Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 26
May 6, 2019
Devils You Know
Devils You Know
Today would have been my father's 81st birthday. This is an especially melancholy fact because he died in 1993, at the age of fifty-four, and though he lived a full life in the sense of experience, travel and accomplishment, he hardly was granted that privilege where it (perhaps) counts most -- in the actual number of his living days.
I was barely twenty-one years old when my father died, and at that point in my life little more than a dissolute fraternity boy -- drunk most of the time, failing all of his classes, content simply to chase women and sleep 'til one in the afternoon. Part of this behavior could be traced to the strain the terminal illness of a parent places on a son, and part of it was simple selfishness. In any event, my father never got to see much in the way of academic excellence or creative success from his youngest child, nor much maturity or responsibility.
Now, perhaps it's just a coincidence, but this morning, his birthday, I awoke to discover that my book DEVILS YOU KNOW had been named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. As the Hoffer people told me in their message, "We consider this a distinction of its own merit." That is because though the Hoffer Awards have many thousands of entrants every year, they list less than 10% as Finalists, and bestow an award upon each (hence the capital "F").
This is an especially satisfying moment for me, not merely because of the timing, but because the work in question is perhaps the most personal thing I have yet published.
DEVILS YOU KNOW is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote from 1990 to 2016. Some of them had been previously published, others I wrote specifically for the anthology itself. As I noted in the book's introduction, "these stories are not my life's work, but they are the work of a lifetime." Twenty-six years of it, anyway. I published DEVILS mainly because I was anxious to show the world that the genre of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, was hardly the limit of my literary ambitions. In traditional publishing, when a person writes a horror novel, or a mystery or a thriller or a work of romantic suspense or any other damned thing, they are immediately pigeonholed: their publishers, agents and promoters say, "Good! Now write one of these a year until you die." Well, CAGE LIFE was a gritty, almost Pulpish crime novel, and while I enjoyed every moment of writing it (well, most of 'em, anyway) I hardly wanted to spend the rest of my life jamming lightning back into that particular bottle. The truth is, I read in almost every genre: why shouldn't I write in them all, too, if that's what pleases me?
Refusal to be pigeonholed, and an extreme reluctance to publish under a pseudonym -- my parents gave me my name, why use another? -- are the principal reasons I decided against traditional publishing as platform for my works. Had I a traditional publisher, DEVILS YOU KNOW would never have seen the light of day. They would not have allowed it. And frankly, the stories contained within are too goddamned good not to be read by anyone curious enough to do so. So I'd like to take a moment to introduce you briefly to each of the thirteen stories within:
THE ADVERSARIAL PROCESS - There are seven stages to grief. They begin with shock and end with acceptance, and somewhere in between are bargaining and anger. But in the mind of a powerful man, a man used to getting what he wants, bargaining and anger might become confused -- or simply fused. So that what follows is not so much bargaining as blackmail. Or extortion. This is the story of a high-powered lawyer in the depths of grief, whose grudge against God takes a turn so dark he needs a match to light his way.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS - Two guys walk into a bar. One is a gangster. One used to be. One is deep in the Life. The other is in Witness Protection. Time has passed, but it does not heal all wounds... and now there is time for one more.
A STORY NEVER TOLD - Paris, 1944. The Allies have liberated the City of Lights after years of grim German occupation. A young American infantry lieutenant, on his way back to the front after recovering from a wound, encounters a larger-than-life war correspondent in a bar on the Rue Daunou. And discovers that it isn't always wise to meet your heroes. Especially when you've had too much to drink.
NOSFERATU - Hannibal Raus believes in Hitler and his vision for Germany. He's willing to kill for it and, in the most honorable traditions of his country, he's willing to die for it, too. But when his determination to win a battle against the Soviet army lands him in an SS field hospital, he discovers there are men willing to go much further than he is for the sake of victory. All the way to hell.
IDENTITY CRISIS - Billy Verecker has a problem. He doesn't know who he is. He never has. And the harder he tries to find an identity, the more elusive it becomes. Would anyone notice if he died? Probably not. But that thought leads to another. Would anyone notice if he killed?
THE SHROUD - It's 1865, the South has lost the war, and there's nothing to be done for an ex-rebel but ride home and pick up the pieces. That's just what Simon Bonventre, the heir to the mighty plantation Court Royal, intends to do. There are only a few small obstacles: the bullet in his ribs, the fact that his horse is dying and the company of Union cavalry in his way.
SHADOWS AND GLORY - Germany. 1940. Hitler has ordered his U-boats to starve Britain into submission, and Commander Kurt Reinhard has answered the call -- so successfully he is now known as the "Lion of the Atlantic." Only his son Karl suspects that his father's devotion to the regime is not what it should be. But can a boy raised by the Hitler Youth reconcile loyalty to the Führer with love for a father who longs to turn his back on war?
D.S.A. - MacAfee is not the questioning sort. He marches where he's told to march, burns what he's told to burn, kills who he's told to kill. It's easier that way; easier to do and not to think. Then one day, in the middle of the Second American Civil War, he meets a man who has a story to tell, and that story gets MacAfee questioning everything.
ROADTRIP - There are times when what you see is what you get. There are others when nothing is what it is seems. In this story, four old friends hit the road in a convertible as the sun goes down, looking to have a little fun. But just what constitutes their idea of fun is anybody's guess...and somebody's nightmare.
A FEVER IN THE BLOOD - Revolutions start in the damnedest places. Beer halls in Munich. Bastilles in Paris. Village greens in Lexington and Concord. You never know what's going to set people off. It could be taxes. It could be war. It could be oppression, racism or greed. In this case, however, it's none of the above. What destroys the social order and plunges the whole city into chaos? An idiot on a cell phone. Think it's implausible? Look who's running for office.
THE ACTION - When his outfit gets diverted from the Eastern Front to help suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, veteran German soldier Gerhard "Gigi" Gadermann just wants to make sure his naive young cousin survives the battle. It turns out, however, that there are much worse dangers lurking in Warsaw than bullets and bombs: there is the awful realization that the most terrifying thing a man can face in war is himself.
PLEAS AND THANK YOUS - Johnny Morra is no stranger to violence. He's a gangster, for God's sake. But when his boss orders a man tortured to death with a chain saw for a minor transgression, Johnny decides he's had enough. He's leaving the mob, right now. The only thing in his way is...the rest of the mob.
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - Did you ever wonder what you were doing here? What your purpose was -- in this life, on this earth, at this moment? You're not alone. Doubt is everywhere. It creeps into the most unlikely places. The most unlikely people. The most unlikely...things. But never fear. There are those who don't have those doubts, those fears, or those feelings of existential angst. In fact, there are those who don't feel anything at all. And tonight, you're going to meet one of them. Isn't that comforting?
Thus DEVILS YOU KNOW. An unlucky number of stories come together to underscore a specific theme: that our devils -- fear and lust, hatred and jealousy, madness and bigotry and wrath and spite -- are part of who we are, but not always our ultimate evils and, in any case, occasionally good for a chuckle or two. If you know me at all, personally or through my work, you know that I believe that while the devil often gains the upper hand in our lives, his victories tend to be fleeting. It's true that darkness is the natural state of the universe, but it's also true -- scientifically true -- that darkness cannot exist in the presence of light.
Well. It's 5:03 PM, a rare-as-a-total-eclipse thunderstorm has just broken over my modest Burbank home, and I'm off to Hollywood to watch a screening of ALIEN RESURRECTION with my friend Mark, who, as it happened, played one of the aliens in the film. It's a strange life we lead, my devils and I... but we wouldn't have it any other way.
Happy birthday, Dad.
Today would have been my father's 81st birthday. This is an especially melancholy fact because he died in 1993, at the age of fifty-four, and though he lived a full life in the sense of experience, travel and accomplishment, he hardly was granted that privilege where it (perhaps) counts most -- in the actual number of his living days.
I was barely twenty-one years old when my father died, and at that point in my life little more than a dissolute fraternity boy -- drunk most of the time, failing all of his classes, content simply to chase women and sleep 'til one in the afternoon. Part of this behavior could be traced to the strain the terminal illness of a parent places on a son, and part of it was simple selfishness. In any event, my father never got to see much in the way of academic excellence or creative success from his youngest child, nor much maturity or responsibility.
Now, perhaps it's just a coincidence, but this morning, his birthday, I awoke to discover that my book DEVILS YOU KNOW had been named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. As the Hoffer people told me in their message, "We consider this a distinction of its own merit." That is because though the Hoffer Awards have many thousands of entrants every year, they list less than 10% as Finalists, and bestow an award upon each (hence the capital "F").
This is an especially satisfying moment for me, not merely because of the timing, but because the work in question is perhaps the most personal thing I have yet published.
DEVILS YOU KNOW is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote from 1990 to 2016. Some of them had been previously published, others I wrote specifically for the anthology itself. As I noted in the book's introduction, "these stories are not my life's work, but they are the work of a lifetime." Twenty-six years of it, anyway. I published DEVILS mainly because I was anxious to show the world that the genre of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, was hardly the limit of my literary ambitions. In traditional publishing, when a person writes a horror novel, or a mystery or a thriller or a work of romantic suspense or any other damned thing, they are immediately pigeonholed: their publishers, agents and promoters say, "Good! Now write one of these a year until you die." Well, CAGE LIFE was a gritty, almost Pulpish crime novel, and while I enjoyed every moment of writing it (well, most of 'em, anyway) I hardly wanted to spend the rest of my life jamming lightning back into that particular bottle. The truth is, I read in almost every genre: why shouldn't I write in them all, too, if that's what pleases me?
Refusal to be pigeonholed, and an extreme reluctance to publish under a pseudonym -- my parents gave me my name, why use another? -- are the principal reasons I decided against traditional publishing as platform for my works. Had I a traditional publisher, DEVILS YOU KNOW would never have seen the light of day. They would not have allowed it. And frankly, the stories contained within are too goddamned good not to be read by anyone curious enough to do so. So I'd like to take a moment to introduce you briefly to each of the thirteen stories within:
THE ADVERSARIAL PROCESS - There are seven stages to grief. They begin with shock and end with acceptance, and somewhere in between are bargaining and anger. But in the mind of a powerful man, a man used to getting what he wants, bargaining and anger might become confused -- or simply fused. So that what follows is not so much bargaining as blackmail. Or extortion. This is the story of a high-powered lawyer in the depths of grief, whose grudge against God takes a turn so dark he needs a match to light his way.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS - Two guys walk into a bar. One is a gangster. One used to be. One is deep in the Life. The other is in Witness Protection. Time has passed, but it does not heal all wounds... and now there is time for one more.
A STORY NEVER TOLD - Paris, 1944. The Allies have liberated the City of Lights after years of grim German occupation. A young American infantry lieutenant, on his way back to the front after recovering from a wound, encounters a larger-than-life war correspondent in a bar on the Rue Daunou. And discovers that it isn't always wise to meet your heroes. Especially when you've had too much to drink.
NOSFERATU - Hannibal Raus believes in Hitler and his vision for Germany. He's willing to kill for it and, in the most honorable traditions of his country, he's willing to die for it, too. But when his determination to win a battle against the Soviet army lands him in an SS field hospital, he discovers there are men willing to go much further than he is for the sake of victory. All the way to hell.
IDENTITY CRISIS - Billy Verecker has a problem. He doesn't know who he is. He never has. And the harder he tries to find an identity, the more elusive it becomes. Would anyone notice if he died? Probably not. But that thought leads to another. Would anyone notice if he killed?
THE SHROUD - It's 1865, the South has lost the war, and there's nothing to be done for an ex-rebel but ride home and pick up the pieces. That's just what Simon Bonventre, the heir to the mighty plantation Court Royal, intends to do. There are only a few small obstacles: the bullet in his ribs, the fact that his horse is dying and the company of Union cavalry in his way.
SHADOWS AND GLORY - Germany. 1940. Hitler has ordered his U-boats to starve Britain into submission, and Commander Kurt Reinhard has answered the call -- so successfully he is now known as the "Lion of the Atlantic." Only his son Karl suspects that his father's devotion to the regime is not what it should be. But can a boy raised by the Hitler Youth reconcile loyalty to the Führer with love for a father who longs to turn his back on war?
D.S.A. - MacAfee is not the questioning sort. He marches where he's told to march, burns what he's told to burn, kills who he's told to kill. It's easier that way; easier to do and not to think. Then one day, in the middle of the Second American Civil War, he meets a man who has a story to tell, and that story gets MacAfee questioning everything.
ROADTRIP - There are times when what you see is what you get. There are others when nothing is what it is seems. In this story, four old friends hit the road in a convertible as the sun goes down, looking to have a little fun. But just what constitutes their idea of fun is anybody's guess...and somebody's nightmare.
A FEVER IN THE BLOOD - Revolutions start in the damnedest places. Beer halls in Munich. Bastilles in Paris. Village greens in Lexington and Concord. You never know what's going to set people off. It could be taxes. It could be war. It could be oppression, racism or greed. In this case, however, it's none of the above. What destroys the social order and plunges the whole city into chaos? An idiot on a cell phone. Think it's implausible? Look who's running for office.
THE ACTION - When his outfit gets diverted from the Eastern Front to help suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, veteran German soldier Gerhard "Gigi" Gadermann just wants to make sure his naive young cousin survives the battle. It turns out, however, that there are much worse dangers lurking in Warsaw than bullets and bombs: there is the awful realization that the most terrifying thing a man can face in war is himself.
PLEAS AND THANK YOUS - Johnny Morra is no stranger to violence. He's a gangster, for God's sake. But when his boss orders a man tortured to death with a chain saw for a minor transgression, Johnny decides he's had enough. He's leaving the mob, right now. The only thing in his way is...the rest of the mob.
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - Did you ever wonder what you were doing here? What your purpose was -- in this life, on this earth, at this moment? You're not alone. Doubt is everywhere. It creeps into the most unlikely places. The most unlikely people. The most unlikely...things. But never fear. There are those who don't have those doubts, those fears, or those feelings of existential angst. In fact, there are those who don't feel anything at all. And tonight, you're going to meet one of them. Isn't that comforting?
Thus DEVILS YOU KNOW. An unlucky number of stories come together to underscore a specific theme: that our devils -- fear and lust, hatred and jealousy, madness and bigotry and wrath and spite -- are part of who we are, but not always our ultimate evils and, in any case, occasionally good for a chuckle or two. If you know me at all, personally or through my work, you know that I believe that while the devil often gains the upper hand in our lives, his victories tend to be fleeting. It's true that darkness is the natural state of the universe, but it's also true -- scientifically true -- that darkness cannot exist in the presence of light.
Well. It's 5:03 PM, a rare-as-a-total-eclipse thunderstorm has just broken over my modest Burbank home, and I'm off to Hollywood to watch a screening of ALIEN RESURRECTION with my friend Mark, who, as it happened, played one of the aliens in the film. It's a strange life we lead, my devils and I... but we wouldn't have it any other way.
Happy birthday, Dad.
April 18, 2019
The Memory Hole, or: Get It While You Can
A few days ago the surviving creators of THE SIMPSONS made an announcement which was greeted by little in the way of fanfare. As Fatherly.com reported:
"A beloved episode of The Simpsons is disappearing from the show’s online platform, syndication, and future physical media editions. The reason? It guest stars Michael Jackson."
The episode in question, "Stark Raving Dad," is considered one of the best and funniest shows produced during the golden age of America's longest-running primetime series. In it, Homer meets a man who believes himself to be Michael Jackson, and the faux-Michael (voiced by Jackson himself), teaches Homer and Bart a number of valuable life-lessons, some of them articulated through song. Due to the recent release of the documentary NEVERLAND, however, which alleges Jackson was a serial pedophile, "Stark Raving Dad" will no longer be commercially available. It has gone down what George Orwell would have referred to as "the memory hole."
In past blogs I have discussed the Roman concept of "damnatio memorae." It was a practice of destroying all physical traces of the existence of a disgraced Roman -- smashing his statues, chipping his name off monuments, striking his image off currency, etc. and so on. Those who were "damned in memory" were in effect, made "unpersons" almost 2,000 years before Orwell penned his famous novels about the malleability of the past, ANIMAL FARM and 1984. Michael Jackson, like Bill Cosby immediately before him, is now in the process of becoming an unperson, and as part of the process the media which bears his likeness and voice is systematically being effaced from the earth.
Some people applaud this sort of thing. Others have deep reservations about the wider implications of using an eraser on any type of history. I have already discussed the arguments about "separating the art from the artist" in either direction and have no wish to bring them up again. What I want to discuss here is something which came up again and again during my years working in the video game industry. It is the concept of ownership, which is undergoing a remarkable change even as you read this.
On the surface nothing could be simpler than the idea of ownership, and this was particularly true as a kid, when I first became interested in video games. Once you had a cartridge or a tape, or later, a disc, it was yours and required no additional time, effort or money to continue its operation. Best of all, so long as it was properly stored, it could last indefinitely. As evidence of this I exhibit my old Atari 800XL, which must have been purchased in 1980 or so. With one exception, every one of the cartridges my father bought for me for this game, and most of the discs, still function perfectly. I can play Pac Man, or Castle Wolfenstein, or the infuriating Transylvania (which I've been playing since 1982 and still can't beat), just as I did as a boy of ten. I can, and do, haul out these primitive but oh-so-enjoyable games and play them with my neice and nephew, and it's my fervent wish that if I ever have children, I can pass the system down to them. That, kids, is ownership.
At some point in the last two decades, however, the internet began to change the basic ideas behind gaming. The invention of online games -- games which allowed you to escape the self-contained confines of a cartridge or disc, and move around in a large world populated both by "bots" and other players -- revolutionized everything. Gaming became an immersive, ongoing, multi-player experience. It is now possible to log in and enter a world populated by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other players -- to compete against them or join forces with them, depending on the demands of the game and the quirks of your own personality.
This development in gaming came at a price. When customers purchased a game, they were no longer receiving physical media, they were, in essence, simply paying for a sort of interactive television channel in which they had the ability to control one character. In practical terms, this put them completely at the mercy of those who controlled the game. It was now possible for two scenarios to unfold which would have been impossible in my day, the Era of Atari. Firstly, the game companies could and did offer "micro-transactions" which allowed players to pay more to receive bennies within the game (meaning that the initial purchase was just that -- the first payment, not the last). Worse, and dealing directly with the subject at hand, it also meant that any time a game developer wanted to discontinue a game, it could do so simply by shutting down the servers which supported it. Thus, if you paid $65 for a game and another $50 in micro-transactions, you might still find yourself out of a game a few years down the road. The company could simply pull the plug. Your ownership, in a sense, would be revoked. And this has happened to modern gamers more than once.
When one pays for something but does not truly own it, one does not own: one rents or leases. There is a world of difference in those words, and this brings me back to THE SIMPSONS.
"Star Raving Dad" is the first episode of the third season of the show, and as of now it will no longer be available in any legal way to those who wish to see it...unless, of course, like me, they bought the DVD, in which case nobody can tell them they can't watch it if they so choose.
I have quite a collection of DVDs. I have been buying them for going on 20 years and continue to do so despite the existence of Blu-Ray and various streaming services. I do this for the same reason I still occasionally buy VHS tapes of movies: I do not want to rent what I own. At the risk of sounding like any one of several characters on GAME OF THRONES, if Miles Watson owns something, he owns it.
People who swear by Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu etc., etc. do not have to deal with bulky DVDs or even bulkier VHS tapes. They don't have to worry about scratching them or losing them or breaking them or cleaning them. Their libraries of films and music and so forth are available instantly through any device with an internet connection. The advantages of this are obvious, but the disadvantages are painful. When the powers that be decide that Michael Jackson or Bill Cosby is now an unperson, they can also decide -- for you -- that the media of such people is no longer for public consumption. Chill with Netflix all you want: you'll never see "Stark Raving Dad" on it, nor will you catch "I, Spy" or "The Cosby Show." Before long you may not have access to any of Michael Jackson's music whether you paid for it or not. And should you have a yen for the unretouched, as-seen-in-theaters versions of the original STAR WARS films, well, guess what? You're out of luck. George Lucas took them out of circulation many years ago. They are no longer for sale in any medium, nor are they available on a streaming service. All of it is now out of your reach without resorting to illegal YouTube channels or other forms of soft or hard piracy, and in time they may be out of your reach altogether.
Faith in the Cloud, in any purely digital medium, is faith that your masters are beneficient and will never choose to take what you possess away from you. I lack this faith for the same reason I wholeheartedly support the Second Amendment. I put not my faith in princes. Never have, never will. Nobody is better qualified than me to decide what the hell I choose to lawfully posess.
We must face a hard truth. As time goes on, and our culture becomes more sensitive and more righteous about, well, everything, more and more artists will be discovered to be harboring ugly secrets of one kind or another. It is the inevitable outcome of the climate in which we live, and it will just as inevitably lead to more censorship of this type. Most recently, an almost 50 year-old interview with John Wayne, during which he said offensive things about blacks, gays, Native Americans etc., has been used to strengthen demands that the airport named in his honor be renamed. I couldn't care less one way or the other, but I am greatly concerned that this extremely belated outrage (Wayne died forty years ago) will call for demands that his films -- and he made nearly 100, including a number of all-time classics in various genres -- be removed from store shelves and streaming services. I am even more concerned that spineless executives at various studios will accede to them, setting a very dangerous precedent indeed.
Twelve years in the entertainment industry have taught me all I need to know about the moral courage of Hollywood executives.
Obviously I have no sympathy whatsoever with rapists like Cosby or (alleged) child molesters like Jackson. Such crimes are unforgivable and deserve all the disgust and anger we can muster. Nor am I a fan of John Wayne as a human being -- I never was, actually: even as a kid he struck me as a jingo patriot with a taste for bullying roles. But that is neither here nor there. The issue at hand is whether I, as an adult residing in an allegedly free country, have the choice to own the works of people who have in some cases gone beyond the pale in their personal or professional lives. It is also whether whether what I buy is my property or merely a rental which can be taken away from me at the convenience / whim of its true owners.
Most people who know me know I'm a libertarian, one who believes in personal freedom. And one of the most fundamental expressions of personal freedom is the right to decide for oneself what one reads, listens to, or watches on television. The country, however, is moving increasingly in the direction of centralized control, a state of affairs in which a self-appointed "elite" decides on our behalf what we need to see, hear, and in time, think. No need to develop aesthetic tastes or political, economic or religious opinions on your own, folks! Big Brother -- or Big Sister -- will do it for you.
Y'all might be thinking I'm making too much out of something as trivial as a 22 minute cartoon. Y'all may be right. But my money, as always, is on me. Having as much historical information crammed in my head as I do, I know all too well how easy it is to destroy the foundations of human freedom. Blasting powder and sledgehammers aren't required. Like Andy Dufraine in The Shawshank Redemption, who broke out of prison by slowly chipping away at the prison walls with a tiny hammer, the people who want to tell us how to think are content to play a very long game indeed.
"A beloved episode of The Simpsons is disappearing from the show’s online platform, syndication, and future physical media editions. The reason? It guest stars Michael Jackson."
The episode in question, "Stark Raving Dad," is considered one of the best and funniest shows produced during the golden age of America's longest-running primetime series. In it, Homer meets a man who believes himself to be Michael Jackson, and the faux-Michael (voiced by Jackson himself), teaches Homer and Bart a number of valuable life-lessons, some of them articulated through song. Due to the recent release of the documentary NEVERLAND, however, which alleges Jackson was a serial pedophile, "Stark Raving Dad" will no longer be commercially available. It has gone down what George Orwell would have referred to as "the memory hole."
In past blogs I have discussed the Roman concept of "damnatio memorae." It was a practice of destroying all physical traces of the existence of a disgraced Roman -- smashing his statues, chipping his name off monuments, striking his image off currency, etc. and so on. Those who were "damned in memory" were in effect, made "unpersons" almost 2,000 years before Orwell penned his famous novels about the malleability of the past, ANIMAL FARM and 1984. Michael Jackson, like Bill Cosby immediately before him, is now in the process of becoming an unperson, and as part of the process the media which bears his likeness and voice is systematically being effaced from the earth.
Some people applaud this sort of thing. Others have deep reservations about the wider implications of using an eraser on any type of history. I have already discussed the arguments about "separating the art from the artist" in either direction and have no wish to bring them up again. What I want to discuss here is something which came up again and again during my years working in the video game industry. It is the concept of ownership, which is undergoing a remarkable change even as you read this.
On the surface nothing could be simpler than the idea of ownership, and this was particularly true as a kid, when I first became interested in video games. Once you had a cartridge or a tape, or later, a disc, it was yours and required no additional time, effort or money to continue its operation. Best of all, so long as it was properly stored, it could last indefinitely. As evidence of this I exhibit my old Atari 800XL, which must have been purchased in 1980 or so. With one exception, every one of the cartridges my father bought for me for this game, and most of the discs, still function perfectly. I can play Pac Man, or Castle Wolfenstein, or the infuriating Transylvania (which I've been playing since 1982 and still can't beat), just as I did as a boy of ten. I can, and do, haul out these primitive but oh-so-enjoyable games and play them with my neice and nephew, and it's my fervent wish that if I ever have children, I can pass the system down to them. That, kids, is ownership.
