Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 28

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

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.

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.

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?”

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?"

A BRIEF INTERRUPTION (FUCK OFF, 2017)

Before I continue with the series I am presently writing about America – where she is, what she was, and where she is headed – I wanted to post a few words here about the collection of days known as 2017. It's almost New Year's Eve, after all, and therefore a time of summation.

Like all years, this one built off the previous, and all in all, 2016 was a good one for me. I released no less than three books – Cage Life, its sequel Knuckle Down, and a collection of short-stories called Devils You Know – traveled to San Francisco, Vancouver, and Chicago, got to see two of my favorite bands play live (each for the first time), and spent an enormous amount of time swimming, hiking, and generally making use of Los Angeles, which has often gone to such brutal lengths to “make use” of me. In spite of the fact that '16 wil 'e'er be known as The Great Celebrity Massacre, it was in many ways a year to remember fondly.

This one? I'd kind of like to forget.

It started well enough, though money was tight. Money always seems tight in L.A. Whether you're working three jobs or on unemployment, whether the books are selling like crazy or not selling at all, somehow there's never enough of the green to go around. Somebody always has their hand out – the IRS, the student loan people, the mechanic down the street. But I've lived here ten years and am now used to a feeling of poverty, even when my account is flush. Besides, there are other forms of wealth than cash: my first novel won two awards, including “Book of the Year,” and received a large number of really outstanding reviews from both readers and critics alike. I also got to do what I shamelessly admit is one of my favorite parts of living here: meeting actors. I met Mel Gibson, Ronda Rousey, Martin and Juliet Landau, and even Herbert Jefferson, who played “Boomer” on the original Battlestar Galactica (a nerd moment to rival any nerd moment). In the middle of February, however, I sustained a head injury which has proven to be the most expensive boo-boo I've ever had: not financially, but in terms of aggravation. Head trauma, it turns out, is a strange and mysterious thing. A guy like Jake LaMotta sustains tens of thousands of hard blows to the head from some of the toughest boxers ever to lace up a glove, and he dies of old age without so much as slurring a word. A middle-aged author bonks his noggin against a plaster wall and endures tinnitus, dizziness, nausea, and weakness in the limbs for an entire calendar year, only to be told by a host of doctors that there is nothing whatever they can do to help. “Maybe it'll go away on its own,” one of these sage medicos told me, tugging thoughtfully at his chin. And in fact some of it did finally go away, but not enough to make your humble correspondent happy. It is indeed ironic that someone who has been punched in the face as many times as I have should be brought low by slipping on wet tiles, but if nothing else, this unpleasant experience reminded me of one of nature's basic edicts: don't smash your head into anything if you can possibly avoid it.

To get away from my troubles, I joined my family on a trip to Europe – specifically to London and Paris, neither of which I had ever seen. It was a good trip, and a memorable one, and even creatively productive in a way (I did some serious writing whilst there), but the trouble with escape-cations is that you must eventually return to the place whence your troubles were hatched. Within days of arriving home, I had fallen back into a funk of depression and ill-health, which to an extent were caused and fed-upon by one another. Reciprocating misery, one might say.

Then there were the casualties. I don't mean people blown up by bombs or taken out in accidents, I mean the people who, for one reason or another, decide to shake the dust of Los Angeles from their feet forever. I imagine this town has a larger population of transplants than just about any other city in America other than New York or Washington, D.C., and the fact is that for everyone that arrives here, eager to conquer whatever part of Hollywood that tickles their fancy, another one leaves – often out of frustration, disgust, boredom, exhaustion, homesickness, or just plain old economic necessity (if you're gonna be broke, you may as well be broke in a city where rent doesn't cost $2,000). Well, this year, a number of my very favorite people departed for points elsewhere, flattening my once-vast social circle into a line. Big cities can be awfully lonely places, and – get this – it turns out they are more lonely when half your friends leave within a few months of each other. During my spare time, which admittedly is harder to come by now than ever before, I was used to meeting up with folks to hike, swim, eat, drink, watch UFC fights, go to concerts, and see movies. Now I get to do a lot of that stuff by myself, which is every bit as dull and depressing as it sounds. Turns out the only thing harder than losing old friends is making new ones, especially in a town where so many people reserve “friendship” only for those who can help serve their ambitions.

To ease the sting of these losses, I flew to Maryland for the first time in eighteen months, but even this trip, which I enjoyed, was not without its drawbacks. I'd been kind of homesick, and coming home – well, sometimes it cures homesickness, and other times it reminds you why you're homesick in the first place. Then, in the middle of the year, I returned to the world of television and film after a four-year hiatus. Don't mistake me: the money is pretty good, the work itself is interesting, and I like the people around me, but goddamn, is it hard work. After all that time in the video game industry, which operates at a pace perfectly suited to a lazy college student, I have rediscovered what it means to bust your ass – all day, every day, to the point that getting in bed by nine or nine-thirty seems not a sacrifice but a relief. I have also rediscovered a sensation I'd forgotten, which is the all-consuming relief one experiences on a Friday afternoon. It was always nice to have days off, but when your last job consisted of sitting in a chair, drinking beer and playing video games to direction, the transition from “working” to “not working” was hardly a violent shock. Never mind sexcapades, drunken debaucheries and grand adventures, my idea of a “good weekend” now consists mainly of sleeping in and then spending the day watching DVD of long-extinct 80s television shows like T.J. Hooker and Matt Houston, until it's time to sleep again. (Are you jealous yet?)

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that there are years in which random chance or hard work tends to align so many positive events and circumstances that one ends these years feeling not only blessed, but strongly positioned to continue or even increase the blessings in the year to come. Then there are years – for me 2003 and 2013 come to mind – which are so indisputably awful that all you can do is try to hold on until they pass, like man caught in a Texas hailstorm. This year hasn't been quite that bad, but it sure as shit hasn't been what I hoped or expected it would be, and as it breathes its last, I can't help but feel – however irrationally – that I will be extremely glad on New Year's Day. It's not that I expect my ears to stop ringing, or my job to get easier, or the tedious and often frustrating process of marketing books to suddenly reap massive profits; it's not even that I believe I will finally get into the shape I was in four years ago (a lie I've been telling myself for, well, four years); it's simply that however artificial a construct 2017 may be, it will also be over, thus clearing the decks, if only psychologically, for me to dust myself off and start anew. And that, I suppose, is the purpose of years; not merely to live through them, but to see them end.

