Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 28
June 12, 2018
The Best of the Bad: My Favorite Movie Villains
Face it. Half of what's fun about going to the movies can be summed up in three words: the bad guys. In addition to generally getting the best dialogue (and the best tailors: who dresses better than the Nazis?) the villains or super-villains of cinema allow us to focus our free-floating hatreds and dislikes on one atavistic image, one sneering, gloating face. Everything that sucks about our own lives can be crammed into a single pinata of evil. And if and when the villain is defeated, well, we achieve a vicarious, cathartic release which we are often denied in real life. You can't kill your boss, the office bully or the asshole who just wrote you a $350 ticket for being three inches too far from the curb, but you can watch as appropriately magnified versions of these people are shot, blown to pieces, socked on the jaw, or just told to go fuck themselves.
Now, by definition, every movie must have its antagonists -- those characters whose purpose is to thwart the desires and goals of the heroes or heroines. In some movies these antagonists are not evil or even bad, they are simply obstacles which must be got around -- or through -- for the good guy to get what he or she wants. A good example of this would be "drill instructor" or "tough coach" films where the D.I. is the antagonist but not a villain. These folks are disqualified from my list, so you won't be seeing Louis Gossett, Jr. here even though he did kick Richard Gere's balls into next week win a fight in "An Officer and a Gentleman."
In other films, of course, the baddies are pureblood evil itself, with absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. They have no psychological depth and seem to revel in killing, torture and other nastiness. But simply being evil is not enough to qualify for my own personal Murderer's Row of cinematic goons and goonettes, any more than being able to hit a ball with a stick makes you a Major League ballplayer. To truly wear the Black Hat, you've gotta be bad, and being bad is more than acting that way. You've gotta have that extra something: bad charisma, rabid animal magnetism, kommandant presence, call it what you like.
So, for the record, here are my top 20 Cinematic Villains of All-Time. Actually I chose 21, so call this "The Blackjack of Evil." Here goes....
Evelyn Draper (Play Misty For Me). Long before "Fatal Attraction" gave us rabbit-boiling as a stalker hobby, aficionados of cheating on their wives, fiances and girlfriends had their illicit erections shrunk by the sight of knife-wielding psycho Evelyn (Jessica Walter). In this strangely forgotten horror/thriller, Clint Eastwood is a disc jockey who picks up a sultry stranger at a bar for a one-night stand. Unfortunately for him, one night of pleasure turns into a whole lotta nights of terror. Seems Evelyn is not quite ready to let him go, and she expresses her unwillingness in this direction by stalking the ever-loving shit out of Eastwood's character and his (legitimate) girlfriend. Seeing the cinematic tough guy of all tough guys driven to the point of hysteria by the hit-and-run tactics of the demented Evelyn is enough to scare anybody, but the relentless and increasingly terrifying methods she uses to express her displeasure make this movie, and this bad girl, very hard to forget. There is a scene where she cuts the eyes out of one of his paintings which is horrifying to watch. Trust me, you will never be able to have casual sex with an obsessive psychopath again.
Sergeant Waters (A Soldier's Story). Sgt. Waters is one of the most psychologically complex bad guys I have ever encountered in cinema. A career black soldier in a still-segregated U.S. Army, Waters is tough as nails, a First World War hero who pushes his men hard and punishes mistakes without mercy. Sounds like the typical movie NCO, right? Wrong. See, Waters has a serious hate on against a particular type of stereotypical Southern black man he refers to as a "Geechee." Geechees, in his mind, drag the black race down by making it impossible for white people to respect them.
So, as a half-hobby, half-crusade, Waters (Adolph Caesar) selects the Geechiest black men in his units and pushes them toward destruction -- prison, suicide, he doesn't care, so long as the Geechie is destroyed. Waters is a nasty piece of work, scientifically vicious, yet his grievance is so totally sincere, and the racism he himself is subjected to is so intense, that you pity him even as you despise him. Waters is never so terrifying as when he recounts how a soldier in his segregated outfit allowed himself to be publicly humiliated in France in WW1 for money by wearing a tail and eating bananas to amuse a white audience. "And would you believe," Waters mutters over his drink. "That when we slit his throat, the fool actually had the nerve to ask us what he had done wrong?"
Frank Nitti (The Untouchables). Billy Drago is one of those actors whose face tells the whole story before he utters a single word. Blessed by genetics with the mug of a total villain, Drago plays Al Capone's vicious right-hand man to a T of evil. Within moments of the movie's opening, he has already murdered a little girl by blowing her to bits with a bomb, along with everyone else in a homey little candy store, and it's all downhill from there. Later he brutally murders not one but two of the audience's favorite good-guy characters, and then has the audacity to taunt the do-gooding Eliot Ness about it with these words: "You're friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Think about that when I beat the rap!" Shit, any man who machine-guns Sean Connery has to be truly awful.
Rick Masters (To Live and Die in L.A.). You can always judge a bad guy in this manner: on a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you want to see him die? With one or two exceptions I can't think of a villain I hated more than the sadistic counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in the L.A.-noir film “To Live and Die in L.A.” Masters is not only bloodthirsty and extremely cruel, clearly relishing the terror and agony of his many victims, he's also insufferably smug. There were times I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the ugly fucker myself. Dafoe would go on to achieve fame as the almost saintly Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” but I've never forgotten the way the mere sight of him on the screen made me want to simultaneously kill the sonofabitch and cover up my testicles less he shoot them off me. And yes, he really does shoot someone in the balls in this movie.
The Kurgan (Highlander). With his hulking stature, huge cold eyes, and marbled facial features, not to mention his savage voice, Clancy Brown makes one scary-ass bad guy in any movie. In “Highlander” he plays the immortal warrior Kurgan, who was raised, we were told, by a nomadic people who threw their children into pits full of starving dogs to fight over meat. It shows. This is one mean motherfucker. Enormously tall, dressed in a punk outfit cut to look like a gladiator's armor, and sporting a row of safety pins in his neck and a sword the size of the Empire State Building, Kurgan positively delights in killing and mayhem, and not just with his sword: in one scene he drives around Manhattan running people down for the sheer fun of it, all the while mocking his victims and the terrified woman he's taken hostage. Referring to Sean Connery's character, who he beheads midway through the film, Kurgan boasts: “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was cold!” And he says this in a church. Nasty, nasty piece of work. (Connery is now 0 - 2 against my villains.)
Warden Norton (Shawshank Redemption). Villains are like ice cream; they come in every flavor. One of the worst kinds of baddie is the towering hypocrite, who preaches one thing and does quite the other, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hypocritical prick than Norton (Bob Gunton). The warden of Shawshank prison, he not only uses his inmates as slaves, allows his sadistic henchmen to torture them, and prevents an innocent man from being released, he does this for money...all while quoting the Bible. This would be bad enough, but Norton actually seems to be as pious as he pretends; you get the feeling his fussy manners, severe crew-cut and avoidance of profanity aren't an act...which makes him all the more appalling when he calmly watches atrocities go on all around him with a faint, sanctimonious smile. Picture a totally demonic Ned Flanders and you've got the Warden. Hell, any villain who refers to a scantily-clad woman as “Miss Fussy-britches” has to be pure evil.
Thulsa Doom (Conan the Barbarian). Many cinematic villains like to twirl their mustaches and revel in their own evil. The ancient sorcerer Thulsa Doom is of a very different class. He's the cult leader type, unflappable even in the face of imminent danger, always in control of his emotions and quite the debater. He's also absolutely pitiless. In the opening of “Conan,” he kills Conan's father by unleashing war dogs on him; chops the head off Conan's mother; slaughters every adult inhabitant of Conan's village; and sells Conan into slavery. All before the opening credits are even dry. Not a bad intro. Yet Doom is far from a wild, bloodthirsty maniac; on the contrary, he's so even-tempered, so calm, so reasonable in his arguments that it's hard not to like him a little, even when he's ordering people fed to giant snakes. His best bad-guy moment comes when, instead of screaming at Conan for seeking revenge, he gives him a fatherly lecture rife with disappointment. And then has him crucified. That's a bad-guy microphone drop if ever a Wiz there was.
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus). If I ever needed anyone to play the Devil, not as towering Leviathan of pure evil but a subtle, sympathetic Satan whose terrifying depths of villainy only slowly come to light over the course of a movie, I would pick F. Murray Abraham, who justly won an Oscar for his mesmerizing performance as a man so consumed by jealousy that he carries out a diabolical plan to murder the target of his obsession, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it is not mere jealousy that drives Salieri, a composer who at first actually admired the brash young genius; it is the belief that God has betrayed him by investing that genius in such a crude, vulgar, boorish figure as “Amadeus” turns out to be. Much of Salieri's grievance against Mozart, and even God, perhaps, is justified; what is not are the terrible lengths he goes to obtain revenge against both. This is a man who is fully conscious of the fact that what he is doing is totally evil, even by his own sense of right and wrong, and does it anyway. It's difficult to watch, and impossible not to.
Segeant Barnes (Platoon). Americans tend to think of their military men with haloes over their helmets, but Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a soldier whose close-cropped curls might just conceal horns. A scar-faced veteran of many tours in Vietnam, Barnes is tough as nails and a first-class leader; he's also a merciless killer who isn't too partial about what gets in front of his gun. Over the course of “Platoon,” Barnes doesn't just grease Viet Cong; he blasts an old woman between the eyes, threatens to massacre an entire village, and then kills one of his own men who has proffered criminal charges against him. In one memorable scene, he laments, “them politicians back in Washington, tryin' to fight this war with one hand tied to their balls." And then declares, "Ain't no time or need for a courtroom out here.” One of the most interesting comments about Barnes is actually rendered by his mortal enemy Elias: “Barnes believes in what he's doing.” And indeed he does. Which is what makes him so goddamned scary.
Darth Vader (Star Wars). A man who truly needs no introduction, everyone's favorite Sith Lord is no ordinary villain: enclosed black armor, black leather, and a black cape, speaking through a vocabulator that makes him sound every bit as wicked as he is, the artist formerly known as Anakin Skywalker set the bar for bad behavior in “Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” I've seen a positive crap-ton of movies, but I have never, before or since watched an audience hiss when the antagonist enters a room. Honest to God, the audience hissed. I thought that was the sort of thing people did in 19th century opera houses in Sicily when they didn't like the tenor, but I'm here to tell you it actually happened. Vader, the archetype of the “fallen angel” character, is a volcano of villainy. In his first on-screen appearance in 1977, he crushes the trachea of a rebel leader and then hurls his corpse into a wall so hard it rebounds like a ping-pong ball. This sets the tone for all sorts of future mayhem, but he's never more evil than in the sequel, when his violence is directed as much at his own troops as the enemy. Whether killing incompetent admirals, torturing his daughter or shortening his son by a hand, Vader is, as Ice Cube might observe, the wrong nigga to fuck wit.
Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). If Antonio Salieri represents the hidden side of Satan, earnest and sincere, then Gekko is his public face: handsome, charismatic, charming...and always looking to make a deal. Michael Douglas plays this utterly unscrupulous corporate raider with a relish bordering on glee, and it's impossible not to be seduced, even though you know the seduction won't end well. Indeed, while Gekko exults in making money, it's not really the money he's after, it's the sheer thrill of making it, and he's so addicted to that rush he doesn't give a fuck who he hurts or what the consequences are. When his protege asks him “How much is enough?” his answer, with all the bullshit scraped away, comes down to: greed doesn't lead to satiety. Greed leads to greed. The pleasure is therefore in wanting, not having. But of all his pleasures, none is sweeter to him than corrupting others into his way of thinking, and isn't that what the devil does best?
Hans Gruber (Die Hard). With his droll manners and tailor-made suits, the former East German radical turned “extraordinary thief” has a special place in the Great Hall of Villains. This gentleman poses as a terrorist to execute a bold and bloody robbery that he knows will lead to the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a pregnant woman. Does he give a fuck? Not even a little one. Though we get little of Gruber's backstory in the movie, it's pretty clear he's the sort of disillusioned ex-radical who makes the very worst kind of criminal: the type with zero beliefs at all. Gruber (Alan Rickman) not only doesn't give a shit about “collateral damage,” he doesn't give two about his own men. Just the money he came to steal. Yet somehow, despite all of this, he manages to convey a moralistic disdain for both his nemesis John McClane, and for American culture generally. He'll show us about greed and materialism!...by being greedier and more materialistic than any of us! I can't see this guy on screen without thinking: “You've been struck by a smooth criminal.” *
* The gangster in Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" was Billy Drago!
Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Before he was debased into a sort of cartoon character by a string of increasingly moronic sequels, this extra-crispy revenant from hell was one of the most terrifying baddies ever to keep you awake at night. Played by the normally cuddly Robert Englund, Fred Krueger was a vicious child-murderer sprung on a technicality but brought to savage justice by the parents of his victims, who burned him alive. Years later, however, Freddy returns as a malevolent spirit who invades the dreams of his killers' children, terrorizing them to the point of insanity before slashing them to bloody ribbons with his trademark razor-tipped glove. Vicious, cunning and sadistic, Freddy hit audiences where they felt safest – in their beds and in their dreams, turning them into terrifying nightmares where failure to wake up meant horrible death. I can honestly say this bastard robbed me of many a good night's rest when I was in my tweens, and I still find the slice-and-dice he performs on some of his victims, including Johnny Depp, unsettling today. Though he has limited screen time, Englund manages to fairly crackle with a mixture of dirty, snuff-film sadism and capering, evil glee. This is one villain who loves what he does and wants you to know it.
John Kreese (The Karate Kid). Few movies take less time to establish just what their bad guys are made of than “TKK.” When we first meet John Kreese, he is instructing a class full of impressionable young karate students. The following exchange occurs:
Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Prepare! What do we study here?
Cobra Kai: The way of the fist, sir!
Kreese: And what is that way?
Cobra Kai: Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir!
Kreese: We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition. A man confronts you, he is the enemy, and an enemy deserves no mercy!
Kreese, the founder of Cobra Kai Karate, is the perfect Black Hat. He's a bully, he's a bigot, he's an egotist, and his attitude rests entirely in his fists. But his bigotry is really his best quality, because it's so marvelously hypocritical. He refers to Mr. Miyagi as a “slant” and a “slope,” which is really breathtaking when you consider that he's mocking mock of the same race of people that invented the martial art he's devoted his life to and from which he makes his entire living. Bad as he is, he's never badder than when he infamously instructs his star pupil, Johnny, to “sweep the leg” when fighting the heroic Daniel. The look of betrayal on actor Billy Zabka's face when he realizes just what sort of man he's chosen to be his idol, mentor, and father-figure is as evocative as it is haunting. This is child abuse at its psychological worst.
Tommy D. (Goodfellas). Aside from Rick Masters, I can't think of anyone I wanted to see die more than Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese's unbeatable gangster epic. Tommy, a Mafia associate angling hard to get his button, is one of the worst human beings ever to cross the silver screen. He's pathologically violent, casually sadistic, and so unstable that you have no idea what the hell is going to set him off from one moment to the next. Whether he's attacking a waiter for daring to ask him to pay his bill, casually murdering a bartender for talking back to him, or slaughtering a made man for failing to show him respect he isn't due and hasn't earned, Tommy is a parole board's worst nightmare. He has no conscience, no remorse, no pity, and neither the ability nor willingness to restrain his impulses toward violence. Imagine a wagon full of old dynamite, sweating big beads of Nitro as it jounces along a badly rutted country road; that's Tommy. Every time he makes an appearance you know someone is going to die horribly. Maybe even Tommy himself. But hey, he isn't all bad. After killing the hapless Billy Batts, he apologizes to Henry with the immortal words: “I didn't mean to get blood on your floor.”
Amon Goethe (Schindler's List). Like Tommy D., Goethe (Ralph Finnes) was, unfortunately, a real-life human being. A low-ranking officer in the Death's Head branch of the SS, he ran a small forced-labor camp in Poland during WW2, but Goethe's introduction to the audience is chillingly deceptive. He comes off as self-involved, cynical, and a bit profane; the sort of corrupt sensualist that the film's hero, Oskar Schindler, can easily relate to and work with. But Goethe is no love-able scoundrel, no rouge with a heart of gold. Actually he has no heart at all. What he does possess is a decided taste for murder – the more casual and capricious, the better. Throughout the movie Goethe kills for cause, for whim, and for no goddamned reason at all; his morning “exercise” is to shoot lollygagging camp prisoners from his balcony with a hunting rifle. He's such a crook and thief that even the SS doesn't really like or trust him. But it's with his psychological torture of his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, on whom he has a sort of perverse crush, that achieves his apotheosis. “I realize,” he tells her one night. “That you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” No line he utters could sum up the character of this gentleman better. It's said that Ralph Finnes was so convincing in the role of this homicidal psychopath that one of the Holocaust survivors visiting the film set actually wet herself when she laid eyes on him. It's easy to understand why. He's the Angel of Death with a drinking problem.
King Edward I a.k.a. Edward the Longshanks (Braveheart). The Scots are a notoriously difficult people to subdue. This has been known from the time of the Roman emperors, who subjugated what is now England and Wales but decided it was in their best interests to simply build a wall up north to keep the goddamn Scottish savages out of the rest of the country. As late as WW2, it was observed that, when taken captive by the Germans, “the Scots resorted to the sort of behavior that made Hadrian build his wall.” Well, in “Braveheart,” Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) is determined to ensure his dominance over the troublesome country to the north, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Before we even see his character on screen, he's already shown his mettle by inviting Scottish leaders to a parlay under flag of truce – and then having the lot of them hanged. In the course of the movie, he murders his son's lover by throwing him out a window, initiates a program to breed the Scots out of their own by letting his nobles rape Scottish women, and once again violates a flag of truce by inviting William Wallace to a meeting and there trying to assassinate him. As if all that is not enough, he's cheap, too. When asked in battle if his archers should lay down a barrage before he sends in his Irish conscript soldiers, the King replies, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”
Khan Noonian Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). In 1968, Ricardo Montalban was cast on the low-rated cult TV series “Star Trek” to play a genetically enhanced war criminal who had escaped Earth in a cryogenic spaceship and drifted in suspended animation, with the survivors of his army, among the stars for centuries before being rescued by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Montalban later remarked that he enjoyed the role but, as a busy character actor, quickly forgot it. He was probably surprised when he was asked to reprise that role fifteen years later for the second feature-length “Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.” If so, the surprise didn't hurt his performance. In the television episode, Khan repays James T. Kirk's hospitality by hijacking his ship, but is defeated and exiled on a remote planet with his followers. In the movie, Khan escapes and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Kirk, who he blames for the death of his wife. Bristling with charisma, masculinity and an ego as big as the universe he wants to conquer, Khan thrives on his own hatred; it's nitrous oxide for the engine of his vengeance, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way. Khan enslaves Federation officers using parasitic slugs, slaughters hapless Starfleet cadets, and tortures and then kills scientists who try to hamper his plans. At one point, taunting Kirk, he says, “I've done worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me – as you left my wife. Marooned for all eternity at the center of a dead planet. Buried alive.” Kirk's epic response: “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” is one of the most memorable one-line comebacks in cinematic history, and the sort of thing that can only occur when a great hero has a great villain to fight with. I'm convinced that if TWOK had been a drama and not sci-fi, Montalban would have won an Oscar like Douglas, Caesar and Abraham did.*
* Berenger and Finnes were nominated for Oscars for the afformentioned roles but stupidly did not win.
Lord Humungus & Wes (The Road Warrior). Okay, this is cheating, but sometimes a “bad” is actually a tag-team affair. In “The Road Warrior” our redoubtable lone-wolf antihero, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, is vexed by an army of nomadic bandits led by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nillssen). Humungus is a hulking wall of muscle who wears a steel hockey mask, a loincloth, and issues decidedly not-hollow threats and demands in a savage yet highly educated growl from the loudspeaker on his souped-up dune buggy. His men kill pretty much everything they can, including dogs, and like a spot of rape first if they can manage it. Like many evildoers, the Lord of the Wastelands blames his victims for their suffering: “Once again,” he lectures the defenders of a desert fort who he has been besieging for months. “You've made me unleash my dogs of war.” The biggest of these “dogs” is Wez (Vernon Wells), a goggle-eyed psychopath whose stare could make a face bleed, and who has almost no dialogue except things like “Kill! Kill! Killlllllll!” Wez, unlike most baddies, doesn't need a signature weapon to do his killllllllling; he can put you in your grave with a head-butt. Nor does shooting him work; he'll just pluck the arrow from his body and give it a masochistic lick. In an interesting departure from convention, Wez is gay, and the death of his lover drives him, if this is possible, even more crazy than he is at the beginning of the movie. It also affords a rather amusing scene where a gust of wind shows us that Wez does not care for loincloths.
Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th). Most people think of “Friday” films as the bloody playground of one Jason Voorhees, he of the hockey mask, machete and bad attitude generally. But in the iconic first film the villain is not Jason, but her batshit-crazy mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, an accomplished stage actress who took her role in the movie so she could buy a new car. Palmer's motives may have been mercenary, but her performance as the knife-wielding mommy of Crystal Lake's least popular citizen is unforgettable. Like many crazy cinematic killers, Mrs. Voorhees has a legitimate grudge; her only son, the deformed Jason, drowned when camp counselors decided to leave him alone so they could make love. That mistake causes a lot of people to pay a grisly price, not leastwhich is Pamela herself. The slow reveal of her insanity at the movie's climax, cultimating in a scene where she begins speaking in Jason's voice (“Get her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away!”) is so disturbing that it frightens me even now as I write this, at 3:11 pm on a sunny California day.
In compiling this list I'm sure I've forgotten a few who would qualify, and excluded others who, for one reason or another, I don't consider real villains but merely antagonists. These are simply Black Hats who made a deep impression on your humble correspondent. If there are any I missed who made an impression on you, please let me know.
Now, by definition, every movie must have its antagonists -- those characters whose purpose is to thwart the desires and goals of the heroes or heroines. In some movies these antagonists are not evil or even bad, they are simply obstacles which must be got around -- or through -- for the good guy to get what he or she wants. A good example of this would be "drill instructor" or "tough coach" films where the D.I. is the antagonist but not a villain. These folks are disqualified from my list, so you won't be seeing Louis Gossett, Jr. here even though he did kick Richard Gere's balls into next week win a fight in "An Officer and a Gentleman."
In other films, of course, the baddies are pureblood evil itself, with absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. They have no psychological depth and seem to revel in killing, torture and other nastiness. But simply being evil is not enough to qualify for my own personal Murderer's Row of cinematic goons and goonettes, any more than being able to hit a ball with a stick makes you a Major League ballplayer. To truly wear the Black Hat, you've gotta be bad, and being bad is more than acting that way. You've gotta have that extra something: bad charisma, rabid animal magnetism, kommandant presence, call it what you like.
So, for the record, here are my top 20 Cinematic Villains of All-Time. Actually I chose 21, so call this "The Blackjack of Evil." Here goes....
Evelyn Draper (Play Misty For Me). Long before "Fatal Attraction" gave us rabbit-boiling as a stalker hobby, aficionados of cheating on their wives, fiances and girlfriends had their illicit erections shrunk by the sight of knife-wielding psycho Evelyn (Jessica Walter). In this strangely forgotten horror/thriller, Clint Eastwood is a disc jockey who picks up a sultry stranger at a bar for a one-night stand. Unfortunately for him, one night of pleasure turns into a whole lotta nights of terror. Seems Evelyn is not quite ready to let him go, and she expresses her unwillingness in this direction by stalking the ever-loving shit out of Eastwood's character and his (legitimate) girlfriend. Seeing the cinematic tough guy of all tough guys driven to the point of hysteria by the hit-and-run tactics of the demented Evelyn is enough to scare anybody, but the relentless and increasingly terrifying methods she uses to express her displeasure make this movie, and this bad girl, very hard to forget. There is a scene where she cuts the eyes out of one of his paintings which is horrifying to watch. Trust me, you will never be able to have casual sex with an obsessive psychopath again.
Sergeant Waters (A Soldier's Story). Sgt. Waters is one of the most psychologically complex bad guys I have ever encountered in cinema. A career black soldier in a still-segregated U.S. Army, Waters is tough as nails, a First World War hero who pushes his men hard and punishes mistakes without mercy. Sounds like the typical movie NCO, right? Wrong. See, Waters has a serious hate on against a particular type of stereotypical Southern black man he refers to as a "Geechee." Geechees, in his mind, drag the black race down by making it impossible for white people to respect them.
So, as a half-hobby, half-crusade, Waters (Adolph Caesar) selects the Geechiest black men in his units and pushes them toward destruction -- prison, suicide, he doesn't care, so long as the Geechie is destroyed. Waters is a nasty piece of work, scientifically vicious, yet his grievance is so totally sincere, and the racism he himself is subjected to is so intense, that you pity him even as you despise him. Waters is never so terrifying as when he recounts how a soldier in his segregated outfit allowed himself to be publicly humiliated in France in WW1 for money by wearing a tail and eating bananas to amuse a white audience. "And would you believe," Waters mutters over his drink. "That when we slit his throat, the fool actually had the nerve to ask us what he had done wrong?"
Frank Nitti (The Untouchables). Billy Drago is one of those actors whose face tells the whole story before he utters a single word. Blessed by genetics with the mug of a total villain, Drago plays Al Capone's vicious right-hand man to a T of evil. Within moments of the movie's opening, he has already murdered a little girl by blowing her to bits with a bomb, along with everyone else in a homey little candy store, and it's all downhill from there. Later he brutally murders not one but two of the audience's favorite good-guy characters, and then has the audacity to taunt the do-gooding Eliot Ness about it with these words: "You're friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Think about that when I beat the rap!" Shit, any man who machine-guns Sean Connery has to be truly awful.
Rick Masters (To Live and Die in L.A.). You can always judge a bad guy in this manner: on a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you want to see him die? With one or two exceptions I can't think of a villain I hated more than the sadistic counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in the L.A.-noir film “To Live and Die in L.A.” Masters is not only bloodthirsty and extremely cruel, clearly relishing the terror and agony of his many victims, he's also insufferably smug. There were times I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the ugly fucker myself. Dafoe would go on to achieve fame as the almost saintly Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” but I've never forgotten the way the mere sight of him on the screen made me want to simultaneously kill the sonofabitch and cover up my testicles less he shoot them off me. And yes, he really does shoot someone in the balls in this movie.
The Kurgan (Highlander). With his hulking stature, huge cold eyes, and marbled facial features, not to mention his savage voice, Clancy Brown makes one scary-ass bad guy in any movie. In “Highlander” he plays the immortal warrior Kurgan, who was raised, we were told, by a nomadic people who threw their children into pits full of starving dogs to fight over meat. It shows. This is one mean motherfucker. Enormously tall, dressed in a punk outfit cut to look like a gladiator's armor, and sporting a row of safety pins in his neck and a sword the size of the Empire State Building, Kurgan positively delights in killing and mayhem, and not just with his sword: in one scene he drives around Manhattan running people down for the sheer fun of it, all the while mocking his victims and the terrified woman he's taken hostage. Referring to Sean Connery's character, who he beheads midway through the film, Kurgan boasts: “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was cold!” And he says this in a church. Nasty, nasty piece of work. (Connery is now 0 - 2 against my villains.)