At some point in the last two decades, however, the internet began to change the basic ideas behind gaming. The invention of online games -- games which allowed you to escape the self-contained confines of a cartridge or disc, and move around in a large world populated both by "bots" and other players -- revolutionized everything. Gaming became an immersive, ongoing, multi-player experience. It is now possible to log in and enter a world populated by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other players -- to compete against them or join forces with them, depending on the demands of the game and the quirks of your own personality.
This development in gaming came at a price. When customers purchased a game, they were no longer receiving physical media, they were, in essence, simply paying for a sort of interactive television channel in which they had the ability to control one character. In practical terms, this put them completely at the mercy of those who controlled the game. It was now possible for two scenarios to unfold which would have been impossible in my day, the Era of Atari. Firstly, the game companies could and did offer "micro-transactions" which allowed players to pay more to receive bennies within the game (meaning that the initial purchase was just that -- the first payment, not the last). Worse, and dealing directly with the subject at hand, it also meant that any time a game developer wanted to discontinue a game, it could do so simply by shutting down the servers which supported it. Thus, if you paid $65 for a game and another $50 in micro-transactions, you might still find yourself out of a game a few years down the road. The company could simply pull the plug. Your ownership, in a sense, would be revoked. And this has happened to modern gamers more than once.
When one pays for something but does not truly own it, one does not own: one rents or leases. There is a world of difference in those words, and this brings me back to THE SIMPSONS.
"Star Raving Dad" is the first episode of the third season of the show, and as of now it will no longer be available in any legal way to those who wish to see it...unless, of course, like me, they bought the DVD, in which case nobody can tell them they can't watch it if they so choose.
I have quite a collection of DVDs. I have been buying them for going on 20 years and continue to do so despite the existence of Blu-Ray and various streaming services. I do this for the same reason I still occasionally buy VHS tapes of movies: I do not want to rent what I own. At the risk of sounding like any one of several characters on GAME OF THRONES, if Miles Watson owns something, he owns it.
People who swear by Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu etc., etc. do not have to deal with bulky DVDs or even bulkier VHS tapes. They don't have to worry about scratching them or losing them or breaking them or cleaning them. Their libraries of films and music and so forth are available instantly through any device with an internet connection. The advantages of this are obvious, but the disadvantages are painful. When the powers that be decide that Michael Jackson or Bill Cosby is now an unperson, they can also decide -- for you -- that the media of such people is no longer for public consumption. Chill with Netflix all you want: you'll never see "Stark Raving Dad" on it, nor will you catch "I, Spy" or "The Cosby Show." Before long you may not have access to any of Michael Jackson's music whether you paid for it or not. And should you have a yen for the unretouched, as-seen-in-theaters versions of the original STAR WARS films, well, guess what? You're out of luck. George Lucas took them out of circulation many years ago. They are no longer for sale in any medium, nor are they available on a streaming service. All of it is now out of your reach without resorting to illegal YouTube channels or other forms of soft or hard piracy, and in time they may be out of your reach altogether.
Faith in the Cloud, in any purely digital medium, is faith that your masters are beneficient and will never choose to take what you possess away from you. I lack this faith for the same reason I wholeheartedly support the Second Amendment. I put not my faith in princes. Never have, never will. Nobody is better qualified than me to decide what the hell I choose to lawfully posess.
We must face a hard truth. As time goes on, and our culture becomes more sensitive and more righteous about, well, everything, more and more artists will be discovered to be harboring ugly secrets of one kind or another. It is the inevitable outcome of the climate in which we live, and it will just as inevitably lead to more censorship of this type. Most recently, an almost 50 year-old interview with John Wayne, during which he said offensive things about blacks, gays, Native Americans etc., has been used to strengthen demands that the airport named in his honor be renamed. I couldn't care less one way or the other, but I am greatly concerned that this extremely belated outrage (Wayne died forty years ago) will call for demands that his films -- and he made nearly 100, including a number of all-time classics in various genres -- be removed from store shelves and streaming services. I am even more concerned that spineless executives at various studios will accede to them, setting a very dangerous precedent indeed.
Twelve years in the entertainment industry have taught me all I need to know about the moral courage of Hollywood executives.
Obviously I have no sympathy whatsoever with rapists like Cosby or (alleged) child molesters like Jackson. Such crimes are unforgivable and deserve all the disgust and anger we can muster. Nor am I a fan of John Wayne as a human being -- I never was, actually: even as a kid he struck me as a jingo patriot with a taste for bullying roles. But that is neither here nor there. The issue at hand is whether I, as an adult residing in an allegedly free country, have the choice to own the works of people who have in some cases gone beyond the pale in their personal or professional lives. It is also whether whether what I buy is my property or merely a rental which can be taken away from me at the convenience / whim of its true owners.
Most people who know me know I'm a libertarian, one who believes in personal freedom. And one of the most fundamental expressions of personal freedom is the right to decide for oneself what one reads, listens to, or watches on television. The country, however, is moving increasingly in the direction of centralized control, a state of affairs in which a self-appointed "elite" decides on our behalf what we need to see, hear, and in time, think. No need to develop aesthetic tastes or political, economic or religious opinions on your own, folks! Big Brother -- or Big Sister -- will do it for you.
Y'all might be thinking I'm making too much out of something as trivial as a 22 minute cartoon. Y'all may be right. But my money, as always, is on me. Having as much historical information crammed in my head as I do, I know all too well how easy it is to destroy the foundations of human freedom. Blasting powder and sledgehammers aren't required. Like Andy Dufraine in The Shawshank Redemption, who broke out of prison by slowly chipping away at the prison walls with a tiny hammer, the people who want to tell us how to think are content to play a very long game indeed.
March 22, 2019
Fuck Twitter.
We all don't swim in the same sewer.
– Clive Cussler
It was the last day of seventh grade, and I had a decision to make. A particularly ugly-minded bully, who had been one of the banes of my existence from September of 1984 until June of 1985, was getting off the bus about 100 yards away. I hated this kid enough to have killed him if I'd had the nerve, means and opportunity (fortunately for both of us, I was lacking all three), so I had settled on a much smaller-scale revenge. Specifically, I was going to shout a long stream of abuse at him, telling him exactly what I thought of his intelligence, hygine, family and prospects for future success: I was then going to run the very small distance, no more than 20 yards, to the safety of my own home. According to my plan, the bully would have all summer to brood over the names I had called him while I remained torturously out of his reach. Like most bullies he was astonishingly egotistical and vain, and the thought of grubby little Miles Watson, with his greasy hair and his hand-me-down clothes, having gotten the better of him, even for an instant, would have poisoned his entire summer. The thought of it warmed the cuckles of my twelve year-old heart.
When the moment came, however – that is, when I saw the bully emerge from the bus, such nerve as I did possess failed me. It was not precisely cowardice that froze my vocal chords, but the realization that my plan might actually be too successful for my own good. The bully would indeed have three months to brood, and by the time we met again, on the first day of eighth grade, he might concievably make it his first-day priority to exact a terrible, well-thought-out vengeance upon me.
So in the end I said nothing and trudged home. It was a discouraging way to end a bad year and I felt very much like the coward I believed myself to be.
Cut to the present day. Like just about everyone else on the planet, grown up Miles Watson has a cellular phone – a “mobile device” as they are more accurately called. On this device are many applications which I use every day. There are quite a few others I rarely bother with but keep as a kind of security blanket. There is only which comes and goes, being downloaded only to be erased a few days later in a fit of disgust...and then, inevitability, downloaded again. There is a name for this app. It is called Twitter.
As a man who grew up without mobile devices or the Internet, I entered my online phase of life the way a man enters a very cold body of water: toes first. I didn't get an e-mail account until 1998, and did not use a cell phone until 2004. The existence of my Facebook account is owed entirely to the actions of three female members of the York College swim team who barricaded themselves in my room one night in 2006 and started up a profile for me against my will (it was three days before they even gave me the password). Nevertheless, once I sank into the strange waters of cyberspace, I found myself reluctant to leave. E-mail was convenient, and for a long time so was instant messaging. Cell phones were an even larger convenience, and Facebook, while annoying, was also quite...well, convenient. Of Twitter I knew nothing until 2008, when I first heard it mentioned on the radio. People were terribly enthusiastic about it, which seemed to me sufficient cause to avoid it – and avoid it I did, for almost ten years. Then I went and became an author.
Whoops.
In the old days – meaning, I'm sad to say, the time I grew up in – it was sufficient for an author simply to write. Everything else, including personal appearances, book signings, guest spots on television, etc. and so on, were handled for him by his publisher. But things have changed, and authors of all kinds are expected to spend enormities of time online, drumming up free publicity by posting their every thought on social media platforms...just like Twitter. It is because of Twitter that I know much Stephen King hates Donald Trump. It is because of Twitter that I know how cantankerous William Shatner really is. And it is because of Twitter that I realize how few people in positions of political power know how to spell at the level of a sixth grader. But this is not my beef with the platform. The tweets I've read from hockey players, actors, comedians, writers, politicians, pundits, and so on are not any more ungrammatical or poorly written on that platform than they are on Facebook or Instagram. No, what differentiates Twitter from the others, what makes me walk away from whatever following I manage to build and then come back, weeks or months later, to make a half-hearted attempt to rebuild it before I inevitably abandon it again, is a phenomenon directly related to the incident I recounted at the beginning of this blog. This phenomenon exists everywhere on the internet -- it is as ubiquitously found online as Old Bay is on the shelves of Maryland crab shacks -- but it seems to live on Twitter, just as the devil is reputed to live in hell.
When I was a kid, the expression “telephone tough guy” was what “keyboard warrior” is today. It described someone who talked tough from a distance, i.e. when there was no actual possibility of being held to account for his words. Examples of telephone tough-guy-ism in the 80s were not just limited to yelling abuse over a phone line: it included shouting invective at visiting teams at football games, shouting similar nonsense at pedestrians from the passenger seat of your best friend's car, spewing fighting words on a playground when you had five or six friends to make sure no fist every touched you in retaliation, or performing some aggressive act on a stronger person an instant before an authority figure like a teacher, parent or cop walked into view. Simply put, it was an act of calculated cowardice.
In 1985, I wanted to yell the ugliest insults I could think of that at the afformentioned bully. I knew I could get to my door faster than he could get to me, and I knew our paths would never cross during the summer, giving me a temporary victory over him. But I also knew that three months down the road, if he remembered the insults, he might finally exact vengeance, a vengeance which might be all the more terrible because he'd had to wait 90 long days to get it. So I kept my mouth shut and felt myself a coward. It was only much later that I realized how prudent, and in a certain sense, how principled, my decision had actually been.
Growing up in the 80s, I came from a time where those who talked the talk, but could not walk the walk, were an especially hated and despised group. They ranked far beneath mere cowards or weaklings in social status. It was considered much nobler to be the downtrodden victim of bullying than it was to be the sort who talked a lot of smoke around friends and classmates when it was safe to do so, and then quietly handed over his lunch money when the bully approached. A weakling, after all, was only a weakling: a weakling who pretended to strength was also a fake, which was infinitely worse. He was held in contempt by both bullies and by his fellow weaklings, who at least had the dignity of being who they were. I knew, standing at my bus stop in June of 1985, that I was unwilling to engage my bully in single combat. I knew my petty revenge could only be exacted if I did it from a distance and then ran and, in essence, let geography allow me to hide until the following September. In short, I knew I could only score off of the bully by becoming a telephone tough guy. I was unwilling to do this. As Xander Harris once said on Buffy: “I'm not doing this. I have my pride. Granted, I don't have a lot of my pride, but I have enough that I'm not doing this.”
What does this have to do with Twitter, you ask? Much. Very much indeed. You see, every time I dip a toe into the Twitterverse, what strikes me immediately is the change in standards which has occurred between 1985 and 2019. The telephone tough guy, a.k.a. the keyboard warrior, is no longer a despised, ridiculed minority, held in contempt even by the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Oh no. On Twitter, the model of values is set upon its head, and those who talk the most shit are held in the highest esteem. Every day, these people, from both sexes and all races and every possible walk of life, send out tweets calculated to humiliate or to enrage people they have never met and have little to no prospect of meeting – and the more successful they are at it, the larger their following becomes. It scarcely matters whether the subject at hand is politics, sex, race, religion, movies, books, comedy, music – the idea seems to be to signal as many virtues as you can while simultaneously spewing as much vitriol as possible. This in itself might not be so bad if, say, Twitter were like the UFC. In the UFC, a fighter can boast about his or her abilities as much as they want, and at the same time insult and provoke every other fighter on the roster in the nastiest, most juvenile way possible: the critical difference is that a trash-talking fighter must sooner or later be locked into an eight-sided cage with the person they have insulted, giving said individual the chance to smash them in the face and choke them unconscious. It doesn't necessarily make communication between fighters more civilized, but it does force the fighters to be prepared to back up what they say online...which makes them, in my mind, nobler creatures than the trash-talking cowards you otherwise encounter on Twitter.
What it boils down to, really, is the age-old idea of being held accountable for what you say. Whenever I watch the old TV mini-series NORTH AND SOUTH, what strikes me is the way dueling culture influenced manners in antebellum America. The elaborate courtesy that strikes us all as so affected and ridiculous today, was simply a by-product of a society where it was common, even expected, for men who had been offended to demand satisfaction in the form of a duel to the death. The fear of being called out had softening effects on speech, on manners, even on the written word. Of course I am not quite old enough to remember the antebellum South, but some feeble, lingering echo of the old conceptions of honor did still resonate in the Maryland of my childhood. They manifested in a series of unwritten rules known to all children, foremost of which was: don't insult anyone you aren't prepared to fight.
Some people may ask: is it a good thing that people should go around in fear that a fast lip might become a fat one? For me, the answer is yes. The truth is that we live in a world where the idea that actions have consequences has been steadily eroding for decades. The extent to which it has crumbled is easy enough to prove by exploring any Twitter feed for just five minutes. On Twitter, everyone feels free to fire as many missiles as they wish in any direction they choose, secure in the knowledge there will be no actual consequence, and that they will never be physically confronted by the people they are attacking. This consequence-free environment has emboldened the cowardly, armed the feckless, and put ersatz strength into weaklings whose opinions would ordinarily and rightfully be disregarded. It has fostered an atmosphere where not the most intelligent, the most principled or the most reasonable voices are heard, but merely the loudest and most obnoxious. And it has acted as a subtle but persistent cut into the foundation stones of any healthy society: respect, toughness, and personal accountability. Freedom of speech is vital to any healthy human society, but freedom of speech has always been accompanied by the concomitant knowledge that words are dangerous things, and like any dangerous thing, have to be handled carefully and responsibly. This is precisely what has been destroyed during my own lifetime -- the idea that you might actually have to cash the check with your ass that you wrote with your mouth. The fact is that a lot more people need to be punched in the mouth for what they Tweet. The pain and humiliation would prove valuable lessons, one of which is: don't start what you can't finish.
It so happens that some years after the incident in question, I finally put the boots to the bully of this story. It happened in a hallway in high school, probably in 1988, and it was immensely satisfying. Passing me in the hallway, he made as if to hit me: when I flinched, he smirked and muttered, “Bitch!” It was the wrong day to make that remark, and I jumped him, right then and there. Yet what struck me about the fight, when it finally happened, is how one-sided it was. I hit him with two or three punches to the body and kicked him in the ass as hard as I could, and that was it – he did not even attempt to strike back once I began hitting him. The bully, it turned out, was a coward: I probably could have gotten him off my back much sooner, and spared myself much suffering, if I'd only acted sooner. But the lesson had to be learned. It was not I who was the telephone tough guy, it was him. But in that hot, sticky summer day three years earlier, I realized I was not yet prepared to fight my tormentor, so I kept my mouth shut. Any excursion on Twitter makes me wish millions of others would do the same.
– Clive Cussler
It was the last day of seventh grade, and I had a decision to make. A particularly ugly-minded bully, who had been one of the banes of my existence from September of 1984 until June of 1985, was getting off the bus about 100 yards away. I hated this kid enough to have killed him if I'd had the nerve, means and opportunity (fortunately for both of us, I was lacking all three), so I had settled on a much smaller-scale revenge. Specifically, I was going to shout a long stream of abuse at him, telling him exactly what I thought of his intelligence, hygine, family and prospects for future success: I was then going to run the very small distance, no more than 20 yards, to the safety of my own home. According to my plan, the bully would have all summer to brood over the names I had called him while I remained torturously out of his reach. Like most bullies he was astonishingly egotistical and vain, and the thought of grubby little Miles Watson, with his greasy hair and his hand-me-down clothes, having gotten the better of him, even for an instant, would have poisoned his entire summer. The thought of it warmed the cuckles of my twelve year-old heart.
When the moment came, however – that is, when I saw the bully emerge from the bus, such nerve as I did possess failed me. It was not precisely cowardice that froze my vocal chords, but the realization that my plan might actually be too successful for my own good. The bully would indeed have three months to brood, and by the time we met again, on the first day of eighth grade, he might concievably make it his first-day priority to exact a terrible, well-thought-out vengeance upon me.
So in the end I said nothing and trudged home. It was a discouraging way to end a bad year and I felt very much like the coward I believed myself to be.
Cut to the present day. Like just about everyone else on the planet, grown up Miles Watson has a cellular phone – a “mobile device” as they are more accurately called. On this device are many applications which I use every day. There are quite a few others I rarely bother with but keep as a kind of security blanket. There is only which comes and goes, being downloaded only to be erased a few days later in a fit of disgust...and then, inevitability, downloaded again. There is a name for this app. It is called Twitter.
As a man who grew up without mobile devices or the Internet, I entered my online phase of life the way a man enters a very cold body of water: toes first. I didn't get an e-mail account until 1998, and did not use a cell phone until 2004. The existence of my Facebook account is owed entirely to the actions of three female members of the York College swim team who barricaded themselves in my room one night in 2006 and started up a profile for me against my will (it was three days before they even gave me the password). Nevertheless, once I sank into the strange waters of cyberspace, I found myself reluctant to leave. E-mail was convenient, and for a long time so was instant messaging. Cell phones were an even larger convenience, and Facebook, while annoying, was also quite...well, convenient. Of Twitter I knew nothing until 2008, when I first heard it mentioned on the radio. People were terribly enthusiastic about it, which seemed to me sufficient cause to avoid it – and avoid it I did, for almost ten years. Then I went and became an author.
Whoops.
In the old days – meaning, I'm sad to say, the time I grew up in – it was sufficient for an author simply to write. Everything else, including personal appearances, book signings, guest spots on television, etc. and so on, were handled for him by his publisher. But things have changed, and authors of all kinds are expected to spend enormities of time online, drumming up free publicity by posting their every thought on social media platforms...just like Twitter. It is because of Twitter that I know much Stephen King hates Donald Trump. It is because of Twitter that I know how cantankerous William Shatner really is. And it is because of Twitter that I realize how few people in positions of political power know how to spell at the level of a sixth grader. But this is not my beef with the platform. The tweets I've read from hockey players, actors, comedians, writers, politicians, pundits, and so on are not any more ungrammatical or poorly written on that platform than they are on Facebook or Instagram. No, what differentiates Twitter from the others, what makes me walk away from whatever following I manage to build and then come back, weeks or months later, to make a half-hearted attempt to rebuild it before I inevitably abandon it again, is a phenomenon directly related to the incident I recounted at the beginning of this blog. This phenomenon exists everywhere on the internet -- it is as ubiquitously found online as Old Bay is on the shelves of Maryland crab shacks -- but it seems to live on Twitter, just as the devil is reputed to live in hell.
When I was a kid, the expression “telephone tough guy” was what “keyboard warrior” is today. It described someone who talked tough from a distance, i.e. when there was no actual possibility of being held to account for his words. Examples of telephone tough-guy-ism in the 80s were not just limited to yelling abuse over a phone line: it included shouting invective at visiting teams at football games, shouting similar nonsense at pedestrians from the passenger seat of your best friend's car, spewing fighting words on a playground when you had five or six friends to make sure no fist every touched you in retaliation, or performing some aggressive act on a stronger person an instant before an authority figure like a teacher, parent or cop walked into view. Simply put, it was an act of calculated cowardice.
In 1985, I wanted to yell the ugliest insults I could think of that at the afformentioned bully. I knew I could get to my door faster than he could get to me, and I knew our paths would never cross during the summer, giving me a temporary victory over him. But I also knew that three months down the road, if he remembered the insults, he might finally exact vengeance, a vengeance which might be all the more terrible because he'd had to wait 90 long days to get it. So I kept my mouth shut and felt myself a coward. It was only much later that I realized how prudent, and in a certain sense, how principled, my decision had actually been.
Growing up in the 80s, I came from a time where those who talked the talk, but could not walk the walk, were an especially hated and despised group. They ranked far beneath mere cowards or weaklings in social status. It was considered much nobler to be the downtrodden victim of bullying than it was to be the sort who talked a lot of smoke around friends and classmates when it was safe to do so, and then quietly handed over his lunch money when the bully approached. A weakling, after all, was only a weakling: a weakling who pretended to strength was also a fake, which was infinitely worse. He was held in contempt by both bullies and by his fellow weaklings, who at least had the dignity of being who they were. I knew, standing at my bus stop in June of 1985, that I was unwilling to engage my bully in single combat. I knew my petty revenge could only be exacted if I did it from a distance and then ran and, in essence, let geography allow me to hide until the following September. In short, I knew I could only score off of the bully by becoming a telephone tough guy. I was unwilling to do this. As Xander Harris once said on Buffy: “I'm not doing this. I have my pride. Granted, I don't have a lot of my pride, but I have enough that I'm not doing this.”
What does this have to do with Twitter, you ask? Much. Very much indeed. You see, every time I dip a toe into the Twitterverse, what strikes me immediately is the change in standards which has occurred between 1985 and 2019. The telephone tough guy, a.k.a. the keyboard warrior, is no longer a despised, ridiculed minority, held in contempt even by the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Oh no. On Twitter, the model of values is set upon its head, and those who talk the most shit are held in the highest esteem. Every day, these people, from both sexes and all races and every possible walk of life, send out tweets calculated to humiliate or to enrage people they have never met and have little to no prospect of meeting – and the more successful they are at it, the larger their following becomes. It scarcely matters whether the subject at hand is politics, sex, race, religion, movies, books, comedy, music – the idea seems to be to signal as many virtues as you can while simultaneously spewing as much vitriol as possible. This in itself might not be so bad if, say, Twitter were like the UFC. In the UFC, a fighter can boast about his or her abilities as much as they want, and at the same time insult and provoke every other fighter on the roster in the nastiest, most juvenile way possible: the critical difference is that a trash-talking fighter must sooner or later be locked into an eight-sided cage with the person they have insulted, giving said individual the chance to smash them in the face and choke them unconscious. It doesn't necessarily make communication between fighters more civilized, but it does force the fighters to be prepared to back up what they say online...which makes them, in my mind, nobler creatures than the trash-talking cowards you otherwise encounter on Twitter.
What it boils down to, really, is the age-old idea of being held accountable for what you say. Whenever I watch the old TV mini-series NORTH AND SOUTH, what strikes me is the way dueling culture influenced manners in antebellum America. The elaborate courtesy that strikes us all as so affected and ridiculous today, was simply a by-product of a society where it was common, even expected, for men who had been offended to demand satisfaction in the form of a duel to the death. The fear of being called out had softening effects on speech, on manners, even on the written word. Of course I am not quite old enough to remember the antebellum South, but some feeble, lingering echo of the old conceptions of honor did still resonate in the Maryland of my childhood. They manifested in a series of unwritten rules known to all children, foremost of which was: don't insult anyone you aren't prepared to fight.
Some people may ask: is it a good thing that people should go around in fear that a fast lip might become a fat one? For me, the answer is yes. The truth is that we live in a world where the idea that actions have consequences has been steadily eroding for decades. The extent to which it has crumbled is easy enough to prove by exploring any Twitter feed for just five minutes. On Twitter, everyone feels free to fire as many missiles as they wish in any direction they choose, secure in the knowledge there will be no actual consequence, and that they will never be physically confronted by the people they are attacking. This consequence-free environment has emboldened the cowardly, armed the feckless, and put ersatz strength into weaklings whose opinions would ordinarily and rightfully be disregarded. It has fostered an atmosphere where not the most intelligent, the most principled or the most reasonable voices are heard, but merely the loudest and most obnoxious. And it has acted as a subtle but persistent cut into the foundation stones of any healthy society: respect, toughness, and personal accountability. Freedom of speech is vital to any healthy human society, but freedom of speech has always been accompanied by the concomitant knowledge that words are dangerous things, and like any dangerous thing, have to be handled carefully and responsibly. This is precisely what has been destroyed during my own lifetime -- the idea that you might actually have to cash the check with your ass that you wrote with your mouth. The fact is that a lot more people need to be punched in the mouth for what they Tweet. The pain and humiliation would prove valuable lessons, one of which is: don't start what you can't finish.
