Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 26

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Female Perspective

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
-- Virginia Woolf

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through her body with his pen.

Behind my house in Burbank there is an alley longer than a football field. One day when my Mom was visiting from back East, I decided to take us through the alley to my back gate to save some time. As we walked, we passed a great collection of junk someone had left propped against the alley wall. These little clusters of junk are a common sight in the alleys of otherwise neat and tidy Burbank: they represent a technically illegal but commonly accepted way of disposing of things too big for the regular trash haul. By unwritten rule, they are taken away by junk prospectors or hauled off by the city. I am so used to them that I seldom cast them a glance, but my Mom, observing one pile at the mouth of the alley, commented sadly, “There's something that didn't work out.”

I looked over, and at first saw only the usual random collection of neatly stacked junk – broken bookshelves, waterlogged paperbacks, an out-of-date television, a lamp with a torn shade, this, that. But at the end of the junkpile was a box overflowing with momentos – a wedding album, loose photographs, the make-female figures that sit atop a wedding cake. The stuff that means so much to married couples when the marriage is working, and so little when the marriage fails.

As we passed the wreckage of someone's failed relationship, it struck me that I might have passed that disjecta membra a hundred times without noticing what it was or deriving any emotional response from it. My Mom, on the other hand, had needed only one glimpse to understand what it represented and feel some sorrow over a thing which had plainly not worked out. This experience triggered a memory, one which further highlighted the difference in the way men and women interpret reality and experience.

The scene was my old apartment in Park La Brea, six or seven years before. My then-girlfriend and I were tucked into the couch in front of our enormous (and enormously heavy) television, doing what might be called “DVD and chill.” Both of us had eclectic tastes in television shows: we watched everything from the Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” series to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “M*A*S*H,” “Frasier,” “The Simpsons” and God knows what else. On this particular occasion, however, we were watching the original “Star Trek.” In particular, an episode from the show's third season called “Elaan of Troyius.”

The story goes as follows. The two planets Elas and Troyius have been at war for years, and have now reached the point where further conflict will bring mutual destruction. In the hopes of bringing peace, the planets have struck upon an archaic solution: a member of the royal family of Elas will wed a member of the ruling family of Troyius and unite the two planets. As the episode opens, Captain Kirk and the Enterprise have been ordered to ferry Elaan, princess of Elas, to Troyius for the wedding. Kirk is further requested to proceed slowly, so that the Troyaan ambassador, Petri, has time to educate Elaan as to the ways of his people and prepare her for marriage.

Seems simple enough. The problem is that Elaan comes from a savage, arrogant, warlike race that is extremely short on social graces: she treats everyone on the ship like dirt, and to top it off, she doesn't want to be married off to the ruler of Troyius. When Petri attempts to present her with wedding gifts, she throws them at him and then has her bodyguards toss him out. When he returns to have a second go at her, she stabs him. Petri, recuperating in sick bay, refuses to have anything more to do with the princess, so Kirk is stuck with her job. Reluctantly, but with his usual determination, Kirk goes to her quarters to give her the news.


ELAAN: So, Ambassador Petri is going to recover? That is too bad. You have delivered your message. Now you may go.
KIRK: Nothing would please me more, Your Glory. But your impetuous nature--
ELAAN: Your Troyian pig was here in my quarters without any permission, so I stabbed him. Just to be Troyian is enough.
KIRK: You Elasians pride yourselves on being a warrior people. You must understand discipline to be able to give and take orders. My orders are to take you to Troyius to be married and to see that you learn Troyian customs.
ELAAN: I despise Troyians. Any contact with them makes me feel soiled.
KIRK: It's been my experience that the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.
ELAAN: It's not in my experience.
KIRK: Well, we're still faced with the same problem.
ELAAN: Problem?
KIRK: Yes, the problem of your indoctrination to Troyian customs and manners.
ELAAN: (snorts) I have eliminated that problem.
KIRK: No, you have eliminated the teacher. The problem still remains.
ELAAN: Oh. And how do we solve the problem?
KIRK: By giving you a new teacher.
ELAAN: Tell me, what can you teach me?
KIRK: Table manners, for one thing. This is a plate. It contains food. This is a knife. It cuts the food. This is a glass--
ELAAN: Leave me!
KIRK: Like it or not, you're going to learn what you've been ordered to learn.
ELAAN: You will return me to Elas immediately!
KIRK: That's impossible.
ELAAN: Everything I order is possible.
KIRK: That's the first problem we're going to work on. Then we'll get you ready to go to Troyius.
ELAAN: (screaming) I will not go to Troyius, I will not be mated to a Troyian, and I will not be humiliated, and I will not be given to a green pig as a bribe to stop a war!
KIRK: You enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of being a Dohlman. Then be worthy of them. If you don't want the obligations that go along with the title, then give it up.
ELAAN: Nobody speaks to me that way!
KIRK: That's another one of your problems. Nobody's told you that you're an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster!

(Elaan slaps Kirk, so he slaps her back.)

KIRK: That's no way to treat someone who's telling you the truth.

(He turns to leave, she takes a knife from her sleeve and throws it. It just misses him and sticks in the wall.)

KIRK: Tomorrow's lesson will be on courtesy.

This scene has made me laugh out loud since I first viewed it as a child. There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a “spoiled brat” laid low. But my girlfriend did not share in my amusement. She remained silent. Later, when Kirk revisits the princesses' quarters, I had cause to laugh again, twice.

When Kirk goes to Elaan's quarters, her bodyguards prevent him from gaining entry: Spock has to stun them with his phaser. He praises Kirk for correctly predicting that Elaan would deny him entry, but expresses confusion at Elaan's reasoning, which to him, isn't logical.