Warden Norton (Shawshank Redemption). Villains are like ice cream; they come in every flavor. One of the worst kinds of baddie is the towering hypocrite, who preaches one thing and does quite the other, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hypocritical prick than Norton (Bob Gunton). The warden of Shawshank prison, he not only uses his inmates as slaves, allows his sadistic henchmen to torture them, and prevents an innocent man from being released, he does this for money...all while quoting the Bible. This would be bad enough, but Norton actually seems to be as pious as he pretends; you get the feeling his fussy manners, severe crew-cut and avoidance of profanity aren't an act...which makes him all the more appalling when he calmly watches atrocities go on all around him with a faint, sanctimonious smile. Picture a totally demonic Ned Flanders and you've got the Warden. Hell, any villain who refers to a scantily-clad woman as “Miss Fussy-britches” has to be pure evil.
Thulsa Doom (Conan the Barbarian). Many cinematic villains like to twirl their mustaches and revel in their own evil. The ancient sorcerer Thulsa Doom is of a very different class. He's the cult leader type, unflappable even in the face of imminent danger, always in control of his emotions and quite the debater. He's also absolutely pitiless. In the opening of “Conan,” he kills Conan's father by unleashing war dogs on him; chops the head off Conan's mother; slaughters every adult inhabitant of Conan's village; and sells Conan into slavery. All before the opening credits are even dry. Not a bad intro. Yet Doom is far from a wild, bloodthirsty maniac; on the contrary, he's so even-tempered, so calm, so reasonable in his arguments that it's hard not to like him a little, even when he's ordering people fed to giant snakes. His best bad-guy moment comes when, instead of screaming at Conan for seeking revenge, he gives him a fatherly lecture rife with disappointment. And then has him crucified. That's a bad-guy microphone drop if ever a Wiz there was.
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus). If I ever needed anyone to play the Devil, not as towering Leviathan of pure evil but a subtle, sympathetic Satan whose terrifying depths of villainy only slowly come to light over the course of a movie, I would pick F. Murray Abraham, who justly won an Oscar for his mesmerizing performance as a man so consumed by jealousy that he carries out a diabolical plan to murder the target of his obsession, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it is not mere jealousy that drives Salieri, a composer who at first actually admired the brash young genius; it is the belief that God has betrayed him by investing that genius in such a crude, vulgar, boorish figure as “Amadeus” turns out to be. Much of Salieri's grievance against Mozart, and even God, perhaps, is justified; what is not are the terrible lengths he goes to obtain revenge against both. This is a man who is fully conscious of the fact that what he is doing is totally evil, even by his own sense of right and wrong, and does it anyway. It's difficult to watch, and impossible not to.
Segeant Barnes (Platoon). Americans tend to think of their military men with haloes over their helmets, but Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a soldier whose close-cropped curls might just conceal horns. A scar-faced veteran of many tours in Vietnam, Barnes is tough as nails and a first-class leader; he's also a merciless killer who isn't too partial about what gets in front of his gun. Over the course of “Platoon,” Barnes doesn't just grease Viet Cong; he blasts an old woman between the eyes, threatens to massacre an entire village, and then kills one of his own men who has proffered criminal charges against him. In one memorable scene, he laments, “them politicians back in Washington, tryin' to fight this war with one hand tied to their balls." And then declares, "Ain't no time or need for a courtroom out here.” One of the most interesting comments about Barnes is actually rendered by his mortal enemy Elias: “Barnes believes in what he's doing.” And indeed he does. Which is what makes him so goddamned scary.
Darth Vader (Star Wars). A man who truly needs no introduction, everyone's favorite Sith Lord is no ordinary villain: enclosed black armor, black leather, and a black cape, speaking through a vocabulator that makes him sound every bit as wicked as he is, the artist formerly known as Anakin Skywalker set the bar for bad behavior in “Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” I've seen a positive crap-ton of movies, but I have never, before or since watched an audience hiss when the antagonist enters a room. Honest to God, the audience hissed. I thought that was the sort of thing people did in 19th century opera houses in Sicily when they didn't like the tenor, but I'm here to tell you it actually happened. Vader, the archetype of the “fallen angel” character, is a volcano of villainy. In his first on-screen appearance in 1977, he crushes the trachea of a rebel leader and then hurls his corpse into a wall so hard it rebounds like a ping-pong ball. This sets the tone for all sorts of future mayhem, but he's never more evil than in the sequel, when his violence is directed as much at his own troops as the enemy. Whether killing incompetent admirals, torturing his daughter or shortening his son by a hand, Vader is, as Ice Cube might observe, the wrong nigga to fuck wit.
Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). If Antonio Salieri represents the hidden side of Satan, earnest and sincere, then Gekko is his public face: handsome, charismatic, charming...and always looking to make a deal. Michael Douglas plays this utterly unscrupulous corporate raider with a relish bordering on glee, and it's impossible not to be seduced, even though you know the seduction won't end well. Indeed, while Gekko exults in making money, it's not really the money he's after, it's the sheer thrill of making it, and he's so addicted to that rush he doesn't give a fuck who he hurts or what the consequences are. When his protege asks him “How much is enough?” his answer, with all the bullshit scraped away, comes down to: greed doesn't lead to satiety. Greed leads to greed. The pleasure is therefore in wanting, not having. But of all his pleasures, none is sweeter to him than corrupting others into his way of thinking, and isn't that what the devil does best?
Hans Gruber (Die Hard). With his droll manners and tailor-made suits, the former East German radical turned “extraordinary thief” has a special place in the Great Hall of Villains. This gentleman poses as a terrorist to execute a bold and bloody robbery that he knows will lead to the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a pregnant woman. Does he give a fuck? Not even a little one. Though we get little of Gruber's backstory in the movie, it's pretty clear he's the sort of disillusioned ex-radical who makes the very worst kind of criminal: the type with zero beliefs at all. Gruber (Alan Rickman) not only doesn't give a shit about “collateral damage,” he doesn't give two about his own men. Just the money he came to steal. Yet somehow, despite all of this, he manages to convey a moralistic disdain for both his nemesis John McClane, and for American culture generally. He'll show us about greed and materialism!...by being greedier and more materialistic than any of us! I can't see this guy on screen without thinking: “You've been struck by a smooth criminal.” *
* The gangster in Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" was Billy Drago!
Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Before he was debased into a sort of cartoon character by a string of increasingly moronic sequels, this extra-crispy revenant from hell was one of the most terrifying baddies ever to keep you awake at night. Played by the normally cuddly Robert Englund, Fred Krueger was a vicious child-murderer sprung on a technicality but brought to savage justice by the parents of his victims, who burned him alive. Years later, however, Freddy returns as a malevolent spirit who invades the dreams of his killers' children, terrorizing them to the point of insanity before slashing them to bloody ribbons with his trademark razor-tipped glove. Vicious, cunning and sadistic, Freddy hit audiences where they felt safest – in their beds and in their dreams, turning them into terrifying nightmares where failure to wake up meant horrible death. I can honestly say this bastard robbed me of many a good night's rest when I was in my tweens, and I still find the slice-and-dice he performs on some of his victims, including Johnny Depp, unsettling today. Though he has limited screen time, Englund manages to fairly crackle with a mixture of dirty, snuff-film sadism and capering, evil glee. This is one villain who loves what he does and wants you to know it.
John Kreese (The Karate Kid). Few movies take less time to establish just what their bad guys are made of than “TKK.” When we first meet John Kreese, he is instructing a class full of impressionable young karate students. The following exchange occurs:
Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Prepare! What do we study here?
Cobra Kai: The way of the fist, sir!
Kreese: And what is that way?
Cobra Kai: Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir!
Kreese: We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition. A man confronts you, he is the enemy, and an enemy deserves no mercy!
Kreese, the founder of Cobra Kai Karate, is the perfect Black Hat. He's a bully, he's a bigot, he's an egotist, and his attitude rests entirely in his fists. But his bigotry is really his best quality, because it's so marvelously hypocritical. He refers to Mr. Miyagi as a “slant” and a “slope,” which is really breathtaking when you consider that he's mocking mock of the same race of people that invented the martial art he's devoted his life to and from which he makes his entire living. Bad as he is, he's never badder than when he infamously instructs his star pupil, Johnny, to “sweep the leg” when fighting the heroic Daniel. The look of betrayal on actor Billy Zabka's face when he realizes just what sort of man he's chosen to be his idol, mentor, and father-figure is as evocative as it is haunting. This is child abuse at its psychological worst.
Tommy D. (Goodfellas). Aside from Rick Masters, I can't think of anyone I wanted to see die more than Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese's unbeatable gangster epic. Tommy, a Mafia associate angling hard to get his button, is one of the worst human beings ever to cross the silver screen. He's pathologically violent, casually sadistic, and so unstable that you have no idea what the hell is going to set him off from one moment to the next. Whether he's attacking a waiter for daring to ask him to pay his bill, casually murdering a bartender for talking back to him, or slaughtering a made man for failing to show him respect he isn't due and hasn't earned, Tommy is a parole board's worst nightmare. He has no conscience, no remorse, no pity, and neither the ability nor willingness to restrain his impulses toward violence. Imagine a wagon full of old dynamite, sweating big beads of Nitro as it jounces along a badly rutted country road; that's Tommy. Every time he makes an appearance you know someone is going to die horribly. Maybe even Tommy himself. But hey, he isn't all bad. After killing the hapless Billy Batts, he apologizes to Henry with the immortal words: “I didn't mean to get blood on your floor.”
Amon Goethe (Schindler's List). Like Tommy D., Goethe (Ralph Finnes) was, unfortunately, a real-life human being. A low-ranking officer in the Death's Head branch of the SS, he ran a small forced-labor camp in Poland during WW2, but Goethe's introduction to the audience is chillingly deceptive. He comes off as self-involved, cynical, and a bit profane; the sort of corrupt sensualist that the film's hero, Oskar Schindler, can easily relate to and work with. But Goethe is no love-able scoundrel, no rouge with a heart of gold. Actually he has no heart at all. What he does possess is a decided taste for murder – the more casual and capricious, the better. Throughout the movie Goethe kills for cause, for whim, and for no goddamned reason at all; his morning “exercise” is to shoot lollygagging camp prisoners from his balcony with a hunting rifle. He's such a crook and thief that even the SS doesn't really like or trust him. But it's with his psychological torture of his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, on whom he has a sort of perverse crush, that achieves his apotheosis. “I realize,” he tells her one night. “That you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” No line he utters could sum up the character of this gentleman better. It's said that Ralph Finnes was so convincing in the role of this homicidal psychopath that one of the Holocaust survivors visiting the film set actually wet herself when she laid eyes on him. It's easy to understand why. He's the Angel of Death with a drinking problem.
King Edward I a.k.a. Edward the Longshanks (Braveheart). The Scots are a notoriously difficult people to subdue. This has been known from the time of the Roman emperors, who subjugated what is now England and Wales but decided it was in their best interests to simply build a wall up north to keep the goddamn Scottish savages out of the rest of the country. As late as WW2, it was observed that, when taken captive by the Germans, “the Scots resorted to the sort of behavior that made Hadrian build his wall.” Well, in “Braveheart,” Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) is determined to ensure his dominance over the troublesome country to the north, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Before we even see his character on screen, he's already shown his mettle by inviting Scottish leaders to a parlay under flag of truce – and then having the lot of them hanged. In the course of the movie, he murders his son's lover by throwing him out a window, initiates a program to breed the Scots out of their own by letting his nobles rape Scottish women, and once again violates a flag of truce by inviting William Wallace to a meeting and there trying to assassinate him. As if all that is not enough, he's cheap, too. When asked in battle if his archers should lay down a barrage before he sends in his Irish conscript soldiers, the King replies, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”
Khan Noonian Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). In 1968, Ricardo Montalban was cast on the low-rated cult TV series “Star Trek” to play a genetically enhanced war criminal who had escaped Earth in a cryogenic spaceship and drifted in suspended animation, with the survivors of his army, among the stars for centuries before being rescued by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Montalban later remarked that he enjoyed the role but, as a busy character actor, quickly forgot it. He was probably surprised when he was asked to reprise that role fifteen years later for the second feature-length “Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.” If so, the surprise didn't hurt his performance. In the television episode, Khan repays James T. Kirk's hospitality by hijacking his ship, but is defeated and exiled on a remote planet with his followers. In the movie, Khan escapes and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Kirk, who he blames for the death of his wife. Bristling with charisma, masculinity and an ego as big as the universe he wants to conquer, Khan thrives on his own hatred; it's nitrous oxide for the engine of his vengeance, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way. Khan enslaves Federation officers using parasitic slugs, slaughters hapless Starfleet cadets, and tortures and then kills scientists who try to hamper his plans. At one point, taunting Kirk, he says, “I've done worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me – as you left my wife. Marooned for all eternity at the center of a dead planet. Buried alive.” Kirk's epic response: “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” is one of the most memorable one-line comebacks in cinematic history, and the sort of thing that can only occur when a great hero has a great villain to fight with. I'm convinced that if TWOK had been a drama and not sci-fi, Montalban would have won an Oscar like Douglas, Caesar and Abraham did.*
* Berenger and Finnes were nominated for Oscars for the afformentioned roles but stupidly did not win.
Lord Humungus & Wes (The Road Warrior). Okay, this is cheating, but sometimes a “bad” is actually a tag-team affair. In “The Road Warrior” our redoubtable lone-wolf antihero, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, is vexed by an army of nomadic bandits led by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nillssen). Humungus is a hulking wall of muscle who wears a steel hockey mask, a loincloth, and issues decidedly not-hollow threats and demands in a savage yet highly educated growl from the loudspeaker on his souped-up dune buggy. His men kill pretty much everything they can, including dogs, and like a spot of rape first if they can manage it. Like many evildoers, the Lord of the Wastelands blames his victims for their suffering: “Once again,” he lectures the defenders of a desert fort who he has been besieging for months. “You've made me unleash my dogs of war.” The biggest of these “dogs” is Wez (Vernon Wells), a goggle-eyed psychopath whose stare could make a face bleed, and who has almost no dialogue except things like “Kill! Kill! Killlllllll!” Wez, unlike most baddies, doesn't need a signature weapon to do his killllllllling; he can put you in your grave with a head-butt. Nor does shooting him work; he'll just pluck the arrow from his body and give it a masochistic lick. In an interesting departure from convention, Wez is gay, and the death of his lover drives him, if this is possible, even more crazy than he is at the beginning of the movie. It also affords a rather amusing scene where a gust of wind shows us that Wez does not care for loincloths.
Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th). Most people think of “Friday” films as the bloody playground of one Jason Voorhees, he of the hockey mask, machete and bad attitude generally. But in the iconic first film the villain is not Jason, but her batshit-crazy mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, an accomplished stage actress who took her role in the movie so she could buy a new car. Palmer's motives may have been mercenary, but her performance as the knife-wielding mommy of Crystal Lake's least popular citizen is unforgettable. Like many crazy cinematic killers, Mrs. Voorhees has a legitimate grudge; her only son, the deformed Jason, drowned when camp counselors decided to leave him alone so they could make love. That mistake causes a lot of people to pay a grisly price, not leastwhich is Pamela herself. The slow reveal of her insanity at the movie's climax, cultimating in a scene where she begins speaking in Jason's voice (“Get her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away!”) is so disturbing that it frightens me even now as I write this, at 3:11 pm on a sunny California day.
In compiling this list I'm sure I've forgotten a few who would qualify, and excluded others who, for one reason or another, I don't consider real villains but merely antagonists. These are simply Black Hats who made a deep impression on your humble correspondent. If there are any I missed who made an impression on you, please let me know.
May 24, 2018
Why Trump? Why now?
At breakfast a few weeks ago, while reading the Los Angeles Times, I encountered these words about Donald Trump, written by an op-ed writer named Stephen Almond:
I have spent many anguished hours pondering how it is that a man of such low character and dubious qualifications occupies the Oval Office. I've spent even longer trying to understand his presidency. I've pored over polls and research papers, absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None has solved the mystery.
The opening three sentences go a fair country distance toward explaining why Trump was in fact elected in the first place, and why there is a substantial chance he will be elected in again in 2020, should he somehow escape the various legal entanglements which now hamper him. “I've poured over polls and research papers,” Mr. Almond tells us, and “absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None of them has solved the mystery.”
Polls? Research papers? Think pieces? Are you kidding me? Why would analyses written by ivory-tower intellectuals, themselves invariably liberals to a man (or woman), yield any useful information about Donald Trump or the people who voted for him? Asking a university professor, a member of a political think tank, or a professional journalist to “solve the mystery” is about as effective as inviting a professional soldier to perform brain surgery, merely because he knows how to handle a knife. As I have stated before – in this very blog, no less – there is no group of people less qualified to explain the Trump phenomenon than the professional journalistic class and its various hangers-on: pundits, pollsters, academics. They do not “get it.” They will never “get it.” There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is their own political outlook, which prevents them from seeing this country as it actually is; but the reasons go beyond the blinders all political partisans wear. The fact is, this class of people are endeavoring to use a scientific process to examine human motivation, which resides deep within the human heart and is about as likely to yield its secrets to a microscope as a bank vault is to open because you mutter the words, “Open sesame.”
When Trump was elected, the dismay, horror and anguish of the left and a large chunk of the political center produced a collective wail so deafening that for weeks and even months after he took office, it was impossible to “hear” anything else in the press. The seven stages of grief began their grisly march through newscasts, op-ed pieces, blogs, newspaper articles, news magazines, even comedic monologues. Shock was followed by denial; pain by guilt (“Why did we sabotage Bernie's candidacy?”); anger by a species of bargaining (“Wait until 2018, when we get the Senate back!”); and most recently, depression. There is not a lot of evidence, however, that the last and most important of these stages are being approached, much less embraced. A year into Trump's presidency I still see few signs that the “upward turn” – reconstruction, “working through,” acceptance and hope – are on the horizon. The left is anger-locked, unable to get past its fury that a thrice-married, many-times bankrupt reality television star twice convicted of civil fraud by the United States government defeated “the most qualified candidate in history” and assumed the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, this is understandable. Being defeated by a moral and mental mediocrity is difficult to accept, as any intelligent, sensitive person who was ever bullied in junior high school by a sub-literate moron can tell you. Nevertheless, it happened, and unless the left and center-left grasp why it happened, it may very well happen again.
As I have noted before, and despite the almost hysterical insistence of the mainstream press and the left generally, America remains a “white” country when viewed in strictly demographic terms. By the last census, the total population is 318 million; if we exclude the fifteen million of those who are here illegally and cannot vote (despite what The Donald claims) we come to a figure of 303 million, of which 200 million identify, or are identified by the rules of the census, as “white.” Of course, “white” is largely a meaningless term (indeed, the absurdity of the concept of race is never more evident than when one tries to quantify it), since many classified that way are, in fact, nothing of the kind. Still, the census gives us a good, if very broad and crude, notion of the basic racial makeup of the country. Two hundred million “whites” out of a population of 300 million means two out of every three American citizens is “white.” This is a fact which sticks hard in the craw of many liberals and center-leftists, especially those who live in big, racially and ethnically diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Fransisco. The reality they see is the reality they more or less assume obtains for the rest of the nation; but as anyone who has ever driven through, say, Kansas, or southern Illinois, or rural Pennsylvania will tell you, it is not actual reality. Perspective is everything when forming a worldview, or for that matter, trying to solve the “mystery” which so puzzles Mr. Almond.
According to public records, about 128 million people voted in the 2016 election -- 63 million for Trump, 65 million for Clinton. But of the white people who voted, 58% cast their ballots for Trump, and no less than 63% of all white men. While Trump's deepest support lay in whites in the age demographic 45 – 65, he also received the majority of white female vote as well: 53%. This fact seems rather astonishing when one considers that Trump was running against a well-known female candidate with extensive educational and public service credentials, but it remains a fact: more than half of white people who voted, voted for Trump. More than half of white women who voted, voted for Trump. It is these figures which baffle, dismay and outrage so many pundits, journalists and “political experts.” In their minds, America is a steadily liberalizing country, fast doing away with religious belief and embracing the concepts of democratic socialism, cultural diversity, and internationalism. When they are smacked upside the head by evidence to the contrary, they are gobsmacked, flabbergasted – choose your archaic term for bone-deep and unwelcome surprise. As I said, they don't get it. The question “why?” is at least as important as the question of why so many white people voted for Donald Trump – and would probably do so again, given the chance. Almond's “mystery” is in fact two mysteries. I aim to solve both.
I have noted previously that 2016 may be the year most remembered as that in which journalists discovered there is actually a white working class. On the face of it, the fact that the media did not grasp the existence of a population which may number as many as 76 million men and women – just under one in four Americans – seems absurd, but the evidence is too plain to ignore. These polished, well-educated, seemingly intelligent people, whose entire job is to keep a finger on the pulse of this nation and to understand the working of its innermost mind and heart, were as ignorant of this horde of blue-collared white folks as Columbus was of the New World when he blundered into it. It took Trump's election to open their eyes, but even when awakened, their political leanings forced them into an Orwellian state where they were unwilling to draw any conclusions from their discovery. Thus, the tiresome, almost nauseating insistence that Trump's election was solely the product of white racism.
Of course, some Trump supporters are racists, and others on the borderline of racism. The evidence of this, too, is impossible to ignore. (Trump himself make frank and open appeals to xenophobia during his campaign, and continues to do so.) But the fact remains that of all the people I know personally who voted for Trump, I would characterize none as genuine bigots. At worst, some have slight prejudices, but if pressed, if put in a situation where they had to abandon those prejudices or double down on them, I truly believe every one would choose the former rather than the latter course. To a man (and woman), they voted for Trump because they quite simply reject the vision of America which the left has been peddling for decades. Yes, they resent the “cultural diversity seminars” forced upon them at work, the unpaid “racial sensitivity trainings,” the mandatory “gender identity education courses” for their children; yes, they are frustrated that it is easier to obtain, at many major universities, a copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto than it is one of the United States Constitution; yes, they weary of watching liberals gnash their teeth over the issues of transgender bathrooms and the fact that illegal immigrants might not be able to obtain driver's licenses and health care when millions of actual American citizens have neither; yes, they worry that liberals turn a blind eye toward outrages perpetrated by radical Islam while seemingly condemning Christianity and promoting atheism at every opportunity; but the most common motive for a Trump vote is not purely political or religious-racial-ethnic but economic in nature. When I listen to interviews with the more articulate and intelligent of his supporters throughout the country, what strikes me again and again is the narrowness of their concerns. We live in an age of one-issue voters, and the one-issue which seemed to drive so many working-class whites to pull the lever for Donald Trump is simply the fear of being left behind.
If you are old enough to really recall the 1990s, you will probably remember them as an era of unrivaled economic prosperity and generalized optimism. The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the Cold War had ended in bloodless triumph, democracy was on the march all across the world, and so determined was Bill Clinton to smash racism in America that he was only half-jokingly referred to as "the first black president." It was scarcely noticed by many of the big media outlets, or even by the middle class itself, that the decline of skilled and highly-paid unskilled labor jobs in the U.S. continued to decline, that coal miners, factory workers, farmers and other salt-of-the-earth Americans were not being swept along by the rush of free-trade "prosperity" embodied by the NAFTA agreements, but rather watching in kind of baffled fury as their own incomes and prospects shrank and kept shrinking. This erosion predated the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, but it certainly continued and perhaps even accelerated during their administrations. The white working class certainly felt abandoned by Obama, who neither understood nor seemed to sympathize with them – the condescending remark he made about “guns and Bibles” was as offensive to many in this country as a flippant joke about “fried chicken and watermelons” would have been to black people had it been uttered by a white president. Indeed, the very nature of Obama's presidency was bound up with the idea that those who had traditionally been excluded from the American Dream – minorities in general – were finally seeing their moment arrive. This moment was undeniably overdue, but it offered little comfort to the West Virginia coal miner now two years unemployed, the small businessman in Kansas choked out of business by red tape, the Pennsylvanian master welder who saw his job at the Caterpillar plant exported to Korea and was told to go get a job at Wal-Mart instead. More importantly, when he vented his grievance, he was generally told by the media and intelligentsia to shut up. The complaints of white men were of zero interest to the left and center-left; their very existence was only tolerated if they toed the left-wing line. The miner was told he was environmentally destructive; the farmer that he lived on “stolen” Indian land (as if his critic did not!); the factory worker was dismissed with the sentiment that “we don't want to hear white men complain about anything." The evident motive of these dismissals was rooted in a feeling that the time had come to right old wrongs; the problem was that it ignored the fact that two wrongs do not constitute a right. If it was wrong to subject black people to Jim Crow and systematized, institutionalized racism, if it was wrong to harass and punish gays merely for being gay, if it was wrong to oppress and devalue women – and it was – then it was equally wrong to negate the apprehensions of the supposedly privileged white male, to dismiss them with contempt, to tell him, in effect, that his time had passed and he ought to go quietly into that good night. And it was not merely morally wrong, but stupid. It would have been far more sensible for the left to try to win over the working class white man than to call him a ignorant, uneducated bigot whose feelings did not matter. In choosing the latter course the American left not only alienated millions of potential voters, it ignored its own history, to wit: in the 19th century, the left found its strongest support among the working class, which was being ruthlessly exploited by its capitalist masters, regardless of race or ethnicity. As late as the mid-20th century, the white union worker walked, to some extent, hand-in-hand with the left-wing intelligentsia; with socialists and borderline socialists; with Jews, blacks Latinos and other minorities; and with the broad masses of the Democratic Party. But times had changed, and the leaders of liberalism and progressivism had moved up in economic status, concentrating on the coasts and the big cities and universities, and gradually severing their ties with the workers whom they once idealized, recruited and to some extent, led. A different political landscape emerged, one in which the blue collars which had once been die-hard Democrats began to vote increasingly Republican, and to become more vulnerable to the kind of demagogic, blame-them tactics employed by Trump and people of his ilk. Politics abhors a vacuum; if the needs of a group of people are not fulfilled, or at least addressed, by one party, then they will be adopted by the other. When the left disowned the white working class, they set in motion a chain of events that handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.
Trump's election campaign contained very little of substance. Unlike, for example, Bernie Sanders, who was more than willing to get into the nuts and bolts of many of his proposals – perhaps even to his detriment – Trump mainly spoke in generalities and was deliberately vague about how he would execute such ideas as he had. However, on certain points he was quite specific, and the most important of these, more important than his infamous border wall or proposed Muslim ban, was the idea that he cared for, and would protect and serve, the American worker. Trump was a businessman and presumably understood business better than any professional politician. He would “get tough” with our trade partners, throw out harmful or useless trade agreements, punish U.S. corporations who shipped jobs overseas, and slash business and banking regulation to the bone. Anything that inhibited the economy would be thrown out; anything that added jobs, be it drilling in national parks or allowing every manner of filth to be poured into the atmosphere, soil and water, would be permitted. In a very real sense his agenda was Reaganomics on steroids, an idea that government governs best not when it governs least, but when it governs not at all.
Liberals were aghast at this, and many centrists as well, but again, they failed to understand the appeal this sort of talk has to a proud third-generation coal miner who has been out of work for two years and cannot reconcile himself to pumping gas, flipping burgers or stocking shelves for $6.75 an hour. It is often, and rightly, said that when a man's belly is empty, his only concern is with filling it; it is only when he is full that moral, philosophical and spiritual issues begin to concern him. Concern for the environment, for a justice system that serves everyone, for an America where it is not necessary to remind people that Black Lives Matter – all of this is virtuous. But none of it is likely to be of great concern to the man in question when he cannot pay his mortgage, cannot afford health care, and cannot see any prospect of doing so in the future. Hell is not necessarily a place; it is simply the absence of hope. And if nothing else, The Donald offered hope to people who had none.