It so happens that some years after the incident in question, I finally put the boots to the bully of this story. It happened in a hallway in high school, probably in 1988, and it was immensely satisfying. Passing me in the hallway, he made as if to hit me: when I flinched, he smirked and muttered, “Bitch!” It was the wrong day to make that remark, and I jumped him, right then and there. Yet what struck me about the fight, when it finally happened, is how one-sided it was. I hit him with two or three punches to the body and kicked him in the ass as hard as I could, and that was it – he did not even attempt to strike back once I began hitting him. The bully, it turned out, was a coward: I probably could have gotten him off my back much sooner, and spared myself much suffering, if I'd only acted sooner. But the lesson had to be learned. It was not I who was the telephone tough guy, it was him. But in that hot, sticky summer day three years earlier, I realized I was not yet prepared to fight my tormentor, so I kept my mouth shut. Any excursion on Twitter makes me wish millions of others would do the same.
February 20, 2019
The Gift of Burbank, or; Things I Learned From My Orange Tree
Six years ago I moved from Los Angeles to Burbank. As the car drives, that is a distance of about 10.5 miles. In practical terms, it is roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Los Angeles, especially the area in which I previously resided, known as Mid-City West, is densely populated, noisy, traffic-congested and more or less urban in feel. The neighborhoods around you -- Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood proper, the Miracle Mile and so forth -- are all along the most famous and the most heavily visited in the city. Real estate is at a premium and getting more expensive by the minute (when I moved into Park La Brea in 2010, I paid $1,420 for a one-bedroom apartment: as of today the same apartment goes for about $2,000). Just about every aspiring actor, comedian, musician, model, writer, director and producer who comes to the city settles in this vicinity, at least for awhile, reasoning that it is best to be at the epicenter of the entertainment industry than somewhere on its fringe. The young trust-fund jockeys and bunnies of the West Side also come here to "rough it," and on the other end of the scale, so does seemingly every homeless person, schizophrenic, and drug addict not presently residing on Skid Row. Sherlock Holmes' buddy and my possible relation, Dr. John Watson, once observed that London was "that great cesspool to which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." Well, Los Angeles can claim similar honors. If it's noisy, dirty, snobbish or entitled, it's here.
The net effect of all of this gravitation is that long-time residents, like myself, become somewhat inured to it all -- the press and police helicopters blasting overhead at treetop altitude for hours at a time; the expensive cars whose speaker-systems rattle windows for blocks in every direction at 3 AM; the winos screaming delirious nonsense outside your window; the buses jammed with tourists who stare at you like a beast in a cage as they trundle past. You don't like it -- you don't like the stench of ozone, human piss and rotting garbage, either -- but you get used to it. The endless shriek of sirens, the enormous traffic jams, the road construction that never seems to build or repair anything, the fact that your gym or favorite restaurant is closed two days out of every seven so someone can shoot a movie there, it's all just so much white noise.
It is only when you move to a sleepy studio community like Burbank that you begin to understand how traumatized you were by all those years amid the cacophony. This awareness strikes you almost the moment the moving truck drives away in a cloud of dust, because even the dust in Burbank is different: it is actual, organic dirt particle of the sort God allegedly made, and not pulverized concrete and asphalt. In Burbank, which is climatically a semi-desert, you nevertheless realize you are closer to nature than you can ever be in L.A. -- there are trees and shrubs and grasses everywhere -- and this, along with the lesser congestion and population density, give the air a different, more natural, cleaner taste.
When the truck is gone you stand on what is now your street, and experience a sense of confusion whose cause takes a moment to determine. You eventually realize the source: silence. In Los Angeles silence is an incredibly precious and rare commodity. There is no time of day or night at any time of the year where you are likely to encounter it. Summer is noisier than what passes for winter, but both are quite cacaphonous. Here in Burbank, at seven o'clock on a summer weekday, the only sound you hear are insects, and even they are keeping it down.
That night you require a certain amount of white noise to ease you to sleep: you're used to sirens and choppers and speakers and arguments resonating through your windows and walls, after all: silence is eerie. But you soon get used to it, and the sense of relaxation you discover within your muscles as you rise in the morning and go about your business makes you realize, with a start, that you have been carrying yourself in a state of coiled-spring tension for longer than you can remember. In L.A., just walking down the street to buy a cup of coffee carries with it the element of risk: you could be hit by a car (I have been, and nearly struck on two other occasions) or you could be accosted by a lunatic demanding money who won't take no for an answer. Because of this, you find yourself perpetually tense, perpetually at-the-ready for some kind of minor confrontation. But there is no need for this in Burbank: as you soon discover, confrontation of any kind here is rare, and even when I came eye-to-eye with a coyote in the middle of the street one night, he politely padded away without causing any mischief.
Burbank being a semi-desert climate, the summers are long (about 6 months in duration), and in the words of Michael Caine, "insanely hot," with triple-digit temperatures practically the norm. For someone like me, of pure North European ancestry, that poses a lot of problems; but there are benefits. The climate here is perfect for flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and this fact is how I became acquainted with my orange tree.
Like my rosebushes, it came with the house, and sits in the extreme left-hand corner of my enormous yard (enormous yards for tiny homes are the norm in the San Fernando Valley: why I have no idea, with the possible exception of the fact that this town has an enormous number of dogs). Possessing an orange tree in Burbank is no big deal. This climate excels at producing citrus plants of all kinds, as well as roses -- as I said before, in Burbank you feel closer to nature than you ever will in L.A. In my immediate neighborhood, in addition to orange trees, there also grow pomegranates, lemons, grapefruit, clementines, and limes, all in great profusion. But in my own yard, I have an orange tree.
To be perfectly honest, it is really more a large bush than a tree. I don't suppose the trunk is nearly as thick as my thigh, and its general shape is cubic rather than the T-shape of your average tree. To look at it in the offseason is to look past it: it is simply a big green mass in the corner of the yard, under which my cat occasionally likes to shade himself. But twice a year -- every 6 - 7 months like clockwork -- the tree begins to bud with emerald-green fruits the size of acorns. The baby oranges stay in this modest and unappealing shape and color for what seem like weeks: then, almost overnight, they burst into much larger fruits of the traditional color, and before long can be picked and eaten with abandon. Based on my six years of tending the plant, I would estimate that each "harvest" yields an average of about 70 oranges, but the crop varies depending on a number of factors, like the amount of rainfall or the temperature at the time the fruits blossom. But what is remarkable is not the size of the crop relative to the tree, but the flavor of the fruit.
Oranges have always been among my favorite fruits, but until I picked a ripe one off the vine, peeled it and ate it while the fragrant smell of the blossoms was still on the skin, I had never really experienced what it was like to taste one of the blessed things. My father, who had grown up in Missouri and Illinois, had often insisted when I was growing up that we only eat corn bought directly from local Maryland farmers, because "only fresh corn has any taste to it." Well, he might have added that this also applies to oranges. Biting into one of these is an explosion of flavor that makes your taste buds cramp: it is as far from the tepid suggestion of flavor produced by a store-bought, refrigerated, imported orange as a Guinness is from a Miller Lite. Eating them was a wake-up call that triggered in me a very protective attitude toward the tree.
Now, I grew up in two places -- Wilmette, Illinois and Bethesda, Maryland -- which had boisenberry trees, and believe me when I tell you I spent every summer both cramming the ripe red-and-blue-black berries down my gullet and getting yelled at for tracking the ink-like juices into the house, where they (permanently) stained all and sundry. But as a kid, I never looked at those trees as anything but a kind of benny of summer, manna which fell not from heaven, but from the backyard. I didn't give the trees themselves a second thought, and I had no qualms about hacking away inconvenient branches. As a grown man, my relationship with growing things in my own yard has changed.
In both Pagan, Eastern and Native American and Aboriginal philosophy, there is a great deal of emphasis on the relationship and interconnection between man and nature. In Japan, the samurai were expected to draw conclusions from what they saw in nature; in China, many styles of kung fu were developed by observing the movements of animals and insects. Among First Nations tribes in the Americas, and among Aborigines and European Pagans, there is a commonality in the way the tribes looked at the cycles of the seasons, the behaviors of the animals, the land itself, and even the weather: as parts of a unified whole. From their surroundings, they drew inspiration from their folklore and spiritual beliefs, and to some extent even their way of hunting and fighting. Now, I'm not claiming I sit beneath the orange tree in white robes as the sun rises, murmuring snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom: but I am saying that the twice-yearly ritual of harvesting the tree has proven surprisingly educational. Some of the things which tending the tree have taught me:
Patience. I am not a patient man. Never have been. Probably never will be. When I was studying tae kwon do, my main focus was on the next belt test -- and the next and the next, until I could finally tie the black one around my waist. I was in such a rush for that moment that when it arrived I realized I had failed to savor the process which had allowed it to become possible. It was the same way with the oranges -- months of impatient waiting, then a sudden orgy of orange-eating, a kind of debauchery of citrus. However, as the years have gone on, my sense of impatience has been lessened, in part because I have come to understand that the long intervals between me eating the last of the fruit (which I did yesterday) and me eating the first orange of the following harvest (probably August or September of this year) are actually important parts of the ritual. When you're a kid, you wish every day could be Christmas: it's not until you're older that you realize that it's precisely the fact that Christmas comes but once a year which makes it special. As Major Charles Emerson Winchester III once said on an episode of M*A*S*H, "Anticipation is in itself a sensory delight." To my surprise, it really is.
Compassion. Like most people, I rarely think of plant life as being worthy of, or even a candidate for, compassion. Plants are alive, of course, but because they are a form of life utterly alien to us -- no brain, no nervous system, no bones or blood -- we tend to look upon them as simple phenomena and not living beings which allow us to exist. A few years ago California was in the grip of a severe drought which parched the soil to the consistency of dryer dust: a lot of lawns died, along with most of the non-indigenous flora, and even the palms and yucca plants were drooping. Although I was extremely punctilious in obeying water restrictions in every other area of life -- dishes, laundry, showers, cooking, all of it -- I braved the furnace-like noonday sun and triple digit temps to make sure the orange tree got its share of H2O via my garden hose. I am of 100% Nordic-Gaelic-Anglo-Saxon descent, so the Burbank sun is my mortal enemy, but damned if I didn't roast myself a redder shade of lobster making sure that thirsty sumbitch got all the water she needed. Was self-interest at play here? Yes -- initially. I wanted my damned oranges and no sorry-ass drought was gonna stop me from getting them. But watering the orange tree led me to notice the withered condition of the roses, the yucca plants, the various cacti and so on, who were also silently pleading for relief. Before long I could be seen furtively watering all of them, usually with buckets filled by the otherwise annoyingly leaky bathroom faucet. I did not like the idea of them dying of thirst: I began to see them as living creatures in need of assistance, not scenery.
Generosity. Everyone has a besetting sin. Mine -- one of mine, I should say -- is greed. I'm not sure where this impulse came from, but I have it in abundance. When I first tasted the oranges, I couldn't get over how good they were, and this led me to pick them in large numbers. I clucked over my hoard of fruit like a dragon over his treasure, and only very grudgingly gave away individual samples to friends and relatives. Because I can only eat so many oranges, however, eventually I noticed that some of the fruits were going bad before I could get to them -- rotting and going to waste because I didn't have the heart to share them. This was embarrassing, so I gradually forced myself to become less parsimonious and to give them away in much larger numbers, even mailing them across the country to friends and family. Of the last crop, I'd estimate at least 30 went to other people, which is quite an increase from my original figure of zero. Of course, about a half a dozen still went bad, so I have room for improvement...but at least I recognize this, which is progress.
Respect. I used to consider the orange tree simply another thing which grew on my lawn, like the roses. Then I began to see it as a gift which provides me, on a yearly basis, with between 100 - 150 delicious pieces of fruit. Now I see it for what it is: a generous friend. I have eaten the oranges off the tree, I have crushed them into juice, I have used them to flavor water, I have made them into a crude form of jam, I have curried favor with them and bartered them for other locally-grown fruits.
I have done all of this without spending a single penny. Except during times of drought, orange tree asks nothing of me and wants nothing from me. Anything that can provide so much and ask for next to zero ought to be treated reverently, and I do try do just exactly that.
Humility. First Nations/Aboriginal tribes tend to maintain that they do not own land; they belong to it. Whenever I feel greed in relation to the coming harvest ("Mine! All mine! Bwahahaha!") I remember that the time will come -- perhaps even this year -- when I will no longer live here and the orange tree will no longer be "mine." Someone else, or perhaps several someones, or perhaps no one at all (you'd be surprised how many nitwits simply let their fruit rot on their front lawn) will reap the benefits. Every time I pick one of the oranges, I keep in mind that having access to the tree at all was either an accident or a gift, and like everything else in life, including life itself, it is temporary. This tree is probably very young -- as I said, it's more of a bush than a tree, and not very large -- and according to my research may live for a century or more, which is probably far longer than I will last. Will it remember me 80 years from now? Was it ever aware of me at all? I don't know. I never will. And in spite of my human ego, which wants desperately to be remembered and revered, I have learned to take comfort in this.
You see, humans tend to think of life as a play -- with a beginning, middle, and end. We seldom see ourselves as part of a larger community, cells in a body, so to speak, whose individual life-cycles simply transpire within the much larger organism of life itself, which on this planet is billions of years old. But each of us is in a sense only one link in an enormous DNA chain stretching back through the ages to some unimaginably ancient past: even this orange tree, which will probably outlive me by many years, has a progenitor, and with every fruit it grows, tries to seed the ground with future offspring. Individually, we die. Collectively, we go on.
I told you before I don't sit beneath the tree mumbling yogic mantras beneath the rising sun, and right now I probably sound as if I do. But among its other properties, the orange tree in my yard is a teacher, and one of the things it taught me is to share.
Los Angeles, especially the area in which I previously resided, known as Mid-City West, is densely populated, noisy, traffic-congested and more or less urban in feel. The neighborhoods around you -- Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood proper, the Miracle Mile and so forth -- are all along the most famous and the most heavily visited in the city. Real estate is at a premium and getting more expensive by the minute (when I moved into Park La Brea in 2010, I paid $1,420 for a one-bedroom apartment: as of today the same apartment goes for about $2,000). Just about every aspiring actor, comedian, musician, model, writer, director and producer who comes to the city settles in this vicinity, at least for awhile, reasoning that it is best to be at the epicenter of the entertainment industry than somewhere on its fringe. The young trust-fund jockeys and bunnies of the West Side also come here to "rough it," and on the other end of the scale, so does seemingly every homeless person, schizophrenic, and drug addict not presently residing on Skid Row. Sherlock Holmes' buddy and my possible relation, Dr. John Watson, once observed that London was "that great cesspool to which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." Well, Los Angeles can claim similar honors. If it's noisy, dirty, snobbish or entitled, it's here.
The net effect of all of this gravitation is that long-time residents, like myself, become somewhat inured to it all -- the press and police helicopters blasting overhead at treetop altitude for hours at a time; the expensive cars whose speaker-systems rattle windows for blocks in every direction at 3 AM; the winos screaming delirious nonsense outside your window; the buses jammed with tourists who stare at you like a beast in a cage as they trundle past. You don't like it -- you don't like the stench of ozone, human piss and rotting garbage, either -- but you get used to it. The endless shriek of sirens, the enormous traffic jams, the road construction that never seems to build or repair anything, the fact that your gym or favorite restaurant is closed two days out of every seven so someone can shoot a movie there, it's all just so much white noise.
It is only when you move to a sleepy studio community like Burbank that you begin to understand how traumatized you were by all those years amid the cacophony. This awareness strikes you almost the moment the moving truck drives away in a cloud of dust, because even the dust in Burbank is different: it is actual, organic dirt particle of the sort God allegedly made, and not pulverized concrete and asphalt. In Burbank, which is climatically a semi-desert, you nevertheless realize you are closer to nature than you can ever be in L.A. -- there are trees and shrubs and grasses everywhere -- and this, along with the lesser congestion and population density, give the air a different, more natural, cleaner taste.
When the truck is gone you stand on what is now your street, and experience a sense of confusion whose cause takes a moment to determine. You eventually realize the source: silence. In Los Angeles silence is an incredibly precious and rare commodity. There is no time of day or night at any time of the year where you are likely to encounter it. Summer is noisier than what passes for winter, but both are quite cacaphonous. Here in Burbank, at seven o'clock on a summer weekday, the only sound you hear are insects, and even they are keeping it down.
That night you require a certain amount of white noise to ease you to sleep: you're used to sirens and choppers and speakers and arguments resonating through your windows and walls, after all: silence is eerie. But you soon get used to it, and the sense of relaxation you discover within your muscles as you rise in the morning and go about your business makes you realize, with a start, that you have been carrying yourself in a state of coiled-spring tension for longer than you can remember. In L.A., just walking down the street to buy a cup of coffee carries with it the element of risk: you could be hit by a car (I have been, and nearly struck on two other occasions) or you could be accosted by a lunatic demanding money who won't take no for an answer. Because of this, you find yourself perpetually tense, perpetually at-the-ready for some kind of minor confrontation. But there is no need for this in Burbank: as you soon discover, confrontation of any kind here is rare, and even when I came eye-to-eye with a coyote in the middle of the street one night, he politely padded away without causing any mischief.
Burbank being a semi-desert climate, the summers are long (about 6 months in duration), and in the words of Michael Caine, "insanely hot," with triple-digit temperatures practically the norm. For someone like me, of pure North European ancestry, that poses a lot of problems; but there are benefits. The climate here is perfect for flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and this fact is how I became acquainted with my orange tree.
Like my rosebushes, it came with the house, and sits in the extreme left-hand corner of my enormous yard (enormous yards for tiny homes are the norm in the San Fernando Valley: why I have no idea, with the possible exception of the fact that this town has an enormous number of dogs). Possessing an orange tree in Burbank is no big deal. This climate excels at producing citrus plants of all kinds, as well as roses -- as I said before, in Burbank you feel closer to nature than you ever will in L.A. In my immediate neighborhood, in addition to orange trees, there also grow pomegranates, lemons, grapefruit, clementines, and limes, all in great profusion. But in my own yard, I have an orange tree.
To be perfectly honest, it is really more a large bush than a tree. I don't suppose the trunk is nearly as thick as my thigh, and its general shape is cubic rather than the T-shape of your average tree. To look at it in the offseason is to look past it: it is simply a big green mass in the corner of the yard, under which my cat occasionally likes to shade himself. But twice a year -- every 6 - 7 months like clockwork -- the tree begins to bud with emerald-green fruits the size of acorns. The baby oranges stay in this modest and unappealing shape and color for what seem like weeks: then, almost overnight, they burst into much larger fruits of the traditional color, and before long can be picked and eaten with abandon. Based on my six years of tending the plant, I would estimate that each "harvest" yields an average of about 70 oranges, but the crop varies depending on a number of factors, like the amount of rainfall or the temperature at the time the fruits blossom. But what is remarkable is not the size of the crop relative to the tree, but the flavor of the fruit.
Oranges have always been among my favorite fruits, but until I picked a ripe one off the vine, peeled it and ate it while the fragrant smell of the blossoms was still on the skin, I had never really experienced what it was like to taste one of the blessed things. My father, who had grown up in Missouri and Illinois, had often insisted when I was growing up that we only eat corn bought directly from local Maryland farmers, because "only fresh corn has any taste to it." Well, he might have added that this also applies to oranges. Biting into one of these is an explosion of flavor that makes your taste buds cramp: it is as far from the tepid suggestion of flavor produced by a store-bought, refrigerated, imported orange as a Guinness is from a Miller Lite. Eating them was a wake-up call that triggered in me a very protective attitude toward the tree.
Now, I grew up in two places -- Wilmette, Illinois and Bethesda, Maryland -- which had boisenberry trees, and believe me when I tell you I spent every summer both cramming the ripe red-and-blue-black berries down my gullet and getting yelled at for tracking the ink-like juices into the house, where they (permanently) stained all and sundry. But as a kid, I never looked at those trees as anything but a kind of benny of summer, manna which fell not from heaven, but from the backyard. I didn't give the trees themselves a second thought, and I had no qualms about hacking away inconvenient branches. As a grown man, my relationship with growing things in my own yard has changed.
In both Pagan, Eastern and Native American and Aboriginal philosophy, there is a great deal of emphasis on the relationship and interconnection between man and nature. In Japan, the samurai were expected to draw conclusions from what they saw in nature; in China, many styles of kung fu were developed by observing the movements of animals and insects. Among First Nations tribes in the Americas, and among Aborigines and European Pagans, there is a commonality in the way the tribes looked at the cycles of the seasons, the behaviors of the animals, the land itself, and even the weather: as parts of a unified whole. From their surroundings, they drew inspiration from their folklore and spiritual beliefs, and to some extent even their way of hunting and fighting. Now, I'm not claiming I sit beneath the orange tree in white robes as the sun rises, murmuring snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom: but I am saying that the twice-yearly ritual of harvesting the tree has proven surprisingly educational. Some of the things which tending the tree have taught me:
Patience. I am not a patient man. Never have been. Probably never will be. When I was studying tae kwon do, my main focus was on the next belt test -- and the next and the next, until I could finally tie the black one around my waist. I was in such a rush for that moment that when it arrived I realized I had failed to savor the process which had allowed it to become possible. It was the same way with the oranges -- months of impatient waiting, then a sudden orgy of orange-eating, a kind of debauchery of citrus. However, as the years have gone on, my sense of impatience has been lessened, in part because I have come to understand that the long intervals between me eating the last of the fruit (which I did yesterday) and me eating the first orange of the following harvest (probably August or September of this year) are actually important parts of the ritual. When you're a kid, you wish every day could be Christmas: it's not until you're older that you realize that it's precisely the fact that Christmas comes but once a year which makes it special. As Major Charles Emerson Winchester III once said on an episode of M*A*S*H, "Anticipation is in itself a sensory delight." To my surprise, it really is.
Compassion. Like most people, I rarely think of plant life as being worthy of, or even a candidate for, compassion. Plants are alive, of course, but because they are a form of life utterly alien to us -- no brain, no nervous system, no bones or blood -- we tend to look upon them as simple phenomena and not living beings which allow us to exist. A few years ago California was in the grip of a severe drought which parched the soil to the consistency of dryer dust: a lot of lawns died, along with most of the non-indigenous flora, and even the palms and yucca plants were drooping. Although I was extremely punctilious in obeying water restrictions in every other area of life -- dishes, laundry, showers, cooking, all of it -- I braved the furnace-like noonday sun and triple digit temps to make sure the orange tree got its share of H2O via my garden hose. I am of 100% Nordic-Gaelic-Anglo-Saxon descent, so the Burbank sun is my mortal enemy, but damned if I didn't roast myself a redder shade of lobster making sure that thirsty sumbitch got all the water she needed. Was self-interest at play here? Yes -- initially. I wanted my damned oranges and no sorry-ass drought was gonna stop me from getting them. But watering the orange tree led me to notice the withered condition of the roses, the yucca plants, the various cacti and so on, who were also silently pleading for relief. Before long I could be seen furtively watering all of them, usually with buckets filled by the otherwise annoyingly leaky bathroom faucet. I did not like the idea of them dying of thirst: I began to see them as living creatures in need of assistance, not scenery.
Generosity. Everyone has a besetting sin. Mine -- one of mine, I should say -- is greed. I'm not sure where this impulse came from, but I have it in abundance. When I first tasted the oranges, I couldn't get over how good they were, and this led me to pick them in large numbers. I clucked over my hoard of fruit like a dragon over his treasure, and only very grudgingly gave away individual samples to friends and relatives. Because I can only eat so many oranges, however, eventually I noticed that some of the fruits were going bad before I could get to them -- rotting and going to waste because I didn't have the heart to share them. This was embarrassing, so I gradually forced myself to become less parsimonious and to give them away in much larger numbers, even mailing them across the country to friends and family. Of the last crop, I'd estimate at least 30 went to other people, which is quite an increase from my original figure of zero. Of course, about a half a dozen still went bad, so I have room for improvement...but at least I recognize this, which is progress.
Respect. I used to consider the orange tree simply another thing which grew on my lawn, like the roses. Then I began to see it as a gift which provides me, on a yearly basis, with between 100 - 150 delicious pieces of fruit. Now I see it for what it is: a generous friend. I have eaten the oranges off the tree, I have crushed them into juice, I have used them to flavor water, I have made them into a crude form of jam, I have curried favor with them and bartered them for other locally-grown fruits.
I have done all of this without spending a single penny. Except during times of drought, orange tree asks nothing of me and wants nothing from me. Anything that can provide so much and ask for next to zero ought to be treated reverently, and I do try do just exactly that.
Humility. First Nations/Aboriginal tribes tend to maintain that they do not own land; they belong to it. Whenever I feel greed in relation to the coming harvest ("Mine! All mine! Bwahahaha!") I remember that the time will come -- perhaps even this year -- when I will no longer live here and the orange tree will no longer be "mine." Someone else, or perhaps several someones, or perhaps no one at all (you'd be surprised how many nitwits simply let their fruit rot on their front lawn) will reap the benefits. Every time I pick one of the oranges, I keep in mind that having access to the tree at all was either an accident or a gift, and like everything else in life, including life itself, it is temporary. This tree is probably very young -- as I said, it's more of a bush than a tree, and not very large -- and according to my research may live for a century or more, which is probably far longer than I will last. Will it remember me 80 years from now? Was it ever aware of me at all? I don't know. I never will. And in spite of my human ego, which wants desperately to be remembered and revered, I have learned to take comfort in this.
