Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 27

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.

Even Now: Anthony Bourdain and the Suicide Solution

Oh, forgive me father, for I have sinned
I've been through hell and back again
I shook hands with the devil
Looked 'em in the eye
Looked like a long lost friend
Oh, anything you want, any dirty deeds
He's got everything -- except what I really need
Keeping me temporarily satisfied
But not one thing I've tried
Filled me up inside or felt like mine
Mine, all mine.
-- Van Halen

The living's in the way we die.
-- Ah-Ha

When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a Paris hotel room a few months ago, the reaction of the press taught me a lot about the way suicide is approached in what is sometimes called “the national conversation.” Journalists circled around the story in tornado-like fashion, whirling details into our collective face for weeks afterward. We were briefed on every detail of Bourdain's upbringing and career, the various high-profile feuds in which he'd engaged, the details of his relationship with actress Asia Argento, the aggressive role he'd taken in what is known as the #metoo movement. We got reams of tributes from fellow chefs, television personalities and internet celebrities, and were constantly reminded about his hit television show, “Destination Unknown,” and his bestselling books, including “Kitchen Confidential,” which briefly became a scripted TV series. The actual details of his death, however, remained curiously elusive, even after sufficient time had passed for them to become public, either by virtue of official pronouncements or leaks to the press. Many of the reports I read repeated the same line almost verbatim: Bourdain had been “found unresponsive” in his hotel room by fellow chef Eric Ripert, and had later been pronounced dead. It took me some time to confirm an early rumor that had fleetingly appeared on the Net immediately following the news of his demise: Bourdain had hanged himself.

To concentrate on such a morbid detail may strike the reader as pointless or macabre, but the reluctance of the press, which under ordinary circumstances pants like a horny high school student at the thought of tragic or salacious details, especially as they regard celebrities, to come clean about the manner in which Bourdain shed this vale of tears is illustrative of a much greater problem in our society, to wit: the way we deal with suicide, and the conditions which drive people to commit it.

In every country and culture, there are social taboos, subjects that cannot be broached without considerable backlash. British society, for many centuries, was governed by the principle summed up in a single sentence: “It simply isn't done.” And that which was “not done” was not only not to be done, it was not to be discussed. Such a system was surprisingly effective for ensuring that topics like venereal disease, homosexuality, alcoholism and drug abuse, bankruptcy, social inequality, deformity or retardation in children, spousal abuse were swept under the societal rug. On the other hand, it created an environment in which the undiscussed also festered, for the simple reason that no problem can be solved unless and until it is first acknowledged. In American society, there are relatively few social taboos that remain universal throughout this remarkably vast and diverse nation, but mental illness and depression are high among them, and suicide, the unholy spawn of these bastards, probably chief. The press reported honestly that Anthony Bourdain killed himself. In showing a squeamish reluctance to discuss the manner by which he took his life, however, they made it clear that when it comes to suicide, it is simply “not done” to go into too many details. Even now, in an age when the Internet has made accessing atrocity as easy as clicking on a hyperlink, suicide remains shrouded in mystery.

The conscious motive behind this is probably decent enough, i.e. to spare the family, loved ones and fans the gruesome details, but the decency is misplaced, because the unconscious driving force behind the motive is undoubtedly embarrassment. To kill oneself is seen as a shameful and disgusting act, and so it is easier to write that Bordain was “found unresponsive” than “found hanging from a luggage strap.” The idea is that softening the details grants the dead person dignity. That it may. What it does not do, and I understand that I am repeating myself here, is drive home the horror of suicide and the conditions which precipitate it. These need to be discussed fearlessly, ruthlessly and honestly. To describe the circumstances of a particular death is simple enough if one is willing to skirt the taboo, but to discuss the series of events which trigger self-destruction is more difficult, because it is here that the the fears and loathings which created the taboo in the first place confront us.

Let us take celebrity suicide. This has become so common that it is difficult for the press to keep up with it. Robin Williams died by hanging. Fashion maven Kate Spade killed herself the same week as Bourdain. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden hanged himself, and not long afterward so did his close friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Stephanie Adams, a former Playboy playmate, threw herself off a building. Tony Scott, director of mega-hits like TOP GUN and BEVERLY HILLS COP II, jumped off a bridge. Michael Ruppert, author of PRESIDENTIAL ENERGY POLICY, which became the basis of the popular documentary THE COLLAPSE, shot himself. In each case there is a tendency, perhaps understandable, to ask why one should be feel sorry for wealthy, often famous people who can't find a reason to live but evidently can find at least one compelling reason to die. Yet the rash of celebrity and quasi-celebrity suicides is simply a bellwether of a much larger trend in American society, one which tends to cut across economic lines. According to the CDC, the suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, rising by 25% overall, with twenty-five states reporting increases of up to 30% in that time period. Suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in this country, claiming 42,773 lives each year – and this, at a time when prescription of psychiatric drugs is at an all-time high: approximately 33 million adults are on medication, i.e. 10% of the entire country; but the figures for children are especially appalling. Information supplied by the mental health watchdog CCHR indicates that 2.1 million kids are on antidepressants; 1.2 million on antipsychotics, and 1.4 million on anti-anxiety meds.