"Mr. Spock," the captain replies. "The women on your planet are logical. That's the only planet in this galaxy that can make that claim."

I laughed hard at this. My girlfriend made a grumpy sound. On screen, Kirk entered the princess' quarters. Elaan immediately took another swing at him, so he forced her back down onto the bed.

ELAAN: You dare touch a member of the royal family?
KIRK: Only in self-defence. Now, are you going to behave or not?
ELAAN: The penalty is death for what you are doing!
KIRK: We're not on Elas. We're on my starship. I command here.

(She bites his hand and runs into the bathroom.)

ELAAN: You are warned, Captain, never to touch me again!
KIRK: If I touch you again, Your Glory, it'll be to administer an ancient Earth custom called a spanking, a form of punishment administered to spoiled brats!
ELAAN: You have my leave to go.
KIRK: You forget, Your Glory, we haven't started your lesson in courtesy!
ELAAN: You can teach me nothing, Captain. If I have to stay here for ten light years, I will not be soiled by any contact with you!
KIRK: Very well. I'll send in Mister Spock or Doctor McCoy. Either way, you're going to be properly prepared for Troyius. As ordered by councils, rulers, and bureaucrats!

Elaan begins to weep, and Kirk, feeling guilty, wipes away her tears, not knowing they contain a biochemical substance which enslaves those who touch them to those who shed them – a super love potion. Elaan, it seems, is so taken by Kirk's strength that she has decided he would make a perfect mate. While all this is going on, the evil Klingons show up. Having sabotaged Kirk's ship so that it is virtually helpless, they then initiate an attack. Kirk sends Elaan to sick bay, which is the safest part of the ship. There she encounters Petri, who offers her the crown jewels of Troyius.

PETRI: Now that we are all about to die, I ask you once again to accept this necklace, and to wear it as a token of respect for the desperate wishes of your people and mine for peace.
ELAAN: That's all you men of other worlds can speak of...duty and responsibility.

In the end, of course, Kirk finds a way to defeat the Klingons and save the day, but the love potion makes giving away the bride to the rulers of Troyius excruciatingly painful on him emotionally. He is only able to overcome his drug-induced love for Elaan by clinging to his sense of duty. Beautiful in her wedding gown, Elaan goes to the transporter room with the captain, looking as if she is going to her own execution.

ELAAN: You will not beam down for the ceremony?
KIRK: No.
ELAAN: I want you to have this as a personal memento. I have learned that on Troyius, they do not wear such things. Remember me.

(She hands over her dagger.)

KIRK: I have no choice.
ELAAN: Nor have I. I have only responsibilities and obligations. Goodbye.
KIRK: Goodbye.
So the episode ends. But what struck me as I discussed it with my girlfriend later was her reaction to Elaan's behavior. She did not find the princess to be “an arrogant monster” or a “spoiled brat in need of a spanking.” She found her instead a victim to be pitied.

“She didn't want to marry that guy,” my girlfriend said angrily. “But they forced her to. She was right when she said she was being given away as a bribe, like an object. Typical patriarchal bullshit. No one cared about what she wanted or how she felt about having to spend the rest of her life on an alien planet, married to someone she didn't love.”

“But she roofied Captain Kirk!” I exclaimed. “She roofied him. How is that better than an arranged marriage?”

“She was trying to escape what amounts to being sold into slavery.” She replied. “She was entitled. I mean, if you're put into prison for a crime you didn't commit, you have every right to drug the guard and try to escape."

Now, I had seen “Elaan of Troyius” God knows how many times in the previous three decades, and it had literally never occurred to me to consider what the character might have been feeling before the episode began, when she was told what her “duties and obligations” were. It never once entered my head that her anger, violence and desperation, which appear only as comic fodder when she's getting put in her place by Kirk, were totally understandable if you put yourself in her slippers. But it took my girlfriend's angry reaction to Elaan being “sold” to the Troyian king to see the situation from Elaan's perspective.

It is interesting to look at the story and see that everyone she meets -- her ruling council, Ambassador Petri, Captain Kirk -- is focused only on what they stand to gain by marrying her off to an alien ruler. No one stops to ask, "Elaan, what do you want?" Of course in the grand scale of things, it's fair to say that what she wants is not very important, since the wedding will save two races from total extermination: but the fact that our individual wants, needs, hopes, desires and dreams may not, in the words of Humphrey Bogart, "add up to a hill of beans" to other people or to the universe, don't make them any less important to us. "Duty and obligation" are very important, even vital, to the survival of society, but acknowledging the suzerainty they have over our lives shouldn't preclude us from feeling compassion for those who are their victims. But oftimes they do. I saw a heap of shattered dreams in an alley and dismissed them as junk. I saw a woman reduced to a bargaining chip and dismissed her as an uppity bitch that needed a spanking. In both cases I saw only the surface, not what lay beneath it.

I have no idea if the difference between male and female perspectives is a function of gender, which is itself supposedly a societal construct, or whether it is something sexually based, and therefore hard-wired into our bodies, like the organs that determine which sex we are. For all I know it could be both. But it is interesting, is it not, the way two human beings can look at the same object and see two completely different things? Perhaps men would benefit themselves, and those around them, if they tried, if only once in a while, to view the world from a woman's perspective.