You see, humans tend to think of life as a play -- with a beginning, middle, and end. We seldom see ourselves as part of a larger community, cells in a body, so to speak, whose individual life-cycles simply transpire within the much larger organism of life itself, which on this planet is billions of years old. But each of us is in a sense only one link in an enormous DNA chain stretching back through the ages to some unimaginably ancient past: even this orange tree, which will probably outlive me by many years, has a progenitor, and with every fruit it grows, tries to seed the ground with future offspring. Individually, we die. Collectively, we go on.
I told you before I don't sit beneath the tree mumbling yogic mantras beneath the rising sun, and right now I probably sound as if I do. But among its other properties, the orange tree in my yard is a teacher, and one of the things it taught me is to share.
February 6, 2019
My New Release
I think you all know by now that I am a lazy-ass at heart. Yes, I go hiking. Yes, I swim. Yes, I practice yoga (sometimes) and martial arts (other times). The truth is, however, that all these pastimes are simply preventive medicine, things I do to avoid becoming the sort of 900-lb blob that has to be cut out of his house and transported to the hospital in the back of a cattle truck. At the core of my being, I'm a lazy bastard and not an outdoorsman or fitness freak. I like to eat, I like to sit on the couch and watch Simon & Simon while sipping Irish whiskey and digesting legally prescribed marijuana edibles, and that's just the truth of it.
There is one area of my life, however, in which I am not only not lazy, but highly industrious: when it comes to writing, I work like goddamn stevedore. Thomas the Tank Engine's got nothing on me. "Prolific" is a pretty good descriptor of the pile of meat, bone and vital juice labeled Miles Girard Watson. But being prolific doesn't mean publishing prolifically. After a huge flurry of publications in 2016 -- two novels and a book of 13 short stories, several of which I wrote specifically for the collection -- I have only written. I have not published.
The reason for this is partly due to the fact that I so glutted the market with my works that only the first one, CAGE LIFE, really got any attention. It got a lot of attention, and continues to -- it's won two major awards and was runner-up to a third -- but its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, and the collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, have been somewhat neglected by yours truly in the advertising department. The bitterbrush truth of it is that I don't have the financial resources to promote all three books simultaneously. Releasing them in such close proximity was therefore probably a mistake, but as Ray Bradbury said, we build our wings on the way down. I'm still learning the process of marketing, even as I work my fingers to well-worn bone banging out more short stories, more novelettes, more novellas, and more novels.
One thing I have learned -- somewhat to my surprise -- is that a certain amount of social media crowing is necessary to drive sales. This is a surprise because when I dropped my first novel, I couldn't believe how little Facebook ads were worth in terms of actual units sold. Nearly every other marketing technique I tried was more effective that supposedly "vital" Facebook ads: in the end they seemed a total waste of money. And perhaps they still would be even if I were using them. A little trumpet fanfare on my own Facebook pages, however, plus a few mentions on Twitter and so forth, really drove sales of my last release, "Killing Time" -- my objective, to penetrate the top 100 Kindle sellers, was more than achieved when I briefly laid claim to the #17 slot.
Why am I mentioning this? Am I just humble-bragging my roundabout way to some distant point? No. I mention it because I have a new release to crow about, and while Goodreads is not social media, it is online, and has the benefit (unlike Facebook) of being composed entirely of people who actually like to read. So, to cases.
Today I released a novelette, "The Numbers Game," on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a novelette is a story of 7,500 - 17,000 words -- longer than a short story but shorter than a novella.) The pedigree of this tale is worthy of a few lines in itself, but before I get to that, here is its description as it reads on Amazon:
The Battle of Britain rages. London is in flames, and civilization itself totters on the brink. Does Pilot Officer Maurice Mickelwhite care? Not one damn. He may be one of the better fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force, but it's not by choice. Maurice is a mathematical genius, who, if not for Hitler, would be happily teaching algebra and calculus at university. To hell with the war! Maurice just wants his numbers.
Trouble is...the numbers also want him."
As you can see, "The Numbers Game" is a war story. As I hope you can discern from that rather terse description, it is also a comedy...a very black comedy about the statistical probability of surviving one of the deadliest trades on earth: flying combat.
Like many of my stories, it has very deep roots indeed. When I was still basically a child, no more than twelve or so, I read about an incident which supposedly happened to the Red Baron, Manfred von Richtofen, in which some tactless shitwit told him that he had already outlived his mathematical chances for survival and was living on borrowed time. Perhaps not coincidentally, the seemingly invincible flying ace, the greatest of WW1, was killed in action not long afterward. This got me thinking (even at twelve) about the contrast between the cold, statistical numbers and the hot reality of human psychology. Cut to April of 2017. I am visiting London with my family, in part because my brother invited me, in part to celebrate the British magazine ZEALOT SCRIPT awarding me their "Book of the Year" award for 2016. Lying in my bed in Battersea...or maybe it was Clapham, I never did get that straight and I'm not sure the English have, either...I was working on a story when, as these things do, the idea for another story suddenly ignited within my brain. Being in London, and having just visited the underground command center Churchill used during the Battle of Britain, my thoughts had turned to the great air war which raged over Europe between 1939 - 1945. At the same time, encountering English accents everyday -- and Welsh, and Northern Irish, and a few Scots and a Geordie or two -- I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite authors, Derek Robinson, a prolific Briton who penned some of the greatest war novels ever written (if you haven't read Piece of Cake or War Story, you really ought to), and who understands the psychology of the fighter pilot better than any other writer I've ever read. Finally, I'd also just finished the great actor Michael Caine's autobiography. Caine, who was born Maurice Mickelwhite, grew up during The Blitz in WW2, and knows a lot about what it's like to look up at the sky and see it filled with fire.
Out of all of this, then, came "The Numbers Game." It is the story of a man whose passion is mathematics, but who ends up flying combat against what seem to be unending hordes of German aircraft. Day in, day out, for weeks, months, and eventually, years, Maurice straps himself in to 5,600 lbs of Hawker Hurricane and flies against the best pilots in Hitler's aerial army. Some days he gets the better of them, and some days, they get the better of his mates. But Maurice always seems to make it. Soon, he begins to wonder: just how long can he make it? What is the maximum life expectancy of a fighter pilot in wartime? Is it possible for him to calculate the day, the very hour he himself will go down in flames?
If you read my books or my short stories, or even this blog, you already know that human behavior obsesses me. Like Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I consider myself "a student of human moves," a self-proclaimed expert on the human heart, and the reaction of more or less ordinary people to extreme stress has always been a source of fascination. For a fighter pilot flying combat on an almost daily, and in some cases a twice or thrice-daily, basis, the feeling that their last hour may be now is a constant experience. So too is the knowledge that death, when it comes, may not be swift and painless but instead fiery and terrible. When your squadron mates are getting killed left and right, sometimes literally in front of you, it's very hard to pretend you're immortal.
And what is the effect of all this stress, all this sudden and extreme terror, on the human mind, even a mind as disciplined and logical as Maurice Mickelwhite's? For the answer, at least my take on it anyway, you must read "The Numbers Game." But don't get annoyed at me. It's only 99 cents, and available instantaneously for download onto your Kindle, tablet, phone, or even your PC. And by this weekend, I hope to have a softcover version available for delivery via Amazon.
As I said at the beginning of this epistle, I work very hard at what I do: I just haven't been as prolific at publishing as I have at writing. Well, in
2019, I am endeavoring to share the fruit of these unseen labors with you.
Cheers.
Miles Watson
The Numbers Game
There is one area of my life, however, in which I am not only not lazy, but highly industrious: when it comes to writing, I work like goddamn stevedore. Thomas the Tank Engine's got nothing on me. "Prolific" is a pretty good descriptor of the pile of meat, bone and vital juice labeled Miles Girard Watson. But being prolific doesn't mean publishing prolifically. After a huge flurry of publications in 2016 -- two novels and a book of 13 short stories, several of which I wrote specifically for the collection -- I have only written. I have not published.
The reason for this is partly due to the fact that I so glutted the market with my works that only the first one, CAGE LIFE, really got any attention. It got a lot of attention, and continues to -- it's won two major awards and was runner-up to a third -- but its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, and the collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, have been somewhat neglected by yours truly in the advertising department. The bitterbrush truth of it is that I don't have the financial resources to promote all three books simultaneously. Releasing them in such close proximity was therefore probably a mistake, but as Ray Bradbury said, we build our wings on the way down. I'm still learning the process of marketing, even as I work my fingers to well-worn bone banging out more short stories, more novelettes, more novellas, and more novels.
One thing I have learned -- somewhat to my surprise -- is that a certain amount of social media crowing is necessary to drive sales. This is a surprise because when I dropped my first novel, I couldn't believe how little Facebook ads were worth in terms of actual units sold. Nearly every other marketing technique I tried was more effective that supposedly "vital" Facebook ads: in the end they seemed a total waste of money. And perhaps they still would be even if I were using them. A little trumpet fanfare on my own Facebook pages, however, plus a few mentions on Twitter and so forth, really drove sales of my last release, "Killing Time" -- my objective, to penetrate the top 100 Kindle sellers, was more than achieved when I briefly laid claim to the #17 slot.
Why am I mentioning this? Am I just humble-bragging my roundabout way to some distant point? No. I mention it because I have a new release to crow about, and while Goodreads is not social media, it is online, and has the benefit (unlike Facebook) of being composed entirely of people who actually like to read. So, to cases.
Today I released a novelette, "The Numbers Game," on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a novelette is a story of 7,500 - 17,000 words -- longer than a short story but shorter than a novella.) The pedigree of this tale is worthy of a few lines in itself, but before I get to that, here is its description as it reads on Amazon:
The Battle of Britain rages. London is in flames, and civilization itself totters on the brink. Does Pilot Officer Maurice Mickelwhite care? Not one damn. He may be one of the better fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force, but it's not by choice. Maurice is a mathematical genius, who, if not for Hitler, would be happily teaching algebra and calculus at university. To hell with the war! Maurice just wants his numbers.
Trouble is...the numbers also want him."
As you can see, "The Numbers Game" is a war story. As I hope you can discern from that rather terse description, it is also a comedy...a very black comedy about the statistical probability of surviving one of the deadliest trades on earth: flying combat.
Like many of my stories, it has very deep roots indeed. When I was still basically a child, no more than twelve or so, I read about an incident which supposedly happened to the Red Baron, Manfred von Richtofen, in which some tactless shitwit told him that he had already outlived his mathematical chances for survival and was living on borrowed time. Perhaps not coincidentally, the seemingly invincible flying ace, the greatest of WW1, was killed in action not long afterward. This got me thinking (even at twelve) about the contrast between the cold, statistical numbers and the hot reality of human psychology. Cut to April of 2017. I am visiting London with my family, in part because my brother invited me, in part to celebrate the British magazine ZEALOT SCRIPT awarding me their "Book of the Year" award for 2016. Lying in my bed in Battersea...or maybe it was Clapham, I never did get that straight and I'm not sure the English have, either...I was working on a story when, as these things do, the idea for another story suddenly ignited within my brain. Being in London, and having just visited the underground command center Churchill used during the Battle of Britain, my thoughts had turned to the great air war which raged over Europe between 1939 - 1945. At the same time, encountering English accents everyday -- and Welsh, and Northern Irish, and a few Scots and a Geordie or two -- I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite authors, Derek Robinson, a prolific Briton who penned some of the greatest war novels ever written (if you haven't read Piece of Cake or War Story, you really ought to), and who understands the psychology of the fighter pilot better than any other writer I've ever read. Finally, I'd also just finished the great actor Michael Caine's autobiography. Caine, who was born Maurice Mickelwhite, grew up during The Blitz in WW2, and knows a lot about what it's like to look up at the sky and see it filled with fire.
Out of all of this, then, came "The Numbers Game." It is the story of a man whose passion is mathematics, but who ends up flying combat against what seem to be unending hordes of German aircraft. Day in, day out, for weeks, months, and eventually, years, Maurice straps himself in to 5,600 lbs of Hawker Hurricane and flies against the best pilots in Hitler's aerial army. Some days he gets the better of them, and some days, they get the better of his mates. But Maurice always seems to make it. Soon, he begins to wonder: just how long can he make it? What is the maximum life expectancy of a fighter pilot in wartime? Is it possible for him to calculate the day, the very hour he himself will go down in flames?
If you read my books or my short stories, or even this blog, you already know that human behavior obsesses me. Like Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I consider myself "a student of human moves," a self-proclaimed expert on the human heart, and the reaction of more or less ordinary people to extreme stress has always been a source of fascination. For a fighter pilot flying combat on an almost daily, and in some cases a twice or thrice-daily, basis, the feeling that their last hour may be now is a constant experience. So too is the knowledge that death, when it comes, may not be swift and painless but instead fiery and terrible. When your squadron mates are getting killed left and right, sometimes literally in front of you, it's very hard to pretend you're immortal.
And what is the effect of all this stress, all this sudden and extreme terror, on the human mind, even a mind as disciplined and logical as Maurice Mickelwhite's? For the answer, at least my take on it anyway, you must read "The Numbers Game." But don't get annoyed at me. It's only 99 cents, and available instantaneously for download onto your Kindle, tablet, phone, or even your PC. And by this weekend, I hope to have a softcover version available for delivery via Amazon.
As I said at the beginning of this epistle, I work very hard at what I do: I just haven't been as prolific at publishing as I have at writing. Well, in
2019, I am endeavoring to share the fruit of these unseen labors with you.
Cheers.
Miles Watson
The Numbers Game
January 21, 2019
EVERYBODY'S INDIGENOUS
Many years ago, when I was still in college, I accompanied a fraternity brother of mine to Baltimore to take the police department entrance exam. I had no desire whatever to become a member of the BCPD, but one of my criminal justice professors had made taking a police exam part of his curriculum. Tired and hung-over, I stood with my friend in the lobby of some city government building in Baltimore, discussing the grading curve on the test. A white guy nearby was grumbling that black people got an automatic five points added to their score; he suggested, a bit aggressively, that he ought to collect the same bonus, because “my ancestors come from Africa, too.”
“Everybody's ancestors come from Africa,” I said with a sigh.
“Right.” He said. “We're all Africans. So why can't we [white folks] get the goddamned bonus, too?”
This impolitic and rather silly remark had the benefit of being, by then-accepted scientific and paleoanthropological consensus, the virtue of being true, or at least very likely. Although the origin of archaic humans in Africa is not considered a fact, and recently some have begun to argue that we actually may have hailed from the Middle East, “out of Africa” is the most widely accepted theory and the the one with the most physical evidence to back itself up. The oldest homo sapien fossils yet discovered come from Africa (specifically Morocco), as do the bones of “Lucy,” the oldest of our ape-like hominin ancestors, which were excavated in Ethiopia. In fact, it is posited by those in a position to posit that all modern humans have a single common ancestor who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.
Twenty years after the incident in Baltimore, I was attending a house party in Los Angeles, when my host, a young white woman, remarked that she would like to “travel and spend time with indigenous people.” Half-facetiously, half-seriously, I replied, “You mean like, the Irish?”
Irritated, she said, “I said indigenous people, like the Aborigines in Australia.”
“What – the Irish aren't indigenous people?”
“No. They migrated from continental Europe.”
“Right. And the Aborigines migrated from Southeast Asia.”
“Forty thousand years ago.”
“Well, the Irish migrated Europe like 13,000 years ago. How long does a people have to be in a place to be considered indigenous?”
My host had no answer, and over the course of our discussion, I began to realize that she had never really considered what the word “indigenous” means. Few of us do. The dictionary definition – “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” – seems obvious and self-explanatory, but as I think I have just demonstrated, in regards to human beings, it is anything but. As an exemplar of this, another incident: when I was in college, one of my fraternity brothers, a black guy from South Africa, scoffed at the notion that white South Africans could, in fact, be Africans. “They're Europeans,” he told me. “Colonists!”
“Well, they have lived there for 400 years,” I replied.
“So what? My ancestors have lived there since the beginning of time!”
I understood his point. Still, I wasn't sure if the underlying question had been answered. Exactly how long, I wondered, would Europeans have to live in Africa to be considered African again? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Twenty-five? How long did the so-called “Native Americans,” who were not native to America but technically Asians (having come, theoretically, from Siberia, i.e. North Asia), have to reside in the Americas to be “native?” And how long did they have to remain in Asia before that to be considered Asians and not Indians or Middle-Easterners or Europeans? Who sets these rules, and how are they set?
If modern humans evolved in Africa, then migrated outward across the Middle East to Europe and Asia and, eventually, over the rest of the globe, this makes every human's ancestry, including racial supremacists who find it terribly inconvenient, African. And because we know we all descend from a single common ancestor, this makes every human being related – very distant cousins, but still family. Yet almost nobody would claim that a third cousin three thousand times removed is really family, and at the same time, I, as a white man, cannot seriously claim to be African, because the color of my eyes and hair, my lack of skin pigmentation, and the shape of my facial bones indicates that between migrating out of Africa in the Paleolithic past, and arriving in North America a few centuries ago, my ancestors lived in Europe for 40,000 years. But I was not born in Europe, and neither were my parents, or their parents, or their parents; but by my fraternity brother's calculations, I am not indigenously American but rather indigenously European. Still, years later, my “white” host refused to concede that Europeans were “indigenous” to that continent, even though the Aborigines had not lived in Australia much longer than the Europeans had lived in Europe, and possibly not even as long.
As the evening, and the argument, wore on, I slowly began to grasp that my host's definition of indigenous simply meant dark-skinned people. By this metric anyone who is not “white” is somehow indigenous, even though, by the very same logic, only “black” African people are actually indigenous, since they evolved in Africa and remained there; but even this assumption does not hold much water, because if there is one thing world history has shown over and over again, it is that populations migrate relentlessly even within their own continents. Humans, like other animals, will always seek out areas where food and water is more readily available, and if other humans already occupy those areas, then conflict will ensue. It is no different in Africa than anywhere else. The present layout of “black” African populations is simply the latest arrangement in a pattern that has been folding and unfolding for tens of thousands of years. Doubtless there were innumerable migrations over time, so it is by no means assured that the various “black” ethnic groups and subgroups in South Africa actually originated there. They may have come from some entirely different area in Africa thousands of years ago, and they may very well have driven off, massacred or enslaved the people that lived there before them. In any event, they would only be indigenous to Africa itself, not to a particular territory with it. In a very real sense, where you're from is simply where you're at.
One of the implications my host seemed to be making was that “indigenous people” were those dark-skinned peoples who had been displaced or overrun by colonialists, i.e. by “Europeans.” In that sense, she was referring to American “native” tribes, to the Aborigines, and so on. But again, this logic also applies to the Irish, and to various European groups who were displaced or overrun by other Europeans, or by Mongols, or by Moors. The truth is, the occupation of any specific part of the Earth by any particular group is by nature a temporary phenomenon. If you read Caesar's accounts of his conquests in Gaul, written almost 21 centuries ago, he makes frequent mention of the migratory nature of the Gaullic and Germanic tribes, which were in turn caused partially by relentless pressure placed upon them by tribes further to the east (the Huns), which in turn caused pressured the Roman frontier. Indeed, the eventual collapse of Rome was caused as much by constant, violent migrations of populations along their vast border as by any other factor. So it has been everywhere, including the Americas. Long before the Spanish blundered into these two continents and promptly ransacked them, the “native” tribes which ran from the northernmost wastes of Canada to the southernmost tip of Argentina were ceaselessly pushing back and forth against one another in a violent struggle for control of resources and slaves. This unpopular observation was never made better than in the HBO film BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, when General Nelson Miles rails at Sitting Bull for stating that the Black Hills are “sacred Sioux land:”
"You came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee without mercy. And yet you claim the Black Hills as a private preserve bequeathed to you by the Great Spirit? Chief Sitting Bull, the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all. You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.”
Lust over “game and lands” is hard-wired into human DNA. It was that lust which propelled our primitive ancestors out of Africa, and propelled their descendants, men as varied as Shaka Zulu and Adolf Hitler, to attempt vast land grabs with varying degrees of success. Nothing much has ever changed in that regard except that the migrations nowadays tend to come in peaceful waves rather than huge, armed invasions. What we see as fixed, unyielding borders and demographic blocs are in fact in a state of constant flux, constant change; it is simply that human lives come and go so rapidly, and the forces of history move so slowly, that we tend to think of as permanent anything which existed when we came into the world and subsequently grew up with.
It is interesting to note the sense of self-loathing which is contained within my host's implication that “white people” cannot also be “indigenous,” and that, on top of that, only “white people” are colonialists at heart. As I have shown, the urge to migrate and exploit resources is hardly the exclusive province of Europeans, though you would hard-pressed to find a college professor, progressive, or “social justice activist” who would admit this. It is simply that European migration had a series of technological boosts which allowed it to spread much further than any previous migration save, I think, for the Mongolian one. Ironically, it is that same technology that now allows dark-skinned people from all over the planet to migrate into Europe, North America and Australia, where the vast majority of “white people” presently live.
You will note that I have not answered the central question raised by this essay, i.e., how long does a people have to remain in an area to be called indigenous to it? The textbook definition (“originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native”) is no help because it excludes all of us save for “black” Africans living in Africa, and as I believe I have demonstrated, we cannot prove even they are purely indigenous to the regions they presently occupy. The closest thing to an answer that I have come up with is that while humans may have evolved in Africa, the individual races of man (Europeans, First Nations people, Asians, Polynesians, Aborigines, etc.) evolved outside of Africa, which is whey they have different physical characteristics in the first place. They were “born” in specific geographic areas and can therefore claim native status. In other words, if First Nations people got their unique features in America, they are truly “native” to the Americas in a way a person of European ancestry will never be. Therefore only they really belong in the Americas; the rest of us are tourists or colonists. This is true in and of itself, but it presupposes that the races of man actually exist and are not a societal construct, one which has little validity when examined from the standpoint of genetics. And in recent years this presupposition has come under increasing attack from various scientific quarters. Dr. Jeffrey Fish, writing in Psychology Today, explained that what we think of as “race” is actually “social race,” which he defines as an “unfortunate attempt to classify people by what they look like, or by their ancestry, or according to some other sociocultural criteria.” It has nothing to do with so-called “biological race,” which, Fish contends, also does not exist:
“There are many reasons that there has been, for about a half-century, a consensus among specialists – biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists – that biological races do not exist in the human species...There just isn't enough variability among humans to produce biological races. And that is the main reason races don't exist.”
Note that what Fish means is not that physical differences between humans don't exist. Obviously they do. What he means is that – with all apologies to Hitler – they don't mean much of anything. As Nadra Nittle wrote in an article for ThoughtCo.:
“Scientists still say that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one because people of the so-called same race have more distinctions in their DNA than people of different races do. In fact, scientists posit that all people are roughly 99.5 percent genetically identical.”
Going back to Fish, the idea that biological races don't exist hinges on what he calls a lack of “genetic variability.” In practical terms, this means that while I may be “white” and have green eyes and brown hair, these things are simply shallow genetic mutations caused by the environment in which my ancestors lived: they do not make me another “race,” they merely make my exterior differ from someone whose ancestors lived for a long time in a different environment. So while First Nations people can certainly state with confidence that they evolved in the Americas, they are not truly indigenous: they simply arrived sooner than I did. We remain one race, whose origin is African.
When I think about the world today, about how much tribalism and divisiveness there seems to be, and how depressing and pointless it all is, I try to take comfort in the fact that tribalism and divisiveness are nothing new in human affairs, it is merely that technology has allowed us to be tribal and divisive with others besides our immediate neighbors. This is in fact not much comfort in itself, but it reminds me that taken in context with the existence of my race, my own life is an infinitesimal blip, a single and ephemeral thread in a massive pattern that covers the entire globe, and that while I may not be “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” to my own land of America, I damn well am indigenous to the planet America resides upon. That's the only indigenous label I want, and the only one that matters. And in the end, the salvation of the human race, if it occurs,will come from this knowledge.
“Everybody's ancestors come from Africa,” I said with a sigh.
“Right.” He said. “We're all Africans. So why can't we [white folks] get the goddamned bonus, too?”
This impolitic and rather silly remark had the benefit of being, by then-accepted scientific and paleoanthropological consensus, the virtue of being true, or at least very likely. Although the origin of archaic humans in Africa is not considered a fact, and recently some have begun to argue that we actually may have hailed from the Middle East, “out of Africa” is the most widely accepted theory and the the one with the most physical evidence to back itself up. The oldest homo sapien fossils yet discovered come from Africa (specifically Morocco), as do the bones of “Lucy,” the oldest of our ape-like hominin ancestors, which were excavated in Ethiopia. In fact, it is posited by those in a position to posit that all modern humans have a single common ancestor who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.
