, approximately 89,500 men were killed, wounded or captured between December 16, 1944 and January 16, 1945. Some of the heaviest fighting occurred between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
* Speaking of Christmas, I have just completed watching the brooding, beautifully shot, darkly unpredictable Chris Carter show MILLENNIUM, which ran from 1996 – 1999. This series featured two Christmas-themed episodes of surprising beauty: “Midnight of the Century,” in which the show's hero, Frank Black, tries to mend fences with his estranged father, played by Darrin McGavin (“A Christmas Story”). The other is “Omerta,” in which Frank and his daughter Jordan deal with a repentant mobster played by John Polito (“Miller's Crossing”). It's very difficult to “do” Christmas without sinking into a swamp of saccharine emotions and Hallmark-channel pathos, but MILLENNIUM pulls it off with imagination and flair.
* One nation which knows how to do Christmas right is Great Britain. Just about every television show on the BBC turns out a Christmas special each year, but it was only in 2019 that I realized one of my all-time favorite television programs, SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 – 1994) had produced such a special. It's a silly little thing, hardly worth mentioning, but it led me to a second, greater discovery, not Christmas-relayed directly but a kind of Christmas present. In 1992, the British channel ITV debuted a special program called “The Four Oaks Mystery” which featured “a four-part sequence of stories featuring the stars of four ITV detective shows of the time all separately working to solve the same mystery.” One of those four shows was SHERLOCK HOLMES. I had never even heard of this “sequence of stories,” but courtesy of YouTube, I was able to catch a “new” episode of a show that had been off the air for 23 years.
* I forgot to mention that the SHERLOCK HOLMES episode "The Blue Carbuncle" is another staple of my Christmas-themed TV watching. It's a terrific, touching tale that has the normally ice-blooded detective working overtime to save both a former jewel thief wrongfully accused of stealing a precious stone...and the bumbling amateur thief who really did nick it.
* One of the first things I noticed when I moved to California, in November of 2007, was the gung-ho, balls-out attitude everyone seemed to have toward Christmas and the holidays generally. Every other house was decked in lights, festooned with decorations and in some cases, with elaborate displays both traditional (the manger) and silly (enormous lighted blow-up dolls of Snoopy in a Santa hat). Jewish families often did “Kosher Christmas” by putting up trees festooned with dradels, Stars of David and blue tinsel and decorating their houses in blue and white lights with manorahs in the window. It took some getting used to, seeing “snow” made of cotton on front lawns, plastic icicles, and palm trees strung with Xmas lights, but I soon began to realize that the very climate here, which precludes most of what people think of as “winter weather,” also forces people to improvise. And while some dismiss it as another facet of the make-believe atmosphere which pervades this town, I admire the spirit: if you don't have it, fake it.
* I was planning a separate blog for this subject, but what the hell: my novel KNUCKLE DOWN: A CAGE LIFE MYSTERY was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Awards for 2019. The review of the book is excellent and I will be sharing it here, but for now, I just want to crow a little, and remind y'all that it would make a great Christmas gift, as would its x3 award-winning predecessor, CAGE LIFE.
And that, my friends, just about empties the bucket for this evening. No marbles left, except the one that says, “Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.”
November 30, 2019
Why is "aspiring" a dirty word?
Aspiring: directing one's hopes or ambitions toward becoming a specified type of person.
Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.
Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
I got into an interesting discussion today about this rather elderly tweet from an actress named Lolia Etomi, which was only recently brought to my attention. She wrote:
I'm an actor. Professionally. I even did extra & got the degree & everything. So please Fam/Friends, don't call me an "aspiring actress." The career isn't only legitimized by fame. After you pass the bar, I call you a lawyer. You're not just 'aspiring' before you become partner.
As you can see, she's frustrated, and possibly insulted and even hurt, by people calling her an "aspiring" actress and just wants to be called an "actress," full stop. I looked up her IMDB and while she does indeed have extensive high-level training in acting, she has just two credits, both for short films.
Now, I am not knocking short films. Hell no. I have been in short films, I've PA'd on short films and I have even paid others to PA or work as extras on them. Short films are a legitimate medium, actually a vital medium since they help train the next generation of actors, directors, writers, etc., and can also be a great forum for experimental work (see, for example, "Calle Lejos" on Amazon Prime). But if you're a film/TV actress -- as opposed to stage -- and your resume consists of two short films, you aren't paying your bills through acting. You aren't even paying for your coffee through acting. You want to be doing this, you are ASPIRING to do it, but you're not quite there yet.
Obviously I understand her frustration in the sense that acting is the thing she's dedicated her life and passion to and she wants to be regarded as an actress with no qualifiers. She feels like she's being condescended when people precede “actress” with “aspiring.” However, the example she uses in the Tweet strikes me as a logical fallacy/false comparison, and one which is indicative of a larger societal problem that I think needs some discussion. Ms. Etomi says fame doesn't legitimize the work, and she's absolutely right about that. A career is NOT legitimized by fame, not even a Hollywood career, where most “working actors” are still unknown to the public by name, and sometimes by face as well. But a career is legitimized by work, especially paid work, and that's where her lawyer comparison falls apart. To quote her own example, which is actually not a very good one, a practicing lawyer is just that -- a practicing lawyer. He has a degree, but he also has a practice, a job, a paycheck. If he doesn't, he is still a lawyer, but he gets the qualifier "unemployed." Ms. Etomi has training -- she has the degree -- but she doesn't yet have the paycheck. It's a distinction with a difference.
There has gotta be some kind of a bar you've got to meet before you can call yourself a real member of a profession, and in acting and most creative, artistic, or musical work that bar is, I believe, actually getting work and actually being paid for doing it. Not necessarily making a living at it, but at least being paid when you do work, and working with some level of frequency. That is, after all, what you're aspiring TO when you become an actor, writer, musician, comedian, etc., etc. That's the bar you're presumably trying to meet when you enter the profession.
To quote from my own experience, a lot of writers, including myself, take cheap shots from folks who think if you're not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling you're a deluded phony: but I don't think being called an aspiring actress when you haven't done anything other than a pair of short films qualifies as a cheap shot or an insult. I think it's an accurate assessment of where Ms. Etomi is as an actress at this particular moment of her career. Her problem, as someone pointed out to me today, is that she attaches a stigma to the word "aspiring" that shouldn't be there. In her mind, "aspiring actress" and "wanna-be actress" are the same thing, and that's why (I believe) she feels insulted.
But they are NOT the same thing at all.
If you're a white belt in jiu-jitsu, you have aspirations of being a black belt, but you're not a wanna-be: a wanna-be is someone who wishes and hopes and wants and dreams but doesn't put in the work to get there. Ms. Etomi presumably aspires to be a working actress who makes a living exclusively by acting and doesn't need a day job or a “side hustle.” Terrific. She's obviously willing to put in the work, too -- equally terrific. I hope she destroys Hollywood and wins 4 Oscars and needs dump trucks for all her cash. But I'm not sure she's entitled to demand others remove "aspiring" from "actress" on the basis of a lot of training and 2 short films.
Look at me. I have both an MA and an MFA in writing popular fiction from a very good school. I received an endowed scholarship from my writing program. My first novel was named “Book of the Year.” I have five literary awards, including the BIBA, which is one of the top-10 honors an independent author can receive. I was commissioned to write a screenplay and was paid for it (not paid well, mind you, or even ethically, but I was paid). I get royalty payments every month and have worked four contracted writing jobs this year alone, including one for Netflix. But I don't introduce myself to people as a writer. I introduce myself to people as a freelancer in the entertainment industry, because that's how I make most of my money. The day I make a full living off writing alone is when I will start introducing myself as a writer. It gives me something to ASPIRE to.
Aspiration is a good thing. Aspiration means that one wishes to become more than we presently are, which is probably the most noble state a human can achieve. Aspiration does not make us weak, it is a sign of strength. It is a sign of intelligence, too, in that we have goals, which stupid people almost never do (stupid people have wishes, which are quite different). Aspiration carries with it no taint. It is not the same as being the dreaded “wannabe,” who has a desire for a status but no plan to get there and no discipline to put a plan into effect even if they had one.
I wrote this not as an attack on Ms. Etomi, who is obviously free to feel any way she wants about how she is addressed, but because I feel the larger problem laid bare by the Tweet is one we must answer as a society. It's the idea that we can use this "I identify as X" mentality in aspects of our lives where it's not really up to us to make that identification. I identify as a Cubs fan, but it doesn't mean I can identify as a Cub and go play at Wrigley and collect a nine-figure paycheck for doing so. I can identify as a black belt in jiu-jitsu but if I go to a tournament I will be exposed as a fraud immediately if I am not the genuine article. Hell, I can identify as a Medal of Honor winner or a U.S. Army Ranger or a Navy SEAL if I so choose. I won't do it because I never earned the distinction. There are some titles you can just claim and it legitimately becomes so -- "I'm a Star Trek fan!" -- and there are other titles you actually have to go out there and earn. Simply wanting them is not enough. The stark fact is you are simply not entitled to be addressed by a title you haven't yet achieved.
I wrote this article with some reluctance and have been several months debating with myself whether I ought to publish it. I don't want to be viewed as attacking this young woman who was simply trying to make a point -- a point I'm sure many people agree with. But again, I do feel there are larger issues at stake and one of them is this ridiculous notion that there is no difference between wanting something and achieving it, between wish and reality. (Because, as Abraham Lincoln once noted: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.") And perhaps even more importantly, because it casts aspertions on the concept of aspiration which the word does not deserve. I do feel that Ms. Etomi is an aspiring actress, and I do not see the shame in it. Quite the contrary.
Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.
Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
I got into an interesting discussion today about this rather elderly tweet from an actress named Lolia Etomi, which was only recently brought to my attention. She wrote:
I'm an actor. Professionally. I even did extra & got the degree & everything. So please Fam/Friends, don't call me an "aspiring actress." The career isn't only legitimized by fame. After you pass the bar, I call you a lawyer. You're not just 'aspiring' before you become partner.
As you can see, she's frustrated, and possibly insulted and even hurt, by people calling her an "aspiring" actress and just wants to be called an "actress," full stop. I looked up her IMDB and while she does indeed have extensive high-level training in acting, she has just two credits, both for short films.
Now, I am not knocking short films. Hell no. I have been in short films, I've PA'd on short films and I have even paid others to PA or work as extras on them. Short films are a legitimate medium, actually a vital medium since they help train the next generation of actors, directors, writers, etc., and can also be a great forum for experimental work (see, for example, "Calle Lejos" on Amazon Prime). But if you're a film/TV actress -- as opposed to stage -- and your resume consists of two short films, you aren't paying your bills through acting. You aren't even paying for your coffee through acting. You want to be doing this, you are ASPIRING to do it, but you're not quite there yet.
Obviously I understand her frustration in the sense that acting is the thing she's dedicated her life and passion to and she wants to be regarded as an actress with no qualifiers. She feels like she's being condescended when people precede “actress” with “aspiring.” However, the example she uses in the Tweet strikes me as a logical fallacy/false comparison, and one which is indicative of a larger societal problem that I think needs some discussion. Ms. Etomi says fame doesn't legitimize the work, and she's absolutely right about that. A career is NOT legitimized by fame, not even a Hollywood career, where most “working actors” are still unknown to the public by name, and sometimes by face as well. But a career is legitimized by work, especially paid work, and that's where her lawyer comparison falls apart. To quote her own example, which is actually not a very good one, a practicing lawyer is just that -- a practicing lawyer. He has a degree, but he also has a practice, a job, a paycheck. If he doesn't, he is still a lawyer, but he gets the qualifier "unemployed." Ms. Etomi has training -- she has the degree -- but she doesn't yet have the paycheck. It's a distinction with a difference.
There has gotta be some kind of a bar you've got to meet before you can call yourself a real member of a profession, and in acting and most creative, artistic, or musical work that bar is, I believe, actually getting work and actually being paid for doing it. Not necessarily making a living at it, but at least being paid when you do work, and working with some level of frequency. That is, after all, what you're aspiring TO when you become an actor, writer, musician, comedian, etc., etc. That's the bar you're presumably trying to meet when you enter the profession.
To quote from my own experience, a lot of writers, including myself, take cheap shots from folks who think if you're not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling you're a deluded phony: but I don't think being called an aspiring actress when you haven't done anything other than a pair of short films qualifies as a cheap shot or an insult. I think it's an accurate assessment of where Ms. Etomi is as an actress at this particular moment of her career. Her problem, as someone pointed out to me today, is that she attaches a stigma to the word "aspiring" that shouldn't be there. In her mind, "aspiring actress" and "wanna-be actress" are the same thing, and that's why (I believe) she feels insulted.
But they are NOT the same thing at all.
If you're a white belt in jiu-jitsu, you have aspirations of being a black belt, but you're not a wanna-be: a wanna-be is someone who wishes and hopes and wants and dreams but doesn't put in the work to get there. Ms. Etomi presumably aspires to be a working actress who makes a living exclusively by acting and doesn't need a day job or a “side hustle.” Terrific. She's obviously willing to put in the work, too -- equally terrific. I hope she destroys Hollywood and wins 4 Oscars and needs dump trucks for all her cash. But I'm not sure she's entitled to demand others remove "aspiring" from "actress" on the basis of a lot of training and 2 short films.
Look at me. I have both an MA and an MFA in writing popular fiction from a very good school. I received an endowed scholarship from my writing program. My first novel was named “Book of the Year.” I have five literary awards, including the BIBA, which is one of the top-10 honors an independent author can receive. I was commissioned to write a screenplay and was paid for it (not paid well, mind you, or even ethically, but I was paid). I get royalty payments every month and have worked four contracted writing jobs this year alone, including one for Netflix. But I don't introduce myself to people as a writer. I introduce myself to people as a freelancer in the entertainment industry, because that's how I make most of my money. The day I make a full living off writing alone is when I will start introducing myself as a writer. It gives me something to ASPIRE to.
Aspiration is a good thing. Aspiration means that one wishes to become more than we presently are, which is probably the most noble state a human can achieve. Aspiration does not make us weak, it is a sign of strength. It is a sign of intelligence, too, in that we have goals, which stupid people almost never do (stupid people have wishes, which are quite different). Aspiration carries with it no taint. It is not the same as being the dreaded “wannabe,” who has a desire for a status but no plan to get there and no discipline to put a plan into effect even if they had one.
I wrote this not as an attack on Ms. Etomi, who is obviously free to feel any way she wants about how she is addressed, but because I feel the larger problem laid bare by the Tweet is one we must answer as a society. It's the idea that we can use this "I identify as X" mentality in aspects of our lives where it's not really up to us to make that identification. I identify as a Cubs fan, but it doesn't mean I can identify as a Cub and go play at Wrigley and collect a nine-figure paycheck for doing so. I can identify as a black belt in jiu-jitsu but if I go to a tournament I will be exposed as a fraud immediately if I am not the genuine article. Hell, I can identify as a Medal of Honor winner or a U.S. Army Ranger or a Navy SEAL if I so choose. I won't do it because I never earned the distinction. There are some titles you can just claim and it legitimately becomes so -- "I'm a Star Trek fan!" -- and there are other titles you actually have to go out there and earn. Simply wanting them is not enough. The stark fact is you are simply not entitled to be addressed by a title you haven't yet achieved.
I wrote this article with some reluctance and have been several months debating with myself whether I ought to publish it. I don't want to be viewed as attacking this young woman who was simply trying to make a point -- a point I'm sure many people agree with. But again, I do feel there are larger issues at stake and one of them is this ridiculous notion that there is no difference between wanting something and achieving it, between wish and reality. (Because, as Abraham Lincoln once noted: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.") And perhaps even more importantly, because it casts aspertions on the concept of aspiration which the word does not deserve. I do feel that Ms. Etomi is an aspiring actress, and I do not see the shame in it. Quite the contrary.
November 21, 2019
Gone Too Soon Again: 5 More TV Shows That Shoulda Lasted Longer
The time has finally come for me to write the second installment in my "Gone Too Soon" series about television shows cancelled before their time. In the last episode (June 17, 2017), I wrote about five one-season wonders which might have offered us something truly grand...if only they hadn't been axed in or immediately after their first season. This list was by no means comprehensive, and reflected only personal tastes and sense of regret. In time I will examine yet more shows of this type, but today I wish to examine the other category of "gone too soon" television: series which lasted more than one year, yet still left me feeling as if they died considerably before their time.
As before, I have tried to avoid some of the most obvious choices on the menu. It is pointless, for example, to shed tears over the cancellation of the original STAR TREK after just three seasons: given the legacy of the show, one may as well mourn the death of a phoenix. Likewise, there are some shows, like AfterM*A*S*H which, had they been handled well from the start, might have been worth a few sobs, but in practice were so horrifically botched that their cancellation (in that case, after a season and a half) was more of a mercy than a tragedy. What I am talking about are series which, whatever their flaws may have been or however long they actually ran, left us feeling cheated rather than satisfied when they went off the air. So without further ado, here they are, presented in chronological order:
WKRP IN CINCINATTI (1978 - 1982). This sit-com about a failing radio station in one of America's least glamorous cities was a staple of my childhood. The day handsome, cocky program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) walks into the crumbling, failing station, he's warned by burned-out deejay Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) that "this is the bottom" -- and he's right. Cellar-low ratings, a hapless boss (Gordon Jump), and dysfunctional staff make Travis' job of turning WKRP (and yes, the KRP is for "crap") around an uphill battle. And in fact WKRP was an unusual take on the sit-com, in that laughs were not always the principal objective: a certain amount of social commentary was embedded within each of its four seasons, covering such topics as the Vietnam war, feminism, inter-ractial relationships, sexual harassment, payola, punk rock, the concept of "selling out" and even concert safety -- an entire episode is devoted to the aftermath of the deadly Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinatti which killed eleven people on December 3, 1979. Truthfully, many of the show's jokes fell flat: it was not consistently hilarious or even consistently funny. But it was consistently engaging, due to excellent characters and casting: Frank Bonnar, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers and Tim Reid all turn in the sort of performances that leave you coming back for more. (The show is worth watching just for Bonnar's hideous plaid and white leather salesman's outfits). Indeed, Rcihard Sanders, who played the neurotic middle-American cartoon Les Nessman, may own one of the most famous sequences in television history when he reports in horror on a failed WKRP attempt to deliver Thanksgiving turkeys by throwing them out of a helicopter ("I swear I thought turkeys could fly!"). The reason I placed WKRP on this list is because the fifth season was to have been the one where Travis finally realized his goal of making WKRP the No. 1 station in Cincinatti, which would have been a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it got the axe at the end of season four, and so we never got to see ole Andy get to celebrate his hard-fought victory.
FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES (1987 – 1990). The name of this not-well-remembered yet extremely influential TV show has led to a great deal of confusion as to its identity. It has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees, Crystal Lake or hockey-masked killers. Instead, it is the story of two cousins by marriage, Micki Foster (Elisabeth Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. Le May) and their mysterious mentor Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) who own a shop in Toronto called Curious Goods. The cousins inherited the shop without knowing its inventory contained items cursed by the devil himself, and with Marshak's help, they try to reclaim the many hundreds of objects now wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace. Shot in the somewhat cheesy, zero-subtlety style of 80s horror movies, FRIDAY is dark, violent, and often deeply twisted -- one episode was directed by David Cronenberg! -- and the bloody, sometimes Quixotic quest to retrieve the devil's playthings often has our heroes questioning their own resolve and courage.
The ironic nature of the curses often made the stories explorations in morals and ethics: one memorable episode featured a wheelchair which could restore mobility to its user, provided she murdered those who made her a quadreplegic. Another featured a mediocre surgeon who could perform any operation successfully, if he "fed" his cursed scalpel with innocent victims beforehand. But the format was enormously flexible and thus we encountered vampires, werewolves, serial killers, demons, and ghosts, as well as scheming or desperate mortal men and women. The show was abruptly canceled toward the end of its third season because of a threatened boycott by angry Christian evangelists, but not before it influenced a host of shows which followed, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FRINGE, and SUPERNATURAL. That being said, I'd sell part of my own soul for another two seasons of this particular Friday.
FOREVER KNIGHT (1992 – 1996). Another Toronto-based horror series which influenced those who came after it starred the likeable Geraint Wyn-Davies as Nick Knight, a 800 year-old vampire who is working off an emormity of guilt by working as a police detective. Knight, who is engaged in a quest to regain his humanity and atone for his innumerable sins, works the night shift with a cynical partner named Don Shcanke (John Kapelos) who has no idea he is a vampire, while trying to manage a complex relationship with a mortal coroner named Natalie (Catherine Disher). While cheesy -- especially in the first season -- this show is extremely addictive, in part because of Knight's vampire "family" -- the evil yet strangely principled LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), and the sensual and morally ambiguous Janet (Deborah Duchene), who continually interfere, and sometimes assist, in his "mortal" life. KNIGHT was a busy series, combining buddy-cop convention with an exploration of the vampire world and both the up and the down-sides of immortality, and utilizing lavish flashbacks to various points in Knight's long life. One of its outstanding facets was its ruthlessness: even the core cast members were not safe from being killed off or written out. It not only deeply influenced HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, but was ripped off almost idea-for-idea by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt when they crafted their BUFFY spin-off, ANGEL, in 1999. It ran three seasons, and while it completed, for all intents and purposes, its own story, there were a great many stories to tell.
MILLENNIUM (1996 - 1999). I once described this sadly half-forgotten Chris Carter TV series as a "baffling, frustrating, engrossing, charismatic prestidigitation of a show, one which defies categorization." MILLENNIUM was the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a retired FBI profiler who is hired by a mysterious consulting firm known as The Millennium Group to assist local law enforcement agencies with investigations that are beyond their expertise. Over the course of time, Frank begins to suspect the Group is much more than a mere think tank, and may in fact be a sort of cult making preparations for the end of the world. Written and shot in the same manner as his more famous series THE X-FILES, and featuring the same enormous range of storylines, MILLENNIUM will instantly appeal to fans of horror, atmosphere and the sort of stylization that Chris Carter, James Wong and Glen Morgan specialize in. Some episodes are thoughtful, others graphic and gruesome; some are hilarious, and others touching. It could be amazing, and it could also be infuriating. Never has a television show made so many changes of direction in such a brief run on the air: over the course of three seasons, it killed off or wrote out major characters on what felt like whims, shifted its central premise from forensic cop show to supernatural mystery to conspiracy theory, and in general, and went from having absolutely no sense of humor at all to turning every third episode into a comedy or a lark. And yet...damn. Besides Henriksen, who considers this his favorite role (he told me that himself), it boasts a superbly ambiguous performance by Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts; a brief but pregnant series of appearances by Bill Smitrovich as Detective Bletcher; and fine turns by Megan Gallagher and Brittany Tiplady as Frank's strong but long-suffering wife and adorable (but not annoying) daughter. MILLENNIUM is a baffling show in many ways, and in others exasperating, but it had a charisma that is impossible to dismiss, and its cancellation -- ironically, just before the actual Millennium -- was a crushing blow. Although the series was to some small extent "resolved" by an X-FILES crossover that same year (1999), nothing was really resolved. Fans wanted more. So did the actors. And if you watch it all, so will you.
THE LOST WORLD (1999 - 2002). Okay, this one is more emotional than logical, but hey, it's my goddamned blog. THE LOST WORLD was based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and in essence, was kind of like THE LAND OF THE LOST for a different generation. The basic premise is that a crew of 19th century explorers end up marooned in a kind of "land that time forgot" on the edge of reality -- a place where dinosaurs roam, magic is real and all manner of witches, time-travelers, sub-human monsters and assorted weirdness stalk the land. Now, I must make several confessions here: the first is that I have always been a sucker for adventure shows of this or any other type, going back to childhood. The second is that the sheer ridiculous escapism of this show -- the concept is a mashup of TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY, TARZAN and CHARMED -- got me through a tough time 20 years ago. The third is that the series lead, Jennifer O'Dell, was a crush of mine and I later met and befriended her when I moved to Los Angeles, so yeah, there are several soft spots at work here. But the fact remains that as cartoonish as it is, THE LOST WORLD is that rarest of shows -- the no-holds-barred, no-logic-applied adventure saga, which in this cynical age is rarely exploited. Before the Internet closed the mind's-eye of the world, kids used to dream of adventures somewhere between those of Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, and THE LOST WORLD offers just such adventures. Interestingly, the show was not cancelled due to low ratings but because of an embezzelment in the holding company's finances, ending things on a cliffhanger. It's too bad. The 10 year old in me needs closure.
ANGEL (1999 – 2004). It may seem strange to include here a series that cracked the mythical 100 episode mark in a list of "shows gone too soon," but I believe if ANGEL had been allowed to run its projected 7 seasons instead of only 5, it may have finally emerged from the shadow of its progenitor, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, to establish its own firm identity in the eyes of fandom. ANGEL spun off the eponymous vampire character played by David Boreanaz and took him to Los Angeles, where combined with a crew of extremely well-drawn sidekicks played by, at various times, Charisma Carpenter, Glenn Quinn, Alexis Denisoff, Amy Acker, J. August Richards, Andy Hallett and Mercedes McNabb. The conceit of ANGEL was simple, and as I said, identical to FOREVER KNIGHT: a formerly evil vampire wants to atone for his crimes by "helping the helpless" via a supernatural detective agency. Yet ANGEL was more than the sum of its pointy parts. It was also a tongue-in-cheek take on life in Hollywood and, being darker in tone than BUFFY, a really gritty examination of the nature of good, evil, revenge, immortality, morality, and whether redemption is even possible. Though it began to stumble and become more involuted and soap-oper-ish by the fourth season, it came roaring back in the fifth, in no small part due to the choice to bring James Marsters' character of Spike into the cast, and to flip the script and make our heroes, in a sense, the bad guys, by placing them in charge of the demonic law firm which had been the bane of their existence from the pilot episode. The final season was so good that one can only imagine where David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon were going to take it in the projected final two years, and while it ends on a gory and decisive note, I can't help but wonder what else might have been.
ROME (2005 - 2007). HBO Television has done some very good work over the years, but one of its best shows was also led to one of its stupidest decisions: the one to cancel what in essence was GAME OF THRONES before GAME OF THRONES even existed. ROME, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar was ushering in the age of Empire, and told primarily through the eyes of two Roman soldiers; rigid, principled Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and vulgar, brawing Pullo (Ray Stevenson). The series, however, was hardly about Roman military life, but the incredibly complex webs of political and personal intrigue that wealthy Roman families such as the Julii Clan (had to navigate to maintain and expand their power. "In the game of thrones you win or you die," and there was a lot of dying in ROME. Also a lot of torture and a lot of nudity. Intertwining with actual historical figures and events, it showed the complexity, granduer, cruelty, greed and brutality of the Romans in exacting detail, and anyone who considers the "vicious, clever, powerful female" a product of the GAME OF THRONES era might want to take in Polly Walker's terrifying performance as Atia of the Julii, a woman who will stop at absolutely nothing to protect her family's position. Actually, the acting is superb all around, with James Purefoy playing a viciously degenerate Marc Antony with relish while Ciarán Hinds' Julius Caesar is stately, predatory and full of icy grace. Max Woods, Tobias Menzies and Max Pircus are also excellent, and this is the sort of show which, despite killing its characters off with abandon, I could have watched for ten years running. Unfortunately, HBO deemed it too expensive and pulled the plug after just two short seasons, and has shown a baffling reluctance to either revive it or give its fans true closure with a feature film, the way they did with DEADWOOD. Oh well, we'll always have Pullo saying things like, "Here I come, girls! I'm gonna drink all the wine, smoke all the smoke and fuck every whore in the city!"
With that brilliant declaration, I bring the latest chapter of this series to a close. I have by no means exhausted the list of either one-season wonders or shows which simply ended before their time, but this will do for now. After all, I've gotta save something for chapter three, don't I?
As before, I have tried to avoid some of the most obvious choices on the menu. It is pointless, for example, to shed tears over the cancellation of the original STAR TREK after just three seasons: given the legacy of the show, one may as well mourn the death of a phoenix. Likewise, there are some shows, like AfterM*A*S*H which, had they been handled well from the start, might have been worth a few sobs, but in practice were so horrifically botched that their cancellation (in that case, after a season and a half) was more of a mercy than a tragedy. What I am talking about are series which, whatever their flaws may have been or however long they actually ran, left us feeling cheated rather than satisfied when they went off the air. So without further ado, here they are, presented in chronological order:
WKRP IN CINCINATTI (1978 - 1982). This sit-com about a failing radio station in one of America's least glamorous cities was a staple of my childhood. The day handsome, cocky program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) walks into the crumbling, failing station, he's warned by burned-out deejay Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) that "this is the bottom" -- and he's right. Cellar-low ratings, a hapless boss (Gordon Jump), and dysfunctional staff make Travis' job of turning WKRP (and yes, the KRP is for "crap") around an uphill battle. And in fact WKRP was an unusual take on the sit-com, in that laughs were not always the principal objective: a certain amount of social commentary was embedded within each of its four seasons, covering such topics as the Vietnam war, feminism, inter-ractial relationships, sexual harassment, payola, punk rock, the concept of "selling out" and even concert safety -- an entire episode is devoted to the aftermath of the deadly Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinatti which killed eleven people on December 3, 1979. Truthfully, many of the show's jokes fell flat: it was not consistently hilarious or even consistently funny. But it was consistently engaging, due to excellent characters and casting: Frank Bonnar, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers and Tim Reid all turn in the sort of performances that leave you coming back for more. (The show is worth watching just for Bonnar's hideous plaid and white leather salesman's outfits). Indeed, Rcihard Sanders, who played the neurotic middle-American cartoon Les Nessman, may own one of the most famous sequences in television history when he reports in horror on a failed WKRP attempt to deliver Thanksgiving turkeys by throwing them out of a helicopter ("I swear I thought turkeys could fly!"). The reason I placed WKRP on this list is because the fifth season was to have been the one where Travis finally realized his goal of making WKRP the No. 1 station in Cincinatti, which would have been a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it got the axe at the end of season four, and so we never got to see ole Andy get to celebrate his hard-fought victory.
FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES (1987 – 1990). The name of this not-well-remembered yet extremely influential TV show has led to a great deal of confusion as to its identity. It has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees, Crystal Lake or hockey-masked killers. Instead, it is the story of two cousins by marriage, Micki Foster (Elisabeth Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. Le May) and their mysterious mentor Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) who own a shop in Toronto called Curious Goods. The cousins inherited the shop without knowing its inventory contained items cursed by the devil himself, and with Marshak's help, they try to reclaim the many hundreds of objects now wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace. Shot in the somewhat cheesy, zero-subtlety style of 80s horror movies, FRIDAY is dark, violent, and often deeply twisted -- one episode was directed by David Cronenberg! -- and the bloody, sometimes Quixotic quest to retrieve the devil's playthings often has our heroes questioning their own resolve and courage.
The ironic nature of the curses often made the stories explorations in morals and ethics: one memorable episode featured a wheelchair which could restore mobility to its user, provided she murdered those who made her a quadreplegic. Another featured a mediocre surgeon who could perform any operation successfully, if he "fed" his cursed scalpel with innocent victims beforehand. But the format was enormously flexible and thus we encountered vampires, werewolves, serial killers, demons, and ghosts, as well as scheming or desperate mortal men and women. The show was abruptly canceled toward the end of its third season because of a threatened boycott by angry Christian evangelists, but not before it influenced a host of shows which followed, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FRINGE, and SUPERNATURAL. That being said, I'd sell part of my own soul for another two seasons of this particular Friday.
FOREVER KNIGHT (1992 – 1996). Another Toronto-based horror series which influenced those who came after it starred the likeable Geraint Wyn-Davies as Nick Knight, a 800 year-old vampire who is working off an emormity of guilt by working as a police detective. Knight, who is engaged in a quest to regain his humanity and atone for his innumerable sins, works the night shift with a cynical partner named Don Shcanke (John Kapelos) who has no idea he is a vampire, while trying to manage a complex relationship with a mortal coroner named Natalie (Catherine Disher). While cheesy -- especially in the first season -- this show is extremely addictive, in part because of Knight's vampire "family" -- the evil yet strangely principled LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), and the sensual and morally ambiguous Janet (Deborah Duchene), who continually interfere, and sometimes assist, in his "mortal" life. KNIGHT was a busy series, combining buddy-cop convention with an exploration of the vampire world and both the up and the down-sides of immortality, and utilizing lavish flashbacks to various points in Knight's long life. One of its outstanding facets was its ruthlessness: even the core cast members were not safe from being killed off or written out. It not only deeply influenced HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, but was ripped off almost idea-for-idea by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt when they crafted their BUFFY spin-off, ANGEL, in 1999. It ran three seasons, and while it completed, for all intents and purposes, its own story, there were a great many stories to tell.
MILLENNIUM (1996 - 1999). I once described this sadly half-forgotten Chris Carter TV series as a "baffling, frustrating, engrossing, charismatic prestidigitation of a show, one which defies categorization." MILLENNIUM was the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a retired FBI profiler who is hired by a mysterious consulting firm known as The Millennium Group to assist local law enforcement agencies with investigations that are beyond their expertise. Over the course of time, Frank begins to suspect the Group is much more than a mere think tank, and may in fact be a sort of cult making preparations for the end of the world. Written and shot in the same manner as his more famous series THE X-FILES, and featuring the same enormous range of storylines, MILLENNIUM will instantly appeal to fans of horror, atmosphere and the sort of stylization that Chris Carter, James Wong and Glen Morgan specialize in. Some episodes are thoughtful, others graphic and gruesome; some are hilarious, and others touching. It could be amazing, and it could also be infuriating. Never has a television show made so many changes of direction in such a brief run on the air: over the course of three seasons, it killed off or wrote out major characters on what felt like whims, shifted its central premise from forensic cop show to supernatural mystery to conspiracy theory, and in general, and went from having absolutely no sense of humor at all to turning every third episode into a comedy or a lark. And yet...damn. Besides Henriksen, who considers this his favorite role (he told me that himself), it boasts a superbly ambiguous performance by Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts; a brief but pregnant series of appearances by Bill Smitrovich as Detective Bletcher; and fine turns by Megan Gallagher and Brittany Tiplady as Frank's strong but long-suffering wife and adorable (but not annoying) daughter. MILLENNIUM is a baffling show in many ways, and in others exasperating, but it had a charisma that is impossible to dismiss, and its cancellation -- ironically, just before the actual Millennium -- was a crushing blow. Although the series was to some small extent "resolved" by an X-FILES crossover that same year (1999), nothing was really resolved. Fans wanted more. So did the actors. And if you watch it all, so will you.
THE LOST WORLD (1999 - 2002). Okay, this one is more emotional than logical, but hey, it's my goddamned blog. THE LOST WORLD was based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and in essence, was kind of like THE LAND OF THE LOST for a different generation. The basic premise is that a crew of 19th century explorers end up marooned in a kind of "land that time forgot" on the edge of reality -- a place where dinosaurs roam, magic is real and all manner of witches, time-travelers, sub-human monsters and assorted weirdness stalk the land. Now, I must make several confessions here: the first is that I have always been a sucker for adventure shows of this or any other type, going back to childhood. The second is that the sheer ridiculous escapism of this show -- the concept is a mashup of TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY, TARZAN and CHARMED -- got me through a tough time 20 years ago. The third is that the series lead, Jennifer O'Dell, was a crush of mine and I later met and befriended her when I moved to Los Angeles, so yeah, there are several soft spots at work here. But the fact remains that as cartoonish as it is, THE LOST WORLD is that rarest of shows -- the no-holds-barred, no-logic-applied adventure saga, which in this cynical age is rarely exploited. Before the Internet closed the mind's-eye of the world, kids used to dream of adventures somewhere between those of Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, and THE LOST WORLD offers just such adventures. Interestingly, the show was not cancelled due to low ratings but because of an embezzelment in the holding company's finances, ending things on a cliffhanger. It's too bad. The 10 year old in me needs closure.
ANGEL (1999 – 2004). It may seem strange to include here a series that cracked the mythical 100 episode mark in a list of "shows gone too soon," but I believe if ANGEL had been allowed to run its projected 7 seasons instead of only 5, it may have finally emerged from the shadow of its progenitor, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, to establish its own firm identity in the eyes of fandom. ANGEL spun off the eponymous vampire character played by David Boreanaz and took him to Los Angeles, where combined with a crew of extremely well-drawn sidekicks played by, at various times, Charisma Carpenter, Glenn Quinn, Alexis Denisoff, Amy Acker, J. August Richards, Andy Hallett and Mercedes McNabb. The conceit of ANGEL was simple, and as I said, identical to FOREVER KNIGHT: a formerly evil vampire wants to atone for his crimes by "helping the helpless" via a supernatural detective agency. Yet ANGEL was more than the sum of its pointy parts. It was also a tongue-in-cheek take on life in Hollywood and, being darker in tone than BUFFY, a really gritty examination of the nature of good, evil, revenge, immortality, morality, and whether redemption is even possible. Though it began to stumble and become more involuted and soap-oper-ish by the fourth season, it came roaring back in the fifth, in no small part due to the choice to bring James Marsters' character of Spike into the cast, and to flip the script and make our heroes, in a sense, the bad guys, by placing them in charge of the demonic law firm which had been the bane of their existence from the pilot episode. The final season was so good that one can only imagine where David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon were going to take it in the projected final two years, and while it ends on a gory and decisive note, I can't help but wonder what else might have been.
