Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 28
May 12, 2018
Nightclubbin'
So I guess I must have just been dreaming
When I thought I heard myself say no
Anyway it looks like no one heard me so here I go
'Cause when you're in the company of strangers
Or just the strangers you call friends
You know before you start just how it's going to end
When the doors swing open and all the drinks are passed around,
Anytime the pickings look too easy...hold me down
I can't remember why I like this feeling
When it only seems to let me down
Soon I find I'm searching for the exit from the ground
If I think the room is turning faster
Then I think the music is too loud
By then I've lived another broken story to let me down.
-- The Gin Blossoms
We're only immortal for a limited time.
-- Rush
Before anything else, the sense memories. Smell and sight, taste and touch. And sound, sound, sound.
If we begin with our noses, we must observe that the scent of a nightclub changes over the course of one's time there. When one first arrives, and the place is still largely empty, it is a coldish smell, the smell of air conditioning in an empty space, tinged with the nasal sting of disinfectant and the heavier, muskier odor last night's beer. It is an unwelcome smell, somewhat unpleasant, but there is a positive Pavlovian response to it nonetheless. Just as cheap, cloying perfume may nevertheless remind one of sex, the fickle odors of the empty nightclub serve as reminders of all the other good nights that began this way – amidst that chilly, unwelcome, unwholesome odor.
As the evening stretches into night and the trickle of patrons becomes a steady flow, the temperature of the air changes and with it, the smell. All those young bodies burning at 98.6 degrees soon warm things up, and more pleasant scents intrude: perfume, cologne, hair spray, fresh beer, puffs of cigarette smoke. This is the smell that the earlier smell promised; that of youth, infused with hormones and anticipation. It is not the smell of sex; it is the smell of the possibility of sex.
Later, toward the end of the night, when the clock tells us that it is in fact morning, our noses will once again tell us a story. By that time the smoke will be much thicker, mingled with the underscent of someone's furtively puffed joint; deodorant and designer-imposter body spray will have yielded to the rank odors of dance-floor sweat; and the bathrooms will give off a powerful stench of urine and vomit. Once in a great while an unseen door will bang open, admitting a welcome flood of cool, cleansing air, but the moment is always too brief; only at the very end, when the lights come up and everyone is revealed in all their sweat-plastered, lipstick-smeared, runny-mascara'd glory, will fresh air intrude into this dank, humid, nostril-clogging effluvium that a thousand people have conspired to make.
And that is just the nose. Our eyes, too, have observed the arc of appearance as the night wore on and out. Expensive haircuts unravel into matted, sweat-soaked strings. Makeup smears and runs. Shirts with starched collars wilt into wet dishrags; blouses bead with the stains of spilled drinks, or become wetly transparent. The haughty-faced beauty in the tight yellow tube dress, who sauntered into the place at nine-thirty looking as bored and disdainful as a princess wandering among paupers, is at one forty-five a streaked and staggering mess, gulping down a tenth Sea Breeze while the guy who she met an hour ago dry-fucks her from behind in the shadows of a busted speaker, hard enough to send her sequins flying. Another girl weeps hysterically in the corner as she regards a broken high heeled shoe. A young man who arrived clean-shaven, freshly barbered and dressed to the very nines now looks like a dirty drugged-out wino, staring at the world through eyes of red glass, dropping dollar bills all over the dance floor as he struggles to open his wallet. Men and women are scribbling their phone numbers on napkins, scraps of paper, the backs of hands, the inside of wrists; some, who cannot wait, are fused together against pillars or alley walls or the sides of rain-jeweled cars in the parking lot. Others, less lucky, nurse lips split by sudden, angry fists, or stare unhappily at the rents and tears and dirt-stains on clothing which has been roughly handled by bouncers or boyfriends. Faces express lust, dismay, humiliation, drunken ecstasy which tomorrow may resemble shame.
Touch in a nightclub has many, many meanings. As with smell it tends to change over the course of the evening's revelry. When one first arrives everything is cool and slick – the drinks, the countertops, the vinyl covers of the stools. Later, if one is lucky, one touches other things: smooth skin heated by exertions on the dance floor, clean sweat, tongues flavored by the drinks that coursed over them. But even this changes as the hours whirl by: hot skin grows clammy, silky hair dampens and grows coarse, the mirrors that cover the walls run with condensation that soaks through the back of one's shirt. Touch goes from the objective to the thing to avoid; at the same time the increasing overcrowdedness make it unavoidable. Bodies press bodies press bodies, willingly and unwillingly. Every now and again one places a hand somewhere and withdraws it in disgust, having encountered a puddle of liquid, a streak of slime, a smear of foam. But there are rewards as well. The mad crush of the crowd sometimes thrusts a pleasing shape against you, breasts to chest, hips to hips, in forced intimacy: more than one night's passion has begun this way, accidentally. Brief embarrassment and discomfiture leads to a shared smile, a flash of the eyes that says, "Why not?"
Taste, too, runs the gamut. The first drinks are always delightful; cool and smooth and refreshing. Later, as the drunkenness increases, the palate grows dull; what was a pleasure becomes a ritual devoid of pleasure. Toward the end, every belch brings with it a taste of bile and vomit. And yet the tasting goes on, because when one is young, thirst is bottomless. Like the need for sound.
Of course, sound is the foundation of any nightclub. The enormous edifice of a club is like a glass, which has no purpose unless filled with bass and treble, rhythm, melody and harmony. Not everyone comes to a club for music, but without music there can be no club. It is the music which draws the women, who come to dance; and it is the women who draw the men, who come to fuck. Unlike a bar and most unlike a pub, a nightclub's raison d'etre is the coming-together of bodies. It is a temple consecrated to the gods of lust. The food it serves, the drinks it plies, the endless deafening stream of sound which flows forth from it from the moment of its opening to the last minutes after last call, are all nothing more than ingredients mingled together to produce a specific moment – the moment of orgasm. Yet the sound is deceptive, a merry jingle full of fine print. The specific moment is only bait. It is a promise that is uttered every night but seldom delivered. The torrent of noise, the bass that vibrates one's solar plexus and steals the breath away, the shrieking lyrics that pain the eardrums, the tinkling progression of synthetic noises that all but compel feet to move and keep moving – it's all as sincere as the welcoming smile of a casino greeter, and it has the same motive. Drown out the customer's good sense; give him hope; sell him a fantasy. Then empty his wallet and send him on his way. That is all the deejays deliver, hour after hour, from their elevated dais and cramped little booths; the remote chance of a good time. No loudspeaker blatting from a North Korean public square ever promised more than the siren-song of the nightclub deejay. And if you leave with empty pockets, a bursting bladder and a reservoir of untapped lust, you have the ringing in your ears and the bump of the subwoofers to keep you company while the darkness lasts. Next time you'll get 'em!
All of this came to me – rather, came back to me – whilst I was driving through Hollywood last night. It was not good California weather; the evening was cool, damp and gloomy; a sullen mist hung over the fabled hills, and if the traffic was awful, the crowds on the bronze-starred pavement were thinner and less exuberant than usual. Nevertheless, as I rolled sluggishly past the Boulevard, into the Cahuenga Pass which would take me home to Burbank, I had a chance to observe the people lining up to get into a fashionable nightclub. It was a biggish group, overdressed to an outrageous degree, and bathed in limousine light. The women were less than half-dressed, their nubile twentysomething bodies crammed into skin-tight fabrics that covered not a helluva lot more than the average bikini. The men were also kitted-out for dance-floor battle; hair gel had flowed in quarts, beards been carefully trimmed and anointed, shirts clean but wrinkled just so for that casual-not-casual look. Jewelry, ostentatious and vulgar, flashed every time a papparazzo ignited his bulb. There is a special pathos, is there not, about people lined up at a nightclub door? At the same time they are feeling desperately awkward and helpless before the impenetrable velvet rope, they are also projecting an air of smugness and arrogance which seems to have a physical weight. It is the latter quality that struck me last night. They are young, beautiful and bursting with life's juices; you are middle-aged, tired and eager to go home and watch re-runs on television in your pajamas. They are about to get into X., “Hollywood's hottest nightclub,” (until it goes out of business), you are stuck in traffic in your shitty secondhand car, hoping it doesn't overheat. And yet, oddly enough, though the sight provoked memories in me I hadn't thought of in years, it did not in any way spark feelings of envy or jealousy; not even of nostalgia. My memories came back to me so completely that there was no need, even if there had been a desire.
Life, my father used to say, is cyclical. This is true but not the whole story. Life is cyclical; it is also seasonal. There is a time and place for nearly everything that we do and experience – even the most hurtful, humiliating, damaging things – and when the time passes, it often passes without leaving much behind, like a lighted match consuming itself to ashes. I mentioned nostalgia above; I am severely prone to same; I tend to romanticize and mythologize everything. But I do not feel nostalgia for my nightclub days, and understanding why has brought me a little more peace and happiness than such a petty realization might be expected to produce.
I began clubbing pretty heavily when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. A high-school buddy, one year ahead of me in both age and class, had become a deejay and, after the usual, dismal apprenticeship spinning turntables at cheap weddings and sleazy airport bars, rapidly ascended the nightclub scene in the Washington, D.C. area. His rise was my own; though underage, I found myself admitted to one premier bar and nightclub after the other, given the VIP armband, plied with free drinks, treated by the bartenders and bouncers and dancers as one of the Anointed. It was heady wine indeed to a callow teenager bursting with hormones and the need, common to all teens, to feel more important than I really was. Oddly enough, I can remember only a few of the places I haunted: the Cellar, the Dome, the Guards. But there was one club in particular which, during the now long-gone 1990s, dominated all the others in D.C.: it was called the Fifth Column, in Northwest, and it was located in an enormous Gothic structure which had once been a bank but which much more strongly resembled a church. This cavernous, almost sinister-looking fortress, standing in grim majesty in a desolated and crime-ridden part of the city – a backdrop right out of The Crow – was the setting for all sorts of farcical, embarrassing, comic-tragic, R-to-X-rated shenanigans: drinking, fist-fights, make-out sessions in alleys and the backs of cars, frantic dancing that resembled copulation with the clothes in place. I well remember the feelings of excitement, mingled with fear, which would come over me when I knew I was headed there for the evening; I remember too, the arc which I have described above, the way the huge expectations almost inevitably collapsed into debaucheries which were, in many cases, not even particularly enjoyable. I remember exchanges of phone numbers that were never followed up; I remember meetings which were planned that never took place; I remember scuffles that never quite became fights, threats never acted upon, promises of vengeance for some drunken offense, never fulfilled but endlessly discussed. I remember the heated, breathless dance-floor fumblings that led to clumsy dates that were never repeated, and I remember being shaken down by hard-nosed D.C. police officers whose side hustle was extorting underage drinkers for cash. I remember friendships that revolved entirely around the ritual of drinking, dancing, and drugging, and disintegrated the moment one person or the other wanted to stop, and I remember coming home at three-thirty in the morning during the summer months between college semesters, and my older brother opening the door with bleary eyes to tell me that I smelled like a distillery. I remember the night Madonna was denied entry and roared off angrily in her limo, and the time the backdoor bouncer went into amphetamine psychosis and punched out a windshield with his bare fist. But mostly I remember that it went on for several years, which in your early-mid 20s is an enormous period of time; and lastly I remember that it ended, not because of any outside force, such as the club closing (though it did, eventually, do just that), but because I wanted it to.
As Stephen King once said, everything's eventual, and if you drink from a particular well for too long, the time will come when the taste no longer pleases you. For a period of about three to five years I hit nightclubs regularly and willingly, and even after I had realized how shallow, exploitative and even dangerous they could be – between the fights, muggings, parking lot burglaries, sexually transmitted diseases and occasional stabbings, there was a distinct element of menace at some of them – I kept going, off and on, for some years more. The twentysomething male, and to some extent the female as well, are largely ruled by hormones and by that seemingly endless supply of energy which young people contain. It is a raw, untamed, uncontrolled energy, and when expended it resurges with startling speed, operating through illness, fatigue and hangover without much difficulty. It is not merely there in ample supply, waiting to be used; it demands release, and at that age, it is not a demand that can be lightly or easily refused. The ordinary hot-blooded guy-or-doll has about as much chance of holding back from the desires in his or her blood as a victim of Lycanthropy can resist becoming a werewolf when the moon comes up. But as Rush once said, we're only immortal for a limited time, and when that tide begins to slacken, when the siren-song of the bass and the cheap allure of the half-naked girl (oh so slutty-seeming yet oh so unattainable, oh so many times) begins to wane, the desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights amidst all that writhing, desperate flesh also cools. There are, I admit, many aspects of youth I do miss, but not that, not the feeling of being shoved around by my glands, manipulated into motion by desires I couldn't manage or control, and which made me behave badly and foolishly. Age may rob us of much, but it actually grants quite a bit in terms of the strength with which we grasp the tiller of our own life.