Twenty years after the incident in Baltimore, I was attending a house party in Los Angeles, when my host, a young white woman, remarked that she would like to “travel and spend time with indigenous people.” Half-facetiously, half-seriously, I replied, “You mean like, the Irish?”
Irritated, she said, “I said indigenous people, like the Aborigines in Australia.”
“What – the Irish aren't indigenous people?”
“No. They migrated from continental Europe.”
“Right. And the Aborigines migrated from Southeast Asia.”
“Forty thousand years ago.”
“Well, the Irish migrated Europe like 13,000 years ago. How long does a people have to be in a place to be considered indigenous?”
My host had no answer, and over the course of our discussion, I began to realize that she had never really considered what the word “indigenous” means. Few of us do. The dictionary definition – “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” – seems obvious and self-explanatory, but as I think I have just demonstrated, in regards to human beings, it is anything but. As an exemplar of this, another incident: when I was in college, one of my fraternity brothers, a black guy from South Africa, scoffed at the notion that white South Africans could, in fact, be Africans. “They're Europeans,” he told me. “Colonists!”
“Well, they have lived there for 400 years,” I replied.
“So what? My ancestors have lived there since the beginning of time!”
I understood his point. Still, I wasn't sure if the underlying question had been answered. Exactly how long, I wondered, would Europeans have to live in Africa to be considered African again? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Twenty-five? How long did the so-called “Native Americans,” who were not native to America but technically Asians (having come, theoretically, from Siberia, i.e. North Asia), have to reside in the Americas to be “native?” And how long did they have to remain in Asia before that to be considered Asians and not Indians or Middle-Easterners or Europeans? Who sets these rules, and how are they set?
If modern humans evolved in Africa, then migrated outward across the Middle East to Europe and Asia and, eventually, over the rest of the globe, this makes every human's ancestry, including racial supremacists who find it terribly inconvenient, African. And because we know we all descend from a single common ancestor, this makes every human being related – very distant cousins, but still family. Yet almost nobody would claim that a third cousin three thousand times removed is really family, and at the same time, I, as a white man, cannot seriously claim to be African, because the color of my eyes and hair, my lack of skin pigmentation, and the shape of my facial bones indicates that between migrating out of Africa in the Paleolithic past, and arriving in North America a few centuries ago, my ancestors lived in Europe for 40,000 years. But I was not born in Europe, and neither were my parents, or their parents, or their parents; but by my fraternity brother's calculations, I am not indigenously American but rather indigenously European. Still, years later, my “white” host refused to concede that Europeans were “indigenous” to that continent, even though the Aborigines had not lived in Australia much longer than the Europeans had lived in Europe, and possibly not even as long.
As the evening, and the argument, wore on, I slowly began to grasp that my host's definition of indigenous simply meant dark-skinned people. By this metric anyone who is not “white” is somehow indigenous, even though, by the very same logic, only “black” African people are actually indigenous, since they evolved in Africa and remained there; but even this assumption does not hold much water, because if there is one thing world history has shown over and over again, it is that populations migrate relentlessly even within their own continents. Humans, like other animals, will always seek out areas where food and water is more readily available, and if other humans already occupy those areas, then conflict will ensue. It is no different in Africa than anywhere else. The present layout of “black” African populations is simply the latest arrangement in a pattern that has been folding and unfolding for tens of thousands of years. Doubtless there were innumerable migrations over time, so it is by no means assured that the various “black” ethnic groups and subgroups in South Africa actually originated there. They may have come from some entirely different area in Africa thousands of years ago, and they may very well have driven off, massacred or enslaved the people that lived there before them. In any event, they would only be indigenous to Africa itself, not to a particular territory with it. In a very real sense, where you're from is simply where you're at.
One of the implications my host seemed to be making was that “indigenous people” were those dark-skinned peoples who had been displaced or overrun by colonialists, i.e. by “Europeans.” In that sense, she was referring to American “native” tribes, to the Aborigines, and so on. But again, this logic also applies to the Irish, and to various European groups who were displaced or overrun by other Europeans, or by Mongols, or by Moors. The truth is, the occupation of any specific part of the Earth by any particular group is by nature a temporary phenomenon. If you read Caesar's accounts of his conquests in Gaul, written almost 21 centuries ago, he makes frequent mention of the migratory nature of the Gaullic and Germanic tribes, which were in turn caused partially by relentless pressure placed upon them by tribes further to the east (the Huns), which in turn caused pressured the Roman frontier. Indeed, the eventual collapse of Rome was caused as much by constant, violent migrations of populations along their vast border as by any other factor. So it has been everywhere, including the Americas. Long before the Spanish blundered into these two continents and promptly ransacked them, the “native” tribes which ran from the northernmost wastes of Canada to the southernmost tip of Argentina were ceaselessly pushing back and forth against one another in a violent struggle for control of resources and slaves. This unpopular observation was never made better than in the HBO film BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, when General Nelson Miles rails at Sitting Bull for stating that the Black Hills are “sacred Sioux land:”
"You came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee without mercy. And yet you claim the Black Hills as a private preserve bequeathed to you by the Great Spirit? Chief Sitting Bull, the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all. You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.”
Lust over “game and lands” is hard-wired into human DNA. It was that lust which propelled our primitive ancestors out of Africa, and propelled their descendants, men as varied as Shaka Zulu and Adolf Hitler, to attempt vast land grabs with varying degrees of success. Nothing much has ever changed in that regard except that the migrations nowadays tend to come in peaceful waves rather than huge, armed invasions. What we see as fixed, unyielding borders and demographic blocs are in fact in a state of constant flux, constant change; it is simply that human lives come and go so rapidly, and the forces of history move so slowly, that we tend to think of as permanent anything which existed when we came into the world and subsequently grew up with.
It is interesting to note the sense of self-loathing which is contained within my host's implication that “white people” cannot also be “indigenous,” and that, on top of that, only “white people” are colonialists at heart. As I have shown, the urge to migrate and exploit resources is hardly the exclusive province of Europeans, though you would hard-pressed to find a college professor, progressive, or “social justice activist” who would admit this. It is simply that European migration had a series of technological boosts which allowed it to spread much further than any previous migration save, I think, for the Mongolian one. Ironically, it is that same technology that now allows dark-skinned people from all over the planet to migrate into Europe, North America and Australia, where the vast majority of “white people” presently live.
You will note that I have not answered the central question raised by this essay, i.e., how long does a people have to remain in an area to be called indigenous to it? The textbook definition (“originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native”) is no help because it excludes all of us save for “black” Africans living in Africa, and as I believe I have demonstrated, we cannot prove even they are purely indigenous to the regions they presently occupy. The closest thing to an answer that I have come up with is that while humans may have evolved in Africa, the individual races of man (Europeans, First Nations people, Asians, Polynesians, Aborigines, etc.) evolved outside of Africa, which is whey they have different physical characteristics in the first place. They were “born” in specific geographic areas and can therefore claim native status. In other words, if First Nations people got their unique features in America, they are truly “native” to the Americas in a way a person of European ancestry will never be. Therefore only they really belong in the Americas; the rest of us are tourists or colonists. This is true in and of itself, but it presupposes that the races of man actually exist and are not a societal construct, one which has little validity when examined from the standpoint of genetics. And in recent years this presupposition has come under increasing attack from various scientific quarters. Dr. Jeffrey Fish, writing in Psychology Today, explained that what we think of as “race” is actually “social race,” which he defines as an “unfortunate attempt to classify people by what they look like, or by their ancestry, or according to some other sociocultural criteria.” It has nothing to do with so-called “biological race,” which, Fish contends, also does not exist:
“There are many reasons that there has been, for about a half-century, a consensus among specialists – biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists – that biological races do not exist in the human species...There just isn't enough variability among humans to produce biological races. And that is the main reason races don't exist.”
Note that what Fish means is not that physical differences between humans don't exist. Obviously they do. What he means is that – with all apologies to Hitler – they don't mean much of anything. As Nadra Nittle wrote in an article for ThoughtCo.:
“Scientists still say that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one because people of the so-called same race have more distinctions in their DNA than people of different races do. In fact, scientists posit that all people are roughly 99.5 percent genetically identical.”
Going back to Fish, the idea that biological races don't exist hinges on what he calls a lack of “genetic variability.” In practical terms, this means that while I may be “white” and have green eyes and brown hair, these things are simply shallow genetic mutations caused by the environment in which my ancestors lived: they do not make me another “race,” they merely make my exterior differ from someone whose ancestors lived for a long time in a different environment. So while First Nations people can certainly state with confidence that they evolved in the Americas, they are not truly indigenous: they simply arrived sooner than I did. We remain one race, whose origin is African.
When I think about the world today, about how much tribalism and divisiveness there seems to be, and how depressing and pointless it all is, I try to take comfort in the fact that tribalism and divisiveness are nothing new in human affairs, it is merely that technology has allowed us to be tribal and divisive with others besides our immediate neighbors. This is in fact not much comfort in itself, but it reminds me that taken in context with the existence of my race, my own life is an infinitesimal blip, a single and ephemeral thread in a massive pattern that covers the entire globe, and that while I may not be “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native” to my own land of America, I damn well am indigenous to the planet America resides upon. That's the only indigenous label I want, and the only one that matters. And in the end, the salvation of the human race, if it occurs,will come from this knowledge.
January 16, 2019
WE'RE ENTITLED
When I first arrived in Los Angeles many years ago, I worked the usual assortment of odd and rather shitty jobs that entertainment industry wannabees take while trying to break in to the business. My favorite of all of these by far was a security gig I worked at gated community on the bluffs of Zuma Bay, in Malibu. The community had a busy main entrance which handled a lot of traffic in and out all day and night long; it also had a much smaller back entrance right by the beach, which almost nobody used, and I had a the four to midnight shift there.
It was a mindless dead-end job, low paying but easy to perform and very nearly hassle-free. I say “very nearly” because sometimes celebrities of dubious sobriety, manners or mental state would appear and make difficulties – my boss Jesse had a running feud with Pierce Brosnan, Sharon Stone was on the “do not admit” list, and Martin Sheen would occasionally appear, addled and carrying a cowbell. Also, because people who can afford to live in 2.5 million-dollar townhouses overlooking the Pacific often carrying with them a tremendous sense of entitlement, a kind of feudal mentality which allows them to look at those of lower economic status as serfs, peasants, or even slaves, albeit of the “wage” variety.
One afternoon in the summer three residents came bicycling up the road to the gate. Instead of using the cyclists' entrance, which had to be unlocked, they simply waited until a car went through, and then tried to shoot in after it before the swing-arm came back down. Big mistake. The automatic arm came down and very neatly clotheslined the last person in the group, a college-age female. She went down so hard that I ran over immediately, assuming she'd been knocked unconscious. In fact she was only stunned and extremely embarrassed. Being a resident, she knew, as did her two friends, that “rushing the gate” was not only stupid but dangerous, and in fact the victim was very humble. She asked my name, introduced herself, apologized, declined my offer of an ambulance, and peddled off, obviously wishing to leave the humiliating incident behind her. Her two friends were not so contrite. In fact, they tried pretty hard to find a way to blame me for the incident: one kept pointing out how dangerous the gate was, as if I had built the fucking thing. When I finally replied, “Yeah, it is dangerous, that's why you're not supposed to rush it,” she turned bright red. Her friend was even more obnoxious, making vague legalistic-sounding threats under her breath until I reminded her that the HOA considered “rushing the gate” a serious violation of the covenant and subject to punishment by heavy fines on the family in question. That did the trick. Both women left in a huff, convinced that the disaster had been anyone's fault but their own, and even more impressively, having learned nothing whatsoever from the incident. It is interesting to note that the only person who was actually hurt in this scenario was also the least angry about it.
It so happens that people reveal themselves in small ways, and the way folks treat a stray dog begging for food or a waiter who has gotten the order wrong can tell you as much or more about them as any resume ever could. As a $10/hr security guard in Malibu, I was a maybe a half-step above the “sandwich expert” at your local Subway in terms of social prestige; so when a wealthy person made a bad decision and suffered equally negative consequences for it in my presence, it was only natural that her two friends would try to shunt those consequences onto me. They felt entitled to do it. In a sense, that was what I was there for: to serve as a kind of dumping ground for the bad moods of those above me. Shit flows downhill, and it flows faster and heavier from rich folks than it does from any people on the planet Earth. Trust me, I know: I once worked a summer at a country club.
After I had broken into the entertainment industry, I began to find myself working on set or location for various television shows. Contrary to popular belief, shooting episodic television is neither glamorous nor sexy nor particularly exciting. What it is is very damned hard work, and most of the people involved in it are hardened professionals who do their jobs efficiently and well. But there are exceptions, and those exceptions are always from the uppermost rungs of the Hollywood pecking order: I have seen some directors and first A.D.'s throw childish temper-tantrums because they didn't get what they wanted, and nobody said a thing – nobody dared. I have also seen a few stars behave the same way, and again, nobody said a word. But except for a young stuntman who didn't know any better, I have never seen anyone from the rank and file behave in an egregiously entitled manner – and this fellow was promptly crushed flat by his boss, the stunt coordinator. The unspoken message is always clear: the middle and lower classes of Hollywood are not entitled to behave badly, but the upper crust can do what it wants: they are entitled. And what is Hollywood but a mirror of American society generally?
A sense of entitlement is a fascinating thing. We all have one about something, in some cases several somethings, but what we feel entitled to varies enormously from person to person and class to class. A poor person in York, Pennsylvania feels entitled to live in Section Eight housing and collect welfare. A rich person in Malibu, California feels entitled to place the blame for their own actions on a person of lower economic status. But what about the middle class? Well, when I was working in Rockville, Maryland, back in the winter of 2003 – 2004, a woman whose area code was no better than mine rang me up demanding that I send snow plows to her house immediately.
“Ma'am,” I said politely. “This here is the Department of CORRECTIONS. We deal with criminals. What you want is the Department of Transportation. They plow the roads. The number there is--”
“I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHO YOU WORK FOR!” She screamed. “I WANT THAT SNOW PLOWED RIGHT NOW! NOW, DAMMIT, OR I'LL HAVE YOUR JOB!"
This kind of abuse is suffered daily, and in some cases hourly, by many people in public service, but what struck me about it was not only the stupidity of the woman in question, or her childish attitude, but the fact that making an error – calling the wrong department of county services – actually made her feel angrier and more entitled than she had been before. If she wanted snow plows a moment ago, she wanted them all the faster now that she had been exposed as dialing the wrong number. Like the girls who rushed the barrier, being caught in error by a person of inferior social status (a public servant is always of inferior social status, even if he makes more money than you) only heightened this woman's sense of arrogance. This reaction was caused partly by embarrassment, but at the core of it is expectation. More precisely, it is caused by a confusion between what we think are entitled to versus what we have a right to actually expect.
I once read a book on Zen Buddhism in which the writer explained that frustration came in two forms, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate form occurs when our expectations are reasonable, but are nonetheless unmet – if we don't get our paycheck after a hard week's work, for example. Unreasonable frustration, on the other hand, occurs when our expectations are both unreasonable and unmet: if we buy a lottery ticket and don't win, to become angry is simply an act of foolishness.
Entitlement is a very similar phenomenon, but a little subtler, because to be entitled does not mean possessing entitlements. The definition of “entitlement” is actually “the fact of having the right to do something,” and we do have many rights, both under God, the law, and also as consumers and customers. I pay Burbank Water & Power to provide me with electricity, and I therefore feel entitled to have lights on in my home, but this feeling doesn't make me entitled. A feeling of entitlement would be to expect my power to continue flowing even if I stopped paying my bills, or if the neighborhood was struck with a power outage.
When you think about it, much of the disgusting behavior that occurs in life comes from this confusion between what we want and expect, and what we're actually entitled to. Snobbery usually manifests as a feeling that one person is superior to another person based on their education, income or lineage and therefore has additional rights, rights reserved exclusively for them. What is sometimes referred to as “rape culture” probably stems directly from the idea that a man is entitled to sex with any woman he chooses, which is obviously not a reasonable expectation. Even racism and bigotry could be considered twisted forms of entitlement, because both find their strongest roots in the feeling that this, that or the other group of people shouldn't have the same rights you do. European colonialism, Communist expansionism, religious primacy, American manifest destiny, fascist dreams of empire – all came from the false belief that one group has the right to rule over and exploit others.
The odd thing about a false sense of entitlement, however, is that while it can lead to truly monstrous behavior, there are actually times when it works for the benefit of everyone involved. Probably no one ought to expect modern civilization to work: it's so fragile, so badly organized, so ready to collapse at the slightest push, that we ought to go around in a kind of cringing, fatalistic daze, grateful that we have access to rubella vaccines and venti mocha lattes but also expecting that something will soon go catastrophically wrong and put us right back in the jungle where our ancestors lived. And yet we don't. In fact, we assume precisely the opposite, and not without some justification. As George Orwell quite rightly pointed out, during times of great crisis, during wars and disasters and pandemics and so forth, it is neither the rich nor the poor who tended to come to the front and restore the situation, but those from the middle class. The rich, he said, were too softened by luxury and decadence to get off their asses and exert themselves, and too stupid to lead even if they'd had the impulse: they would be content for someone to come along and save them. The poor, on the other hand, were so emasculated and beaten-down by poverty and ignorance that they did not know how to lead and would not have known what to do had they been put in charge: they too would be content to wait for someone to tell them what to do. Only the middle class were perfectly placed to stand up and fix things, because they expected society to function, and felt entitled to its benefits: water flowing from taps, power plants generating electricity, trash being picked up, hospitals and school open, buses and trains running. They did not have mansions, but they had public utilities, and by God they were going to get them. Whether or not this sense of entitlement, this set of expectations, was reasonable or not, the middle class possessed it, and therefore always act upon it. It is worth noting that the great revolutionaries of history, both good and evil, were almost all exclusively products of the middle or merchant classes. When they felt the system wasn't working, they picked up guns and manifestos and tried to fix it the violent way.
When I look at America today, I am struck by the way that this particular sense of entitlement is both deepening among the middle class and at the same time fading away. The Millennial Generation is materialistically one of the best-off in human history, and therefore one of the most entitled-acting in its behavior: if you doubt this, take their wi-fi away, even for ten minutes. At the same time, they are far more self-conscious as a group of the threats facing the planet and the human race, and far readier to come to the fore and try to fix the situation, than their predecessors were: the very same feeling that causes this group to say things like “owning a cell phone is a human right” is also what makes them demand that we stop fracking, stop burning coal, stop driving gasoline-powered cars, and so on. There is a certain amount of evidence that we are already past the tipping point, environmentally speaking, that human civilization is ultimately doomed, and that no measures we are actually likely to take will have much effect in the long run. But Millennials nonetheless expect civilization to survive, so they jump into the process of saving it, or at least extending its life, and this is a positive thing.
It follows that in the history of humanity, many great triumphs – military, scientific, cultural, artistic – have been achieved not through our intelligence per se, but because the people involved simply felt entitled to win, and acted arrogantly and blindly upon that basis. This was as true of Julius Caesar as George Washington, of Michaelangelo as Thomas Edison. From an objective standpoint, and to bring this article full circle, I myself had almost no chance of successfully breaking into the entertainment industry when I got here. Almost everything was against me, including the cold hard odds. That I succeeded, at least enough to have made a living at it for a decade or more, probably speaks less of my intelligence than it does of my ego and my capacity for positive self-delusion. I felt that success in this town was and is my right. I still feel that way. It isn't logical, and there is much evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't make a difference to my outlook, because some small but indestructible part of me insists that I'm entitled to it. The laughable notion that Hollywood owes me something, that success is something I have a right to, keeps me going...and somehow, against all logic, also seems to keep my phone ringing.
It may be, in the grand scheme of things, that a sense of entitlement, as disgusting and annoying as it may be, is also a factor which in human affairs has been enormously underrated.
It was a mindless dead-end job, low paying but easy to perform and very nearly hassle-free. I say “very nearly” because sometimes celebrities of dubious sobriety, manners or mental state would appear and make difficulties – my boss Jesse had a running feud with Pierce Brosnan, Sharon Stone was on the “do not admit” list, and Martin Sheen would occasionally appear, addled and carrying a cowbell. Also, because people who can afford to live in 2.5 million-dollar townhouses overlooking the Pacific often carrying with them a tremendous sense of entitlement, a kind of feudal mentality which allows them to look at those of lower economic status as serfs, peasants, or even slaves, albeit of the “wage” variety.
One afternoon in the summer three residents came bicycling up the road to the gate. Instead of using the cyclists' entrance, which had to be unlocked, they simply waited until a car went through, and then tried to shoot in after it before the swing-arm came back down. Big mistake. The automatic arm came down and very neatly clotheslined the last person in the group, a college-age female. She went down so hard that I ran over immediately, assuming she'd been knocked unconscious. In fact she was only stunned and extremely embarrassed. Being a resident, she knew, as did her two friends, that “rushing the gate” was not only stupid but dangerous, and in fact the victim was very humble. She asked my name, introduced herself, apologized, declined my offer of an ambulance, and peddled off, obviously wishing to leave the humiliating incident behind her. Her two friends were not so contrite. In fact, they tried pretty hard to find a way to blame me for the incident: one kept pointing out how dangerous the gate was, as if I had built the fucking thing. When I finally replied, “Yeah, it is dangerous, that's why you're not supposed to rush it,” she turned bright red. Her friend was even more obnoxious, making vague legalistic-sounding threats under her breath until I reminded her that the HOA considered “rushing the gate” a serious violation of the covenant and subject to punishment by heavy fines on the family in question. That did the trick. Both women left in a huff, convinced that the disaster had been anyone's fault but their own, and even more impressively, having learned nothing whatsoever from the incident. It is interesting to note that the only person who was actually hurt in this scenario was also the least angry about it.
It so happens that people reveal themselves in small ways, and the way folks treat a stray dog begging for food or a waiter who has gotten the order wrong can tell you as much or more about them as any resume ever could. As a $10/hr security guard in Malibu, I was a maybe a half-step above the “sandwich expert” at your local Subway in terms of social prestige; so when a wealthy person made a bad decision and suffered equally negative consequences for it in my presence, it was only natural that her two friends would try to shunt those consequences onto me. They felt entitled to do it. In a sense, that was what I was there for: to serve as a kind of dumping ground for the bad moods of those above me. Shit flows downhill, and it flows faster and heavier from rich folks than it does from any people on the planet Earth. Trust me, I know: I once worked a summer at a country club.
After I had broken into the entertainment industry, I began to find myself working on set or location for various television shows. Contrary to popular belief, shooting episodic television is neither glamorous nor sexy nor particularly exciting. What it is is very damned hard work, and most of the people involved in it are hardened professionals who do their jobs efficiently and well. But there are exceptions, and those exceptions are always from the uppermost rungs of the Hollywood pecking order: I have seen some directors and first A.D.'s throw childish temper-tantrums because they didn't get what they wanted, and nobody said a thing – nobody dared. I have also seen a few stars behave the same way, and again, nobody said a word. But except for a young stuntman who didn't know any better, I have never seen anyone from the rank and file behave in an egregiously entitled manner – and this fellow was promptly crushed flat by his boss, the stunt coordinator. The unspoken message is always clear: the middle and lower classes of Hollywood are not entitled to behave badly, but the upper crust can do what it wants: they are entitled. And what is Hollywood but a mirror of American society generally?
A sense of entitlement is a fascinating thing. We all have one about something, in some cases several somethings, but what we feel entitled to varies enormously from person to person and class to class. A poor person in York, Pennsylvania feels entitled to live in Section Eight housing and collect welfare. A rich person in Malibu, California feels entitled to place the blame for their own actions on a person of lower economic status. But what about the middle class? Well, when I was working in Rockville, Maryland, back in the winter of 2003 – 2004, a woman whose area code was no better than mine rang me up demanding that I send snow plows to her house immediately.
“Ma'am,” I said politely. “This here is the Department of CORRECTIONS. We deal with criminals. What you want is the Department of Transportation. They plow the roads. The number there is--”
“I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHO YOU WORK FOR!” She screamed. “I WANT THAT SNOW PLOWED RIGHT NOW! NOW, DAMMIT, OR I'LL HAVE YOUR JOB!"
This kind of abuse is suffered daily, and in some cases hourly, by many people in public service, but what struck me about it was not only the stupidity of the woman in question, or her childish attitude, but the fact that making an error – calling the wrong department of county services – actually made her feel angrier and more entitled than she had been before. If she wanted snow plows a moment ago, she wanted them all the faster now that she had been exposed as dialing the wrong number. Like the girls who rushed the barrier, being caught in error by a person of inferior social status (a public servant is always of inferior social status, even if he makes more money than you) only heightened this woman's sense of arrogance. This reaction was caused partly by embarrassment, but at the core of it is expectation. More precisely, it is caused by a confusion between what we think are entitled to versus what we have a right to actually expect.
I once read a book on Zen Buddhism in which the writer explained that frustration came in two forms, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate form occurs when our expectations are reasonable, but are nonetheless unmet – if we don't get our paycheck after a hard week's work, for example. Unreasonable frustration, on the other hand, occurs when our expectations are both unreasonable and unmet: if we buy a lottery ticket and don't win, to become angry is simply an act of foolishness.