And with that, I bid goodbye to 2017, and bid it good fucking riddance, too.

THE MAN WITH THE HAMMER

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

― Ludwig von Mises

No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold.

--- George Orwell

The other day I watched my cat lie down next to an anthill in the back yard. From the look in his evil yellow eyes I knew he could see the tiny ants swarming and scurrying beneath him on the sun-warmed stones; nevertheless he flopped down there without any hesitation and began to lounge as only cats and college students can. Within moments, however, he was crawling with outraged six-legged insects. He twitched a few times in irritation, then jumped up, walked away, and carefully removed all the ants from his body in cat-fashion, by eating them. He glared at the anthill for several seconds, walked back to it, and flopped down upon it once more, stretching out as if he intended to spend the whole day there. Needless to say, his second experience with the hill was no more comfortable than his first, though he did do great violence to the hill and destroyed several additional members of the ant colony before he fled once more.

Watching this incident over my newspaper, it occurred to me suddenly that my cat's behavior was almost perfectly analogous to America's foreign policy – to the modern American attitude toward nearly everything. Because Spike the cat was a hundred times larger and more powerful than any ant, he assumed he could settle upon the ants' territory without negative consequence to himself. When the ants fought back, however, he did not feel chastened or foolish; he did not seek a different place to while away the afternoon, or question his right to lay upon their territory. In fact he learned absolutely nothing, and returned in short order to repeat his initial mistake. All he accomplished in the end was to aggravate himself and take the lives of a certain number of ants.

At this moment, our new Secretary of Defense, “Mad Dog” Mattis, intends to ramp up the fight against the various Islamic factions presently causing havoc with our grand design in the Middle East. Indeed, he has already done so: during his brief tenure as the No. 2 man in our military establishment, America's armed forces have unloaded dozens of cruise missiles at the Assad regime in Syria, and dropped the so-called “mother of all bombs” – the largest non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal – on enemy forces in Afghanistan. Commando teams have hit various camps belonging to various terrorist factions. Drone strikes continue all across the globe with metronomic regularity. Mattis, a former commandant of the Marine Corps and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was known during his military service as a hard charger, tough and relentlessly aggressive. Recently, when asked by a congressman what kept him awake at night, he replied, “Nothing. I keep other people awake at night.” It goes without saying, though I am going to say it anyway, that Mattis is enormously popular with the fighting troops and particularly with those on “the tip of the spear” – the Rangers, SEALs, Delta Forces, etc. who do much of our killing for us while we sit safely in America, reading newspapers and watching cats fumble about on anthills.

Our soldiers seem to feel, more or less collectively, that Secretary Mattis is the sort who will “take the gloves off” and let them get down to the red business of slaughtering America's enemies wherever they may be found. One can hardly blame them for this. Since 1945 there has not been a single conflict in which America's military has been free to unleash all of its power and resources against its enemies. In Korea (1950 - 1953) and particularly in Vietnam (1965 – 1973), use of force was restricted and governed by numerous political considerations that left the men in the field feeling immensely frustrated. Even in the Gulf War (1991), politics dictated not only the way the campaign against Hussein's regime ended, but how peace terms were dictated, leaving a sensation among many that the war, while victorious in outcome, had not been a total victory (Hussein remained in power, after all, for another twelve years). And the so-called “Global War on Terror,” which has been conducted from 2001 onwards without letup, has been a strange and somewhat grotesque combination of overwhelming force and pathetic half-measures, which, if boiled down to a single descriptive sentence, might be: “Kill them – but don't offend them.” The result is that, sixteen years removed from 9/11, almost nothing has changed except the names of the enemies. Hussein gave way to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which gave way to ISIS, which will soon give way to something else, but the conflict itself is no closer to a resolution than it was on September 12, 2001, and may actually be farther away. Military men believe that this is because they have been handcuffed by politicians and bureaucrats-in-uniform, and this is understandable. To a man with the hammer, all the problems look like nails: every human being sees reality through the perspective of their own place within it. When I was in law enforcement, the most commonly expressed sentiment among my peers in the police, corrections department and so on was how helpless they felt beneath the tangle of regulations and red tape that constricted their every movement. It was bad enough to be opposed by cunning and relentless criminals; did we have to fight “downtown” as well?

I will not shock you when I say that it is the fantasy of everyone who ever carried a rifle or a badge to play either Rambo or Dirty Harry at some point in their careers. To saddle up, lock and load, and lay waste until every one of the bad guys was lying dead in a pool of broken glass and blood. This fantasy, eloquently expressed by Toby Keith in his song “Beer For My Horses,” is not rooted in enjoyment of violence; it is rooted in the belief that violence solves problems in and of itself, and that if only the restraining hand were taken away, if our latent power were unleashed, the world would be a better place. Fans of the 90s television show Home Improvement will remember that Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor's answer to any mechanical problem was, “More power!” He was constantly adding boosters and superchargers to things like lawn mowers and chain saws, and constantly dismayed when his mechanical experiments ended in fiery disaster. Like my cat, he did not learn from past mistakes, but kept applying the same methods over and over again and drawing no conclusions from their failure.

Allen's character was, of course, meant to be a caricature of the American male, but in a larger sense he was a caricature of America itself, whose answer is always “more power,” regardless of the question. Rambo made $300 million dollars not because it is a great movie per se, but because frustrated Americans just wanted to see our enemies blown all to hell, with no politician or bleeding-heart in uniform to stop them. The message of the movie was certainly simple enough: if you let American fighting men fight, victory is assured. This is almost certainly true, but it begs a very important question: why were they fighting in the first place?

To paraphrase the historian Walther Görlitz, the belief that power never fails, and that it is the solution to any and all problems, that enough bombs can settle any argument, is probably the most resilient and pernicious delusion of the modern era. It has been disproven so many times that one wonders that anyone believes in it all, and yet decade after decade it remains the basis of American foreign policy and the bedrock of American political thinking. During the afformentioned Vietnam conflict, General Curtis LeMay threatened to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age; when someone pointed out that North Vietnam already lived in the Stone Age, LeMay had no answer. He just went on bombing. And in fact America dropped more bombs in Vietnam than all the combatants combined dropped in the whole of World War II. But the problem in that conflict was not a shortage of bombs. It was lack of strategy, both political and military, and a misunderstanding of what force alone can achieve.