It so happens that I listen to a lot of progressive radio, and in recent months I've been amazed by the insistence that “we (meaning the left) don't need the white working class at election time.” This has been repeated so often that I suspect many progressives actually believe it. They think they can get back in office by putting up candidates whose appeal is rooted almost exclusively among blacks, Latinos, gays, and white liberals. To me this represents a simple doubling-down of mistakes already made. But again, the question is one of ideology versus reality. All ideologues, of any party, dismiss reality at the exact moment it comes into conflict with their political beliefs. The left doesn't “get” the election of Trump because they have chosen not to respect, or even to admit the existence, of a huge, seething mass of people who do not approve of their agenda, and have the power to vote against it; and rather than trying to win these people over – and many could be won over – they have continued to insult and negate them. Flipping the coin, Trump was elected because he grasped, if only by accident, that this mass did in fact exist, and that, if properly galvanized, it might vote for him. Whether it will vote for him again in 2020 (assuming he is able and willing to run) I don't know. But I do know that unless the left can find a way to approach the blue-collar white worker more sensibly and respectfully, it may, at that time, once again find itself on the outside, looking in.
I have spent many anguished hours pondering how it is that a man of such low character and dubious qualifications occupies the Oval Office. I've spent even longer trying to understand his presidency. I've pored over polls and research papers, absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None has solved the mystery.
The opening three sentences go a fair country distance toward explaining why Trump was in fact elected in the first place, and why there is a substantial chance he will be elected in again in 2020, should he somehow escape the various legal entanglements which now hamper him. “I've poured over polls and research papers,” Mr. Almond tells us, and “absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None of them has solved the mystery.”
Polls? Research papers? Think pieces? Are you kidding me? Why would analyses written by ivory-tower intellectuals, themselves invariably liberals to a man (or woman), yield any useful information about Donald Trump or the people who voted for him? Asking a university professor, a member of a political think tank, or a professional journalist to “solve the mystery” is about as effective as inviting a professional soldier to perform brain surgery, merely because he knows how to handle a knife. As I have stated before – in this very blog, no less – there is no group of people less qualified to explain the Trump phenomenon than the professional journalistic class and its various hangers-on: pundits, pollsters, academics. They do not “get it.” They will never “get it.” There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is their own political outlook, which prevents them from seeing this country as it actually is; but the reasons go beyond the blinders all political partisans wear. The fact is, this class of people are endeavoring to use a scientific process to examine human motivation, which resides deep within the human heart and is about as likely to yield its secrets to a microscope as a bank vault is to open because you mutter the words, “Open sesame.”
When Trump was elected, the dismay, horror and anguish of the left and a large chunk of the political center produced a collective wail so deafening that for weeks and even months after he took office, it was impossible to “hear” anything else in the press. The seven stages of grief began their grisly march through newscasts, op-ed pieces, blogs, newspaper articles, news magazines, even comedic monologues. Shock was followed by denial; pain by guilt (“Why did we sabotage Bernie's candidacy?”); anger by a species of bargaining (“Wait until 2018, when we get the Senate back!”); and most recently, depression. There is not a lot of evidence, however, that the last and most important of these stages are being approached, much less embraced. A year into Trump's presidency I still see few signs that the “upward turn” – reconstruction, “working through,” acceptance and hope – are on the horizon. The left is anger-locked, unable to get past its fury that a thrice-married, many-times bankrupt reality television star twice convicted of civil fraud by the United States government defeated “the most qualified candidate in history” and assumed the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, this is understandable. Being defeated by a moral and mental mediocrity is difficult to accept, as any intelligent, sensitive person who was ever bullied in junior high school by a sub-literate moron can tell you. Nevertheless, it happened, and unless the left and center-left grasp why it happened, it may very well happen again.
As I have noted before, and despite the almost hysterical insistence of the mainstream press and the left generally, America remains a “white” country when viewed in strictly demographic terms. By the last census, the total population is 318 million; if we exclude the fifteen million of those who are here illegally and cannot vote (despite what The Donald claims) we come to a figure of 303 million, of which 200 million identify, or are identified by the rules of the census, as “white.” Of course, “white” is largely a meaningless term (indeed, the absurdity of the concept of race is never more evident than when one tries to quantify it), since many classified that way are, in fact, nothing of the kind. Still, the census gives us a good, if very broad and crude, notion of the basic racial makeup of the country. Two hundred million “whites” out of a population of 300 million means two out of every three American citizens is “white.” This is a fact which sticks hard in the craw of many liberals and center-leftists, especially those who live in big, racially and ethnically diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Fransisco. The reality they see is the reality they more or less assume obtains for the rest of the nation; but as anyone who has ever driven through, say, Kansas, or southern Illinois, or rural Pennsylvania will tell you, it is not actual reality. Perspective is everything when forming a worldview, or for that matter, trying to solve the “mystery” which so puzzles Mr. Almond.
According to public records, about 128 million people voted in the 2016 election -- 63 million for Trump, 65 million for Clinton. But of the white people who voted, 58% cast their ballots for Trump, and no less than 63% of all white men. While Trump's deepest support lay in whites in the age demographic 45 – 65, he also received the majority of white female vote as well: 53%. This fact seems rather astonishing when one considers that Trump was running against a well-known female candidate with extensive educational and public service credentials, but it remains a fact: more than half of white people who voted, voted for Trump. More than half of white women who voted, voted for Trump. It is these figures which baffle, dismay and outrage so many pundits, journalists and “political experts.” In their minds, America is a steadily liberalizing country, fast doing away with religious belief and embracing the concepts of democratic socialism, cultural diversity, and internationalism. When they are smacked upside the head by evidence to the contrary, they are gobsmacked, flabbergasted – choose your archaic term for bone-deep and unwelcome surprise. As I said, they don't get it. The question “why?” is at least as important as the question of why so many white people voted for Donald Trump – and would probably do so again, given the chance. Almond's “mystery” is in fact two mysteries. I aim to solve both.
I have noted previously that 2016 may be the year most remembered as that in which journalists discovered there is actually a white working class. On the face of it, the fact that the media did not grasp the existence of a population which may number as many as 76 million men and women – just under one in four Americans – seems absurd, but the evidence is too plain to ignore. These polished, well-educated, seemingly intelligent people, whose entire job is to keep a finger on the pulse of this nation and to understand the working of its innermost mind and heart, were as ignorant of this horde of blue-collared white folks as Columbus was of the New World when he blundered into it. It took Trump's election to open their eyes, but even when awakened, their political leanings forced them into an Orwellian state where they were unwilling to draw any conclusions from their discovery. Thus, the tiresome, almost nauseating insistence that Trump's election was solely the product of white racism.
Of course, some Trump supporters are racists, and others on the borderline of racism. The evidence of this, too, is impossible to ignore. (Trump himself make frank and open appeals to xenophobia during his campaign, and continues to do so.) But the fact remains that of all the people I know personally who voted for Trump, I would characterize none as genuine bigots. At worst, some have slight prejudices, but if pressed, if put in a situation where they had to abandon those prejudices or double down on them, I truly believe every one would choose the former rather than the latter course. To a man (and woman), they voted for Trump because they quite simply reject the vision of America which the left has been peddling for decades. Yes, they resent the “cultural diversity seminars” forced upon them at work, the unpaid “racial sensitivity trainings,” the mandatory “gender identity education courses” for their children; yes, they are frustrated that it is easier to obtain, at many major universities, a copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto than it is one of the United States Constitution; yes, they weary of watching liberals gnash their teeth over the issues of transgender bathrooms and the fact that illegal immigrants might not be able to obtain driver's licenses and health care when millions of actual American citizens have neither; yes, they worry that liberals turn a blind eye toward outrages perpetrated by radical Islam while seemingly condemning Christianity and promoting atheism at every opportunity; but the most common motive for a Trump vote is not purely political or religious-racial-ethnic but economic in nature. When I listen to interviews with the more articulate and intelligent of his supporters throughout the country, what strikes me again and again is the narrowness of their concerns. We live in an age of one-issue voters, and the one-issue which seemed to drive so many working-class whites to pull the lever for Donald Trump is simply the fear of being left behind.
If you are old enough to really recall the 1990s, you will probably remember them as an era of unrivaled economic prosperity and generalized optimism. The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the Cold War had ended in bloodless triumph, democracy was on the march all across the world, and so determined was Bill Clinton to smash racism in America that he was only half-jokingly referred to as "the first black president." It was scarcely noticed by many of the big media outlets, or even by the middle class itself, that the decline of skilled and highly-paid unskilled labor jobs in the U.S. continued to decline, that coal miners, factory workers, farmers and other salt-of-the-earth Americans were not being swept along by the rush of free-trade "prosperity" embodied by the NAFTA agreements, but rather watching in kind of baffled fury as their own incomes and prospects shrank and kept shrinking. This erosion predated the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, but it certainly continued and perhaps even accelerated during their administrations. The white working class certainly felt abandoned by Obama, who neither understood nor seemed to sympathize with them – the condescending remark he made about “guns and Bibles” was as offensive to many in this country as a flippant joke about “fried chicken and watermelons” would have been to black people had it been uttered by a white president. Indeed, the very nature of Obama's presidency was bound up with the idea that those who had traditionally been excluded from the American Dream – minorities in general – were finally seeing their moment arrive. This moment was undeniably overdue, but it offered little comfort to the West Virginia coal miner now two years unemployed, the small businessman in Kansas choked out of business by red tape, the Pennsylvanian master welder who saw his job at the Caterpillar plant exported to Korea and was told to go get a job at Wal-Mart instead. More importantly, when he vented his grievance, he was generally told by the media and intelligentsia to shut up. The complaints of white men were of zero interest to the left and center-left; their very existence was only tolerated if they toed the left-wing line. The miner was told he was environmentally destructive; the farmer that he lived on “stolen” Indian land (as if his critic did not!); the factory worker was dismissed with the sentiment that “we don't want to hear white men complain about anything." The evident motive of these dismissals was rooted in a feeling that the time had come to right old wrongs; the problem was that it ignored the fact that two wrongs do not constitute a right. If it was wrong to subject black people to Jim Crow and systematized, institutionalized racism, if it was wrong to harass and punish gays merely for being gay, if it was wrong to oppress and devalue women – and it was – then it was equally wrong to negate the apprehensions of the supposedly privileged white male, to dismiss them with contempt, to tell him, in effect, that his time had passed and he ought to go quietly into that good night. And it was not merely morally wrong, but stupid. It would have been far more sensible for the left to try to win over the working class white man than to call him a ignorant, uneducated bigot whose feelings did not matter. In choosing the latter course the American left not only alienated millions of potential voters, it ignored its own history, to wit: in the 19th century, the left found its strongest support among the working class, which was being ruthlessly exploited by its capitalist masters, regardless of race or ethnicity. As late as the mid-20th century, the white union worker walked, to some extent, hand-in-hand with the left-wing intelligentsia; with socialists and borderline socialists; with Jews, blacks Latinos and other minorities; and with the broad masses of the Democratic Party. But times had changed, and the leaders of liberalism and progressivism had moved up in economic status, concentrating on the coasts and the big cities and universities, and gradually severing their ties with the workers whom they once idealized, recruited and to some extent, led. A different political landscape emerged, one in which the blue collars which had once been die-hard Democrats began to vote increasingly Republican, and to become more vulnerable to the kind of demagogic, blame-them tactics employed by Trump and people of his ilk. Politics abhors a vacuum; if the needs of a group of people are not fulfilled, or at least addressed, by one party, then they will be adopted by the other. When the left disowned the white working class, they set in motion a chain of events that handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.
Trump's election campaign contained very little of substance. Unlike, for example, Bernie Sanders, who was more than willing to get into the nuts and bolts of many of his proposals – perhaps even to his detriment – Trump mainly spoke in generalities and was deliberately vague about how he would execute such ideas as he had. However, on certain points he was quite specific, and the most important of these, more important than his infamous border wall or proposed Muslim ban, was the idea that he cared for, and would protect and serve, the American worker. Trump was a businessman and presumably understood business better than any professional politician. He would “get tough” with our trade partners, throw out harmful or useless trade agreements, punish U.S. corporations who shipped jobs overseas, and slash business and banking regulation to the bone. Anything that inhibited the economy would be thrown out; anything that added jobs, be it drilling in national parks or allowing every manner of filth to be poured into the atmosphere, soil and water, would be permitted. In a very real sense his agenda was Reaganomics on steroids, an idea that government governs best not when it governs least, but when it governs not at all.
Liberals were aghast at this, and many centrists as well, but again, they failed to understand the appeal this sort of talk has to a proud third-generation coal miner who has been out of work for two years and cannot reconcile himself to pumping gas, flipping burgers or stocking shelves for $6.75 an hour. It is often, and rightly, said that when a man's belly is empty, his only concern is with filling it; it is only when he is full that moral, philosophical and spiritual issues begin to concern him. Concern for the environment, for a justice system that serves everyone, for an America where it is not necessary to remind people that Black Lives Matter – all of this is virtuous. But none of it is likely to be of great concern to the man in question when he cannot pay his mortgage, cannot afford health care, and cannot see any prospect of doing so in the future. Hell is not necessarily a place; it is simply the absence of hope. And if nothing else, The Donald offered hope to people who had none.
It so happens that I listen to a lot of progressive radio, and in recent months I've been amazed by the insistence that “we (meaning the left) don't need the white working class at election time.” This has been repeated so often that I suspect many progressives actually believe it. They think they can get back in office by putting up candidates whose appeal is rooted almost exclusively among blacks, Latinos, gays, and white liberals. To me this represents a simple doubling-down of mistakes already made. But again, the question is one of ideology versus reality. All ideologues, of any party, dismiss reality at the exact moment it comes into conflict with their political beliefs. The left doesn't “get” the election of Trump because they have chosen not to respect, or even to admit the existence, of a huge, seething mass of people who do not approve of their agenda, and have the power to vote against it; and rather than trying to win these people over – and many could be won over – they have continued to insult and negate them. Flipping the coin, Trump was elected because he grasped, if only by accident, that this mass did in fact exist, and that, if properly galvanized, it might vote for him. Whether it will vote for him again in 2020 (assuming he is able and willing to run) I don't know. But I do know that unless the left can find a way to approach the blue-collar white worker more sensibly and respectfully, it may, at that time, once again find itself on the outside, looking in.
May 12, 2018
Nightclubbin'
So I guess I must have just been dreaming
When I thought I heard myself say no
Anyway it looks like no one heard me so here I go
'Cause when you're in the company of strangers
Or just the strangers you call friends
You know before you start just how it's going to end
When the doors swing open and all the drinks are passed around,
Anytime the pickings look too easy...hold me down
I can't remember why I like this feeling
When it only seems to let me down
Soon I find I'm searching for the exit from the ground
If I think the room is turning faster
Then I think the music is too loud
By then I've lived another broken story to let me down.
-- The Gin Blossoms
We're only immortal for a limited time.
-- Rush
Before anything else, the sense memories. Smell and sight, taste and touch. And sound, sound, sound.
If we begin with our noses, we must observe that the scent of a nightclub changes over the course of one's time there. When one first arrives, and the place is still largely empty, it is a coldish smell, the smell of air conditioning in an empty space, tinged with the nasal sting of disinfectant and the heavier, muskier odor last night's beer. It is an unwelcome smell, somewhat unpleasant, but there is a positive Pavlovian response to it nonetheless. Just as cheap, cloying perfume may nevertheless remind one of sex, the fickle odors of the empty nightclub serve as reminders of all the other good nights that began this way – amidst that chilly, unwelcome, unwholesome odor.
As the evening stretches into night and the trickle of patrons becomes a steady flow, the temperature of the air changes and with it, the smell. All those young bodies burning at 98.6 degrees soon warm things up, and more pleasant scents intrude: perfume, cologne, hair spray, fresh beer, puffs of cigarette smoke. This is the smell that the earlier smell promised; that of youth, infused with hormones and anticipation. It is not the smell of sex; it is the smell of the possibility of sex.
Later, toward the end of the night, when the clock tells us that it is in fact morning, our noses will once again tell us a story. By that time the smoke will be much thicker, mingled with the underscent of someone's furtively puffed joint; deodorant and designer-imposter body spray will have yielded to the rank odors of dance-floor sweat; and the bathrooms will give off a powerful stench of urine and vomit. Once in a great while an unseen door will bang open, admitting a welcome flood of cool, cleansing air, but the moment is always too brief; only at the very end, when the lights come up and everyone is revealed in all their sweat-plastered, lipstick-smeared, runny-mascara'd glory, will fresh air intrude into this dank, humid, nostril-clogging effluvium that a thousand people have conspired to make.
And that is just the nose. Our eyes, too, have observed the arc of appearance as the night wore on and out. Expensive haircuts unravel into matted, sweat-soaked strings. Makeup smears and runs. Shirts with starched collars wilt into wet dishrags; blouses bead with the stains of spilled drinks, or become wetly transparent. The haughty-faced beauty in the tight yellow tube dress, who sauntered into the place at nine-thirty looking as bored and disdainful as a princess wandering among paupers, is at one forty-five a streaked and staggering mess, gulping down a tenth Sea Breeze while the guy who she met an hour ago dry-fucks her from behind in the shadows of a busted speaker, hard enough to send her sequins flying. Another girl weeps hysterically in the corner as she regards a broken high heeled shoe. A young man who arrived clean-shaven, freshly barbered and dressed to the very nines now looks like a dirty drugged-out wino, staring at the world through eyes of red glass, dropping dollar bills all over the dance floor as he struggles to open his wallet. Men and women are scribbling their phone numbers on napkins, scraps of paper, the backs of hands, the inside of wrists; some, who cannot wait, are fused together against pillars or alley walls or the sides of rain-jeweled cars in the parking lot. Others, less lucky, nurse lips split by sudden, angry fists, or stare unhappily at the rents and tears and dirt-stains on clothing which has been roughly handled by bouncers or boyfriends. Faces express lust, dismay, humiliation, drunken ecstasy which tomorrow may resemble shame.
Touch in a nightclub has many, many meanings. As with smell it tends to change over the course of the evening's revelry. When one first arrives everything is cool and slick – the drinks, the countertops, the vinyl covers of the stools. Later, if one is lucky, one touches other things: smooth skin heated by exertions on the dance floor, clean sweat, tongues flavored by the drinks that coursed over them. But even this changes as the hours whirl by: hot skin grows clammy, silky hair dampens and grows coarse, the mirrors that cover the walls run with condensation that soaks through the back of one's shirt. Touch goes from the objective to the thing to avoid; at the same time the increasing overcrowdedness make it unavoidable. Bodies press bodies press bodies, willingly and unwillingly. Every now and again one places a hand somewhere and withdraws it in disgust, having encountered a puddle of liquid, a streak of slime, a smear of foam. But there are rewards as well. The mad crush of the crowd sometimes thrusts a pleasing shape against you, breasts to chest, hips to hips, in forced intimacy: more than one night's passion has begun this way, accidentally. Brief embarrassment and discomfiture leads to a shared smile, a flash of the eyes that says, "Why not?"
Taste, too, runs the gamut. The first drinks are always delightful; cool and smooth and refreshing. Later, as the drunkenness increases, the palate grows dull; what was a pleasure becomes a ritual devoid of pleasure. Toward the end, every belch brings with it a taste of bile and vomit. And yet the tasting goes on, because when one is young, thirst is bottomless. Like the need for sound.
Of course, sound is the foundation of any nightclub. The enormous edifice of a club is like a glass, which has no purpose unless filled with bass and treble, rhythm, melody and harmony. Not everyone comes to a club for music, but without music there can be no club. It is the music which draws the women, who come to dance; and it is the women who draw the men, who come to fuck. Unlike a bar and most unlike a pub, a nightclub's raison d'etre is the coming-together of bodies. It is a temple consecrated to the gods of lust. The food it serves, the drinks it plies, the endless deafening stream of sound which flows forth from it from the moment of its opening to the last minutes after last call, are all nothing more than ingredients mingled together to produce a specific moment – the moment of orgasm. Yet the sound is deceptive, a merry jingle full of fine print. The specific moment is only bait. It is a promise that is uttered every night but seldom delivered. The torrent of noise, the bass that vibrates one's solar plexus and steals the breath away, the shrieking lyrics that pain the eardrums, the tinkling progression of synthetic noises that all but compel feet to move and keep moving – it's all as sincere as the welcoming smile of a casino greeter, and it has the same motive. Drown out the customer's good sense; give him hope; sell him a fantasy. Then empty his wallet and send him on his way. That is all the deejays deliver, hour after hour, from their elevated dais and cramped little booths; the remote chance of a good time. No loudspeaker blatting from a North Korean public square ever promised more than the siren-song of the nightclub deejay. And if you leave with empty pockets, a bursting bladder and a reservoir of untapped lust, you have the ringing in your ears and the bump of the subwoofers to keep you company while the darkness lasts. Next time you'll get 'em!
All of this came to me – rather, came back to me – whilst I was driving through Hollywood last night. It was not good California weather; the evening was cool, damp and gloomy; a sullen mist hung over the fabled hills, and if the traffic was awful, the crowds on the bronze-starred pavement were thinner and less exuberant than usual. Nevertheless, as I rolled sluggishly past the Boulevard, into the Cahuenga Pass which would take me home to Burbank, I had a chance to observe the people lining up to get into a fashionable nightclub. It was a biggish group, overdressed to an outrageous degree, and bathed in limousine light. The women were less than half-dressed, their nubile twentysomething bodies crammed into skin-tight fabrics that covered not a helluva lot more than the average bikini. The men were also kitted-out for dance-floor battle; hair gel had flowed in quarts, beards been carefully trimmed and anointed, shirts clean but wrinkled just so for that casual-not-casual look. Jewelry, ostentatious and vulgar, flashed every time a papparazzo ignited his bulb. There is a special pathos, is there not, about people lined up at a nightclub door? At the same time they are feeling desperately awkward and helpless before the impenetrable velvet rope, they are also projecting an air of smugness and arrogance which seems to have a physical weight. It is the latter quality that struck me last night. They are young, beautiful and bursting with life's juices; you are middle-aged, tired and eager to go home and watch re-runs on television in your pajamas. They are about to get into X., “Hollywood's hottest nightclub,” (until it goes out of business), you are stuck in traffic in your shitty secondhand car, hoping it doesn't overheat. And yet, oddly enough, though the sight provoked memories in me I hadn't thought of in years, it did not in any way spark feelings of envy or jealousy; not even of nostalgia. My memories came back to me so completely that there was no need, even if there had been a desire.
Life, my father used to say, is cyclical. This is true but not the whole story. Life is cyclical; it is also seasonal. There is a time and place for nearly everything that we do and experience – even the most hurtful, humiliating, damaging things – and when the time passes, it often passes without leaving much behind, like a lighted match consuming itself to ashes. I mentioned nostalgia above; I am severely prone to same; I tend to romanticize and mythologize everything. But I do not feel nostalgia for my nightclub days, and understanding why has brought me a little more peace and happiness than such a petty realization might be expected to produce.
I began clubbing pretty heavily when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. A high-school buddy, one year ahead of me in both age and class, had become a deejay and, after the usual, dismal apprenticeship spinning turntables at cheap weddings and sleazy airport bars, rapidly ascended the nightclub scene in the Washington, D.C. area. His rise was my own; though underage, I found myself admitted to one premier bar and nightclub after the other, given the VIP armband, plied with free drinks, treated by the bartenders and bouncers and dancers as one of the Anointed. It was heady wine indeed to a callow teenager bursting with hormones and the need, common to all teens, to feel more important than I really was. Oddly enough, I can remember only a few of the places I haunted: the Cellar, the Dome, the Guards. But there was one club in particular which, during the now long-gone 1990s, dominated all the others in D.C.: it was called the Fifth Column, in Northwest, and it was located in an enormous Gothic structure which had once been a bank but which much more strongly resembled a church. This cavernous, almost sinister-looking fortress, standing in grim majesty in a desolated and crime-ridden part of the city – a backdrop right out of The Crow – was the setting for all sorts of farcical, embarrassing, comic-tragic, R-to-X-rated shenanigans: drinking, fist-fights, make-out sessions in alleys and the backs of cars, frantic dancing that resembled copulation with the clothes in place. I well remember the feelings of excitement, mingled with fear, which would come over me when I knew I was headed there for the evening; I remember too, the arc which I have described above, the way the huge expectations almost inevitably collapsed into debaucheries which were, in many cases, not even particularly enjoyable. I remember exchanges of phone numbers that were never followed up; I remember meetings which were planned that never took place; I remember scuffles that never quite became fights, threats never acted upon, promises of vengeance for some drunken offense, never fulfilled but endlessly discussed. I remember the heated, breathless dance-floor fumblings that led to clumsy dates that were never repeated, and I remember being shaken down by hard-nosed D.C. police officers whose side hustle was extorting underage drinkers for cash. I remember friendships that revolved entirely around the ritual of drinking, dancing, and drugging, and disintegrated the moment one person or the other wanted to stop, and I remember coming home at three-thirty in the morning during the summer months between college semesters, and my older brother opening the door with bleary eyes to tell me that I smelled like a distillery. I remember the night Madonna was denied entry and roared off angrily in her limo, and the time the backdoor bouncer went into amphetamine psychosis and punched out a windshield with his bare fist. But mostly I remember that it went on for several years, which in your early-mid 20s is an enormous period of time; and lastly I remember that it ended, not because of any outside force, such as the club closing (though it did, eventually, do just that), but because I wanted it to.
As Stephen King once said, everything's eventual, and if you drink from a particular well for too long, the time will come when the taste no longer pleases you. For a period of about three to five years I hit nightclubs regularly and willingly, and even after I had realized how shallow, exploitative and even dangerous they could be – between the fights, muggings, parking lot burglaries, sexually transmitted diseases and occasional stabbings, there was a distinct element of menace at some of them – I kept going, off and on, for some years more. The twentysomething male, and to some extent the female as well, are largely ruled by hormones and by that seemingly endless supply of energy which young people contain. It is a raw, untamed, uncontrolled energy, and when expended it resurges with startling speed, operating through illness, fatigue and hangover without much difficulty. It is not merely there in ample supply, waiting to be used; it demands release, and at that age, it is not a demand that can be lightly or easily refused. The ordinary hot-blooded guy-or-doll has about as much chance of holding back from the desires in his or her blood as a victim of Lycanthropy can resist becoming a werewolf when the moon comes up. But as Rush once said, we're only immortal for a limited time, and when that tide begins to slacken, when the siren-song of the bass and the cheap allure of the half-naked girl (oh so slutty-seeming yet oh so unattainable, oh so many times) begins to wane, the desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights amidst all that writhing, desperate flesh also cools. There are, I admit, many aspects of youth I do miss, but not that, not the feeling of being shoved around by my glands, manipulated into motion by desires I couldn't manage or control, and which made me behave badly and foolishly. Age may rob us of much, but it actually grants quite a bit in terms of the strength with which we grasp the tiller of our own life.