ROME (2005 - 2007). HBO Television has done some very good work over the years, but one of its best shows was also led to one of its stupidest decisions: the one to cancel what in essence was GAME OF THRONES before GAME OF THRONES even existed. ROME, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar was ushering in the age of Empire, and told primarily through the eyes of two Roman soldiers; rigid, principled Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and vulgar, brawing Pullo (Ray Stevenson). The series, however, was hardly about Roman military life, but the incredibly complex webs of political and personal intrigue that wealthy Roman families such as the Julii Clan (had to navigate to maintain and expand their power. "In the game of thrones you win or you die," and there was a lot of dying in ROME. Also a lot of torture and a lot of nudity. Intertwining with actual historical figures and events, it showed the complexity, granduer, cruelty, greed and brutality of the Romans in exacting detail, and anyone who considers the "vicious, clever, powerful female" a product of the GAME OF THRONES era might want to take in Polly Walker's terrifying performance as Atia of the Julii, a woman who will stop at absolutely nothing to protect her family's position. Actually, the acting is superb all around, with James Purefoy playing a viciously degenerate Marc Antony with relish while Ciarán Hinds' Julius Caesar is stately, predatory and full of icy grace. Max Woods, Tobias Menzies and Max Pircus are also excellent, and this is the sort of show which, despite killing its characters off with abandon, I could have watched for ten years running. Unfortunately, HBO deemed it too expensive and pulled the plug after just two short seasons, and has shown a baffling reluctance to either revive it or give its fans true closure with a feature film, the way they did with DEADWOOD. Oh well, we'll always have Pullo saying things like, "Here I come, girls! I'm gonna drink all the wine, smoke all the smoke and fuck every whore in the city!"
With that brilliant declaration, I bring the latest chapter of this series to a close. I have by no means exhausted the list of either one-season wonders or shows which simply ended before their time, but this will do for now. After all, I've gotta save something for chapter three, don't I?
November 7, 2019
SINNER'S CROSS
Today I announce -- belatedly, but that's the way I do everything -- the release of Sinner's Cross, my first full-length novel in three years.
As a rule, I dislike self-promotion. When I finish a novel, I'd prefer to type, "The End," hand the book over to a crew of savvy marketing folk, and hop the first plane to Hawaii; but it is the lot of an independent author to do the lion's share of publicity himself, so here I am, with a story to tell about the story I've told.
Sinner's Cross is a novel of the Second World War, told from the perspectives of three very different men, two Americans and one German. The setting is the Huertgen Forest on the German - Belgian border, the time late 1944. At this point in the war, the Allies were grinding their way across the frontiers of the Third Reich, in fighting so savage and so costly that the forest in question was known to G.I.'s as "The Green Hell" or even more starkly, "The Death Factory." Entire infantry divisions were burned up like sugar in a fire, for terrain which seemed to be intrinsically worthless. It was a time when horror and heroism, fear and a sense of complete futility, were found in equal measure on both sides, and I thought it the perfect place to inaugurate a new book series, one which will cover the final half-year of the war in pitiless detail.
World War Two has always been a source of especial pride and fascination for Americans, but our novelists (like our historians) tend to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than in our war movies, which since the war itself have been little more than orgies of disingenuous boasting, and have given two extremely false impressions: one, that the American soldier, because he was engaged in a righteous cause, was somehow more immune to terror, misery, doubt and pain than those who fought in less popular wars like Vietnam; and two, that his German opponent was a cowardly and incompetent dolt, a kind of Colonel Klink figure who could never shoot straight and was equal parts bully and coward. It is partly to attack these two false impressions, neither of which gives the American soldier his actual due, that I was inspired to write Sinner's Cross.
You see, gentle reader, I have always operated on a theory that if the German soldier was as stupid and gutless as he is inevitably portrayed in movies and many novels, the war would have been over in about two weeks, and victory no more worthy of honor than, say, washing a set of particularly dirty dishes. Yet the facts of the war were quite different. The Germans were, taken as a whole, exceptionally well-trained, well-motivated, and well-led, and to beat them required a job of very bloody, dirty, exhausting work. At the same time, "the Kraut" (as he was uncharitably known by American soldiers) was also a human being. He too felt terror and panic, loneliness and despair, and, particularly in the closing months of the war, a sense of bitter futility. One of the central horrors of all wars is the fact that the ordinary fighting man on any side has more in common with his opponent than with the politicians and generals who send him into battle, or the public which cheers him bloodthirstily on from a very safe distance.
To this end, I have divided Sinner's Cross into three distinct perspectives. They are:
HALLECK - a tough-as-nails Texan who drove cattle before the war, Halleck has zero interest in soldiering, he just happens to be damned good at it. And yet he is haunted by the grisly similarity between his former and present jobs: herding terrified masses toward the slaughter. Does this seemingly indestructable man have a breaking point?
BREESE - a handsome pretty boy straight out of Columbia University, the foppish Breese finds himself utterly inadequate not merely to his job (platoon leader) but to the demands of the war. Yet unlike the roles he took as as a collegiate actor, Breese can't fake his way through battle. He will have to learn. Or die. In the mean time, he may get a lot of people killed.
ZENGER - One of the most decorated paratroopers in Nazi Germany, "Papa Zengy" -- hitherto known for his ruthless determination -- is slowly and painfully developing a conscience as his battalion of elite soldiers melts away in the heavy fighting. For the first time in his life he begins to value the men before the mission, and in the end is fighting three different wars: one with the Americans, one with his own superiors...and one with himself.
Sinner's Cross was, in a very real sense, a lifetime in the making. I first became aware of the Huertgen Forest campaign when I was twelve or so years old, and found a book on the battle written by the prolific, readable and not too terribly professional historian Charles Whiting. Whiting may have been disinterested in scholarly research, but as a WW2 veteran himself he was able to capture the essence of the horror of the battle in a way the better-schooled historian could not. Whiting understood, as legions of tweed-clad professors couldn't, what it was like to crawl through icy mud while tracer bullets screamed overhead, wounded men cried out in pain and mortar bombs exploded only yards away. And it was his ability to recreate the terror and panic of warfare from the viewpoint of what we now call "grunts" -- both Allied and Axis -- that set me on the path which eventually led me to writing this novel, whose first lines I penned when I was twenty-eight. Because, while wars are won by grand strategy and industrial output, they are fought by human beings, and as a writer it is in human beings and not technology or logistics which interests me. Like Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I am a student of human moves, and no human movement is more profound than the one he or she makes under fire. Sinner's Cross is my attempt to put the reader in that uncomfortable, soul-baring place.
For a link to the novel in both paperback and e-book version, click here:
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
For links to some of my other WW2 fiction (novelettes):
Nosferatu
The Numbers Game
Shadows and Glory
As a rule, I dislike self-promotion. When I finish a novel, I'd prefer to type, "The End," hand the book over to a crew of savvy marketing folk, and hop the first plane to Hawaii; but it is the lot of an independent author to do the lion's share of publicity himself, so here I am, with a story to tell about the story I've told.
Sinner's Cross is a novel of the Second World War, told from the perspectives of three very different men, two Americans and one German. The setting is the Huertgen Forest on the German - Belgian border, the time late 1944. At this point in the war, the Allies were grinding their way across the frontiers of the Third Reich, in fighting so savage and so costly that the forest in question was known to G.I.'s as "The Green Hell" or even more starkly, "The Death Factory." Entire infantry divisions were burned up like sugar in a fire, for terrain which seemed to be intrinsically worthless. It was a time when horror and heroism, fear and a sense of complete futility, were found in equal measure on both sides, and I thought it the perfect place to inaugurate a new book series, one which will cover the final half-year of the war in pitiless detail.
World War Two has always been a source of especial pride and fascination for Americans, but our novelists (like our historians) tend to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than in our war movies, which since the war itself have been little more than orgies of disingenuous boasting, and have given two extremely false impressions: one, that the American soldier, because he was engaged in a righteous cause, was somehow more immune to terror, misery, doubt and pain than those who fought in less popular wars like Vietnam; and two, that his German opponent was a cowardly and incompetent dolt, a kind of Colonel Klink figure who could never shoot straight and was equal parts bully and coward. It is partly to attack these two false impressions, neither of which gives the American soldier his actual due, that I was inspired to write Sinner's Cross.
You see, gentle reader, I have always operated on a theory that if the German soldier was as stupid and gutless as he is inevitably portrayed in movies and many novels, the war would have been over in about two weeks, and victory no more worthy of honor than, say, washing a set of particularly dirty dishes. Yet the facts of the war were quite different. The Germans were, taken as a whole, exceptionally well-trained, well-motivated, and well-led, and to beat them required a job of very bloody, dirty, exhausting work. At the same time, "the Kraut" (as he was uncharitably known by American soldiers) was also a human being. He too felt terror and panic, loneliness and despair, and, particularly in the closing months of the war, a sense of bitter futility. One of the central horrors of all wars is the fact that the ordinary fighting man on any side has more in common with his opponent than with the politicians and generals who send him into battle, or the public which cheers him bloodthirstily on from a very safe distance.
To this end, I have divided Sinner's Cross into three distinct perspectives. They are:
HALLECK - a tough-as-nails Texan who drove cattle before the war, Halleck has zero interest in soldiering, he just happens to be damned good at it. And yet he is haunted by the grisly similarity between his former and present jobs: herding terrified masses toward the slaughter. Does this seemingly indestructable man have a breaking point?
BREESE - a handsome pretty boy straight out of Columbia University, the foppish Breese finds himself utterly inadequate not merely to his job (platoon leader) but to the demands of the war. Yet unlike the roles he took as as a collegiate actor, Breese can't fake his way through battle. He will have to learn. Or die. In the mean time, he may get a lot of people killed.
ZENGER - One of the most decorated paratroopers in Nazi Germany, "Papa Zengy" -- hitherto known for his ruthless determination -- is slowly and painfully developing a conscience as his battalion of elite soldiers melts away in the heavy fighting. For the first time in his life he begins to value the men before the mission, and in the end is fighting three different wars: one with the Americans, one with his own superiors...and one with himself.
Sinner's Cross was, in a very real sense, a lifetime in the making. I first became aware of the Huertgen Forest campaign when I was twelve or so years old, and found a book on the battle written by the prolific, readable and not too terribly professional historian Charles Whiting. Whiting may have been disinterested in scholarly research, but as a WW2 veteran himself he was able to capture the essence of the horror of the battle in a way the better-schooled historian could not. Whiting understood, as legions of tweed-clad professors couldn't, what it was like to crawl through icy mud while tracer bullets screamed overhead, wounded men cried out in pain and mortar bombs exploded only yards away. And it was his ability to recreate the terror and panic of warfare from the viewpoint of what we now call "grunts" -- both Allied and Axis -- that set me on the path which eventually led me to writing this novel, whose first lines I penned when I was twenty-eight. Because, while wars are won by grand strategy and industrial output, they are fought by human beings, and as a writer it is in human beings and not technology or logistics which interests me. Like Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I am a student of human moves, and no human movement is more profound than the one he or she makes under fire. Sinner's Cross is my attempt to put the reader in that uncomfortable, soul-baring place.
For a link to the novel in both paperback and e-book version, click here:
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
For links to some of my other WW2 fiction (novelettes):
Nosferatu
The Numbers Game
Shadows and Glory
October 6, 2019
As I Please
For some years, George Orwell wrote a column in the London Tribune called simply “As I Please.” The title was not deceptive. The column had no particular focus, except to the extent that Orwell was generally focused on politics, world affairs and social change: he simply talked about whatever happened to interest, amuse or outrage him at a particular moment, be it German air raids or the degeneration of English beer; the things you could find prowling junk shops, or the best way to serve tea. Orwell was often justly attacked for possessing misanthropic views about the human race, and misanthropy and introversion are quite common elements in the makeup of writers, but they are hardly the only elements. In many ways, “As I Please” simply reflected Orwell's more positive characteristics: namely his intense curiosity about life and his love of useless (but often amusing and interesting) facts and anecdotes.
The other day I was putting the finishing touches on a blog I was quite pleased with, and quite literally reaching to tap the “save” button, when my knuckle chanced over the wrong key and the web-page upon which I was writing disappeared. An entire morning's writing disappeared with it. This exasperating little incident, so common in modern, electronicized life, got me thinking that perhaps I ought to take a page out of Orwell's book from time to time and pen an “As I Please” column of my own, one which did not require so much time and energy to compose, for use when writing a larger essay is impossible due to time constraints or computer mishaps. So on this cool and quiet Sunday I am going to do just exactly that, and leave you with a series of random thoughts, observations and memories. If nothing else, they may show you why I have always regarded Orwell as the greatest of all writers I have encountered on the page -- we think alike!
* In my Twitter feed, I have noticed that a large number of people who claim to be “writers” frequently make rather passionate arguments in favor of various types of censorship. They do not, of course, use the word “censorship” – no one who wants to censor your thoughts, writings, speeches or lyrics ever does – but the positions they advocate deserve no other description. Not only is this tendency cowardly and disgusting, it is also deeply hypocritical, for the very same lot who work themselves into a foam-flecked rage over men writing women, straight writing gay, white writing black, etc. are also the same who shriek like demented cats over the lack of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity in novels, television shows and movies. As a straight white man, I have literally been told in so many words both A) I ought to write more characters of color or who belong to some type of minority group, and B) questioned as to whether I as a straight white man am “qualified” to write for gay characters or characters of color. Presumably such people desire a world where every completed creative endeavor resembles a kind of human rainbow, yet at the same time, they seem to desire a situation where only a rainbow can write a rainbow: in practical terms, this would lead to a world where, presumably, only (for example) a black gay female writer would be allowed to write anything at all. Yet I have to ask: why would she be qualified to write a straight white male? The people who say these sort of things, and make these self-contradictory demands, never seem to grasp what the inevitable result of this kind of logic must be: a world where no on is allowed to exercise their imagination or their qualities of empathy and projection, a world in which every creative person must stay in their own lane lest they be attacked for assuming a foreign point of view. Such a world could create nothing of literary or artistic value; by its very nature it would spend all of its time poking around the bona fides of a writer, trying to determine if some act of cultural or sexual theft had been committed. This ought to be obvious even to the stupidest person, yet uncountable numbers of people seem oblivious to it. The concept of the “slippery slope,” which used to be taught to our children in Civics classes from a very young age, has evidently found itself a casualty of the endless pogrom presently being conducted by our society against the concept of critical thinking.
*There comes a moment in everyone's life when they can no longer kid themselves and accept that their youth is finished. By a series of contortions worthy of Neo in THE MATRIX I was able to avoid accepting the arrival of middle age far longer than anyone I know, but some recent photos posted online by the woman to whom I lost my virginity have left me no doubt that it is here and has been for some time. The photos in question are of her oldest daughter, who is now 18 years old – the same age I was when met her mother.
*I have been a practicing libertarian since 2016, but my libertarian sentiments were probably awakened fifteen years ago or more, when I began to grasp that we had invested so much power in the presidency and the courts that congress, the most democratic and vital branch of government, seemed to be in danger of becoming little more than a figurehead, like the Senate after the consecration of the Roman Empire. The Trump Presidency has proven to me beyond on doubt that America is now in very much the same shoes as Rome was just before the death of the Republic. Militarily and economically we remain very nearly all-powerful, but morally and ethically we are in a state of collapse, and this collapse has manifested in an ever-increasing concentration of power into individuals, specifically federal and SC justices and the president. If you doubt this, ask yourself how important it is that the next president be stable and sane. A hundred years ago it scarcely mattered if he were either: now the fate of all humanity depends upon both. Technology is of course the principal architect here, because 100 years ago we didn't possess nuclear bombs, but the fact remains every election has become a GAME OF THRONES-esque exercise in holding one's breath in the hopes that the next king – or queen – isn't a fire-breathing lunatic. We must find a way to rein in the immense and unhealthy power of the presidency and the courts and return both institutions into balance they once shared with the third co-equal branch of our government, congress. Because as a rule of thumb, if you fear who occupies a particular office – I mean really fear it, in the mortal sense – then that office has too much power.
* Today, as I was leaving a diner after breakfast, the sun hit me rather uncomfortably on the face and I noted, not for the first time, that Southern California does not possess four seasons but only one and a half. I call them “summer” and “not-summer.” The interesting thing about these seasons is that when one is in the midst of of either, it is natural to believe the other does not exist. In August, in the San Fernando Valley, it is so mercilessly hot – 112 degrees is not unknown – that the very existence of such things as space heaters and wool socks strikes you as ridiculous. In February, when you require both to avoid freezing your toes off while you sleep, and the back yard is a swamp of cold mud, the notion that you will soon require both your air conditioning and your ceiling fan merely to get to sleep at night – and then only barely – comes off as equally nonsensical. In states where the typical "four seasons" model exists, life seems far less of a syllogism.
* A friend of mine caught me watching bare-knuckle boxing the other day and remarked about my “insatiable bloodlust.” He also made comments to the effect that a civilized society would not allow such things as mixed martial arts or bare-knuckle boxing even to exist, much less publicize, normalize and reward them. You can make a case that he is correct on both counts, but I believe such arguments to be of the debate-society type – all style and no substance. The brute fact is that there are many human beings who are in essence, hunters in a farmer's world. Such people require outlets for their savagery and it is far better for them to release their primal urges toward violence, risk-taking and adrenaline rushes via combat sports, bungee jumping, sky-diving, race-car driving, etc., etc. than it would be to ban such things and let these impulses build to the explosion point. To simply deny that humans have savage elements is as foolish and self-destructive as letting them run riot. The savage has his uses just as the civilized man does: it is merely a question of harnessing the primal energies in a modern way. As the character of Uncle Kelloway pointed out in “Piece of Cake,” apropos of R.A.F. pilots, “It's a good job these fellows are flying fighters for His Majesty; otherwise they'd be out robbing banks.”
* When I was about ten or eleven years old, my friend Erik and I engaged in a complex, extremely well-planned scheme to obtain a copy of PLAYBOY from the local store. I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly we drew up our plans or how meticulous we were in executing them. We had an alibi for our absence from school, a store of money, and an expertly forged note, ostensibly from Erik's father, with which we were going to fool the clerk at the store. All this plotting came to naught, however – not because we were caught, but because we had forgotten about sales tax and were short something like ten or fifteen cents. I mention this story in large part because it goes to show both the immense curiosity which boys of that age have about women and sex, and also because such an event would never happen today. The existence of the Internet has utterly and completely de-mystified the female body as well as the sexual act, to the point that even very young children whose hormones are years from awakening know far more than is desirable or necessary about both. The effect that pornography and semi-pornographic imagery will have on the sexuality and social interaction of future generations is a cause for study, and perhaps for worry, too. There is, after all, something to be said for the air of mystery.
The other day I was putting the finishing touches on a blog I was quite pleased with, and quite literally reaching to tap the “save” button, when my knuckle chanced over the wrong key and the web-page upon which I was writing disappeared. An entire morning's writing disappeared with it. This exasperating little incident, so common in modern, electronicized life, got me thinking that perhaps I ought to take a page out of Orwell's book from time to time and pen an “As I Please” column of my own, one which did not require so much time and energy to compose, for use when writing a larger essay is impossible due to time constraints or computer mishaps. So on this cool and quiet Sunday I am going to do just exactly that, and leave you with a series of random thoughts, observations and memories. If nothing else, they may show you why I have always regarded Orwell as the greatest of all writers I have encountered on the page -- we think alike!