These figures obviously demands a series of questions, but the most obvious, and the most pressing, is why. The United States, for all of its problems, is one of the crown-jewel nations of the earth. Education is free until the eighteenth year. Credit allows people of low economic standing to live a full class above their means. Compared to much of the rest of the planet, we possess an abundance of food, natural resources and living space. We have no fear of foreign invasion and the threat of nuclear war is a faint fraction of what it was during the Cold War. Political violence of the sort that plagues much of the rest of the planet is almost non-existent, and the cost of living in many areas is ridiculously cheap. Even some of our more rampant issues, things like the obesity epidemic, the increase in diabetes, psychological problems with body image – “first world problems” as they are now called – cannot be taken all that seriously since they are symptomatic of our own tendency toward excess. Yet Americans are killing themselves at a greater rate than ever, and this increase began several years before such landmark events as 9/11, the Iraq War and subsequent “Global War on Terror,” the Great Recession, and the election of Donald Trump, all of which have been blamed for increasing national anxiety.

It's even worse than you think. In 1999, the year our suicide rate began its upward spike, America was enjoying a seldom-precedented period of all-around prosperity. During the previous decade, the Gross Domestic Product continued to increase by roughly 4.5% a year, while unemployment steadily declined from a high, in 1991, of 7.3%, to a scant 3.9% in 1999. The domestic political situation was stable, democracy was on the march all over the world, and there was less to fear, in concrete terms, than there had ever been since any period since the Jazz Age. It is logical to conclude, then, that the motivation behind these deaths came from circumstances which were not economic in nature, nor driven by anxieties about nuclear war, pandemic or any other possible catastrophe. It is also logical to conclude that contrary to all American propaganda going back to the time of the Declaration of Independence, physical comfort, economic prosperity and material wealth do not provide much of a shield against internal despair. Americans have been taught from birth to believe that wealth and especially fame provide happiness, but the rash of celebrity deaths and the suicide rates among the middle, upper middle and rich classes argue decisively otherwise.

According to Medbroadcast, the chief cause of suicide is “major psychiatric illness - in particular, mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia).” The next is “substance abuse (primarily alcohol abuse).” Others include a family history of suicide, which is probably linked to genetic predisposition to depression, and “unbearable emotional pain,” which is hardly distinguishable from depression. The common theme here is obvious: suicide is driven by things we Americans prefer not to talk about.
And because we do not talk about them, we further isolate those who suffer from them. Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation are one of the chief precursors of suicide. Because of our taboo, people beginning the process of “suicidal ideation” (the process of normalizing suicide in one's thoughts) often feel, or have been made to feel, that they are weak, dysfunctional, damaged, or helpless; when they speak out they are shamed for making others uncomfortable ("First world problem over here!") and when they remain silent their suffering grows. It is a vicious cycle and one which frequently ends with a gunshot.

In America, we have a peculiar habit of looking at effects without discussing their causes. This applies to every aspect of American life, most notably mass shootings, but in the case of suicide it is particularly egregious. Despite the skyrocket in suicide throughout our land, the social taboo remains firmly in place. We are allowed to express dismay, to vent anger, even to grieve, but not to ask the larger questions, or the largest one of all, why. Instead, the ugly truths are avoided or sanded-down so as not to alarm or offend. Unimportant or secondary factors are endlessly discusses while, without exception, the crucial ones are smothered in silence. We hear the sirens of the coroner's wagon, smile a sickly smile and say, "There's nothing to see here, folks!" We whistle past our own graveyards.

In regards to Bourdain's suicide, the causes were obviously complex and may never be fully understood. At the heart of every suicide, even those provoked by severe mental illness, there remains at least a small element of mystery. But as part of the broader trend of the increase in American suicides, I can venture a few educated guesses as to the critical question of "why?"

The original draft of the Declaration of Independence drafted the mission statement of the new nation as "life, liberty and the pursuit of property." This last word was viewed as a bit too vulgar and was altered to "happiness." No one, however, has ever been fooled by the change. In America, "property" and "happiness" are believed to be synonymous, interchangeable. Having one means having the other, and anyone who has achieved material prosperity who does not exhibit happiness is viewed as spoiled, weak, ungrateful, and altogether disgusting. You have more; therefore you ought be happier than those who have less. By the very act of their unhappiness they are challenging the American mantra, in a sense committing a sort of societal treason.

The social psychologist Erich Fromm famously wrote that humanity in the industrial age had two choices -- to have, or to be. Those who "had" believed happiness lay in the acquisition of material goods and the satisfaction of material desires. Those who wanted to "be" believed that happiness -- the meaning of life -- lay in experience, self-discovery, and finding harmony with the larger world. The former camp tended toward narcissism and egotism, which in turn isolated them from the rest of humanity and from the world as a whole. They were materially prosperous but internally destitute -- "alienated," in Fromm's words, and often unhappy. They sought to alleviate their unhappiness by the further acquisition of wealth, and when this failed, their unhappiness increased, and with it their isolation.

In contrast, the latter, those who wanted to "be" were interested in inner activity, which Fromm described thusly:

"To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which - though in varying degrees – every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested...to give."