The MMA fighter Dan Henderson observed that the forties were a remarkable time in a man's development, because while he wanted sex just as much as he did when he was younger, it no longer controlled him. I believe he made similar comments about physical ability. “I can do everything I can do when I was twenty,” he quipped. “I just can't do it as fast.” I feel largely the same way. The speed is gone, but so too is the desire to use the speed, to burn the candle at both ends, to gulp recklessly from the cup of life until one's belly swells and the room begins to spin. I still howl at the moon, but I do so at a pace that suits me, and when I strike the mood, not when the mood strikes me. And it is astonishing, perhaps, how little that mood comes around, at least where nightclubs and things of that nature are concerned. In the last twenty years, I can count on two hands the number of times I've crossed the threshold of one, and two of those occasions were industry-related; the first a wrap party for Heroes, the second for a movie I didn't work on but got invited to anyway. I enjoyed both excursions, but I had no desire to repeat them. It is, I suppose, like the time you're in college and somebody's dad, in town to take his son to dinner, shows up to the fraternity keg party. It's great fun. The "old man" drinks and flirts and dances, and he enjoys the hell out of himself and so do you, but the next day he goes home and never comes back. A sip of that cup is sufficient. The season has passed. Why mourn it? Whatever purpose it had has been served, and it deserves neither nostalgia nor regret.
Were I to return to F Street in N.W. D.C. tomorrow, and look up the old Fifth Column, I would no doubt be surprised to see the changes to it and the surrounding neighborhood. I might chuckle a little remembering the big black dude that challenged me to a fight right there by the entrance and then ran away when he discovered none of his friends would back him up, or the time I made out with the blonde pastry chef from Virginia (all I ever learned about her) by the payphone in the back, or the time I made plans for a menage-a-trois with two older girls who I never saw again and who doubtlessly enjoyed a good laugh at leaving me high and extremely dry. I might pause a second to see if my mind's ear could recall the sound of all those techno-beats thundering through the stone walls to the rain-drowned streets outside, or try to recall the faces of the fair-weather friends I ran with in those days, who, sometime around 1995, scattered into the winds and were ne'er seen or heard from again. But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't be bothered. Life lessons come to me with astonishing slowness, but the one I've taken away from this little epiphany is that there are times when the process letting go is not painful. Some periods of life are to be kept close, to be treasured and savored as long as the heart still beats; others -- let's face it -- just ought to be marked, "use once and destroy."
When I thought I heard myself say no
Anyway it looks like no one heard me so here I go
'Cause when you're in the company of strangers
Or just the strangers you call friends
You know before you start just how it's going to end
When the doors swing open and all the drinks are passed around,
Anytime the pickings look too easy...hold me down
I can't remember why I like this feeling
When it only seems to let me down
Soon I find I'm searching for the exit from the ground
If I think the room is turning faster
Then I think the music is too loud
By then I've lived another broken story to let me down.
-- The Gin Blossoms
We're only immortal for a limited time.
-- Rush
Before anything else, the sense memories. Smell and sight, taste and touch. And sound, sound, sound.
If we begin with our noses, we must observe that the scent of a nightclub changes over the course of one's time there. When one first arrives, and the place is still largely empty, it is a coldish smell, the smell of air conditioning in an empty space, tinged with the nasal sting of disinfectant and the heavier, muskier odor last night's beer. It is an unwelcome smell, somewhat unpleasant, but there is a positive Pavlovian response to it nonetheless. Just as cheap, cloying perfume may nevertheless remind one of sex, the fickle odors of the empty nightclub serve as reminders of all the other good nights that began this way – amidst that chilly, unwelcome, unwholesome odor.
As the evening stretches into night and the trickle of patrons becomes a steady flow, the temperature of the air changes and with it, the smell. All those young bodies burning at 98.6 degrees soon warm things up, and more pleasant scents intrude: perfume, cologne, hair spray, fresh beer, puffs of cigarette smoke. This is the smell that the earlier smell promised; that of youth, infused with hormones and anticipation. It is not the smell of sex; it is the smell of the possibility of sex.
Later, toward the end of the night, when the clock tells us that it is in fact morning, our noses will once again tell us a story. By that time the smoke will be much thicker, mingled with the underscent of someone's furtively puffed joint; deodorant and designer-imposter body spray will have yielded to the rank odors of dance-floor sweat; and the bathrooms will give off a powerful stench of urine and vomit. Once in a great while an unseen door will bang open, admitting a welcome flood of cool, cleansing air, but the moment is always too brief; only at the very end, when the lights come up and everyone is revealed in all their sweat-plastered, lipstick-smeared, runny-mascara'd glory, will fresh air intrude into this dank, humid, nostril-clogging effluvium that a thousand people have conspired to make.
And that is just the nose. Our eyes, too, have observed the arc of appearance as the night wore on and out. Expensive haircuts unravel into matted, sweat-soaked strings. Makeup smears and runs. Shirts with starched collars wilt into wet dishrags; blouses bead with the stains of spilled drinks, or become wetly transparent. The haughty-faced beauty in the tight yellow tube dress, who sauntered into the place at nine-thirty looking as bored and disdainful as a princess wandering among paupers, is at one forty-five a streaked and staggering mess, gulping down a tenth Sea Breeze while the guy who she met an hour ago dry-fucks her from behind in the shadows of a busted speaker, hard enough to send her sequins flying. Another girl weeps hysterically in the corner as she regards a broken high heeled shoe. A young man who arrived clean-shaven, freshly barbered and dressed to the very nines now looks like a dirty drugged-out wino, staring at the world through eyes of red glass, dropping dollar bills all over the dance floor as he struggles to open his wallet. Men and women are scribbling their phone numbers on napkins, scraps of paper, the backs of hands, the inside of wrists; some, who cannot wait, are fused together against pillars or alley walls or the sides of rain-jeweled cars in the parking lot. Others, less lucky, nurse lips split by sudden, angry fists, or stare unhappily at the rents and tears and dirt-stains on clothing which has been roughly handled by bouncers or boyfriends. Faces express lust, dismay, humiliation, drunken ecstasy which tomorrow may resemble shame.
Touch in a nightclub has many, many meanings. As with smell it tends to change over the course of the evening's revelry. When one first arrives everything is cool and slick – the drinks, the countertops, the vinyl covers of the stools. Later, if one is lucky, one touches other things: smooth skin heated by exertions on the dance floor, clean sweat, tongues flavored by the drinks that coursed over them. But even this changes as the hours whirl by: hot skin grows clammy, silky hair dampens and grows coarse, the mirrors that cover the walls run with condensation that soaks through the back of one's shirt. Touch goes from the objective to the thing to avoid; at the same time the increasing overcrowdedness make it unavoidable. Bodies press bodies press bodies, willingly and unwillingly. Every now and again one places a hand somewhere and withdraws it in disgust, having encountered a puddle of liquid, a streak of slime, a smear of foam. But there are rewards as well. The mad crush of the crowd sometimes thrusts a pleasing shape against you, breasts to chest, hips to hips, in forced intimacy: more than one night's passion has begun this way, accidentally. Brief embarrassment and discomfiture leads to a shared smile, a flash of the eyes that says, "Why not?"
Taste, too, runs the gamut. The first drinks are always delightful; cool and smooth and refreshing. Later, as the drunkenness increases, the palate grows dull; what was a pleasure becomes a ritual devoid of pleasure. Toward the end, every belch brings with it a taste of bile and vomit. And yet the tasting goes on, because when one is young, thirst is bottomless. Like the need for sound.
Of course, sound is the foundation of any nightclub. The enormous edifice of a club is like a glass, which has no purpose unless filled with bass and treble, rhythm, melody and harmony. Not everyone comes to a club for music, but without music there can be no club. It is the music which draws the women, who come to dance; and it is the women who draw the men, who come to fuck. Unlike a bar and most unlike a pub, a nightclub's raison d'etre is the coming-together of bodies. It is a temple consecrated to the gods of lust. The food it serves, the drinks it plies, the endless deafening stream of sound which flows forth from it from the moment of its opening to the last minutes after last call, are all nothing more than ingredients mingled together to produce a specific moment – the moment of orgasm. Yet the sound is deceptive, a merry jingle full of fine print. The specific moment is only bait. It is a promise that is uttered every night but seldom delivered. The torrent of noise, the bass that vibrates one's solar plexus and steals the breath away, the shrieking lyrics that pain the eardrums, the tinkling progression of synthetic noises that all but compel feet to move and keep moving – it's all as sincere as the welcoming smile of a casino greeter, and it has the same motive. Drown out the customer's good sense; give him hope; sell him a fantasy. Then empty his wallet and send him on his way. That is all the deejays deliver, hour after hour, from their elevated dais and cramped little booths; the remote chance of a good time. No loudspeaker blatting from a North Korean public square ever promised more than the siren-song of the nightclub deejay. And if you leave with empty pockets, a bursting bladder and a reservoir of untapped lust, you have the ringing in your ears and the bump of the subwoofers to keep you company while the darkness lasts. Next time you'll get 'em!
All of this came to me – rather, came back to me – whilst I was driving through Hollywood last night. It was not good California weather; the evening was cool, damp and gloomy; a sullen mist hung over the fabled hills, and if the traffic was awful, the crowds on the bronze-starred pavement were thinner and less exuberant than usual. Nevertheless, as I rolled sluggishly past the Boulevard, into the Cahuenga Pass which would take me home to Burbank, I had a chance to observe the people lining up to get into a fashionable nightclub. It was a biggish group, overdressed to an outrageous degree, and bathed in limousine light. The women were less than half-dressed, their nubile twentysomething bodies crammed into skin-tight fabrics that covered not a helluva lot more than the average bikini. The men were also kitted-out for dance-floor battle; hair gel had flowed in quarts, beards been carefully trimmed and anointed, shirts clean but wrinkled just so for that casual-not-casual look. Jewelry, ostentatious and vulgar, flashed every time a papparazzo ignited his bulb. There is a special pathos, is there not, about people lined up at a nightclub door? At the same time they are feeling desperately awkward and helpless before the impenetrable velvet rope, they are also projecting an air of smugness and arrogance which seems to have a physical weight. It is the latter quality that struck me last night. They are young, beautiful and bursting with life's juices; you are middle-aged, tired and eager to go home and watch re-runs on television in your pajamas. They are about to get into X., “Hollywood's hottest nightclub,” (until it goes out of business), you are stuck in traffic in your shitty secondhand car, hoping it doesn't overheat. And yet, oddly enough, though the sight provoked memories in me I hadn't thought of in years, it did not in any way spark feelings of envy or jealousy; not even of nostalgia. My memories came back to me so completely that there was no need, even if there had been a desire.
Life, my father used to say, is cyclical. This is true but not the whole story. Life is cyclical; it is also seasonal. There is a time and place for nearly everything that we do and experience – even the most hurtful, humiliating, damaging things – and when the time passes, it often passes without leaving much behind, like a lighted match consuming itself to ashes. I mentioned nostalgia above; I am severely prone to same; I tend to romanticize and mythologize everything. But I do not feel nostalgia for my nightclub days, and understanding why has brought me a little more peace and happiness than such a petty realization might be expected to produce.
I began clubbing pretty heavily when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. A high-school buddy, one year ahead of me in both age and class, had become a deejay and, after the usual, dismal apprenticeship spinning turntables at cheap weddings and sleazy airport bars, rapidly ascended the nightclub scene in the Washington, D.C. area. His rise was my own; though underage, I found myself admitted to one premier bar and nightclub after the other, given the VIP armband, plied with free drinks, treated by the bartenders and bouncers and dancers as one of the Anointed. It was heady wine indeed to a callow teenager bursting with hormones and the need, common to all teens, to feel more important than I really was. Oddly enough, I can remember only a few of the places I haunted: the Cellar, the Dome, the Guards. But there was one club in particular which, during the now long-gone 1990s, dominated all the others in D.C.: it was called the Fifth Column, in Northwest, and it was located in an enormous Gothic structure which had once been a bank but which much more strongly resembled a church. This cavernous, almost sinister-looking fortress, standing in grim majesty in a desolated and crime-ridden part of the city – a backdrop right out of The Crow – was the setting for all sorts of farcical, embarrassing, comic-tragic, R-to-X-rated shenanigans: drinking, fist-fights, make-out sessions in alleys and the backs of cars, frantic dancing that resembled copulation with the clothes in place. I well remember the feelings of excitement, mingled with fear, which would come over me when I knew I was headed there for the evening; I remember too, the arc which I have described above, the way the huge expectations almost inevitably collapsed into debaucheries which were, in many cases, not even particularly enjoyable. I remember exchanges of phone numbers that were never followed up; I remember meetings which were planned that never took place; I remember scuffles that never quite became fights, threats never acted upon, promises of vengeance for some drunken offense, never fulfilled but endlessly discussed. I remember the heated, breathless dance-floor fumblings that led to clumsy dates that were never repeated, and I remember being shaken down by hard-nosed D.C. police officers whose side hustle was extorting underage drinkers for cash. I remember friendships that revolved entirely around the ritual of drinking, dancing, and drugging, and disintegrated the moment one person or the other wanted to stop, and I remember coming home at three-thirty in the morning during the summer months between college semesters, and my older brother opening the door with bleary eyes to tell me that I smelled like a distillery. I remember the night Madonna was denied entry and roared off angrily in her limo, and the time the backdoor bouncer went into amphetamine psychosis and punched out a windshield with his bare fist. But mostly I remember that it went on for several years, which in your early-mid 20s is an enormous period of time; and lastly I remember that it ended, not because of any outside force, such as the club closing (though it did, eventually, do just that), but because I wanted it to.
As Stephen King once said, everything's eventual, and if you drink from a particular well for too long, the time will come when the taste no longer pleases you. For a period of about three to five years I hit nightclubs regularly and willingly, and even after I had realized how shallow, exploitative and even dangerous they could be – between the fights, muggings, parking lot burglaries, sexually transmitted diseases and occasional stabbings, there was a distinct element of menace at some of them – I kept going, off and on, for some years more. The twentysomething male, and to some extent the female as well, are largely ruled by hormones and by that seemingly endless supply of energy which young people contain. It is a raw, untamed, uncontrolled energy, and when expended it resurges with startling speed, operating through illness, fatigue and hangover without much difficulty. It is not merely there in ample supply, waiting to be used; it demands release, and at that age, it is not a demand that can be lightly or easily refused. The ordinary hot-blooded guy-or-doll has about as much chance of holding back from the desires in his or her blood as a victim of Lycanthropy can resist becoming a werewolf when the moon comes up. But as Rush once said, we're only immortal for a limited time, and when that tide begins to slacken, when the siren-song of the bass and the cheap allure of the half-naked girl (oh so slutty-seeming yet oh so unattainable, oh so many times) begins to wane, the desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights amidst all that writhing, desperate flesh also cools. There are, I admit, many aspects of youth I do miss, but not that, not the feeling of being shoved around by my glands, manipulated into motion by desires I couldn't manage or control, and which made me behave badly and foolishly. Age may rob us of much, but it actually grants quite a bit in terms of the strength with which we grasp the tiller of our own life.
The MMA fighter Dan Henderson observed that the forties were a remarkable time in a man's development, because while he wanted sex just as much as he did when he was younger, it no longer controlled him. I believe he made similar comments about physical ability. “I can do everything I can do when I was twenty,” he quipped. “I just can't do it as fast.” I feel largely the same way. The speed is gone, but so too is the desire to use the speed, to burn the candle at both ends, to gulp recklessly from the cup of life until one's belly swells and the room begins to spin. I still howl at the moon, but I do so at a pace that suits me, and when I strike the mood, not when the mood strikes me. And it is astonishing, perhaps, how little that mood comes around, at least where nightclubs and things of that nature are concerned. In the last twenty years, I can count on two hands the number of times I've crossed the threshold of one, and two of those occasions were industry-related; the first a wrap party for Heroes, the second for a movie I didn't work on but got invited to anyway. I enjoyed both excursions, but I had no desire to repeat them. It is, I suppose, like the time you're in college and somebody's dad, in town to take his son to dinner, shows up to the fraternity keg party. It's great fun. The "old man" drinks and flirts and dances, and he enjoys the hell out of himself and so do you, but the next day he goes home and never comes back. A sip of that cup is sufficient. The season has passed. Why mourn it? Whatever purpose it had has been served, and it deserves neither nostalgia nor regret.
Were I to return to F Street in N.W. D.C. tomorrow, and look up the old Fifth Column, I would no doubt be surprised to see the changes to it and the surrounding neighborhood. I might chuckle a little remembering the big black dude that challenged me to a fight right there by the entrance and then ran away when he discovered none of his friends would back him up, or the time I made out with the blonde pastry chef from Virginia (all I ever learned about her) by the payphone in the back, or the time I made plans for a menage-a-trois with two older girls who I never saw again and who doubtlessly enjoyed a good laugh at leaving me high and extremely dry. I might pause a second to see if my mind's ear could recall the sound of all those techno-beats thundering through the stone walls to the rain-drowned streets outside, or try to recall the faces of the fair-weather friends I ran with in those days, who, sometime around 1995, scattered into the winds and were ne'er seen or heard from again. But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't be bothered. Life lessons come to me with astonishing slowness, but the one I've taken away from this little epiphany is that there are times when the process letting go is not painful. Some periods of life are to be kept close, to be treasured and savored as long as the heart still beats; others -- let's face it -- just ought to be marked, "use once and destroy."
April 27, 2018
America's Dad, or: Life After Cosby
At some point today, in between washing foam latex zombie hands for The Walking Dead and scrutinizing a cowl used for an alien character on The Orville, I was notified that Bill Cosby had been convicted by a Pennsylvania court on three counts of "aggravated indecent assault." Being a former law enforcement official in that commonwealth, I could a tale unfold about the memories the words "aggravated indecent assault" provoked in me, but in truth those memories were themselves swept away by other, completely different recollections. They were of The Cosby Show.
The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992, and while on paper it was just another family sit-com in a schedule crammed to the rafters with them, this show was different. Not only was the fictitious Huxtable clan black -- there had been other sit-coms about black families -- they were rich, or very nearly so. Yes, The Jeffersons were rich too, but that family was dysfunctional. The Huxtables were a kind of Partridge Family on steroids; black Cleavers for the 1980s, but upgraded in terms of both brains and style. They were funny. They were good-looking. They were smart. They dressed in bold, even flamboyant colors. They prized education and personal character. But what struck me most about this fictional fam was the father, Heathcliffe, portrayed by Cosby himself. In a television world where father-figures were often portrayed as pushovers or comic-opera tyrants, Heathcliffe Huxtable was kind of a badass. Not only was he a doctor married to a lawyer, not only was he bringing in merry bushels of cash that allowed his family to occupy a luxurious brownstone in Manhattan, not only was he funny and knowledgeable about life, he was, well, pretty close to perfect. He had awesome powers of observation and sarcasm. He was an expert at child psychology. He could be warm, engaging or silly, but he could also be tough and implacable. The son of a bitch could even quote Shakespeare. People might disappoint or annoy him, but in the end he always got the better of them and the situations they created. In short, picture any Steven Segal character, minus the violent tendencies and spray-on hair. The perfect -- and I mean perfect -- father figure. America's uber-dad.
The Cosby Show ran for eight years. It was a cultural phenomenon and a ratings smash, and it broke down barriers that had survived the success of other "black" television shows such as Good Times, What's Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, etc. After the Huxtables, it would never again be possible to think of black folks in America only in terms of a people struggling against poverty, racism and crime. The sprawling abstraction known as White, Middle Class America had seen hip, prosperous, intelligent, witty black people on television at last and embraced them without reservation. But I confess the racial significance of the show, the way it smashed stereotypes, was of far less interest to me than the fact that it had produced a seminal patriarch.
Now that Cosby has been convicted of heinous crimes -- crimes which may in fact represent only the tip of his particular iceberg -- America will begin the process of systematically erasing his legacy from our collective consciousness. It will be a more difficult task than some may expect. Cosby is a man with an immense career that stretches back nearly sixty years. He was a successful stand-up comedian for decades, won an Emmy for his lead role in I, Spy (1965 - 1968), and starred in numerous films as well as two TV shows which bore his name. Following his infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech at an NAACP ceremony, he also became a social activist, albeit a considerably controversial one. Very few stars keep any of their star-power into later life, but Cosby did: in a sense, he remained America's Dad. Now he will begin the process of becoming an unperson. The Cosby Show has already been pulled from television re-runs; soon it will be unavailable for purchase on DVD, and eventually almost impossible to lay hands on. The same thing will happen to his comedy albums and television specials. They will go down the Orwellian "memory hole," ne'er to be seen again.
When Cosby was initially accused of these crimes a few years ago, I wrote a blog about the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which would formally obliterate the name of a disgraced person from the public record: coins bearing his face would be melted down and restruck, statues defaced or beheaded, plaques and plinths vandalized, scrolls burned. Barring a miraculous reversal on appeal, the same fate awaits Cosby, in a modernized form. The father figure of all father figures has been toppled, his crown vacated, and in his place is -- who?
Modern television is not the place for father figures or even generic role models. We live in a deeply cynical age in which there are almost no television or cinematic heroes, only deeply flawed protagonists, and even a squeaky-clean, Dudley Doorite character like Superman is presented as brooding, edgy, and "troubled." Thus, make-believe father figures of the sort epitomized by Dr. Huxtable are rather hard to come by, and even when they do exist -- Sam Elliot's Beau Bennett on The Ranch comes to mind -- they are often presented as charming but anachronistic; relics of a bygone era, to be humored as much as respected. This is unutterably depressing, but I take a certain amount of heart in what might be called Fatherhood Row: my own personal stash of first-class cinematic father figures.
One one of the first television dads I encountered and fell in love with was Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), the commanding officer of the 4077 mobile army surgical hospital, better known to millions of Americans as M*A*S*H. Potter was a crusty, hot-tempered ex-cavalryman with a passion for poker, whiskey, cigars, his mare Sophie, and his unseen wife Mildred. He was also a first-class battle surgeon who'd been through three wars and only wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Nevertheless, Potter tackled the awesome responsibility of wrangling a crew of drunken surgeons, homesick nurses and highly reluctant draftee soldiers through yet another war like an absolute pro. He was a tough little customer who could rip you a new one faster than you could salute, but he had a soft, compassionate, unfailingly loyal side that was utterly endearing and made you willing to go to hell and back for the man: he wasn't afraid of his own tears. He had plenty of formal schooling, but his wisdom came from often bitter experience: a long career in the Army, a lot of carnage, a lot of heartbreak. Of course, he wasn't actually a "father" to any of his troops, but they looked on him as one and he knew it and accepted it, even if he did admit it was a "bit of a pain in the ass."
Not many people are too familiar with Friday the 13th: The Series, a Toronto-based horror episodic which ran from 1987 - 1990, but in addition to being enormously influential on later TV shows, it also produced a fine father figure in Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins). Friday was the story of an antique shop whose inventory had been cursed by the devil and whose new owners took it upon themselves to recover all previously sold items before the curses could wreak any more havoc. The owners, Micki and Ryan, were distant cousins who spent a lot of time fighting and the rest of it wondering whether their quest was worth the risk and the pain; it was wise, courageous, kindly old Jack who kept them on course. A bearded, burly teddy bear of a man, he had, like any good pop, an underlying toughness, but it was his ability to sum up situations, to balm painful wounds with some prosaic-yet-profound remark, and most importantly, to lose his cool when the situation required it, that made me love him.
No list of father figs would be complete without Anthony Stewart Head's Rupert Giles, better known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's long-suffering but resolute Watcher. There is no doubt in my mind that the Giles character is drawn partially from Marshak, but the two are as different as they are alike. Giles is fussy, pedantic, polite, and eminently English; he drinks tea, wears tweed and employs sarcasm like a saber; at the same time he has plenty of darkness in his nature and a bad-boy past which befits any good dad (you need to wander from the flock to appreciate the importance of a shepherd). He is often exasperated by his charge, the headstrong teenager Buffy, and on the whole can barely control her -- he is really more of an advisor than a boss, yet over the course of time she and her friends come to appreciate not only his book knowledge but his wisdom and courage, and more than that, his true role, which is patriarch of a de facto family.
Frasier ran for eleven hilarious years, and not one of those years would have been possible without the character of Martin Crane, more than ably played by John Mahoney. The premise of Frasier was actually quite simple -- a sort of "Odd Couple" story of an insufferable snob-psychiatrist forced to live with his irascible, beer-drinking father, a retired cop. In practice the show was genius, and part of that genius rested in the character of Marty Crane. Though barely educated compared to his two genius sons, and possessing about as much taste as your average habituate of Wal-Mart (his favorite object was a disgustingly ugly easy chair), his street knowledge and fatherly wisdom -- sometimes reinforced by a fatherly boot to the ass -- were the perfect counterpoint to Frasier's arrogance and Niles' pomposity. Marty Crane was every dad who couldn't say "I love you" and so tried to show it by taking you fishing. Even if you didn't want to go.
I like very few sit-coms, but the first three seasons of Good Times are as funny as anything I've ever seen on TV, and oddly enough, it was the least comedic of the characters that brought everything together: James Evans, the patriarch of the five-member Evans clan. Poor black Chicagoans living in a crummy project apartment in the 70s, the Evanses struggled against everything: poverty, unemployment, the oil crisis, racism, street violence, a worthless landlord -- you name it. Luckily the scary-as-hell James Evans was more than a match for it. A farmboy from Mississippi who dropped out of sixth grade, Evans had served in Korea and fathered three children with his beloved wife Florida, and believe me, those kids knew they had a dad. With his blazing glare, flaring nostrils and prizefighter's physique, a pissed-off James Evans was not to be fucked with. But he had more than an intimidating, ultra-masculine presence; he was hard-working, decent, and completely in love with his wife. What's more, he was willing to work two miserable jobs if it would give his kids a better life than he'd had. Whatever it takes to be considered a leader -- charisma, command presence, animal magnetism -- the Evans character had it in spades. I once met Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, and went nonverbal with awe. If I met Amos, I'd probably shit myself.
The last figure on my list is probably the most inaccessible, and therefore, in some perverse way, the most appealing. Jean-Luc Picard was captain of the fabled Enterprise (D) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike his predecessor, the two-fisted, quick-tempered, woman-devouring Captain Kirk, Picard was dry, austere, even remote; a thoughtful man and a consummate diplomat, he had enormous patience for insult and threat, resorted to violence only when unavoidable, and seldom dabbled in romance, finding passion a bit distasteful. He was in many ways a paragon of virtue, even a prig, and intimidating in the bargain, with his cold demeanor and icy stare; he ought to have been intolerable as a result. Yet is there any patriarchal figure in recent memory who evokes such feelings of loyalty and respect from his audience? Picard's secret lies partly in his inaccessibility -- everyone secretly wants to please the unpleasable -- but perhaps just as much in the flashes of vulnerability and humanity that he occasionally showed through the cracks in his armor. The fact that we knew that there was a sensitive, flawed human beneath all that virtue brought us closer to him; not close enough, but who is ever really close enough with their dad? That last unbridgeable distance between the commander and the commanded is a key element in the nature of father - children relationships. Even when we somehow graduate from son or daughter to friend and equal, we know, and we completely accept, that we are neither. We will never truly be their friend, and we will never (ever) be their equal. Nor, in our own secret hearts, do we truly want to be. And isn't that the essence of the appeal of the father figure? When we are lost at sea, we follow the North Star to safety; but even if we reach safety, we never reach the star. We emulate our fathers, but we have no real wish to exceed them. Hell, where would the fun be in that?