We Wuz Robbed! or, Boxing as Bad Romance

Cage Life


Last night was, for me, rather like running into a crazy old lover from yesteryear. At first you're a bit anxious because you don't know what to expect. Then comes a surge of excitement, when you remember the passion and the pleasure she afforded you. Then, having spent some time with her, you remember why it didn't last in the first place -- namely, because she's nuttier than a shithouse rat in a peanut factory: unstable, unpredictable, untrustworthy. You leave the situation mentally and emotionally exhausted, having relived an entire affair in just a few short hours.

That's what my relationship with the sport of boxing was like. In the 1980s, I was curious and kind of wary. I watched, but I did not necessarily want to be drawn in to such a chaotic, badly run, brutal blood sport, where crooked men flourished and fighters were often treated no better than prostitutes. In the 1990s I was utterly bewitched, ensared, smitten, infatuated. The combination of savagery and technique amazed me, as did the classic appeal to spectacle and bloodlust -- the lure, one might say, of the Roman Arena. In the early 2000s, having bitten into the forbidden apple, I realized it contained more than a few brown spots as well as a worm or two: the corruption was too naked to ignore, as were the unsavory characters that seemed to be everywhere, in an out of the ring. Then, in the mid-late 00s, came the full disillusionment, the exasperation, the disgust, and finally, the divorce. Unable to take another mismatch, bad decision, obvious fix, or intrusion of crude greed and politics into what ought to have been a clean athletic contest between two fighters, I walked away, embittered and saddened, from the only sport I had ever really loved. And, when I caught glimpses of boxing over the years that followed, I saw nothing that caused me to question my leaving her. Only reminders of why I had left.

Then came last night.

For those of you who don't follow the Sweet Science, Saturday, December 1, 2018 was the date of the heavyweight championship match between Deontay Wilder (40 - 0, 38 KOs) and Tyson Fury (27 - 0, 19 KOs). On paper it was an interesting matchup. First, you had the America (Wilder) vs. Britain (Fury) boxing rivalry, which is nearly as old as boxing itself. Then you had the fact both men were undefeated, leading to the classic "somebody's 0 must go" tagline. Then there was the fact that Fury is white while Wilder is black, which doesn't mean what it used to (thank God) but still makes for an interesting visual aesthetic. Finally, the styles of each man were opposed. Wilder is an almost comically sloppy power-puncher with no technique; Fury is an actually comical defensive whiz whose herky-jerky movements are the definition of awkward. It was this that lured me to my friend Nick's house to watch the fight. In essence, it was like being invited to an intimate dinner party in which you knew you'd be paired up with the aforementioned crazy ex-lover: exciting, but also daunting. Did I really want to look into those beautiful but batshit-crazy eyes again? Did I really want to expose myself to the madness and the heartbreak? Because like many of my fellow humans, I have a taste for things that are bad for me. A genuine thirst, one might say. And since 90% of temptation is opportunity, I was well advised to stay home.

I didn't take my own advice. I seldom do. So a few hours later I ended up on the couch, beer in hand, when the opening bell rang in the contest between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I was looking my ex-lover directly in the eye, and I felt... exactly what I thought I'd feel. Anxiety. My gaze was on the television screen, but my mind was slipping back to the darkest days of my affair with the sport. To the frustration I'd felt at the way people like Don King and Bob Arum, and organizations like HBO and Showtime, had conspired countless to prevent the best fighters from fighting each other. To the dismay I'd felt at the plethora of nakedly corrupt sanctioning bodies -- WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO -- who conspired to make the word "champion" meaningless. To the disgust I'd felt at boxing judges, who seemed to be either hopelessly corrupt or hopelessly incompetent. To the way the sport itself invariably blacked its own eye every time it had a chance to present a positive face to the world -- the "Bite Fight" between Tyson and Holyfield, the horrible decision in Lewis - Holyfield I, the in-the-ring riots following Tszyu - Judah and Golota - Bowe I. These were the reasons I'd walked away. What the hell was I doing in coming back?

Anxiety, however, quickly gave way to excitement. Yes, Wilder is the sloppiest championship-caliber fighter I have ever seen, a man who seems to have learned boxing in a boxcar rather than a gym. Yes, he throws wild haymakers that are so badly telegraphed his opponents have about an hour to decide which way to duck; yes, he holds his hands way too low; and yes, his idea of throwing combinations is to throw two or at most three wild punches instead of just one. But, as as Sir Mix-a-lot would say, it's a big but, he's also so goddamned powerful that any one of those wild bombs can put your lights out at any time. Unlike most heavyweights, Wilder is not less dangerous in round 11 than he was in round 2: he carries his power to the final bell. This makes him enormously exciting. He can flatten you at any moment. He only has to be lucky once.

And Fury? He too has a host of issues. For one, he's flabby and unmuscled. This doesn't make a damn bit of difference in fighting, of course -- beautiful bodies don't win fights, else-wise Mr. Universe would be heavyweight champion -- but it made him look a bit comical next to the anatomical sketch that is Wilder. For another, his style is so frenetic and spasmodic it looks as if he's snorted two pounds of Columbian flake through a garden hose before he steps into the ring. He doesn't bob and weave so much as jitter and twitch. Nor are many of his punches thrown with any kind of force: he doesn't even close his fist when employing his left, rendering it an open-handed slap. And he has a kind of Clown Prince shtick he performs as he fights: grinning, leering, taunting, placing his hands behind his back, sticking out his chin, and -- this is the killer -- performing a kind of air-cunnilingus with his mouth when he wants to enrage his opponent. Yet somehow this shitshow, this dumpster fire of bizarre and bad behavior seem to work in "The Gypsy King's" favor. For a man of superhuman size -- he's 6'9" and 257 lbs -- he has remarkable reflexes. He can make an opponent miss, miss, and miss again, and he counters with punches from weird angles. They may not hurt very much, but the land, and they land pretty often.