In the early 19th century, the Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book, On War, which remains the cornerstone of all military thought and philosophy to this very hour. He defined war as “politics carried out by other means” (war, in other words) and stated that no sane person would enter into a war without having clearly defined postwar goals as well as a concrete strategy for winning. He emphasized that no amount of tactical brilliance could win a war if that underlying strategy was false – that bad strategy, like an improper foundation, would simply cause the whole effort to collapse. After WW2, a German field marshal under Allied interrogation stated that Hitler's mistake in that conflict was to flip Clausewitz's dictum on its head, to view military victory as an end in itself, and a cure for the political problems that had started it. Stalin, too, subscribed to this theory, stating, “A dead man is not a problem. Kill the man and you eliminate the problem.” When someone asked him about moral authority, referencing the Pope, the Soviet dictator famously sneered, “The Pope? How many divisions does he have?” To Stalin the idea of an underlying moral authority was nonsense. What mattered were how many planes, tanks, guns and troops you could muster, and whether or not you were willing to use them. Somehow, since 1945, we Americans have come to believe roughly the same thing as a nation. We are the world's foremost military power; our missiles can strike anywhere on earth, and our troops can be deployed within a matter of days to almost any point of the compass from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole. Furthermore, we are almost completely immune from retaliation. Abraham Lincoln's observation that “all the armies of Europe and Asia could not water their horses in the Ohio river” remains true today. It simply doesn't compute in our collective brains that groups of what we consider to be murderous savages, tucked away in places like Yemen and Nigeria and Indonesia, could defy us for any long period of time. If final victory in the “Global War on Terror” hasn't been achieved after close to two decades, then the answer must be simple – we aren't bombing them hard enough. What we need is...more power!

And more power is precisely what we are applying. Though the Trump administration is still wet behind the ears, we've already been told that there may be a need to put “boots on the ground” in Syria to tackle the threat of ISIS; that a military strike can't be ruled out against North Korea; and that we will stand no more nonsense from Iran. This, in addition to continuing U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Niger, daily drone strikes in Yemen, and, almost incredibly, another surge of troop strength in Iraq -- a war which, at this point, is nearly as old as the soldiers fighting it. Confidence runs high that more drone strikes, more commando raids, more cruise missile attacks, more bombs and more boots will somehow succeed where previous military action has failed; and that more money – endless torrents of taxpayer dollars, running into the hundreds of billions – will put some starch into the flaccid American puppet regimes in the Islamic world, or the so-called “friendly” Islamic states of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Surely, the logic goes, if we just combine larger carrots with larger sticks, we will finally hit upon the formula to exterminate Islamic terror groups, establish democracy everywhere, and keep the Mideast pipelines open and flowing into American combustion engines. The “Global War on Terror” will come to a victorious conclusion, and we can resume traveling by airplane without feeling like inmates in minimum security prisons.

As I have stated, there is a great deal of sincerity behind this belief, and it comes from a total misunderstanding of history; but this misunderstanding can work two ways. It would be wrong to say that violence never solves anything. America won its independence through violence. Slavery was abolished by violence. German, Italian and Japanese fascism were destroyed by violence. Violence was and remains a tool which can be used to settle important problems. But like any other tool, it is useless and can even be self-destructive if it is employed without intelligence. One will note that in the examples I just used, the objective of our government was always simple and clear-cut, and all military, economic and political considerations were subordinated to achieving it. In 1776 the objective was the end of British rule in America. In 1861 it was the restoration of the Union and later, the abolition of slavery (as a means of restoring said Union). In 1941 it was the destruction of fascism and the establishment of democracy throughout the world. But as I noted above, our military efforts subsequent to WW2, our record of success has been much worse even though our expenditures of money and bombs have been much higher, because our objectives have been nebulous or uninspiring, and we were therefore unable to unify our military, economic and political efforts. This applies especially to the endless “Global War on Terror.” In the beginning, of course, it seemed an easy thing to understand. We had been attacked on our own soil. Thousands were dead. Our greatest city had been symbolically emasculated. Naturally we wanted revenge. But amidst the cries for vengeance very few people asked why this terrible thing had happened. What was the motivation of the attackers? What were their strategic aims? What was it they hoped to accomplish through such a massacre, knowing that our retaliation would be swift and terrible?

Then-President Bush supplied convenient answers. “They hate freedom,” was one. “They want to destroy our way of life,” was another. On several occasions he simply wrote off the entire attack as an act of “pure evil,” as if the motivations of Osama bin Laden's gang were simply mustache-twirling villainy for its own sake. One man who rejected these explanations was Ron Paul, who stated that 9/11 was simply a consequence of America's interventionalist foreign policy. It was, in essence, the revenge of the ants on the cat who sat on their anthill. For decades, America has dropped bombs almost without number throughout the Middle East – in Libya, in Syria, in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Iraq. At the same time we have pursued a policy of arming, funding and enabling the Israelis to behave as they please toward more or less subject populations who are predominately Islamic in faith. And on top of this we have not only arranged for violent “regime changes” against inconvenient leaders, but constantly backed, with both money and arms, ruthless dictators who imposed stifling oppression on their own people. The story of American meddling in the Middle East would require a multi-volume book series of its own to tell in full, but the point is simply that our own hands are not clean and haven't been since before most of us were born. Much of the anger and hatred expressed toward us in that part of the region is quite frankly justified, and if you doubt that, take a look at the kill statistics vis-a-vis American drone strikes in the last few years – the proportion of terrorists definitely killed versus that of innocent bystanders who had the bad fortune of being a half-block away when the bomb went off. In many cases we are killing as many as five civilians for every terrorist, and in many documented instances the missiles have missed the terrorists entirely and wiped out dozens and in some cases hundreds of totally blameless people. This sort of thing may not bother the fat-bellied wannbe warlords you encounter in American bars and barber shops who don't give a damn how many ragheads we have to grease to get at the bad ones, but it bothers me, because I can put myself in the place of a hard-working husband who comes home to find his inconveniently-located house a smoking hole in the ground, and his family nothing more than bloody garbage smeared over the rubble. You have to be pretty cold in the heart and pretty thick in the head not to realize that every time we create this situation, we make the job of the terrorist recruiter that much simpler.