* In my Twitter feed, I have noticed that a large number of people who claim to be “writers” frequently make rather passionate arguments in favor of various types of censorship. They do not, of course, use the word “censorship” – no one who wants to censor your thoughts, writings, speeches or lyrics ever does – but the positions they advocate deserve no other description. Not only is this tendency cowardly and disgusting, it is also deeply hypocritical, for the very same lot who work themselves into a foam-flecked rage over men writing women, straight writing gay, white writing black, etc. are also the same who shriek like demented cats over the lack of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity in novels, television shows and movies. As a straight white man, I have literally been told in so many words both A) I ought to write more characters of color or who belong to some type of minority group, and B) questioned as to whether I as a straight white man am “qualified” to write for gay characters or characters of color. Presumably such people desire a world where every completed creative endeavor resembles a kind of human rainbow, yet at the same time, they seem to desire a situation where only a rainbow can write a rainbow: in practical terms, this would lead to a world where, presumably, only (for example) a black gay female writer would be allowed to write anything at all. Yet I have to ask: why would she be qualified to write a straight white male? The people who say these sort of things, and make these self-contradictory demands, never seem to grasp what the inevitable result of this kind of logic must be: a world where no on is allowed to exercise their imagination or their qualities of empathy and projection, a world in which every creative person must stay in their own lane lest they be attacked for assuming a foreign point of view. Such a world could create nothing of literary or artistic value; by its very nature it would spend all of its time poking around the bona fides of a writer, trying to determine if some act of cultural or sexual theft had been committed. This ought to be obvious even to the stupidest person, yet uncountable numbers of people seem oblivious to it. The concept of the “slippery slope,” which used to be taught to our children in Civics classes from a very young age, has evidently found itself a casualty of the endless pogrom presently being conducted by our society against the concept of critical thinking.
*There comes a moment in everyone's life when they can no longer kid themselves and accept that their youth is finished. By a series of contortions worthy of Neo in THE MATRIX I was able to avoid accepting the arrival of middle age far longer than anyone I know, but some recent photos posted online by the woman to whom I lost my virginity have left me no doubt that it is here and has been for some time. The photos in question are of her oldest daughter, who is now 18 years old – the same age I was when met her mother.
*I have been a practicing libertarian since 2016, but my libertarian sentiments were probably awakened fifteen years ago or more, when I began to grasp that we had invested so much power in the presidency and the courts that congress, the most democratic and vital branch of government, seemed to be in danger of becoming little more than a figurehead, like the Senate after the consecration of the Roman Empire. The Trump Presidency has proven to me beyond on doubt that America is now in very much the same shoes as Rome was just before the death of the Republic. Militarily and economically we remain very nearly all-powerful, but morally and ethically we are in a state of collapse, and this collapse has manifested in an ever-increasing concentration of power into individuals, specifically federal and SC justices and the president. If you doubt this, ask yourself how important it is that the next president be stable and sane. A hundred years ago it scarcely mattered if he were either: now the fate of all humanity depends upon both. Technology is of course the principal architect here, because 100 years ago we didn't possess nuclear bombs, but the fact remains every election has become a GAME OF THRONES-esque exercise in holding one's breath in the hopes that the next king – or queen – isn't a fire-breathing lunatic. We must find a way to rein in the immense and unhealthy power of the presidency and the courts and return both institutions into balance they once shared with the third co-equal branch of our government, congress. Because as a rule of thumb, if you fear who occupies a particular office – I mean really fear it, in the mortal sense – then that office has too much power.
* Today, as I was leaving a diner after breakfast, the sun hit me rather uncomfortably on the face and I noted, not for the first time, that Southern California does not possess four seasons but only one and a half. I call them “summer” and “not-summer.” The interesting thing about these seasons is that when one is in the midst of of either, it is natural to believe the other does not exist. In August, in the San Fernando Valley, it is so mercilessly hot – 112 degrees is not unknown – that the very existence of such things as space heaters and wool socks strikes you as ridiculous. In February, when you require both to avoid freezing your toes off while you sleep, and the back yard is a swamp of cold mud, the notion that you will soon require both your air conditioning and your ceiling fan merely to get to sleep at night – and then only barely – comes off as equally nonsensical. In states where the typical "four seasons" model exists, life seems far less of a syllogism.
* A friend of mine caught me watching bare-knuckle boxing the other day and remarked about my “insatiable bloodlust.” He also made comments to the effect that a civilized society would not allow such things as mixed martial arts or bare-knuckle boxing even to exist, much less publicize, normalize and reward them. You can make a case that he is correct on both counts, but I believe such arguments to be of the debate-society type – all style and no substance. The brute fact is that there are many human beings who are in essence, hunters in a farmer's world. Such people require outlets for their savagery and it is far better for them to release their primal urges toward violence, risk-taking and adrenaline rushes via combat sports, bungee jumping, sky-diving, race-car driving, etc., etc. than it would be to ban such things and let these impulses build to the explosion point. To simply deny that humans have savage elements is as foolish and self-destructive as letting them run riot. The savage has his uses just as the civilized man does: it is merely a question of harnessing the primal energies in a modern way. As the character of Uncle Kelloway pointed out in “Piece of Cake,” apropos of R.A.F. pilots, “It's a good job these fellows are flying fighters for His Majesty; otherwise they'd be out robbing banks.”
* When I was about ten or eleven years old, my friend Erik and I engaged in a complex, extremely well-planned scheme to obtain a copy of PLAYBOY from the local store. I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly we drew up our plans or how meticulous we were in executing them. We had an alibi for our absence from school, a store of money, and an expertly forged note, ostensibly from Erik's father, with which we were going to fool the clerk at the store. All this plotting came to naught, however – not because we were caught, but because we had forgotten about sales tax and were short something like ten or fifteen cents. I mention this story in large part because it goes to show both the immense curiosity which boys of that age have about women and sex, and also because such an event would never happen today. The existence of the Internet has utterly and completely de-mystified the female body as well as the sexual act, to the point that even very young children whose hormones are years from awakening know far more than is desirable or necessary about both. The effect that pornography and semi-pornographic imagery will have on the sexuality and social interaction of future generations is a cause for study, and perhaps for worry, too. There is, after all, something to be said for the air of mystery.
September 16, 2019
MAGNUM & ME
If you were alive in the 80s and conscious of your surroundings, then the chances are you were well-familiar with MAGNUM, P.I. whether you wanted to be or not. In an age crowded with iconic prime-time television shows, MAGNUM stood at or near the top of the heap, both in terms of popularity, quality and longevity. The dimpled, mustachioe'd face of its star, Tom Selleck, was inescapable: if you didn't see him on TV, you'd surely see him in the supermarket, on the cover of PEOPLE or TV GUIDE or some other staple magazine of the era. It happens that this was not as annoying a phenomenon as it probably appears, because Selleck, in addition to being the sort of handsome that is not obnoxious to behold, was a very talented and likeable actor and MAGNUM a particularly good show. Indeed, there was a definite comfort in tuning in, year after year, and seeing him and his cohorts fighting crime to the tune of that beyond-iconic theme song. MAGNUM was, in many ways, the background of the 1980s. It was always there.
Recently I made the decision to rewatch all eight seasons – all 162 episodes – of this legendary television show which ran from 1980 – 1988. It was a deliberate trip down the nostalgia rabbit hole, but it was also made consciously out the memory of MAGNUM as first-rate entertainment. What I came away with following the experience, however, was far more than nostalgia or even a feeling of satisfaction (or regret) at having spent so much time in front of the boob tube. I actually learned quite a bit about myself – who I was in the 80s, and who I am now, in 2019. I picked up on themes which went over my head – or distinctly turned me off – when I was a teenager but resontate very strongly with me now.
For those who have forgotten or don't know, MAGNUM was the story of Thomas Sullivan Magnum (Selleck), a Vietnam vet and ex-Navy SEAL who hailed from an old Navy family and was early into a brilliant military career when he chucked it all away, and went to work in Hawaii as a private investigator. When asked why he did so, Magnum would invariably reply, “One day I turned 33 and realized I'd never been 23.” Although invariably broke, Magnum lived a life of luxury as a permanent guest of the mysterious, ultra-wealthy novelist Robin Masters, who kept a huge estate on Oahu and allowed Magnum to use his red Ferarri 308 GTS. On the other hand, he paid a steep price for his free room and board, in the form of Johnathan Quayle Higgins (Johnathan Hillerman), the pompous, tyrannical snob who managed the estate for the always-absent Robin and made Magnum's life a constant misery.
Magnum was (unwillingly) joined in his investigations by his Vietnam buddies Theodore “T.C.” Calvin (Roger E. Mosley) and Orville “Rick” Wright (Larry Manetti). The hulking T.C. ran a chopper service called Island Hoppers and often served as Magnum's aerial chauffeur, though he never did seem to get reimbursed for gas money or for the bullet holes invariably punched in his plexiglass; diminutive Rick managed the swanky King Kahmehameha Club and utilized his vast network of underworld contacts to facilitate Magnum's sleuthing.
I ought to note here that prime-time television during the 80s (or for that matter, the 50s, 60s and 70s) generally tended to use a formula known as “status quo ante.” Recurring characters were relatively infrequent, story arcs spanning multiple episodes were almost unheard of, and no matter how tragically an episode might conclude, or how badly battered the hero was at the end of a story, he appeared in the next as if nothing whatever had happened to him, physically or emotionally. This sort of storytelling had in mind the idea that a new viewer should be able to tune in and “get it” immediately, and not be repelled by arriving in the middle of some over-arching plot he knew nothing about. It also freed the writers from the cumulative tedium of worrying about continuity. The practical effect, however, was to prevent the characters of television shows from growing and changing over time. In life, human beings learn more by pain and defeat than they do pleasure or success, yet the formula of “status quo ante” meant that all life-lessons were sponged away at the end of an episode, leaving the characters as fresh, and as blank, as they were when it began.
MAGNUM departed from this formula in a number of ways: it featured a number of recurring characters, stories that played out in small pieces over time, and it did not always return Magnum to the status quo after a harrowing episode. (At the end of the two-part episode “Images,” for example, Magnum's mentally ill girlfriend-client [played by Sharon Stone] kills herself in front of him; in the following episode, “Mac's Back,” we find him in a drunken, bearded, guilt-ridden stupor, suffering from terrible flashbacks). Most importantly, MAGNUM did something no show I'd ever seen before (or since) ever did: it broke the fourth wall. He, and occasionally other characters, would sometimes look directly at the camera – usually to smirk, occasionally to raise an eyebrow or just plain roll their eyes. This information is not just trivia: it plays heavily into why MAGNUM had such an impact upon me then, but most especially why it affects me now.
When I began watching MAGNUM, at the age of 7 ½, what I most enjoyed about the character was his mix of toughness and humanity, knightly honor and juvenile irresponsibility. Magnum was a total badass, but he was just as often a chump, subject to all manner of ridicule and humiliation by Higgins, and to a lesser extent, his friends. He was a decorated Vietnam vet, capable of being moved to tears by a sunset or a memorial, but also a guy who loved eating chilli dogs while swilling beer and tossing around his lucky rubber chicken. He'd been through the wringer in Nam, but was determined to recapture his youth when not working on his cases – dating beautiful women, swimming in the ocean, entering surf-ski races and triathalons, roaring around Oahu in a luxury sportscar he didn't own, and coming back to a luxurious guest house that wasn't his. And indeed, the first four seasons of MAGNUM, which lasted until roughly my twelfth year, were very much in this vein. Thomas was, beneath all his .45 wielding, villain-punching, Ferarri-driving badassery, just a big, handsome kid. The oppression he dealt with at the hands of Higgins was the oppression I dealt with every day from my parents and my teachers. The scorn he often faced from his friends Rick and T.C. due to his indolent, sophomoric lifestyle was the scorn I endured for my inattention in class, my poor grades, my unwillingness to face up to adult responsibility. And yet, because of his badassery, and indeed, his irresponsibility, Magnum was also something I could aspire to.
At some point within the fifth season, my relationship with the show began to change. It was a subtle change, and probably not one I understood at the time, but in retrospect it is fairly obvious. After four full years of playing in the surf with bikini babes when he wasn't taking criminals to the figurative woodshed, Magnum began to show the first signs of transitioning from what Patrick Swayze, in ROADHOUSE, called “a forty year-old adolescent,” into something else – a grownup. The show began -- very slowly -- to pull Magnum away somewhat from his habits of running miles along the beach every morning or his penchant for entering triathalons and surf-ski competitions – the habits of a young man – and allowed a certain self-doubt to creep into his mid-life career choice. In season three, for example, he sharply rebuffs T.C. for suggesting he might want to sidle back into the military via the reserves, but a year later, during narration, he ponders “when he will have to grow up,” suggesting his career as a P.I. is really just an elaborate dodge of the inevitable.
I do believe this line upset me when I heard it as a kid. It upset me more as a middle-aged man, for reasons I'll disclose in a moment. But I didn't really get upset with MAGNUM (as a teenager) until the sixth season, when I saw the episode “The Hotel Dick.” 'Dick,' for you perverts out there, is old-school slang for detective, and the story in question finds Magnum having left Robin's Nest and his P.I. gig to work as a hotel detective. He wears a suit (rather than his trademark Hawaiian shirt and Ocean Pacific short-shorts), uses glasses to read, and takes rafts of shit from his boss without fighting back. As a 13 year-old kid who equated Magnum's lifestyle not only with rebellion but successful rebellion, the idea that he would take such a job really bothered me. It constituted, in my mind, a progression toward “adulthood” that I did not want to see him take. It reminded me that “growing up” was not something that could be avoided forever – not even on television. The decision of MAGNUM's producers to let age and consequences slowly dissolve the status quo was difficult for me to swallow: it contained reminders of infirmity and mortality. Then, in season seven, came “Paper War.” In this episode, Magnum accuses Higgins of actually being the elusive, never-seen Robin Masters, and Higgins' evasions and denials were less than convincing. It seemed to me then that MAGNUM was taking “breaking the fourth wall” to new levels and actually inviting us, the audience, to question the very foundation the show – any show – actually rested upon: the identity of its characters. Could I believe in nothing?
The final season of MAGNUM disturbed me on several levels. The episode “Unfinished Business” offered Magnum a chance to kill the murderer of his wife, Michelle; Magnum declined to take it. He passed on vengeance to serve a greater good. What the fuck was up with that? In the climax of season three's notorious two-part episode “Did You See The Sunrise?” Magnum coldly executes a Soviet officer who tortured him as POW in Vietnam and later murdered his friend “Mac” Reynolds (Jeff Mackay) in Hawaii. Though shocking as hell for the time period -- it really was a scandal -- I heartily approved of him taking the law into his own hands. How could that same judgment-passing Magnum pass up on killing the cold-blooded murderer of his own wife? What had happened to my hero? Why was he forgoing personal satisfaction for the sake of others?
But it was the series finale that really did me in. In “Revelations, Part II,” Magnum makes the decision to hand over the keys to the Ferarri, leave Robin's Nest, and rejoin the Navy. After nearly a decade of woman-loving, bad-guy bashing and check bouncing, he cuts his hair, puts on the white uniform of a commander, USN, and decides to resume his military career – as a single dad, to boot! In essence, the show seemed to be saying, “It's been real, kids, and it's been fun – but it hasn't been real fun. Everyone has to grow up sometime, and for Thomas Sullivan Magnum, that time is now.”
For me, as a 16 year-old kid, this episode was a flat-out insult. We – the audience – had only come to know Thomas Magnum through his life as a private investigator, through Higgins, and through his long-suffering buddies Rick and T.C. Now we were being told that this whole period, this near-decade of adventure and do-gooding, was really just a kind of belch that occurred between courses in Magnum's life, an attempted escape from adulthood that had run its futile course. He was like a man who had run away from his wife and kids and drank it up and whored it up and then come home, hung over and contrite, to resume the life of a husband and father. It had all just been an idyll, a soujourn, a tryst, a fling, an affair. It signified nothing except a failed attempt to recapture a youth he had lost in the humid, insect-infested rice paddies of Vietnam.
All of this, I suppose, is why the first four seasons of MAGNUM are so clear and fresh and vital and immediate in my middle-aged mind: testaments to my own desire to stay forever 23...even when I was thirteen. At the same time, they are the same reason I can scarcely recall more than ten or twenty percent of the stories from the show's second half, its last eighty-plus episodes. As a teenager, I just didn't want to hear this shit. I didn't want to see Thomas Magnum in reading glasses, feeling a bit too long in the tooth for surf-ski competitions, experiencing existential angst about the course of his life. To see that meant acknowledging that some day I too would have to give up athletics, to wear knee braces and ice packs, and have to choose between life on the couch with a bag of cheetos resting on my gut or the ice-cold comforts offered by the alarm clock, the rat race, and the weekly paycheck. And folks, volk, wolves, dogs, homies, peeps, niggas, party comrades, friends, Romans and countrymen – I just didn't want to do that.
On the other hand, rewatching MAGNUM at my present age offered series of fresh epiphanies and fresh feelings. “The Hotel Dick” resonated with me so hard I felt like a goddamned tuning fork when the credits rolled. And why not? I could – I can – relate.
I graduated from college in 1997. From then until 2004 I worked in the criminal justice system with great success – as a parole officer, investigator for the district attorney, and correctional specialist. At the height of my career, however, I chucked it all away to go back to school and write creatively. I did this because I felt I had been outraging my true nature by pursuing a conventional career when my creative talents were going used. I got myself a luxurious apartment, a wide circle of friends and lovers, and for about four years, lived essentially lived on the early Magnum level, sans responsibility. At the end of 2007 I came out to Hollywood to double down on my dream of living off my talent rather than a set of abilities I had learned but did not feel passionately about. And to make the parallel complete, I even worked periodically as a private investigator myself, right down to the occasional high-speed chase (unfortunately without music). I published novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories. I was paid – poorly and disingenuously, but still paid – to write a screenplay. I racked up an shelf-load of literary awards, and unlike some, I got them on my own merits (I don't ride coat-tails, and I don't take credit for things I didn't do). Yet after about ten years, part of me – what Magnum would call his Little Voice – started whispering, “Is this adulthood? Is this what grown-ups do? Where is your 401K? Where are your health benefits? Where is your house, your wife, your kids? Where is your actual contribution to the society in which you live? What have you sacrificed to live the life of a forty year-old adolescent?”
What, indeed?