The fight progressed the way you'd expect a fight between men with these attributes and failings to progress. Fury frustrated the much more powerful Wilder, taunted him, peppered him with punches. Wilder, for his part, stalked and stalked, throwing bomb after bomb that didn't land, but at every moment conveyed the impression he could end the fight with one punch. He lost rounds -- in my book, every round -- but somehow I just knew he'd find Fury's chin sooner or later. And in Round 9, he finally did.

Actually it wasn't so much the Gypsy's chin as the back of his head, which would be an illegal strike, but Fury, having bent over from the waist in a defensive movement, forfeited his right to call a foul by ducking into the blow. Down went the giant, but he got up, shook it off, and went back to work. In fact, he carried the fight to Wilder so energetically that Deontay looked, going back to his stool at the bell, like he'd been the one who'd been dropped. He was tired, discouraged, and confused, and on a trivial level, I know the feeling. I've spent enough time in and on dojos, boxing gyms and grappling mats to understand what's like to face a guy who presents a seemingly insoluble puzzle, who can take your best shots and keep coming with a smirk, who just seems to have your number firmly in his back pocket.

The fight went on, and my excitement kept rising. This was good! This was fun! This was dramatic and mesmerizing and emotional -- the Roman Arena without the guilt. This was, in fact, everything that had made me fall in love with boxing in the first place. I admired the fearless, awkward, silly-yet-effective style of Fury, and I respected the grim determination of Wilder, who seemed to retain faith that his fists could deliver him the victory in the face of superior energy and superior -- if you want to call it that, because I don't know what the hell else to call it -- technique. I was, I realized, falling in love with my lover all over again.

The twelfth and final round arrived, and now my excitement and love reached Shakespearian proportions. In the last round of a heavyweight fight, if it goes that far, you usually get two exhausted leviathans leaning on each other, gasping for breath, and only occasionally slapping punches at each other's ribs. Not so here. Fury, ignoring the danger in Wilder's hand cannons, kept coming forward, throwing his off-angle punches, twisting and contorting his body like a larger, chubbier, paler version of Darth Maul, and sticking out his tongue. Wilder, for his part, finally employed the semblance of a strategy: he began to back up instead of advancing, holding his dangerous right like a catapult ready to fly, clearly hoping Fury would step into range and skewer himself on it. And that's largely what happened. Fury crouched into a right hand, began to fall, and then ate a tremendous left hook on his way down. When he hit the canvas I shouted, "That's it, it's over, he's done!" And it really seemed that he was. He lay there, knees up, unmoving, while the ref counted. But somehow, against all the laws that ought to govern human affairs, the giant got up -- at the count of nine! -- and the fight resumed.

Wilder had looked ecstatic when he'd put Fury on his ass; he'd even begun a celebratory moonwalk. The expression on his face when the Gypsy King got up ready to resume the fight was comical -- he resembled Sarah Connor, watching the Terminator decide it wasn't done yet, nope, not by half, and never mind that it was on fire. So the action resumed. First Wilder, then Fury got the better of it, and finally, the bell rang.

Holy hell! What a fight! What a war! What an expression of determination and nearly super-human toughness! What a tribute to the Sweet Science, or at least to the manly art of fighting (neither man's technique was what you'd call "sweet")! Now I remember why I loved this lady called boxing so much! And to think I'd once called her a bitch and a whore!

My rocket had reached maximum altitude. I was high on adrenaline and excitement. I looked forward with vicarious vorfreude to Fury being awarded the WBC heavyweight championship. But what goes up, must come down, and in boxing, what usually comes down comes down hard. The judges solemnly turned in their scores, which were portentously read by the announcer, the venerable Jimmy Lennon, Jr. I'd like to say I couldn't believe what I heard, but of course I could believe it. I had put my fragile heart in the hands of this crazy lover before, and watched as she threw it as hard as she could into the nearest stone wall.

For the judges had scored the fight as follows:

115-111: Wilder
110-114: Fury
113-113: Even

A split draw! Three judges seeing three different fights, only one of which really corresponded to what had actually happened. Ah, boxing judges! You were giving us alternative facts long before Trump made it fashionable!

Realization hit me. In the middle of our wild passion, our romance-novel lovemaking, our adventure in adrenal erotica, the treacherous twat had gotten hold of my heart and shot-putted the thing into the fucking wall.

Again.

If you know anything at all about boxing, you know that the favorite narrative of promoters, sanctioning bodies and cable networks, even more than the Fake Blood Feud, is the Bullshit Rematch. Boxing has a long and sickening history of handing out ludicrous decisions to force needless, or at least questionable, second fights, so that even more money can be sucked out of the audience's pocket, and last night's fight was simply one more example of this sorry tradition -- a tradition, I might add, that was instrumental in getting me to quit boxing the first time.

There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or, as Clint Eastwood said in Two Mules for Sister Sarah: "Everyone has a right to be a sucker -once." I had gone into my original relationship with boxing in good faith, and over the course of two decades gradually come to understand that I had hitched my emotional wagon to a diseased, mean-spirited, ill-tempered horse that wanted to take me right over the nearest cliff. So I cut loose from the harness and walked away. At that moment I was in the right. I may have been a sucker, but I was a morally pure sucker, the victim of a clever seduction, a sleight-of-hand game that had convinced me the horse had been a magnificent stallion and not a mangy nag with a bad case of the strangles. When I went back last night, however, I forfeited my right to victim status. I'd been fooled twice, suckered twice, and shamed. I'd let lust overcome experience, false hope outweigh common sense. I deserved to be heartbroken. This was my thought as I sat silently on the long Uber ride back to Burbank.