I suppose, like everyone else, I will now join in the hive-mind expulsion of Bill Cosby from my consciousness. He will become the punch-line of bad jokes, a cautionary tale, a movie with a stern moral people can hashtag and like. I will not even bother to reflect on the cruel irony of an eminent father figure who was, it seems, nothing but a charlatan-hypocrite of the very worst type. Yet if Cosby is already slipping into non-existence without any real regret or remorse on my part, there is a piece of me that will forever mourn the loss of Heathcliffe Huxtable. He wasn't the man Bill Cosby was, but he was the man Bill Cosby should have been.
The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992, and while on paper it was just another family sit-com in a schedule crammed to the rafters with them, this show was different. Not only was the fictitious Huxtable clan black -- there had been other sit-coms about black families -- they were rich, or very nearly so. Yes, The Jeffersons were rich too, but that family was dysfunctional. The Huxtables were a kind of Partridge Family on steroids; black Cleavers for the 1980s, but upgraded in terms of both brains and style. They were funny. They were good-looking. They were smart. They dressed in bold, even flamboyant colors. They prized education and personal character. But what struck me most about this fictional fam was the father, Heathcliffe, portrayed by Cosby himself. In a television world where father-figures were often portrayed as pushovers or comic-opera tyrants, Heathcliffe Huxtable was kind of a badass. Not only was he a doctor married to a lawyer, not only was he bringing in merry bushels of cash that allowed his family to occupy a luxurious brownstone in Manhattan, not only was he funny and knowledgeable about life, he was, well, pretty close to perfect. He had awesome powers of observation and sarcasm. He was an expert at child psychology. He could be warm, engaging or silly, but he could also be tough and implacable. The son of a bitch could even quote Shakespeare. People might disappoint or annoy him, but in the end he always got the better of them and the situations they created. In short, picture any Steven Segal character, minus the violent tendencies and spray-on hair. The perfect -- and I mean perfect -- father figure. America's uber-dad.
The Cosby Show ran for eight years. It was a cultural phenomenon and a ratings smash, and it broke down barriers that had survived the success of other "black" television shows such as Good Times, What's Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, etc. After the Huxtables, it would never again be possible to think of black folks in America only in terms of a people struggling against poverty, racism and crime. The sprawling abstraction known as White, Middle Class America had seen hip, prosperous, intelligent, witty black people on television at last and embraced them without reservation. But I confess the racial significance of the show, the way it smashed stereotypes, was of far less interest to me than the fact that it had produced a seminal patriarch.
Now that Cosby has been convicted of heinous crimes -- crimes which may in fact represent only the tip of his particular iceberg -- America will begin the process of systematically erasing his legacy from our collective consciousness. It will be a more difficult task than some may expect. Cosby is a man with an immense career that stretches back nearly sixty years. He was a successful stand-up comedian for decades, won an Emmy for his lead role in I, Spy (1965 - 1968), and starred in numerous films as well as two TV shows which bore his name. Following his infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech at an NAACP ceremony, he also became a social activist, albeit a considerably controversial one. Very few stars keep any of their star-power into later life, but Cosby did: in a sense, he remained America's Dad. Now he will begin the process of becoming an unperson. The Cosby Show has already been pulled from television re-runs; soon it will be unavailable for purchase on DVD, and eventually almost impossible to lay hands on. The same thing will happen to his comedy albums and television specials. They will go down the Orwellian "memory hole," ne'er to be seen again.
When Cosby was initially accused of these crimes a few years ago, I wrote a blog about the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which would formally obliterate the name of a disgraced person from the public record: coins bearing his face would be melted down and restruck, statues defaced or beheaded, plaques and plinths vandalized, scrolls burned. Barring a miraculous reversal on appeal, the same fate awaits Cosby, in a modernized form. The father figure of all father figures has been toppled, his crown vacated, and in his place is -- who?
Modern television is not the place for father figures or even generic role models. We live in a deeply cynical age in which there are almost no television or cinematic heroes, only deeply flawed protagonists, and even a squeaky-clean, Dudley Doorite character like Superman is presented as brooding, edgy, and "troubled." Thus, make-believe father figures of the sort epitomized by Dr. Huxtable are rather hard to come by, and even when they do exist -- Sam Elliot's Beau Bennett on The Ranch comes to mind -- they are often presented as charming but anachronistic; relics of a bygone era, to be humored as much as respected. This is unutterably depressing, but I take a certain amount of heart in what might be called Fatherhood Row: my own personal stash of first-class cinematic father figures.
One one of the first television dads I encountered and fell in love with was Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), the commanding officer of the 4077 mobile army surgical hospital, better known to millions of Americans as M*A*S*H. Potter was a crusty, hot-tempered ex-cavalryman with a passion for poker, whiskey, cigars, his mare Sophie, and his unseen wife Mildred. He was also a first-class battle surgeon who'd been through three wars and only wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Nevertheless, Potter tackled the awesome responsibility of wrangling a crew of drunken surgeons, homesick nurses and highly reluctant draftee soldiers through yet another war like an absolute pro. He was a tough little customer who could rip you a new one faster than you could salute, but he had a soft, compassionate, unfailingly loyal side that was utterly endearing and made you willing to go to hell and back for the man: he wasn't afraid of his own tears. He had plenty of formal schooling, but his wisdom came from often bitter experience: a long career in the Army, a lot of carnage, a lot of heartbreak. Of course, he wasn't actually a "father" to any of his troops, but they looked on him as one and he knew it and accepted it, even if he did admit it was a "bit of a pain in the ass."
Not many people are too familiar with Friday the 13th: The Series, a Toronto-based horror episodic which ran from 1987 - 1990, but in addition to being enormously influential on later TV shows, it also produced a fine father figure in Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins). Friday was the story of an antique shop whose inventory had been cursed by the devil and whose new owners took it upon themselves to recover all previously sold items before the curses could wreak any more havoc. The owners, Micki and Ryan, were distant cousins who spent a lot of time fighting and the rest of it wondering whether their quest was worth the risk and the pain; it was wise, courageous, kindly old Jack who kept them on course. A bearded, burly teddy bear of a man, he had, like any good pop, an underlying toughness, but it was his ability to sum up situations, to balm painful wounds with some prosaic-yet-profound remark, and most importantly, to lose his cool when the situation required it, that made me love him.
No list of father figs would be complete without Anthony Stewart Head's Rupert Giles, better known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's long-suffering but resolute Watcher. There is no doubt in my mind that the Giles character is drawn partially from Marshak, but the two are as different as they are alike. Giles is fussy, pedantic, polite, and eminently English; he drinks tea, wears tweed and employs sarcasm like a saber; at the same time he has plenty of darkness in his nature and a bad-boy past which befits any good dad (you need to wander from the flock to appreciate the importance of a shepherd). He is often exasperated by his charge, the headstrong teenager Buffy, and on the whole can barely control her -- he is really more of an advisor than a boss, yet over the course of time she and her friends come to appreciate not only his book knowledge but his wisdom and courage, and more than that, his true role, which is patriarch of a de facto family.
Frasier ran for eleven hilarious years, and not one of those years would have been possible without the character of Martin Crane, more than ably played by John Mahoney. The premise of Frasier was actually quite simple -- a sort of "Odd Couple" story of an insufferable snob-psychiatrist forced to live with his irascible, beer-drinking father, a retired cop. In practice the show was genius, and part of that genius rested in the character of Marty Crane. Though barely educated compared to his two genius sons, and possessing about as much taste as your average habituate of Wal-Mart (his favorite object was a disgustingly ugly easy chair), his street knowledge and fatherly wisdom -- sometimes reinforced by a fatherly boot to the ass -- were the perfect counterpoint to Frasier's arrogance and Niles' pomposity. Marty Crane was every dad who couldn't say "I love you" and so tried to show it by taking you fishing. Even if you didn't want to go.
I like very few sit-coms, but the first three seasons of Good Times are as funny as anything I've ever seen on TV, and oddly enough, it was the least comedic of the characters that brought everything together: James Evans, the patriarch of the five-member Evans clan. Poor black Chicagoans living in a crummy project apartment in the 70s, the Evanses struggled against everything: poverty, unemployment, the oil crisis, racism, street violence, a worthless landlord -- you name it. Luckily the scary-as-hell James Evans was more than a match for it. A farmboy from Mississippi who dropped out of sixth grade, Evans had served in Korea and fathered three children with his beloved wife Florida, and believe me, those kids knew they had a dad. With his blazing glare, flaring nostrils and prizefighter's physique, a pissed-off James Evans was not to be fucked with. But he had more than an intimidating, ultra-masculine presence; he was hard-working, decent, and completely in love with his wife. What's more, he was willing to work two miserable jobs if it would give his kids a better life than he'd had. Whatever it takes to be considered a leader -- charisma, command presence, animal magnetism -- the Evans character had it in spades. I once met Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, and went nonverbal with awe. If I met Amos, I'd probably shit myself.
The last figure on my list is probably the most inaccessible, and therefore, in some perverse way, the most appealing. Jean-Luc Picard was captain of the fabled Enterprise (D) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike his predecessor, the two-fisted, quick-tempered, woman-devouring Captain Kirk, Picard was dry, austere, even remote; a thoughtful man and a consummate diplomat, he had enormous patience for insult and threat, resorted to violence only when unavoidable, and seldom dabbled in romance, finding passion a bit distasteful. He was in many ways a paragon of virtue, even a prig, and intimidating in the bargain, with his cold demeanor and icy stare; he ought to have been intolerable as a result. Yet is there any patriarchal figure in recent memory who evokes such feelings of loyalty and respect from his audience? Picard's secret lies partly in his inaccessibility -- everyone secretly wants to please the unpleasable -- but perhaps just as much in the flashes of vulnerability and humanity that he occasionally showed through the cracks in his armor. The fact that we knew that there was a sensitive, flawed human beneath all that virtue brought us closer to him; not close enough, but who is ever really close enough with their dad? That last unbridgeable distance between the commander and the commanded is a key element in the nature of father - children relationships. Even when we somehow graduate from son or daughter to friend and equal, we know, and we completely accept, that we are neither. We will never truly be their friend, and we will never (ever) be their equal. Nor, in our own secret hearts, do we truly want to be. And isn't that the essence of the appeal of the father figure? When we are lost at sea, we follow the North Star to safety; but even if we reach safety, we never reach the star. We emulate our fathers, but we have no real wish to exceed them. Hell, where would the fun be in that?
I suppose, like everyone else, I will now join in the hive-mind expulsion of Bill Cosby from my consciousness. He will become the punch-line of bad jokes, a cautionary tale, a movie with a stern moral people can hashtag and like. I will not even bother to reflect on the cruel irony of an eminent father figure who was, it seems, nothing but a charlatan-hypocrite of the very worst type. Yet if Cosby is already slipping into non-existence without any real regret or remorse on my part, there is a piece of me that will forever mourn the loss of Heathcliffe Huxtable. He wasn't the man Bill Cosby was, but he was the man Bill Cosby should have been.
April 11, 2018
Killing Time, or: A Free Short Story
A year and a half ago I published DEVILS YOU KNOW, a collection of short stories which I had written over a period of twenty-six years, i.e. between 1990 and 2016. In deciding what stories to include and what to leave out, I had to make some tough choices. I did not want DEVILS to be dominated by any one genre or sub-genre of fiction, but rather by the greater theme of how many ways the dark side of human nature can manifest itself in we troubled homo sapiens. Some of the stories were historical or dystopian fiction, others horror or comedy of the blackest type. And as I had already chosen two crime stories ("Pleas and Thank-Yous" and "Unfinished Business") I decided not to put in a third. As a result, the following story, "Killing Time," has never before seen the light of day. I've always considered that a shame, and since my work schedule has not allowed me to devote the time I wish to this blog of late -- it's supposed to be a weekly and has deteriorated into more of a monthly -- I decided this evening that, rather than do my taxes, I'd format the story and include it here for your reading pleasure (or pain). Those of you who have read my novel CAGE LIFE (or its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN) will recognize a character or two, but knowledge of those books is not necessary: this is a stand-alone story which exists in its own universe. In point of fact, for those of you who are interested in such things, this story predates my novels by a good dozen years or more. It was one of the seeds which ultimately lead me to quit my career in law-enforcement and begin writing full time. For that reason alone it will always have a special place in my heart. So read, enjoy, and feel no guilt that I blew off going to my accountant to entertain you for free. The taxes can wait. As Herman Wouk once remarked, for bad news there is always time.
We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"
He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.
"Are you sure?"
He hesitated.
"It's no thing," I said.
He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."
I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."
Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.
"Salud," I said.
He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.
“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.
He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.
"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”
He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.
"What'd you say?"
He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."
"Why?"
He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."
I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"
He shrugged, took another sip.
"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."
He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."
"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"
"Longer."
"That's a long fuckin' time."
"Yeah."
"An' you never saw it coming?"
"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"
"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."
He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."
Grunt.
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"
He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"
"Take the bottle."
He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."
"How?"
"Why you want to know?"
"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."
He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."
"Okay."
"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"
My eyebrows shot up.
"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.
"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'
"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"
He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.
"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."
"Handy."
"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."
"Ain't that some shit," I said.
He nodded.
"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."
"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.
"Yeah."
"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."
"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"
"Capitol."
"Or Columbia."
"Yeah."
"Tell me somethin' else," I said.
He leaned back on the couch.
"What happened with you an' Gino?"
I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."
"He's got an arm, all right."
"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"
"Save it."
We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."
"Maybe."
"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"
"I heard a gun go off."
"That ain't what I axed you."
"No. Okay? No."
He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."
He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.
"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."
The desk phone rang. We both jumped.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"
"He's here."
"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"
"No. I didn't--"
"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"
Click.
I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."
For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.
But that didn't make it any easier.
Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.
Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.
"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"
"As soon as I talked to you."
"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."
"Sorry, Gino."
"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.
I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"
"Hear what?"
"Is there a beef, or what?"
Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."
I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.
I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"
"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."
"You're not gonna--"
"No, I'm not. You are."
"Gino, I can't--"
"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."
"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."
"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"
"I can't, man. Please."
He looked at me in disgust.
"I just can't."
"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."
We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"
"Killing time," I said.
"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."
"Sorry, Gene."
He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."
"Pizza okay?"
"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."
Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.
I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.
But it never got any easier.
I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.
"It figures," I muttered.
"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."
"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."
We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"
He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.
"Are you sure?"
He hesitated.
"It's no thing," I said.
He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."
I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."
Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.
"Salud," I said.
He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.
“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.
He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.
"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”
He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.
"What'd you say?"
He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."
"Why?"
He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."
I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"
He shrugged, took another sip.
"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."
He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."
"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"
"Longer."
"That's a long fuckin' time."
"Yeah."
"An' you never saw it coming?"
"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"
"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."
He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."
Grunt.
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"
He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"
"Take the bottle."
He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."
"How?"
"Why you want to know?"
"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."
He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."
"Okay."
"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"
My eyebrows shot up.
"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.
"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'
"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"
He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.
"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."
"Handy."
"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."
"Ain't that some shit," I said.
He nodded.
"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."
"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.
"Yeah."
"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."
"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"
"Capitol."
"Or Columbia."
"Yeah."
"Tell me somethin' else," I said.
He leaned back on the couch.
"What happened with you an' Gino?"
I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."
"He's got an arm, all right."
"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"
"Save it."
We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."
"Maybe."
"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"
"I heard a gun go off."
"That ain't what I axed you."
"No. Okay? No."
He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."
He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.
"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."
The desk phone rang. We both jumped.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"
"He's here."
"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"
"No. I didn't--"
"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"
Click.
I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."
For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.
But that didn't make it any easier.
Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.
Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.
"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"
"As soon as I talked to you."
"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."
"Sorry, Gino."
"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.
I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"
"Hear what?"
"Is there a beef, or what?"
Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."
I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.
I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"
"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."
"You're not gonna--"
"No, I'm not. You are."
"Gino, I can't--"
"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."
"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."
"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"
"I can't, man. Please."
He looked at me in disgust.
"I just can't."
"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."
We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"
"Killing time," I said.
"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."
"Sorry, Gene."
He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."
"Pizza okay?"
"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."
Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.
I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.
But it never got any easier.
I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.
"It figures," I muttered.
"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."
"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."
March 24, 2018
Just Bleed: or, Thoughts on the Dead Man in the Rain
You bleed just to know you're alive.
-- The Goo Goo Dolls
The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.
So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.
I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?
I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.
My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.
When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.
Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?
I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.
And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.
It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.
My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.
When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.
When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.
I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.
I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:
Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is
-- The Goo Goo Dolls
The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.
So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.
I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?
I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.
My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.
When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.
Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?
I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.
And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.
It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.
My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.
When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.
When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.
I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.
I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:
Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is
March 4, 2018
VOICES OF THE DAMNED
I'm a student of human moves.
-- Fast Eddie Felson
We have such sights to show you.
-- The Hell Priest
People have always fascinated me -- who they are, what they are, and why they do the things they do. I suppose any writer worth his salt is similarly fascinated. Writers, after all, traffic in human beings both real and imagined. They are our stock-in-trade. In order for our subjects and characters to rise off the page and take three-dimensional shape in the readers' mind, we must nurse the conceit that we understand human nature to a degree which the ordinary person does not. We must make this conceit part of who we are, and never shy away from it or apologize for it. It takes a certain arrogance to be a surgeon or a fighter pilot, and it takes a not totally dissimilar arrogance to write about our fellow homo sapiens, because before we can begin, before we can set down a single word, we must first understand the motive causes of our characters. Who are these people? What drives them? What to they want? What to they love, what do they hate, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- what do they fear? If you can't answer that, or at least speculate in some detail, you've no business writing about people at all.
Now, it so happens that in my life I've had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary miscellany of human beings, from professional criminals to decorated law enforcement officers, from famous scientists to disgraced politicians, from A-list actors to D-list comedians, and everything in between. My father was the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, and that opened certain doors into the world of politics, intelligence and the military. I chose a career in law enforcement, which opened more doors, into the worlds of criminality, crime-fighting and social work, just to name a few. And later, of course, I became a cog in the Hollywood machine, which brought me (and still brings me) into contact with a staggering variety of characters from every walk of life and every background. Some are friends, some acquaintances, some people I met only once, in the back seats of Ubers or cabs or next to me on park benches or trains. At some point or other, I began to realize that many of these people had left marks on me -- their faces, and especially their voices, began to haunt me, as did the details of their life stories. From time to time I tapped into these recollections when creating fictional characters or situations for my books, but for the most part, I've hoarded them, collected them, kept them to myself. Recently, I got the idea that perhaps I ought to cull some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had into a play or a book. To test the waters, I've begun to write down the words that have been rattling around in my head, in some cases for decades, but to do so in a way that entirely preserved the anonymity of these confessionals. As part of that test, I'm adducing a few of the choicer monologues here, gathered over the last 20-odd years. All of them are real and not works of fiction or imagination, though I am going from memory in these particular examples and not from transcripts or recordings. In some cases, too, they are syntheses of more than one person in the same profession. In any case, they are but a sample of the human menagerie which exists within my head, and much of what they say may offend, shock, or bewilder. But as the saying goes -- people: what can you do?
THE HOOKER: When they busted me it was such a fucking joke. I mean, there I was in this motel, doing it with this guy, and after we finished he left, I had no more appointments, so I cleaned up and packed my things and left. And they arrested me in the parking lot. They didn't hassle my client. He just drove away. But they got me and took me in. I denied everything, but they told me don't waste my time, they had been in the next room listening. I was like, “Did you enjoy yourselves?” I was so angry. I mean, people are out there getting raped and murdered, gangs are selling drugs in schoolyards – I've got two kids, mind you – and like, there's the Mafia and terrorists and everything, and you've got four cops in a hotel room with a spike mike in the wall listening to me fake it. And they acted like they were heroes making the streets safer and I was this disgusting piece of trash who had to be stopped. Come on. What a fucking joke. It's my body, why can't I do what I want with it? Athletes sell their bodies, why can't I? If there weren't a demand for pussy, men wouldn't pay for it. So I had to go to court and plead guilty and it was so humiliating because all that stuff ends up in the papers, but it was bullshit, too, because all the guys are looking me up and down, even the judge, and I know damn well some of them would have been very happy to get me in bed and would have paid to do it, too. Come to think of it, I should have handed out business cards.
THE OLD MAN: I tell you what, this neighborhood has gone straight to hell. I've lived here all my life, which is a long time now, longer than I care to remember, really, and I tell you, this used to be a great place to live. Where that electronics store used to be was a livery stable, and we'd go rent a couple of horses and ride all the way to downtown Los Angeles. We'd tie up the horses outside a bar and have a couple of beers and then ride back up the Cahuenga Pass. And that whole time you wouldn't see more than a few cars. Not like today, when it's just bumper-to-bumper all day every day, even on Sundays. In those days, when I was a kid, I tell you, things were so different. This town was really more like the West. Everything was flat and dusty and hot and spread out. Orange groves here. Lemon groves there. We had a hundred acres out here, grew grapes and some other fruits that certain races of people like to eat. I drove around in my daddy's pickup with a shotgun to make sure nobody trespassed. Used to fire over their heads – once I found people using our barbeque and our picnic tables and I let 'em have it. They ran like the devil. People are shocked when I tell 'em that now. But things were different, people were different. Guns were a part of who we were. My friend Charlie was a cop, and he wouldn't take off his pistol for anything, no way. When he got married he got out of the car in his tux and his service revolver just fell plumb out of his cummerbund and hit the pavement right there in front of everybody. I said, “Charlie, for God's sake, let me have the gun.” And he said no, and we had a big argument right there outside the church, and the upshot of it was I carried his gun during the ceremony but he got it right back afterwards when he was climbing back into the car to take him to his honeymoon. He never did stop carrying that gun, but it didn't do him no damn good because he died of spinal meningitis.
THE CABBIE: You what really gets me? American Jews. I don't understand them. I'm Israeli – you can probably tell from my accent. I understand Israelis because we're all hustlers, you know, animals. We like to party. We're not religious. We just know we're Jews. But these American Jews, I don't get at all. They are all so into being Jewish. It's like a religion to them – not Judaism, being Jewish. Like they feel guilty for not living in Israel so they want to show us how Jewish they are, how they keep kosher, how they go to synagogue, how they raise money for kibbutzim and shit. When I meet one they always tell me how much they support Israel. I say, “If you want to support Israel, move there. We could use your money.” Shit, if every Jew in America moved to Israel the Arabs would never get rid of us. We'd have five million more people and we wouldn't need your “support,” because we'd have your money and your kids for the army. I was in the army and I'm a woman. In Israel, everyone goes into the army except the ultra-Orthodox, and you can have them. Worthless. All they do is procreate and pray. Of course I left Israel years ago. Went to Europe, and now here. I like America. There are so many different kinds of people here. I don't think I'll move back. I'll be an American and a Jew. But I'll never be an American Jew.
THE MARINE: Once, in Iraq, we flew out to where the insurgents had gotten hold of a whole bunch of police officer candidates, you know, the guys we were training to be cops for the new government. The insurgents had taken them out into the desert and tied their wrists together with barbed wire and made them kneel down in the sand and shot them in the back of the head. We found fifty of them like that. Made 'em take off their clothes – except their underwear, the Arabs are weird about nudity – and just killed them. And that was like, a common thing. We were always finding bodies, ten, twenty, thirty bodies. All men. Never any women. Sometimes they'd cut the heads off and sometimes they'd just shoot them. It made you wonder how desperate people must be to want to join the police force or the army, that they'd risk getting their fucking heads cut off. What a fucking country. Being in a place like that makes you pretty hard. Otherwise you'll lose it. Like, I was a sergeant and these new guys – we called them nuggets – they'd arrive at the base, and the first thing I'd do was say, “Nuggets, go clean out the fucking helicopter.” Well, we'd lost a gunner the day before and there was blood and brains everywhere and these poor nuggets are puking while they're scrubbing. We found that funny. We did a lot of sick shit like that. Funny thing, at Christmastime we'd get cases and cases of candy canes from back home, and the fucking hajis hated the sight of those things. They knew that candy canes meant Christmas and Christmas is Christian, and they fucking hate Christians. So we'd fly over their villages and dump candy canes on them – thousands and thousands of candy canes – and they'd run out and shake their fists at us and stomp them. We always got a good laugh out of that.
THE HOOKER: It's so frustrating, the way life works. I spent years building up a clientele. I had two houses. I had $50,000 in the bank. A boyfriend that was very supportive. One of my regulars was a CPA and he handled my books – not for free, but you know, we worked something out. Then I got in my accident. Somebody ran a red light and T-boned my car. My back was all messed up. I was out of commission for months. Then I needed surgery – two surgeries, actually. And my line of work doesn't come with health insurance. Everything was out of pocket. By the time the smoke cleared I was living in an apartment again. Savings gone. I used to see 4 – 5 clients a day. Now I see 4 – 5 clients a week. Okay, I'm not as young as I was, and I can't work out the way I used to because of my back, but I've still got this face and these tits, so what's the big deal? But people just move on. I wasn't answering the phone so they moved on. I e-mailed them and told them I was back in business but nobody came back. Not many, anyway. There's no loyalty. Now I have to get a regular job. I have to start sending out resumes. But what the hell am I supposed to put on them?
THE OLD MAN: Guns aren't the problem. I was handling my dad's guns when I was twelve. His shotgun. But he also bought me a .22 bolt-action. Hell, we needed guns then, growing up in the desert. My older brother heard hell breaking loose in our yard one night, the horses screaming, and he went out with his rifle and saw what he thought was a dog out there. He thought it was our neighbor's dog got loose, maybe, so he didn't fire; but it turned out it was a goddamned mountain lion. Messed one of the horses up pretty good. And there were rattlers, too. You had to shoot 'em if you were on horseback. Everyone had a gun back then, but nobody shot anybody. You hear about this big shooting, that big shooting, and everyone blames the guns. OK, so maybe a man doesn't need an AR-15 or whatever, but why blame the gun when it's a man who pulls the trigger? Problem is nobody's afraid of consequences anymore. You kill 30 people, they send you to jail and the taxpayer gets to foot the bill for your food and clothes and medical care. Why should you be afraid? String 'em up from trees, the way we used to, and you won't have that problem anymore. Hell, I can remember when they broadcast executions on the radio.
THE MARINE: The frustrating thing was the rules, really. We knew who the bad guys were but the rules were so fucking strict, and you had these candy asses calling the shots. It got people killed. One day we saw this pickup cruising along, and we had the grunts stop it, and it was full of hajis, including some wanted guys, but the lieutenant wouldn't pull the trigger. He couldn't get clearance and he ordered us to let them go. Well, they rigged the road with IED's, and the next day they blew the fuck out of one of our patrols. You want to talk bitter. We could have wasted every one of those fuckers. We should have. But that's not always the way it works. But sometimes it does. Can I tell you about the night I killed eight people? I won't. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't want to be one of those guys that everybody things is lying. Like, my grandfather always used to say that the guys who really saw the shit in WW2 never said a word, but the fakers wouldn't shut up about it. He was right. I was in a bar not long after I got back, and I'm telling my brother-in-law about Iraq, and this dumpy little guy in Coke-bottle glasses comes over and says, real loud, “Oh, you were over there too, huh? I'm with the CIA. I was hunting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” And I'm like, Sure you were, kitten. It's so fucking sad the way people lie about stuff like that, because it just cheapens it for all of us who really were over there doing the dirty work.