This is a tremendous rejection of the creed that money buys happiness, and in my personal experience it is true. As Lawrence Sanders once wrote, greed does not lead to satiety; greed leads to greed. The pit is bottomless. But understanding this is not the American way. In the face of mounting unhappiness, of an ever-climbing suicide rate, of an entire generation of children who have to be medicated, or think they have to be medicated, simply to function in our society, we have doubled-down on the idea that wealth, power and fame are the definition of happiness and even raised them to the status of moral virtues. The Jenners, the Kardashians, the Hiltons and those of their ilk have become a species of demigod, all the more admirable for the fact that they have done little or nothing of practical value to earn their success. In this we now resemble the British Empire at the height of its decadence, having made a Golden Calf of the flesh while neglecting the needs of the soul. And what happened to the British Empire?

It will no doubt come as a surprise to some that the rates of mental illness, even severe mental illness like schizophrenia, drops in any nation during time of war, as does chronic depression. It may also come as a surprise that in tribal societies, mental illness and depression are almost unheard-of. This phenomenon was examined by Sebastian Junger in his illuminating book Tribe and his conclusion was simple: what we call civilization, with its tendency toward egotism, isolation, selfishness, and materialism, not only neglects the deeper needs of the human soul, it creates a disharmonious relationship with the environment, the effects of which we are only now just beginning to understand.

I am not advocating throwing all your possessions into the sea and living in a cave somewhere on roots and rainwater. As the Police once sang, we are spirits in a material world, and we are ruled to some extent by material considerations. We need clothes, food, running water, a roof over our heads. These things provide us with comfort and security. But they do not provide us with happiness and if we spend our lives pursuing them to the exclusion of all else...well, he who dies with the most toys, still dies. It's what he does in the years and decades beforehand that matters. What did he learn about life? What did he learn about himself? What did he learn about the world and his place within it? None of these answers can be found in an interest statement. Nor can they be found by swallowing pills and placing a bag over your head. Suicide is not a solution to anything, it is simply an escape from the problem. That such an obvious sentiment even needs to be uttered is a devastating commentary on the mentality with which we have been raised.

Anthony Bourdain was rich. He was also incredibly famous. By any American metric he ought to have been happy. Yet he killed himself. Again, I don't claim to know precisely why. News continues to break which indicates possible motives, and the hollowness of materialism may have had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his decision. But the fact remains that by the logic upon which this country was founded, he should never have wanted to take his own life. Only the working class, the poor and the homeless ought to do so. Yet among those segments of our society the rate of suicide is so low as to be practically non-existent. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the struggle simply to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads leaves little time for the sort of extended anguish that leads to suicide; but the more unpleasant truth is that those on the lower margins of our society know instinctively what all living things know, but which materialists have forgotten, to wit: the meaning of life is in living.

The Way It Was When

I found myself in Hollywood again. I can't remember the date or the circumstances, but it was a beautiful evening – balmy, with a breeze that ruffled the palm trees nodding over the boulevard like sleepy sentinels. My destination? Burbank, and home. But though traffic was mysteriously light – almost non-existent – I found myself in no hurry to get there. Between the weather, the open road, the superb tunes rolling out of the radio, and my general state of relaxation, I was enjoying myself thoroughly. As I shot past the Hollywood Bowl to the 101 Freeway, equally and suspiciously free of cars, I was struck by a realization which made me laugh out loud: quite by accident, I had re-discovered the joy of cruising.

Cruising, or in the parlance of my parents, “going for a drive,” is something which used to be an important part of my life. It is one of the few distinct pleasures which I remember from high school, which otherwise was not all that pleasurable of an experience. The ages between, say, twelve and sixteen are a continuous struggle to define oneself as a adult, at a time when one is still actually a child both physically and mentally, and the acquisition of a driver's license bestows upon the teenager a precious commodity: temporary freedom. You may live, as I did, in a too-small house with too many people and animals, and spend the rest of your time jammed in school with a couple of thousand other equally frustrated young humans; you may exist in a state of simmering sexual frustration, the victim of hormonal mood swings and the quasi-tantrums that result from them. You may be oppressed by parents, homework, chores, bullies, elder siblings, and the sense that one's life is not your own and there is no such thing as privacy; but when they hand you that license and a set of car keys, everything changes, if only for an hour or two, here and there.

When I was about seventeen I had a specific ritual I followed, beginning the spring and ending somewhere in the fall. When the weather was just right, in that period of day known as the gloaming – when the sun is down but light still fills the sky – I would swing into the '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme that was my temporary chariot, fire up every one of the 350 cubic inches in its engine, set the four-barrel carburator to rumble, and have myself a drive.