So yeah, I'm done with the bitch. Done with boxing for good. Through carefully putting my Humpty-Dumpty heart back together again piece by piece only to watch Dame Boxing smash it to bits once more with her trusty sledgehammer. I refuse, categorically and absolutely, to return to Nick's house in a few months and watch the inevitable rematch between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I just won't do it. She won't get my time, she won't get my money, she won't get my hopes. I won't be fooled again. This was the last time.

(Until the next time.)

Halloween 2018

Halloween is upon us once again, and so naturally my mind, and my gaze, have returned to such things as carving jack o' lanterns, offering unwanted critical judgments as to my neighbors Halloween decorations, and watching horror movies.

Lots and lots of horror movies.

Now it must be stated here that I need no excuse to watch said movies. For me, the author of (ahem) Devils You Know, every day is Halloween. It stands to reason, therefore, that I have put more thought than the average bloke into just what horror movies are and why we watch them. Of course, in doing this I was preceded by (among others) Stephen King, who wrote a brilliant essay on the "why" of "why do people enjoy being scared?" in his under-rated nonfiction book Danse Macabre. King's conclusion was that horror movies -- and novels -- served as a way of "feeding the gators" which swim beneath man's "civilized forebrain." In other words, they appeal to the beast within us -- not only vicariously satisfying our appetite for blood and violence, but also serving to release pent-up fears. I quite agree with Master King on this, so I'd like to take my own investigation in a different direction entirely.

I was once told there were really only two types of horror films -- the ones based on reality, and ones based on supernatural events. A reality-based horror film proposes a scenario which could happen in everyday life, however improbable it may be. These flicks play into primal fears which evolution has taught us -- fear of the dark, fear of strangers, fear of open water or the deep woods, fear of tight spaces, predatory animals and even disease. They also play on the fears we have of specific fates: being eaten alive, for example, or buried alive, or subjected to torture, or simply hunted by something larger and scarier than ourselves.

A supernaturally-based horror movie, on the other hand, is founded on ideas that are based on magic, demonic possession, communication with the dead, diabolical pacts, or some other thing for which there is no basis in scientific fact. The success of these movies is predicated on the idea that the viewer can fear something which does not exist, but this is actually not as bold a proposition as it sounds. Human beings are to some extent naturally superstitious, and for most of history tended to seek supernatural rather than scientific explanations for almost everything negative which occurred in their daily lives. Humans also seem to have an almost instinctive belief that the supernatural exists as a kind of balance for the arrogance of science, and take a macabre pleasure in envisioning scenarios in which science is helpless and only the priest, or the magic amulet, or the bubbling potion will save them.

As with all either-or choices in life, the idea that movies fall into one or other of these categories requires some qualification. It is possible for a movie with a supernatural theme to be based in reality, and it is possible (though not as common) for a film based in reality to strike a supernatural theme. As an example of the former, I would strongly argue that movies like "Friday the 13th" are reality-based, even though, as the series goes on, Jason is actually a revenant -- a supernaturally-powered being. This seeming contradiction exists because Jason's return from the grave in Part VI is simply a plot device to allow the character to keep appearing following his physical death in Part IV. At any rate, the key element of all "Friday" films is not that Jason is undead, but that he is a psychopathic murderer who tries to slaughter everyone he comes across. And however unlikely it may be, being attacked out of the blue by a person with no discernible motive is a thing that could actually happen to you, and which did in fact happen to your ancient ancestors. If you go into the woods, Jason will get you -- that is "Friday the 13th" at its simplest, and so the supernatural element of Jason himself is actually not important. The fear he engenders is based in hard, cruel reality.

As examples of reality-based horror films, a random sampling might include Friday the 13th , Ten to Midnight, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Saw, Deliverance, Hostel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Wolf Creek, and Scream.

Random examples of supernatural horror movies would include the Exorcist, the Hellraiser, Amityville and Poltergeist series; the Omen trilogy, Phantasm, the Conjuring, the Annabelle movies, the Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Paranormal Activity.

Obviously, even with qualifications, the choice between A and B is a basic metric and not necessarily accurate or the final word. A movie like John Carpenter's The Thing, for example, could be considered supernatural in the sense it deals with malevolent aliens, but the fears the movie plays on -- isolation, paranoia, fear of disease -- are everyday fears. The Blair Witch Project is ostensibly about an evil witch, but it's really about the simple fear of being lost in the woods (ostensibly with a scary creature lying in wait). The Shining could be called a ghost story or a possession story, but it also plays on isolation and fear of nature. Likewise The Howling can be seen as both a fear of the Big Bad Wolf in the Woods, and also a fear of the BBW which lies within all of us. Viewed broadly, however, I think the idea of “natural vs. supernatural” offers an interesting insight into the idea of why some people are terrified of the Exorcist but yawn when they see Jason Voorhees, and why others (like me) ho-hum through The Exorcist and The Changeling and so on but can't sleep and refuse to shower immediately after watching Friday the 13 Part III or the original Black Christmas. Simply put, it boils down to what scares you.

God (or perhaps the devil) knows how many horror movies have been made over the years, but what is inarguable is that only a very, very few have made sufficient impact on our collective psyche as to elevate their antagonists to iconic status. Bela Lugosi played Dracula in 1931, and he also played a lunatic scientist named Paul Carruthers who killed his enemies with scientifically engineered bats in 1940. For which film is he remembered?