The MMA fighter Dan Henderson observed that the forties were a remarkable time in a man's development, because while he wanted sex just as much as he did when he was younger, it no longer controlled him. I believe he made similar comments about physical ability. “I can do everything I can do when I was twenty,” he quipped. “I just can't do it as fast.” I feel largely the same way. The speed is gone, but so too is the desire to use the speed, to burn the candle at both ends, to gulp recklessly from the cup of life until one's belly swells and the room begins to spin. I still howl at the moon, but I do so at a pace that suits me, and when I strike the mood, not when the mood strikes me. And it is astonishing, perhaps, how little that mood comes around, at least where nightclubs and things of that nature are concerned. In the last twenty years, I can count on two hands the number of times I've crossed the threshold of one, and two of those occasions were industry-related; the first a wrap party for Heroes, the second for a movie I didn't work on but got invited to anyway. I enjoyed both excursions, but I had no desire to repeat them. It is, I suppose, like the time you're in college and somebody's dad, in town to take his son to dinner, shows up to the fraternity keg party. It's great fun. The "old man" drinks and flirts and dances, and he enjoys the hell out of himself and so do you, but the next day he goes home and never comes back. A sip of that cup is sufficient. The season has passed. Why mourn it? Whatever purpose it had has been served, and it deserves neither nostalgia nor regret.
Were I to return to F Street in N.W. D.C. tomorrow, and look up the old Fifth Column, I would no doubt be surprised to see the changes to it and the surrounding neighborhood. I might chuckle a little remembering the big black dude that challenged me to a fight right there by the entrance and then ran away when he discovered none of his friends would back him up, or the time I made out with the blonde pastry chef from Virginia (all I ever learned about her) by the payphone in the back, or the time I made plans for a menage-a-trois with two older girls who I never saw again and who doubtlessly enjoyed a good laugh at leaving me high and extremely dry. I might pause a second to see if my mind's ear could recall the sound of all those techno-beats thundering through the stone walls to the rain-drowned streets outside, or try to recall the faces of the fair-weather friends I ran with in those days, who, sometime around 1995, scattered into the winds and were ne'er seen or heard from again. But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't be bothered. Life lessons come to me with astonishing slowness, but the one I've taken away from this little epiphany is that there are times when the process letting go is not painful. Some periods of life are to be kept close, to be treasured and savored as long as the heart still beats; others -- let's face it -- just ought to be marked, "use once and destroy."
When I thought I heard myself say no
Anyway it looks like no one heard me so here I go
'Cause when you're in the company of strangers
Or just the strangers you call friends
You know before you start just how it's going to end
When the doors swing open and all the drinks are passed around,
Anytime the pickings look too easy...hold me down
I can't remember why I like this feeling
When it only seems to let me down
Soon I find I'm searching for the exit from the ground
If I think the room is turning faster
Then I think the music is too loud
By then I've lived another broken story to let me down.
-- The Gin Blossoms
We're only immortal for a limited time.
-- Rush
Before anything else, the sense memories. Smell and sight, taste and touch. And sound, sound, sound.
If we begin with our noses, we must observe that the scent of a nightclub changes over the course of one's time there. When one first arrives, and the place is still largely empty, it is a coldish smell, the smell of air conditioning in an empty space, tinged with the nasal sting of disinfectant and the heavier, muskier odor last night's beer. It is an unwelcome smell, somewhat unpleasant, but there is a positive Pavlovian response to it nonetheless. Just as cheap, cloying perfume may nevertheless remind one of sex, the fickle odors of the empty nightclub serve as reminders of all the other good nights that began this way – amidst that chilly, unwelcome, unwholesome odor.
As the evening stretches into night and the trickle of patrons becomes a steady flow, the temperature of the air changes and with it, the smell. All those young bodies burning at 98.6 degrees soon warm things up, and more pleasant scents intrude: perfume, cologne, hair spray, fresh beer, puffs of cigarette smoke. This is the smell that the earlier smell promised; that of youth, infused with hormones and anticipation. It is not the smell of sex; it is the smell of the possibility of sex.
Later, toward the end of the night, when the clock tells us that it is in fact morning, our noses will once again tell us a story. By that time the smoke will be much thicker, mingled with the underscent of someone's furtively puffed joint; deodorant and designer-imposter body spray will have yielded to the rank odors of dance-floor sweat; and the bathrooms will give off a powerful stench of urine and vomit. Once in a great while an unseen door will bang open, admitting a welcome flood of cool, cleansing air, but the moment is always too brief; only at the very end, when the lights come up and everyone is revealed in all their sweat-plastered, lipstick-smeared, runny-mascara'd glory, will fresh air intrude into this dank, humid, nostril-clogging effluvium that a thousand people have conspired to make.
And that is just the nose. Our eyes, too, have observed the arc of appearance as the night wore on and out. Expensive haircuts unravel into matted, sweat-soaked strings. Makeup smears and runs. Shirts with starched collars wilt into wet dishrags; blouses bead with the stains of spilled drinks, or become wetly transparent. The haughty-faced beauty in the tight yellow tube dress, who sauntered into the place at nine-thirty looking as bored and disdainful as a princess wandering among paupers, is at one forty-five a streaked and staggering mess, gulping down a tenth Sea Breeze while the guy who she met an hour ago dry-fucks her from behind in the shadows of a busted speaker, hard enough to send her sequins flying. Another girl weeps hysterically in the corner as she regards a broken high heeled shoe. A young man who arrived clean-shaven, freshly barbered and dressed to the very nines now looks like a dirty drugged-out wino, staring at the world through eyes of red glass, dropping dollar bills all over the dance floor as he struggles to open his wallet. Men and women are scribbling their phone numbers on napkins, scraps of paper, the backs of hands, the inside of wrists; some, who cannot wait, are fused together against pillars or alley walls or the sides of rain-jeweled cars in the parking lot. Others, less lucky, nurse lips split by sudden, angry fists, or stare unhappily at the rents and tears and dirt-stains on clothing which has been roughly handled by bouncers or boyfriends. Faces express lust, dismay, humiliation, drunken ecstasy which tomorrow may resemble shame.
Touch in a nightclub has many, many meanings. As with smell it tends to change over the course of the evening's revelry. When one first arrives everything is cool and slick – the drinks, the countertops, the vinyl covers of the stools. Later, if one is lucky, one touches other things: smooth skin heated by exertions on the dance floor, clean sweat, tongues flavored by the drinks that coursed over them. But even this changes as the hours whirl by: hot skin grows clammy, silky hair dampens and grows coarse, the mirrors that cover the walls run with condensation that soaks through the back of one's shirt. Touch goes from the objective to the thing to avoid; at the same time the increasing overcrowdedness make it unavoidable. Bodies press bodies press bodies, willingly and unwillingly. Every now and again one places a hand somewhere and withdraws it in disgust, having encountered a puddle of liquid, a streak of slime, a smear of foam. But there are rewards as well. The mad crush of the crowd sometimes thrusts a pleasing shape against you, breasts to chest, hips to hips, in forced intimacy: more than one night's passion has begun this way, accidentally. Brief embarrassment and discomfiture leads to a shared smile, a flash of the eyes that says, "Why not?"
Taste, too, runs the gamut. The first drinks are always delightful; cool and smooth and refreshing. Later, as the drunkenness increases, the palate grows dull; what was a pleasure becomes a ritual devoid of pleasure. Toward the end, every belch brings with it a taste of bile and vomit. And yet the tasting goes on, because when one is young, thirst is bottomless. Like the need for sound.
Of course, sound is the foundation of any nightclub. The enormous edifice of a club is like a glass, which has no purpose unless filled with bass and treble, rhythm, melody and harmony. Not everyone comes to a club for music, but without music there can be no club. It is the music which draws the women, who come to dance; and it is the women who draw the men, who come to fuck. Unlike a bar and most unlike a pub, a nightclub's raison d'etre is the coming-together of bodies. It is a temple consecrated to the gods of lust. The food it serves, the drinks it plies, the endless deafening stream of sound which flows forth from it from the moment of its opening to the last minutes after last call, are all nothing more than ingredients mingled together to produce a specific moment – the moment of orgasm. Yet the sound is deceptive, a merry jingle full of fine print. The specific moment is only bait. It is a promise that is uttered every night but seldom delivered. The torrent of noise, the bass that vibrates one's solar plexus and steals the breath away, the shrieking lyrics that pain the eardrums, the tinkling progression of synthetic noises that all but compel feet to move and keep moving – it's all as sincere as the welcoming smile of a casino greeter, and it has the same motive. Drown out the customer's good sense; give him hope; sell him a fantasy. Then empty his wallet and send him on his way. That is all the deejays deliver, hour after hour, from their elevated dais and cramped little booths; the remote chance of a good time. No loudspeaker blatting from a North Korean public square ever promised more than the siren-song of the nightclub deejay. And if you leave with empty pockets, a bursting bladder and a reservoir of untapped lust, you have the ringing in your ears and the bump of the subwoofers to keep you company while the darkness lasts. Next time you'll get 'em!
All of this came to me – rather, came back to me – whilst I was driving through Hollywood last night. It was not good California weather; the evening was cool, damp and gloomy; a sullen mist hung over the fabled hills, and if the traffic was awful, the crowds on the bronze-starred pavement were thinner and less exuberant than usual. Nevertheless, as I rolled sluggishly past the Boulevard, into the Cahuenga Pass which would take me home to Burbank, I had a chance to observe the people lining up to get into a fashionable nightclub. It was a biggish group, overdressed to an outrageous degree, and bathed in limousine light. The women were less than half-dressed, their nubile twentysomething bodies crammed into skin-tight fabrics that covered not a helluva lot more than the average bikini. The men were also kitted-out for dance-floor battle; hair gel had flowed in quarts, beards been carefully trimmed and anointed, shirts clean but wrinkled just so for that casual-not-casual look. Jewelry, ostentatious and vulgar, flashed every time a papparazzo ignited his bulb. There is a special pathos, is there not, about people lined up at a nightclub door? At the same time they are feeling desperately awkward and helpless before the impenetrable velvet rope, they are also projecting an air of smugness and arrogance which seems to have a physical weight. It is the latter quality that struck me last night. They are young, beautiful and bursting with life's juices; you are middle-aged, tired and eager to go home and watch re-runs on television in your pajamas. They are about to get into X., “Hollywood's hottest nightclub,” (until it goes out of business), you are stuck in traffic in your shitty secondhand car, hoping it doesn't overheat. And yet, oddly enough, though the sight provoked memories in me I hadn't thought of in years, it did not in any way spark feelings of envy or jealousy; not even of nostalgia. My memories came back to me so completely that there was no need, even if there had been a desire.
Life, my father used to say, is cyclical. This is true but not the whole story. Life is cyclical; it is also seasonal. There is a time and place for nearly everything that we do and experience – even the most hurtful, humiliating, damaging things – and when the time passes, it often passes without leaving much behind, like a lighted match consuming itself to ashes. I mentioned nostalgia above; I am severely prone to same; I tend to romanticize and mythologize everything. But I do not feel nostalgia for my nightclub days, and understanding why has brought me a little more peace and happiness than such a petty realization might be expected to produce.