I grew up near the Potomac River, among trees and ivy and rolling hills. It was suburbia, but not the sort that desecrates the landscape; the houses all seemed like hobbitons, growing up out of the earth in the shade of the trees. Natural phenomena, as it were. Just a few minutes from my house were single-lane railway bridges, fast-moving streams, brooding woods, and sprawling fields unbesmirched by a single man-made structure. In the summers, after a thunderstorm, mist would hang thickly over the woods and the open pastures; in the fall, the sharp October air was full of the spice of decaying leaves and woodsmoke. All of this was perfect backdrop for cruising. I would steer the great Cutlass through the landscape, passing the homes of schoolmates, inhaling the perfume of growing things, and listening to the mix tape I'd jammed into the dashboard player. In those days, every kid was armed with a tremendous collection of mix tapes, mostly recorded off the radio, and there was one for every mood. Nowadays you say, “There's an app for that.” In those days you said, “There's a mix tape for that” – “that” being your state of mind. If you were angry, if you were lonely, if you were feeling confident, happy or just plain horny, you had a collection of songs you could fall back on to enhance those feelings. The construction of a mix tape was a science that had to be carefully apprenticed before it could be mastered; I could probably write a book about the techniques necessary to produce the perfect one, if I thought anyone would read it. At any rate, I had more tapes than I could count, but there was one in particular which always accompanied my when I went cruising. After all these years I can only recall two songs on it – Guns 'n Roses “Patience” and “You Don't Move Me Anymore” by Keith Richards – but the effect it produced in me on those lazy, moon-lighted evenings in the summer I can remember perfectly. It was a sensation of freedom, coupled with the knowledge that in that moment you were completely unreachable by telephone, parent or teacher. Nobody knew where you were; nobody could tell you what to do or how to do it. Cell phones did not exist. GPS tracking did not exist. When you got in that car, you were like a deep-sea diver with a thousand feet of water over his head: immersed in, yet disconnected from, the world around you. Returning from a good cruise produced in my teenage body and mind the exact feelings which a cigar and two fingers of Irish whiskey produce in my middle-aged ones: peace and contentment.

At the moment of my Hollywood epiphany, I realized that it had been nearly a dozen years since I had simply “gone for a drive.” When I moved to Los Angeles in '07, I quickly discovered that the traffic here, along with the inadequate road system and the brutality of the summer and early fall weather, were not conducive to cruising. Indeed, nobody around here drives just for the sake of it. Though L.A. is famous for its car culture, the automobile here is either a status symbol or a means to an end. The idea that it can be used as a balm for one's soul is not even considered. Conditions simply make it impossible. The circumstances which allowed me to cruise by accident were simply a set of perfectly aligned flukes which I'd never experienced before and have not experienced since. Nevertheless, having “gone for a drive” by accident, it got me thinking about how much life has changed since my cruising days, since the times I used to spend hours in the basement or in my room, patiently waiting for the right song to come over the radio so I could add it to my latest mix tape. I realized that I am now old enough to mourn The Way Things Were When.

Being born in the early 70s, I have layers and layers of intricate memories of a now-extinct society, a world before cellular phones or mobile devices or the Internet, before microchips in cars, before recycling, before CDs and MP3s and podcasts, before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, before streaming services and cloud drives, before almost everything which makes our modern society work. A world in which “going for a drive” was a significant act, and creating a mix tape was a rite of passage, like a Native American boy's learning to track a deer. A world of newspapers, cassette tapes, watches, Walkmans, Atari computers, VCRs, 200 lb television sets with rabbit ears, and mail-order catalogs with six-to-eight week delivery times. A world of Encyclopedias and TV Guides. A world in which it was not possible or even desirable to be called or contacted at any time. A world in which the simple act of climbing into a car unplugged you from the world.

Lest you think I am simply indulging in nostalgia, let me say that I am quite well aware at the world of the 70s, 80s and early-mid 90s was hardly perfect and we who lived through those times are were old enough to make conscious judgments of them knew it even then. There is no word in the English language for the frustration which a person feels when he desires a technology or a device which does not yet exist, but I felt that frustration quite keenly as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Simply put, we knew a much more sophisticated world was around the corner, a world of instantaneous gratification and all-hours convenience, but we weren't there yet. We were stuck with cassette tapes and clunky VCRs and a choice between ABC, NBC or CBS; stuck with telephone cords that inevitably twisted into knots, and the very real possibility of breaking down a lonely stretch of highway in bad weather with absolutely no way to call for help. So no, this is not nostalgia; not all nostalgia, anyway. It is simply an awareness that time is marching on, and that as it so marches, certain pleasures which were unique to my generation have been left behind in its dust, probably forever. Cruising – at least in Los Angeles – is one. Assembling mix tapes on clunky tape-recorders is another. But the list, if I were to sit down and really think about it, is immense.

In Anne Rice's novel Interview With A Vampire, the character of Armand explains to the neophyte vampire Louis that the reason the undead do not really live forever is because very few of them have the stomach for immortality. The vampire, Armand explains, is born into a particular era and belongs to that era alone; as time passes, language changes, clothing changes, custom changes, architecture changes, and at some point, the vampire finds itself unable to relate to the present. It is still looking for the accents, the styles, the sounds of its own era, now long extinct and never to return. In the end the loneliness, the imposed isolation, the sense of being “in but not of” the world becomes unbearable, and the vampire steps deliberately into the light and destroys itself. I do not, of course, feel that way just now – like destroying myself, I mean. I'm way too young for that. But I have come to understand the grumbling, the carping, the endless complaining my grandparents were guilty of as far back as I can remember – a constant, ne'er-ceasing lament about the Way The World Was When. They talked about things like coal-fired stoves, milkmen, nickel beers, listening to soap operas on the radio, and the pain-in-the-ass necessity of having your collar turned or your hat reblocked. They talked about how you had to wear a suit or a dress to a movie theater and how a dollar could buy you a steak dinner with all the trimmings and a cold beer and still leave you enough money for the tip and the trolley home. At the time, I didn't want to hear any of that sort of talk and it is only recently that I have come to understand what a wonderful insight it gave me into the world in which they experienced their own youth. But it also lends me an understanding of just what it feels like to be the Vampire Armand, struggling endlessly to keep up with a life that never stops moving, that allows each of us a certain time to be both “in and of” the world, and then slowly begins to pull away from us, to make us living anachronisms, who bore the younger folk with our tales of The Way The World Was When.