Americans are often frighteningly ignorant of the way they are perceived in other countries, but this myopia is not universal. I once encountered here in Los Angeles an old but vigorous retired businessman who regaled me with tales of his travels as a youth. One point he wanted to press home in particular was how lucky he was to have traveled extensively in North Africa and the Middle East in the early-mid 1960s. Americans, he said, were treated "like kings" by the Arabs back then. "They trusted us and believed us to be good-hearted people who didn't interfere in other people's affairs," he said. "And they remembered how well we treated them when our armies were in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia during WW2. How we had respected their laws and customs. How we left without a fuss when the war was over and how we later opposed the European colonial powers when they tried to steal back their empires in the 1950s." Now, he said, he wouldn't travel to the Middle East if you paid him. Generations of dropping bombs, toppling inconvenient regimes and propping up bloodthirsty tyrants has burned up all their goodwill. They see us not only as an enemy but as a bully, and a vicious one at that. The cheers, actual or secret, that went up in much of the Islamic world when the Twin Towers fell down were driven as much by a feeling that America's chickens had finally come home to roost as by any so-called “hatred of freedom.” The stark fact is that, rightly or wrongly, America is viewed by much of the population on this planet as simply a more up-to-date version of the old British Empire. We may be somewhat more sophisticated than our British cousins were about how we administer that Empire, preferring economic exploitation under the guise of trade to naked conquest; but in the end, when the economic hit-men fail, the troops go in, bringing the corporations behind them. Whether you agree with this assessment is immaterial and irrelevant; the perception has become the reality.

This year there was a tremendous wave of terrorist attacks throughout Europe and Africa – this despite the fact that ISIS has been almost as thoroughly wiped out as al-Qaeda, and that there are no longer a plethora of save havens for terrorists to train. These attacks keep coming, too: the latest was in New York just a few days ago. These are carried out by different groups with different methods, and in many cases these groups do not even get along with each other, but their ultimate goal is the same – get the cat off the anthill, to get the United States out of their countries – militarily, culturally, economically, and politically. It is a simple, clear-cut strategy, and it does not require much in the way of advanced technology or even organization. As we have seen, in the right circumstances, a fanatic with a car and a kitchen knife can do as much or more damage as a bomb or a machine gun; and such people, hiding in plain sight, are much harder to fight than a large, armed band which can be located, identified and exterminated by our military. We can throw Hellfire missiles at suspected terrorists in Yemen, but we cannot do it in Kansas City or Rome or Barcelona. And while we can and do arrest and convict terrorists and would-be terrorists in those places using conventional law enforcement methods, we cannot, using such methods, stop people from choosing to become terrorists in the first place. One cannot cure a disease by treating the symptoms. The limits of purely force-based solutions to political problems are once again looming unpleasantly upon us. Like the Roman army at Masada, we have come face to face with the limits of military power. The problem which brings our men and women to arms has come full circle and landed back in the laps of our politicians.

Secretary Mattis promises to take the fight to the bad guys, to keep them in constant fear, to wipe them off the face of the earth. Doubtless he is a skilled tactician and can accomplish much in this direction. But I submit that tactics alone cannot win the “war on terror.” We must have a strategy, and it must consist of more than destroying one terror cell only to watch two more spring up, mushroom-like, in its place. It must consist of more than giving hundreds of billions in aid to a loathsome regime like Saudi Arabia's in hopes that an even more loathsome regime won't come along and take its place. It must consist of more than keeping the flow of money, weaponry and moral support to Israel continuous and ignoring the stark reality that the gratitude of a few million Jews is paid for by the unrelenting hatred of two billion Muslims. It is perhaps this last point is perhaps the most important, for our politicians must recognize that the supply of potential terrorists is never going to run out. No matter how many times we return to the anthill and start stomping, fresh ants will continue to emerge from their hole, ready to bite and sting. The trick is not to find more and more sophisticated ways of killing them but to take away their motivation for doing this in the first place. And the way to go about this, or at least to begin going about this, is to understand that some – not all, but some – of their grievances against us are legitimate and need to be addressed. Our foreign policy is a clumsy butcher job and has been for generations. It is driven by greed, arrogance, and special interest, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the ideals laid down by our Founding Fathers, or with true patriotism. Americans would not tolerate for a day what we've routinely done to other countries all across the planet for generations, and we ought to start by acknowledging this fact. Should we do so, I think we will discover that the necessity for American bombs is often much lower than we have been led to believe, just as the arguments to keep troops in over 100 nations are thinner and more self-serving that most of us would care to admit.

Many people would say that my attitude is defeatist and another way of advocating surrender. But it seems to me our surrender is already underway, for we are playing directly into the strategy of our opponent. And to understand that, it is necessary to understand what a terrorist really is, and what he wants.

All terrorists (or "freedom-fighters," if you happen to agree with their aims) fight the same way. They employ high-profile terror tactics to effect political change. But the use of these tactics and the emotions they create -- terror and rage -- are means and not ends in themselves. By inciting fear across a whole nation or planet, they give themselves a power out of proportion to their numbers. By provoking rage, they ensure the victim government will retaliate. And as odd as it may sound, terrorists actually wantto be retaliated against. Their hope, often openly stated, is that the enemy government will employ such indiscriminate and violent means of repression that they will end up slaughtering innocent people as well as terrorists. The relatives of these slaughtered innocents will then become sympathetic to the terrorist cause and in many cases actively support or even join it. The very act of trying to destroy a terrorist organization thus, in many cases, empowers that organization. But the insidious genius of terrorism doesn't end there. By virtue of the terrible nature of its crimes -- shooting up schools, blowing airliners to bits, slaughtering concertgoers or tourists, killing even women, children and old people -- it tends to cause the societies it attacks to abandon its own democratic traditions – to opt for security over safety. When I look at how the country has changed in the last sixteen years, how many of our freedoms have been compromised in the name of “national security,” I am continuously reminded of Benjamin Franklin's words, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." The brutal truth is that in spite of all of our military successes, in spite of heaps of immolated terrorist corpses scattered all over the globe, in spite of huge new sums voted by Congress to flow into the military's already bulging coffers, we are losing this fight, and losing it badly. Americans have willingly exchanged hard-won freedoms for a sense of temporary safety. We have set up a surveillance state in which we are told “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” We have vindictively prosecuted whistle-blowers and hurled them into prisons, not for betraying secrets to our enemies, but for blurting terrible truths the government didn't want us to hear. We have allowed the persecution of unpopular minorities to satisfy our momentary resentment and anger. We are beating America into a grim new shape, and we are doing it at the behest of vile murderers who want to drag the entire planet back into the Dark Ages. Isn't that the real surrender?