Entitlement is a very similar phenomenon, but a little subtler, because to be entitled does not mean possessing entitlements. The definition of “entitlement” is actually “the fact of having the right to do something,” and we do have many rights, both under God, the law, and also as consumers and customers. I pay Burbank Water & Power to provide me with electricity, and I therefore feel entitled to have lights on in my home, but this feeling doesn't make me entitled. A feeling of entitlement would be to expect my power to continue flowing even if I stopped paying my bills, or if the neighborhood was struck with a power outage.
When you think about it, much of the disgusting behavior that occurs in life comes from this confusion between what we want and expect, and what we're actually entitled to. Snobbery usually manifests as a feeling that one person is superior to another person based on their education, income or lineage and therefore has additional rights, rights reserved exclusively for them. What is sometimes referred to as “rape culture” probably stems directly from the idea that a man is entitled to sex with any woman he chooses, which is obviously not a reasonable expectation. Even racism and bigotry could be considered twisted forms of entitlement, because both find their strongest roots in the feeling that this, that or the other group of people shouldn't have the same rights you do. European colonialism, Communist expansionism, religious primacy, American manifest destiny, fascist dreams of empire – all came from the false belief that one group has the right to rule over and exploit others.
The odd thing about a false sense of entitlement, however, is that while it can lead to truly monstrous behavior, there are actually times when it works for the benefit of everyone involved. Probably no one ought to expect modern civilization to work: it's so fragile, so badly organized, so ready to collapse at the slightest push, that we ought to go around in a kind of cringing, fatalistic daze, grateful that we have access to rubella vaccines and venti mocha lattes but also expecting that something will soon go catastrophically wrong and put us right back in the jungle where our ancestors lived. And yet we don't. In fact, we assume precisely the opposite, and not without some justification. As George Orwell quite rightly pointed out, during times of great crisis, during wars and disasters and pandemics and so forth, it is neither the rich nor the poor who tended to come to the front and restore the situation, but those from the middle class. The rich, he said, were too softened by luxury and decadence to get off their asses and exert themselves, and too stupid to lead even if they'd had the impulse: they would be content for someone to come along and save them. The poor, on the other hand, were so emasculated and beaten-down by poverty and ignorance that they did not know how to lead and would not have known what to do had they been put in charge: they too would be content to wait for someone to tell them what to do. Only the middle class were perfectly placed to stand up and fix things, because they expected society to function, and felt entitled to its benefits: water flowing from taps, power plants generating electricity, trash being picked up, hospitals and school open, buses and trains running. They did not have mansions, but they had public utilities, and by God they were going to get them. Whether or not this sense of entitlement, this set of expectations, was reasonable or not, the middle class possessed it, and therefore always act upon it. It is worth noting that the great revolutionaries of history, both good and evil, were almost all exclusively products of the middle or merchant classes. When they felt the system wasn't working, they picked up guns and manifestos and tried to fix it the violent way.
When I look at America today, I am struck by the way that this particular sense of entitlement is both deepening among the middle class and at the same time fading away. The Millennial Generation is materialistically one of the best-off in human history, and therefore one of the most entitled-acting in its behavior: if you doubt this, take their wi-fi away, even for ten minutes. At the same time, they are far more self-conscious as a group of the threats facing the planet and the human race, and far readier to come to the fore and try to fix the situation, than their predecessors were: the very same feeling that causes this group to say things like “owning a cell phone is a human right” is also what makes them demand that we stop fracking, stop burning coal, stop driving gasoline-powered cars, and so on. There is a certain amount of evidence that we are already past the tipping point, environmentally speaking, that human civilization is ultimately doomed, and that no measures we are actually likely to take will have much effect in the long run. But Millennials nonetheless expect civilization to survive, so they jump into the process of saving it, or at least extending its life, and this is a positive thing.
It follows that in the history of humanity, many great triumphs – military, scientific, cultural, artistic – have been achieved not through our intelligence per se, but because the people involved simply felt entitled to win, and acted arrogantly and blindly upon that basis. This was as true of Julius Caesar as George Washington, of Michaelangelo as Thomas Edison. From an objective standpoint, and to bring this article full circle, I myself had almost no chance of successfully breaking into the entertainment industry when I got here. Almost everything was against me, including the cold hard odds. That I succeeded, at least enough to have made a living at it for a decade or more, probably speaks less of my intelligence than it does of my ego and my capacity for positive self-delusion. I felt that success in this town was and is my right. I still feel that way. It isn't logical, and there is much evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't make a difference to my outlook, because some small but indestructible part of me insists that I'm entitled to it. The laughable notion that Hollywood owes me something, that success is something I have a right to, keeps me going...and somehow, against all logic, also seems to keep my phone ringing.
It may be, in the grand scheme of things, that a sense of entitlement, as disgusting and annoying as it may be, is also a factor which in human affairs has been enormously underrated.
January 7, 2019
BOILING THE FROG
I'm just wondering why I feel so all alone
Why I'm a stranger in my own life?
– Sheryl Crow
Marge, I agree with you in theory. In theory, Communism works. In theory.
– Homer Simpson
A year ago I was a different person. I know, I know, major cliché...everyone is a different person today than they were a year past, or six months ago, for that matter. Life is change, usually slow and cumulative, sometimes fast and violent, but regardless of the speed or the tempo, who you are never stands still. Call it entropy or call it growth, we're all shifting infinitesimally from one moment to the next: our bodies, our minds, our outlooks on life. Still, there are changes and there are changes, and some of them are fairly dramatic.
A year ago tonight I was sitting in the very spot where I sit now, moodily writing in my journal. At that point in life, the diary I've kept for the last twelve years, which used to be a source of humor, ideas and reflections, had become a litany of complaints and morose observations. A single passage will give you a sense of the mental atmosphere in which I lived:
“The day was a slow one. I couldn't wait to rocket out of (work), but when I got home, I didn't have anything to eat that I wanted, so I foolishly went to (the local diner). With the exception of breakfast, which they do well enough, I am almost always disappointed there, and today was no exception. Not terrible food, just bland and served at a sluggish pace by a girl with way too many eyelashes. I came home overheated, sweaty and in a restless bad temper: as a result, I had no choice but to change and head over to the gym at eight-thirty. I did 37 minutes on the elliptical machine whilst watching a replay of the old Lawler – Condit (UFC) fight, then did a few short rounds on the heavy bag, but by that point I was sweated-out and exhausted. Spirit willing, flesh weak (and fat). But it felt good. I'm still not in what you'd call a happy humor, but when am I happy, nowadays? The frustration I feel over my life and career saps me on a daily basis. More and more I want to escape, but where would I go, and what would I do when I got there?”
If you don't mind, pretend you're a forensic pathologist and take a scalpel to my soul. Go ahead. Really look at this passage. Dissect it, Doctor Quincy. Now, I dunno what you see here, but here's my take on our subject's state of being. The very first sentence indicates boredom and discontent. The rest are full of self-criticism, disappointment, powerlessness, and desperation. The one positive comment – that punching the heavy bag “felt good” – is like a single raisin in pounds of gray dough. If I wanted, and you had the desire and patience, I could bury you under countless pages of identical gloom. The average size of one of my yearly journals is 300,000 words, which in layman's terms means three full-length novels, and if I had to estimate, I'd say that at least 100,000 of those words were written in the same cornered-rat vein. 365 days ago, today, I was in the Pit of Despair, the Slough of Despond, the Black Hole of Calcutta. Mentally fucked.
Depression's a weird thing. My entire life, I thought that depression meant sadness – deep, abiding, unremitting sadness. I had no idea that depression – real depression, clinical depression – is more like a chronic illness than a case of the deep blues. It makes you feel like complete, utter shit. The sadness is, in a sense, a kind of side-effect of physical misery – numbness, weakness, anxiety, nausea, insomnia. When my neurologist told me, on March 27, after a long battery of tests, that there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I was depressed, my main reaction was surprise. Me? Depressed? How could that be? My life, on paper, looked pretty goddamned good. I was living in the city that I had wanted to reside in since my first visit there in 1999. Against all odds, I had broken into the entertainment industry, and was making more money than I had ever made in my life. My debut novel had collected two awards and was in contention for others. I got to work with enormously talented people and meet actors and athletes and celebrities, many of whom I had idolized as a kid. Friends and family were readily available. I lived in a clean, quiet, safe neighborhood in a location that was equally convenient to wild hiking trails in the mountains or the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. I could swim outdoors in February, for God's sake. In theory, I was living the dream. But as Homer Simpson so wisely once observed, “In theory, Communism works.”
I'm a writer by trade and by passion and by identity, too. An imaginative person. I am at my happiest when I'm creating something. It might be a historical or genre novel. It might be a short story. It might be a screenplay or even a graphic novel. It might be a crime story, a WW2 tale, horror, erotica or fantasy. I don't discriminate. I'm bad at a lot of things, good at a few, meant to do precisely one. I know this, and yet the pressures and seeming necessities of life constantly interpose themselves between me and my reason for occupying space on this troubled planet. In this, of course, I'm no different than most others. In the matrix in which we are condemned to exist, the demands required simply to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly occupy most of our time and energy and thought, leaving only crumbs and gristle for our métier: but a human soul is very much like the human body it occupies; if you don't feed it, it withers and dies. Scraps won't do. This is the paradox of modern existence: to remain human, and not degenerate into Morlocks, mere office or factory drones out of a Mike Judge movie – sexless, obedient, without ambition – it's necessary to feed said soul, and yet any given moment is more likely to find us paying bills, sitting in traffic, staring at the ceiling or standing in line. As the character of George Bowling observed in Orwell's “Coming Up For Air” – “There's time for everything in life except the things that really matter.”
You will recall I used the word “powerlessness” to describe how I felt on January 4, 2018. But in regards to my own behavior, the proper appellation is “passivity.” The attitude I had adopted toward my own life was a resigned one. I meekly, tiredly, sadly accepted a situation that had sucked the enthusiasm right out of me: even when I tried to take action, in the form of exercise, it was in a posture of submission, of reaction (“I had no choice”) rather than assertiveness and strength. Here's a non-rhetorical question: how the fuck did that happen?
The technique by which all my aggressive, assertive qualities were reduced to a formless, subservient mush of despair and self-pity is known as “boiling the frog.” When one wishes to serve fresh “cuisses de grenouille” – frog's legs – one takes live frogs and places them in a pan of lukewarm water on a stove, and then, by installments, turns up the heat to the boiling point. If properly executed, this method will kill the frogs in so subtle a manner that they will never even try to escape, but will sit quiescently until they are cooked through. It is often the same with people. Had I been suddenly and violently assailed by circumstance, I would have grasped I was under attack and either fought back or run away, like a frog thrown into already boiling water. But life is a subtle opponent and opted instead to gradually turn up the flame, so that I was quite content to stew in my own juices until it was very nearly too late to save myself.
2016 was a banner year for me. I released three books, traveled to San Francisco, Vancouver, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and spent almost every waking hour that I wasn't writing or promoting my fiction, swimming or hiking – my journal for that year records 99 hikes and 95 visits to my excellent outdoor pool. I even stole away from the Book Expo America to watch my Cubs flatten the Pirates at Wrigley Field, where I hadn't been in probably 30 years. I was fit, tanned, productive, and adventurous: I spent New Year's Eve on a mountaintop in a rainstorm, shouting Cliver Barker's poetry over the empty, shimmering canyons (I'm melodramatic like that).
2017 was, for me, the year in which I got boiled. The method life used to do so was a variation on “give and take” which might be described as “give and take more.” In January, I was healthy and happy, coming off a strong and adventurous year. In February, I sustained an injury which left me with a chronic condition, tinnitus – a persistent ringing in the ear that makes sleep impossible without judicious doses of white noise. In March, my first novel was named “Book of the Year” by Zealot Script magazine. In April, I visited Britain and France with my family. In May, I was working a job I detested and suffering acutely from physical symptoms that sucked all the quality from my life but which no doctor could even diagnose, much less cure. In June, I was given an offer for enormously higher pay in an extremely competitive field, but by July I hated the job worse than the one I'd left to take it. So on and so on, with ups following downs just often enough to give me the illusion that things weren't so bad. The trend, however, was going in only one direction – south.
This was the pattern of 2017. It fed me just enough to keep me on my feet, but starved me of what I needed to thrive. And the deeper I went into the year, the less return I seemed to get in my investment of time, the less inspired I felt, the less productive I became. My energy waned, and with it, my workout routine. Tanned skin paled. Hard muscles softened. A trim waist began to puddle around the button of my jeans. I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror, and I didn't want to admit that this was the case – I wallowed in denial. Denial that my body was turning to pudding, denial that my work ethic was doing the same. And it was a damnably easy feat of self-hypnosis to perform. Money was flowing in. IMDB credits were piling up, I was being invited to the houses of celebrity actors and attending cons and shows which not long ago would have turned me away at the door, and I had the stability that comes with a steady job. I kept trying to anesthetize that part of my soul which was shrieking in pain because I wasn't doing what I showed up on Earth to do. But the more anesthetic I applied, the more comfortable – if I may presume to quote Pink Floyd – my numbness became. Well, perhaps not comfortable; perhaps just endurable. Things were hot, but not hot enough for me to jump out of the pan. That was the way I saw it, week after empty lonely sterile week, month after boring tedious unproductive month. In the mean time, I cooked.
Think for a moment. Setting aside the obvious, i.e. food, water, shelter, sex, and family, what is it that you feel you cannot live without? The thing or things you do which trigger a sense of happiness, contentment, justification, satisfaction, and pleasure? The things without which life seems pointless, dull, or even painful? For me, as with many others, the answer isn't as obvious as it may seem, because what I enjoy and what I actually need are sometimes different things. I enjoy training in the martial arts, drinking whiskey and beer, watching combat sports on television, listening to Old Time Radio programs, watching old movies on the big screen...but I could probably go the rest of my life without doing any of these things if I had to and not feel as if I had a hole in the center of my being. Reading and writing I cannot do without. I need them to live. And yet in 2017, I read infrequently and wrote hardly at all, because I allowed myself to believe that “adult responsibility” (making as much money as I possibly could) trumped the innermost needs of Miles Watson the human being. In our society it's an easy mistake to make, because we're trained from infancy to associate financial success with happiness and even virtue. It's a bullshit ethos, probably invented by Satan in one of his more fiendishly ingenious moments, but it's hard not to drink it in with your mother's milk. In this case, it wasn't until my body began to strike back at me for neglecting my spirit that I grasped how hot the temperature of the water was around me.
“Positive actualization” is a real thing. So is its inversion. The heavenly courses we set for ourselves, we can follow if we believe that we can follow them; but the hells that we imagine – the disappointments, the frustrations, the left-handed compromises – can also be willed into existence. Everything in life has an opposite. If there is a will to power, there is also will to powerlessness, and the first step in overcoming it is recognizing it exists: that we all have a tendency to convince ourselves that shit is sugar, that theory is practice, that communism works. A moment came in the spring of '18 when I confessed to myself that the water around me was boiling, and the time had come for me to jump clear. Fate gave me a shove in the right direction by getting me laid off from a job that was poisoning my soul, but getting back to who I had been before I'd hit the water in the first place was another matter entirely. It actually began a month or so before the layoff, when I forced myself to go back to the gym. It sounds trivial, but the hour I spent there between 4:30 and 5:30 PM went a long way toward sweating out not only the actual toxins I was absorbing into my skin every day, but the spiritual toxins I had accumulated over the previous year. The human body is designed for movement, and when you move it, after some protesting squeaks, it generally begins to reward you, not only by looking better but by releasing endorphins which make you feel better. The truth is, however, that whether my workouts were effective or not on a fitness level, they represented a return to the discipline which I needed to feel like a man and a success. Failure, like excellence, is a habit, and I'd developed a way of thinking that dragged like an anchor every time I tried to move forward. To cut that chain took – takes! – conscious effort, and to slacken even for a moment invites backsliding. And in fact, even with conscious effort I have discovered that I will never again come to exactly the same place I occupied in January of 2017, because, as I think I already pointed out, life is a jetway. We are constantly transitioning from who we were to who we will be. But again, this can be a positive as well as a negative. I am different not only because of the emotional and spiritual scars I bear, but because I'm wiser and tougher than I was before – in other words, better, despite my previous misery. After a lot of work, a lot of self-scrutiny and self-care, I find myself more positive in outlook and more productive in fact than I have been in several years. I'm writing like mad. I'm submitting like crazy. I've picked up another literary award. I have another interview scheduled. My diet is kicking ass, and when I was injured in a hiking accident a week ago, I didn't sulk but shrugged and found ways to keep exercising despite a bum ankle and a torn rotator cuff. The future is bright, but only because I've brightened my future. I am no longer a stranger in my own life. But -- and here's the crucial thing -- I may be again if I'm not careful.
As you all know by now, I work in Hollywood, and if there's one thing Hollywood taught me growing up, it's the idea of the climactic battle and the "happily ever after" which follows the slaying of the dragon, the destruction of the Death Star, or the defeat of Voldemort. But in real life, our only true climactic battle is one we lose -- the one in which we die, I mean. All the battles prior to that one merely lead to more battles. I described life as a jetway, but it's really more of a gauntlet, a trial by combat, an elimination tournament in which every victory is followed by a fresh challenge. The idea that one decisive moment will turn us around for good, steer us into "ever after" territory, is bunk. As Hannibal Lecter told Clarice Starling: "You'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever." The brutal fact is – and I say this as a friendly warning – that the chef is always beneath us, holding his pan and saying with a smile, “Come on in – the water's fine!”
Whether we go swimming is up to us.
Why I'm a stranger in my own life?
– Sheryl Crow
Marge, I agree with you in theory. In theory, Communism works. In theory.
– Homer Simpson
A year ago I was a different person. I know, I know, major cliché...everyone is a different person today than they were a year past, or six months ago, for that matter. Life is change, usually slow and cumulative, sometimes fast and violent, but regardless of the speed or the tempo, who you are never stands still. Call it entropy or call it growth, we're all shifting infinitesimally from one moment to the next: our bodies, our minds, our outlooks on life. Still, there are changes and there are changes, and some of them are fairly dramatic.
A year ago tonight I was sitting in the very spot where I sit now, moodily writing in my journal. At that point in life, the diary I've kept for the last twelve years, which used to be a source of humor, ideas and reflections, had become a litany of complaints and morose observations. A single passage will give you a sense of the mental atmosphere in which I lived:
“The day was a slow one. I couldn't wait to rocket out of (work), but when I got home, I didn't have anything to eat that I wanted, so I foolishly went to (the local diner). With the exception of breakfast, which they do well enough, I am almost always disappointed there, and today was no exception. Not terrible food, just bland and served at a sluggish pace by a girl with way too many eyelashes. I came home overheated, sweaty and in a restless bad temper: as a result, I had no choice but to change and head over to the gym at eight-thirty. I did 37 minutes on the elliptical machine whilst watching a replay of the old Lawler – Condit (UFC) fight, then did a few short rounds on the heavy bag, but by that point I was sweated-out and exhausted. Spirit willing, flesh weak (and fat). But it felt good. I'm still not in what you'd call a happy humor, but when am I happy, nowadays? The frustration I feel over my life and career saps me on a daily basis. More and more I want to escape, but where would I go, and what would I do when I got there?”
If you don't mind, pretend you're a forensic pathologist and take a scalpel to my soul. Go ahead. Really look at this passage. Dissect it, Doctor Quincy. Now, I dunno what you see here, but here's my take on our subject's state of being. The very first sentence indicates boredom and discontent. The rest are full of self-criticism, disappointment, powerlessness, and desperation. The one positive comment – that punching the heavy bag “felt good” – is like a single raisin in pounds of gray dough. If I wanted, and you had the desire and patience, I could bury you under countless pages of identical gloom. The average size of one of my yearly journals is 300,000 words, which in layman's terms means three full-length novels, and if I had to estimate, I'd say that at least 100,000 of those words were written in the same cornered-rat vein. 365 days ago, today, I was in the Pit of Despair, the Slough of Despond, the Black Hole of Calcutta. Mentally fucked.
Depression's a weird thing. My entire life, I thought that depression meant sadness – deep, abiding, unremitting sadness. I had no idea that depression – real depression, clinical depression – is more like a chronic illness than a case of the deep blues. It makes you feel like complete, utter shit. The sadness is, in a sense, a kind of side-effect of physical misery – numbness, weakness, anxiety, nausea, insomnia. When my neurologist told me, on March 27, after a long battery of tests, that there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I was depressed, my main reaction was surprise. Me? Depressed? How could that be? My life, on paper, looked pretty goddamned good. I was living in the city that I had wanted to reside in since my first visit there in 1999. Against all odds, I had broken into the entertainment industry, and was making more money than I had ever made in my life. My debut novel had collected two awards and was in contention for others. I got to work with enormously talented people and meet actors and athletes and celebrities, many of whom I had idolized as a kid. Friends and family were readily available. I lived in a clean, quiet, safe neighborhood in a location that was equally convenient to wild hiking trails in the mountains or the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. I could swim outdoors in February, for God's sake. In theory, I was living the dream. But as Homer Simpson so wisely once observed, “In theory, Communism works.”
I'm a writer by trade and by passion and by identity, too. An imaginative person. I am at my happiest when I'm creating something. It might be a historical or genre novel. It might be a short story. It might be a screenplay or even a graphic novel. It might be a crime story, a WW2 tale, horror, erotica or fantasy. I don't discriminate. I'm bad at a lot of things, good at a few, meant to do precisely one. I know this, and yet the pressures and seeming necessities of life constantly interpose themselves between me and my reason for occupying space on this troubled planet. In this, of course, I'm no different than most others. In the matrix in which we are condemned to exist, the demands required simply to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly occupy most of our time and energy and thought, leaving only crumbs and gristle for our métier: but a human soul is very much like the human body it occupies; if you don't feed it, it withers and dies. Scraps won't do. This is the paradox of modern existence: to remain human, and not degenerate into Morlocks, mere office or factory drones out of a Mike Judge movie – sexless, obedient, without ambition – it's necessary to feed said soul, and yet any given moment is more likely to find us paying bills, sitting in traffic, staring at the ceiling or standing in line. As the character of George Bowling observed in Orwell's “Coming Up For Air” – “There's time for everything in life except the things that really matter.”
You will recall I used the word “powerlessness” to describe how I felt on January 4, 2018. But in regards to my own behavior, the proper appellation is “passivity.” The attitude I had adopted toward my own life was a resigned one. I meekly, tiredly, sadly accepted a situation that had sucked the enthusiasm right out of me: even when I tried to take action, in the form of exercise, it was in a posture of submission, of reaction (“I had no choice”) rather than assertiveness and strength. Here's a non-rhetorical question: how the fuck did that happen?
The technique by which all my aggressive, assertive qualities were reduced to a formless, subservient mush of despair and self-pity is known as “boiling the frog.” When one wishes to serve fresh “cuisses de grenouille” – frog's legs – one takes live frogs and places them in a pan of lukewarm water on a stove, and then, by installments, turns up the heat to the boiling point. If properly executed, this method will kill the frogs in so subtle a manner that they will never even try to escape, but will sit quiescently until they are cooked through. It is often the same with people. Had I been suddenly and violently assailed by circumstance, I would have grasped I was under attack and either fought back or run away, like a frog thrown into already boiling water. But life is a subtle opponent and opted instead to gradually turn up the flame, so that I was quite content to stew in my own juices until it was very nearly too late to save myself.
2016 was a banner year for me. I released three books, traveled to San Francisco, Vancouver, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and spent almost every waking hour that I wasn't writing or promoting my fiction, swimming or hiking – my journal for that year records 99 hikes and 95 visits to my excellent outdoor pool. I even stole away from the Book Expo America to watch my Cubs flatten the Pirates at Wrigley Field, where I hadn't been in probably 30 years. I was fit, tanned, productive, and adventurous: I spent New Year's Eve on a mountaintop in a rainstorm, shouting Cliver Barker's poetry over the empty, shimmering canyons (I'm melodramatic like that).
2017 was, for me, the year in which I got boiled. The method life used to do so was a variation on “give and take” which might be described as “give and take more.” In January, I was healthy and happy, coming off a strong and adventurous year. In February, I sustained an injury which left me with a chronic condition, tinnitus – a persistent ringing in the ear that makes sleep impossible without judicious doses of white noise. In March, my first novel was named “Book of the Year” by Zealot Script magazine. In April, I visited Britain and France with my family. In May, I was working a job I detested and suffering acutely from physical symptoms that sucked all the quality from my life but which no doctor could even diagnose, much less cure. In June, I was given an offer for enormously higher pay in an extremely competitive field, but by July I hated the job worse than the one I'd left to take it. So on and so on, with ups following downs just often enough to give me the illusion that things weren't so bad. The trend, however, was going in only one direction – south.