This question begs another: why do some horror movie baddies become iconic while others, even when their film-vehicle was successful, fade into oblivion? Well, I keep using the word “icon,” and I have come to believe that some horror villains survive because they are physical representations of specific fears which we all share. . In the old days of horror, Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, and pretty much anyone wrapped in enough bandages to be called a Mummy, pressed pretty hard on the public psyche. Over time, though, they lost their power to frighten and had to be replaced – and beginning in 1978, with "Halloween," they were. So without further ado, let's have a look at some of the most popular of the modern era, and what I think they actually represent.

CHUCKY ("Childs Play") is every creepy doll you ever saw on the shelf of your spinster aunt's guest bedroom at 3 AM. To some extent he's also every creepy clown you encountered at a birthday party. He's supposed to be cute and innocent and fun...but he's not. He's creepy, his offer of friendship is fake, and he's nursing some horrible agenda that probably includes taking you into a soundproof basement somewhere...the kind with a drain in the floor. The fact that you know this and your parents don't is what makes him so scary. After all, they let him in the house. And now he's in your bedroom. At three in the morning. Staring at you.

LEATHERFACE ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") is that greasy old man who lives alone in the dilapidated house at the end of the block – on a dead-end street, no less. He drives a rusty, dirty old car and snarls every time you look at him or come near his property. Nobody knows what he does for a living. Nobody knows what goes on in his home. In real life he's probably a harmless recluse, but in your imagination he's got an attic full of mummified children and a basement full of torture tools. He's the monster that lives next door and doesn't bother to hide what he is. If you pass by his house at night or even on a quiet afternoon when there are no witnesses, you'll never be seen again. But you may be heard screaming. Leatherface is the epitome of the hostile outsider, the Other, the one who doesn't want to sit by the fire and tell ghost stories because he'd rather be the ghost. He plays by his own twisted set of rules. God help you if you play with him.

PINHEAD ("Hellraiser") is what happens when, to quote Mean Streets, you fuck around with the infinite. He's Frankenstein's monster, he's the Necronomicon, the Ouija board, the game of Bloody Mary. He's the dare to sleep in the cemetery or visit the haunted house or say the Lord's Prayer backwards. Pinhead is what happens when you knock on the forbidden door and somebody actually answers. He doesn't come to your home and kill you; he waits for you to come to him, and then smirks when you try to change your mind and leave. He's the dare you should not have taken. He's the apple in Eden, and he's also what happens to Lot's wife in the Bible. He's scary not just because of what he does to you but because you asked him to do it.

GHOSTFACE ("Scream") is a variation on a theme. Actually several themes. Like Michael Meyers, he's capricious. Like Leatherface and Freddy, he lives next door or down the street. But unlike them, he's so completely normal you'd never suspect him of even having bad manners, much less being a bloodthirsty killer who is just as happy to butcher a close friend or a lover as a complete stranger. Ghostface is not just your neighbor; he may be your friend, your brother, even your wife. In a sense, Ghostface is the dark corner within every human mind, except that his corner is a lot larger and a lot darker than most, and its full of pointy objects, and instead of avoiding it, he lives there. He's the guy who puts on the sad face over your misfortune when inside he's diabolically laughing. He's the one who lets you cry on your shoulder because your girlfriend got murdered when he was the one who killed her. He's the fear that we don't really know anyone and can't trust anyone. He's the guy who you never suspect until you feel his knife in your back.

FREDDY KRUEGER ("A Nightmare on Elm Street") is the summation of a simple fear, or rather, several simple fears. Every child wants to believe they are safe at home and that their parents will protect them from whatever comes calling which may want to do them harm. Every child wants to believe that their room is the safest place of all, and when they sleep, nothing can get them, not monsters nor madmen. Freddy is living proof that this belief is bullshit. He wants to kill you, to terrorize you and cut you to bloody ribbons, and he wants to do it not at some isolated sleep-away camp or scary abandoned house, but in your own bed, in your own house, with your parents sleeping in the next room. He wants to show you no place is safe and that no one can help you. It's this last theme that Freddy specializes in. He attacks you where you are weakest and most vulnerable, and in such a way that nobody will ever believe you except, maybe, other kids. He's like Norman Bates in Psycho, but instead of the shower, he gets you in your bed, in your dreams. The awfulness of Freddy is that he makes your bed and your dreams the scariest places on earth. That refuge you had? Gone. Welcome to adult life, where the sleepless bed is a demon playground.

MICHAEL MEYERS ("Halloween") is the Boogeyman, pure and simple. He has no personality, no language, no backstory...and no motive. Nobody knows what he looks like, really...he's just a Shape, if you will, filled with bad intentions. He is the walking embodiment of the Book of Job -- a bad thing that happens to good people for absolutely no reason. Unlike Jason, he isn't driven by a need for vengeance and he isn't interested in slaughtering everyone he meets. Oh no. He's interested in slaughtering you. Why? Because he can, that's why. Is he unfair? Oh yes. In fact he specializes in unfairness. He didn't pick you because you're bad, or even because you're good. Nobody knows why he picked you. Even he may not know. Michael is the summation of your fear of the dark, a kind of avatar of all the shapeless dreads you ever had late at night when you couldn't sleep and the branches were squeaking on the window and the closet door was a bit ajar and you wondered what the hell was lurking in it. Michael is a cancer diagnosis, he's a random madman with an axe, a faulty brake line, he's the thing that comes along out of the night and changes everything for the worse, and never once gives you a reason why he did it.