Contrary to popular belief, there is a way to break the cycle of violence in which we presently find ourselves, and to do so without compromising a single principle; but to understand how we can escape, we must understand how we became trapped in the first place. And this is precisely what I aim to do in the next installment of this blog, "America: From Republic to Empire (and Back Again)."

Foreign Words We Ne Need To Steal

All English-using writers have occasionally experienced the frustration of reaching for a word that isn't there. The writer knows precisely the action, mood or feeling he wants to convey, but there is no single, clear-cut word in the language with which to describe it. He can make up a phrase, but it often comes off clunky and awkward. He can beat the thesaurus like a pinata, but nothing really useful falls out. And this feeling of frustration – for which, ironically, English also seems to have no word – is hardly unique to writers. Ordinary people feel it every day when trying to convey an idea, only to discover there is no vehicle for doing so. This discovery, coupled with a reluctance that English-speakers possess for studying the vocabulary they actually do have available to them, leads to a great increase in the usage of slang; but slang words, like politicians' promises, have very short shelf lives. They only temporarily fill the linguistic gap, they are often vulgar in expression, and it often happens that when they expire, the following generation does not replace them. I recently watched a documentary about the 60s, and what struck me was how little of the slang from that day was still in use now -- or even in the 1980s, when its originators were still quite young. The same thing has happened to the slang of "my" 1980s; with a couple of notable exceptions ("dope," for example) it has disappeared so completely from use that encountering it on TV re-runs is a little jarring, like stepping into a time machine.

In these circumstances, it is often necessary for English-users to appropriate foreign words to express their thoughts and circumstances accurately. American English is positively riddled with French, Latin, and German words which are unchanged from their original form except in pronunciation, but it seems to me that Americans are becoming more, rather than less reluctant to do this as time goes on, and are relying more heavily than ever on brunch words, slang, and idiom to communicate ideas. This jury-rigging of our language is a dubious thing at best, especially when there are so many delightful foreign words just waiting to be stolen and Americanized. I have decided therefore to make a list of some of my favorites. (Please note: Because the only language I studied in depth is German, I have included more German words than others.)

Opinionswille: This is an archaic and very complex German term which literally translates to “opinion of the will.” (Some attribute its invention to Adolf Hitler, but never mind that.) It presupposes the idea that one's will can have its own opinion, perhaps independent of the rational mind. In practical terms it means when a person expresses an attitude which rests in his or her desire to do something, or to avoid it. “I know I ought to lose weight, but it is my opinionswille that I eat this jelly donut.”

Shitaka-na-gi: A common expression in Japan, shitaka-na-gi is roughly equivalent to the French “c'est la vie,” and is generally used to express the stoic acceptance of something that really sucks about life. In broader terms it can be called an acceptance of the unfairness and harshness of life, the inability of humans to do anything but endure in the face of misfortune. The literal translation is said to be, “Nothing can be done about it” or, less commonly, “What can you do?” It differs from such phrases as "that's life" or "life's a bitch" in that there is no element of bitterness, merely philosophical acceptance.

Treppenwitz: A German word with two equally good meanings. You know when somebody devastates you at noon with a smart-ass remark, and you think of the perfect comeback at three in the morning? That's treppenwitz. But it can also mean a joke which might have been funny when it was uttered but later seems in bad taste. When Reagan-era functionary James Watt heard a reporter's assertion that the president's cabinet was essentially just a gang of old white men, he replied, “Not true. We've got a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” The assembled journalists erupted in laughter...then crucified Watt for his tastelessness the next day. But if you watch the clip, you'll notice they are all laughing at the time he said it. This "laugh now, cringe later" sort of behavior is treppenwitz at its finest.

Eomchina: In the movie CLOCKWATCHERS, the unhappy character played by Parker Posey bitterly references a meal during which she had to endure, “hours of listening to my parents talking about my sisters...my perfect sisters.” The sneering yet despairing emphasis she puts on the word “perfect” would be called in Korean “eomchina,” a reference to a person whose perfection drives you fucking crazy. When your mom screams, “Why can't you be more like your brother?” that means your brother is an eomchina.

Dafka: There is a scene in GOOD WILL HUNTING which defines this word clearly:

Will: My father used to just put a belt, a stick, and a wrench on the kitchen table and say, ‘Choose.’
Sean: Well, I gotta go with the belt there.
Will: I used to go with the wrench.
Sean: Why?
Will: ’Cause fuck him. That’s why.

In other words, Will Hunting chose the wrench “dafka.” It is an ultra-flexible Hebrew term, which the novelist Herman Wouk defined as meaning “necessary, for that very reason, perversely, defiantly, in spite of everything.” One should note the use of the word “necessary” in Wouk's definition. It is not literal but perceived necessity, in this case the "necessity" of pride. I remember repeatedly taunting an older bully on my seventh-grade schoolbus, knowing he would punch me in the arm for it, but also knowing my defiance would eat in his guts like a worm all day long. I did this "dafka."

Weltschmertz: On the television show THREE'S COMPANY, the character of Janet would always stuff herself with french fries when put under great stress. Being an actress, she never gained any weight, but in America, the weight we gain from such stress-induced binge-eating is called “weltschmertz.” Given the present shape of America, I'm surprised this German word isn't as popular as “kindergarten.”

Dépayser: In English we use the clunky phrase “out of the comfort zone” to describe when a new activity, or movement outside the routine, brings us emotional discomfort in the form of anxiety and uncertainty. We lack a phrase which describes the reverse, a positive feeling triggered by travel or change. Dépayser is this word. People who travel for pleasure, and thus constantly place themselves in strange and unfamiliar locations by choice, do so in part for the feeling of dépayser. This year, when I was at a low point financially, emotionally and physically, I traveled to London and Paris. My health improved immediately, I began to write again, and I returned to Los Angeles feeling very much renewed. Thus dépayser.