I began clubbing pretty heavily when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. A high-school buddy, one year ahead of me in both age and class, had become a deejay and, after the usual, dismal apprenticeship spinning turntables at cheap weddings and sleazy airport bars, rapidly ascended the nightclub scene in the Washington, D.C. area. His rise was my own; though underage, I found myself admitted to one premier bar and nightclub after the other, given the VIP armband, plied with free drinks, treated by the bartenders and bouncers and dancers as one of the Anointed. It was heady wine indeed to a callow teenager bursting with hormones and the need, common to all teens, to feel more important than I really was. Oddly enough, I can remember only a few of the places I haunted: the Cellar, the Dome, the Guards. But there was one club in particular which, during the now long-gone 1990s, dominated all the others in D.C.: it was called the Fifth Column, in Northwest, and it was located in an enormous Gothic structure which had once been a bank but which much more strongly resembled a church. This cavernous, almost sinister-looking fortress, standing in grim majesty in a desolated and crime-ridden part of the city – a backdrop right out of The Crow – was the setting for all sorts of farcical, embarrassing, comic-tragic, R-to-X-rated shenanigans: drinking, fist-fights, make-out sessions in alleys and the backs of cars, frantic dancing that resembled copulation with the clothes in place. I well remember the feelings of excitement, mingled with fear, which would come over me when I knew I was headed there for the evening; I remember too, the arc which I have described above, the way the huge expectations almost inevitably collapsed into debaucheries which were, in many cases, not even particularly enjoyable. I remember exchanges of phone numbers that were never followed up; I remember meetings which were planned that never took place; I remember scuffles that never quite became fights, threats never acted upon, promises of vengeance for some drunken offense, never fulfilled but endlessly discussed. I remember the heated, breathless dance-floor fumblings that led to clumsy dates that were never repeated, and I remember being shaken down by hard-nosed D.C. police officers whose side hustle was extorting underage drinkers for cash. I remember friendships that revolved entirely around the ritual of drinking, dancing, and drugging, and disintegrated the moment one person or the other wanted to stop, and I remember coming home at three-thirty in the morning during the summer months between college semesters, and my older brother opening the door with bleary eyes to tell me that I smelled like a distillery. I remember the night Madonna was denied entry and roared off angrily in her limo, and the time the backdoor bouncer went into amphetamine psychosis and punched out a windshield with his bare fist. But mostly I remember that it went on for several years, which in your early-mid 20s is an enormous period of time; and lastly I remember that it ended, not because of any outside force, such as the club closing (though it did, eventually, do just that), but because I wanted it to.
As Stephen King once said, everything's eventual, and if you drink from a particular well for too long, the time will come when the taste no longer pleases you. For a period of about three to five years I hit nightclubs regularly and willingly, and even after I had realized how shallow, exploitative and even dangerous they could be – between the fights, muggings, parking lot burglaries, sexually transmitted diseases and occasional stabbings, there was a distinct element of menace at some of them – I kept going, off and on, for some years more. The twentysomething male, and to some extent the female as well, are largely ruled by hormones and by that seemingly endless supply of energy which young people contain. It is a raw, untamed, uncontrolled energy, and when expended it resurges with startling speed, operating through illness, fatigue and hangover without much difficulty. It is not merely there in ample supply, waiting to be used; it demands release, and at that age, it is not a demand that can be lightly or easily refused. The ordinary hot-blooded guy-or-doll has about as much chance of holding back from the desires in his or her blood as a victim of Lycanthropy can resist becoming a werewolf when the moon comes up. But as Rush once said, we're only immortal for a limited time, and when that tide begins to slacken, when the siren-song of the bass and the cheap allure of the half-naked girl (oh so slutty-seeming yet oh so unattainable, oh so many times) begins to wane, the desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights amidst all that writhing, desperate flesh also cools. There are, I admit, many aspects of youth I do miss, but not that, not the feeling of being shoved around by my glands, manipulated into motion by desires I couldn't manage or control, and which made me behave badly and foolishly. Age may rob us of much, but it actually grants quite a bit in terms of the strength with which we grasp the tiller of our own life.
The MMA fighter Dan Henderson observed that the forties were a remarkable time in a man's development, because while he wanted sex just as much as he did when he was younger, it no longer controlled him. I believe he made similar comments about physical ability. “I can do everything I can do when I was twenty,” he quipped. “I just can't do it as fast.” I feel largely the same way. The speed is gone, but so too is the desire to use the speed, to burn the candle at both ends, to gulp recklessly from the cup of life until one's belly swells and the room begins to spin. I still howl at the moon, but I do so at a pace that suits me, and when I strike the mood, not when the mood strikes me. And it is astonishing, perhaps, how little that mood comes around, at least where nightclubs and things of that nature are concerned. In the last twenty years, I can count on two hands the number of times I've crossed the threshold of one, and two of those occasions were industry-related; the first a wrap party for Heroes, the second for a movie I didn't work on but got invited to anyway. I enjoyed both excursions, but I had no desire to repeat them. It is, I suppose, like the time you're in college and somebody's dad, in town to take his son to dinner, shows up to the fraternity keg party. It's great fun. The "old man" drinks and flirts and dances, and he enjoys the hell out of himself and so do you, but the next day he goes home and never comes back. A sip of that cup is sufficient. The season has passed. Why mourn it? Whatever purpose it had has been served, and it deserves neither nostalgia nor regret.
Were I to return to F Street in N.W. D.C. tomorrow, and look up the old Fifth Column, I would no doubt be surprised to see the changes to it and the surrounding neighborhood. I might chuckle a little remembering the big black dude that challenged me to a fight right there by the entrance and then ran away when he discovered none of his friends would back him up, or the time I made out with the blonde pastry chef from Virginia (all I ever learned about her) by the payphone in the back, or the time I made plans for a menage-a-trois with two older girls who I never saw again and who doubtlessly enjoyed a good laugh at leaving me high and extremely dry. I might pause a second to see if my mind's ear could recall the sound of all those techno-beats thundering through the stone walls to the rain-drowned streets outside, or try to recall the faces of the fair-weather friends I ran with in those days, who, sometime around 1995, scattered into the winds and were ne'er seen or heard from again. But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't be bothered. Life lessons come to me with astonishing slowness, but the one I've taken away from this little epiphany is that there are times when the process letting go is not painful. Some periods of life are to be kept close, to be treasured and savored as long as the heart still beats; others -- let's face it -- just ought to be marked, "use once and destroy."
April 27, 2018
America's Dad, or: Life After Cosby
At some point today, in between washing foam latex zombie hands for The Walking Dead and scrutinizing a cowl used for an alien character on The Orville, I was notified that Bill Cosby had been convicted by a Pennsylvania court on three counts of "aggravated indecent assault." Being a former law enforcement official in that commonwealth, I could a tale unfold about the memories the words "aggravated indecent assault" provoked in me, but in truth those memories were themselves swept away by other, completely different recollections. They were of The Cosby Show.
The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992, and while on paper it was just another family sit-com in a schedule crammed to the rafters with them, this show was different. Not only was the fictitious Huxtable clan black -- there had been other sit-coms about black families -- they were rich, or very nearly so. Yes, The Jeffersons were rich too, but that family was dysfunctional. The Huxtables were a kind of Partridge Family on steroids; black Cleavers for the 1980s, but upgraded in terms of both brains and style. They were funny. They were good-looking. They were smart. They dressed in bold, even flamboyant colors. They prized education and personal character. But what struck me most about this fictional fam was the father, Heathcliffe, portrayed by Cosby himself. In a television world where father-figures were often portrayed as pushovers or comic-opera tyrants, Heathcliffe Huxtable was kind of a badass. Not only was he a doctor married to a lawyer, not only was he bringing in merry bushels of cash that allowed his family to occupy a luxurious brownstone in Manhattan, not only was he funny and knowledgeable about life, he was, well, pretty close to perfect. He had awesome powers of observation and sarcasm. He was an expert at child psychology. He could be warm, engaging or silly, but he could also be tough and implacable. The son of a bitch could even quote Shakespeare. People might disappoint or annoy him, but in the end he always got the better of them and the situations they created. In short, picture any Steven Segal character, minus the violent tendencies and spray-on hair. The perfect -- and I mean perfect -- father figure. America's uber-dad.
The Cosby Show ran for eight years. It was a cultural phenomenon and a ratings smash, and it broke down barriers that had survived the success of other "black" television shows such as Good Times, What's Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, etc. After the Huxtables, it would never again be possible to think of black folks in America only in terms of a people struggling against poverty, racism and crime. The sprawling abstraction known as White, Middle Class America had seen hip, prosperous, intelligent, witty black people on television at last and embraced them without reservation. But I confess the racial significance of the show, the way it smashed stereotypes, was of far less interest to me than the fact that it had produced a seminal patriarch.
Now that Cosby has been convicted of heinous crimes -- crimes which may in fact represent only the tip of his particular iceberg -- America will begin the process of systematically erasing his legacy from our collective consciousness. It will be a more difficult task than some may expect. Cosby is a man with an immense career that stretches back nearly sixty years. He was a successful stand-up comedian for decades, won an Emmy for his lead role in I, Spy (1965 - 1968), and starred in numerous films as well as two TV shows which bore his name. Following his infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech at an NAACP ceremony, he also became a social activist, albeit a considerably controversial one. Very few stars keep any of their star-power into later life, but Cosby did: in a sense, he remained America's Dad. Now he will begin the process of becoming an unperson. The Cosby Show has already been pulled from television re-runs; soon it will be unavailable for purchase on DVD, and eventually almost impossible to lay hands on. The same thing will happen to his comedy albums and television specials. They will go down the Orwellian "memory hole," ne'er to be seen again.
When Cosby was initially accused of these crimes a few years ago, I wrote a blog about the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which would formally obliterate the name of a disgraced person from the public record: coins bearing his face would be melted down and restruck, statues defaced or beheaded, plaques and plinths vandalized, scrolls burned. Barring a miraculous reversal on appeal, the same fate awaits Cosby, in a modernized form. The father figure of all father figures has been toppled, his crown vacated, and in his place is -- who?
Modern television is not the place for father figures or even generic role models. We live in a deeply cynical age in which there are almost no television or cinematic heroes, only deeply flawed protagonists, and even a squeaky-clean, Dudley Doorite character like Superman is presented as brooding, edgy, and "troubled." Thus, make-believe father figures of the sort epitomized by Dr. Huxtable are rather hard to come by, and even when they do exist -- Sam Elliot's Beau Bennett on The Ranch comes to mind -- they are often presented as charming but anachronistic; relics of a bygone era, to be humored as much as respected. This is unutterably depressing, but I take a certain amount of heart in what might be called Fatherhood Row: my own personal stash of first-class cinematic father figures.
One one of the first television dads I encountered and fell in love with was Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), the commanding officer of the 4077 mobile army surgical hospital, better known to millions of Americans as M*A*S*H. Potter was a crusty, hot-tempered ex-cavalryman with a passion for poker, whiskey, cigars, his mare Sophie, and his unseen wife Mildred. He was also a first-class battle surgeon who'd been through three wars and only wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Nevertheless, Potter tackled the awesome responsibility of wrangling a crew of drunken surgeons, homesick nurses and highly reluctant draftee soldiers through yet another war like an absolute pro. He was a tough little customer who could rip you a new one faster than you could salute, but he had a soft, compassionate, unfailingly loyal side that was utterly endearing and made you willing to go to hell and back for the man: he wasn't afraid of his own tears. He had plenty of formal schooling, but his wisdom came from often bitter experience: a long career in the Army, a lot of carnage, a lot of heartbreak. Of course, he wasn't actually a "father" to any of his troops, but they looked on him as one and he knew it and accepted it, even if he did admit it was a "bit of a pain in the ass."
Not many people are too familiar with Friday the 13th: The Series, a Toronto-based horror episodic which ran from 1987 - 1990, but in addition to being enormously influential on later TV shows, it also produced a fine father figure in Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins). Friday was the story of an antique shop whose inventory had been cursed by the devil and whose new owners took it upon themselves to recover all previously sold items before the curses could wreak any more havoc. The owners, Micki and Ryan, were distant cousins who spent a lot of time fighting and the rest of it wondering whether their quest was worth the risk and the pain; it was wise, courageous, kindly old Jack who kept them on course. A bearded, burly teddy bear of a man, he had, like any good pop, an underlying toughness, but it was his ability to sum up situations, to balm painful wounds with some prosaic-yet-profound remark, and most importantly, to lose his cool when the situation required it, that made me love him.
No list of father figs would be complete without Anthony Stewart Head's Rupert Giles, better known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's long-suffering but resolute Watcher. There is no doubt in my mind that the Giles character is drawn partially from Marshak, but the two are as different as they are alike. Giles is fussy, pedantic, polite, and eminently English; he drinks tea, wears tweed and employs sarcasm like a saber; at the same time he has plenty of darkness in his nature and a bad-boy past which befits any good dad (you need to wander from the flock to appreciate the importance of a shepherd). He is often exasperated by his charge, the headstrong teenager Buffy, and on the whole can barely control her -- he is really more of an advisor than a boss, yet over the course of time she and her friends come to appreciate not only his book knowledge but his wisdom and courage, and more than that, his true role, which is patriarch of a de facto family.