JASON VOORHEES ("Friday the 13th") is...Death. Pure and simple. He may take on the guise of a vengeance-driven madman or a killer zombie, he may tap into the primal fear of being hunted and slaughtered, but these are just clothes he wears, like his hockey mask. Jason -- I'm quoting none other than Robert Englund here -- "is death, death coming for your ass.” The mask is actually a giveaway in that regard. It's awfully reminiscent of a skull, the skull of the Reaper, with the exception that the Reaper grins and Jason has no mouth. It's not only that he is silent, but that he has nothing to say even if he could speak. Jason is all business. He's merciless. He has no pity and no remorse and no fear and he's obsessively single-minded. He wants to kill you. Why? Because you're there. Shoot him, stab him, set him on fire -- he just gets up and keeps coming. His desire for murder is insatiable. He'll kill your mom, your pregnant wife, your wheelchair-bound best friend, your brother, your dog, you, and even if you banish him tonight you can get your bottom dollar he'll be back tomorrow. Because, like Death, he won't stop until he gets you.

By now you're wondering – okay, smart guy, you know so much about fear, tell me who you're afraid of? The answer is that last fella. Jason. The big, rotting, mask-faced zombie with the machete. He scared the nuts off of me when I was nine years old, and again when I was thirteen, and he kept scaring me for decades afterwards. Old as I am now, on the right night, he can still summon up the old terror. Because I'm afraid of death? Well, yeah, sure, but no more than anyone else. It's not death – dying of old age, for example – that scares me. It's the fact that Jason is not just Death, but Death with rabies. He's random, premature, utterly pointless and meaningless death, death without dignity. After all, it's one thing to die on a battlefield for the freedom of your people, or in your own doorway with gun in hand, defending it against invaders: it's quite another to escape to a cabin for a romantic weekend and end up with a railroad spike through your forehead, for no other reason than some damnable lunatic decided to put it there.

The most interesting aspect of examining all this stuff is that as a make-up effects artist (one of the many tattered hats I wear), I have actually met a number of the people who scared the shit out of me as a kid. I've met Pinhead, I've met two of the fellas who played Jason, and I've met Freddy Krueger, too. I've seen John Carpenter, who directed The Thing, The Fog and Halloween, perform his music onstage, and attended a Q & A with Stuart Gordon, who was responsible for Re-Antimator. I've chatted with horror-movie heroines like Ashley Lawrence (Hellraiser) and Heather Langenkamp (Nightmare on Elm Street), and I've met and worked with make-up artists who worked on most of the films that I've mentioned. I've had my own hands dirtied by the foam latex and silicone and fake blood that provides a lot of the scares in these types of films, and I know as well as anyone how industrial a process making them really is. In short, I ought to be as immune as anyone could be from the power of the horror movie. But I'm not. Because while Chucky may just be a prop, and Michael a sweaty stunt man in a William Shatner mask, the things they represent are very real. That's why they scare us. And that's why we pay them to do it.

Happy Halloween.

Space X: or, memories of the Cold War

Last night I went outside to watch the launch of the latest Space X rocket. My expectations were extremely low. In my experience, skywatching almost invariably leads to disappointment. Blood moons, blue moons, lunar eclipses, solar eclipses, such-and-such comet, the perihelion of Mars -- somehow whatever it is, it never meets my expectations, and I figured that if nature couldn't raise my jaded eyebrows, what chance did a man-made rocket have?

As it turned out, I was wrong, wrong by a very wide margin. What unfolded before my I eyes last night was spectacularly beautiful. First we saw the rocket blasting upward into the heavens, a huge orange-red fireball rising on a column of smoke. Then it seemed to disappear, only to emerge Phoenix-like a few moments later amid a huge, slowly expanding corona of blue-gray gas. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was like watching the universe being created -- a nebula of light that slowly filled the lower quadrant of the sky like a newly-born cosmos. And through this, the fiery ascent continued, doubled when the rocket separated into its two sections, effectively doubling the spectacle.

As I've said, the whole process was breathtaking to witness. But beneath the feeling of awe and silly happiness which overcomes me every time I see anything awe-inspiring, came a completely unexpected sensation of animal terror. At first I couldn't understand why I was experiencing it, and indeed, it took a few minutes to puzzle out why such a rewarding and rare sight would trigger the fear-centers of my brain. Then, as the rocket's decidedly red glare dwindled to a pinpoint, it hit me: I had stumbled into one of those abandoned, forgotten, deeply entombed memory-vaults which all of us carry somewhere in the center of our brains. And this particular vault, which more resembled a mausoleum than anything else, read COLD WAR CHILDHOOD - DO NOT OPEN.

When I first saw daylight in 1972, the Cold War was already a quarter century old and showed every sign of either lasting forever or ending with a tremendous bang. Neither outcome was particularly attractive. Endless continuation meant endless tension, endless fear, and, perhaps worst of all, an endless sensation of futility. When you think the world may blow itself to bits at any moment, the idea of long-term planning vis-à-vis your own life seems pointless. Indeed, though I was by no means part of the punk movement, the attitude I had during my later childhood and early teenage years was essentially a punk attitude -- apathetic, nihilistic, angry. It was best summed up by the lyrics of Mayhem's 1982 song "Choke":

I don't know why you're trying – give up
You know you're gonna die – give up
It's all a stupid joke – give up
I want to see you choke, choke, choke
Mushroom cloud in the sky
Pass the bottles, see the city fry
Load the gun, aim it at your head
Pull a trigger, you're better off dead!

As you can see, there's an inherent contradiction in being placed between these two millstones -- on the one side, waiting for something you don't want to happen but which feels so inevitable you just wish they'd push the button and get it over with, and on the other, hoping like hell you never woke up to see "the mushroom cloud in the sky" since it would not only mean your own destruction, but that of everyone you knew, and indeed, of the entire world itself.