I do not, at present, have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew and sometimes, when I am regaling them with tales of my own childhood, I can see the boredom glassing over their eyes. They cannot relate, and there is really no reason why they should: they belong to a different world, one which is growing more different, more alien – to me, anyway – with every passing year. Yet at the same time I cannot look at them without feeling a twinge of pity. Just as I will never know what it is like to go to school in the horse-drawn sleigh that pulled my grandmother through Indiana snow, they will never – so long as they live in Los Angeles – know the joy of cruising through somnolent streets on lovely summer evenings, alone with their thoughts, knowing they are unreachable, untouchable, totally, wonderfully alone. Nor will they ever grasp the complex mixture of method and patience which was required to construct the perfect mix tape. But I'll tell you this much, friends and neighbors: they don't know what the hell they're missing.

Where the Beechwoods Used to Be; or, why I love Secondhand Bookstores

Say what you like -- call it silly, childish, anything -- but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?

-- George Orwell, "Coming Up For Air"

Only a fool stands in the way of progress...if this is progress.

-- Captain James T. Kirk

I grew up in a house filled with books. I mean this literally. Both my parents and my older brother were voracious readers, albeit readers with different tastes, and there were bookshelves almost everywhere -- the living room, the den (which we called "the sunporch"), the upstairs hallway, the various bedrooms, even the basement. Excess books were to be found in the attic, the garage and, in the case of rare volumes from past centuries, in the breakfronts in the dining room. My father read scholarly history, biography and works on politics, along with some historical fiction: big, hard-backed, intimidating-looking works of almost Biblical proportions. My mother devoured mysteries by the freightload -- probably forty or fifty a year, mostly paperbacks, which to me seemed more approachable and less frighteningly adult. My brother's tastes were eclectic indeed: comic books, science-fiction, pictorial volumes on cinema, collections of essays and short stories by writers as varied as Harlan Ellison and George Orwell, this, that. It was damn near impossible to go anywhere in our house without encountering books, and being a child of a curious nature, I started first by looking at the pictures (if any), then reading the descriptions on the flyleaves of the dust jackets, then making tentative efforts to read the books themselves. Most were way over my head in terms of subject matter, but that didn't stop me, and I delighted in the literary smorgasbord I could sample at will: a novel about ancient Rome, a biography of Al Capone, stacks of Fantastic Four comics, mysteries written by Lawrence Sanders and Agatha Christie, the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin. Believe it or not -- and you may not, if you're thirty or younger -- one of my favorite pastimes was yanking a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off its shelf and just turning the gilt-edged pages for hours, marveling at the pictures, diagrams (some of them transparencies or fold-outs), sketches and maps. Today this sort of thing is done via the soulless instruments known as Google and Wikipedia; but Google-Wikipedia have nothing on the pleasure of sitting in an easy chair with a big, leather-bound volume tooled in gold, reading about crocodiles or the Battle of Hastings or the Sahara Desert or the Xyphoid process or any other of ten thousand random people, places or things that make up this world.

Growing up, my family had an obsession with moviegoing which was pretty impressive, but the one thing which rivaled it was our tendency to make Viking-like raids on bookstores. No such establishment in the Maryland - D.C. - Virginia area was safe. There was nothing my father liked better to do on a Saturday during the early 1980s than pack us into the car, hunt down a book merchant, and loot him empty. Everyone got a book, and some of us got two or even three. My mother spent a lot of years in a state of frustration over the staggering sums of money we -- meaning her husband -- spent on this passion. In those days, of course, bookstores were not what they are today or were just ten years ago; the mega-chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders did not exist. Crown Books was probably as big of a chain as existed and the individual stores were not very large, and no, you couldn't get a cup of coffee or a Danish and no, you couldn't get wi-fi because it didn't exist and neither did the Internet. A bookstore was just that -- a store with books in it. Nothing else. But that was fine with us, and especially with me.

You see, the family obsession with the written word carried with it its own aesthetic. When you grow up surrounded by books, you constantly encounter certain tactile and olfactory sensations which get bound up in your mind with various concepts and emotions, all of them positive. Thousands of books create a smell of paper, leather, linen and dust which permeates not only your nose but your childhood; touching those pebbled leather or scratchy linen covers brings forth memories of sitting by the fireplace, reading in perfect comfort and security into the late hours of the night. The associations are pleasant, and they linger into adulthood. So it's little wonder that entering a bookstore now, especially a secondhand bookstore, plunges me immediately and totally into some of the happiest days of my own early life.

The secondhand bookstore has distinct advantages in my mind over the firsthand bookstore for several reasons. Firstly, the moment you walk through the door your nostrils are confronted with the smell of thousands of decaying, dust-coated tomes full of foxed paper -- to me and other bibliophiles, a terrific sensation. Secondly, the lighting is almost invariably dim, giving the whole place a hushed, intimate atmosphere. Third, the fact that the books are all used means that the place is full of nearly extinct, out of print editions, old volumes from past centuries, and other impossible-to-find works, often by long-dead or obscure authors. Perusing stacks of these old mummies often yields great treasure, for the fact that a book has become utterly forgotten by no means excludes it from greatness, and should you find some long-forgotten great work, you experience the special pleasure of being let in on a dusty old secret known only to a select few.