Frasier ran for eleven hilarious years, and not one of those years would have been possible without the character of Martin Crane, more than ably played by John Mahoney. The premise of Frasier was actually quite simple -- a sort of "Odd Couple" story of an insufferable snob-psychiatrist forced to live with his irascible, beer-drinking father, a retired cop. In practice the show was genius, and part of that genius rested in the character of Marty Crane. Though barely educated compared to his two genius sons, and possessing about as much taste as your average habituate of Wal-Mart (his favorite object was a disgustingly ugly easy chair), his street knowledge and fatherly wisdom -- sometimes reinforced by a fatherly boot to the ass -- were the perfect counterpoint to Frasier's arrogance and Niles' pomposity. Marty Crane was every dad who couldn't say "I love you" and so tried to show it by taking you fishing. Even if you didn't want to go.
I like very few sit-coms, but the first three seasons of Good Times are as funny as anything I've ever seen on TV, and oddly enough, it was the least comedic of the characters that brought everything together: James Evans, the patriarch of the five-member Evans clan. Poor black Chicagoans living in a crummy project apartment in the 70s, the Evanses struggled against everything: poverty, unemployment, the oil crisis, racism, street violence, a worthless landlord -- you name it. Luckily the scary-as-hell James Evans was more than a match for it. A farmboy from Mississippi who dropped out of sixth grade, Evans had served in Korea and fathered three children with his beloved wife Florida, and believe me, those kids knew they had a dad. With his blazing glare, flaring nostrils and prizefighter's physique, a pissed-off James Evans was not to be fucked with. But he had more than an intimidating, ultra-masculine presence; he was hard-working, decent, and completely in love with his wife. What's more, he was willing to work two miserable jobs if it would give his kids a better life than he'd had. Whatever it takes to be considered a leader -- charisma, command presence, animal magnetism -- the Evans character had it in spades. I once met Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, and went nonverbal with awe. If I met Amos, I'd probably shit myself.
The last figure on my list is probably the most inaccessible, and therefore, in some perverse way, the most appealing. Jean-Luc Picard was captain of the fabled Enterprise (D) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike his predecessor, the two-fisted, quick-tempered, woman-devouring Captain Kirk, Picard was dry, austere, even remote; a thoughtful man and a consummate diplomat, he had enormous patience for insult and threat, resorted to violence only when unavoidable, and seldom dabbled in romance, finding passion a bit distasteful. He was in many ways a paragon of virtue, even a prig, and intimidating in the bargain, with his cold demeanor and icy stare; he ought to have been intolerable as a result. Yet is there any patriarchal figure in recent memory who evokes such feelings of loyalty and respect from his audience? Picard's secret lies partly in his inaccessibility -- everyone secretly wants to please the unpleasable -- but perhaps just as much in the flashes of vulnerability and humanity that he occasionally showed through the cracks in his armor. The fact that we knew that there was a sensitive, flawed human beneath all that virtue brought us closer to him; not close enough, but who is ever really close enough with their dad? That last unbridgeable distance between the commander and the commanded is a key element in the nature of father - children relationships. Even when we somehow graduate from son or daughter to friend and equal, we know, and we completely accept, that we are neither. We will never truly be their friend, and we will never (ever) be their equal. Nor, in our own secret hearts, do we truly want to be. And isn't that the essence of the appeal of the father figure? When we are lost at sea, we follow the North Star to safety; but even if we reach safety, we never reach the star. We emulate our fathers, but we have no real wish to exceed them. Hell, where would the fun be in that?
I suppose, like everyone else, I will now join in the hive-mind expulsion of Bill Cosby from my consciousness. He will become the punch-line of bad jokes, a cautionary tale, a movie with a stern moral people can hashtag and like. I will not even bother to reflect on the cruel irony of an eminent father figure who was, it seems, nothing but a charlatan-hypocrite of the very worst type. Yet if Cosby is already slipping into non-existence without any real regret or remorse on my part, there is a piece of me that will forever mourn the loss of Heathcliffe Huxtable. He wasn't the man Bill Cosby was, but he was the man Bill Cosby should have been.
The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992, and while on paper it was just another family sit-com in a schedule crammed to the rafters with them, this show was different. Not only was the fictitious Huxtable clan black -- there had been other sit-coms about black families -- they were rich, or very nearly so. Yes, The Jeffersons were rich too, but that family was dysfunctional. The Huxtables were a kind of Partridge Family on steroids; black Cleavers for the 1980s, but upgraded in terms of both brains and style. They were funny. They were good-looking. They were smart. They dressed in bold, even flamboyant colors. They prized education and personal character. But what struck me most about this fictional fam was the father, Heathcliffe, portrayed by Cosby himself. In a television world where father-figures were often portrayed as pushovers or comic-opera tyrants, Heathcliffe Huxtable was kind of a badass. Not only was he a doctor married to a lawyer, not only was he bringing in merry bushels of cash that allowed his family to occupy a luxurious brownstone in Manhattan, not only was he funny and knowledgeable about life, he was, well, pretty close to perfect. He had awesome powers of observation and sarcasm. He was an expert at child psychology. He could be warm, engaging or silly, but he could also be tough and implacable. The son of a bitch could even quote Shakespeare. People might disappoint or annoy him, but in the end he always got the better of them and the situations they created. In short, picture any Steven Segal character, minus the violent tendencies and spray-on hair. The perfect -- and I mean perfect -- father figure. America's uber-dad.
The Cosby Show ran for eight years. It was a cultural phenomenon and a ratings smash, and it broke down barriers that had survived the success of other "black" television shows such as Good Times, What's Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, etc. After the Huxtables, it would never again be possible to think of black folks in America only in terms of a people struggling against poverty, racism and crime. The sprawling abstraction known as White, Middle Class America had seen hip, prosperous, intelligent, witty black people on television at last and embraced them without reservation. But I confess the racial significance of the show, the way it smashed stereotypes, was of far less interest to me than the fact that it had produced a seminal patriarch.
Now that Cosby has been convicted of heinous crimes -- crimes which may in fact represent only the tip of his particular iceberg -- America will begin the process of systematically erasing his legacy from our collective consciousness. It will be a more difficult task than some may expect. Cosby is a man with an immense career that stretches back nearly sixty years. He was a successful stand-up comedian for decades, won an Emmy for his lead role in I, Spy (1965 - 1968), and starred in numerous films as well as two TV shows which bore his name. Following his infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech at an NAACP ceremony, he also became a social activist, albeit a considerably controversial one. Very few stars keep any of their star-power into later life, but Cosby did: in a sense, he remained America's Dad. Now he will begin the process of becoming an unperson. The Cosby Show has already been pulled from television re-runs; soon it will be unavailable for purchase on DVD, and eventually almost impossible to lay hands on. The same thing will happen to his comedy albums and television specials. They will go down the Orwellian "memory hole," ne'er to be seen again.
When Cosby was initially accused of these crimes a few years ago, I wrote a blog about the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which would formally obliterate the name of a disgraced person from the public record: coins bearing his face would be melted down and restruck, statues defaced or beheaded, plaques and plinths vandalized, scrolls burned. Barring a miraculous reversal on appeal, the same fate awaits Cosby, in a modernized form. The father figure of all father figures has been toppled, his crown vacated, and in his place is -- who?
Modern television is not the place for father figures or even generic role models. We live in a deeply cynical age in which there are almost no television or cinematic heroes, only deeply flawed protagonists, and even a squeaky-clean, Dudley Doorite character like Superman is presented as brooding, edgy, and "troubled." Thus, make-believe father figures of the sort epitomized by Dr. Huxtable are rather hard to come by, and even when they do exist -- Sam Elliot's Beau Bennett on The Ranch comes to mind -- they are often presented as charming but anachronistic; relics of a bygone era, to be humored as much as respected. This is unutterably depressing, but I take a certain amount of heart in what might be called Fatherhood Row: my own personal stash of first-class cinematic father figures.
One one of the first television dads I encountered and fell in love with was Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), the commanding officer of the 4077 mobile army surgical hospital, better known to millions of Americans as M*A*S*H. Potter was a crusty, hot-tempered ex-cavalryman with a passion for poker, whiskey, cigars, his mare Sophie, and his unseen wife Mildred. He was also a first-class battle surgeon who'd been through three wars and only wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Nevertheless, Potter tackled the awesome responsibility of wrangling a crew of drunken surgeons, homesick nurses and highly reluctant draftee soldiers through yet another war like an absolute pro. He was a tough little customer who could rip you a new one faster than you could salute, but he had a soft, compassionate, unfailingly loyal side that was utterly endearing and made you willing to go to hell and back for the man: he wasn't afraid of his own tears. He had plenty of formal schooling, but his wisdom came from often bitter experience: a long career in the Army, a lot of carnage, a lot of heartbreak. Of course, he wasn't actually a "father" to any of his troops, but they looked on him as one and he knew it and accepted it, even if he did admit it was a "bit of a pain in the ass."
Not many people are too familiar with Friday the 13th: The Series, a Toronto-based horror episodic which ran from 1987 - 1990, but in addition to being enormously influential on later TV shows, it also produced a fine father figure in Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins). Friday was the story of an antique shop whose inventory had been cursed by the devil and whose new owners took it upon themselves to recover all previously sold items before the curses could wreak any more havoc. The owners, Micki and Ryan, were distant cousins who spent a lot of time fighting and the rest of it wondering whether their quest was worth the risk and the pain; it was wise, courageous, kindly old Jack who kept them on course. A bearded, burly teddy bear of a man, he had, like any good pop, an underlying toughness, but it was his ability to sum up situations, to balm painful wounds with some prosaic-yet-profound remark, and most importantly, to lose his cool when the situation required it, that made me love him.
No list of father figs would be complete without Anthony Stewart Head's Rupert Giles, better known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's long-suffering but resolute Watcher. There is no doubt in my mind that the Giles character is drawn partially from Marshak, but the two are as different as they are alike. Giles is fussy, pedantic, polite, and eminently English; he drinks tea, wears tweed and employs sarcasm like a saber; at the same time he has plenty of darkness in his nature and a bad-boy past which befits any good dad (you need to wander from the flock to appreciate the importance of a shepherd). He is often exasperated by his charge, the headstrong teenager Buffy, and on the whole can barely control her -- he is really more of an advisor than a boss, yet over the course of time she and her friends come to appreciate not only his book knowledge but his wisdom and courage, and more than that, his true role, which is patriarch of a de facto family.
Frasier ran for eleven hilarious years, and not one of those years would have been possible without the character of Martin Crane, more than ably played by John Mahoney. The premise of Frasier was actually quite simple -- a sort of "Odd Couple" story of an insufferable snob-psychiatrist forced to live with his irascible, beer-drinking father, a retired cop. In practice the show was genius, and part of that genius rested in the character of Marty Crane. Though barely educated compared to his two genius sons, and possessing about as much taste as your average habituate of Wal-Mart (his favorite object was a disgustingly ugly easy chair), his street knowledge and fatherly wisdom -- sometimes reinforced by a fatherly boot to the ass -- were the perfect counterpoint to Frasier's arrogance and Niles' pomposity. Marty Crane was every dad who couldn't say "I love you" and so tried to show it by taking you fishing. Even if you didn't want to go.
I like very few sit-coms, but the first three seasons of Good Times are as funny as anything I've ever seen on TV, and oddly enough, it was the least comedic of the characters that brought everything together: James Evans, the patriarch of the five-member Evans clan. Poor black Chicagoans living in a crummy project apartment in the 70s, the Evanses struggled against everything: poverty, unemployment, the oil crisis, racism, street violence, a worthless landlord -- you name it. Luckily the scary-as-hell James Evans was more than a match for it. A farmboy from Mississippi who dropped out of sixth grade, Evans had served in Korea and fathered three children with his beloved wife Florida, and believe me, those kids knew they had a dad. With his blazing glare, flaring nostrils and prizefighter's physique, a pissed-off James Evans was not to be fucked with. But he had more than an intimidating, ultra-masculine presence; he was hard-working, decent, and completely in love with his wife. What's more, he was willing to work two miserable jobs if it would give his kids a better life than he'd had. Whatever it takes to be considered a leader -- charisma, command presence, animal magnetism -- the Evans character had it in spades. I once met Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, and went nonverbal with awe. If I met Amos, I'd probably shit myself.