THE COP: I was a week on the job the first time I got shot at. A sniper. We were under a railroad bridge when he opened up on us. People always ask, What did you do? Well, what the fuck do you think I did? I ran. Me and my partner. I guess if it were TV show we'd have shot back, called for backup, the whole nine yards. Life isn't a TV show. We ran. We lived. A week after that, I got called to a housing project because of a stabbing. Black woman was lying there bleeding out from a wound to a leg. Femoral artery, I'm sure. I hauled ass over to her and tried to get a tourniquet around her leg, and you know what happened? All the people above me in the building started throwing shit at me. I don't mean rotten eggs. I mean like potted plants and bricks and shit. There I am, trying to save this woman's life, and they're trying to kill me. It was the damndest thing. They kept driving me off and I kept going back. They didn't do it because I was white. They did it because I was cop. Being white didn't help though. I remember once we were patting down some gangbangers outside the project and this one loudmouth kid, this troublemaker, he came over and started giving us shit. He was already in a cast because some cop had beaten his ass a couple of weeks before, and his family was suing the city. He just walked over and got in our faces. Big mistake. There was a guy I was working with, big guy, he says, “Shut your fucking mouth, nigger,” and blasts the guy right in his mouth. The kid fell off the curb and broke his leg. Broke his leg! He already had a broken arm! I just put my head in my hands. That's another lawsuit and please God I don't get subpoenaed to testify. I don't want to work with people like that. I mean, you can call 'em savages but not niggers. That's wrong.
THE ACTRESS: Sometimes it's the good things that hurt you the worst. The things you wait for. That you hope and pray for. I worked on this one show for Nickelodeon as an extra and I got to know the crew pretty well. I'd laugh and joke around with them, and they got to liking me. I never hassled the cast, of course; you can't talk to them when you're an extra, but the crew was different, we were all in the same boat. I'd stand at Craft Services, eating, and kid around with them. So I always got asked back. But of course nobody comes to Hollywood to be an extra. I wanted to act. And one day I'm at my barista job, slinging java, and I get a call from my agent saying they have a part for me. A recurring character. Still a very small part, but I'd be part of this clique of bitchy high school girls, kind of sidekicks to the queen bee bitch, and I'd get a line or two here or there, and it would pay a thousand dollars for the first episode. Same money for any subsequent appearances, and more if I got lines. I was over the moon. This is how you get in the door. Look at Mercedes McNabb, for God's sake: she had years of work off the same kind of role on Buffy. Or the guys who played the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. They came in as day players and got nine years' work out of it. So I asked my boss for the time off to shoot the episode and he said, “As long as you can find somebody to cover your shift, you can do it, otherwise, no.” And I asked everybody. I mean everybody. And they all said no. Every single fucking one of them. I think it was jealousy. We were all in the trenches together, all “aspiring” to be something, and as long as we were all at the bottom we were all bestest buddies. But now I had a chance to take that first rung on the ladder, and boom, out came the claws. It was horrible. It finally came to the point where I had to decide between taking the part and losing my job. But I couldn't afford to lose my job for a thousand dollar payday with no guarantee of other work. I mean, this is L.A., for crissake; a thousand dollars won't even cover one month's rent. What could I do? I passed on the role, went home, and cried myself to sleep.
THE COP: You've got to be fucking crazy to be a cop and put up with all that shit. And we were. We'd get drunk and play bumper cars. Just smash around the streets, hitting each other, hitting parked cars, late at night. We'd get pulled over and flash our tin and the cops would just let us go. They knew we were just blowing off steam. But I was never a hypocrite about it. Once I came up to this car at a green light, and it wasn't moving. I waited two cycles and then hit my siren and lights. Nothing. I got out and found a black kid at the wheel, passed out cold. Drunk. I woke him up. He was underage and scared shitless. I said, “Kid, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive this car home at exactly five miles an hour. I am going to follow you. If you hit anyone, if you hit anything, I'm arresting you for DUI. If you make it home safe, you're off the hook.” That poor kid, I don't think he even touched the pedal on his way home. When he finally parked the car I said, “Give me the keys, then go in and go to sleep. Tomorrow come to the station and ask for me, and you'll get the keys back.” When people ask me why I did that I say, “I've driven drunk a thousand times, how can I lock up someone else for it and look myself in the mirror?”
THE BOXER: People ask me, “Would you let your son become a boxer?” I say, “Would you let yours?” And when they say, “No!” – and they always say, “No!” – I say, “Well, you have your answer.” The truth is, I didn't want to turn pro. My style was perfect for the amateurs, but professional boxing is a totally different sport. Being a great amateur doesn't mean you'll pan out as a pro. There's a lot of Olympic gold medalists who washed out in the pros. Look at Henry Tillman. Look at Andrew Maynard. Look at Herbert Runge, for God's sake. I know the history, man. But my father, he had his heart set on me getting there. He wanted me to be the thing he never was, I guess. But it's a hard, hard life. And it's not natural. God gave us this head to think with, not to use as a motherfucking punching bag. People are always surprised by how easily I get upset watching a boxing match. That's because the the things they want to see are not the things I want to see. I can appreciate the technique, the artistry. I can't appreciate one dude beating on another like a fucking slab of meat. You wouldn't either, if you'd ever been knocked out.
THE OLD MAN: It's not just the things that were different, it's people. People understood what community was. Not like now, when everything's so selfish. That's the right word. Selfish. Nobody cares about anyone else. Hell, I'll tell you a story. Lockheed used to have a plant up the way, made P-38 Lightnings or something during the war. And they had a test field here, where the commercial airport is now. One day, I guess maybe this was in the late 1950s, I saw a plane zooming around overhead, which was nothing new, but this one was at treetop level. Like in Korea, the fliers used to do this thing called a Nape Scrape, where they'd fly so low to avoid ground fire they was practically dragging their bellies on the deck? That's what this fella was doing and I knew something was wrong, because even a test pilot don't do that in a residential neighborhood. Well, he zoomed over the houses and crashed into the gravel pit over there – it used to be over there, but I guess that's where the mall is now. Killed the pilot. Well, they had an investigation and it turned out his engine went bad and he had to make a decision – go toward the field down the way, and maybe live, but risk a whole lotta lives, or crash into the pit right here and die, but save everybody else. He chose to crash. Think about that. If he'd made for the field he might still be alive. But he didn't think he had the right to risk a bunch of folks for the chance of saving his own ass. So he gave up his life just like that, for people he didn't even know. People used to be like that, you know. They understood community. They understood they weren't nothing but leaves on a tree: they'd have their time, and then they'd go, but the tree would always be here. But nobody cares about the tree today. And that, my friend, is why the tree is dying.
-- Fast Eddie Felson
We have such sights to show you.
-- The Hell Priest
People have always fascinated me -- who they are, what they are, and why they do the things they do. I suppose any writer worth his salt is similarly fascinated. Writers, after all, traffic in human beings both real and imagined. They are our stock-in-trade. In order for our subjects and characters to rise off the page and take three-dimensional shape in the readers' mind, we must nurse the conceit that we understand human nature to a degree which the ordinary person does not. We must make this conceit part of who we are, and never shy away from it or apologize for it. It takes a certain arrogance to be a surgeon or a fighter pilot, and it takes a not totally dissimilar arrogance to write about our fellow homo sapiens, because before we can begin, before we can set down a single word, we must first understand the motive causes of our characters. Who are these people? What drives them? What to they want? What to they love, what do they hate, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- what do they fear? If you can't answer that, or at least speculate in some detail, you've no business writing about people at all.
Now, it so happens that in my life I've had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary miscellany of human beings, from professional criminals to decorated law enforcement officers, from famous scientists to disgraced politicians, from A-list actors to D-list comedians, and everything in between. My father was the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, and that opened certain doors into the world of politics, intelligence and the military. I chose a career in law enforcement, which opened more doors, into the worlds of criminality, crime-fighting and social work, just to name a few. And later, of course, I became a cog in the Hollywood machine, which brought me (and still brings me) into contact with a staggering variety of characters from every walk of life and every background. Some are friends, some acquaintances, some people I met only once, in the back seats of Ubers or cabs or next to me on park benches or trains. At some point or other, I began to realize that many of these people had left marks on me -- their faces, and especially their voices, began to haunt me, as did the details of their life stories. From time to time I tapped into these recollections when creating fictional characters or situations for my books, but for the most part, I've hoarded them, collected them, kept them to myself. Recently, I got the idea that perhaps I ought to cull some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had into a play or a book. To test the waters, I've begun to write down the words that have been rattling around in my head, in some cases for decades, but to do so in a way that entirely preserved the anonymity of these confessionals. As part of that test, I'm adducing a few of the choicer monologues here, gathered over the last 20-odd years. All of them are real and not works of fiction or imagination, though I am going from memory in these particular examples and not from transcripts or recordings. In some cases, too, they are syntheses of more than one person in the same profession. In any case, they are but a sample of the human menagerie which exists within my head, and much of what they say may offend, shock, or bewilder. But as the saying goes -- people: what can you do?
THE HOOKER: When they busted me it was such a fucking joke. I mean, there I was in this motel, doing it with this guy, and after we finished he left, I had no more appointments, so I cleaned up and packed my things and left. And they arrested me in the parking lot. They didn't hassle my client. He just drove away. But they got me and took me in. I denied everything, but they told me don't waste my time, they had been in the next room listening. I was like, “Did you enjoy yourselves?” I was so angry. I mean, people are out there getting raped and murdered, gangs are selling drugs in schoolyards – I've got two kids, mind you – and like, there's the Mafia and terrorists and everything, and you've got four cops in a hotel room with a spike mike in the wall listening to me fake it. And they acted like they were heroes making the streets safer and I was this disgusting piece of trash who had to be stopped. Come on. What a fucking joke. It's my body, why can't I do what I want with it? Athletes sell their bodies, why can't I? If there weren't a demand for pussy, men wouldn't pay for it. So I had to go to court and plead guilty and it was so humiliating because all that stuff ends up in the papers, but it was bullshit, too, because all the guys are looking me up and down, even the judge, and I know damn well some of them would have been very happy to get me in bed and would have paid to do it, too. Come to think of it, I should have handed out business cards.
THE OLD MAN: I tell you what, this neighborhood has gone straight to hell. I've lived here all my life, which is a long time now, longer than I care to remember, really, and I tell you, this used to be a great place to live. Where that electronics store used to be was a livery stable, and we'd go rent a couple of horses and ride all the way to downtown Los Angeles. We'd tie up the horses outside a bar and have a couple of beers and then ride back up the Cahuenga Pass. And that whole time you wouldn't see more than a few cars. Not like today, when it's just bumper-to-bumper all day every day, even on Sundays. In those days, when I was a kid, I tell you, things were so different. This town was really more like the West. Everything was flat and dusty and hot and spread out. Orange groves here. Lemon groves there. We had a hundred acres out here, grew grapes and some other fruits that certain races of people like to eat. I drove around in my daddy's pickup with a shotgun to make sure nobody trespassed. Used to fire over their heads – once I found people using our barbeque and our picnic tables and I let 'em have it. They ran like the devil. People are shocked when I tell 'em that now. But things were different, people were different. Guns were a part of who we were. My friend Charlie was a cop, and he wouldn't take off his pistol for anything, no way. When he got married he got out of the car in his tux and his service revolver just fell plumb out of his cummerbund and hit the pavement right there in front of everybody. I said, “Charlie, for God's sake, let me have the gun.” And he said no, and we had a big argument right there outside the church, and the upshot of it was I carried his gun during the ceremony but he got it right back afterwards when he was climbing back into the car to take him to his honeymoon. He never did stop carrying that gun, but it didn't do him no damn good because he died of spinal meningitis.
THE CABBIE: You what really gets me? American Jews. I don't understand them. I'm Israeli – you can probably tell from my accent. I understand Israelis because we're all hustlers, you know, animals. We like to party. We're not religious. We just know we're Jews. But these American Jews, I don't get at all. They are all so into being Jewish. It's like a religion to them – not Judaism, being Jewish. Like they feel guilty for not living in Israel so they want to show us how Jewish they are, how they keep kosher, how they go to synagogue, how they raise money for kibbutzim and shit. When I meet one they always tell me how much they support Israel. I say, “If you want to support Israel, move there. We could use your money.” Shit, if every Jew in America moved to Israel the Arabs would never get rid of us. We'd have five million more people and we wouldn't need your “support,” because we'd have your money and your kids for the army. I was in the army and I'm a woman. In Israel, everyone goes into the army except the ultra-Orthodox, and you can have them. Worthless. All they do is procreate and pray. Of course I left Israel years ago. Went to Europe, and now here. I like America. There are so many different kinds of people here. I don't think I'll move back. I'll be an American and a Jew. But I'll never be an American Jew.
THE MARINE: Once, in Iraq, we flew out to where the insurgents had gotten hold of a whole bunch of police officer candidates, you know, the guys we were training to be cops for the new government. The insurgents had taken them out into the desert and tied their wrists together with barbed wire and made them kneel down in the sand and shot them in the back of the head. We found fifty of them like that. Made 'em take off their clothes – except their underwear, the Arabs are weird about nudity – and just killed them. And that was like, a common thing. We were always finding bodies, ten, twenty, thirty bodies. All men. Never any women. Sometimes they'd cut the heads off and sometimes they'd just shoot them. It made you wonder how desperate people must be to want to join the police force or the army, that they'd risk getting their fucking heads cut off. What a fucking country. Being in a place like that makes you pretty hard. Otherwise you'll lose it. Like, I was a sergeant and these new guys – we called them nuggets – they'd arrive at the base, and the first thing I'd do was say, “Nuggets, go clean out the fucking helicopter.” Well, we'd lost a gunner the day before and there was blood and brains everywhere and these poor nuggets are puking while they're scrubbing. We found that funny. We did a lot of sick shit like that. Funny thing, at Christmastime we'd get cases and cases of candy canes from back home, and the fucking hajis hated the sight of those things. They knew that candy canes meant Christmas and Christmas is Christian, and they fucking hate Christians. So we'd fly over their villages and dump candy canes on them – thousands and thousands of candy canes – and they'd run out and shake their fists at us and stomp them. We always got a good laugh out of that.
THE HOOKER: It's so frustrating, the way life works. I spent years building up a clientele. I had two houses. I had $50,000 in the bank. A boyfriend that was very supportive. One of my regulars was a CPA and he handled my books – not for free, but you know, we worked something out. Then I got in my accident. Somebody ran a red light and T-boned my car. My back was all messed up. I was out of commission for months. Then I needed surgery – two surgeries, actually. And my line of work doesn't come with health insurance. Everything was out of pocket. By the time the smoke cleared I was living in an apartment again. Savings gone. I used to see 4 – 5 clients a day. Now I see 4 – 5 clients a week. Okay, I'm not as young as I was, and I can't work out the way I used to because of my back, but I've still got this face and these tits, so what's the big deal? But people just move on. I wasn't answering the phone so they moved on. I e-mailed them and told them I was back in business but nobody came back. Not many, anyway. There's no loyalty. Now I have to get a regular job. I have to start sending out resumes. But what the hell am I supposed to put on them?
THE OLD MAN: Guns aren't the problem. I was handling my dad's guns when I was twelve. His shotgun. But he also bought me a .22 bolt-action. Hell, we needed guns then, growing up in the desert. My older brother heard hell breaking loose in our yard one night, the horses screaming, and he went out with his rifle and saw what he thought was a dog out there. He thought it was our neighbor's dog got loose, maybe, so he didn't fire; but it turned out it was a goddamned mountain lion. Messed one of the horses up pretty good. And there were rattlers, too. You had to shoot 'em if you were on horseback. Everyone had a gun back then, but nobody shot anybody. You hear about this big shooting, that big shooting, and everyone blames the guns. OK, so maybe a man doesn't need an AR-15 or whatever, but why blame the gun when it's a man who pulls the trigger? Problem is nobody's afraid of consequences anymore. You kill 30 people, they send you to jail and the taxpayer gets to foot the bill for your food and clothes and medical care. Why should you be afraid? String 'em up from trees, the way we used to, and you won't have that problem anymore. Hell, I can remember when they broadcast executions on the radio.
THE MARINE: The frustrating thing was the rules, really. We knew who the bad guys were but the rules were so fucking strict, and you had these candy asses calling the shots. It got people killed. One day we saw this pickup cruising along, and we had the grunts stop it, and it was full of hajis, including some wanted guys, but the lieutenant wouldn't pull the trigger. He couldn't get clearance and he ordered us to let them go. Well, they rigged the road with IED's, and the next day they blew the fuck out of one of our patrols. You want to talk bitter. We could have wasted every one of those fuckers. We should have. But that's not always the way it works. But sometimes it does. Can I tell you about the night I killed eight people? I won't. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't want to be one of those guys that everybody things is lying. Like, my grandfather always used to say that the guys who really saw the shit in WW2 never said a word, but the fakers wouldn't shut up about it. He was right. I was in a bar not long after I got back, and I'm telling my brother-in-law about Iraq, and this dumpy little guy in Coke-bottle glasses comes over and says, real loud, “Oh, you were over there too, huh? I'm with the CIA. I was hunting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” And I'm like, Sure you were, kitten. It's so fucking sad the way people lie about stuff like that, because it just cheapens it for all of us who really were over there doing the dirty work.
THE COP: I was a week on the job the first time I got shot at. A sniper. We were under a railroad bridge when he opened up on us. People always ask, What did you do? Well, what the fuck do you think I did? I ran. Me and my partner. I guess if it were TV show we'd have shot back, called for backup, the whole nine yards. Life isn't a TV show. We ran. We lived. A week after that, I got called to a housing project because of a stabbing. Black woman was lying there bleeding out from a wound to a leg. Femoral artery, I'm sure. I hauled ass over to her and tried to get a tourniquet around her leg, and you know what happened? All the people above me in the building started throwing shit at me. I don't mean rotten eggs. I mean like potted plants and bricks and shit. There I am, trying to save this woman's life, and they're trying to kill me. It was the damndest thing. They kept driving me off and I kept going back. They didn't do it because I was white. They did it because I was cop. Being white didn't help though. I remember once we were patting down some gangbangers outside the project and this one loudmouth kid, this troublemaker, he came over and started giving us shit. He was already in a cast because some cop had beaten his ass a couple of weeks before, and his family was suing the city. He just walked over and got in our faces. Big mistake. There was a guy I was working with, big guy, he says, “Shut your fucking mouth, nigger,” and blasts the guy right in his mouth. The kid fell off the curb and broke his leg. Broke his leg! He already had a broken arm! I just put my head in my hands. That's another lawsuit and please God I don't get subpoenaed to testify. I don't want to work with people like that. I mean, you can call 'em savages but not niggers. That's wrong.
THE ACTRESS: Sometimes it's the good things that hurt you the worst. The things you wait for. That you hope and pray for. I worked on this one show for Nickelodeon as an extra and I got to know the crew pretty well. I'd laugh and joke around with them, and they got to liking me. I never hassled the cast, of course; you can't talk to them when you're an extra, but the crew was different, we were all in the same boat. I'd stand at Craft Services, eating, and kid around with them. So I always got asked back. But of course nobody comes to Hollywood to be an extra. I wanted to act. And one day I'm at my barista job, slinging java, and I get a call from my agent saying they have a part for me. A recurring character. Still a very small part, but I'd be part of this clique of bitchy high school girls, kind of sidekicks to the queen bee bitch, and I'd get a line or two here or there, and it would pay a thousand dollars for the first episode. Same money for any subsequent appearances, and more if I got lines. I was over the moon. This is how you get in the door. Look at Mercedes McNabb, for God's sake: she had years of work off the same kind of role on Buffy. Or the guys who played the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. They came in as day players and got nine years' work out of it. So I asked my boss for the time off to shoot the episode and he said, “As long as you can find somebody to cover your shift, you can do it, otherwise, no.” And I asked everybody. I mean everybody. And they all said no. Every single fucking one of them. I think it was jealousy. We were all in the trenches together, all “aspiring” to be something, and as long as we were all at the bottom we were all bestest buddies. But now I had a chance to take that first rung on the ladder, and boom, out came the claws. It was horrible. It finally came to the point where I had to decide between taking the part and losing my job. But I couldn't afford to lose my job for a thousand dollar payday with no guarantee of other work. I mean, this is L.A., for crissake; a thousand dollars won't even cover one month's rent. What could I do? I passed on the role, went home, and cried myself to sleep.
THE COP: You've got to be fucking crazy to be a cop and put up with all that shit. And we were. We'd get drunk and play bumper cars. Just smash around the streets, hitting each other, hitting parked cars, late at night. We'd get pulled over and flash our tin and the cops would just let us go. They knew we were just blowing off steam. But I was never a hypocrite about it. Once I came up to this car at a green light, and it wasn't moving. I waited two cycles and then hit my siren and lights. Nothing. I got out and found a black kid at the wheel, passed out cold. Drunk. I woke him up. He was underage and scared shitless. I said, “Kid, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive this car home at exactly five miles an hour. I am going to follow you. If you hit anyone, if you hit anything, I'm arresting you for DUI. If you make it home safe, you're off the hook.” That poor kid, I don't think he even touched the pedal on his way home. When he finally parked the car I said, “Give me the keys, then go in and go to sleep. Tomorrow come to the station and ask for me, and you'll get the keys back.” When people ask me why I did that I say, “I've driven drunk a thousand times, how can I lock up someone else for it and look myself in the mirror?”
THE BOXER: People ask me, “Would you let your son become a boxer?” I say, “Would you let yours?” And when they say, “No!” – and they always say, “No!” – I say, “Well, you have your answer.” The truth is, I didn't want to turn pro. My style was perfect for the amateurs, but professional boxing is a totally different sport. Being a great amateur doesn't mean you'll pan out as a pro. There's a lot of Olympic gold medalists who washed out in the pros. Look at Henry Tillman. Look at Andrew Maynard. Look at Herbert Runge, for God's sake. I know the history, man. But my father, he had his heart set on me getting there. He wanted me to be the thing he never was, I guess. But it's a hard, hard life. And it's not natural. God gave us this head to think with, not to use as a motherfucking punching bag. People are always surprised by how easily I get upset watching a boxing match. That's because the the things they want to see are not the things I want to see. I can appreciate the technique, the artistry. I can't appreciate one dude beating on another like a fucking slab of meat. You wouldn't either, if you'd ever been knocked out.
THE OLD MAN: It's not just the things that were different, it's people. People understood what community was. Not like now, when everything's so selfish. That's the right word. Selfish. Nobody cares about anyone else. Hell, I'll tell you a story. Lockheed used to have a plant up the way, made P-38 Lightnings or something during the war. And they had a test field here, where the commercial airport is now. One day, I guess maybe this was in the late 1950s, I saw a plane zooming around overhead, which was nothing new, but this one was at treetop level. Like in Korea, the fliers used to do this thing called a Nape Scrape, where they'd fly so low to avoid ground fire they was practically dragging their bellies on the deck? That's what this fella was doing and I knew something was wrong, because even a test pilot don't do that in a residential neighborhood. Well, he zoomed over the houses and crashed into the gravel pit over there – it used to be over there, but I guess that's where the mall is now. Killed the pilot. Well, they had an investigation and it turned out his engine went bad and he had to make a decision – go toward the field down the way, and maybe live, but risk a whole lotta lives, or crash into the pit right here and die, but save everybody else. He chose to crash. Think about that. If he'd made for the field he might still be alive. But he didn't think he had the right to risk a bunch of folks for the chance of saving his own ass. So he gave up his life just like that, for people he didn't even know. People used to be like that, you know. They understood community. They understood they weren't nothing but leaves on a tree: they'd have their time, and then they'd go, but the tree would always be here. But nobody cares about the tree today. And that, my friend, is why the tree is dying.
February 3, 2018
Candy Ass Kings, or: Welcome to the Tyranny of the Weak
In a healthy society, the weak copy the strong; in a decaying one, the strong adopt the methods of the weak.
--- axiom
I am once again interrupting my series on how to fix America, this time for the purposes of venting my spleen.
I must start by saying that as a rule, I dislike posting rants, for the simple reason that all that negativity poisons an online atmosphere which already dripping with the stuff: I much prefer silly-ass humor, or scholarly analysis, or random observations about life, or any other damn thing at all so long as it is constructive, to listening to somebody rave, or rave myself. But sometimes, goddamn it, you've got to -- in the words of Emperor Palpatine -- "Use your aggressive feelings...and let the hate flow through you." So, here comes my hate.
Like a lot of people, I live in two worlds. On the one hand, I am a former parole officer and district attorney investigator; I even worked in corrections for a time. I'm a black belt and not too shabby with a revolver or a shotgun, either. I lift weights, have several tattoos and read piles of books about war, crime and the Mafia. In college, I was in a fraternity and drank enough beer to kill a Tyrannosaurus.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fucking nerd.
This statement requires a little expansion. Those other things came later in life, but I was always a nerd. I started watching Star Trekin my highchair and never stopped. I saw Star Wars when I was five, triggering another obsession, and when I was eight years old my Mom introduced me to Dr. Who -- about three decades before most of the rest of America had ever heard of it. I loved the original Battlestar Galactica and owned enough Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia to fill a bookshelf (even today, I can occasionally still find twenty-sided dice in the corners of the house I grew up in). I owned (and still own) an Atari 400 and 800 XL computer before I ever heard of Nintendo, and I had troves of toys and comic books. These things were common enough in every childhood back in the 70s and 80s, but I continued my interest in them long after most of my friends and classmates had moved onto other interests -- sports, rock music, sneakers, clothes, girls. And even when I finally took an interest in such things, I retained my essential nerdiness. It has never gone away, nor would I ever wish it to.
Because of said condition, I have joined a number of fan groups on Facebook -- groups that celebrate and discuss various facets of nerd-dom, from Sherlock Holmes to Friday the 13th: The Series. One of them focuses on the original Star Trek, and it has been an enjoyable experience. It's always nice to commune with people that remind you that you're not alone in your nerdy obsessions. The other day I posted my thoughts about an episode called "This Side of Paradise," in which the redoubtable Mr. Spock falls victim to parasitic spores that cause his emotional controls to collapse. In these epistles I try very hard to be thoughtful and respectful, to listen to dissenting opinions carefully and, in general, to keep things in the positive spirit which this group, and others like it, represent. My post, which concentrated on the writing and the acting, was extremely well-received; only one person took it upon himself to make trouble. He was offended, you see, because I hadn't "understood the anti-religious implications" of the spores. In his mind, their intoxicating effect represented organized religion, which offered a false and mindless "paradise" in which no advancement could take place, and which had to be destroyed by bringing people violently back to "reality." He went on to level several insults at religion and religious people generally. Several people took issue with his tone and general attitude, and the group's administrator stepped in immediately, which is what group admins are supposed to do in these circumstances; except that rather than admonish the troll, she shut down all commentary on the thread. Her evident reasoning was the troll's feelings might be hurt by others ganging-up on him for -- well, being a fucking troll. The fact that he had started everything with his needlessly combative and condescending attitude didn't matter. He felt offended, and he had voiced his grievance first, so everyone else had to be muzzled to please him.
This incident is obviously extremely trivial in and of itself, and I wouldn't mention it here, except that I feel it is part of a much larger problem besetting our society, to wit: people seem to think that the act of being offended grants them certain special rights. Say the magic words, "I'm offended!" and poof!, a shield forms around you, protecting you from any further words, symbols, facial expressions, etc. that might hurt your widdle feewings.