There is of course another reason I prefer secondhand bookstores to the big conglomerates, of which Barnes & Noble is, now, I believe the last representative; they are privately owned and, for this and the fore-mentioned reasons, are in possession of a soul. And as our nation continues down the path of gentrification, cultural homogenization and corporatization generally, soul is an increasingly rare commodity anywhere. The secondhand bookstore, like the mom-and-pop grocery, the independently-owned hardware, toy, dime or record store, the hobby shop and the family-owned diner or coffeehouse, is increasingly in the process of being exterminated. This extermination is cold-blooded, deliberate and seemingly irreversible, which is odd because nearly everyone -- every human being with taste or aesthetic feeling, that is -- prefers to do business with the small businessman rather than the large if given any kind of choice at all. And is not merely sentiment that drives this preference. So long as small businesses of any kind proliferate, the customer is sure to be treated honestly and fairly in the vast majority of his dealings; what's more, if he is a repeat customer, he will also be treated personally. All of these qualities are absent from corporations and chains. They are run not by owners but by managers, and staffed by underpaid employees who like as not get no benefits and are treated poorly or indifferently by their employer, and have neither the incentive nor the native interest to please the customer. Going to a Barnes & Noble may be a positive experience to the Bibliophile insomuch as it is full of books and coffee, but in comparison with a good secondhand bookstore it is rather like tinned peaches versus ripe peaches taken directly off the tree. The former gives you the simulacrum of the thing you want, and the latter gives you the reality.

Whenever I move to a new city or state, the first thing I do is run down a mental checklist of the things I will need to locate after, or even before, I unpack: A friendly pub. A good restaurant. An honest mechanic. And a bookstore, preferably secondhand. Until a few weeks ago I was a habituate of a place in Burbank called Movie World, located downtown on San Fernando Boulevard. The title of the store was deceptive; while Movie World did sell movie posters, old VCR tapes, cinematic publicity stills, television scripts and various other ephemera related to Hollywood, it was by and large simply a used bookstore. And what a used bookstore. From floor to ceiling were stacked tens of thousands of hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, leatherbound collections -- you name it, it was there, coated in dust and jammed in so tight against its fellows you practically needed a crowbar to pry it free. Indeed, Movie World was a firetrap of the first order, overstocked to an unsafe degree (there were literally avalanches of magazines and books that blocked entire isles), and not terribly well organized, though the gentlemanly owner tried his best to do so. He had, he told me, once run three secondhand bookshops, but the other two had folded and he'd been forced to cram the stock of both the others into his sole remaining store. Truth be told, I didn't mind; in fact I rather liked the ramshackle appearance. After the brightly lighted, sanitized, everything-in-its-place appearance of a Barnes & Noble, the existence of this kind of store, where every square foot was heaped with such a freight of books and old magazines and rolled-up posters and dog-eared 8 x 10 headshots that you wondered why the floor didn't collapse, was a positive joy for me. What's more, it was directly around the corner from my gym. I could roll up in my car, work out for an hour, then wander into Movie World and inhale its intoxicating scent as I hunted the isles for something new to read. Like as not I'd then eat lunch across the street, enjoying the first pages of my spontaneous purchase -- a pleasure all the more pleasurable for not being shared.

I patronized Movie World for years. Occasionally I'd go inside with a friend, but in a sense, Movie World was my friend and there was no need for further company. I don't know how many purchases I made there, but the number must be very great indeed, and included some terrific finds: old army manuals from WW2, out-of-print classics like Beau Geste, trashy adventure novels covered with mustard stains (I hope they were mustard stains), smashing autobiographies of obscure actors. Shopping there -- or just wandering there, without buying anything -- became a settled part of my routine. I really didn't need any of the stuff I bought, especially the scripts for episodes of forgotten 80s television shows like Matt Houston, but that was part of the fun. Nobody ever died because they didn't buy that old steel ammunition box from WW2 they saw in the junk shop window; on the other hand, nobody who hasn't paid hard-earned cash for a useless item simply for the joy of possessing it has lived a day in their life. Anyway, one day late last year -- I'm sure you knew this was coming, though I'm not sure I did -- the owner informed me that after decades in business he was finally retiring -- he'd sell off his entire stock, give away what didn't sell on his last day, and vacate the premises he'd occupied sometime around the year of my birth. If I may extend the metaphor, it was rather like having a good buddy tell you he's decided to leave town forever and head for the opposite side of he earth, where you can never visit. It reminded me of a similar experience I'd had in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000s, when Second Story Books was forced by developers to shut its doors to make way for some fucking abomination of an art gallery that nobody wanted. In that case, it was less like losing a buddy than witnessing a murder you are powerless to prevent and equally powerless to avenge (unless you burn the fucking art gallery to the ground, which I may or may not have seriously considered). In both cases, though, these individual tiny incidents belong to a much larger trend -- a cultural massacre, a sort of slow-rolling genocide of everything which possesses soul in favor of everything which does not.