The last figure on my list is probably the most inaccessible, and therefore, in some perverse way, the most appealing. Jean-Luc Picard was captain of the fabled Enterprise (D) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike his predecessor, the two-fisted, quick-tempered, woman-devouring Captain Kirk, Picard was dry, austere, even remote; a thoughtful man and a consummate diplomat, he had enormous patience for insult and threat, resorted to violence only when unavoidable, and seldom dabbled in romance, finding passion a bit distasteful. He was in many ways a paragon of virtue, even a prig, and intimidating in the bargain, with his cold demeanor and icy stare; he ought to have been intolerable as a result. Yet is there any patriarchal figure in recent memory who evokes such feelings of loyalty and respect from his audience? Picard's secret lies partly in his inaccessibility -- everyone secretly wants to please the unpleasable -- but perhaps just as much in the flashes of vulnerability and humanity that he occasionally showed through the cracks in his armor. The fact that we knew that there was a sensitive, flawed human beneath all that virtue brought us closer to him; not close enough, but who is ever really close enough with their dad? That last unbridgeable distance between the commander and the commanded is a key element in the nature of father - children relationships. Even when we somehow graduate from son or daughter to friend and equal, we know, and we completely accept, that we are neither. We will never truly be their friend, and we will never (ever) be their equal. Nor, in our own secret hearts, do we truly want to be. And isn't that the essence of the appeal of the father figure? When we are lost at sea, we follow the North Star to safety; but even if we reach safety, we never reach the star. We emulate our fathers, but we have no real wish to exceed them. Hell, where would the fun be in that?
I suppose, like everyone else, I will now join in the hive-mind expulsion of Bill Cosby from my consciousness. He will become the punch-line of bad jokes, a cautionary tale, a movie with a stern moral people can hashtag and like. I will not even bother to reflect on the cruel irony of an eminent father figure who was, it seems, nothing but a charlatan-hypocrite of the very worst type. Yet if Cosby is already slipping into non-existence without any real regret or remorse on my part, there is a piece of me that will forever mourn the loss of Heathcliffe Huxtable. He wasn't the man Bill Cosby was, but he was the man Bill Cosby should have been.
April 11, 2018
Killing Time, or: A Free Short Story
A year and a half ago I published DEVILS YOU KNOW, a collection of short stories which I had written over a period of twenty-six years, i.e. between 1990 and 2016. In deciding what stories to include and what to leave out, I had to make some tough choices. I did not want DEVILS to be dominated by any one genre or sub-genre of fiction, but rather by the greater theme of how many ways the dark side of human nature can manifest itself in we troubled homo sapiens. Some of the stories were historical or dystopian fiction, others horror or comedy of the blackest type. And as I had already chosen two crime stories ("Pleas and Thank-Yous" and "Unfinished Business") I decided not to put in a third. As a result, the following story, "Killing Time," has never before seen the light of day. I've always considered that a shame, and since my work schedule has not allowed me to devote the time I wish to this blog of late -- it's supposed to be a weekly and has deteriorated into more of a monthly -- I decided this evening that, rather than do my taxes, I'd format the story and include it here for your reading pleasure (or pain). Those of you who have read my novel CAGE LIFE (or its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN) will recognize a character or two, but knowledge of those books is not necessary: this is a stand-alone story which exists in its own universe. In point of fact, for those of you who are interested in such things, this story predates my novels by a good dozen years or more. It was one of the seeds which ultimately lead me to quit my career in law-enforcement and begin writing full time. For that reason alone it will always have a special place in my heart. So read, enjoy, and feel no guilt that I blew off going to my accountant to entertain you for free. The taxes can wait. As Herman Wouk once remarked, for bad news there is always time.
We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"
He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.
"Are you sure?"
He hesitated.
"It's no thing," I said.
He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."
I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."
Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.
"Salud," I said.
He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.
“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.
He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.
"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”
He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.
"What'd you say?"
He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."
"Why?"
He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."
I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"
He shrugged, took another sip.
"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."
He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."
"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"
"Longer."
"That's a long fuckin' time."
"Yeah."
"An' you never saw it coming?"
"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"
"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."
He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."
Grunt.
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"
He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"
"Take the bottle."
He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."
"How?"
"Why you want to know?"
"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."
He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."
"Okay."
"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"
My eyebrows shot up.
"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.
"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'
"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"
He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.
"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."
"Handy."
"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."
"Ain't that some shit," I said.
He nodded.
"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."
"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.
"Yeah."
"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."
"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"
"Capitol."
"Or Columbia."
"Yeah."
"Tell me somethin' else," I said.
He leaned back on the couch.
"What happened with you an' Gino?"
I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."
"He's got an arm, all right."
"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"
"Save it."
We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."
"Maybe."
"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"
"I heard a gun go off."
"That ain't what I axed you."
"No. Okay? No."
He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."
He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.
"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."
The desk phone rang. We both jumped.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"
"He's here."
"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"
"No. I didn't--"
"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"
Click.
I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."
For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.
But that didn't make it any easier.
Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.
Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.
"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"
"As soon as I talked to you."
"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."
"Sorry, Gino."
"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.
I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"
"Hear what?"
"Is there a beef, or what?"
Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."
I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.
I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"
"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."
"You're not gonna--"
"No, I'm not. You are."
"Gino, I can't--"
"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."
"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."
"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"
"I can't, man. Please."
He looked at me in disgust.
"I just can't."
"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."
We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"
"Killing time," I said.
"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."
"Sorry, Gene."
He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."
"Pizza okay?"
"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."
Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.
I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.
But it never got any easier.
I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.
"It figures," I muttered.
"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."
"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."
We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"
He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.
"Are you sure?"
He hesitated.
"It's no thing," I said.
He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."
I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."
Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.
"Salud," I said.
He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.
“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.
He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.
"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”
He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.
"What'd you say?"
He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."
"Why?"
He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."
I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"
He shrugged, took another sip.
"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."
He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."
"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"
"Longer."
"That's a long fuckin' time."
"Yeah."
"An' you never saw it coming?"
"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"
"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."
He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."
Grunt.
"What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"
He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"
"Take the bottle."
He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."
"How?"
"Why you want to know?"
"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."
He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."
"Okay."
"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"
My eyebrows shot up.
"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.
"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'
"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"
He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.
"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."
"Handy."
"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."
He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."
"Ain't that some shit," I said.
He nodded.
"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."
"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.
"Yeah."
"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."
"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"
"Capitol."
"Or Columbia."
"Yeah."
"Tell me somethin' else," I said.
He leaned back on the couch.
"What happened with you an' Gino?"
I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."
"He's got an arm, all right."
"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"
"Save it."
We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."
"Maybe."
"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"
"I heard a gun go off."
"That ain't what I axed you."
"No. Okay? No."
He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."
He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.
"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."
The desk phone rang. We both jumped.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"
"He's here."
"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"
"No. I didn't--"
"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"
Click.
I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."
For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.
But that didn't make it any easier.
Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.
Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.
"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"
"As soon as I talked to you."
"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."
"Sorry, Gino."
"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.
I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"
"Hear what?"
"Is there a beef, or what?"
Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."
I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.
I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"
"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."
"You're not gonna--"
"No, I'm not. You are."
"Gino, I can't--"
"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."
"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."
"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"
"I can't, man. Please."
He looked at me in disgust.
"I just can't."
"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."
We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"
"Killing time," I said.
"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."
"Sorry, Gene."
He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."
"Pizza okay?"
"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."
Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.
I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.
But it never got any easier.
I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.
"It figures," I muttered.
"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."
"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."
March 24, 2018
Just Bleed: or, Thoughts on the Dead Man in the Rain
You bleed just to know you're alive.
-- The Goo Goo Dolls
The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.
So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.
I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?
I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.
My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.
When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.
Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?
I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.
And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.
It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.
My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.
When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.
When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.
I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.
I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:
Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is
-- The Goo Goo Dolls
The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.
So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.
I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?
I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.
My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.
When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.
Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?
I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.
And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.
It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.
My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.
When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.
When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.
I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.
I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:
Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is
March 4, 2018
VOICES OF THE DAMNED
I'm a student of human moves.
-- Fast Eddie Felson
We have such sights to show you.
-- The Hell Priest
People have always fascinated me -- who they are, what they are, and why they do the things they do. I suppose any writer worth his salt is similarly fascinated. Writers, after all, traffic in human beings both real and imagined. They are our stock-in-trade. In order for our subjects and characters to rise off the page and take three-dimensional shape in the readers' mind, we must nurse the conceit that we understand human nature to a degree which the ordinary person does not. We must make this conceit part of who we are, and never shy away from it or apologize for it. It takes a certain arrogance to be a surgeon or a fighter pilot, and it takes a not totally dissimilar arrogance to write about our fellow homo sapiens, because before we can begin, before we can set down a single word, we must first understand the motive causes of our characters. Who are these people? What drives them? What to they want? What to they love, what do they hate, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- what do they fear? If you can't answer that, or at least speculate in some detail, you've no business writing about people at all.
Now, it so happens that in my life I've had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary miscellany of human beings, from professional criminals to decorated law enforcement officers, from famous scientists to disgraced politicians, from A-list actors to D-list comedians, and everything in between. My father was the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, and that opened certain doors into the world of politics, intelligence and the military. I chose a career in law enforcement, which opened more doors, into the worlds of criminality, crime-fighting and social work, just to name a few. And later, of course, I became a cog in the Hollywood machine, which brought me (and still brings me) into contact with a staggering variety of characters from every walk of life and every background. Some are friends, some acquaintances, some people I met only once, in the back seats of Ubers or cabs or next to me on park benches or trains. At some point or other, I began to realize that many of these people had left marks on me -- their faces, and especially their voices, began to haunt me, as did the details of their life stories. From time to time I tapped into these recollections when creating fictional characters or situations for my books, but for the most part, I've hoarded them, collected them, kept them to myself. Recently, I got the idea that perhaps I ought to cull some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had into a play or a book. To test the waters, I've begun to write down the words that have been rattling around in my head, in some cases for decades, but to do so in a way that entirely preserved the anonymity of these confessionals. As part of that test, I'm adducing a few of the choicer monologues here, gathered over the last 20-odd years. All of them are real and not works of fiction or imagination, though I am going from memory in these particular examples and not from transcripts or recordings. In some cases, too, they are syntheses of more than one person in the same profession. In any case, they are but a sample of the human menagerie which exists within my head, and much of what they say may offend, shock, or bewilder. But as the saying goes -- people: what can you do?
THE HOOKER: When they busted me it was such a fucking joke. I mean, there I was in this motel, doing it with this guy, and after we finished he left, I had no more appointments, so I cleaned up and packed my things and left. And they arrested me in the parking lot. They didn't hassle my client. He just drove away. But they got me and took me in. I denied everything, but they told me don't waste my time, they had been in the next room listening. I was like, “Did you enjoy yourselves?” I was so angry. I mean, people are out there getting raped and murdered, gangs are selling drugs in schoolyards – I've got two kids, mind you – and like, there's the Mafia and terrorists and everything, and you've got four cops in a hotel room with a spike mike in the wall listening to me fake it. And they acted like they were heroes making the streets safer and I was this disgusting piece of trash who had to be stopped. Come on. What a fucking joke. It's my body, why can't I do what I want with it? Athletes sell their bodies, why can't I? If there weren't a demand for pussy, men wouldn't pay for it. So I had to go to court and plead guilty and it was so humiliating because all that stuff ends up in the papers, but it was bullshit, too, because all the guys are looking me up and down, even the judge, and I know damn well some of them would have been very happy to get me in bed and would have paid to do it, too. Come to think of it, I should have handed out business cards.
THE OLD MAN: I tell you what, this neighborhood has gone straight to hell. I've lived here all my life, which is a long time now, longer than I care to remember, really, and I tell you, this used to be a great place to live. Where that electronics store used to be was a livery stable, and we'd go rent a couple of horses and ride all the way to downtown Los Angeles. We'd tie up the horses outside a bar and have a couple of beers and then ride back up the Cahuenga Pass. And that whole time you wouldn't see more than a few cars. Not like today, when it's just bumper-to-bumper all day every day, even on Sundays. In those days, when I was a kid, I tell you, things were so different. This town was really more like the West. Everything was flat and dusty and hot and spread out. Orange groves here. Lemon groves there. We had a hundred acres out here, grew grapes and some other fruits that certain races of people like to eat. I drove around in my daddy's pickup with a shotgun to make sure nobody trespassed. Used to fire over their heads – once I found people using our barbeque and our picnic tables and I let 'em have it. They ran like the devil. People are shocked when I tell 'em that now. But things were different, people were different. Guns were a part of who we were. My friend Charlie was a cop, and he wouldn't take off his pistol for anything, no way. When he got married he got out of the car in his tux and his service revolver just fell plumb out of his cummerbund and hit the pavement right there in front of everybody. I said, “Charlie, for God's sake, let me have the gun.” And he said no, and we had a big argument right there outside the church, and the upshot of it was I carried his gun during the ceremony but he got it right back afterwards when he was climbing back into the car to take him to his honeymoon. He never did stop carrying that gun, but it didn't do him no damn good because he died of spinal meningitis.