The most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is that in every case, the person who claimed to be offended first is the only one granted the benefit of these rights. In essence, it is like a gunfight in the Old West: whoever "draws" the "offended" card before the other wins. But the cultural effect of this nonsense is even worse than its cause. Because now, institutions -- schools, businesses, the government, and yes, even Facebook nerd-groups -- are so eager to slap special privilege on the offended that they no longer take into account the possible absurdity of the incident which supposedly caused offense. It is enough simply to experience a feeling of offense, regardless of its validity, and the whistle blows.
If we take my troll as an example, this is a person who was offended by the fact my take on an episode of a 50 year-old television program didn't correspond with his own. He took it upon himself to take me to task for this -- which he evidently had a right to do, because of the aforementioned special rights. At the same time, he was shielded by his rights from the counter-attacks launched by others on my behalf. The fact that he was alone in his opinion meant nothing to the conscientious admin. The entire commentary had to be shut down just to please him. The feelings of the others meant nothing.
Imagine a scenario in which a hundred people sit in a room at a comedy club. A joke is told by one person to the crowd, ninety-eight of which find funny. One person shouts, "I find that offensive!" Whereupon the police immediately enter the club, shut down the premises, and send everyone home. That, roughly, is what happens at universities, businesses, and yes, online groups in America on a daily basis. I've seen it happen myself over and over again in "real" (meaning not online) life. And what frightens me about shit like this is not so much that it happens -- fools and the cowards that enable them will always be with us -- but that so many people accept it without objection as "normal." History has repeatedly shown us that the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority. Because where the strong may rule solely through their strength, which is bad, the weak can only rule through viciousness, which is worse. Cultural rules such as "don't hit a man when he's down" were imposed by the strong to protect the weak. On the other hand, underhanded fighting, ambushes, hitting below the belt, etc., are all historically the methods of the weaker party. They were devised by the weak to attack the strong. And while it is certainly fair for a weaker party to "fight dirty" if "fighting dirty" will roughly even the odds, it becomes extremely dangerous to continue those methods when the weaker party ends up in power. Which brings me to the quotation with which I began this missive.
Implicit in the idea of "don't hit a man when he's down" (or "don't raise your hand to a woman," "help old ladies across the street," "be kind to animals," etc.) is the idea that with strength comes responsibility. Those in power have obligations -- not only not to use their power wickedly, but to use it actively for good. That is what I mean by "the methods of the strong" (also known as "The Spider-Man Principle"). The first principle of any democracy is "the majority rules, but protects the rights of the minority." The first principle of a dictatorship or oligarchy is, "The minority rules through intimidation." If we look at a place like North Korea, we can safely calculate that only a small percentage of the population actually supports the Kim Jong government or wants it in power; at the same time there is little prospect of it toppling any time soon. The weak have employed the methods of cruelty and intimidation to keep hold of their privileges, and the majority is helpless. There are few if any situations in life which justify the tyranny of the minority, yet increasingly, in America, we tend to find ourselves muzzled and held hostage by the weakest person in the group.
Now, some of what I'm saying may strike you as hypocritical given the anti-bullying stance I have frequently taken in this blog, and indeed, those of you who have been victimized by bullying in any form -- racial, sexual, political, monetary, religious, physical, etc. -- are probably in a stew right now, saying, "The 'strong' don't always behave themselves!" This is very true, and it is why democracies and republics, and yes, even our schools, have built-in safeguards which ensure, at least in theory, that the rights of the minority will be protected. In practice, of course, they often fail (how much bullying occurs in our schools right under the noses of teachers and administrators?), but the fact they exist at all means our hearts were once in the right place; so what remains is merely to make them more vigorous, more effective. It ought to be possible to wage war against bullying while simultaneously not allowing the bullied to become, in effect, bullies themselves. We must always remember that in "free" societies, the majority will rule; yet majority rule is a two-sided coin, and the obverse reads, "but it must respect and protect the rights of the minority." In the end, societal harmony is all about roughly balancing the needs of both sides. The great misunderstanding comes when people mistake rough balance for perfect balance, and assume because we haven't achieved perfection, we may as well slant entirely in favor of the supposedly oppressed party. When, in other words, we go so far in the direction of protecting the minority that the rights of the majority are no longer respected. And this where we find ourselves now. I have my own theories as to how we got here, but the important thing is to fight against this tendency whenever we find it -- at work, in government, and online, too. When someone tries to jam up the works by barking, "I'm offended!" you probably have a moral obligation to pause and ask yourself whether you've given legitimate reason for offense. But if the answer is no, "So fucking what!" is a perfectly reasonable response.
--- axiom
I am once again interrupting my series on how to fix America, this time for the purposes of venting my spleen.
I must start by saying that as a rule, I dislike posting rants, for the simple reason that all that negativity poisons an online atmosphere which already dripping with the stuff: I much prefer silly-ass humor, or scholarly analysis, or random observations about life, or any other damn thing at all so long as it is constructive, to listening to somebody rave, or rave myself. But sometimes, goddamn it, you've got to -- in the words of Emperor Palpatine -- "Use your aggressive feelings...and let the hate flow through you." So, here comes my hate.
Like a lot of people, I live in two worlds. On the one hand, I am a former parole officer and district attorney investigator; I even worked in corrections for a time. I'm a black belt and not too shabby with a revolver or a shotgun, either. I lift weights, have several tattoos and read piles of books about war, crime and the Mafia. In college, I was in a fraternity and drank enough beer to kill a Tyrannosaurus.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fucking nerd.
This statement requires a little expansion. Those other things came later in life, but I was always a nerd. I started watching Star Trekin my highchair and never stopped. I saw Star Wars when I was five, triggering another obsession, and when I was eight years old my Mom introduced me to Dr. Who -- about three decades before most of the rest of America had ever heard of it. I loved the original Battlestar Galactica and owned enough Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia to fill a bookshelf (even today, I can occasionally still find twenty-sided dice in the corners of the house I grew up in). I owned (and still own) an Atari 400 and 800 XL computer before I ever heard of Nintendo, and I had troves of toys and comic books. These things were common enough in every childhood back in the 70s and 80s, but I continued my interest in them long after most of my friends and classmates had moved onto other interests -- sports, rock music, sneakers, clothes, girls. And even when I finally took an interest in such things, I retained my essential nerdiness. It has never gone away, nor would I ever wish it to.
Because of said condition, I have joined a number of fan groups on Facebook -- groups that celebrate and discuss various facets of nerd-dom, from Sherlock Holmes to Friday the 13th: The Series. One of them focuses on the original Star Trek, and it has been an enjoyable experience. It's always nice to commune with people that remind you that you're not alone in your nerdy obsessions. The other day I posted my thoughts about an episode called "This Side of Paradise," in which the redoubtable Mr. Spock falls victim to parasitic spores that cause his emotional controls to collapse. In these epistles I try very hard to be thoughtful and respectful, to listen to dissenting opinions carefully and, in general, to keep things in the positive spirit which this group, and others like it, represent. My post, which concentrated on the writing and the acting, was extremely well-received; only one person took it upon himself to make trouble. He was offended, you see, because I hadn't "understood the anti-religious implications" of the spores. In his mind, their intoxicating effect represented organized religion, which offered a false and mindless "paradise" in which no advancement could take place, and which had to be destroyed by bringing people violently back to "reality." He went on to level several insults at religion and religious people generally. Several people took issue with his tone and general attitude, and the group's administrator stepped in immediately, which is what group admins are supposed to do in these circumstances; except that rather than admonish the troll, she shut down all commentary on the thread. Her evident reasoning was the troll's feelings might be hurt by others ganging-up on him for -- well, being a fucking troll. The fact that he had started everything with his needlessly combative and condescending attitude didn't matter. He felt offended, and he had voiced his grievance first, so everyone else had to be muzzled to please him.
This incident is obviously extremely trivial in and of itself, and I wouldn't mention it here, except that I feel it is part of a much larger problem besetting our society, to wit: people seem to think that the act of being offended grants them certain special rights. Say the magic words, "I'm offended!" and poof!, a shield forms around you, protecting you from any further words, symbols, facial expressions, etc. that might hurt your widdle feewings.
The most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is that in every case, the person who claimed to be offended first is the only one granted the benefit of these rights. In essence, it is like a gunfight in the Old West: whoever "draws" the "offended" card before the other wins. But the cultural effect of this nonsense is even worse than its cause. Because now, institutions -- schools, businesses, the government, and yes, even Facebook nerd-groups -- are so eager to slap special privilege on the offended that they no longer take into account the possible absurdity of the incident which supposedly caused offense. It is enough simply to experience a feeling of offense, regardless of its validity, and the whistle blows.
If we take my troll as an example, this is a person who was offended by the fact my take on an episode of a 50 year-old television program didn't correspond with his own. He took it upon himself to take me to task for this -- which he evidently had a right to do, because of the aforementioned special rights. At the same time, he was shielded by his rights from the counter-attacks launched by others on my behalf. The fact that he was alone in his opinion meant nothing to the conscientious admin. The entire commentary had to be shut down just to please him. The feelings of the others meant nothing.
Imagine a scenario in which a hundred people sit in a room at a comedy club. A joke is told by one person to the crowd, ninety-eight of which find funny. One person shouts, "I find that offensive!" Whereupon the police immediately enter the club, shut down the premises, and send everyone home. That, roughly, is what happens at universities, businesses, and yes, online groups in America on a daily basis. I've seen it happen myself over and over again in "real" (meaning not online) life. And what frightens me about shit like this is not so much that it happens -- fools and the cowards that enable them will always be with us -- but that so many people accept it without objection as "normal." History has repeatedly shown us that the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority. Because where the strong may rule solely through their strength, which is bad, the weak can only rule through viciousness, which is worse. Cultural rules such as "don't hit a man when he's down" were imposed by the strong to protect the weak. On the other hand, underhanded fighting, ambushes, hitting below the belt, etc., are all historically the methods of the weaker party. They were devised by the weak to attack the strong. And while it is certainly fair for a weaker party to "fight dirty" if "fighting dirty" will roughly even the odds, it becomes extremely dangerous to continue those methods when the weaker party ends up in power. Which brings me to the quotation with which I began this missive.
Implicit in the idea of "don't hit a man when he's down" (or "don't raise your hand to a woman," "help old ladies across the street," "be kind to animals," etc.) is the idea that with strength comes responsibility. Those in power have obligations -- not only not to use their power wickedly, but to use it actively for good. That is what I mean by "the methods of the strong" (also known as "The Spider-Man Principle"). The first principle of any democracy is "the majority rules, but protects the rights of the minority." The first principle of a dictatorship or oligarchy is, "The minority rules through intimidation." If we look at a place like North Korea, we can safely calculate that only a small percentage of the population actually supports the Kim Jong government or wants it in power; at the same time there is little prospect of it toppling any time soon. The weak have employed the methods of cruelty and intimidation to keep hold of their privileges, and the majority is helpless. There are few if any situations in life which justify the tyranny of the minority, yet increasingly, in America, we tend to find ourselves muzzled and held hostage by the weakest person in the group.
Now, some of what I'm saying may strike you as hypocritical given the anti-bullying stance I have frequently taken in this blog, and indeed, those of you who have been victimized by bullying in any form -- racial, sexual, political, monetary, religious, physical, etc. -- are probably in a stew right now, saying, "The 'strong' don't always behave themselves!" This is very true, and it is why democracies and republics, and yes, even our schools, have built-in safeguards which ensure, at least in theory, that the rights of the minority will be protected. In practice, of course, they often fail (how much bullying occurs in our schools right under the noses of teachers and administrators?), but the fact they exist at all means our hearts were once in the right place; so what remains is merely to make them more vigorous, more effective. It ought to be possible to wage war against bullying while simultaneously not allowing the bullied to become, in effect, bullies themselves. We must always remember that in "free" societies, the majority will rule; yet majority rule is a two-sided coin, and the obverse reads, "but it must respect and protect the rights of the minority." In the end, societal harmony is all about roughly balancing the needs of both sides. The great misunderstanding comes when people mistake rough balance for perfect balance, and assume because we haven't achieved perfection, we may as well slant entirely in favor of the supposedly oppressed party. When, in other words, we go so far in the direction of protecting the minority that the rights of the majority are no longer respected. And this where we find ourselves now. I have my own theories as to how we got here, but the important thing is to fight against this tendency whenever we find it -- at work, in government, and online, too. When someone tries to jam up the works by barking, "I'm offended!" you probably have a moral obligation to pause and ask yourself whether you've given legitimate reason for offense. But if the answer is no, "So fucking what!" is a perfectly reasonable response.
January 7, 2018
AMERICA: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE (AND BACK AGAIN), PART II
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- Herman Goering
It is obvious who benefits from the existence of the Empire: arms manufacturers and their employees. The entire professional military and intelligence class, which is large and growing larger every year. Corporations of all types who can only operate with impunity overseas if they are backed up by the American military. Wealthy individuals whose fortunes ride on strength of those corporations' stock. The ordinary American benefits little, if it all. But he does foot the bill. From a financial standpoint, the maintenance of this Empire represents a staggering burden on our people. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven most powerful nations combined: $652.6 billion is the projected budget for 2018, or one-fifth of our gross national product. Of that, $150 billion is spent operating our vast network of foreign bases. When one considers the sorry, near disastrous condition of America's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and even airports all crumbling and falling apart -- the terrible condition of many of our inner cities, and the 45 million Americans who live in poverty every day, justification for this sort of expense becomes increasingly difficult, especially when one considers the fact that you are six times more likely to be killed by a shark than a terrorist bomb. And yet the justifications continue, and the majority of Americans seem to swallow them almost unexamined. Why?
What has happened since the Korean War (1950 - 1953) is not merely a massive increase in the size, power and influence of our military and its adjunct, the intelligence community; it is a change in how Americans see themselves as a nation and their role in the world, a process I refer to as “the normalization of Empire.” During the era of the Republic, America saw itself (rightly or wrongly) as a nation which minded its business and expected the rest of the world to do the same (for the purposes of this essay I am setting aside the treatment of the Natives and the Mexican War, which I will address later). We had little interest in foreign affairs and rested comfortably on the knowledge that two very broad oceans, and the willingness of the population to answer any legitimate call to arms, protected us from any possible aggression. The rapid expansion and contraction of America's armed forces after the Civil War, WW1 and WW2 was not merely an expression of the American willingness to fight if a fight was deemed necessary, but our distrust of large standing armies and the whole culture of militarism which inevitably results from them. One man who clearly grasped the danger of militarism invading the American psyche was President Eisenhower, whose farewell speech in 1961 contained an explicit warning:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Ike's warning went unheeded, and the power of the “military-industrial complex” (and the intelligence community, which is certainly an important part of the same) continued to grow, shaping not only domestic issues such as the budget, but “the very structure of our society.” The ordinary American, who gains nothing from it, became increasingly invested emotionally in the idea of America as a superpower (empire) with a worldwide presence. Expressing hope that such presence could be lessened or eliminated entirely became tantamount to cowardice or even a form of low-grade treason. Nowhere was this reality reversal more evident than in the Republican Party. Prior to WW2, Republicans had held fast to the principles of small government, isolationism and demilitarization. With the onset of the Cold War, the GOP took upon itself to upend each and every one of these identifying principles: government expansionism, an aggressive foreign policy and a massive increase in military funding became their watchwords and remain so to this day. But the Democratic Party is only superficially different in its outlook. No candidate in the last national election was more openly hawkish than Hillary Clinton, and Obama's tenure in office, though marked by a certain comparative flaccidity in its military policy, was sometimes referred to as “the drone Presidency” due to his propensity for using those weapons all over the planet, including against American citizens. Moreover, while the Patriot Act was signed into law by the Republican Bush (43), the National Defense Authorization Act was penned by Obama, thus forming bookends which crush many of our most vital civil liberties between them. Both parties have endorsed warrantless mass surveillance of the population and both have waged aggressive war against the press, and in particular the "whistleblowers" who enable the press in its watchdog-role vis-a-vis the government. The ultimate result of 9/11 was thus not merely to expand the Empire and bring the imperial mentality to our foreign policy, but to turn the metaphorical screws inward, and begin the process of undercutting and destabilizing our freedoms at home -- not only with the passive acceptance, but the actual support of the brainwashed American citizen.
It follows that the features of the Empire are superficially those of the Republic; but upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that each foundational principal of the 1776 – 1898 period has been set neatly on its head:
1. Political power is concentrated increasingly in the executive branch of government, with an unelected, appointed-for-life federal judiciary simultaneously cutting into the power of the legislature branch from the opposite direction.
2. The legislature itself is largely in the hands of a professional political class which is extremely wealthy and bears little resemblance to its constituency: the average net worth of a U.S. Senator is one million dollars. The Citizens United case has essentially held up public office for sale to the highest bidder, to the point where it is foreseeable that corporations, rather than the States, might one day be represented in our legislature.
3. The political parties no longer have any significant differences in terms of their overall foreign and military policies: acceptance of the empire, and its attendant oppression of civil liberty, is universal.
4. The country is militarized to a high degree, with large standing armies which increasingly exert their cultural influence by displays of strength and various means of cultural propaganda.
5. Foreign policy is aggressive and backed up by economic, clandestine, and military operations carried out regularly all over the planet in complete disregard for the sovereignty of foreign nations: no country in history has dropped more bombs than the United States of America. No country in history has funded more coups or deliberately brought down foreign governments judged to be hostile, potentially hostile, or simply economically inconvenient.
6. The course of foreign policy is set not by politicians but by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and large corporations with overseas interests. This is particularly true since the election of Donald Trump, who is gutting the State Department, leaving the CIA and Pentagon to set the course of foreign policy.
7. The monetary system is almost entirely controlled by a privately controlled central bank called the Federal Reserve, which does not use the gold standard, encourages inflation, and feeds into the general climate of militarism “because war is good for business.”
If you want to see the American Empire, it isn't necessary to travel overseas to some enormous military base (“mini-Americas,” they are called) or ride with a carrier battle group, or drop in on a secret CIA prison somewhere in the back of the beyond. Nor do you have to sit in on the councils of political and corporate power. All you need do is pick up a history book to grasp what America was when it was truly a republic, and how different life was, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy, than it is today, in the age of Empire. To see how attitudes have shifted, not merely among the politicos and the generals but among the ordinary citizen, who can no longer conceive of what life is like without mass surveillance, without endless war, without systemic corruption and the near-extinction of the Bill of Rights. As brutal as the settlement period of the American West was, there has probably never been a period in our history when so many people lived in such a state of complete personal freedom, especially after 1865 -- free from oppressive taxes and government regulations. This period was so central to the development of the American identity that we mythologized it in our popular culture as the "Wild West." But it is precisely this sort of freedom that empire-builders in government and corporate America despise and fear the most. The very last thing they want is an armed populace who will accept only the most token restraints on its collective freedoms, and who actually expect to receive something concrete and specific for such taxes as they are forced to pay. Had the "spirit of the West" been kept alive after 1900 it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the federal-corporate octopus to lay its tentacles into every aspect of American life, to take away freedoms and return them one by one as paid, licensed privileges.
But the trouble with Americans is that we have no sense of history and little interest in it. We are concerned primarily with the here and now, and to a lesser extent, with the future. This makes us perennial optimists and tends to prevent the sort of long-simmering domestic grudges that wrack the rest of the world, but it also prevents us from understanding the extent to which we have changed, and declined, as a nation. As I stated before, the whole process of transitioning from Republic to Empire is one of gradual societal habituation. What was strange becomes normal over time; and what is normal, in the end, not only seems safe to us but somehow inherently right. The word “conservative,” stripped of its present political meaning, is defined as “holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” The change to imperium was a process that took many years, here advancing in great leaps, there crawling ahead by inches, but always in such a way as to remain largely below the awareness of the ordinary American. There is an old adage that if one wants to boil a frog, one need only slowly turn up the temperature; so it is with our people. The changes took place, but so subtly and so gradually, and often with such seemingly good intentions, that few people noticed. What would have been unimaginable in 1776 – or 1876, for that matter – has become commonplace in 2017. Millions can no longer imagine, and do not even want to imagine, what America might be like if we were no longer the key player on the world stage, if we no longer held on to this oversized military and colossal foreign empire.
I stated above that a republic may transition into an empire, but an empire cannot evolve into a new third form; it must either be destroyed, as Rome was, or eventually collapse in on itself, as the British Empire did. Of the two choices, the second is far more attractive, because America, unlike Britain, is an enormous country of nearly unlimited natural resources, which gains almost nothing, and loses much, from the existence of its empire. We have very little to fear from the end of it, and much to gain by its demise. So the question must be answered, “How do we restore the Republic?”
-- Herman Goering
It is obvious who benefits from the existence of the Empire: arms manufacturers and their employees. The entire professional military and intelligence class, which is large and growing larger every year. Corporations of all types who can only operate with impunity overseas if they are backed up by the American military. Wealthy individuals whose fortunes ride on strength of those corporations' stock. The ordinary American benefits little, if it all. But he does foot the bill. From a financial standpoint, the maintenance of this Empire represents a staggering burden on our people. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven most powerful nations combined: $652.6 billion is the projected budget for 2018, or one-fifth of our gross national product. Of that, $150 billion is spent operating our vast network of foreign bases. When one considers the sorry, near disastrous condition of America's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and even airports all crumbling and falling apart -- the terrible condition of many of our inner cities, and the 45 million Americans who live in poverty every day, justification for this sort of expense becomes increasingly difficult, especially when one considers the fact that you are six times more likely to be killed by a shark than a terrorist bomb. And yet the justifications continue, and the majority of Americans seem to swallow them almost unexamined. Why?
What has happened since the Korean War (1950 - 1953) is not merely a massive increase in the size, power and influence of our military and its adjunct, the intelligence community; it is a change in how Americans see themselves as a nation and their role in the world, a process I refer to as “the normalization of Empire.” During the era of the Republic, America saw itself (rightly or wrongly) as a nation which minded its business and expected the rest of the world to do the same (for the purposes of this essay I am setting aside the treatment of the Natives and the Mexican War, which I will address later). We had little interest in foreign affairs and rested comfortably on the knowledge that two very broad oceans, and the willingness of the population to answer any legitimate call to arms, protected us from any possible aggression. The rapid expansion and contraction of America's armed forces after the Civil War, WW1 and WW2 was not merely an expression of the American willingness to fight if a fight was deemed necessary, but our distrust of large standing armies and the whole culture of militarism which inevitably results from them. One man who clearly grasped the danger of militarism invading the American psyche was President Eisenhower, whose farewell speech in 1961 contained an explicit warning:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Ike's warning went unheeded, and the power of the “military-industrial complex” (and the intelligence community, which is certainly an important part of the same) continued to grow, shaping not only domestic issues such as the budget, but “the very structure of our society.” The ordinary American, who gains nothing from it, became increasingly invested emotionally in the idea of America as a superpower (empire) with a worldwide presence. Expressing hope that such presence could be lessened or eliminated entirely became tantamount to cowardice or even a form of low-grade treason. Nowhere was this reality reversal more evident than in the Republican Party. Prior to WW2, Republicans had held fast to the principles of small government, isolationism and demilitarization. With the onset of the Cold War, the GOP took upon itself to upend each and every one of these identifying principles: government expansionism, an aggressive foreign policy and a massive increase in military funding became their watchwords and remain so to this day. But the Democratic Party is only superficially different in its outlook. No candidate in the last national election was more openly hawkish than Hillary Clinton, and Obama's tenure in office, though marked by a certain comparative flaccidity in its military policy, was sometimes referred to as “the drone Presidency” due to his propensity for using those weapons all over the planet, including against American citizens. Moreover, while the Patriot Act was signed into law by the Republican Bush (43), the National Defense Authorization Act was penned by Obama, thus forming bookends which crush many of our most vital civil liberties between them. Both parties have endorsed warrantless mass surveillance of the population and both have waged aggressive war against the press, and in particular the "whistleblowers" who enable the press in its watchdog-role vis-a-vis the government. The ultimate result of 9/11 was thus not merely to expand the Empire and bring the imperial mentality to our foreign policy, but to turn the metaphorical screws inward, and begin the process of undercutting and destabilizing our freedoms at home -- not only with the passive acceptance, but the actual support of the brainwashed American citizen.
It follows that the features of the Empire are superficially those of the Republic; but upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that each foundational principal of the 1776 – 1898 period has been set neatly on its head:
1. Political power is concentrated increasingly in the executive branch of government, with an unelected, appointed-for-life federal judiciary simultaneously cutting into the power of the legislature branch from the opposite direction.
2. The legislature itself is largely in the hands of a professional political class which is extremely wealthy and bears little resemblance to its constituency: the average net worth of a U.S. Senator is one million dollars. The Citizens United case has essentially held up public office for sale to the highest bidder, to the point where it is foreseeable that corporations, rather than the States, might one day be represented in our legislature.
3. The political parties no longer have any significant differences in terms of their overall foreign and military policies: acceptance of the empire, and its attendant oppression of civil liberty, is universal.
4. The country is militarized to a high degree, with large standing armies which increasingly exert their cultural influence by displays of strength and various means of cultural propaganda.
5. Foreign policy is aggressive and backed up by economic, clandestine, and military operations carried out regularly all over the planet in complete disregard for the sovereignty of foreign nations: no country in history has dropped more bombs than the United States of America. No country in history has funded more coups or deliberately brought down foreign governments judged to be hostile, potentially hostile, or simply economically inconvenient.
6. The course of foreign policy is set not by politicians but by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and large corporations with overseas interests. This is particularly true since the election of Donald Trump, who is gutting the State Department, leaving the CIA and Pentagon to set the course of foreign policy.
7. The monetary system is almost entirely controlled by a privately controlled central bank called the Federal Reserve, which does not use the gold standard, encourages inflation, and feeds into the general climate of militarism “because war is good for business.”
If you want to see the American Empire, it isn't necessary to travel overseas to some enormous military base (“mini-Americas,” they are called) or ride with a carrier battle group, or drop in on a secret CIA prison somewhere in the back of the beyond. Nor do you have to sit in on the councils of political and corporate power. All you need do is pick up a history book to grasp what America was when it was truly a republic, and how different life was, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy, than it is today, in the age of Empire. To see how attitudes have shifted, not merely among the politicos and the generals but among the ordinary citizen, who can no longer conceive of what life is like without mass surveillance, without endless war, without systemic corruption and the near-extinction of the Bill of Rights. As brutal as the settlement period of the American West was, there has probably never been a period in our history when so many people lived in such a state of complete personal freedom, especially after 1865 -- free from oppressive taxes and government regulations. This period was so central to the development of the American identity that we mythologized it in our popular culture as the "Wild West." But it is precisely this sort of freedom that empire-builders in government and corporate America despise and fear the most. The very last thing they want is an armed populace who will accept only the most token restraints on its collective freedoms, and who actually expect to receive something concrete and specific for such taxes as they are forced to pay. Had the "spirit of the West" been kept alive after 1900 it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the federal-corporate octopus to lay its tentacles into every aspect of American life, to take away freedoms and return them one by one as paid, licensed privileges.