When Movie World shut down, I struck out in search of a replacement, but I've yet to find one which truly fills that particular niche within my soul. A very well-maintained secondhand bookstore does in fact reside very close to me in Toluca Lake, but in my first visit to the place I found it a little too well-maintained: too bright, too neat, too organized. Even the presence of several cats, sleeping peaceably atop stacks of books, couldn't quite give it the atmosphere of run-down, homey charm that I associate with a "real" used bookshop. It occurred to me as I left (having bought two books; hell, I'm not wasting a visit) that the mom-and-pop operations, even where they survive, have had to change their character somewhat in order to compete, or feel as if they are competing, with the big chains. Thus the cleanliness, the harsh lighting, the absence of dust. But it is precisely these things, in my mind, which lend the secondhand store its final coat of charm. Shops like that don't really give a shit whether you have allergies or expect to be served coffee or fume because there's no wi-fi for your android phone; not because they are indifferent to your wants, but because they concentrate on your needs. Customer service is sometimes more than satisfying petty desires in the consumer; it is sometimes slipping past them and reminding you, via a book avalanche or a handful of dust-bunnies, why you actually came into the store in the first place.

In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell brilliantly and evocatively told the story of a harassed, disappointed, much put-upon London everyman named George Bowling who rebels against the cold, mechanistic, heartless trend of the modern world by trying to revisit the idyllic country town of his boyhood, only to find that it has been utterly destroyed by the wheels of "progress." In confess that sometimes, as I comb through Los Angeles for a proper secondhand bookstore and a re-connection to the best days of my own childhood, I feel much like poor old George Bowling, who discovers there is no refuge from the bright lights and dead souls that surround him. Yet all is not lost. The hulking chain stores like Borders, which helped obliterate the secondhand store nationwide, are themselves being driven out of existence by Internet-based booksellers like Amazon: Borders ceased to exist almost a decade ago, and Barnes & Noble is sluggishly dying. Some will of course decry this as the final doom of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but I see the strong possibility of a different future, because I know I am not alone in my passion for the tactile experience which is part and parcel of entering a bookshop. Human beings are gregarious animals and while they may enjoy the convenience of online shopping, it doesn't exactly fill up a Saturday afternoon for the family. The market abhors a vacuum, and if the last of the big chains goes into extinction, I foresee the rise of a new generation of bookseller -- one who bridges the gap between the cold, "full service" store which serves coffee and biscotti and carries mostly new releases from big publishers, and the dusty, dimly-lighted, no-frills secondhand store about which I have just waxed rhapsodic-nostalgic for the last few thousand words. This new sort of bookstore will carry heaps of old used books, but also sell coffee and have the latest bestsellers. It will have a lounge where people can read and get wi-fi, but the furniture will be secondhand and mismatched, and anyone talking on a cell phone will be told roughly to get the hell out. And best of all, it will be privately owned and privately run, designed and organized to the owner's whims and personal tastes. Said owner will not be a mere manager selling a commodity which to him might as well be pork bellies or wheat futures, but rather a bibliophile who passionately loves books, and reading, and the whole atmosphere which can surround both. Beechwoods can be cut down, you see, but they can also be replanted and regrown. All it takes is love, courage...and a little bit of soul.

Breaking Brad: or, why Grammar Nazis is good for ya

Like most people, I often want to beat the shit out of that subspecies of human we refer to as “the grammar Nazi.” You know, that sumbitch that's always telling you it's “whom” and not “who” or “me” and not “I.” Who tells you the comma should be a semicolon, or that you ended the sentence in a preposition and shouldn't have, because it "just isn't done." You know, that guy.

Unlike most people – I say this uncomfortably, with some upper-lip sweat, but I've gotta say it – I must confess I am occasionally that grammar Nazi. I've pulled on the black boots and carried the whip and Luger of the full-fledged, heel-clicking, monocle-wearing, grammar-syntax-spelling-punctuation fascist. Hail grammar!

Schizophrenic? Never been diagnosed. Hypocrite? Possibly. Morally correct? Here is my argument that I am. And it starts with a little discussion about brads. Yup, you heard me, brads.

A brad, for those of you who don't know, is a little brass paper fastener, about 2 ¾ inches long, which is used to hold together bodies of paper too thick to be stapled. It can be truly said that Hollywood runs on brads. They are the ammunition for its machine gun, the cream for its coffee, the peanut butter for its jelly. You can't have Hollywood without brads, because without brads, every script in this town would fall apart, literally, just like that. Given that every script has at least 90-odd pages, and there are hundreds of thousands of scripts in this city, it would be a total disaster. An explosion in a confetti factory. Doom.

Now, it so happens that hole-punchers make three holes: top, middle and bottom. So in theory, each script requires three brads. But in reality, only two are used: one at the top and one at the bottom. The middle is left empty. Always. In fact, if you submit a script to a studio, and they see it has three brads in it, or they see that it has brads in the top and middle, or middle and bottom, holes, they will throw it in the recycling bin faster than you can say “broken dreams.” They will not look at the title. They will not read the first page. They will not hand it a blindfold and a cigarette. They will just pull the trigger.

If this seems capricious or cruel, well, it is – cruel anyway. But it is not capricious. It has a very definite rationale, a cold and ruthless purpose. The purpose is to save time.