THE CABBIE: You what really gets me? American Jews. I don't understand them. I'm Israeli – you can probably tell from my accent. I understand Israelis because we're all hustlers, you know, animals. We like to party. We're not religious. We just know we're Jews. But these American Jews, I don't get at all. They are all so into being Jewish. It's like a religion to them – not Judaism, being Jewish. Like they feel guilty for not living in Israel so they want to show us how Jewish they are, how they keep kosher, how they go to synagogue, how they raise money for kibbutzim and shit. When I meet one they always tell me how much they support Israel. I say, “If you want to support Israel, move there. We could use your money.” Shit, if every Jew in America moved to Israel the Arabs would never get rid of us. We'd have five million more people and we wouldn't need your “support,” because we'd have your money and your kids for the army. I was in the army and I'm a woman. In Israel, everyone goes into the army except the ultra-Orthodox, and you can have them. Worthless. All they do is procreate and pray. Of course I left Israel years ago. Went to Europe, and now here. I like America. There are so many different kinds of people here. I don't think I'll move back. I'll be an American and a Jew. But I'll never be an American Jew.
THE MARINE: Once, in Iraq, we flew out to where the insurgents had gotten hold of a whole bunch of police officer candidates, you know, the guys we were training to be cops for the new government. The insurgents had taken them out into the desert and tied their wrists together with barbed wire and made them kneel down in the sand and shot them in the back of the head. We found fifty of them like that. Made 'em take off their clothes – except their underwear, the Arabs are weird about nudity – and just killed them. And that was like, a common thing. We were always finding bodies, ten, twenty, thirty bodies. All men. Never any women. Sometimes they'd cut the heads off and sometimes they'd just shoot them. It made you wonder how desperate people must be to want to join the police force or the army, that they'd risk getting their fucking heads cut off. What a fucking country. Being in a place like that makes you pretty hard. Otherwise you'll lose it. Like, I was a sergeant and these new guys – we called them nuggets – they'd arrive at the base, and the first thing I'd do was say, “Nuggets, go clean out the fucking helicopter.” Well, we'd lost a gunner the day before and there was blood and brains everywhere and these poor nuggets are puking while they're scrubbing. We found that funny. We did a lot of sick shit like that. Funny thing, at Christmastime we'd get cases and cases of candy canes from back home, and the fucking hajis hated the sight of those things. They knew that candy canes meant Christmas and Christmas is Christian, and they fucking hate Christians. So we'd fly over their villages and dump candy canes on them – thousands and thousands of candy canes – and they'd run out and shake their fists at us and stomp them. We always got a good laugh out of that.
THE HOOKER: It's so frustrating, the way life works. I spent years building up a clientele. I had two houses. I had $50,000 in the bank. A boyfriend that was very supportive. One of my regulars was a CPA and he handled my books – not for free, but you know, we worked something out. Then I got in my accident. Somebody ran a red light and T-boned my car. My back was all messed up. I was out of commission for months. Then I needed surgery – two surgeries, actually. And my line of work doesn't come with health insurance. Everything was out of pocket. By the time the smoke cleared I was living in an apartment again. Savings gone. I used to see 4 – 5 clients a day. Now I see 4 – 5 clients a week. Okay, I'm not as young as I was, and I can't work out the way I used to because of my back, but I've still got this face and these tits, so what's the big deal? But people just move on. I wasn't answering the phone so they moved on. I e-mailed them and told them I was back in business but nobody came back. Not many, anyway. There's no loyalty. Now I have to get a regular job. I have to start sending out resumes. But what the hell am I supposed to put on them?
THE OLD MAN: Guns aren't the problem. I was handling my dad's guns when I was twelve. His shotgun. But he also bought me a .22 bolt-action. Hell, we needed guns then, growing up in the desert. My older brother heard hell breaking loose in our yard one night, the horses screaming, and he went out with his rifle and saw what he thought was a dog out there. He thought it was our neighbor's dog got loose, maybe, so he didn't fire; but it turned out it was a goddamned mountain lion. Messed one of the horses up pretty good. And there were rattlers, too. You had to shoot 'em if you were on horseback. Everyone had a gun back then, but nobody shot anybody. You hear about this big shooting, that big shooting, and everyone blames the guns. OK, so maybe a man doesn't need an AR-15 or whatever, but why blame the gun when it's a man who pulls the trigger? Problem is nobody's afraid of consequences anymore. You kill 30 people, they send you to jail and the taxpayer gets to foot the bill for your food and clothes and medical care. Why should you be afraid? String 'em up from trees, the way we used to, and you won't have that problem anymore. Hell, I can remember when they broadcast executions on the radio.
THE MARINE: The frustrating thing was the rules, really. We knew who the bad guys were but the rules were so fucking strict, and you had these candy asses calling the shots. It got people killed. One day we saw this pickup cruising along, and we had the grunts stop it, and it was full of hajis, including some wanted guys, but the lieutenant wouldn't pull the trigger. He couldn't get clearance and he ordered us to let them go. Well, they rigged the road with IED's, and the next day they blew the fuck out of one of our patrols. You want to talk bitter. We could have wasted every one of those fuckers. We should have. But that's not always the way it works. But sometimes it does. Can I tell you about the night I killed eight people? I won't. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't want to be one of those guys that everybody things is lying. Like, my grandfather always used to say that the guys who really saw the shit in WW2 never said a word, but the fakers wouldn't shut up about it. He was right. I was in a bar not long after I got back, and I'm telling my brother-in-law about Iraq, and this dumpy little guy in Coke-bottle glasses comes over and says, real loud, “Oh, you were over there too, huh? I'm with the CIA. I was hunting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” And I'm like, Sure you were, kitten. It's so fucking sad the way people lie about stuff like that, because it just cheapens it for all of us who really were over there doing the dirty work.
THE COP: I was a week on the job the first time I got shot at. A sniper. We were under a railroad bridge when he opened up on us. People always ask, What did you do? Well, what the fuck do you think I did? I ran. Me and my partner. I guess if it were TV show we'd have shot back, called for backup, the whole nine yards. Life isn't a TV show. We ran. We lived. A week after that, I got called to a housing project because of a stabbing. Black woman was lying there bleeding out from a wound to a leg. Femoral artery, I'm sure. I hauled ass over to her and tried to get a tourniquet around her leg, and you know what happened? All the people above me in the building started throwing shit at me. I don't mean rotten eggs. I mean like potted plants and bricks and shit. There I am, trying to save this woman's life, and they're trying to kill me. It was the damndest thing. They kept driving me off and I kept going back. They didn't do it because I was white. They did it because I was cop. Being white didn't help though. I remember once we were patting down some gangbangers outside the project and this one loudmouth kid, this troublemaker, he came over and started giving us shit. He was already in a cast because some cop had beaten his ass a couple of weeks before, and his family was suing the city. He just walked over and got in our faces. Big mistake. There was a guy I was working with, big guy, he says, “Shut your fucking mouth, nigger,” and blasts the guy right in his mouth. The kid fell off the curb and broke his leg. Broke his leg! He already had a broken arm! I just put my head in my hands. That's another lawsuit and please God I don't get subpoenaed to testify. I don't want to work with people like that. I mean, you can call 'em savages but not niggers. That's wrong.
THE ACTRESS: Sometimes it's the good things that hurt you the worst. The things you wait for. That you hope and pray for. I worked on this one show for Nickelodeon as an extra and I got to know the crew pretty well. I'd laugh and joke around with them, and they got to liking me. I never hassled the cast, of course; you can't talk to them when you're an extra, but the crew was different, we were all in the same boat. I'd stand at Craft Services, eating, and kid around with them. So I always got asked back. But of course nobody comes to Hollywood to be an extra. I wanted to act. And one day I'm at my barista job, slinging java, and I get a call from my agent saying they have a part for me. A recurring character. Still a very small part, but I'd be part of this clique of bitchy high school girls, kind of sidekicks to the queen bee bitch, and I'd get a line or two here or there, and it would pay a thousand dollars for the first episode. Same money for any subsequent appearances, and more if I got lines. I was over the moon. This is how you get in the door. Look at Mercedes McNabb, for God's sake: she had years of work off the same kind of role on Buffy. Or the guys who played the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. They came in as day players and got nine years' work out of it. So I asked my boss for the time off to shoot the episode and he said, “As long as you can find somebody to cover your shift, you can do it, otherwise, no.” And I asked everybody. I mean everybody. And they all said no. Every single fucking one of them. I think it was jealousy. We were all in the trenches together, all “aspiring” to be something, and as long as we were all at the bottom we were all bestest buddies. But now I had a chance to take that first rung on the ladder, and boom, out came the claws. It was horrible. It finally came to the point where I had to decide between taking the part and losing my job. But I couldn't afford to lose my job for a thousand dollar payday with no guarantee of other work. I mean, this is L.A., for crissake; a thousand dollars won't even cover one month's rent. What could I do? I passed on the role, went home, and cried myself to sleep.
THE COP: You've got to be fucking crazy to be a cop and put up with all that shit. And we were. We'd get drunk and play bumper cars. Just smash around the streets, hitting each other, hitting parked cars, late at night. We'd get pulled over and flash our tin and the cops would just let us go. They knew we were just blowing off steam. But I was never a hypocrite about it. Once I came up to this car at a green light, and it wasn't moving. I waited two cycles and then hit my siren and lights. Nothing. I got out and found a black kid at the wheel, passed out cold. Drunk. I woke him up. He was underage and scared shitless. I said, “Kid, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive this car home at exactly five miles an hour. I am going to follow you. If you hit anyone, if you hit anything, I'm arresting you for DUI. If you make it home safe, you're off the hook.” That poor kid, I don't think he even touched the pedal on his way home. When he finally parked the car I said, “Give me the keys, then go in and go to sleep. Tomorrow come to the station and ask for me, and you'll get the keys back.” When people ask me why I did that I say, “I've driven drunk a thousand times, how can I lock up someone else for it and look myself in the mirror?”
THE BOXER: People ask me, “Would you let your son become a boxer?” I say, “Would you let yours?” And when they say, “No!” – and they always say, “No!” – I say, “Well, you have your answer.” The truth is, I didn't want to turn pro. My style was perfect for the amateurs, but professional boxing is a totally different sport. Being a great amateur doesn't mean you'll pan out as a pro. There's a lot of Olympic gold medalists who washed out in the pros. Look at Henry Tillman. Look at Andrew Maynard. Look at Herbert Runge, for God's sake. I know the history, man. But my father, he had his heart set on me getting there. He wanted me to be the thing he never was, I guess. But it's a hard, hard life. And it's not natural. God gave us this head to think with, not to use as a motherfucking punching bag. People are always surprised by how easily I get upset watching a boxing match. That's because the the things they want to see are not the things I want to see. I can appreciate the technique, the artistry. I can't appreciate one dude beating on another like a fucking slab of meat. You wouldn't either, if you'd ever been knocked out.
THE OLD MAN: It's not just the things that were different, it's people. People understood what community was. Not like now, when everything's so selfish. That's the right word. Selfish. Nobody cares about anyone else. Hell, I'll tell you a story. Lockheed used to have a plant up the way, made P-38 Lightnings or something during the war. And they had a test field here, where the commercial airport is now. One day, I guess maybe this was in the late 1950s, I saw a plane zooming around overhead, which was nothing new, but this one was at treetop level. Like in Korea, the fliers used to do this thing called a Nape Scrape, where they'd fly so low to avoid ground fire they was practically dragging their bellies on the deck? That's what this fella was doing and I knew something was wrong, because even a test pilot don't do that in a residential neighborhood. Well, he zoomed over the houses and crashed into the gravel pit over there – it used to be over there, but I guess that's where the mall is now. Killed the pilot. Well, they had an investigation and it turned out his engine went bad and he had to make a decision – go toward the field down the way, and maybe live, but risk a whole lotta lives, or crash into the pit right here and die, but save everybody else. He chose to crash. Think about that. If he'd made for the field he might still be alive. But he didn't think he had the right to risk a bunch of folks for the chance of saving his own ass. So he gave up his life just like that, for people he didn't even know. People used to be like that, you know. They understood community. They understood they weren't nothing but leaves on a tree: they'd have their time, and then they'd go, but the tree would always be here. But nobody cares about the tree today. And that, my friend, is why the tree is dying.