This was the pattern of 2017. It fed me just enough to keep me on my feet, but starved me of what I needed to thrive. And the deeper I went into the year, the less return I seemed to get in my investment of time, the less inspired I felt, the less productive I became. My energy waned, and with it, my workout routine. Tanned skin paled. Hard muscles softened. A trim waist began to puddle around the button of my jeans. I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror, and I didn't want to admit that this was the case – I wallowed in denial. Denial that my body was turning to pudding, denial that my work ethic was doing the same. And it was a damnably easy feat of self-hypnosis to perform. Money was flowing in. IMDB credits were piling up, I was being invited to the houses of celebrity actors and attending cons and shows which not long ago would have turned me away at the door, and I had the stability that comes with a steady job. I kept trying to anesthetize that part of my soul which was shrieking in pain because I wasn't doing what I showed up on Earth to do. But the more anesthetic I applied, the more comfortable – if I may presume to quote Pink Floyd – my numbness became. Well, perhaps not comfortable; perhaps just endurable. Things were hot, but not hot enough for me to jump out of the pan. That was the way I saw it, week after empty lonely sterile week, month after boring tedious unproductive month. In the mean time, I cooked.
Think for a moment. Setting aside the obvious, i.e. food, water, shelter, sex, and family, what is it that you feel you cannot live without? The thing or things you do which trigger a sense of happiness, contentment, justification, satisfaction, and pleasure? The things without which life seems pointless, dull, or even painful? For me, as with many others, the answer isn't as obvious as it may seem, because what I enjoy and what I actually need are sometimes different things. I enjoy training in the martial arts, drinking whiskey and beer, watching combat sports on television, listening to Old Time Radio programs, watching old movies on the big screen...but I could probably go the rest of my life without doing any of these things if I had to and not feel as if I had a hole in the center of my being. Reading and writing I cannot do without. I need them to live. And yet in 2017, I read infrequently and wrote hardly at all, because I allowed myself to believe that “adult responsibility” (making as much money as I possibly could) trumped the innermost needs of Miles Watson the human being. In our society it's an easy mistake to make, because we're trained from infancy to associate financial success with happiness and even virtue. It's a bullshit ethos, probably invented by Satan in one of his more fiendishly ingenious moments, but it's hard not to drink it in with your mother's milk. In this case, it wasn't until my body began to strike back at me for neglecting my spirit that I grasped how hot the temperature of the water was around me.
“Positive actualization” is a real thing. So is its inversion. The heavenly courses we set for ourselves, we can follow if we believe that we can follow them; but the hells that we imagine – the disappointments, the frustrations, the left-handed compromises – can also be willed into existence. Everything in life has an opposite. If there is a will to power, there is also will to powerlessness, and the first step in overcoming it is recognizing it exists: that we all have a tendency to convince ourselves that shit is sugar, that theory is practice, that communism works. A moment came in the spring of '18 when I confessed to myself that the water around me was boiling, and the time had come for me to jump clear. Fate gave me a shove in the right direction by getting me laid off from a job that was poisoning my soul, but getting back to who I had been before I'd hit the water in the first place was another matter entirely. It actually began a month or so before the layoff, when I forced myself to go back to the gym. It sounds trivial, but the hour I spent there between 4:30 and 5:30 PM went a long way toward sweating out not only the actual toxins I was absorbing into my skin every day, but the spiritual toxins I had accumulated over the previous year. The human body is designed for movement, and when you move it, after some protesting squeaks, it generally begins to reward you, not only by looking better but by releasing endorphins which make you feel better. The truth is, however, that whether my workouts were effective or not on a fitness level, they represented a return to the discipline which I needed to feel like a man and a success. Failure, like excellence, is a habit, and I'd developed a way of thinking that dragged like an anchor every time I tried to move forward. To cut that chain took – takes! – conscious effort, and to slacken even for a moment invites backsliding. And in fact, even with conscious effort I have discovered that I will never again come to exactly the same place I occupied in January of 2017, because, as I think I already pointed out, life is a jetway. We are constantly transitioning from who we were to who we will be. But again, this can be a positive as well as a negative. I am different not only because of the emotional and spiritual scars I bear, but because I'm wiser and tougher than I was before – in other words, better, despite my previous misery. After a lot of work, a lot of self-scrutiny and self-care, I find myself more positive in outlook and more productive in fact than I have been in several years. I'm writing like mad. I'm submitting like crazy. I've picked up another literary award. I have another interview scheduled. My diet is kicking ass, and when I was injured in a hiking accident a week ago, I didn't sulk but shrugged and found ways to keep exercising despite a bum ankle and a torn rotator cuff. The future is bright, but only because I've brightened my future. I am no longer a stranger in my own life. But -- and here's the crucial thing -- I may be again if I'm not careful.
As you all know by now, I work in Hollywood, and if there's one thing Hollywood taught me growing up, it's the idea of the climactic battle and the "happily ever after" which follows the slaying of the dragon, the destruction of the Death Star, or the defeat of Voldemort. But in real life, our only true climactic battle is one we lose -- the one in which we die, I mean. All the battles prior to that one merely lead to more battles. I described life as a jetway, but it's really more of a gauntlet, a trial by combat, an elimination tournament in which every victory is followed by a fresh challenge. The idea that one decisive moment will turn us around for good, steer us into "ever after" territory, is bunk. As Hannibal Lecter told Clarice Starling: "You'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever." The brutal fact is – and I say this as a friendly warning – that the chef is always beneath us, holding his pan and saying with a smile, “Come on in – the water's fine!”
Whether we go swimming is up to us.
December 28, 2018
Yes, Outrage Mob, Lee was a Great General
People tell me I shall go down in history as the greatest general of all time. This is not so, for I have never conducted a retreat.
-- Helmuth von Moltke
The American Civil War has become the historical version of a 1950s drive-in movie monster: The Thing That Would Not Die. The war ended 153 years ago, but it every time it seems the beast is dead, its body cold, its bones moldering, it utters a cough, sits up, and starts wreaking havoc again – rather like Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN.
During the majority of my life the monster appeared comfortably dead. Southerners' bitterness over the defeat of the Confederacy had ebbed, as had Northern smugness over their victory. The former combatants themselves had already made peace in symbolic ways: in 1910, at Gettysburg, aged veterans of the Blue and Gray acted out Pickett's Charge a second time, culminating their re-enactment by embracing one another as brothers and countrymen on the same field where they had slaughtered each other by the tens of thousands decades before. In 1956, Congress magnanimously voted that all Confederate soldiers be retroactively considered members of the United States Army and therefore veterans, rather than insurgents, insurrectionists or rebels. The United States Army, which had lost 360,222 men during the fighting, currently has ten military bases named after Confederate generals, and the Navy has named a number of vessels after Confederates or Confederate victories: the USS Chancellorsville is handled after Robert E. Lee's most spectacular victory.
This sort of memorializing was not viewed by most as "Southern sympathy" but rather an acknowledgement that before, and indeed after, they rebels were Confederates, they were also Americans. It was also seen as a sign of magnanimity from the victorious North: in most countries, defeated rebels get no monuments, but in America, which turned its back on European traditions of vindictiveness, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, wasn't even charged with a crime upon his capture in 1865. After a short imprisonment, he was, in fact, released, as was the rest of the Confederate government and the Confederate military leadership. With the exception of the Andersonville Trial, which convicted a single rebel officer -- himself not even an American, but Swiss -- of war crimes, there were no acts of official vengeance by the United States government. This magnanimity extended even to men like Joe Wheeler, a ferocious Confederate cavalry general who put the blue uniform back on in 1898 to command U.S. army forces in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and James Longstreet, one of the most famous and highest-ranking Confederate generals, who later became the U.S.A.'s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1897 - 1907. (Indeed, when Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, two of the six pallbearers of his casket were ex-rebel generals.) By the time I was old enough to visit Civil War battlefields with my family in the late 70s and early 80s, the idea that anyone could experience anger over the war or its outcome struck most people as either ludicrous or funny. You might as well get mad over the doings of Napoleon -- or Julius Caesar, for that matter.
To be sure, there were occasional hints, glimpses as it were, of lingering resentment. Once, at a Fourth of July BBQ, a distant cousin of mine from the Deep South uttered two phrases which both amused me enormously and stuck forever in my memory. The first was her description of the overcooked hamburger she'd been served – “This burger's been Shermanized!” (As I was only eight or nine at the time, I needed my father to explain that Sherman's name was synonymous in the South with destruction, especially destruction by fire.) The second was the way she sharply corrected someone who had uttered the words “The Civil War” – “You mean the The War of Northern Aggression?”
Many years later, in college, a friend of mine – a Northerner – told me of living in the deeps of Georgia for some years as a kid, and how the period 1861 – 1865 was referred to in his elementary school simply as “Lincoln's War,” the implication of which was obvious. And of course we had all seen movies like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and MISSISSIPPI BURNING, which showed the Jim Crow South at its ugliest or near-ugliest: we knew what the legacy of the Confederacy had been in real terms. But wicked old Jim had himself been lynched by the Civil Rights movement which had directly preceded our births, so that, too, for us, was ancient history. When Ken Burns released his moving and masterful documentary THE CIVIL WAR in 1990, the effect was not to open old wounds but remind everyone of the folly of division. America, to us, was one nation, indivisible, and arguments about the war were either conducted as a purely intellectual exercise or simply for fun. The beast was dead.
All of this, however, preceded the Internet Age and the culture of outrage that eventually followed it. It is well outside the scope of this blog to discuss the history of the restless, ever-vigilant Outrage Mob, always looking for something to be pissed off about, always looking for someone or something to judge and then execute (never mind the jury), but one of the many specific effects of this electronic lynch-mob environment has been to resurrect the beast once more. Violent and bitter arguments about statues and flags have superseded enormously more important issues about the environment and the economy. A year or two ago it was literally impossible to open a newspaper or scroll through a social media feed without being slapped in the face by story after story about Confederate symbols on state flags and statues of Jeff Davis – this, at a time when the country is 21 trillion dollars (that's 12 zeroes, folks) in debt, its infrastructure is crumbling, the environment is in open rebellion against us, our military has been fighting for close to 20 years without a break, and there is every sign that another Great Recession or even a Great Depression is on its way.
Don't misunderstand me. It's not my business to tell someone whether or not they ought to be offended by something. But it is my business -- I'm making it my business -- to remind people of two important facts. The first is that when the house is on fire, its cockroach problem is palpably less important. Priorities matter. Perhaps if we spent less time wasting our indignation on trivia, we would have more for the really terrifying issues confronting us as a nation and a species. But the complete inversion of priority we see in the news and social media is not the worst of it. The real problem is that with all ideologically-based outrage, there comes a certain distortion of reality, a tendency to rewrite history according to the morals, ethics and beliefs of the person doing the rewriting.
It goes without saying, though I am going to say it anyway, that democracy and freedom thrive in an atmosphere of truth and honesty (in other words, a place where 2 + 2 = 4) and wither when placed in an environment where facts become malleable things, subject to the whims of those in power. This is because truth is inherently democratic: it applies to everyone all the time, regardless of their sex or skin color or how much money they have. The moment we make exceptions for the sake of our ideological, racial or religious comfort, we take a step toward tyranny, and the insanity and stupidity that inevitably accompany it. Sean Spicer was justly ridiculed for spluttering about “alternative facts,” just as the Nazis were once ridiculed for insisting that physics were “Jewish science” and didn't apply to Germans.
Two months ago, President Trump, the Bart Simpson of the Executive Branch, got into hot water over a remark he made that “Robert E. Lee was a great general.” Actually, the point of Trump's speech was to praise Lee's nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant, but the Outrage Mob got a hold of the ball and ran with it for several days, implying that Trump was some kind of Confederate sympathizer, until at last the context of the speech was revealed. This, in effect, tackled the Mob and ended the controversy, which disappeared down the memory hole. In and of itself this was only a stupid incident, typical of the uneducated, knee-jerk response that the Internet seems to cultivate, but what alarmed me was the way that the notion that someone might praise Lee for his generalship was in fact worthy of outrage. For...let me state this clearly now... Robert E. Lee was a great general. In fact, you can make an argument, indeed a very serious argument, that Lee is the greatest general America ever produced. Better than Patton. Better than Pershing. Better even than Grant, the man who ultimately defeated him.
Lee was born in 1807, the son of “Light Horse” Harry Lee, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and later married Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. At West Point, he achieved the highest rank of any cadet and graduated second in his class. In the Mexican-American War, the legendary General Winfield Scott called him “the best soldier I have ever seen in the field.” So respected was Lee within the Army that in 1861, when the country was breaking apart, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the army Lincoln intended to use to crush the burgeoning rebellion in the South, despite the fact that Lee was only a colonel and there were numerous generals ahead of him in seniority. Instead of accepting the command, Lee resigned, telling relatives that while he opposed succession and supported the Union, he could not draw his sword against his native state of Virginia.
Lee's first year in the war was inauspicious, but in 1862, Joe Johnston, the commander of the Confederate army in Virginia, was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines, and Lee took command of what came to be known as the Army of Northern Virginia. It would be more accurate to say he created the army, for he immediately imposed tough a discipline and first-class organization upon it, which elevated its spirit and gave it the strength required for the battles which came. This was proven during the so-called Seven Days Battles, during which Lee was confronted by a huge Union army moving on the Confederate capital of Richmond from the Jamestown peninsula. The fact that he was outnumbered, outgunned and out-supplied made little impression on him, and over the course of the next week, Lee attacked his opponent, McClellan, so furiously that despite the fact that Lee lost more men and some of the battles, the Union general's nerves broke and he ordered his army withdrawn from Virginia.
In Lee's next major battle, Second Bull Run, he met the army of John Pope at the sight of the Confederacy's first great victory, and repeated it on a larger scale despite Pope's numerical superiority (77,000 to 50,000). Later that same year (1862), Lee invaded Maryland, but a copy of his battle plan was captured by the Union and General McClellan used it to try to annihilate Lee's army in detail. The resulting Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest single-day conflict of the war: it ended Lee's invasion, and is rightly considered a strategic Union victory, but by managing to escape destruction (despite being outnumbered 2:1 (102,000 to 55,000) and inflicting such terrible losses on his enemy in the mean time, Lee could claim the fight a tactical draw. Indeed, the Union commander, McClellan, was sacked afterwards, ending his military career, which certainly puts a certain complexion on the outcome.
Lee was not dismayed by his defeat and responded by thrashing the Union army twice in a row – at Fredericksburg (December, 1862) and Chancellorsville (April-May, 1863). In the former battle, again outnumbered 2:1, he mauled the Union army of General Burnside (122,000) with little more than 78,000 men, inflicting x3 times as many casualties as he took. The governor of Pennsylvania, touring the battlefield, described it as “not battle, but butchery.” Chancellorsville, often described as “Lee's Masterpeice,” saw him once again facing seemingly hopeless odds – 133,000 well-equipped Union troops, against only 60,000 Confederates. Defying all military logic and tradition, he divided his forces in the face of Joe Hooker's attack and sent Stonewall Jackson into the enemy's rear, precipitating a humiliating rout. Lee's losses were terrible, and his best general, Jackson, fell in the battle, but Lee's reputation and the reputation of his army had never been higher. Lee's aide Charles Marshall wrote afterwards:
"Lee's presence was the signal for one of those uncontrollable bursts of enthusiasm which none can appreciate who has not witnessed them.... one long unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle and hailed the presence of a victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked at him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought that it must have been from some such scene that men in ancient days ascended to the dignity of gods."
Lee is of course associated most closely with his crushing defeat at Gettysburg in July of 1863, and deserves to be: it was his decision, on the third day of the battle, when the outcome was still very much in doubt, to try a massed attack on the Union center, henceforth known as “Pickett's Charge.” This led to a bloody disaster, and Lee was hard-pressed to save his army, extricating it safely from Pennsylvania only with great difficulty. But in fairness to Lee, he was in poor health at the start of the battle, suffering from both the heart disease which eventually killed him, and a riding accident which had effected his ability to ride. He was also plagued by the failure of his cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, to supply him with information about the Union army's location, and by the loss of his "right arm," Stonewall Jackson in the previous fight.
Yet having lost almost a third of his men, Lee remained undaunted. In 1864, when Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Union Army and began an aggressive invasion of Virginia, Lee fought the previously undefeated Grant to a draw in their first two engagements – the Battle of the Wilderness and the even bloodier Battle of Spotsylvania, inflicting 36,000 casualties on Grant's army in two weeks. At Cold Harbor, some weeks later, Lee's men massacred as many as 7,000 Union soldiers in just seven minutes, as they advanced in close-packed ranks into Lee's trench line, and forced Grant to shift his tactics from assault to siege warfare. By withdrawing what was left of his army in good order to the area of Richmond – Petersburg, Lee denied Grant the Confederate capital and extended the Civil War by as much as a year. He could not prevent the Confederacy's defeat, but he did delay it enormously and inflicted upon the Union a terrible price for achieving it.
It is necessary to restate here that in all the numerous battles Lee fought between 1862 – 1865, there was never a single instance where he was not outnumbered, outgunned and out-supplied, often by large margins. The Union army was not only able to replace its losses almost instantaneously, its numerical and material strength actually grew steadily as the war progressed, while the strength of the Confederate army after 1863 never stopped decreasing, and in material terms was never good to begin with. The Union, home to most of the nation's manufacturing, flooded its armies with food, medicine and equipment, while the rebels were largely contingent on captured supplies, smuggled weapons and whatever they could forage. Rebel armies often lacked shoes even in winter, and after the winter of 1864, Lee did not even have enough fodder to feed his horses. Meanwhile, his men subsisted on near-starvation rations. Descriptions of Confederate troops in the last two years of the war unfailingly mention how scrawny, sunburned, dirty, hairy and raggedy-dressed the men were, especially in contrast to their beautifully equipped enemies...yet it was the ragged and underfed rebels who, more often than not, took the victory under Lee's leadership. He was able to achieve these victories against superior armies because of his tactical and strategic skill, his ability to recognize talent in his officers, and the personal loyalty and fanaticism he inspired in his troops: also because he had an almost supernatural understanding of how to exploit the weaknesses of enemy generals. But it was often in defeat that Lee showed his true mettle: at Antietam, Gettysburg and the latter stages of the Overland Campaign he was able to extract his damaged, bleeding army from the jaws of battle, withdraw to better ground under pressure, and continue the fight. This has been defined by none other than Helmuth von Moltke, the father of modern warfare, as the most difficult of all the military arts, the one by which all great generals must be judged, and Lee was a master of it.
I might add that unlike Sherman, Sheridan, Hunter, Butler, Burnside and many other Union generals, Lee's behavior when he was in the field, even on Union soil, was impeccable. His well-disciplined troops committed no wanton acts of destruction, not even in retaliation for the many Union outrages committed in Virginia. He sternly forbade looting, vandalism, or the burning of towns, and while his men “requisitioned” food and livestock (as did all armies of the period), they did not fire barns, dynamite wells, cut down trees, or do anything else to prevent the local population from surviving after they had left.
It is not my purpose here to whitewash Lee as a human being, nor to ignore the mistakes he made as a soldier. Even as a general, Lee had his flaws. He could be reckless when his blood was up, his casualties were always high, and by his own admission he began to believe in the invincibility of his army, a factor which contributed to its ultimate downfall. What's more, and as the historian Shelby Foote noted to Ken Burns, much of his military genius lay in the fact that he was always in a desperate situation and had to take long chances to have any hope of victory. The course open to him, Foote argued, was really the only course he could have taken, and while it was often successful, it might possibly have rewarded a lesser commander nearly as well. None of this, however, really detracts from Lee's status as a commander. Every leader makes mistakes, and the greater the leader, the greater the mistakes tend to be.
Now, it can be argued, and often is, that the Confederacy was really nothing but a life-support system for the institution of slavery. This is an incomplete observation, but not incorrect in and of itself, and because chattel slavery is so disgusting as to be utterly indefensible, those who fought for the Confederacy are often assumed to be little more than warriors in service of a moral abomination. This, too, is an incomplete observation, but also not without some legitimacy. The issue at hand, however, is not the moral rightness or wrongness of Lee's decision to serve the Confederacy, or what his actual opinions on slavery were or succession were, but the much larger issue of whether acknowledging Lee's military greatness is wrong. I believe that even the limited, slovenly biography I have adduced here provides ample proof that Lee was an outstanding general, a genius at war, but more importantly, I believe it ought to be possible for someone, even as provocative a figure as Donald Trump, to acknowledge this without being the subject of attack. The truth is the truth. You don't have to like it, but to deny it because it means giving praise to an enemy is not merely stupid and childish, it is horribly dangerous and can lead us into intellectual moral quagmires from which it may be impossible to escape.
In the 1930s, when Communism was on the march all over the world, the triumphant Communists used to insist that no work of art, novel or play could have any quality or value unless it spoke positively about the communist message. A book was only “good” if it was communist in theme or written by a communist.
Likewise, a scientific premise hatched by communists had to be valid even if "capitalist" science stated otherwise. This warped thinking led the communists to embrace Lysenkoism, a crackpot theory about agriculture that led to the starvation of tens of millions of people all over Europe, and which was not discountenanced despite repeated failures: as late as the 1960s, the Soviets insisted that things like oranges and corn could be grown in Siberia: the failure to achieve any success whatever in doing so was never seen as proof that the theory was nonsense. To acknowledge this would have been to allow for the possibility that communism could err, which, in turn, destroy the communist position that "the Party is always right."
The fact is, once people put on religious or ideological blinders that distort reality in accordance with their wishes, the next logical step is to attack anyone who speaks truth to their own particular power – “conformity” and “enforcement” go hand in hand. And once these people are silenced, said people can go on happily in their stylized denial of reality until something kicks them out of it. In the mean time, however, everything suffers, most notably the truth.
George Orwell said in 1984 that “freedom is the freedom to say 2 + 2 = 4.” To acknowledge the military greatness of Robert E. Lee is simply to make this equation. The sad reality in 2018, however, that is we seem to be sliding into an age where 2 + 2 really does equal five if the Party – in this case, the Outrage Mob – says it does.
-- Helmuth von Moltke
The American Civil War has become the historical version of a 1950s drive-in movie monster: The Thing That Would Not Die. The war ended 153 years ago, but it every time it seems the beast is dead, its body cold, its bones moldering, it utters a cough, sits up, and starts wreaking havoc again – rather like Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN.
During the majority of my life the monster appeared comfortably dead. Southerners' bitterness over the defeat of the Confederacy had ebbed, as had Northern smugness over their victory. The former combatants themselves had already made peace in symbolic ways: in 1910, at Gettysburg, aged veterans of the Blue and Gray acted out Pickett's Charge a second time, culminating their re-enactment by embracing one another as brothers and countrymen on the same field where they had slaughtered each other by the tens of thousands decades before. In 1956, Congress magnanimously voted that all Confederate soldiers be retroactively considered members of the United States Army and therefore veterans, rather than insurgents, insurrectionists or rebels. The United States Army, which had lost 360,222 men during the fighting, currently has ten military bases named after Confederate generals, and the Navy has named a number of vessels after Confederates or Confederate victories: the USS Chancellorsville is handled after Robert E. Lee's most spectacular victory.
This sort of memorializing was not viewed by most as "Southern sympathy" but rather an acknowledgement that before, and indeed after, they rebels were Confederates, they were also Americans. It was also seen as a sign of magnanimity from the victorious North: in most countries, defeated rebels get no monuments, but in America, which turned its back on European traditions of vindictiveness, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, wasn't even charged with a crime upon his capture in 1865. After a short imprisonment, he was, in fact, released, as was the rest of the Confederate government and the Confederate military leadership. With the exception of the Andersonville Trial, which convicted a single rebel officer -- himself not even an American, but Swiss -- of war crimes, there were no acts of official vengeance by the United States government. This magnanimity extended even to men like Joe Wheeler, a ferocious Confederate cavalry general who put the blue uniform back on in 1898 to command U.S. army forces in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and James Longstreet, one of the most famous and highest-ranking Confederate generals, who later became the U.S.A.'s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1897 - 1907. (Indeed, when Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, two of the six pallbearers of his casket were ex-rebel generals.) By the time I was old enough to visit Civil War battlefields with my family in the late 70s and early 80s, the idea that anyone could experience anger over the war or its outcome struck most people as either ludicrous or funny. You might as well get mad over the doings of Napoleon -- or Julius Caesar, for that matter.
To be sure, there were occasional hints, glimpses as it were, of lingering resentment. Once, at a Fourth of July BBQ, a distant cousin of mine from the Deep South uttered two phrases which both amused me enormously and stuck forever in my memory. The first was her description of the overcooked hamburger she'd been served – “This burger's been Shermanized!” (As I was only eight or nine at the time, I needed my father to explain that Sherman's name was synonymous in the South with destruction, especially destruction by fire.) The second was the way she sharply corrected someone who had uttered the words “The Civil War” – “You mean the The War of Northern Aggression?”