"Torschlusspanik" describes a feeling of dread or anxiety produced by the awareness – sudden or creeping – that life is short, the fuse is burning, and we have only a limited amount of time remaining to do all the things we wanted to do with our lives. We would probably refer to it as a “mid-life crisis,” though the “panik” in “torschlusspanik” is not necessarily triggered by age. I experienced this sensation for the first time when I was twenty-nine years old, and began to grasp had chosen the wrong career -- law enforcement. Within a year I had left my profession, moved to a new state and returned to school. Thus, "torschlusspanik" can be a healthy thing, too.

Vorfreude: We appropriated “schadenfreude” (shameful or malicious joy) from the Germans long ago, but for some reason left its cousin Vorfreude behind in the Fatherland. This is a shame, because it is an extraordinarily useful word, covering not an emotion but the feelings which precede the arrival of a particular emotion. In particular, vorfreude is “the anticipation of joy,” i.e. the peculiar feeling of excitement, happiness and pleasure we get when we are expecting a joyous experience -- sex, food, Christmas morning. As Major Winchester said in an episode of M*A*S*H, in regards to preparing himself for a delicious meal, "Anticipation is in itself a sensory delight."

Belarus'ka: This is a Russian word that translates into “someone who doesn't want to get their hands dirty.” A person that gives you an ugly task, such as firing a co-worker, and then leaves the office early and turns off their cell phone, is definitely a belarus'ka. Since we're on the subject, it has a rough equivalent in German, called “Handschuhschneeballwerfer,” which means “a coward who criticizes from far away." When I was a kid we called these people "telephone tough guys," and the modern generation calls them "keyboard warriors." But "belarus'ka" is more precise. These are not necessarily physical cowards, people who prefer to be elsewhere when the consequences of their actions manifest themselves. Many of our politicians are belarus'ka.

Yaourter: This is one of the all-time great French words, which means literally “to yogurt.” Most commonly, a person “yogurts” when they attempt to fake their way through song lyrics they do not know, also known as “The Pearl Jam Effect.” This is such a common experience in America I can't believe we don't have our own word for it, but this one will more than do.
Incidentally, “Yaourter” can also be applied to people faking their way through a foreign language with a bunch of nonsensical gibberish, or even those just generally faking their way through a situation. (When I try to speak German to Germans, I am a "pulling a yogurt.")

Dab-jung-nuh: This is a terrific Korean word that means to be forced to say what someone else wants to hear, often in response to a question from someone else. When your girlfriend asks you, “Does this dress make me look fat?”, your response is almost certainly going to be a “dab-jung-nuh.” (If you don't employ a dab-jung-nuh, expect to sleep on the couch.)

Reichfreudeikit: Yet another archaic German word,
this is best translated into English as "joy in the kingdom," i.e. a sense of universal happiness felt by every last citizen, usually precipitated by some great national triumph. Examples of this in my own lifetime are rare, but would probably include when the American hostages returned from Iran in 1981, and when the Gulf War ended in 1991. America used to experience Reichfreudeikit a lot more than it does today, probably because there is so little sense of national unity.

Of course, I know the English language employs a quarter of a million words, and the ordinary American doesn't use more than a few percent of them. Doubtless if I opened the foot-thick dictionary I have on my desk, I could find many English equivalents to those I have listed here. But sometimes, damn it, it's more fun to steal.

Yoga Thoughts: Or, Namasate, Motherf----r!

The following is taken from my journal of 2014. I wrote it after coming home from my hot yoga class, so I could capture the thought process I go through each and every time I show up.

It is as relevant today as it was then.

Nice and warm in here.

Ah I missed the strangely soothing herbal scent of this place. Why have I been away so long?

How peaceful and quiet it is. A refuge from the noise and bad manners of L.A.

Here's my instructor. My, look at those abs. My, look at that butt. She knows her business. I'm in good hands.

Here we go. This isn't so bad. I'm in better shape than I thought.

Looking pretty good. Feeling pretty good. Shit, I bet I could learn to teach this for a living if I stuck with it.

Hmmm. I forgot how to do that pose. But still. Not so bad. We're like 15 minutes in and I'm barely sweating. Why did I think I was in such bad shape?

Oooh I felt that one a little bit.

Damn it why I can't I hold this pose? Why is my balance so bad? Shit, I just slipped. SHIT, I just said "shit" aloud!

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Find your inner something. Oh no, we're doing that freaking pose again. Who designed this pose? The Marquis de Sade?
How long does she think I can hold this? I'm not a fucking mime.

Jesus I'm sweating like Nixon here. Vietnam wasn't this hot. Why doesn't she give us two seconds to towel off?

Calm down, calm down. Now. Inhale through the -- ? Is it inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, or inhale through the mouth and exhale through the nose? Doesn't matter 'cause I'm panting like a dog.

Christ not another lunge. And why do they call this "Runner's Pose?" Runners RUN. They don't stand at the blocks torturing their thigh muscles until their whole body is vibrating like a Goddamn tuning fork.

Everyone can do this pose but me. I hate you all.

Time to towel off. Wait, how'd my towel get this wet already? Why is my water bottle empty? I don't even remember drinking.

My thighs. Oh sweet Lord my thighs are burning. I can't possibly do this for another second. But I can't be the one who quits first. Quitting second is fine. But I can't quit first.

Crissake, isn't anyone going to quit? Am I the ONLY FUCKING ONE who can't endure this?

Oh thank GOD. We're lying down. Sweet gravity, I embrace thine bountiful bosom!

That's right. Let me just lie here a few minutes and stare at the ceiling in a spiritual manner. Hey, these ceiling fans would be doing me more good if they were TURNING.

No I don't want to grab my hamstrings. My hamstrings are burning chords of pain. And don't tell me to "soften my jaw." I LIKE my jaw clenched.

Oh no not abs. Merciful God not abs! IF THIS IS THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR ABS YOU CAN FREAKING WELL KEEP 'EM! Anyway I already have a six-pack...waiting for me in the fridge.

What do you mean, "Just three more!?" You said "just three more" FIVE MORE AGO, YOU TREACHEROUS SNAKE WOMAN.