-- Fast Eddie Felson
We have such sights to show you.
-- The Hell Priest
People have always fascinated me -- who they are, what they are, and why they do the things they do. I suppose any writer worth his salt is similarly fascinated. Writers, after all, traffic in human beings both real and imagined. They are our stock-in-trade. In order for our subjects and characters to rise off the page and take three-dimensional shape in the readers' mind, we must nurse the conceit that we understand human nature to a degree which the ordinary person does not. We must make this conceit part of who we are, and never shy away from it or apologize for it. It takes a certain arrogance to be a surgeon or a fighter pilot, and it takes a not totally dissimilar arrogance to write about our fellow homo sapiens, because before we can begin, before we can set down a single word, we must first understand the motive causes of our characters. Who are these people? What drives them? What to they want? What to they love, what do they hate, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- what do they fear? If you can't answer that, or at least speculate in some detail, you've no business writing about people at all.
Now, it so happens that in my life I've had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary miscellany of human beings, from professional criminals to decorated law enforcement officers, from famous scientists to disgraced politicians, from A-list actors to D-list comedians, and everything in between. My father was the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, and that opened certain doors into the world of politics, intelligence and the military. I chose a career in law enforcement, which opened more doors, into the worlds of criminality, crime-fighting and social work, just to name a few. And later, of course, I became a cog in the Hollywood machine, which brought me (and still brings me) into contact with a staggering variety of characters from every walk of life and every background. Some are friends, some acquaintances, some people I met only once, in the back seats of Ubers or cabs or next to me on park benches or trains. At some point or other, I began to realize that many of these people had left marks on me -- their faces, and especially their voices, began to haunt me, as did the details of their life stories. From time to time I tapped into these recollections when creating fictional characters or situations for my books, but for the most part, I've hoarded them, collected them, kept them to myself. Recently, I got the idea that perhaps I ought to cull some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had into a play or a book. To test the waters, I've begun to write down the words that have been rattling around in my head, in some cases for decades, but to do so in a way that entirely preserved the anonymity of these confessionals. As part of that test, I'm adducing a few of the choicer monologues here, gathered over the last 20-odd years. All of them are real and not works of fiction or imagination, though I am going from memory in these particular examples and not from transcripts or recordings. In some cases, too, they are syntheses of more than one person in the same profession. In any case, they are but a sample of the human menagerie which exists within my head, and much of what they say may offend, shock, or bewilder. But as the saying goes -- people: what can you do?
THE HOOKER: When they busted me it was such a fucking joke. I mean, there I was in this motel, doing it with this guy, and after we finished he left, I had no more appointments, so I cleaned up and packed my things and left. And they arrested me in the parking lot. They didn't hassle my client. He just drove away. But they got me and took me in. I denied everything, but they told me don't waste my time, they had been in the next room listening. I was like, “Did you enjoy yourselves?” I was so angry. I mean, people are out there getting raped and murdered, gangs are selling drugs in schoolyards – I've got two kids, mind you – and like, there's the Mafia and terrorists and everything, and you've got four cops in a hotel room with a spike mike in the wall listening to me fake it. And they acted like they were heroes making the streets safer and I was this disgusting piece of trash who had to be stopped. Come on. What a fucking joke. It's my body, why can't I do what I want with it? Athletes sell their bodies, why can't I? If there weren't a demand for pussy, men wouldn't pay for it. So I had to go to court and plead guilty and it was so humiliating because all that stuff ends up in the papers, but it was bullshit, too, because all the guys are looking me up and down, even the judge, and I know damn well some of them would have been very happy to get me in bed and would have paid to do it, too. Come to think of it, I should have handed out business cards.
THE OLD MAN: I tell you what, this neighborhood has gone straight to hell. I've lived here all my life, which is a long time now, longer than I care to remember, really, and I tell you, this used to be a great place to live. Where that electronics store used to be was a livery stable, and we'd go rent a couple of horses and ride all the way to downtown Los Angeles. We'd tie up the horses outside a bar and have a couple of beers and then ride back up the Cahuenga Pass. And that whole time you wouldn't see more than a few cars. Not like today, when it's just bumper-to-bumper all day every day, even on Sundays. In those days, when I was a kid, I tell you, things were so different. This town was really more like the West. Everything was flat and dusty and hot and spread out. Orange groves here. Lemon groves there. We had a hundred acres out here, grew grapes and some other fruits that certain races of people like to eat. I drove around in my daddy's pickup with a shotgun to make sure nobody trespassed. Used to fire over their heads – once I found people using our barbeque and our picnic tables and I let 'em have it. They ran like the devil. People are shocked when I tell 'em that now. But things were different, people were different. Guns were a part of who we were. My friend Charlie was a cop, and he wouldn't take off his pistol for anything, no way. When he got married he got out of the car in his tux and his service revolver just fell plumb out of his cummerbund and hit the pavement right there in front of everybody. I said, “Charlie, for God's sake, let me have the gun.” And he said no, and we had a big argument right there outside the church, and the upshot of it was I carried his gun during the ceremony but he got it right back afterwards when he was climbing back into the car to take him to his honeymoon. He never did stop carrying that gun, but it didn't do him no damn good because he died of spinal meningitis.
THE CABBIE: You what really gets me? American Jews. I don't understand them. I'm Israeli – you can probably tell from my accent. I understand Israelis because we're all hustlers, you know, animals. We like to party. We're not religious. We just know we're Jews. But these American Jews, I don't get at all. They are all so into being Jewish. It's like a religion to them – not Judaism, being Jewish. Like they feel guilty for not living in Israel so they want to show us how Jewish they are, how they keep kosher, how they go to synagogue, how they raise money for kibbutzim and shit. When I meet one they always tell me how much they support Israel. I say, “If you want to support Israel, move there. We could use your money.” Shit, if every Jew in America moved to Israel the Arabs would never get rid of us. We'd have five million more people and we wouldn't need your “support,” because we'd have your money and your kids for the army. I was in the army and I'm a woman. In Israel, everyone goes into the army except the ultra-Orthodox, and you can have them. Worthless. All they do is procreate and pray. Of course I left Israel years ago. Went to Europe, and now here. I like America. There are so many different kinds of people here. I don't think I'll move back. I'll be an American and a Jew. But I'll never be an American Jew.
THE MARINE: Once, in Iraq, we flew out to where the insurgents had gotten hold of a whole bunch of police officer candidates, you know, the guys we were training to be cops for the new government. The insurgents had taken them out into the desert and tied their wrists together with barbed wire and made them kneel down in the sand and shot them in the back of the head. We found fifty of them like that. Made 'em take off their clothes – except their underwear, the Arabs are weird about nudity – and just killed them. And that was like, a common thing. We were always finding bodies, ten, twenty, thirty bodies. All men. Never any women. Sometimes they'd cut the heads off and sometimes they'd just shoot them. It made you wonder how desperate people must be to want to join the police force or the army, that they'd risk getting their fucking heads cut off. What a fucking country. Being in a place like that makes you pretty hard. Otherwise you'll lose it. Like, I was a sergeant and these new guys – we called them nuggets – they'd arrive at the base, and the first thing I'd do was say, “Nuggets, go clean out the fucking helicopter.” Well, we'd lost a gunner the day before and there was blood and brains everywhere and these poor nuggets are puking while they're scrubbing. We found that funny. We did a lot of sick shit like that. Funny thing, at Christmastime we'd get cases and cases of candy canes from back home, and the fucking hajis hated the sight of those things. They knew that candy canes meant Christmas and Christmas is Christian, and they fucking hate Christians. So we'd fly over their villages and dump candy canes on them – thousands and thousands of candy canes – and they'd run out and shake their fists at us and stomp them. We always got a good laugh out of that.
THE HOOKER: It's so frustrating, the way life works. I spent years building up a clientele. I had two houses. I had $50,000 in the bank. A boyfriend that was very supportive. One of my regulars was a CPA and he handled my books – not for free, but you know, we worked something out. Then I got in my accident. Somebody ran a red light and T-boned my car. My back was all messed up. I was out of commission for months. Then I needed surgery – two surgeries, actually. And my line of work doesn't come with health insurance. Everything was out of pocket. By the time the smoke cleared I was living in an apartment again. Savings gone. I used to see 4 – 5 clients a day. Now I see 4 – 5 clients a week. Okay, I'm not as young as I was, and I can't work out the way I used to because of my back, but I've still got this face and these tits, so what's the big deal? But people just move on. I wasn't answering the phone so they moved on. I e-mailed them and told them I was back in business but nobody came back. Not many, anyway. There's no loyalty. Now I have to get a regular job. I have to start sending out resumes. But what the hell am I supposed to put on them?
THE OLD MAN: Guns aren't the problem. I was handling my dad's guns when I was twelve. His shotgun. But he also bought me a .22 bolt-action. Hell, we needed guns then, growing up in the desert. My older brother heard hell breaking loose in our yard one night, the horses screaming, and he went out with his rifle and saw what he thought was a dog out there. He thought it was our neighbor's dog got loose, maybe, so he didn't fire; but it turned out it was a goddamned mountain lion. Messed one of the horses up pretty good. And there were rattlers, too. You had to shoot 'em if you were on horseback. Everyone had a gun back then, but nobody shot anybody. You hear about this big shooting, that big shooting, and everyone blames the guns. OK, so maybe a man doesn't need an AR-15 or whatever, but why blame the gun when it's a man who pulls the trigger? Problem is nobody's afraid of consequences anymore. You kill 30 people, they send you to jail and the taxpayer gets to foot the bill for your food and clothes and medical care. Why should you be afraid? String 'em up from trees, the way we used to, and you won't have that problem anymore. Hell, I can remember when they broadcast executions on the radio.
THE MARINE: The frustrating thing was the rules, really. We knew who the bad guys were but the rules were so fucking strict, and you had these candy asses calling the shots. It got people killed. One day we saw this pickup cruising along, and we had the grunts stop it, and it was full of hajis, including some wanted guys, but the lieutenant wouldn't pull the trigger. He couldn't get clearance and he ordered us to let them go. Well, they rigged the road with IED's, and the next day they blew the fuck out of one of our patrols. You want to talk bitter. We could have wasted every one of those fuckers. We should have. But that's not always the way it works. But sometimes it does. Can I tell you about the night I killed eight people? I won't. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't want to be one of those guys that everybody things is lying. Like, my grandfather always used to say that the guys who really saw the shit in WW2 never said a word, but the fakers wouldn't shut up about it. He was right. I was in a bar not long after I got back, and I'm telling my brother-in-law about Iraq, and this dumpy little guy in Coke-bottle glasses comes over and says, real loud, “Oh, you were over there too, huh? I'm with the CIA. I was hunting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” And I'm like, Sure you were, kitten. It's so fucking sad the way people lie about stuff like that, because it just cheapens it for all of us who really were over there doing the dirty work.
THE COP: I was a week on the job the first time I got shot at. A sniper. We were under a railroad bridge when he opened up on us. People always ask, What did you do? Well, what the fuck do you think I did? I ran. Me and my partner. I guess if it were TV show we'd have shot back, called for backup, the whole nine yards. Life isn't a TV show. We ran. We lived. A week after that, I got called to a housing project because of a stabbing. Black woman was lying there bleeding out from a wound to a leg. Femoral artery, I'm sure. I hauled ass over to her and tried to get a tourniquet around her leg, and you know what happened? All the people above me in the building started throwing shit at me. I don't mean rotten eggs. I mean like potted plants and bricks and shit. There I am, trying to save this woman's life, and they're trying to kill me. It was the damndest thing. They kept driving me off and I kept going back. They didn't do it because I was white. They did it because I was cop. Being white didn't help though. I remember once we were patting down some gangbangers outside the project and this one loudmouth kid, this troublemaker, he came over and started giving us shit. He was already in a cast because some cop had beaten his ass a couple of weeks before, and his family was suing the city. He just walked over and got in our faces. Big mistake. There was a guy I was working with, big guy, he says, “Shut your fucking mouth, nigger,” and blasts the guy right in his mouth. The kid fell off the curb and broke his leg. Broke his leg! He already had a broken arm! I just put my head in my hands. That's another lawsuit and please God I don't get subpoenaed to testify. I don't want to work with people like that. I mean, you can call 'em savages but not niggers. That's wrong.