Thomas Magnum came to a conclusion that, after eight years of snuggling hot guest stars like Morgan Fairchild, Sharon Stone, Marta DuBois and Erin Gray, eight years of ripping 'round Hawaii in a knife-prowed Ferarri, eight years of eating chilli dogs on the couch in the guest house of Robin's Nest while watching VHS tapes of his favorite movies or delayed-broadcast Army – Navy games, eight years of going .45 to .38 with his enemies, well, the time had come to take off his Hawaiian shirt, get a haircut, and slip back into that horrible thing we call adulthood. He'd had enough of being 23.
I can relate to that, too.
I've lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, having experiences I never dreamed possible when I was working as an underpaid parole officer in a small town. I've been paid tens of thousands of dollars to play video games (yes, you read that right), I've befriended (or at least partied with) TV stars whose work I long admired, I've had meetings with bombastic cigar-chewing movie producers who were so cartoonishly crass and egotistical that I left feeling as if I myself was playing a small part in a cruel comedy about Hollywood. I have, in short, lived out the vast majority of shallow fantasies I once harbored as a hard-working but unfulfilled member of what we refer to as The System. I don't regret a moment of it, any more than I regret the four years previous to that, spent studying, drinking oceans of beer, chasing women and doing whatever the hell I wanted to do whenever the hell I wanted to do it. It was all enormously fun and strangely productive. But sitting here, now, tonight, a little bagged, a lot tired, a little wrung-out, well, it all seems a little frivolous to me. A little silly. A little meaningless. I came here as a guy in his middle thirties with stars in his eyes, but I'm not in my middle thirties anymore, and those stars, I think, became rather salty droplets of ice-cold water a few years back, with a tendency to sting. Magnum, in “The Hotel Dick,” is trying to prove something to himself – essentially, that he still knows how to adult – and I guess I am, too.
Interesting fact: a man gets older. He starts having to wear reading glasses and to double up on the aspirin after a really tough workout – and even then, he doesn't recover like he used to. He walks down the street, and the cute redhead with the fine ass, who was precisely the type who used to stare him up and down like a side of beef and drop him a wink, now struts past him as if he isn't there, doesn't exist, has never existed. He goes on a bender after a tough week, and it takes him damn near a week to recover. His bills and debts have caught up to him, so he can't afford a flashy car anymore – Christ, he can't even pay his fucking rent anymore, because $3,700/month is no mo'fuckin' joke. He opens his social media accounts to see charlatans, frauds, fakes, thieves, cowards and clowns are accelerating past him on the career curve, dropping the hammer on their puny short-dicked four-cylinder engines, when sometimes he can't even get his massive V12 to even roll over, much less hit 200 MPH. So he discovers that he has a choice. He can continue wearing the Hawaiian shirt, which is no longer such a good fit, and continue to guzzle his Old Dusseldorf, which doesn't taste quite so sweet anymore, or he can say to himself, “It has been real, Thomas, and it has been fun, and it has been real fun, too; but that fun – that particular type of fun – is over, and it's time to do something else. It's time to find the fun somewhere else.”
In the end, I guess what I discovered – or re-discovered – watching MAGNUM again as a middle-aged man, was one of the hardest, coldest, and most unavoidable truths of all. We can escape everything in life except our destiny, and that destiny is not determined by others. It is not determined by the stars, or by genetics, or by fate: it's determined by ourselves. By where our own hearts take us. There is a time for discipline and asceticism, and there is a time for Hawaiian shirts and rubber chickens, and only we can determine which has come, and which has gone.
And which may come again.
Recently I made the decision to rewatch all eight seasons – all 162 episodes – of this legendary television show which ran from 1980 – 1988. It was a deliberate trip down the nostalgia rabbit hole, but it was also made consciously out the memory of MAGNUM as first-rate entertainment. What I came away with following the experience, however, was far more than nostalgia or even a feeling of satisfaction (or regret) at having spent so much time in front of the boob tube. I actually learned quite a bit about myself – who I was in the 80s, and who I am now, in 2019. I picked up on themes which went over my head – or distinctly turned me off – when I was a teenager but resontate very strongly with me now.
For those who have forgotten or don't know, MAGNUM was the story of Thomas Sullivan Magnum (Selleck), a Vietnam vet and ex-Navy SEAL who hailed from an old Navy family and was early into a brilliant military career when he chucked it all away, and went to work in Hawaii as a private investigator. When asked why he did so, Magnum would invariably reply, “One day I turned 33 and realized I'd never been 23.” Although invariably broke, Magnum lived a life of luxury as a permanent guest of the mysterious, ultra-wealthy novelist Robin Masters, who kept a huge estate on Oahu and allowed Magnum to use his red Ferarri 308 GTS. On the other hand, he paid a steep price for his free room and board, in the form of Johnathan Quayle Higgins (Johnathan Hillerman), the pompous, tyrannical snob who managed the estate for the always-absent Robin and made Magnum's life a constant misery.
Magnum was (unwillingly) joined in his investigations by his Vietnam buddies Theodore “T.C.” Calvin (Roger E. Mosley) and Orville “Rick” Wright (Larry Manetti). The hulking T.C. ran a chopper service called Island Hoppers and often served as Magnum's aerial chauffeur, though he never did seem to get reimbursed for gas money or for the bullet holes invariably punched in his plexiglass; diminutive Rick managed the swanky King Kahmehameha Club and utilized his vast network of underworld contacts to facilitate Magnum's sleuthing.
I ought to note here that prime-time television during the 80s (or for that matter, the 50s, 60s and 70s) generally tended to use a formula known as “status quo ante.” Recurring characters were relatively infrequent, story arcs spanning multiple episodes were almost unheard of, and no matter how tragically an episode might conclude, or how badly battered the hero was at the end of a story, he appeared in the next as if nothing whatever had happened to him, physically or emotionally. This sort of storytelling had in mind the idea that a new viewer should be able to tune in and “get it” immediately, and not be repelled by arriving in the middle of some over-arching plot he knew nothing about. It also freed the writers from the cumulative tedium of worrying about continuity. The practical effect, however, was to prevent the characters of television shows from growing and changing over time. In life, human beings learn more by pain and defeat than they do pleasure or success, yet the formula of “status quo ante” meant that all life-lessons were sponged away at the end of an episode, leaving the characters as fresh, and as blank, as they were when it began.
MAGNUM departed from this formula in a number of ways: it featured a number of recurring characters, stories that played out in small pieces over time, and it did not always return Magnum to the status quo after a harrowing episode. (At the end of the two-part episode “Images,” for example, Magnum's mentally ill girlfriend-client [played by Sharon Stone] kills herself in front of him; in the following episode, “Mac's Back,” we find him in a drunken, bearded, guilt-ridden stupor, suffering from terrible flashbacks). Most importantly, MAGNUM did something no show I'd ever seen before (or since) ever did: it broke the fourth wall. He, and occasionally other characters, would sometimes look directly at the camera – usually to smirk, occasionally to raise an eyebrow or just plain roll their eyes. This information is not just trivia: it plays heavily into why MAGNUM had such an impact upon me then, but most especially why it affects me now.
When I began watching MAGNUM, at the age of 7 ½, what I most enjoyed about the character was his mix of toughness and humanity, knightly honor and juvenile irresponsibility. Magnum was a total badass, but he was just as often a chump, subject to all manner of ridicule and humiliation by Higgins, and to a lesser extent, his friends. He was a decorated Vietnam vet, capable of being moved to tears by a sunset or a memorial, but also a guy who loved eating chilli dogs while swilling beer and tossing around his lucky rubber chicken. He'd been through the wringer in Nam, but was determined to recapture his youth when not working on his cases – dating beautiful women, swimming in the ocean, entering surf-ski races and triathalons, roaring around Oahu in a luxury sportscar he didn't own, and coming back to a luxurious guest house that wasn't his. And indeed, the first four seasons of MAGNUM, which lasted until roughly my twelfth year, were very much in this vein. Thomas was, beneath all his .45 wielding, villain-punching, Ferarri-driving badassery, just a big, handsome kid. The oppression he dealt with at the hands of Higgins was the oppression I dealt with every day from my parents and my teachers. The scorn he often faced from his friends Rick and T.C. due to his indolent, sophomoric lifestyle was the scorn I endured for my inattention in class, my poor grades, my unwillingness to face up to adult responsibility. And yet, because of his badassery, and indeed, his irresponsibility, Magnum was also something I could aspire to.
At some point within the fifth season, my relationship with the show began to change. It was a subtle change, and probably not one I understood at the time, but in retrospect it is fairly obvious. After four full years of playing in the surf with bikini babes when he wasn't taking criminals to the figurative woodshed, Magnum began to show the first signs of transitioning from what Patrick Swayze, in ROADHOUSE, called “a forty year-old adolescent,” into something else – a grownup. The show began -- very slowly -- to pull Magnum away somewhat from his habits of running miles along the beach every morning or his penchant for entering triathalons and surf-ski competitions – the habits of a young man – and allowed a certain self-doubt to creep into his mid-life career choice. In season three, for example, he sharply rebuffs T.C. for suggesting he might want to sidle back into the military via the reserves, but a year later, during narration, he ponders “when he will have to grow up,” suggesting his career as a P.I. is really just an elaborate dodge of the inevitable.
I do believe this line upset me when I heard it as a kid. It upset me more as a middle-aged man, for reasons I'll disclose in a moment. But I didn't really get upset with MAGNUM (as a teenager) until the sixth season, when I saw the episode “The Hotel Dick.” 'Dick,' for you perverts out there, is old-school slang for detective, and the story in question finds Magnum having left Robin's Nest and his P.I. gig to work as a hotel detective. He wears a suit (rather than his trademark Hawaiian shirt and Ocean Pacific short-shorts), uses glasses to read, and takes rafts of shit from his boss without fighting back. As a 13 year-old kid who equated Magnum's lifestyle not only with rebellion but successful rebellion, the idea that he would take such a job really bothered me. It constituted, in my mind, a progression toward “adulthood” that I did not want to see him take. It reminded me that “growing up” was not something that could be avoided forever – not even on television. The decision of MAGNUM's producers to let age and consequences slowly dissolve the status quo was difficult for me to swallow: it contained reminders of infirmity and mortality. Then, in season seven, came “Paper War.” In this episode, Magnum accuses Higgins of actually being the elusive, never-seen Robin Masters, and Higgins' evasions and denials were less than convincing. It seemed to me then that MAGNUM was taking “breaking the fourth wall” to new levels and actually inviting us, the audience, to question the very foundation the show – any show – actually rested upon: the identity of its characters. Could I believe in nothing?
The final season of MAGNUM disturbed me on several levels. The episode “Unfinished Business” offered Magnum a chance to kill the murderer of his wife, Michelle; Magnum declined to take it. He passed on vengeance to serve a greater good. What the fuck was up with that? In the climax of season three's notorious two-part episode “Did You See The Sunrise?” Magnum coldly executes a Soviet officer who tortured him as POW in Vietnam and later murdered his friend “Mac” Reynolds (Jeff Mackay) in Hawaii. Though shocking as hell for the time period -- it really was a scandal -- I heartily approved of him taking the law into his own hands. How could that same judgment-passing Magnum pass up on killing the cold-blooded murderer of his own wife? What had happened to my hero? Why was he forgoing personal satisfaction for the sake of others?
But it was the series finale that really did me in. In “Revelations, Part II,” Magnum makes the decision to hand over the keys to the Ferarri, leave Robin's Nest, and rejoin the Navy. After nearly a decade of woman-loving, bad-guy bashing and check bouncing, he cuts his hair, puts on the white uniform of a commander, USN, and decides to resume his military career – as a single dad, to boot! In essence, the show seemed to be saying, “It's been real, kids, and it's been fun – but it hasn't been real fun. Everyone has to grow up sometime, and for Thomas Sullivan Magnum, that time is now.”
For me, as a 16 year-old kid, this episode was a flat-out insult. We – the audience – had only come to know Thomas Magnum through his life as a private investigator, through Higgins, and through his long-suffering buddies Rick and T.C. Now we were being told that this whole period, this near-decade of adventure and do-gooding, was really just a kind of belch that occurred between courses in Magnum's life, an attempted escape from adulthood that had run its futile course. He was like a man who had run away from his wife and kids and drank it up and whored it up and then come home, hung over and contrite, to resume the life of a husband and father. It had all just been an idyll, a soujourn, a tryst, a fling, an affair. It signified nothing except a failed attempt to recapture a youth he had lost in the humid, insect-infested rice paddies of Vietnam.
All of this, I suppose, is why the first four seasons of MAGNUM are so clear and fresh and vital and immediate in my middle-aged mind: testaments to my own desire to stay forever 23...even when I was thirteen. At the same time, they are the same reason I can scarcely recall more than ten or twenty percent of the stories from the show's second half, its last eighty-plus episodes. As a teenager, I just didn't want to hear this shit. I didn't want to see Thomas Magnum in reading glasses, feeling a bit too long in the tooth for surf-ski competitions, experiencing existential angst about the course of his life. To see that meant acknowledging that some day I too would have to give up athletics, to wear knee braces and ice packs, and have to choose between life on the couch with a bag of cheetos resting on my gut or the ice-cold comforts offered by the alarm clock, the rat race, and the weekly paycheck. And folks, volk, wolves, dogs, homies, peeps, niggas, party comrades, friends, Romans and countrymen – I just didn't want to do that.
On the other hand, rewatching MAGNUM at my present age offered series of fresh epiphanies and fresh feelings. “The Hotel Dick” resonated with me so hard I felt like a goddamned tuning fork when the credits rolled. And why not? I could – I can – relate.
I graduated from college in 1997. From then until 2004 I worked in the criminal justice system with great success – as a parole officer, investigator for the district attorney, and correctional specialist. At the height of my career, however, I chucked it all away to go back to school and write creatively. I did this because I felt I had been outraging my true nature by pursuing a conventional career when my creative talents were going used. I got myself a luxurious apartment, a wide circle of friends and lovers, and for about four years, lived essentially lived on the early Magnum level, sans responsibility. At the end of 2007 I came out to Hollywood to double down on my dream of living off my talent rather than a set of abilities I had learned but did not feel passionately about. And to make the parallel complete, I even worked periodically as a private investigator myself, right down to the occasional high-speed chase (unfortunately without music). I published novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories. I was paid – poorly and disingenuously, but still paid – to write a screenplay. I racked up an shelf-load of literary awards, and unlike some, I got them on my own merits (I don't ride coat-tails, and I don't take credit for things I didn't do). Yet after about ten years, part of me – what Magnum would call his Little Voice – started whispering, “Is this adulthood? Is this what grown-ups do? Where is your 401K? Where are your health benefits? Where is your house, your wife, your kids? Where is your actual contribution to the society in which you live? What have you sacrificed to live the life of a forty year-old adolescent?”
What, indeed?
Thomas Magnum came to a conclusion that, after eight years of snuggling hot guest stars like Morgan Fairchild, Sharon Stone, Marta DuBois and Erin Gray, eight years of ripping 'round Hawaii in a knife-prowed Ferarri, eight years of eating chilli dogs on the couch in the guest house of Robin's Nest while watching VHS tapes of his favorite movies or delayed-broadcast Army – Navy games, eight years of going .45 to .38 with his enemies, well, the time had come to take off his Hawaiian shirt, get a haircut, and slip back into that horrible thing we call adulthood. He'd had enough of being 23.
I can relate to that, too.
I've lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, having experiences I never dreamed possible when I was working as an underpaid parole officer in a small town. I've been paid tens of thousands of dollars to play video games (yes, you read that right), I've befriended (or at least partied with) TV stars whose work I long admired, I've had meetings with bombastic cigar-chewing movie producers who were so cartoonishly crass and egotistical that I left feeling as if I myself was playing a small part in a cruel comedy about Hollywood. I have, in short, lived out the vast majority of shallow fantasies I once harbored as a hard-working but unfulfilled member of what we refer to as The System. I don't regret a moment of it, any more than I regret the four years previous to that, spent studying, drinking oceans of beer, chasing women and doing whatever the hell I wanted to do whenever the hell I wanted to do it. It was all enormously fun and strangely productive. But sitting here, now, tonight, a little bagged, a lot tired, a little wrung-out, well, it all seems a little frivolous to me. A little silly. A little meaningless. I came here as a guy in his middle thirties with stars in his eyes, but I'm not in my middle thirties anymore, and those stars, I think, became rather salty droplets of ice-cold water a few years back, with a tendency to sting. Magnum, in “The Hotel Dick,” is trying to prove something to himself – essentially, that he still knows how to adult – and I guess I am, too.
Interesting fact: a man gets older. He starts having to wear reading glasses and to double up on the aspirin after a really tough workout – and even then, he doesn't recover like he used to. He walks down the street, and the cute redhead with the fine ass, who was precisely the type who used to stare him up and down like a side of beef and drop him a wink, now struts past him as if he isn't there, doesn't exist, has never existed. He goes on a bender after a tough week, and it takes him damn near a week to recover. His bills and debts have caught up to him, so he can't afford a flashy car anymore – Christ, he can't even pay his fucking rent anymore, because $3,700/month is no mo'fuckin' joke. He opens his social media accounts to see charlatans, frauds, fakes, thieves, cowards and clowns are accelerating past him on the career curve, dropping the hammer on their puny short-dicked four-cylinder engines, when sometimes he can't even get his massive V12 to even roll over, much less hit 200 MPH. So he discovers that he has a choice. He can continue wearing the Hawaiian shirt, which is no longer such a good fit, and continue to guzzle his Old Dusseldorf, which doesn't taste quite so sweet anymore, or he can say to himself, “It has been real, Thomas, and it has been fun, and it has been real fun, too; but that fun – that particular type of fun – is over, and it's time to do something else. It's time to find the fun somewhere else.”
In the end, I guess what I discovered – or re-discovered – watching MAGNUM again as a middle-aged man, was one of the hardest, coldest, and most unavoidable truths of all. We can escape everything in life except our destiny, and that destiny is not determined by others. It is not determined by the stars, or by genetics, or by fate: it's determined by ourselves. By where our own hearts take us. There is a time for discipline and asceticism, and there is a time for Hawaiian shirts and rubber chickens, and only we can determine which has come, and which has gone.
And which may come again.
August 29, 2019
BALLAD FOR DEAD FRIENDS
Perhaps all bereavement is a mourning for dreams. What has really happened can never be undone. The dead never leave us. What torments is the loss of things that never were – the years of life unlived, the things not said or done, what wasn't, what couldn't be.
– Carly Rheilan
There's an old saying that when you hit your forties, you don't celebrate birthdays, you mourn them. This is just a macabre joke, but it has elements of truth to it. After a certain point, just what the hell is it that you're supposed to be celebrating when a birthday comes around? Another year off what you have left? The fact that age and gravity are one step closer to stripping you of your power to enjoy life? A little less hair and a few more wrinkles? The increased probability of the death of older loved ones?
Still, I try to remain positive about it. A birthday is, after all, an accomplishment. It's one more year you didn't die, which means it's also one more year in which you accumulated experiences and, one hopes, a fair share of joy, pleasure, and knowledge. It triggers reflection, which is a good thing, and can also initiate long-overdue changes and inspire goals.