Hollywood is a town of wannabees. I say that with no malice. Nearly everyone here, myself included, is aspiring to be something other than what they actually are at the moment you meet them: actors, comedians, musicians, producers, directors...and scriptwriters. And a million wannabe scriptwriters means a million scripts. Those scripts pour into studio offices all day, every day, all year long. A friend of mine here told me his own office gets six hundred a week. Theoretically, every one of these has to be read and then summarized so it can be rejected or moved on for further study. It is verboten to simply throw away stacks of scripts because you, the studio reader, don't feel like reading them or are utterly overwhelmed by the influx. After all, you might be chucking away the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But there is one exception to this rule. It is unwritten, but it is universally practiced. If a script comes in with three brads, or improperly placed brads, into the garbage chute it goes, and no one will bat an eye. But why, you ask – why? The answer is that because the rule about brads is so well known, it is assumed – with some degree of justification – that anyone who doesn't know it is a slovenly amateur whose writing won't be any better than their script etiquette. Their scripts can be destroyed unread with a clear conscience. So the tradition goes, anyway.

Okay, you say, now I know about brads and this arcane folkway of Hollywood script-readers. What the heil does that have to do with grammar Nazism?

When I am on the internet, be it Facebook or Twitter or the comments section of any website whatsoever, the first thing that strikes me is the aggressiveness of the posts. The issue people are posting about doesn't matter: gardening, politics, martial arts, kittens, the starship Enterprise – all irrelevant. The human being, safe behind anonymity and a keyboard, is evidently quite the little Ghengis Khan, and will launch a full-fledged, often vicious verbal attack on anyone or anything who disagrees with them in the slightest way on any subject. But when I look at attacks on the internet of any kind, especially those directed at me, one of the first things I take note of is the way they are executed. Is the attacker coherent? Do they write in complete sentences? Is there a structure to their argument? Are the spelling, grammar, punctuation and so forth they use correct or reasonably so? Do they commit any logical fallacies? It's a quick mental checklist, a sort of red-pen rundown I perform automatically, just the way the bleary-eyed script-reader checks each new arrival on his desk for the proper number and arrangement of brads.

You see, it all comes down to credibility. If someone is calling me ignorant who cannot spell the word, if someone is calling me stupid who writes two pages without using a comma and capitalizes more or less when they feel like it, I can assume with reasonable certainty that they are idiots or badly educated and that I can safely ignore what they have to say. If, on the other hand, they can write a proper sentence and construct a proper argument, I will probably listen (meaning read) and if it is not too insulting, give it a fair hearing before I respond. The person may be a jerk, but they know how to use the bloody brads. So to speak.

Snobbish, you say: many intelligent people lack schooling or are just plain bad writers. By red-penning their thoughts instead of arguing with them, I'm being cruel and unhelpful and even sidestepping the debate, whatever the debate may be. This is undeniably true, and it is undeniably unfair. But then some very good scriptwriters have failed the brad test and had their stuff shitcanned because of a misplaced paper fastener, and that, too, is unfair. The hard truth is the script-reader must have ways of thinning the herd. He must establish minimum prerequisites, a run of basic criteria, which if not met disqualify the script-writer, or else he will never get anything done at all. He must, in short, learn to discriminate. And isn't that a loaded word? Applied one way it is a horrible act. Applied another way it is a compliment – the ability to discriminate between, say, between shit and apple pie is important if you are hungry. And that is what the internet is: shit and apple pie. And it's a lot of the former and very little of the latter. We must have a way to discriminate between the two, and it seems to me that gauging the "English IQ" of someone who writes you a snarky or argumentative message is not a bad place to start.

Notice I said start, not end. Someone may be writing you who speaks English as a second or third language, or who is using voice-to-text, or is in a great rush or under pressure or had to drop out of school in eighth grade to get a job to support themselves. These people ought to get passes. I am speaking here mainly of people who are being aggressive, obnoxious, rude, insulting, and just plain nasty. If they are also sloppy in the bargain, why let them off? Why bother sifting through the chaos of their poorly-formed thoughts? Better to simply to lay hands on the grammar Nazi whip and let fly. It will infuriate them, it will make them look foolish, and when you get tired of it you can always destroy their arguments using a less persnickety weapon, like logic. The fact is that Grammar Nazism is often used by people who have no actual answer to an argument and want to distract their opponent and any onlookers from this fact; in that regard it is a logical fallacy itself. I do maintain that is not a legitimate substitute for an argument, but when your attacker is not making an argument but merely slinging mud or spewing nonsense, it is a viable option. The English "brad test" is designed to separate those who don't know the rules from those who do: it does not finish the selection process, but starts it.

I think we can all agree that Grammar Nazism is a terrible thing to be subjected to. I've been on the receiving end of that whip several times and it stings my ego terribly and makes me want to beat the shit out of the person using it – especially if, as I just said, they don't have an argument to make and want to harp on my misuse of a comma or some other trivial nonsense. But that is the nature of weaponry. It can be used by you, or it can be used against you, so it's best to establish a kind of Geneva Convention of Grammar Nazism. Perhaps we could establish a cultural rule that forbids hissy-fits over things like missing semicolons and dangling participles under certain definite conditions, while excusing G.N.'s of their G.N.-ism when a written statement is so egregiously sloppy and stupid that it practically begins to be deconstructed with a rusty scalpel. Perhaps that is a good idea. But in the mean time, goddamn it, I will retain my Grammar Nazi uniform and eight-headed whip and use them, or not, as I see fit. It so happens that I enjoy the screams.