Many years later, in college, a friend of mine – a Northerner – told me of living in the deeps of Georgia for some years as a kid, and how the period 1861 – 1865 was referred to in his elementary school simply as “Lincoln's War,” the implication of which was obvious. And of course we had all seen movies like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and MISSISSIPPI BURNING, which showed the Jim Crow South at its ugliest or near-ugliest: we knew what the legacy of the Confederacy had been in real terms. But wicked old Jim had himself been lynched by the Civil Rights movement which had directly preceded our births, so that, too, for us, was ancient history. When Ken Burns released his moving and masterful documentary THE CIVIL WAR in 1990, the effect was not to open old wounds but remind everyone of the folly of division. America, to us, was one nation, indivisible, and arguments about the war were either conducted as a purely intellectual exercise or simply for fun. The beast was dead.
All of this, however, preceded the Internet Age and the culture of outrage that eventually followed it. It is well outside the scope of this blog to discuss the history of the restless, ever-vigilant Outrage Mob, always looking for something to be pissed off about, always looking for someone or something to judge and then execute (never mind the jury), but one of the many specific effects of this electronic lynch-mob environment has been to resurrect the beast once more. Violent and bitter arguments about statues and flags have superseded enormously more important issues about the environment and the economy. A year or two ago it was literally impossible to open a newspaper or scroll through a social media feed without being slapped in the face by story after story about Confederate symbols on state flags and statues of Jeff Davis – this, at a time when the country is 21 trillion dollars (that's 12 zeroes, folks) in debt, its infrastructure is crumbling, the environment is in open rebellion against us, our military has been fighting for close to 20 years without a break, and there is every sign that another Great Recession or even a Great Depression is on its way.
Don't misunderstand me. It's not my business to tell someone whether or not they ought to be offended by something. But it is my business -- I'm making it my business -- to remind people of two important facts. The first is that when the house is on fire, its cockroach problem is palpably less important. Priorities matter. Perhaps if we spent less time wasting our indignation on trivia, we would have more for the really terrifying issues confronting us as a nation and a species. But the complete inversion of priority we see in the news and social media is not the worst of it. The real problem is that with all ideologically-based outrage, there comes a certain distortion of reality, a tendency to rewrite history according to the morals, ethics and beliefs of the person doing the rewriting.
It goes without saying, though I am going to say it anyway, that democracy and freedom thrive in an atmosphere of truth and honesty (in other words, a place where 2 + 2 = 4) and wither when placed in an environment where facts become malleable things, subject to the whims of those in power. This is because truth is inherently democratic: it applies to everyone all the time, regardless of their sex or skin color or how much money they have. The moment we make exceptions for the sake of our ideological, racial or religious comfort, we take a step toward tyranny, and the insanity and stupidity that inevitably accompany it. Sean Spicer was justly ridiculed for spluttering about “alternative facts,” just as the Nazis were once ridiculed for insisting that physics were “Jewish science” and didn't apply to Germans.
Two months ago, President Trump, the Bart Simpson of the Executive Branch, got into hot water over a remark he made that “Robert E. Lee was a great general.” Actually, the point of Trump's speech was to praise Lee's nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant, but the Outrage Mob got a hold of the ball and ran with it for several days, implying that Trump was some kind of Confederate sympathizer, until at last the context of the speech was revealed. This, in effect, tackled the Mob and ended the controversy, which disappeared down the memory hole. In and of itself this was only a stupid incident, typical of the uneducated, knee-jerk response that the Internet seems to cultivate, but what alarmed me was the way that the notion that someone might praise Lee for his generalship was in fact worthy of outrage. For...let me state this clearly now... Robert E. Lee was a great general. In fact, you can make an argument, indeed a very serious argument, that Lee is the greatest general America ever produced. Better than Patton. Better than Pershing. Better even than Grant, the man who ultimately defeated him.
Lee was born in 1807, the son of “Light Horse” Harry Lee, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and later married Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. At West Point, he achieved the highest rank of any cadet and graduated second in his class. In the Mexican-American War, the legendary General Winfield Scott called him “the best soldier I have ever seen in the field.” So respected was Lee within the Army that in 1861, when the country was breaking apart, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the army Lincoln intended to use to crush the burgeoning rebellion in the South, despite the fact that Lee was only a colonel and there were numerous generals ahead of him in seniority. Instead of accepting the command, Lee resigned, telling relatives that while he opposed succession and supported the Union, he could not draw his sword against his native state of Virginia.
Lee's first year in the war was inauspicious, but in 1862, Joe Johnston, the commander of the Confederate army in Virginia, was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines, and Lee took command of what came to be known as the Army of Northern Virginia. It would be more accurate to say he created the army, for he immediately imposed tough a discipline and first-class organization upon it, which elevated its spirit and gave it the strength required for the battles which came. This was proven during the so-called Seven Days Battles, during which Lee was confronted by a huge Union army moving on the Confederate capital of Richmond from the Jamestown peninsula. The fact that he was outnumbered, outgunned and out-supplied made little impression on him, and over the course of the next week, Lee attacked his opponent, McClellan, so furiously that despite the fact that Lee lost more men and some of the battles, the Union general's nerves broke and he ordered his army withdrawn from Virginia.
In Lee's next major battle, Second Bull Run, he met the army of John Pope at the sight of the Confederacy's first great victory, and repeated it on a larger scale despite Pope's numerical superiority (77,000 to 50,000). Later that same year (1862), Lee invaded Maryland, but a copy of his battle plan was captured by the Union and General McClellan used it to try to annihilate Lee's army in detail. The resulting Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest single-day conflict of the war: it ended Lee's invasion, and is rightly considered a strategic Union victory, but by managing to escape destruction (despite being outnumbered 2:1 (102,000 to 55,000) and inflicting such terrible losses on his enemy in the mean time, Lee could claim the fight a tactical draw. Indeed, the Union commander, McClellan, was sacked afterwards, ending his military career, which certainly puts a certain complexion on the outcome.
Lee was not dismayed by his defeat and responded by thrashing the Union army twice in a row – at Fredericksburg (December, 1862) and Chancellorsville (April-May, 1863). In the former battle, again outnumbered 2:1, he mauled the Union army of General Burnside (122,000) with little more than 78,000 men, inflicting x3 times as many casualties as he took. The governor of Pennsylvania, touring the battlefield, described it as “not battle, but butchery.” Chancellorsville, often described as “Lee's Masterpeice,” saw him once again facing seemingly hopeless odds – 133,000 well-equipped Union troops, against only 60,000 Confederates. Defying all military logic and tradition, he divided his forces in the face of Joe Hooker's attack and sent Stonewall Jackson into the enemy's rear, precipitating a humiliating rout. Lee's losses were terrible, and his best general, Jackson, fell in the battle, but Lee's reputation and the reputation of his army had never been higher. Lee's aide Charles Marshall wrote afterwards:
"Lee's presence was the signal for one of those uncontrollable bursts of enthusiasm which none can appreciate who has not witnessed them.... one long unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle and hailed the presence of a victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked at him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought that it must have been from some such scene that men in ancient days ascended to the dignity of gods."
Lee is of course associated most closely with his crushing defeat at Gettysburg in July of 1863, and deserves to be: it was his decision, on the third day of the battle, when the outcome was still very much in doubt, to try a massed attack on the Union center, henceforth known as “Pickett's Charge.” This led to a bloody disaster, and Lee was hard-pressed to save his army, extricating it safely from Pennsylvania only with great difficulty. But in fairness to Lee, he was in poor health at the start of the battle, suffering from both the heart disease which eventually killed him, and a riding accident which had effected his ability to ride. He was also plagued by the failure of his cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, to supply him with information about the Union army's location, and by the loss of his "right arm," Stonewall Jackson in the previous fight.
Yet having lost almost a third of his men, Lee remained undaunted. In 1864, when Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Union Army and began an aggressive invasion of Virginia, Lee fought the previously undefeated Grant to a draw in their first two engagements – the Battle of the Wilderness and the even bloodier Battle of Spotsylvania, inflicting 36,000 casualties on Grant's army in two weeks. At Cold Harbor, some weeks later, Lee's men massacred as many as 7,000 Union soldiers in just seven minutes, as they advanced in close-packed ranks into Lee's trench line, and forced Grant to shift his tactics from assault to siege warfare. By withdrawing what was left of his army in good order to the area of Richmond – Petersburg, Lee denied Grant the Confederate capital and extended the Civil War by as much as a year. He could not prevent the Confederacy's defeat, but he did delay it enormously and inflicted upon the Union a terrible price for achieving it.
It is necessary to restate here that in all the numerous battles Lee fought between 1862 – 1865, there was never a single instance where he was not outnumbered, outgunned and out-supplied, often by large margins. The Union army was not only able to replace its losses almost instantaneously, its numerical and material strength actually grew steadily as the war progressed, while the strength of the Confederate army after 1863 never stopped decreasing, and in material terms was never good to begin with. The Union, home to most of the nation's manufacturing, flooded its armies with food, medicine and equipment, while the rebels were largely contingent on captured supplies, smuggled weapons and whatever they could forage. Rebel armies often lacked shoes even in winter, and after the winter of 1864, Lee did not even have enough fodder to feed his horses. Meanwhile, his men subsisted on near-starvation rations. Descriptions of Confederate troops in the last two years of the war unfailingly mention how scrawny, sunburned, dirty, hairy and raggedy-dressed the men were, especially in contrast to their beautifully equipped enemies...yet it was the ragged and underfed rebels who, more often than not, took the victory under Lee's leadership. He was able to achieve these victories against superior armies because of his tactical and strategic skill, his ability to recognize talent in his officers, and the personal loyalty and fanaticism he inspired in his troops: also because he had an almost supernatural understanding of how to exploit the weaknesses of enemy generals. But it was often in defeat that Lee showed his true mettle: at Antietam, Gettysburg and the latter stages of the Overland Campaign he was able to extract his damaged, bleeding army from the jaws of battle, withdraw to better ground under pressure, and continue the fight. This has been defined by none other than Helmuth von Moltke, the father of modern warfare, as the most difficult of all the military arts, the one by which all great generals must be judged, and Lee was a master of it.
I might add that unlike Sherman, Sheridan, Hunter, Butler, Burnside and many other Union generals, Lee's behavior when he was in the field, even on Union soil, was impeccable. His well-disciplined troops committed no wanton acts of destruction, not even in retaliation for the many Union outrages committed in Virginia. He sternly forbade looting, vandalism, or the burning of towns, and while his men “requisitioned” food and livestock (as did all armies of the period), they did not fire barns, dynamite wells, cut down trees, or do anything else to prevent the local population from surviving after they had left.
It is not my purpose here to whitewash Lee as a human being, nor to ignore the mistakes he made as a soldier. Even as a general, Lee had his flaws. He could be reckless when his blood was up, his casualties were always high, and by his own admission he began to believe in the invincibility of his army, a factor which contributed to its ultimate downfall. What's more, and as the historian Shelby Foote noted to Ken Burns, much of his military genius lay in the fact that he was always in a desperate situation and had to take long chances to have any hope of victory. The course open to him, Foote argued, was really the only course he could have taken, and while it was often successful, it might possibly have rewarded a lesser commander nearly as well. None of this, however, really detracts from Lee's status as a commander. Every leader makes mistakes, and the greater the leader, the greater the mistakes tend to be.
Now, it can be argued, and often is, that the Confederacy was really nothing but a life-support system for the institution of slavery. This is an incomplete observation, but not incorrect in and of itself, and because chattel slavery is so disgusting as to be utterly indefensible, those who fought for the Confederacy are often assumed to be little more than warriors in service of a moral abomination. This, too, is an incomplete observation, but also not without some legitimacy. The issue at hand, however, is not the moral rightness or wrongness of Lee's decision to serve the Confederacy, or what his actual opinions on slavery were or succession were, but the much larger issue of whether acknowledging Lee's military greatness is wrong. I believe that even the limited, slovenly biography I have adduced here provides ample proof that Lee was an outstanding general, a genius at war, but more importantly, I believe it ought to be possible for someone, even as provocative a figure as Donald Trump, to acknowledge this without being the subject of attack. The truth is the truth. You don't have to like it, but to deny it because it means giving praise to an enemy is not merely stupid and childish, it is horribly dangerous and can lead us into intellectual moral quagmires from which it may be impossible to escape.
In the 1930s, when Communism was on the march all over the world, the triumphant Communists used to insist that no work of art, novel or play could have any quality or value unless it spoke positively about the communist message. A book was only “good” if it was communist in theme or written by a communist.
Likewise, a scientific premise hatched by communists had to be valid even if "capitalist" science stated otherwise. This warped thinking led the communists to embrace Lysenkoism, a crackpot theory about agriculture that led to the starvation of tens of millions of people all over Europe, and which was not discountenanced despite repeated failures: as late as the 1960s, the Soviets insisted that things like oranges and corn could be grown in Siberia: the failure to achieve any success whatever in doing so was never seen as proof that the theory was nonsense. To acknowledge this would have been to allow for the possibility that communism could err, which, in turn, destroy the communist position that "the Party is always right."
The fact is, once people put on religious or ideological blinders that distort reality in accordance with their wishes, the next logical step is to attack anyone who speaks truth to their own particular power – “conformity” and “enforcement” go hand in hand. And once these people are silenced, said people can go on happily in their stylized denial of reality until something kicks them out of it. In the mean time, however, everything suffers, most notably the truth.
George Orwell said in 1984 that “freedom is the freedom to say 2 + 2 = 4.” To acknowledge the military greatness of Robert E. Lee is simply to make this equation. The sad reality in 2018, however, that is we seem to be sliding into an age where 2 + 2 really does equal five if the Party – in this case, the Outrage Mob – says it does.
December 16, 2018
Another award for CAGE LIFE
Cage Life
Knuckle Down
Devils You Know
As you may have noticed, I've finally gotten this blog back to a weekly rather a "whenever I have time" monthly. I am well aware that the key to building readership on a blog is to be consistent, so here I am, and bearing good news, no less.
I released my first novel, Cage Life on February 14, 2016. At the time I was an occasionally published, but utterly unknown author trying to take a stand for creative autonomy. My experiences dealing with traditional publishing had been frustrating in the extreme, and the decision to release my inaugural book independently on Amazon was a child of that frustration. I knew -- or thought I knew -- the task I had assigned myself in going it alone. No book can sell at all, not even a single copy, if the public doesn't know it exists, and when you choose to publish independently, you forego the publicity machine that a traditional publisher provides. You're on you're own.
Making people aware that Cage Life even existed, much less was worthy of purchase, was incredibly tough. The market is flooded with self-published and independently published books of all types: hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions of them, emerge every year. To stand out enough from that crowd that people will actually take a chance on you with their hard-earned cash presents enormous difficulties. The chorus of authors is deafening, and to be heard you have to be even louder than they are. It's not enough to be a good prose-writer, a skillful storyteller, and a keen editor. You have to learn an entirely new discipline, one which doesn't really suit the personality or temperament of most authors: You have to learn how to advertise.
I ought to say here that I have always had an especial horror of the idea of having to sell things. Whatever qualities it takes to make a good salesman, I lack. Trying to convince someone to buy something -- anything -- is far less palatable to me than the notion of going to boot camp or stepping into a boxing ring. Some people are afraid of tarantulas, others of heights; I am afraid of being a salesman. But selling things is, I've found, a very large part of what an indie author does. Think of that girl you know who's pathologically afraid of clowns. Now make her go to clown school. That is roughly where I found myself in 2016.
After two and a half years, I can't say I've mastered the game. Not by a long shot. When I run a promotion, I never know if I'll sell five copies, or fifteen, or fifty. When I attend a book signing, I have no idea if the table will be mobbed or I'll just sit there for two hours, sweating like an actor who forgot all of his lines. I've learned a lot, but I still have a lot to learn. Like practicing the martial arts, it's an ongoing process, and usually the moment when you start to swagger and think you've got it made is also the moment you're about to get your ass kicked.
What I do know for sure is that if I don't keep the gas pedal down, promotionally speaking, the novel does not sell. There is no momentum unless I create it myself, and that can be exhausting, not to mention expensive. The cost of a promotion by no means determines how effective it will be -- I've paid handsomely for promos that didn't move a single copy, and chump change for promos that sold torrents of books -- but when you add it all up, it can cut into or even obliterate your profit margin.
On the credit side, Cage Life seems to be winning the hearts and minds of people who read it, regardless of how they got their hands on it or what format they purchased it. I've said many times (or rather quoted many times) the old adage that writing a novel is like dropping your pants in public and inviting the world to judge what it sees. Every time someone buys it, you know there's a chance that they might dislike it or even hate it, and take their ire or disappointment to social media. And nobody, not even the thickest-skinned writer, wants to log onto Amazon or Goodreads and see that Joe Smith or Jane Doe has trashed the book that took them X years to create, but that's the risk you take when you publish. Anyone who buys your work has the right to pass judgment on it.
So I told myself, anyway, when the book debuted...but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't feared the critical reaction. So far, however, my fears have been utterly groundless. The professional reviewers liked it. The audience liked it. And one of the fiercest groups of critics, the people who judge literary contests, not only likes the book but has decided to give it another award.
As I write this, the trophy for the 2018 Best Indie Book Award (BIBA) glitters above me on the shelf. It's a pretty thing, rather like a giant crystal, and every now and again I look up at it as if to reassure myself that it is there. The Best Indie Book Awards come out once a year to honor the cream of the independent-author crop. There are about a dozen categories, encompassing various genres -- adventure, romance, horror, sci-fi, literary fiction, etc. -- and Cage Life took the gold home for the dual category of Mystery/Suspense. I was not only delighted by this, I was immensely surprised: yes, I think it's a damn good book, but I know how many writers are under consideration for these awards and how keen the competition can be.
Cage Life has been honored before. In 2016, the same year I released it, it took "runner up" in Shelf Unbound Magazine's extremely popular contest for indie authors. Early in 2017, Zealot Script magazine, a British publication that had previously interviewed me and written a review of the novel, surprised me by naming it their "Book of the Year." Each time I was thrilled, but the thrills keep getting bigger: I now have an entire shelf devoted to the trophies this labor of love, betrayal and violence has collected. And at the risk of seeming greedy, at some point I hope there will be room for more.
You see, one of the hard realities of being an independent author is that you have no real team behind you. I am, so to speak, the guy who comes to the dance alone. Yes, I have an editor; yes, I have fellow authors who encourage me; yes, I have friends and family who have helped make my successes possible. But a team -- an agent to cut me the best deal, a publisher to vet my book and protect me from legal pitfalls and flex promotional muscle -- is lacking. I am on my own. This makes my failures especially bitter, because they are my failures and can't be pawned off or even divided. On the other hand, when success comes my way, as it did with the award of the BIBA, it is just as largely my success. In that regard it's like going to the dance alone...and picking up the most beautiful girl present.
To date, I have not had the time or the money to promote Knuckle Down, the second book in the Cage Life series, to anywhere near the extent that I would prefer. Nor have I been able to throw any effort behind Devils You Know, my collection of short stories of which I am extremely proud and which, I believe, offers something for everybody. At times I can get sad, frustrated, and even angry that my audience isn't larger, that more people don't hear my voice, that the world doesn't yet know and love -- or hate -- the characters I've created the way I do. It's at moments like these that validation, in the form of a spike in sales or a positive review on Amazon or Goodreads, means the most to me. But to win an award, especially a competitive award, is the icing on the literary cake. As some athlete whose name I can't remember once said: "I don't do this for the glory, but it sure as hell sweetens the deal."
That's all for now. I'll see you next Monday.
Knuckle Down
Devils You Know
As you may have noticed, I've finally gotten this blog back to a weekly rather a "whenever I have time" monthly. I am well aware that the key to building readership on a blog is to be consistent, so here I am, and bearing good news, no less.
I released my first novel, Cage Life on February 14, 2016. At the time I was an occasionally published, but utterly unknown author trying to take a stand for creative autonomy. My experiences dealing with traditional publishing had been frustrating in the extreme, and the decision to release my inaugural book independently on Amazon was a child of that frustration. I knew -- or thought I knew -- the task I had assigned myself in going it alone. No book can sell at all, not even a single copy, if the public doesn't know it exists, and when you choose to publish independently, you forego the publicity machine that a traditional publisher provides. You're on you're own.
Making people aware that Cage Life even existed, much less was worthy of purchase, was incredibly tough. The market is flooded with self-published and independently published books of all types: hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions of them, emerge every year. To stand out enough from that crowd that people will actually take a chance on you with their hard-earned cash presents enormous difficulties. The chorus of authors is deafening, and to be heard you have to be even louder than they are. It's not enough to be a good prose-writer, a skillful storyteller, and a keen editor. You have to learn an entirely new discipline, one which doesn't really suit the personality or temperament of most authors: You have to learn how to advertise.
I ought to say here that I have always had an especial horror of the idea of having to sell things. Whatever qualities it takes to make a good salesman, I lack. Trying to convince someone to buy something -- anything -- is far less palatable to me than the notion of going to boot camp or stepping into a boxing ring. Some people are afraid of tarantulas, others of heights; I am afraid of being a salesman. But selling things is, I've found, a very large part of what an indie author does. Think of that girl you know who's pathologically afraid of clowns. Now make her go to clown school. That is roughly where I found myself in 2016.
After two and a half years, I can't say I've mastered the game. Not by a long shot. When I run a promotion, I never know if I'll sell five copies, or fifteen, or fifty. When I attend a book signing, I have no idea if the table will be mobbed or I'll just sit there for two hours, sweating like an actor who forgot all of his lines. I've learned a lot, but I still have a lot to learn. Like practicing the martial arts, it's an ongoing process, and usually the moment when you start to swagger and think you've got it made is also the moment you're about to get your ass kicked.
What I do know for sure is that if I don't keep the gas pedal down, promotionally speaking, the novel does not sell. There is no momentum unless I create it myself, and that can be exhausting, not to mention expensive. The cost of a promotion by no means determines how effective it will be -- I've paid handsomely for promos that didn't move a single copy, and chump change for promos that sold torrents of books -- but when you add it all up, it can cut into or even obliterate your profit margin.
On the credit side, Cage Life seems to be winning the hearts and minds of people who read it, regardless of how they got their hands on it or what format they purchased it. I've said many times (or rather quoted many times) the old adage that writing a novel is like dropping your pants in public and inviting the world to judge what it sees. Every time someone buys it, you know there's a chance that they might dislike it or even hate it, and take their ire or disappointment to social media. And nobody, not even the thickest-skinned writer, wants to log onto Amazon or Goodreads and see that Joe Smith or Jane Doe has trashed the book that took them X years to create, but that's the risk you take when you publish. Anyone who buys your work has the right to pass judgment on it.
So I told myself, anyway, when the book debuted...but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't feared the critical reaction. So far, however, my fears have been utterly groundless. The professional reviewers liked it. The audience liked it. And one of the fiercest groups of critics, the people who judge literary contests, not only likes the book but has decided to give it another award.
As I write this, the trophy for the 2018 Best Indie Book Award (BIBA) glitters above me on the shelf. It's a pretty thing, rather like a giant crystal, and every now and again I look up at it as if to reassure myself that it is there. The Best Indie Book Awards come out once a year to honor the cream of the independent-author crop. There are about a dozen categories, encompassing various genres -- adventure, romance, horror, sci-fi, literary fiction, etc. -- and Cage Life took the gold home for the dual category of Mystery/Suspense. I was not only delighted by this, I was immensely surprised: yes, I think it's a damn good book, but I know how many writers are under consideration for these awards and how keen the competition can be.
Cage Life has been honored before. In 2016, the same year I released it, it took "runner up" in Shelf Unbound Magazine's extremely popular contest for indie authors. Early in 2017, Zealot Script magazine, a British publication that had previously interviewed me and written a review of the novel, surprised me by naming it their "Book of the Year." Each time I was thrilled, but the thrills keep getting bigger: I now have an entire shelf devoted to the trophies this labor of love, betrayal and violence has collected. And at the risk of seeming greedy, at some point I hope there will be room for more.
You see, one of the hard realities of being an independent author is that you have no real team behind you. I am, so to speak, the guy who comes to the dance alone. Yes, I have an editor; yes, I have fellow authors who encourage me; yes, I have friends and family who have helped make my successes possible. But a team -- an agent to cut me the best deal, a publisher to vet my book and protect me from legal pitfalls and flex promotional muscle -- is lacking. I am on my own. This makes my failures especially bitter, because they are my failures and can't be pawned off or even divided. On the other hand, when success comes my way, as it did with the award of the BIBA, it is just as largely my success. In that regard it's like going to the dance alone...and picking up the most beautiful girl present.
To date, I have not had the time or the money to promote Knuckle Down, the second book in the Cage Life series, to anywhere near the extent that I would prefer. Nor have I been able to throw any effort behind Devils You Know, my collection of short stories of which I am extremely proud and which, I believe, offers something for everybody. At times I can get sad, frustrated, and even angry that my audience isn't larger, that more people don't hear my voice, that the world doesn't yet know and love -- or hate -- the characters I've created the way I do. It's at moments like these that validation, in the form of a spike in sales or a positive review on Amazon or Goodreads, means the most to me. But to win an award, especially a competitive award, is the icing on the literary cake. As some athlete whose name I can't remember once said: "I don't do this for the glory, but it sure as hell sweetens the deal."
That's all for now. I'll see you next Monday.
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.
- Miles Watson's profile
- 63 followers