There are times, however, when it feeling positive about this era of life is very difficult. Now is one of those times. Actually, it has little to do with me and any kind of bullshit mid-life crisis or existential dread. It's just been a week of bad news about old friends.
In this blog I generally avoid getting too specific about certain things. It's not my privacy that concerns me, but the privacy of others. I could a tale unfold about many great adventures and hi-jinks and songs of inspiration I know you'd enjoy, but they would involve betraying confidences or embarrassing people I care about. In some cases it would involve breaking pledges of secrecy to individuals or organizations to which I belong or have served. So I am damned careful what I talk about here, and often change names, descriptions and circumstances so that real events, even harmless ones, are not traceable to their sources. Tonight, however, I am partially suspending that rule. I'm not sure it's a good idea because it may cause pain to certain people, but sometimes you've gotta speak from the heart, and you can't speak from the heart if you're writing beneath a smoke screen.
Today I was informed a friend of mine from graduate school, Angie F., died at the age of 46 – the same age I was until a few weeks ago. She was a warm, kind, gentle person who nevertheless had some steel beneath the velvet: she had no difficulty holding unpopular political opinions and once, when she overheard a classmate talking trash about me, confronted the guilty party and took up a lance on my behalf (I was 2,000 miles away at the time or I'd have done it myself). We had fallen out of touch in the last few years because she was averse to the social media platforms I use to communicate with most of my far-away friends, but she was rarely far from my mind because she had a special energy about her that was very genuine. Her death leaves me feeling cheated and small – cheated because I didn't talk to her more often, small because the effort involved would have cost me nothing and yielded much, but I didn't make it, and now it's too late. And aren't those two of the shittiest words in the English language, folks?
At times like this I always think of the Dashboard Prophets:
How are you feeling
Do you feel ok?
'Cause I don't
It keeps me reelin'
Will I ever be the same?
No I won't
A week ago I learned of another passing. My fraternity brother Alphonse G. Alphonse was a younger cat who pledged well beneath me, probably in 1996 or 1997. I was about to very belatedly graduate and not enormously interested in getting to know him, and I treated him indifferently and shabbily. The last time I saw him was about five years after graduation: he was on a ladder, painting a house on Philadelphia Street in York, and I thought, “I ought to stop and say hello.” But I didn't. I kept loose tabs on him over the years, meaning to ring him up, meaning to apologize, but again, I never did it. Good intentions and all that. Then, a few weeks ago, I had a very powerful urge to get in touch with him. I decided, this time, to listen to my little voice, but no sooner did I experience this impulse than I heard the news of his passing. I wondered if the sudden desire for contact wasn't perhaps some kind of intimation of that passing – the universe trying to tell me to mend fences while I could. If that was the case, I wasn't fast enough on the draw. Another regret, carefully tucked away in my personal vault of regrets, gathering interest that only I can collect.
Its a cold day in a cruel world
I really wished I could have saved you
Then who would save me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones
I'm an August baby, and August precedes September, and September is when the Towers fell down, 18 years ago. A friend of mine fell with them. His name was Frank. In college we called him F.T. We were in different fraternities, came from different backgrounds, had nothing in common. I liked him very much in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. By the time I came to know him, I had become a bit of a G. in my fraternity, but F.T. was an O.G. in his. He was one of those people who owned who he was and owed it absolutely with no apologies to anyone. Three days before he died I drove past his place of work in Manhattan, not dreaming that enormity of glass and steel and concrete would come tumbling down 72 hours later. I watched it happen on television, not realizing I was watching him die, and every year since I think of him, and have dreamed of him too – dreams that frighten me with their almost supernatural intensity. F.T.'s name is chiseled into the 9/11 memorial. It's also chiseled into my brain.
Have you been dreaming?
I don't dream at all
I have nightmares
Memories careenin'
Have you come to kill what's left
Of my smile
Theres no vacancy in paradise
Once you start thinking along these lines it's hard to stop – like the lines were cut going downhill and you're following them down, into your own personal history. Erik S. died five years ago. I was here in Los Angeles when I got the call. I'd known Erik since 1992, when I was a 19 year-old kid pledging my fraternity. Erik was a crazy musician motherfucker who did crazy musician motherfucker things: he once showed up at my apartment with a machine gun. He liked to drink, he liked to sing and play keyboard and guitar, and he built the bar in my apartment at 821 South Pershing Street in York, Pennsylvania, a bar that was signed by many, many people I knew and which may very will still exist somewhere, soaking up Rolling Rock and Yuengling Lager. The bar may remain, but Erik is gone.
So is Bill E. Bill was a teacher at my school, and also our fraternity advisor. He loved the damned Dallas Cowboys and wouldn't stop talking about them -- or taking action on them. When I was 19 I got mildly drunk with him and Erik on school grounds a few days before the end of the school year. Much later, after I had graduated, we had a stupid quarrel over nothing very important and stopped speaking. In 2016, long after I'd moved away from Pennsylvania, he passed away. When my fraternity brothers (from several generations) were expressing their grief, all I could think of was the fact we used to pass each other in hallways and not look at each other and how goddamned silly that was.
People come and people go, but organizations remain, and in that sense fraternities are funny things. You join them in a literal sense, become part of a stream of history that was flowing along merrily before you got there and continues to flow long after you pack your shit and blow. I remember Jason B. very well. He was one of those fundamentally decent guys who liked to goof off and play the fool. Once I was at a party and he got the idea to streak bare-ass naked from the third floor down to the basement and back, only while he was streaking, some wiseguy got hold of his clothes and hid them. Jason ended up having to borrow a very loose Eagles jersey and a pair of horribly tight football pants to avoid being arrested. I have no memories of him after that. Some years later I got the news he'd been killed in a car accident, leaving behind a wife and children. It was a bitter pill. There's a long list of people I'd have seen in the ground before him.
I really wished I could have saved you
But then who would have saved me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones
I really wish I could have saved you
Life is full of bitter pills, though, and perhaps none is more bitter than the story of Matt F. “Baby Huey” was a guy I got to know quite well, both through my fraternity and through the bar where we worked together for half a year. When he graduated, I thought I'd seen the last of him, but our paths crossed again a few years later. He had joined the army, and a routine physical found bone cancer. Discharged from the military, he came back to school – thin, hollow-cheeked, on crutches, but full of beans and untouched by self-pity. Unfortunately his positive attitude wasn't enough to save him. It made me enormously angry. I lost my father to the same filthy disease, a disease nobody wanted to talk about or even speak aloud because they were all afraid, somehow, that acknowledging it would bring the same doom upon themselves. People are often afraid to speak of the prematurely dead. They want to think they are exempt from the same fate. It doesn't work that way. And that brings me to Geneva D.
I met Geneva in 2005. I'd come back to college to get a second degree and felt awkward – a newly-minted 33 year-old man among (mostly) teenagers. Geneva was in one of my writing classes, and she was an absolute doll: a gorgeous blonde with a brilliant smile and a vivacious personality that could and did light up a room. Despite her tender age – was she even 20? – she was a writer, too, and I remember hours spent in computer labs and lounges and a coffee house on Market Street where we discussed the craft and the art while people read poetry and played guitar before a feedback-prone microphone. Oh yes, I crushed on Geneva, without apologies. She was youth and beauty and eagerness for life. But she died. Dehydration brought on by influenza, or somesuch shit nobody is supposed to die from in the 21st century. It hit me like a hammer to the head. Here one minute, gone the next. No answers, no meaning.
In the Old Testament, Job dared to ask God why his family had been killed and why he himself, a pious believer, had been ruined and destroyed when he had committed no sin. God answered thusly:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this!”
I for one don't know. I'm just a 47 year old man who writes things and drinks beer and smokes the very occasional cigar when I'm not watching re-runs of television shows canceled before you were probably born. I was happy once. I'll be happy again, I suppose, but right now I'm just angry, because people I'm fond of keep dying and the world keeps turning, indifferent as fuck, and I don't have the power to give orders to the morning or show the dawn its place. I don't have the power to go back in time and say "I'm sorry" or "Hey, how are you?" at the moments those words would have been significant. I've got no power at all. But if God doesn't speak to me, even to taunt me with rhetorical questions, Sherlock Holmes does. Witness what he said to my fictional ancestor in “The Mystery of the Cardboard Box”:
“What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
Put another way:
I'll never forget you
I really wish I could have saved you
– Carly Rheilan
There's an old saying that when you hit your forties, you don't celebrate birthdays, you mourn them. This is just a macabre joke, but it has elements of truth to it. After a certain point, just what the hell is it that you're supposed to be celebrating when a birthday comes around? Another year off what you have left? The fact that age and gravity are one step closer to stripping you of your power to enjoy life? A little less hair and a few more wrinkles? The increased probability of the death of older loved ones?
Still, I try to remain positive about it. A birthday is, after all, an accomplishment. It's one more year you didn't die, which means it's also one more year in which you accumulated experiences and, one hopes, a fair share of joy, pleasure, and knowledge. It triggers reflection, which is a good thing, and can also initiate long-overdue changes and inspire goals.
There are times, however, when it feeling positive about this era of life is very difficult. Now is one of those times. Actually, it has little to do with me and any kind of bullshit mid-life crisis or existential dread. It's just been a week of bad news about old friends.
In this blog I generally avoid getting too specific about certain things. It's not my privacy that concerns me, but the privacy of others. I could a tale unfold about many great adventures and hi-jinks and songs of inspiration I know you'd enjoy, but they would involve betraying confidences or embarrassing people I care about. In some cases it would involve breaking pledges of secrecy to individuals or organizations to which I belong or have served. So I am damned careful what I talk about here, and often change names, descriptions and circumstances so that real events, even harmless ones, are not traceable to their sources. Tonight, however, I am partially suspending that rule. I'm not sure it's a good idea because it may cause pain to certain people, but sometimes you've gotta speak from the heart, and you can't speak from the heart if you're writing beneath a smoke screen.
Today I was informed a friend of mine from graduate school, Angie F., died at the age of 46 – the same age I was until a few weeks ago. She was a warm, kind, gentle person who nevertheless had some steel beneath the velvet: she had no difficulty holding unpopular political opinions and once, when she overheard a classmate talking trash about me, confronted the guilty party and took up a lance on my behalf (I was 2,000 miles away at the time or I'd have done it myself). We had fallen out of touch in the last few years because she was averse to the social media platforms I use to communicate with most of my far-away friends, but she was rarely far from my mind because she had a special energy about her that was very genuine. Her death leaves me feeling cheated and small – cheated because I didn't talk to her more often, small because the effort involved would have cost me nothing and yielded much, but I didn't make it, and now it's too late. And aren't those two of the shittiest words in the English language, folks?
At times like this I always think of the Dashboard Prophets:
How are you feeling
Do you feel ok?
'Cause I don't
It keeps me reelin'
Will I ever be the same?
No I won't
A week ago I learned of another passing. My fraternity brother Alphonse G. Alphonse was a younger cat who pledged well beneath me, probably in 1996 or 1997. I was about to very belatedly graduate and not enormously interested in getting to know him, and I treated him indifferently and shabbily. The last time I saw him was about five years after graduation: he was on a ladder, painting a house on Philadelphia Street in York, and I thought, “I ought to stop and say hello.” But I didn't. I kept loose tabs on him over the years, meaning to ring him up, meaning to apologize, but again, I never did it. Good intentions and all that. Then, a few weeks ago, I had a very powerful urge to get in touch with him. I decided, this time, to listen to my little voice, but no sooner did I experience this impulse than I heard the news of his passing. I wondered if the sudden desire for contact wasn't perhaps some kind of intimation of that passing – the universe trying to tell me to mend fences while I could. If that was the case, I wasn't fast enough on the draw. Another regret, carefully tucked away in my personal vault of regrets, gathering interest that only I can collect.
Its a cold day in a cruel world
I really wished I could have saved you
Then who would save me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones
I'm an August baby, and August precedes September, and September is when the Towers fell down, 18 years ago. A friend of mine fell with them. His name was Frank. In college we called him F.T. We were in different fraternities, came from different backgrounds, had nothing in common. I liked him very much in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. By the time I came to know him, I had become a bit of a G. in my fraternity, but F.T. was an O.G. in his. He was one of those people who owned who he was and owed it absolutely with no apologies to anyone. Three days before he died I drove past his place of work in Manhattan, not dreaming that enormity of glass and steel and concrete would come tumbling down 72 hours later. I watched it happen on television, not realizing I was watching him die, and every year since I think of him, and have dreamed of him too – dreams that frighten me with their almost supernatural intensity. F.T.'s name is chiseled into the 9/11 memorial. It's also chiseled into my brain.
Have you been dreaming?
I don't dream at all
I have nightmares
Memories careenin'
Have you come to kill what's left
Of my smile
Theres no vacancy in paradise
Once you start thinking along these lines it's hard to stop – like the lines were cut going downhill and you're following them down, into your own personal history. Erik S. died five years ago. I was here in Los Angeles when I got the call. I'd known Erik since 1992, when I was a 19 year-old kid pledging my fraternity. Erik was a crazy musician motherfucker who did crazy musician motherfucker things: he once showed up at my apartment with a machine gun. He liked to drink, he liked to sing and play keyboard and guitar, and he built the bar in my apartment at 821 South Pershing Street in York, Pennsylvania, a bar that was signed by many, many people I knew and which may very will still exist somewhere, soaking up Rolling Rock and Yuengling Lager. The bar may remain, but Erik is gone.
So is Bill E. Bill was a teacher at my school, and also our fraternity advisor. He loved the damned Dallas Cowboys and wouldn't stop talking about them -- or taking action on them. When I was 19 I got mildly drunk with him and Erik on school grounds a few days before the end of the school year. Much later, after I had graduated, we had a stupid quarrel over nothing very important and stopped speaking. In 2016, long after I'd moved away from Pennsylvania, he passed away. When my fraternity brothers (from several generations) were expressing their grief, all I could think of was the fact we used to pass each other in hallways and not look at each other and how goddamned silly that was.
People come and people go, but organizations remain, and in that sense fraternities are funny things. You join them in a literal sense, become part of a stream of history that was flowing along merrily before you got there and continues to flow long after you pack your shit and blow. I remember Jason B. very well. He was one of those fundamentally decent guys who liked to goof off and play the fool. Once I was at a party and he got the idea to streak bare-ass naked from the third floor down to the basement and back, only while he was streaking, some wiseguy got hold of his clothes and hid them. Jason ended up having to borrow a very loose Eagles jersey and a pair of horribly tight football pants to avoid being arrested. I have no memories of him after that. Some years later I got the news he'd been killed in a car accident, leaving behind a wife and children. It was a bitter pill. There's a long list of people I'd have seen in the ground before him.
I really wished I could have saved you
But then who would have saved me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones
I really wish I could have saved you
Life is full of bitter pills, though, and perhaps none is more bitter than the story of Matt F. “Baby Huey” was a guy I got to know quite well, both through my fraternity and through the bar where we worked together for half a year. When he graduated, I thought I'd seen the last of him, but our paths crossed again a few years later. He had joined the army, and a routine physical found bone cancer. Discharged from the military, he came back to school – thin, hollow-cheeked, on crutches, but full of beans and untouched by self-pity. Unfortunately his positive attitude wasn't enough to save him. It made me enormously angry. I lost my father to the same filthy disease, a disease nobody wanted to talk about or even speak aloud because they were all afraid, somehow, that acknowledging it would bring the same doom upon themselves. People are often afraid to speak of the prematurely dead. They want to think they are exempt from the same fate. It doesn't work that way. And that brings me to Geneva D.
I met Geneva in 2005. I'd come back to college to get a second degree and felt awkward – a newly-minted 33 year-old man among (mostly) teenagers. Geneva was in one of my writing classes, and she was an absolute doll: a gorgeous blonde with a brilliant smile and a vivacious personality that could and did light up a room. Despite her tender age – was she even 20? – she was a writer, too, and I remember hours spent in computer labs and lounges and a coffee house on Market Street where we discussed the craft and the art while people read poetry and played guitar before a feedback-prone microphone. Oh yes, I crushed on Geneva, without apologies. She was youth and beauty and eagerness for life. But she died. Dehydration brought on by influenza, or somesuch shit nobody is supposed to die from in the 21st century. It hit me like a hammer to the head. Here one minute, gone the next. No answers, no meaning.
In the Old Testament, Job dared to ask God why his family had been killed and why he himself, a pious believer, had been ruined and destroyed when he had committed no sin. God answered thusly:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this!”
I for one don't know. I'm just a 47 year old man who writes things and drinks beer and smokes the very occasional cigar when I'm not watching re-runs of television shows canceled before you were probably born. I was happy once. I'll be happy again, I suppose, but right now I'm just angry, because people I'm fond of keep dying and the world keeps turning, indifferent as fuck, and I don't have the power to give orders to the morning or show the dawn its place. I don't have the power to go back in time and say "I'm sorry" or "Hey, how are you?" at the moments those words would have been significant. I've got no power at all. But if God doesn't speak to me, even to taunt me with rhetorical questions, Sherlock Holmes does. Witness what he said to my fictional ancestor in “The Mystery of the Cardboard Box”:
“What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
Put another way:
I'll never forget you
I really wish I could have saved you
August 19, 2019
Unbroken
Somebody told me today, "The whole idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold in sports."
I replied that the whole I idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold, period.
Too many people use that word to describe how they feel after ordinary life setbacks, defeats and embarrassments. Nine times out of ten they are not actually broken. They are maybe a little scuffed, a little shaken, a little dismayed, a little bruised. They don't know the difference between discomfort and pain, disappointment and devastation, getting dented and getting shattered, because they were over protected, coddled and pampered too much growing up. They were handed one too many participation trophies, told they were special one too many times, assured that they had an inalienable right not to be offended. If you've never been hurt, physically or emotionally, a paper cut probably feels like a compound fracture of the tibia.
Pain and upset, like everything else, exist on a sliding scale. The more we experience, the more context we have, and the more understanding we gain of how to deal with them. There is the hunger you feel when you are forced to skip lunch, and the hunger a concentration camp inmate feels doing hard labor on 500 calories of sawdust soup once a day. There is the pain of losing a pet and the pain of losing a parent. I will never forget reading Guy Sajer's THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER -- the passage he writes about the difference between "exhaustion" as a civilian understands it, and the "exhaustion" a fighting man experiences during a terrible war.
When someone describes themself as "broken" after a disappointment, a betrayal, a defeat or an injury, I'm always tempted to answer, "In relation to what?"
When I was in high school, my father once did me the very great favor of explaining to me, after a crushing disappointment, that life was full of goddamned disappointments and a man was measured not by how many of them he endured but how he responded to them afterward. Life will give you endless reasons to quit, he said, and not many reasons to continue. On the other hand, quitting is a choice, and it is usually driven by a false sense of reality.