Whoever put the KFC next to this yoga studio is a huge asshole.

F this. I quit. Gonna just lay here. No shame in that! They always say, "Just lie down if you need a rest." But wait, nobody is lying down. Everyone is doing this horrible crunch-thing. Everyone. Even the woman over there who is like 72 and clearly has never done yoga in her life.

WON'T SOMEBODY QUIT FIRST, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD?

What time is it? How long has this class gone on? This is the 60 minute class, right? Not the 75? PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE THE 75!

Gasp. Is it the 90?

PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE THE 90! I can't cry in front of all these hot girls. Then again, who would notice since I'm drenched in sweat?

Oh no the instructor's getting spiritual again. I am hurting in places where I did not know I had nerve-endings and she's talking about my spirit. What about my BODY? Flab does not like being tortured this way. FLAB HAS RIGHTS, YOU FITNESS FASCIST!

Seriously, if this ab stuff doesn't stop I'm gonna hijack Dr. Who's time machine and find out whoever invented yoga and hit them in the head with a crowbar. "Namaste THAT, motherfucker!"

Pretty sure my knee wasn't supposed to make that sound.

I am sweating like a slug in salt.

Maybe that nut on Yahoo Answers was right and yoga really was created by Satan.

Can't believe I paid for this pain. I could go pick a fight on the street and get my ass kicked for free.

Wait. She just turned the fans on. She only does that when she's winding up the class. Thank each and every god in the Pantheon of gods.

It's over. I can't move. Am I lying in a puddle of sweat or have I actually become the puddle? There's a question for the yogis. One thing's for sure, I'm never coming back to this herbal-scented antechamber to hell. Why did I ever agree to return in the first place?

Oh wait, here comes my instructor. In her spray-on yoga pants.

"Thank you, miss. Great job. Nice (cl)ass. Are you teaching tomorrow? Yes? Great. Terrific. Wonderful. I'll see you then. Unless something comes up."

(Like spending ALL NIGHT IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM YOU DEVIL-WOMAN)

Ha ha ha. Just kidding. I kid because I love. And because I'm delirious from dehydration and pain.

Namaste. Seriously.

Are You Now (Or Have You Ever?)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
– remark attributed to St. Bernard of Clairevaux

When I was in high school, I was directed by one of my English teachers to read Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Ostensibly the story is about the Salem witch trials in New England during the period 1692 – 1693. In reality, the subject is not the trials but the mental attitudes which led to them. Simply put, it is a story about the power of accusation, and how that power can and often is brutally misused to destroy human reputations and lives, all in the name of justice.

You know the saying: “Everyone remembers the accusation, nobody remembers the denial.” Or, “Smear 'em on page one, retract on page twelve.” Or, “Throw enough mud and some of it will stick.” They are all different ways of saying the same thing: to be accused of something is enough to hurt you, and to be accused of something vile – like child molestation or treason – is enough to destroy you. Guilt or innocence don't play into it. Defense, no matter how artfully conducted and no matter how deeply rooted in the truth, never matches the flashy glamor of attack. Trials “in the court of public opinion” are never fair, and only seldom even accidentally hit upon the truly guilty. By the time facts come to light, the damage is usually done, and it is usually fatal.

At the moment, Hollywood – and to a larger extent, America itself, which in a sense is merely the larger reflection of Hollywood – is undergoing a frenzy of career-and-life-destroying accusation which probably hasn't been seen since the opening stages of the McCarthyism. And like McCarthyism, whose stated goal – the removal of communists and communist sympathizes from American public life – was in conflict with its real aims (the criminalization of non-criminal behavior), the present witch-hunt atmosphere seems to have two distinct and opposing characteristics. The more-or-less stated goal of the “#MeToo” campaign is to expose those in power who have committed severe sexual harassment and sexual assault under color of authority, and in this it seems at first glance to be quite effective. In just a few short weeks, a sort of steamroller of accusation has crushed, or at least badly wobbled the pedestals, of such Hollywood players as Harvey Weinstein, Bret Ratner, James Toback, Kevin Spacey, Chris Savino, Roy Price, Jeffrey Tambor, Russell Simmons, George Takei, Louis C.K. and Ben Affleck; it has perhaps aborted the unlikely rise of Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore, is setting fire to the legacy of Bill Clinton, and may have wrecked Al Franken's political career; it has driven Michael Halperin, Michael Oreskes and Lockhart Steele from their media jobs; and it has probably destroyed what was left of Bill O'Reilly's career following his ouster from Fox News. And this may be only the beginning. Fresh scandals probably await in the military, the judiciary, congress, big business, and elsewhere. The lid is being pried off a great stew of ugliness which has been simmering out of sight for decades. Women – and not a few men – are finally getting their own back for being subjected to the disgusting behaviors of those who crassly exploited and even violated them with impunity for years. So, you ask, what the hell could be wrong with that?

Well, for starters, the opposing characteristic of #MeToo is its complete disregard for due process of law. As in the Salem Witch Trials and in the McCarthy hearings themselves, it is enough for the majority of the people in the campaign – and evidently, the country at large – that a person simply be accused of wrongdoing for them to be judged guilty, shamed, and professionally destroyed. The idea that every person get their day in court, that they deserve a fair and impartial hearing regardless of how hideous or outrageous the accusation leveled against them, seems to have been dismissed as inconvenient and unnecessary – even “chauvinistic” and "misogynistic." For example, Hilary Clinton stated unequivocally during her presidential campaign that any woman who claimed to be the victim of sexual assault “had a right to be believed.” Coming from a woman who practiced law for many years, this statement is both incredible and terrifying: surely Clinton knows that no one making an accusation has a “right to be believed” under American jurisprudence. What they have is a right to be heard. The distinction is not semantic. A person who claims to have been sexually assaulted has every right to file civil and criminal complaints against their alleged attacker, but it is not the job of the police and the district attorney's offices to believe them, merely to investigate the charges to determine their validity -- or lack of it. Many false or exaggerated charges are filed in America; and many frivolous lawsuits. It is precisely this fact which causes us to proceed cautiously. In the classic 1943 movie, The Ox-Bow Incident, the murder of a rancher and the theft of his cattle are sufficient for an outraged Western town to lynch three drifters suspected of the crime; it later turns out the men were entirely innocent, and the man most vocal for executing the drifters a liar, coward and fraud. The message of the film is as brutally simple as its climax: the lynch-mob may be a satisfying way of venting outrage, but it is too blunt and crude a tool to be trusted. What's more, it is too easily wielded by those, like Joe McCarthy, who have ulterior motives.