In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell's protagonist George Bowling tells the reader that the unique feature of growing up during the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era was the belief people had back then that their society would last forever. They themselves would die, but British society would not. It took the "bloody balls-up" of the First World War to shake that belief, but even then, the idea that Britain might be physically destroyed, wiped out annihilated, was beyond them, for no weapons existed or even could be imagined that would achieve this. Having been born decades after the fictitious Bowling, I did not have that luxury. I knew even as a child that there were something like 13,000 nuclear missiles sitting in silos all over the planet, primed, ready and waiting to do its part into turning the green and verdant planet upon which I resided into a radioactive cinder hanging in space. There was literally no escape from the knowledge. It was everywhere -- in magazines, in newspapers, on television, in film, in the table-talk of my parents, even in comic books. It was for the most part background music to our daily lives, but the music never switched off, and every now and again some incident would ratchet up the tension still further and make me wonder if the day hadn't arrived at last that I'd go outside and see rocket contrails streaking across the Maryland sky.

Every life has contains a pattern of awareness. In what we call "normal, well-adjusted" people, the harsh realities of life are at first vaguely suspected, then slowly understood, and then finally accepted. This process is gradual and, in a prosperous country like America, often takes several decades, with the very toughest lessons reserved for middle age. In my particular case, this awareness was accelerated, partially by unhappy school experiences beginning around the age of ten, but perhaps just as much by the overall atmosphere that came with living next to Washington, D.C. at the height of the Cold War. While still a young boy who did not grasp much, I understood most intimately the meaning of Yeats' infamous poem, "Second Coming:"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

For those who think I may be indulging in some pretentious melodrama, it's important to remember just how intense the rivalry between the West and the East was during the Reagan era -- especially the period 1981 - 1987, and how many times we seemed on the brink of world war and self-annihilation. By the time I was in fifth grade I took it as an article of faith, as did every one of my friends, that we would almost certainly never live to adulthood, and I have a vivid memory of expressing gratitude that we resided so close to the White House and the Pentagon: I knew none of us would suffer when the war began. How could we, when literally hundreds of Soviet warheads were trained on our very households? A loud rumble, a flash of light -- and then nothingness. That was how the War -- and my own existence -- would end. It seemed immensely preferable to the sort of tormented half-life the survivors would have to endure, wandering amongst the rubble -- possibly for years -- before radiation sickness or starvation or a follow-up barrage of nuclear missiles finally finished them off.

I can't swear to this, but I believe it to be a normal state of affairs in most societies that children begin their lives with an unwavering faith in the wisdom and probity of their parents and leaders and then only gradually -- and in some cases never -- lose this faith. In my case, that naivete never really existed. I knew while still in the single digits the world was a terrifying place, bristling with doomsday armaments, awash in corruption and pollution, planned and organized by lunatics and run by fools. I knew as well that it might cease to exist at any moment. It was, as the saying went, only the push of a button away. This knowledge did not discount the existence of such things as love, friendship, pleasure or happiness, but it did make them harder to come by, and, once acquired, difficult to keep. And it heightened my awareness of my own mortality. When your life depends on the whims and caprices of world leaders who are only dubiously sane, one does not view time as an inexhaustible commodity. Life, too, falls apart, and the more effort expended to make it permanent and safe, the higher and narrower the pedestal upon which it sits seems to become...and the more violent its inevitable crash. So I believed, anyway, when I was a child. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that this period is when I first picked up a pen and began to explore the world around me through fiction. For me, then as now, writing was not merely a way to vent creativity or exercise control, but to come to terms with a universe governed by the one-way flow of time. What is time, after all, but entropy -- and what is entropy but things falling apart?

For my part, I watched the rocket fall apart, and then went back inside. I was still bewitched by the beauty of what I'd seen, and still trembly from having unwittingly opened a vault of old childhood fears. Sitting down in front of my laptop, I thought about the apocalyptic nature of the stories I've been writing lately. In a sense they are an acknowledgement that the world is a place where chaos and ruin are easier to come by than order and stability; but in another sense they are a middle finger extended at time and its hatchetman, entropy. Because, you see, just because things fall apart, doesn't mean I want them to. Like everyone else I'd rather the goddamned center stayed where it was. I don't want the button pushed, I don't want the ice caps to melt, I don't want the rain forests shaved flat or the oceans poisoned, but I feel helpless to do anything about any of it. I'm one man, not a terribly significant one and certainly not one with any financial power. Much of the punk attitude which I formed as a twelve year-old has returned to me against my will and, until I saw the rocket, without my knowledge. I realize I'm angry and seized by a sense of futility, yet at the same time helpless, fatalistic. But I'm not nihilistic anymore, and neither am I totally apathetic. If you read my work, you'll find occasionally -- just occasionally mind you, but often enough that you can't take it for granted otherwise - that the center does hold. Things fall apart. But sometimes they stick together. If only in a story.

Carl Sagan once questioned, not rhetorically, if self-destruction was the inevitable end of every sentient species in the universe. Human beings certainly do have a propensity for cutting things down and blowing them up. The Cold War was a symptom an illness, and the present war we're fighting against our own planet -- a slow-motion war, measured in hurricanes, floods, droughts, extinctions and rising tides -- is also a symptom. The disease is us. But -- and here is where I think I have actually progressed as a person in thirty-odd years -- I believe the disease has a cure. Watching a rocket whose purpose was not annihilation and mass murder, but the betterment of mankind (at least in theory) reminded me that we are not only capable of greatness as well as villainy, we're also capable of change.

Not a bad night's work.