"When you are a toddler," he told me. "You fall down a lot. And when you fall, you cry -- not because of the pain, but because you think crying is what you're supposed to do when you fall. But sooner or later you realize falling is not the end of the world. In fact, it's no big deal. It's actually part of the process of learning to walk. Falling is supposed to teach us that each goal comes with a cost. The goal is going through life on your feet rather than on your knees, and the cost is the pain you feel when you land on your ass. It's the same when you learn to ride a bike, when you crush on girls, when you try out for a team or go on a job interview or apply to a school. You're bound to be rejected and disappointed sometimes, and when you are, you have a choice -- crawl and cry or get up and dust off and keep walking. The small setbacks prep us for the big ones, and if you avoid the small ones, the big ones, when they come, will seem like the end of the world."
The good news in this equation is that 9/10ths of the people who think they are broken, aren't. They just don't have any context for the pain and upset they are feeling. But as the Dead once sang, every silver lining has a touch of gray, and the trouble here is that very few people in our society are providing them any context. Instead, they get affirmation for their own diagnosis. Slightly damaged, they are told that, yes indeed, they are broken and isn't it a pity and don't they deserve sympathy and special treatment?
The fact is, I get scared as hell when I look at Twitter and see the number of people working themselves into a hysterical state because someone disagreed with or slightly displeased them. I get scared when people try to form Internet lynch mobs because they felt insulted by a Tweet or a Facebook post or some remark somebody made 15 years ago.
I get scared because one day there will be another Great Depression or World War or Influenza Pandemic and we will need everybody to roll up their sleeves and come together and pitch in to win the day... and nobody will show up because they're sobbing in a corner somewhere because they overhead someone use the wrong gender pronoun.
As Sherlock Holmes once said, “How can you build a foundation on such quicksand?”
The question is rhetorical, but I think I can provide an answer.
We are all of us in possession of our own internal landscape. Part of the landscape is born with us, part of it shaped by experience. It contains pristine lakes and beautiful mountains, and it also contains fetid swamps and canyons full of gila monsters. When we go exploring within ourselves, we can find beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. The proportions of each differ from person to person: some have a great deal of prime real estate and others, more desert or tundra or active volcanoes. Where we choose to stay -- where we build our foundation within ourselves -- is however up to us. If your landscape is mostly quicksand, that doesn't mean that's where you have to put your house. If you're a middle-aged person who feels inadequate to the slings and arrows of daily misfortune -- thin-skinned, oversensitive, weak, take your pick -- that doesn't mean you can't find a better vantage point within yourself. In short, if you feel broken, it doesn't mean you have to stay broken. And the very process of putting yourself back together may show you that you weren't broken in the first place. Just scuffed a bit. Dinged. Dented.
Ah, you say, that's all well and good. But what if I really am broken? What if my diagnosis was correct, and I as a human being am actually laying in pieces on the ground like the remains of a cheap vase dropped on a marble floor?
My answer to this is simple. Being broken, like falling down as a toddler, like getting chicken pox, like enduring the pain of a skinned knee or a burned finger for the first time, actually has a purpose when it occurs for real. We break because there were places within us unable to stand a particular strain. But this condition is not necessarily permanent. Hemingway famously remarked, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." He grasped that the very act of breaking, which were are taught to think of as shameful, can in fact be the first step to becoming a stronger person. One cannot fix a problem, after all, until one has admitted there is a problem, located it, and sketched a strategy for repair. But even this is impossible if one declares oneself broken after every setback, defeat or disappointment, if one's primary response to stressors is quitting or looking for pity. The difference between thinking one is broken and actually being broken is enormous, but not always readily visible, and understanding that difference is often the key to finding one's true inner strength.
I replied that the whole I idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold, period.
Too many people use that word to describe how they feel after ordinary life setbacks, defeats and embarrassments. Nine times out of ten they are not actually broken. They are maybe a little scuffed, a little shaken, a little dismayed, a little bruised. They don't know the difference between discomfort and pain, disappointment and devastation, getting dented and getting shattered, because they were over protected, coddled and pampered too much growing up. They were handed one too many participation trophies, told they were special one too many times, assured that they had an inalienable right not to be offended. If you've never been hurt, physically or emotionally, a paper cut probably feels like a compound fracture of the tibia.
Pain and upset, like everything else, exist on a sliding scale. The more we experience, the more context we have, and the more understanding we gain of how to deal with them. There is the hunger you feel when you are forced to skip lunch, and the hunger a concentration camp inmate feels doing hard labor on 500 calories of sawdust soup once a day. There is the pain of losing a pet and the pain of losing a parent. I will never forget reading Guy Sajer's THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER -- the passage he writes about the difference between "exhaustion" as a civilian understands it, and the "exhaustion" a fighting man experiences during a terrible war.
When someone describes themself as "broken" after a disappointment, a betrayal, a defeat or an injury, I'm always tempted to answer, "In relation to what?"
When I was in high school, my father once did me the very great favor of explaining to me, after a crushing disappointment, that life was full of goddamned disappointments and a man was measured not by how many of them he endured but how he responded to them afterward. Life will give you endless reasons to quit, he said, and not many reasons to continue. On the other hand, quitting is a choice, and it is usually driven by a false sense of reality.
"When you are a toddler," he told me. "You fall down a lot. And when you fall, you cry -- not because of the pain, but because you think crying is what you're supposed to do when you fall. But sooner or later you realize falling is not the end of the world. In fact, it's no big deal. It's actually part of the process of learning to walk. Falling is supposed to teach us that each goal comes with a cost. The goal is going through life on your feet rather than on your knees, and the cost is the pain you feel when you land on your ass. It's the same when you learn to ride a bike, when you crush on girls, when you try out for a team or go on a job interview or apply to a school. You're bound to be rejected and disappointed sometimes, and when you are, you have a choice -- crawl and cry or get up and dust off and keep walking. The small setbacks prep us for the big ones, and if you avoid the small ones, the big ones, when they come, will seem like the end of the world."
The good news in this equation is that 9/10ths of the people who think they are broken, aren't. They just don't have any context for the pain and upset they are feeling. But as the Dead once sang, every silver lining has a touch of gray, and the trouble here is that very few people in our society are providing them any context. Instead, they get affirmation for their own diagnosis. Slightly damaged, they are told that, yes indeed, they are broken and isn't it a pity and don't they deserve sympathy and special treatment?
The fact is, I get scared as hell when I look at Twitter and see the number of people working themselves into a hysterical state because someone disagreed with or slightly displeased them. I get scared when people try to form Internet lynch mobs because they felt insulted by a Tweet or a Facebook post or some remark somebody made 15 years ago.
I get scared because one day there will be another Great Depression or World War or Influenza Pandemic and we will need everybody to roll up their sleeves and come together and pitch in to win the day... and nobody will show up because they're sobbing in a corner somewhere because they overhead someone use the wrong gender pronoun.
As Sherlock Holmes once said, “How can you build a foundation on such quicksand?”
The question is rhetorical, but I think I can provide an answer.
We are all of us in possession of our own internal landscape. Part of the landscape is born with us, part of it shaped by experience. It contains pristine lakes and beautiful mountains, and it also contains fetid swamps and canyons full of gila monsters. When we go exploring within ourselves, we can find beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. The proportions of each differ from person to person: some have a great deal of prime real estate and others, more desert or tundra or active volcanoes. Where we choose to stay -- where we build our foundation within ourselves -- is however up to us. If your landscape is mostly quicksand, that doesn't mean that's where you have to put your house. If you're a middle-aged person who feels inadequate to the slings and arrows of daily misfortune -- thin-skinned, oversensitive, weak, take your pick -- that doesn't mean you can't find a better vantage point within yourself. In short, if you feel broken, it doesn't mean you have to stay broken. And the very process of putting yourself back together may show you that you weren't broken in the first place. Just scuffed a bit. Dinged. Dented.
Ah, you say, that's all well and good. But what if I really am broken? What if my diagnosis was correct, and I as a human being am actually laying in pieces on the ground like the remains of a cheap vase dropped on a marble floor?
My answer to this is simple. Being broken, like falling down as a toddler, like getting chicken pox, like enduring the pain of a skinned knee or a burned finger for the first time, actually has a purpose when it occurs for real. We break because there were places within us unable to stand a particular strain. But this condition is not necessarily permanent. Hemingway famously remarked, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." He grasped that the very act of breaking, which were are taught to think of as shameful, can in fact be the first step to becoming a stronger person. One cannot fix a problem, after all, until one has admitted there is a problem, located it, and sketched a strategy for repair. But even this is impossible if one declares oneself broken after every setback, defeat or disappointment, if one's primary response to stressors is quitting or looking for pity. The difference between thinking one is broken and actually being broken is enormous, but not always readily visible, and understanding that difference is often the key to finding one's true inner strength.
July 22, 2019
Why You're So Angry
It's one of the characteristics of modern life: people having noisy and sometimes violent meltdowns on planes, trains, and buses; in coffee shops and supermarkets; at government offices and Little League baseball games. Indeed, the Internet so bulges with videos of public tantrums, rants and rage-sparked outbursts of vandalism that it's difficult to remember that not all that long ago – well within my own lifetime, and I'm not old – such antics were exceedingly rare, and confined almost entirely to poor or working-class people, who had more to be angry about. Now, however, sudden and explosive anger seems to be universal, cutting across class lines. With my own eyes I have witnessed seemingly trivial incidents provoke the most volcanic eruptions of fury from men driving Lambos, from women in thousand-dollar shoes, and from middle-class kids who only moments before were saying “please” and “thank you” and exhibiting all the other verbal stigmata of the middle class. Spontaneous rage: it's not just for poor folks anymore.
God knows we live in troubled times – unusually troubled, I mean. Extremes of weather are now the norm everywhere. Political discourse has devolved to the intellectual and moral level of a junior high school shoving match. Oil, the edifice upon which all human civilization is built and which cannot be replaced by any other form of energy nor combination of energies, is now “past peak” and what's left is burning up with terrifying speed. Democracy, which only 20 years ago was on the march all over the planet, is now in shameful retreat everywhere. People are frightened, and if I may presume to paraphrase Yoda, fear leads to anger, and anger can lead to otherwise intelligent, civilized human beings into behaving very badly indeed. Still, I'm convinced it's not the shaky and ill-balanced state of the planet that has most people throwing fits. Nor do I entirely subscribe – partially, yes, but not entirely – to the idea that people have become less mature, less disciplined, less orderly than they used to be. Rather, I blame our collective behavior on a feeling of mounting frustration over the impersonal, incompetent, and indifferent way in which we are treated in our daily lives – not only by the government agencies with which we interact, but with the businesses we patronize and even the ones we work for.
When I was growing up, “customer service” was a term that had real meaning. Businesses, whether public or private, operated from a philosophy that “the customer is always right.” They strove at all times for that quality known as “the human touch.” Whether at a hotel or a hardware store, at an airport or a government office, a barber shop or a switchboard, you could be assured that you would be treated with either formal respect or friendly intimacy, depending on the circumstances. What's more, there was a certain level of accountability. If a service were poor, if a product was defective, if an employee had been rude or disrespectful or dishonest, satisfaction was obtainable, often very swiftly. Businesses did not, of course, do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they feared loss of revenue: the dreaded exclamation, “I'll take my business elsewhere!” was probably the focus of recurring nightmares to men and women in the complaint departments of various corporations and networks, because losing a customer meant that you might lose your job.
“The customer is always right,” as a philosophy, provided an important benefit to people in society. It gave them a feeling – probably a semi-illusion, but nevertheless an important and comforting semi-illusion – that they had power in their everyday lives. They might work low-paying dead-end jobs themselves, spend their lives dog-paddling in debt, and be hapless pawns to forces far greater than themselves, but damn it, they could get a fast refund when the toy they bought for their brat nephew broke coming out of the box. They could get a free night in a hotel if the concierge was rude, or a free meal if the service was slow. If the airline lost their luggage or the mail-order service lost the package or the postman kicked the dog, they could get satisfaction, or at least a simulacrum thereof. All it took was a phone call or a letter or a request to speak to the manager. This knowledge went a long way to keeping people's tempers in check, and to swiftly mollifying feelings of anger before they became outbursts of rage.
At some point about twenty or more years ago, however, all of this began to change. As more and more privately owned businesses were bought out (or wiped out) by corporations, the corporations began to discover that “customer service,” as it had previously been understood, was simply a drag on profits, and with it the long-standing philosophy of “customer rightness.” Changes in technology allowed them to begin the process of building firewalls between themselves and irate or unsatisfied consumers, the first of which was the replacement of telephone switchboards (where you could speak with a human who could direct you to another human) with automated switchboards (where you could speak with a robot who could direct you to another robot). Understaffing complaint departments, which leads to endless hours on hold, was another weapon in this new war waged against the patron. As time marched on and “globalization,” became what we refer to now unpoetically as “a thing,” corporations also discovered it was possible to hire foreign companies – in India, say – to handle customer service, thus placing a second firewall behind the first and further isolating the customer from the people who had wronged him. But the devolution did not stop there. It spread to all aspects of government, who began shunting complaints and even ordinary communication through automated websites as well as contractors and subcontractors. In each and every instance, the idea is the same: to prevent the customer from obtaining relief for their complaint, or, failing that, to make the process so tedious and unrewarding that he either drops the matter or, having seen it through to the end against all odds, decides never to complain again, because it's just not worth the time and misery involved.
One of the many victims of this very deliberate attack on the old philosophy was the idea of personal or company-wide accountability. A rude, disrespectful, lazy or incompetent employee had little to fear from an angry customer when protected by multiple lines of defense designed both to protect him and to keep him anonymous. And indeed, one of the many aspects of modern interaction with government and business is anonymity. It is possible for a government worker or a corporate drone to get away with all manner of infuriating mischief or stupidity when policy keeps their identity from being known to the customer. This in turn leads to a perception, which is in fact quite accurate, that the ordinary consumer has no recourse when insulted or wronged by an agent of a business or a governmental department. He must not only put up with the broken toy, the lost luggage, the fudged hotel reservation, the leaky washing machine or the cold soup, he is powerless to vent any of his quite reasonable ire on anyone responsible for the situation.
In our society, anger is frowned upon, considered unhealthy, and discouraged from being displayed openly. In fact, anger is a necessary and often positive human emotion – many of the great works of literature, the most important pieces of muckraking journalism, most of the advancements in human rights, innumerable works of art, and even some of the more beneficial wars were the product of righteous anger which demanded, and got, release. Injustice produces anger, and anger can produce satisfaction: it is only unhealthy when it is unreasonable or uncontrolled. We now live in a world, however, where anger has no point of healthy release, no way to escape harmlessly before it builds to the danger point. To raise one's voice when rudely treated in an airport or on an aeroplane can lead to a felony arrest. To express indignation over the way one has been treated by a government agency can mark one for retaliation. To raise hell with an insurance or credit card company over an error can lead to ugly shouting matches in which one not only fails to gain satisfaction, but leaves the situation angrier than before. Businesses and government have taken a hard line, to wit: “the customer is always wrong,” and they stick by that line like the Confederates stuck to their earthworks at Cold Harbor. Even in the rare case of an admission of fault, it's expected that the admission will be grudging and issued with ill grace. A fine example of this would be in a ticket I received by the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority for parking at a trail without a permit. In point of fact I had the permit, and had proof that I had purchased it, yet when they dismissed the ticket in my favor, they scribbled in the margin of the flimsy that the dismissal was a “one-time curtesy” (their spelling). The rightness of my counterclaim was therefore never acknowledged. They were doing me a favor, you see, by not forcing to pay $70 because of their mistake.
My private journals are littered with this sort of incident, documenting numerous incidents with various types of businesses and agencies over a period of many years. To give you some random examples from random years, I begin with a conversation which occurred in 2007, when trying to book a hotel room in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I rang up the Courtyard Marriott, but was shunted to a booking service in India. The woman to whom I spoke had no knowledge of American geography or ZIP codes or anything else. We had a 30 minute conversation, of which I transcribed this part:
“I need to reserve a room.”
“When?”
“June 19 – 24.”
“What day?”
“The 19th. Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code?”
“17401.”
“York, Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the 19th?”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code again? One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“Four-zero….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“And that’s the 19th….”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your street address?”
“Eleven North Beaver Street, Apartment –”
“Hold on, hold on. Eleven North….Beaver?”
“Like the creature.”
“Beaver Street….”
“Apartment 205.”
“Apartment?”
“Two zero five.”
“Two zero five?”
“Yes.”
“Eleven North Beaver Street Apartment Two Zero Five?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s one-seven….”
“One seven four zero one.”
“One seven four zero one?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s York, PA?”
Needless to say I became increasingly angry as this nonsense continued. By the time we had finished I had to call the hotel back again and ask the desk clerk why the fuck she couldn't have handled the reservation herself instead of shunting me to India. She coldly explained it was “policy” and hung up on me. Doubtless she resented my anger at her – she did not, after all, create policy – but the incident is noteworthy because a simple task, fundamental to the existence of a hotel – booking rooms! – became an unendurable torment which left everyone involved furious.
Government agencies are no better. When working as an investigator in the mid-2000s, I used to have to obtain Offense Tracking Numbers as part of my job. The following type of conversation was a daily, sometimes an hourly, occurrence:
ME TO CLERK OF COURTS: I need the disposition on this case.
CLERK-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
CLERK-DRONE: I need an OTN.
ME: Where can I get it?
CLERK-DRONE: Try the website.
ME: The website requires an OTN.
CLERK-DRONE: Try the DA.
(calls DA)
ME TO DA: I need the disposition on this case.
DA-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
DA-DRONE: I need an OTN. Try the Clerk.
ME: The Clerk said to try you.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: But it’s public record.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: Where can I get it then?
DA-DRONE: Try the website.
Complaints never availed me anything, and usually caused bridges to be burned – employees remember people who try to hold them accountable for indifference service. Thus I was forced to keep a lid on my temper, which only made me angrier still. It is one thing, however, to be indifferent and apathetic to a customer or member of the tax-paying public: it is quite another to be hostile almost to the point of provoking violence, and doing so deliberately. On two occasions, one in 2000, one in 2017, I was treated so badly at airports that still cannot believe the incidents actually occurred. In the former, my mother and I were racing to a small jet taking us to my brother's wedding, and needed information about the gate since it had been changed without our knowledge. The man behind the desk was on the phone, and barked, “I'm busy.” When I tried to explain we needed the information now or we'd miss a wedding, he looked at me and said, “Did you not hear what I said? Are you deaf? I'm busy.” Only the knowledge that smashing in his face would certainly cause me to miss my only brother's nuptials saved that man from permanent damage. In the latter incident, the following conversation occurred, at what was laughably referred to as United's “Help Desk.”
WOMAN: You can't have two carry-on items. You have to check that laptop.
ME: The laptop was in my checked luggage. They made me remove it back there. That's why I have it now.
WOMAN: Well, they shouldn't have done that but you can't take it on the plane. It has to be checked.
ME: Well, I can't go back, can I?