But the trouble with Americans is that we have no sense of history and little interest in it. We are concerned primarily with the here and now, and to a lesser extent, with the future. This makes us perennial optimists and tends to prevent the sort of long-simmering domestic grudges that wrack the rest of the world, but it also prevents us from understanding the extent to which we have changed, and declined, as a nation. As I stated before, the whole process of transitioning from Republic to Empire is one of gradual societal habituation. What was strange becomes normal over time; and what is normal, in the end, not only seems safe to us but somehow inherently right. The word “conservative,” stripped of its present political meaning, is defined as “holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” The change to imperium was a process that took many years, here advancing in great leaps, there crawling ahead by inches, but always in such a way as to remain largely below the awareness of the ordinary American. There is an old adage that if one wants to boil a frog, one need only slowly turn up the temperature; so it is with our people. The changes took place, but so subtly and so gradually, and often with such seemingly good intentions, that few people noticed. What would have been unimaginable in 1776 – or 1876, for that matter – has become commonplace in 2017. Millions can no longer imagine, and do not even want to imagine, what America might be like if we were no longer the key player on the world stage, if we no longer held on to this oversized military and colossal foreign empire.
I stated above that a republic may transition into an empire, but an empire cannot evolve into a new third form; it must either be destroyed, as Rome was, or eventually collapse in on itself, as the British Empire did. Of the two choices, the second is far more attractive, because America, unlike Britain, is an enormous country of nearly unlimited natural resources, which gains almost nothing, and loses much, from the existence of its empire. We have very little to fear from the end of it, and much to gain by its demise. So the question must be answered, “How do we restore the Republic?”
AMERICA: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE (AND BACK AGAIN)
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.
-- George Orwell, "1984"
A few weeks ago I published an essay called "The Man With The Hammer," which discussed the tendency of America to act as if military power alone can solve all of its problems. I maintain that this way of thinking has become a sort of pathology in the last hundred years, and has perverted America into something she was never meant to be. I ended the essay with the words, "Before we can answer the question, 'What has America become?' it is necessary to ask the question, 'What was America in the first place?'" And to address that that question, I think is necessary to know something of America's only real historical analog: Rome.
When I refer to Rome, of course, I am immediately confronted with yet another necessity: that of defining just precisely what I mean when I use the word. “Rome” can mean the city itself; the Kingdom of Rome; the Roman Republic; the Roman Empire; and the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium. For the purposes of this essay, I define “Rome” to mean two things: The Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.), and the Roman Empire (27 B.C. - 476 A.D.), for it is those two which seem to most closely mirror America in its past and present.
The city of Rome was founded in 753 B.C., and for a period of 244 years was ruled by a series of kings. These kings were the literal definition of despots: they held unto themselves all executive, legal, and religious power. Though a Roman Senate existed, it did so in a largely advisory capacity, and the common man had no say whatever in the doings of government. During the period of the kingdom, Rome extended its power to the lands beyond its walls and became a strong regional power in Italy, but her final king, Tarquinus, was so wantonly despotic that he was eventually deposed and sent into exile. This action ended the Kingdom of Rome and ushered in the age of the Roman Republic.
Republics are so common today, at least in name, that it is easy to forget that there was a time when none existed – when every form of government on the planet was either tribal or tyrannical in nature. The Roman Republic was something very nearly unique, for while it wasn't the first republic to exist (that honor probably falls on Athens), it was almost certainly the most successful – both in terms of longevity, power and cultural influence. The principal novelties of the Republic, what made them both the bafflement and the envy of the ancient world, were:
1. Executive power was vested not in a lone figure, but in two consuls, who would serve as counterweights to each other's political ambitions.
2. These consuls were elected by the citizens of Rome and served in office for only a single year, alternating power between them from month to month.
3. They were advised by a Senate which eventually included members of the plebeian (common) class, and these senators received no pay.
4. Service in the armed forces was considered a civic duty for all classes, but terms of service were short (one year) and large standing armies were frowned upon except in times of war.
5. Thanks to near-universal political-military service, both the aristocrat and the ordinary Roman had a stake in the outcome of all Rome's endeavors. A vote for war meant going to war yourself, or sending a loved one.
6. Italy, and in particular Rome, were almost completely demilitarized: Roman legions were forbidden to cross south the Rubicon River in northern Italy. Roman generals had to temporarily give up their commands when they entered the city (become "24 hour civilians"). No weapon larger than a dagger was permissible in Rome itself.
7. Political figures were judged by the manner in which they comported themselves not only publicly, but in private; moral strength was considered a prerequisite for holding office.
8. There existed a strong, relatively stable monetary system.
The Roman Republic lasted 482 years, finally dissolving in 27 B.C. The cause of its collapse was not external; quite the contrary. When Caesar's nephew Octavian was declared the first emperor of Rome (Augustus) that year, Rome's military power was greater than it had ever been, and its colonial holdings rimmed the entire Mediterranean and extended deeply into Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, ensuring that Roman influence on the world stage was also at a maximum. No, the death of the Republic was part of a long, slow erosion of the “novelties” enumerated above – a gradual slide from republicanism back into despotism, and a concomitant decline of the moral, social and cultural institutions which had made the Republic possible. There were many contributing factors to this descent, but foremost among them was the decision to embark on a series of spectacular foreign conquests which had to be maintained by powerful armies – which, in turn, had to be commanded by able, ruthless men whose ambitions could not always be contained by republican law and tradition. Simply put, the decision to operate a demilitarized, semi-democratic Republic at home while simultaneously maintaining a huge foreign empire held down by powerful armies, put an enormous strain on the fabric which held the Republic together. It was a form of schizophrenia, and it could not long endure. After Octavian became Augustus Caesar,
1. Executive, legal and religious power was vested almost entirely in the emperor himself. There was no settled means of succession, but most emperors tried to pass the crown to a relative, making rule more or less hereditary. (Needless to say, the emperor was not elected.) In short, Rome had rejected the concept of kings, only to replace them with even more powerful emperors.
2. The Senate became a figurehead whose members served primarily for reasons of social prestige and wealth-acquisition, or to position themselves as possible candidates for emperor.
3. Militarization increased (the term of service became 25 years, leading to large standing armies) but the percentage of Italians in the armed forces declined steadily until, by the fifth century A.D., only 5% of Rome's legionaries hailed from the Italian peninsula. The rest were foreign citizens of the Empire or mercenaries. In part because of this, the ordinary Roman no longer held a stake in the success or failure of Roman endeavors abroad. He gained little from the Empire's victories or defeats, because neither he nor his loved ones were involved.
5. The instability of succession often led to military revolts and civil wars that frequently saw would-be emperors "cross the Rubicon" to march on Rome.
5. Moral strength became increasingly irrelevant, with the emperors generally claiming divinity, and thus free to engage in sensational debaucheries and cruelties (witness Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Caracalla, etc.).
6. The monetary system became increasingly unstable.
The Roman Empire (as I've defined it here) lasted 503 years – slightly longer than the Republic – but despite its awesome power and influence, which extended from the British Isles to Africa, from Spain to Syria and beyond – it was constantly wracked with every manner of corruption, strife and tumult, and its declining period exceeded its heyday by a ratio of roughly three and a half years to one. It is not for us to say whether Rome's acquisition of a foreign empire led to the decline of its republican institutions, or whether the decline of those institutions is what spawned the empire; the end result was the same. Today, the word “Rome” is synonymous with architectural genius, cultural dominance and politico-military organization of the highest order; it is also synonymous with arrogance, cruelty and moral and sexual degeneracy. And it is interesting to note that of the latter traits, nearly all trace their roots to the imperial rather than the republican period. Rome produced fewer great philosophers and statesmen under the Empire than she did under the Republic, in large part because veneration of character, intellect and public spirit had been replaced a worship of power, money and pleasure for its own sake. Most importantly, when the Empire fell (in 476 A.D.), it was destroyed from the outside, by barbarian armies. History shows that a nation-state may transition more or less peacefully from a republic to an empire, but it cannot evolve from an empire into a successful third form. Either the empire is utterly destroyed, as Rome was, or it collapses back onto itself and slowly begins to reform a democratic-republican tradition. (This is a generalization, but largely an accurate one.)
By this point one is tempted to ask, “What has any of this to do with America?” The answer is frightfully simple. The history of Rome and the history of America follow surprisingly similar trajectories. Rome was a kingdom that threw off its king and embraced a Republican tradition at a time when no other nation was doing so; later, it abandoned that tradition in the name of empire, a decision which brought enormous short-term benefits and held horrific long-term consequences. And it is precisely this path upon which America is now treading.
The history of America, like that of Rome, can be divided, if crudely, into two distinct periods: the American Republic (1776 – 1898) and the American Empire (1898 – present). The former period answers the question, “What was America in the first place?” The latter, “What has America become?”
In 1775, the thirteen states which now extend from Maine to Florida were colonies of the British crown. But George III, laboring from beneath the weight of his insanity, proved to be too much of a despot for the ruling classes in those colonies to bear. By the following year, a full-fledged rebellion had begun; this rebellion, now known as the American Revolution, lasted until 1783, when the Crown recognized the independence of the former colonies, now loosely organized into a confederation called the United States of America. I say “loosely organized,” because until 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, the central government was so weak that it was unable to perform even basic functions. After 1789, America was no longer confederated but federated, meaning the flaccid “old” government now had a central nervous system to stiffen its spine. But not too strong of one; the Founding Fathers had learned the lessons King George had taught them, and were determined to set up a system predicated on the Republican traditions of the Greeks and Romans. The salient features of this newly-minted Republic were:
1. Political power was divided more or less equally between three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), with each acting as a check on the powers of the others.
2. The executive and all members of the legislature were elected and served clearly-defined terms.
3. The country was demilitarized, with only a tiny standing army, consisting entirely of volunteers; the citizens themselves, via their militias, provided the rest of the armed strength of the nation. (Large armies and sustained periods of war were viewed as threats to democracy.)
4. Foreign policy could be summed up in Thomas Jefferson's words, “Commerce with all, alliance with none.” George Washington's parting words to the American people warned against "foreign entanglements."
5. The course of foreign policy was set by civilian government. Diplomacy was left to diplomats, not soldiers.
6. The monetary system was based on the gold standard, which kept the purchasing power of money fairly stable and discouraged the government from spending money it did not have.
The American Republic lasted 122 years. Many different dates could be chosen as the exact moment of its finis, but the Spanish-American War is probably the best. What happened was simply this. For 400 years, European powers had been conquering huge sections of the planet for the purpose of exploiting their resources (both human and material), and obtaining strategically located seaports and military bases which could protect their trade routes. In 1898, America – a still-young nation bursting with vitality and strength, having conquered the last of the Indian tribes and pushed Mexican territory back to the Rio Grande -- entered a contentious public debate about whether it, too, should join the fraternity of nations with overseas empires. Looking close to home, she rapped figurative knuckles against the shell of the old Spanish Empire and found it rang hollow. American politicians and businessmen saw in “expansionism” the opportunity to strip Spain of the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and this they did. While Cuba was eventually “returned” to its own people, the U.S. retained title to the other lands, and swiftly garrisoned and fortified them, thus establishing the first real foreign bases in its history. These bases positioned the U.S. to become a “player” in Asian affairs and further strengthened its position the Caribbean. During the period 1899 – 1901, U.S. forces helped crush the Boxer Rebellion in China, siding with the oppressors over the oppressed for purely economic reasons. President Teddy Roosevelt, coming to office in '01, made a decision to vastly expand the United States Navy, which was in keeping with Roosevelt's belief that America must be able to strike militarily anywhere in the world. The nation also became more aggressively involved in international affairs (T.R.'s infamous “gunboat diplomacy” in Central and South America) and more friendly to the concept of central banking, which the Founding Fathers had warned would lead only to the destabilization of the currency and to war. In accordance with this policy, the gold standard was largely abandoned, giving rise to inflation which has never stopped: a dollar, today, is worth about 1/100th of what it was worth in 1913.
Finally, in 1917, and despite the explicit promises of Woodrow Wilson not to do so, America declared war on Germany. The ostensible provocation for this act was the German policy of sinking non-belligerent ships in the Atlantic, including American ones, as part of its attempt to blockade the British Isles. In reality, the true motive for America's entry into the contest came from the domestic arms industry, which saw an opportunity to make a fortune off the conflict, and from a clique of Teddy Roosevelt-style politicians and power-brokers who hungered for America to take a larger role on the world stage. Yet America's participation in the war so disillusioned the population of the country that we rapidly fell back into old-school isolationism once again; indeed, the period 1919 – 1941 was marked by repeated efforts to bring the U.S. back into balance with its original ideals of “trade with all, alliance with none.” Even the military, which had blown up to enormous proportions during the war, rapidly shrank into a shadow of its former power. This was a crucial time in the history of the newly-minted Empire, during which we might have returned to the essential principles of Republicanism – demilitarization, non-alliance, non-interference in the affairs of others, and a strong currency whose purchasing power would remain stable. It was not to be. The Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, meant that America had to once again plunge into the morass of world affairs; this time, however, there was no withdrawal. The outcome of WW2 had left only two world powers in existence: the United States and the Soviet Union, and America took it upon itself to counter the USSR's influence both economically, politically and militarily. To do this it had to massively expand its armed forces, and establish an extensive network of military bases all over the planet. Many would argue this was simple necessity; America had to prepare for the possibility of a third World War.
If that were the only motivation for such a huge military presence abroad, however, why was this presence not eliminated, or at least seriously reduced, when the Cold War ended?
While it is true that there was a smallish decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this decline lasted only a decade and has spiked to unprecedented proportions following the events of September 11, 2001. As of two years ago, America maintained no less than 684 military bases in 74 countries; but even this hardly tells the full tale of U.S. involvement overseas, because American troops are stationed in an additional 76 nations without “formal” bases to support them, bringing the total number of nations partially occupied by U.S. forces to 150. When one considers that there are only 195 nations on the planet Earth, the magnitude of our power and reach are finally brought home. Are we to believe that the containment of terrorism and a tiny handful of rogue states requires more military might than the did the massive and ultra-powerful Soviet Union? The very notion is absurd on its face. Yet every year military budgets go up. Every year more bases are opened in more foreign lands, more troops deployed, more carrier battle groups commissioned. Today's generals have more money and more technological terrors and spy capabilities than their Cold War antecedents ever dreamed of, yet no one feels safer, and indeed, they are not meant to. We live -- have lived, for sixteen years -- in a state of constant tension and anxiety, with one enemy giving way to another and another and another, in a succession as numbing as it is unending. But the identity of the enemy of the moment scarcely matters. The main thing is that there be an enemy, always. Otherwise how to explain this massive military expenditure, this unending attack on our civil liberties? In a democratic society, such things are only justifiable as a security measure. If a sense of security is achieved, the justification for empire and its attendant oppression disappears. Which brings us to the next question, "Who benefits?"
-- George Orwell, "1984"
A few weeks ago I published an essay called "The Man With The Hammer," which discussed the tendency of America to act as if military power alone can solve all of its problems. I maintain that this way of thinking has become a sort of pathology in the last hundred years, and has perverted America into something she was never meant to be. I ended the essay with the words, "Before we can answer the question, 'What has America become?' it is necessary to ask the question, 'What was America in the first place?'" And to address that that question, I think is necessary to know something of America's only real historical analog: Rome.
When I refer to Rome, of course, I am immediately confronted with yet another necessity: that of defining just precisely what I mean when I use the word. “Rome” can mean the city itself; the Kingdom of Rome; the Roman Republic; the Roman Empire; and the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium. For the purposes of this essay, I define “Rome” to mean two things: The Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.), and the Roman Empire (27 B.C. - 476 A.D.), for it is those two which seem to most closely mirror America in its past and present.
The city of Rome was founded in 753 B.C., and for a period of 244 years was ruled by a series of kings. These kings were the literal definition of despots: they held unto themselves all executive, legal, and religious power. Though a Roman Senate existed, it did so in a largely advisory capacity, and the common man had no say whatever in the doings of government. During the period of the kingdom, Rome extended its power to the lands beyond its walls and became a strong regional power in Italy, but her final king, Tarquinus, was so wantonly despotic that he was eventually deposed and sent into exile. This action ended the Kingdom of Rome and ushered in the age of the Roman Republic.
Republics are so common today, at least in name, that it is easy to forget that there was a time when none existed – when every form of government on the planet was either tribal or tyrannical in nature. The Roman Republic was something very nearly unique, for while it wasn't the first republic to exist (that honor probably falls on Athens), it was almost certainly the most successful – both in terms of longevity, power and cultural influence. The principal novelties of the Republic, what made them both the bafflement and the envy of the ancient world, were:
1. Executive power was vested not in a lone figure, but in two consuls, who would serve as counterweights to each other's political ambitions.
2. These consuls were elected by the citizens of Rome and served in office for only a single year, alternating power between them from month to month.
3. They were advised by a Senate which eventually included members of the plebeian (common) class, and these senators received no pay.
4. Service in the armed forces was considered a civic duty for all classes, but terms of service were short (one year) and large standing armies were frowned upon except in times of war.
5. Thanks to near-universal political-military service, both the aristocrat and the ordinary Roman had a stake in the outcome of all Rome's endeavors. A vote for war meant going to war yourself, or sending a loved one.
6. Italy, and in particular Rome, were almost completely demilitarized: Roman legions were forbidden to cross south the Rubicon River in northern Italy. Roman generals had to temporarily give up their commands when they entered the city (become "24 hour civilians"). No weapon larger than a dagger was permissible in Rome itself.
7. Political figures were judged by the manner in which they comported themselves not only publicly, but in private; moral strength was considered a prerequisite for holding office.
8. There existed a strong, relatively stable monetary system.
The Roman Republic lasted 482 years, finally dissolving in 27 B.C. The cause of its collapse was not external; quite the contrary. When Caesar's nephew Octavian was declared the first emperor of Rome (Augustus) that year, Rome's military power was greater than it had ever been, and its colonial holdings rimmed the entire Mediterranean and extended deeply into Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, ensuring that Roman influence on the world stage was also at a maximum. No, the death of the Republic was part of a long, slow erosion of the “novelties” enumerated above – a gradual slide from republicanism back into despotism, and a concomitant decline of the moral, social and cultural institutions which had made the Republic possible. There were many contributing factors to this descent, but foremost among them was the decision to embark on a series of spectacular foreign conquests which had to be maintained by powerful armies – which, in turn, had to be commanded by able, ruthless men whose ambitions could not always be contained by republican law and tradition. Simply put, the decision to operate a demilitarized, semi-democratic Republic at home while simultaneously maintaining a huge foreign empire held down by powerful armies, put an enormous strain on the fabric which held the Republic together. It was a form of schizophrenia, and it could not long endure. After Octavian became Augustus Caesar,
1. Executive, legal and religious power was vested almost entirely in the emperor himself. There was no settled means of succession, but most emperors tried to pass the crown to a relative, making rule more or less hereditary. (Needless to say, the emperor was not elected.) In short, Rome had rejected the concept of kings, only to replace them with even more powerful emperors.
2. The Senate became a figurehead whose members served primarily for reasons of social prestige and wealth-acquisition, or to position themselves as possible candidates for emperor.
3. Militarization increased (the term of service became 25 years, leading to large standing armies) but the percentage of Italians in the armed forces declined steadily until, by the fifth century A.D., only 5% of Rome's legionaries hailed from the Italian peninsula. The rest were foreign citizens of the Empire or mercenaries. In part because of this, the ordinary Roman no longer held a stake in the success or failure of Roman endeavors abroad. He gained little from the Empire's victories or defeats, because neither he nor his loved ones were involved.
5. The instability of succession often led to military revolts and civil wars that frequently saw would-be emperors "cross the Rubicon" to march on Rome.
5. Moral strength became increasingly irrelevant, with the emperors generally claiming divinity, and thus free to engage in sensational debaucheries and cruelties (witness Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Caracalla, etc.).
6. The monetary system became increasingly unstable.
The Roman Empire (as I've defined it here) lasted 503 years – slightly longer than the Republic – but despite its awesome power and influence, which extended from the British Isles to Africa, from Spain to Syria and beyond – it was constantly wracked with every manner of corruption, strife and tumult, and its declining period exceeded its heyday by a ratio of roughly three and a half years to one. It is not for us to say whether Rome's acquisition of a foreign empire led to the decline of its republican institutions, or whether the decline of those institutions is what spawned the empire; the end result was the same. Today, the word “Rome” is synonymous with architectural genius, cultural dominance and politico-military organization of the highest order; it is also synonymous with arrogance, cruelty and moral and sexual degeneracy. And it is interesting to note that of the latter traits, nearly all trace their roots to the imperial rather than the republican period. Rome produced fewer great philosophers and statesmen under the Empire than she did under the Republic, in large part because veneration of character, intellect and public spirit had been replaced a worship of power, money and pleasure for its own sake. Most importantly, when the Empire fell (in 476 A.D.), it was destroyed from the outside, by barbarian armies. History shows that a nation-state may transition more or less peacefully from a republic to an empire, but it cannot evolve from an empire into a successful third form. Either the empire is utterly destroyed, as Rome was, or it collapses back onto itself and slowly begins to reform a democratic-republican tradition. (This is a generalization, but largely an accurate one.)
By this point one is tempted to ask, “What has any of this to do with America?” The answer is frightfully simple. The history of Rome and the history of America follow surprisingly similar trajectories. Rome was a kingdom that threw off its king and embraced a Republican tradition at a time when no other nation was doing so; later, it abandoned that tradition in the name of empire, a decision which brought enormous short-term benefits and held horrific long-term consequences. And it is precisely this path upon which America is now treading.
The history of America, like that of Rome, can be divided, if crudely, into two distinct periods: the American Republic (1776 – 1898) and the American Empire (1898 – present). The former period answers the question, “What was America in the first place?” The latter, “What has America become?”
In 1775, the thirteen states which now extend from Maine to Florida were colonies of the British crown. But George III, laboring from beneath the weight of his insanity, proved to be too much of a despot for the ruling classes in those colonies to bear. By the following year, a full-fledged rebellion had begun; this rebellion, now known as the American Revolution, lasted until 1783, when the Crown recognized the independence of the former colonies, now loosely organized into a confederation called the United States of America. I say “loosely organized,” because until 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, the central government was so weak that it was unable to perform even basic functions. After 1789, America was no longer confederated but federated, meaning the flaccid “old” government now had a central nervous system to stiffen its spine. But not too strong of one; the Founding Fathers had learned the lessons King George had taught them, and were determined to set up a system predicated on the Republican traditions of the Greeks and Romans. The salient features of this newly-minted Republic were:
1. Political power was divided more or less equally between three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), with each acting as a check on the powers of the others.
2. The executive and all members of the legislature were elected and served clearly-defined terms.
3. The country was demilitarized, with only a tiny standing army, consisting entirely of volunteers; the citizens themselves, via their militias, provided the rest of the armed strength of the nation. (Large armies and sustained periods of war were viewed as threats to democracy.)
4. Foreign policy could be summed up in Thomas Jefferson's words, “Commerce with all, alliance with none.” George Washington's parting words to the American people warned against "foreign entanglements."
5. The course of foreign policy was set by civilian government. Diplomacy was left to diplomats, not soldiers.
6. The monetary system was based on the gold standard, which kept the purchasing power of money fairly stable and discouraged the government from spending money it did not have.
The American Republic lasted 122 years. Many different dates could be chosen as the exact moment of its finis, but the Spanish-American War is probably the best. What happened was simply this. For 400 years, European powers had been conquering huge sections of the planet for the purpose of exploiting their resources (both human and material), and obtaining strategically located seaports and military bases which could protect their trade routes. In 1898, America – a still-young nation bursting with vitality and strength, having conquered the last of the Indian tribes and pushed Mexican territory back to the Rio Grande -- entered a contentious public debate about whether it, too, should join the fraternity of nations with overseas empires. Looking close to home, she rapped figurative knuckles against the shell of the old Spanish Empire and found it rang hollow. American politicians and businessmen saw in “expansionism” the opportunity to strip Spain of the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and this they did. While Cuba was eventually “returned” to its own people, the U.S. retained title to the other lands, and swiftly garrisoned and fortified them, thus establishing the first real foreign bases in its history. These bases positioned the U.S. to become a “player” in Asian affairs and further strengthened its position the Caribbean. During the period 1899 – 1901, U.S. forces helped crush the Boxer Rebellion in China, siding with the oppressors over the oppressed for purely economic reasons. President Teddy Roosevelt, coming to office in '01, made a decision to vastly expand the United States Navy, which was in keeping with Roosevelt's belief that America must be able to strike militarily anywhere in the world. The nation also became more aggressively involved in international affairs (T.R.'s infamous “gunboat diplomacy” in Central and South America) and more friendly to the concept of central banking, which the Founding Fathers had warned would lead only to the destabilization of the currency and to war. In accordance with this policy, the gold standard was largely abandoned, giving rise to inflation which has never stopped: a dollar, today, is worth about 1/100th of what it was worth in 1913.
Finally, in 1917, and despite the explicit promises of Woodrow Wilson not to do so, America declared war on Germany. The ostensible provocation for this act was the German policy of sinking non-belligerent ships in the Atlantic, including American ones, as part of its attempt to blockade the British Isles. In reality, the true motive for America's entry into the contest came from the domestic arms industry, which saw an opportunity to make a fortune off the conflict, and from a clique of Teddy Roosevelt-style politicians and power-brokers who hungered for America to take a larger role on the world stage. Yet America's participation in the war so disillusioned the population of the country that we rapidly fell back into old-school isolationism once again; indeed, the period 1919 – 1941 was marked by repeated efforts to bring the U.S. back into balance with its original ideals of “trade with all, alliance with none.” Even the military, which had blown up to enormous proportions during the war, rapidly shrank into a shadow of its former power. This was a crucial time in the history of the newly-minted Empire, during which we might have returned to the essential principles of Republicanism – demilitarization, non-alliance, non-interference in the affairs of others, and a strong currency whose purchasing power would remain stable. It was not to be. The Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, meant that America had to once again plunge into the morass of world affairs; this time, however, there was no withdrawal. The outcome of WW2 had left only two world powers in existence: the United States and the Soviet Union, and America took it upon itself to counter the USSR's influence both economically, politically and militarily. To do this it had to massively expand its armed forces, and establish an extensive network of military bases all over the planet. Many would argue this was simple necessity; America had to prepare for the possibility of a third World War.
If that were the only motivation for such a huge military presence abroad, however, why was this presence not eliminated, or at least seriously reduced, when the Cold War ended?
While it is true that there was a smallish decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this decline lasted only a decade and has spiked to unprecedented proportions following the events of September 11, 2001. As of two years ago, America maintained no less than 684 military bases in 74 countries; but even this hardly tells the full tale of U.S. involvement overseas, because American troops are stationed in an additional 76 nations without “formal” bases to support them, bringing the total number of nations partially occupied by U.S. forces to 150. When one considers that there are only 195 nations on the planet Earth, the magnitude of our power and reach are finally brought home. Are we to believe that the containment of terrorism and a tiny handful of rogue states requires more military might than the did the massive and ultra-powerful Soviet Union? The very notion is absurd on its face. Yet every year military budgets go up. Every year more bases are opened in more foreign lands, more troops deployed, more carrier battle groups commissioned. Today's generals have more money and more technological terrors and spy capabilities than their Cold War antecedents ever dreamed of, yet no one feels safer, and indeed, they are not meant to. We live -- have lived, for sixteen years -- in a state of constant tension and anxiety, with one enemy giving way to another and another and another, in a succession as numbing as it is unending. But the identity of the enemy of the moment scarcely matters. The main thing is that there be an enemy, always. Otherwise how to explain this massive military expenditure, this unending attack on our civil liberties? In a democratic society, such things are only justifiable as a security measure. If a sense of security is achieved, the justification for empire and its attendant oppression disappears. Which brings us to the next question, "Who benefits?"
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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