Now, unlike the witch-hunts conducted by McCarthy and various committees of Congress during the 30s - 50s, I very seriously doubt that the destruction of innocent people is an intended consequence of #MeToo. I think the campaign's motive is largely pure, and, for the record, I think it quite likely that many of those accused are probably as guilty as hell. I've lived in Hollywood for ten years, and that is long enough to get an idea of who is getting away with what, and for how long. In the case of people like Weinstein, for example, or Louis C.K., what the broad public is learning about them now has been known to most people in this town forever. And it is notable that many of the accused are not even mounting token defenses against the charges leveled against them, but have meekly slunk out of the limelight after issuing blanket apologies. The point, however, is not whether the tactics of #MeToo are effective at flushing the guilty from their hiding places, but whether the ends justify the means. Supporters of what we now call McCarthyism believed that the threat posed by Communism gave them the right to ignore the U.S. Constitution. Supporters of Bush's Patriot Act and Obama's NDAA believed that the threat posed by terrorists gave them the same right. In each case, fear triumphed over reason, the lynch-mob mentality over the idea of due process of law. At the moment, accusations are being made without eyewitness corroboration, without physical evidence, without any proof whatsoever that they occurred; in some cases, these accusations are, to quote one reporter, “older than half the people living on this planet.” They cannot be verified or disproved and are often past the statute of limitations, yet they are being taken as seriously as if fingerprints, DNA samples and literal smoking guns were in police custody. Reputations that took lifetimes to achieve are being destroyed in less time than it takes to tap 140 characters into a Twitter account, and no one seems to care. On the contrary, the public seems to be almost salivating at the question, "Who's next?" And the very act of defending the accused is viewed by many as an act in support of “rape culture” generally. As with McCarthyism or the Salem Trials, or even the fictional (but too often real) Ox-Bow Incident, those who point out the slippery slope upon which we now reside are immediately lumped in with the guilty. And how hard would it be to ruin them as well? The destruction of you and all you've worked for is now only as far away as the nearest wi-fi connection.

I don't propose to analyze why humans respond so gullibly and eagerly to charges and so skeptically to denials; doubtless the secret is buried somewhere in our collective, tribal subconscious. The important thing is not that this tendency exists but that we fight it whenever it tries to surface, in whatever set of sheep's clothing it chooses to appear. In one of my favorite films, Magnum Force, the hero of the film, “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a man with a tendency to make violent shortcuts through the legal system, discovers a group of even more violent vigilantes has formed within the San Francisco Police Department, bent on exterminating the criminal population. Whatever sympathy Harry might harbor for these rogue cops, however, disappears when they murder an old partner of his who stumbles in their path: Harry rejects their overtures to join their death squad and sets about destroying them. When confronted by their leader, the following conversation ensues:

BRIGGS: Anyone who threatens the security of the people will be executed. Evil for evil, Harry. Retribution.

CALLAHAN: That's just fine, but how does murder fit in? When the police start being their own executioners, where's it gonna end? Pretty soon, you'll start executing people for jaywalking. And executing people for traffic violations. Then you end up executing your neighbor 'cause his dog pisses on your lawn.

BRIGGS: There isn't one man we've killed that didn't deserve what was coming to him.

CALLAHAN: Yes, there is. Charlie McCoy.

BRIGGS: What would you have done?

CALLAHAN: I'd have upheld the law!

BRIGGS: What the hell do you know about the law? You're a great cop, Harry. You had a chance to join the team, but you'd rather stick to the system.

CALLAHAN: Briggs, I hate the goddamn system! But until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it!

This scene has always resonated with me precisely because I understand the positions of both men. Briggs is fed-up with a “justice system” that seems to produce nothing but injustice; Callahan is equally fed up but grasps where vigilantism will inevitably lead in the end. He knows that Charlie McCoy, the cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was simply the first of much worse “collateral damage” to come. Silly as it may seem, the parallels to the #MeToo campaign are inescapable. On the one hand, it is an understandable reaction to a world which tolerated all sorts of sexual abuse and exploitation without batting an eyelash, and in some cases it has done inarguable good; on the other, it is still vigilantism, and this vigilantism is not less dangerous because it is virtual. One is continually reminded of the moral of A Tale of Two Cities, in which we discover that mob rule can be as dangerous to those who use it as to those they use it upon: the heads of the revolutionaries' end up in the same bloody basket as those of the aristocrats they overthrew. The whole practice of internet-shaming may produce short-term good, but the general trend of such tactics is always toward tyranny and injustice. Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked that it is better for a thousand guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished, and our legal system, flawed as it is, is more or less built around this concept. As a former law enforcement officer, I know better than post people how frustrating our legal and civil processes can be; how slow, how inefficient, how tipped in favor of the rich and powerful they actually are. I don't blame victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault from being trepidatious about coming forward, knowing what they have to go through to get even the possibility of legal satisfaction. Yet the alternative, in the form of the literal or virtual lynch mob, is much worse. If you don't believe me, ask yourself this question: if, tomorrow, you woke up to discover someone had made accusations against you for, say, rape or child molestation on Twitter, and discovered as well that thousands of people had accepted those claims at face value, despite the total lack of evidence or corroboration, what would your first impulse be? Aside from horror and revulsion, you would almost certainly seek to defend yourself by legal means. In other words, you would rely on due process of law to protect you and restore your good name. So, no matter how satisfying the noose and the pitchfork may be to hold in your hands, when you yourself are confronted with them, your instinct will always be to run to the sheriff. And what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Legal protections have to exist for everyone all the time, or they mean nothing.

Now, God knows we can do a better job in this country of preventing sexual misconduct in our leaders and employers, and it would probably be disingenuous to claim that #MeToo hasn't performed a certain public service, but at the risk of pummeling a dead horse until the bones fly, the question is not whether the methods work, merely whether they should be used. And I believe history has answered that question.

Just ask Joe McCarthy. Or his victims.