WOMAN: Not my problem.
ME: I guess it is since I can't go back.
WOMAN: (laughs) Then I guess we just won't let you on the plane.
ME: (staring)
WOMAN: (laughs again) We won't let you on the plane, understand?
ME: What am I supposed to do? Leave it here?
WOMAN: You can check it with us but that'll be $25.
ME: What! It WAS checked. They made me take it out. Why should I pay for your mistake?
WOMAN: Not my problem.
It's impossible to communicate in sober prose the deliberate, nasty smugness of the woman in question, or the furious anger I experienced while staring into her pudgy, oily, smarmily-smiling face. It was the type of anger that is only a hair's-breadth from exploding into either a screaming fit or fisticuffs...and it is the type of anger that occurs only when one feels one has been punished for someone else's mistake and then deliberately insulted in the bargain. One final example, from 2003, is telling because it occurred not when dealing with a faceless bureaucracy or a heartless corporation, but at a restaurant down the street from my apartment. I ate breakfast – total $9 – and when the waitress came handed her the only money I had, a $20. Many minutes passed and she never reappeared with my change. At last I flagged down the manager.
ME: Can you get the waitress?
HIM: She went home.
ME: What do you mean, she went home?
HIM: She left.
ME: But she has my money.
HIM: She must have thought it was her tip.
ME: Her tip? Eleven dollars? My bill was $9! Why would she assume I was tipping her 120%?
HIM: (walking away) Next time you see her tell her you want it back.
Individually, none of these incidents or the dozens or hundreds of others I could recount may seem like big or even mid-sized potatoes, but together they have a cumulative weight. In each and every instance the underlying message is that we, the individual consumers/taxpayers, have neither a right nor an expectation to be treated decently; nor do we have any reasonable avenue, recourse or means by which we might complain or obtain a redress of your grievance. And if we dare express anger or frustration, the furthest implication is that you will be punished further for doing so. Had I “made a scene” at the restaurant, I've no doubt the manager would simply have called the police, in which case I'd have been out not only my money, but possibly my freedom as well.
I chose the words “redress of grievance” specifically, because it was acknowledged by our forefathers that such redress was a fundamental right of all free people. To deny the petition is not merely to deny freedom, but in a greater sense to deny a person's humanity. And this in fact is a fundamental condition of being unfree, i.e. a slave – to feel powerless, impotent, robbed of dignity, and to have no outlet for one's legitimate complaints. And this is the world in which we presently live. Whether dealing with the IRS or the Unemployment Office, the local police or some petty city official, a corporation or a small business, the result is generally the same: knuckle under, and lose one's dignity, or fight back, and bring down further inconvenience and humiliation upon oneself.
There is no longer any question that freedom is under attack everywhere in the world, and perhaps nowhere more ferociously than in the West, where most modern democratic ideals originated. But the means by which our freedom is taken away from us vary enormously and do not always present in the obvious ways -- troops in the streets, thugs at polling stations, imprisonment and execution of dissidents, attacks on journalists and journalism. There are far more subtle weapons, and one of them is to first blunt and ultimately smash the idea that it is possible for the ordinary Joe -- or Jane -- to complain about unjust treatment with some expectation of receiving a fair hearing and a measure of compensation. To lower our expectations, rob us of our sense of power, demoralize us so that we accept the stick rather than demand the carrot. To make us feel as if our God-given inalienable rights are actually just privileges which may be revoked or curtailed at the whim of our masters. In short, to keep us in a perpetual state of impotent anger, and never mind the psychological results.
During the First World War, British army psychologists discovered that one of the principal causes of "shell shock" was not war itself -- not the fear, discomfort, and pain -- but rather the one-way nature of military discipline itself. Men at the front were led by officers who in many cases were either criminally negligent, grossly incompetent or psychopathically callous, yet the iron discipline of the British army prevented them from expressing their anger. They simply had to take it -- week after week, month after month, year after bloody year, without letting on that they thought their superiors were bloody fools. It was this, more than the shells, machine gun fire and poison gas that caused so many men to crack. Fury, especially righteous fury, is not an emotion that can be bottled up long without consequences.
It follows that there are many paths to anger. Frustration is probably among the shortest, and frustration is generally caused by unmet expectations. Some frustration – my inability to go back in time and have sex with the 1969 version of Kim Novak, for example – is not legitimate, but most of the frustration I see around me today, and which I experience myself, is caused by a sort of ancestral memory of times when it was possible to be treated poorly or inadequately by a business or an agency, to express one's dissatisfaction about it, and to obtain either redress or a rough approximation of same, without being subjected to abuse or ridicule or a process so deliberately tiresome as to discourage future complaint. It is chic today to say “dissent is patriotic,” but the fact of the matter is that dissent in the face of injustice, even so petty an injustice as rude treatment at a coffee shop, is also patriotism, not to one's country only, but to one's entire race...the human race.
God knows we live in troubled times – unusually troubled, I mean. Extremes of weather are now the norm everywhere. Political discourse has devolved to the intellectual and moral level of a junior high school shoving match. Oil, the edifice upon which all human civilization is built and which cannot be replaced by any other form of energy nor combination of energies, is now “past peak” and what's left is burning up with terrifying speed. Democracy, which only 20 years ago was on the march all over the planet, is now in shameful retreat everywhere. People are frightened, and if I may presume to paraphrase Yoda, fear leads to anger, and anger can lead to otherwise intelligent, civilized human beings into behaving very badly indeed. Still, I'm convinced it's not the shaky and ill-balanced state of the planet that has most people throwing fits. Nor do I entirely subscribe – partially, yes, but not entirely – to the idea that people have become less mature, less disciplined, less orderly than they used to be. Rather, I blame our collective behavior on a feeling of mounting frustration over the impersonal, incompetent, and indifferent way in which we are treated in our daily lives – not only by the government agencies with which we interact, but with the businesses we patronize and even the ones we work for.
When I was growing up, “customer service” was a term that had real meaning. Businesses, whether public or private, operated from a philosophy that “the customer is always right.” They strove at all times for that quality known as “the human touch.” Whether at a hotel or a hardware store, at an airport or a government office, a barber shop or a switchboard, you could be assured that you would be treated with either formal respect or friendly intimacy, depending on the circumstances. What's more, there was a certain level of accountability. If a service were poor, if a product was defective, if an employee had been rude or disrespectful or dishonest, satisfaction was obtainable, often very swiftly. Businesses did not, of course, do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they feared loss of revenue: the dreaded exclamation, “I'll take my business elsewhere!” was probably the focus of recurring nightmares to men and women in the complaint departments of various corporations and networks, because losing a customer meant that you might lose your job.
“The customer is always right,” as a philosophy, provided an important benefit to people in society. It gave them a feeling – probably a semi-illusion, but nevertheless an important and comforting semi-illusion – that they had power in their everyday lives. They might work low-paying dead-end jobs themselves, spend their lives dog-paddling in debt, and be hapless pawns to forces far greater than themselves, but damn it, they could get a fast refund when the toy they bought for their brat nephew broke coming out of the box. They could get a free night in a hotel if the concierge was rude, or a free meal if the service was slow. If the airline lost their luggage or the mail-order service lost the package or the postman kicked the dog, they could get satisfaction, or at least a simulacrum thereof. All it took was a phone call or a letter or a request to speak to the manager. This knowledge went a long way to keeping people's tempers in check, and to swiftly mollifying feelings of anger before they became outbursts of rage.
At some point about twenty or more years ago, however, all of this began to change. As more and more privately owned businesses were bought out (or wiped out) by corporations, the corporations began to discover that “customer service,” as it had previously been understood, was simply a drag on profits, and with it the long-standing philosophy of “customer rightness.” Changes in technology allowed them to begin the process of building firewalls between themselves and irate or unsatisfied consumers, the first of which was the replacement of telephone switchboards (where you could speak with a human who could direct you to another human) with automated switchboards (where you could speak with a robot who could direct you to another robot). Understaffing complaint departments, which leads to endless hours on hold, was another weapon in this new war waged against the patron. As time marched on and “globalization,” became what we refer to now unpoetically as “a thing,” corporations also discovered it was possible to hire foreign companies – in India, say – to handle customer service, thus placing a second firewall behind the first and further isolating the customer from the people who had wronged him. But the devolution did not stop there. It spread to all aspects of government, who began shunting complaints and even ordinary communication through automated websites as well as contractors and subcontractors. In each and every instance, the idea is the same: to prevent the customer from obtaining relief for their complaint, or, failing that, to make the process so tedious and unrewarding that he either drops the matter or, having seen it through to the end against all odds, decides never to complain again, because it's just not worth the time and misery involved.
One of the many victims of this very deliberate attack on the old philosophy was the idea of personal or company-wide accountability. A rude, disrespectful, lazy or incompetent employee had little to fear from an angry customer when protected by multiple lines of defense designed both to protect him and to keep him anonymous. And indeed, one of the many aspects of modern interaction with government and business is anonymity. It is possible for a government worker or a corporate drone to get away with all manner of infuriating mischief or stupidity when policy keeps their identity from being known to the customer. This in turn leads to a perception, which is in fact quite accurate, that the ordinary consumer has no recourse when insulted or wronged by an agent of a business or a governmental department. He must not only put up with the broken toy, the lost luggage, the fudged hotel reservation, the leaky washing machine or the cold soup, he is powerless to vent any of his quite reasonable ire on anyone responsible for the situation.
In our society, anger is frowned upon, considered unhealthy, and discouraged from being displayed openly. In fact, anger is a necessary and often positive human emotion – many of the great works of literature, the most important pieces of muckraking journalism, most of the advancements in human rights, innumerable works of art, and even some of the more beneficial wars were the product of righteous anger which demanded, and got, release. Injustice produces anger, and anger can produce satisfaction: it is only unhealthy when it is unreasonable or uncontrolled. We now live in a world, however, where anger has no point of healthy release, no way to escape harmlessly before it builds to the danger point. To raise one's voice when rudely treated in an airport or on an aeroplane can lead to a felony arrest. To express indignation over the way one has been treated by a government agency can mark one for retaliation. To raise hell with an insurance or credit card company over an error can lead to ugly shouting matches in which one not only fails to gain satisfaction, but leaves the situation angrier than before. Businesses and government have taken a hard line, to wit: “the customer is always wrong,” and they stick by that line like the Confederates stuck to their earthworks at Cold Harbor. Even in the rare case of an admission of fault, it's expected that the admission will be grudging and issued with ill grace. A fine example of this would be in a ticket I received by the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority for parking at a trail without a permit. In point of fact I had the permit, and had proof that I had purchased it, yet when they dismissed the ticket in my favor, they scribbled in the margin of the flimsy that the dismissal was a “one-time curtesy” (their spelling). The rightness of my counterclaim was therefore never acknowledged. They were doing me a favor, you see, by not forcing to pay $70 because of their mistake.
My private journals are littered with this sort of incident, documenting numerous incidents with various types of businesses and agencies over a period of many years. To give you some random examples from random years, I begin with a conversation which occurred in 2007, when trying to book a hotel room in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I rang up the Courtyard Marriott, but was shunted to a booking service in India. The woman to whom I spoke had no knowledge of American geography or ZIP codes or anything else. We had a 30 minute conversation, of which I transcribed this part:
“I need to reserve a room.”
“When?”
“June 19 – 24.”
“What day?”
“The 19th. Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code?”
“17401.”
“York, Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the 19th?”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code again? One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“Four-zero….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“And that’s the 19th….”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your street address?”
“Eleven North Beaver Street, Apartment –”
“Hold on, hold on. Eleven North….Beaver?”
“Like the creature.”
“Beaver Street….”
“Apartment 205.”
“Apartment?”
“Two zero five.”
“Two zero five?”
“Yes.”
“Eleven North Beaver Street Apartment Two Zero Five?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s one-seven….”
“One seven four zero one.”
“One seven four zero one?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s York, PA?”
Needless to say I became increasingly angry as this nonsense continued. By the time we had finished I had to call the hotel back again and ask the desk clerk why the fuck she couldn't have handled the reservation herself instead of shunting me to India. She coldly explained it was “policy” and hung up on me. Doubtless she resented my anger at her – she did not, after all, create policy – but the incident is noteworthy because a simple task, fundamental to the existence of a hotel – booking rooms! – became an unendurable torment which left everyone involved furious.
Government agencies are no better. When working as an investigator in the mid-2000s, I used to have to obtain Offense Tracking Numbers as part of my job. The following type of conversation was a daily, sometimes an hourly, occurrence:
ME TO CLERK OF COURTS: I need the disposition on this case.
CLERK-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
CLERK-DRONE: I need an OTN.
ME: Where can I get it?
CLERK-DRONE: Try the website.
ME: The website requires an OTN.
CLERK-DRONE: Try the DA.
(calls DA)
ME TO DA: I need the disposition on this case.
DA-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
DA-DRONE: I need an OTN. Try the Clerk.
ME: The Clerk said to try you.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: But it’s public record.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: Where can I get it then?
DA-DRONE: Try the website.
Complaints never availed me anything, and usually caused bridges to be burned – employees remember people who try to hold them accountable for indifference service. Thus I was forced to keep a lid on my temper, which only made me angrier still. It is one thing, however, to be indifferent and apathetic to a customer or member of the tax-paying public: it is quite another to be hostile almost to the point of provoking violence, and doing so deliberately. On two occasions, one in 2000, one in 2017, I was treated so badly at airports that still cannot believe the incidents actually occurred. In the former, my mother and I were racing to a small jet taking us to my brother's wedding, and needed information about the gate since it had been changed without our knowledge. The man behind the desk was on the phone, and barked, “I'm busy.” When I tried to explain we needed the information now or we'd miss a wedding, he looked at me and said, “Did you not hear what I said? Are you deaf? I'm busy.” Only the knowledge that smashing in his face would certainly cause me to miss my only brother's nuptials saved that man from permanent damage. In the latter incident, the following conversation occurred, at what was laughably referred to as United's “Help Desk.”
WOMAN: You can't have two carry-on items. You have to check that laptop.
ME: The laptop was in my checked luggage. They made me remove it back there. That's why I have it now.
WOMAN: Well, they shouldn't have done that but you can't take it on the plane. It has to be checked.
ME: Well, I can't go back, can I?
WOMAN: Not my problem.
ME: I guess it is since I can't go back.
WOMAN: (laughs) Then I guess we just won't let you on the plane.
ME: (staring)
WOMAN: (laughs again) We won't let you on the plane, understand?
ME: What am I supposed to do? Leave it here?
WOMAN: You can check it with us but that'll be $25.
ME: What! It WAS checked. They made me take it out. Why should I pay for your mistake?
WOMAN: Not my problem.
It's impossible to communicate in sober prose the deliberate, nasty smugness of the woman in question, or the furious anger I experienced while staring into her pudgy, oily, smarmily-smiling face. It was the type of anger that is only a hair's-breadth from exploding into either a screaming fit or fisticuffs...and it is the type of anger that occurs only when one feels one has been punished for someone else's mistake and then deliberately insulted in the bargain. One final example, from 2003, is telling because it occurred not when dealing with a faceless bureaucracy or a heartless corporation, but at a restaurant down the street from my apartment. I ate breakfast – total $9 – and when the waitress came handed her the only money I had, a $20. Many minutes passed and she never reappeared with my change. At last I flagged down the manager.
ME: Can you get the waitress?
HIM: She went home.
ME: What do you mean, she went home?
HIM: She left.
ME: But she has my money.
HIM: She must have thought it was her tip.
ME: Her tip? Eleven dollars? My bill was $9! Why would she assume I was tipping her 120%?
HIM: (walking away) Next time you see her tell her you want it back.
Individually, none of these incidents or the dozens or hundreds of others I could recount may seem like big or even mid-sized potatoes, but together they have a cumulative weight. In each and every instance the underlying message is that we, the individual consumers/taxpayers, have neither a right nor an expectation to be treated decently; nor do we have any reasonable avenue, recourse or means by which we might complain or obtain a redress of your grievance. And if we dare express anger or frustration, the furthest implication is that you will be punished further for doing so. Had I “made a scene” at the restaurant, I've no doubt the manager would simply have called the police, in which case I'd have been out not only my money, but possibly my freedom as well.
I chose the words “redress of grievance” specifically, because it was acknowledged by our forefathers that such redress was a fundamental right of all free people. To deny the petition is not merely to deny freedom, but in a greater sense to deny a person's humanity. And this in fact is a fundamental condition of being unfree, i.e. a slave – to feel powerless, impotent, robbed of dignity, and to have no outlet for one's legitimate complaints. And this is the world in which we presently live. Whether dealing with the IRS or the Unemployment Office, the local police or some petty city official, a corporation or a small business, the result is generally the same: knuckle under, and lose one's dignity, or fight back, and bring down further inconvenience and humiliation upon oneself.
There is no longer any question that freedom is under attack everywhere in the world, and perhaps nowhere more ferociously than in the West, where most modern democratic ideals originated. But the means by which our freedom is taken away from us vary enormously and do not always present in the obvious ways -- troops in the streets, thugs at polling stations, imprisonment and execution of dissidents, attacks on journalists and journalism. There are far more subtle weapons, and one of them is to first blunt and ultimately smash the idea that it is possible for the ordinary Joe -- or Jane -- to complain about unjust treatment with some expectation of receiving a fair hearing and a measure of compensation. To lower our expectations, rob us of our sense of power, demoralize us so that we accept the stick rather than demand the carrot. To make us feel as if our God-given inalienable rights are actually just privileges which may be revoked or curtailed at the whim of our masters. In short, to keep us in a perpetual state of impotent anger, and never mind the psychological results.
During the First World War, British army psychologists discovered that one of the principal causes of "shell shock" was not war itself -- not the fear, discomfort, and pain -- but rather the one-way nature of military discipline itself. Men at the front were led by officers who in many cases were either criminally negligent, grossly incompetent or psychopathically callous, yet the iron discipline of the British army prevented them from expressing their anger. They simply had to take it -- week after week, month after month, year after bloody year, without letting on that they thought their superiors were bloody fools. It was this, more than the shells, machine gun fire and poison gas that caused so many men to crack. Fury, especially righteous fury, is not an emotion that can be bottled up long without consequences.
It follows that there are many paths to anger. Frustration is probably among the shortest, and frustration is generally caused by unmet expectations. Some frustration – my inability to go back in time and have sex with the 1969 version of Kim Novak, for example – is not legitimate, but most of the frustration I see around me today, and which I experience myself, is caused by a sort of ancestral memory of times when it was possible to be treated poorly or inadequately by a business or an agency, to express one's dissatisfaction about it, and to obtain either redress or a rough approximation of same, without being subjected to abuse or ridicule or a process so deliberately tiresome as to discourage future complaint. It is chic today to say “dissent is patriotic,” but the fact of the matter is that dissent in the face of injustice, even so petty an injustice as rude treatment at a coffee shop, is also patriotism, not to one's country only, but to one's entire race...the human race.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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