THE ACTRESS: Sometimes it's the good things that hurt you the worst. The things you wait for. That you hope and pray for. I worked on this one show for Nickelodeon as an extra and I got to know the crew pretty well. I'd laugh and joke around with them, and they got to liking me. I never hassled the cast, of course; you can't talk to them when you're an extra, but the crew was different, we were all in the same boat. I'd stand at Craft Services, eating, and kid around with them. So I always got asked back. But of course nobody comes to Hollywood to be an extra. I wanted to act. And one day I'm at my barista job, slinging java, and I get a call from my agent saying they have a part for me. A recurring character. Still a very small part, but I'd be part of this clique of bitchy high school girls, kind of sidekicks to the queen bee bitch, and I'd get a line or two here or there, and it would pay a thousand dollars for the first episode. Same money for any subsequent appearances, and more if I got lines. I was over the moon. This is how you get in the door. Look at Mercedes McNabb, for God's sake: she had years of work off the same kind of role on Buffy. Or the guys who played the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. They came in as day players and got nine years' work out of it. So I asked my boss for the time off to shoot the episode and he said, “As long as you can find somebody to cover your shift, you can do it, otherwise, no.” And I asked everybody. I mean everybody. And they all said no. Every single fucking one of them. I think it was jealousy. We were all in the trenches together, all “aspiring” to be something, and as long as we were all at the bottom we were all bestest buddies. But now I had a chance to take that first rung on the ladder, and boom, out came the claws. It was horrible. It finally came to the point where I had to decide between taking the part and losing my job. But I couldn't afford to lose my job for a thousand dollar payday with no guarantee of other work. I mean, this is L.A., for crissake; a thousand dollars won't even cover one month's rent. What could I do? I passed on the role, went home, and cried myself to sleep.
THE COP: You've got to be fucking crazy to be a cop and put up with all that shit. And we were. We'd get drunk and play bumper cars. Just smash around the streets, hitting each other, hitting parked cars, late at night. We'd get pulled over and flash our tin and the cops would just let us go. They knew we were just blowing off steam. But I was never a hypocrite about it. Once I came up to this car at a green light, and it wasn't moving. I waited two cycles and then hit my siren and lights. Nothing. I got out and found a black kid at the wheel, passed out cold. Drunk. I woke him up. He was underage and scared shitless. I said, “Kid, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive this car home at exactly five miles an hour. I am going to follow you. If you hit anyone, if you hit anything, I'm arresting you for DUI. If you make it home safe, you're off the hook.” That poor kid, I don't think he even touched the pedal on his way home. When he finally parked the car I said, “Give me the keys, then go in and go to sleep. Tomorrow come to the station and ask for me, and you'll get the keys back.” When people ask me why I did that I say, “I've driven drunk a thousand times, how can I lock up someone else for it and look myself in the mirror?”
THE BOXER: People ask me, “Would you let your son become a boxer?” I say, “Would you let yours?” And when they say, “No!” – and they always say, “No!” – I say, “Well, you have your answer.” The truth is, I didn't want to turn pro. My style was perfect for the amateurs, but professional boxing is a totally different sport. Being a great amateur doesn't mean you'll pan out as a pro. There's a lot of Olympic gold medalists who washed out in the pros. Look at Henry Tillman. Look at Andrew Maynard. Look at Herbert Runge, for God's sake. I know the history, man. But my father, he had his heart set on me getting there. He wanted me to be the thing he never was, I guess. But it's a hard, hard life. And it's not natural. God gave us this head to think with, not to use as a motherfucking punching bag. People are always surprised by how easily I get upset watching a boxing match. That's because the the things they want to see are not the things I want to see. I can appreciate the technique, the artistry. I can't appreciate one dude beating on another like a fucking slab of meat. You wouldn't either, if you'd ever been knocked out.
THE OLD MAN: It's not just the things that were different, it's people. People understood what community was. Not like now, when everything's so selfish. That's the right word. Selfish. Nobody cares about anyone else. Hell, I'll tell you a story. Lockheed used to have a plant up the way, made P-38 Lightnings or something during the war. And they had a test field here, where the commercial airport is now. One day, I guess maybe this was in the late 1950s, I saw a plane zooming around overhead, which was nothing new, but this one was at treetop level. Like in Korea, the fliers used to do this thing called a Nape Scrape, where they'd fly so low to avoid ground fire they was practically dragging their bellies on the deck? That's what this fella was doing and I knew something was wrong, because even a test pilot don't do that in a residential neighborhood. Well, he zoomed over the houses and crashed into the gravel pit over there – it used to be over there, but I guess that's where the mall is now. Killed the pilot. Well, they had an investigation and it turned out his engine went bad and he had to make a decision – go toward the field down the way, and maybe live, but risk a whole lotta lives, or crash into the pit right here and die, but save everybody else. He chose to crash. Think about that. If he'd made for the field he might still be alive. But he didn't think he had the right to risk a bunch of folks for the chance of saving his own ass. So he gave up his life just like that, for people he didn't even know. People used to be like that, you know. They understood community. They understood they weren't nothing but leaves on a tree: they'd have their time, and then they'd go, but the tree would always be here. But nobody cares about the tree today. And that, my friend, is why the tree is dying.
February 3, 2018
Candy Ass Kings, or: Welcome to the Tyranny of the Weak
In a healthy society, the weak copy the strong; in a decaying one, the strong adopt the methods of the weak.
--- axiom
I am once again interrupting my series on how to fix America, this time for the purposes of venting my spleen.
I must start by saying that as a rule, I dislike posting rants, for the simple reason that all that negativity poisons an online atmosphere which already dripping with the stuff: I much prefer silly-ass humor, or scholarly analysis, or random observations about life, or any other damn thing at all so long as it is constructive, to listening to somebody rave, or rave myself. But sometimes, goddamn it, you've got to -- in the words of Emperor Palpatine -- "Use your aggressive feelings...and let the hate flow through you." So, here comes my hate.
Like a lot of people, I live in two worlds. On the one hand, I am a former parole officer and district attorney investigator; I even worked in corrections for a time. I'm a black belt and not too shabby with a revolver or a shotgun, either. I lift weights, have several tattoos and read piles of books about war, crime and the Mafia. In college, I was in a fraternity and drank enough beer to kill a Tyrannosaurus.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fucking nerd.
This statement requires a little expansion. Those other things came later in life, but I was always a nerd. I started watching Star Trekin my highchair and never stopped. I saw Star Wars when I was five, triggering another obsession, and when I was eight years old my Mom introduced me to Dr. Who -- about three decades before most of the rest of America had ever heard of it. I loved the original Battlestar Galactica and owned enough Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia to fill a bookshelf (even today, I can occasionally still find twenty-sided dice in the corners of the house I grew up in). I owned (and still own) an Atari 400 and 800 XL computer before I ever heard of Nintendo, and I had troves of toys and comic books. These things were common enough in every childhood back in the 70s and 80s, but I continued my interest in them long after most of my friends and classmates had moved onto other interests -- sports, rock music, sneakers, clothes, girls. And even when I finally took an interest in such things, I retained my essential nerdiness. It has never gone away, nor would I ever wish it to.
Because of said condition, I have joined a number of fan groups on Facebook -- groups that celebrate and discuss various facets of nerd-dom, from Sherlock Holmes to Friday the 13th: The Series. One of them focuses on the original Star Trek, and it has been an enjoyable experience. It's always nice to commune with people that remind you that you're not alone in your nerdy obsessions. The other day I posted my thoughts about an episode called "This Side of Paradise," in which the redoubtable Mr. Spock falls victim to parasitic spores that cause his emotional controls to collapse. In these epistles I try very hard to be thoughtful and respectful, to listen to dissenting opinions carefully and, in general, to keep things in the positive spirit which this group, and others like it, represent. My post, which concentrated on the writing and the acting, was extremely well-received; only one person took it upon himself to make trouble. He was offended, you see, because I hadn't "understood the anti-religious implications" of the spores. In his mind, their intoxicating effect represented organized religion, which offered a false and mindless "paradise" in which no advancement could take place, and which had to be destroyed by bringing people violently back to "reality." He went on to level several insults at religion and religious people generally. Several people took issue with his tone and general attitude, and the group's administrator stepped in immediately, which is what group admins are supposed to do in these circumstances; except that rather than admonish the troll, she shut down all commentary on the thread. Her evident reasoning was the troll's feelings might be hurt by others ganging-up on him for -- well, being a fucking troll. The fact that he had started everything with his needlessly combative and condescending attitude didn't matter. He felt offended, and he had voiced his grievance first, so everyone else had to be muzzled to please him.
This incident is obviously extremely trivial in and of itself, and I wouldn't mention it here, except that I feel it is part of a much larger problem besetting our society, to wit: people seem to think that the act of being offended grants them certain special rights. Say the magic words, "I'm offended!" and poof!, a shield forms around you, protecting you from any further words, symbols, facial expressions, etc. that might hurt your widdle feewings.
The most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is that in every case, the person who claimed to be offended first is the only one granted the benefit of these rights. In essence, it is like a gunfight in the Old West: whoever "draws" the "offended" card before the other wins. But the cultural effect of this nonsense is even worse than its cause. Because now, institutions -- schools, businesses, the government, and yes, even Facebook nerd-groups -- are so eager to slap special privilege on the offended that they no longer take into account the possible absurdity of the incident which supposedly caused offense. It is enough simply to experience a feeling of offense, regardless of its validity, and the whistle blows.
If we take my troll as an example, this is a person who was offended by the fact my take on an episode of a 50 year-old television program didn't correspond with his own. He took it upon himself to take me to task for this -- which he evidently had a right to do, because of the aforementioned special rights. At the same time, he was shielded by his rights from the counter-attacks launched by others on my behalf. The fact that he was alone in his opinion meant nothing to the conscientious admin. The entire commentary had to be shut down just to please him. The feelings of the others meant nothing.
Imagine a scenario in which a hundred people sit in a room at a comedy club. A joke is told by one person to the crowd, ninety-eight of which find funny. One person shouts, "I find that offensive!" Whereupon the police immediately enter the club, shut down the premises, and send everyone home. That, roughly, is what happens at universities, businesses, and yes, online groups in America on a daily basis. I've seen it happen myself over and over again in "real" (meaning not online) life. And what frightens me about shit like this is not so much that it happens -- fools and the cowards that enable them will always be with us -- but that so many people accept it without objection as "normal." History has repeatedly shown us that the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority. Because where the strong may rule solely through their strength, which is bad, the weak can only rule through viciousness, which is worse. Cultural rules such as "don't hit a man when he's down" were imposed by the strong to protect the weak. On the other hand, underhanded fighting, ambushes, hitting below the belt, etc., are all historically the methods of the weaker party. They were devised by the weak to attack the strong. And while it is certainly fair for a weaker party to "fight dirty" if "fighting dirty" will roughly even the odds, it becomes extremely dangerous to continue those methods when the weaker party ends up in power. Which brings me to the quotation with which I began this missive.
Implicit in the idea of "don't hit a man when he's down" (or "don't raise your hand to a woman," "help old ladies across the street," "be kind to animals," etc.) is the idea that with strength comes responsibility. Those in power have obligations -- not only not to use their power wickedly, but to use it actively for good. That is what I mean by "the methods of the strong" (also known as "The Spider-Man Principle"). The first principle of any democracy is "the majority rules, but protects the rights of the minority." The first principle of a dictatorship or oligarchy is, "The minority rules through intimidation." If we look at a place like North Korea, we can safely calculate that only a small percentage of the population actually supports the Kim Jong government or wants it in power; at the same time there is little prospect of it toppling any time soon. The weak have employed the methods of cruelty and intimidation to keep hold of their privileges, and the majority is helpless. There are few if any situations in life which justify the tyranny of the minority, yet increasingly, in America, we tend to find ourselves muzzled and held hostage by the weakest person in the group.
Now, some of what I'm saying may strike you as hypocritical given the anti-bullying stance I have frequently taken in this blog, and indeed, those of you who have been victimized by bullying in any form -- racial, sexual, political, monetary, religious, physical, etc. -- are probably in a stew right now, saying, "The 'strong' don't always behave themselves!" This is very true, and it is why democracies and republics, and yes, even our schools, have built-in safeguards which ensure, at least in theory, that the rights of the minority will be protected. In practice, of course, they often fail (how much bullying occurs in our schools right under the noses of teachers and administrators?), but the fact they exist at all means our hearts were once in the right place; so what remains is merely to make them more vigorous, more effective. It ought to be possible to wage war against bullying while simultaneously not allowing the bullied to become, in effect, bullies themselves. We must always remember that in "free" societies, the majority will rule; yet majority rule is a two-sided coin, and the obverse reads, "but it must respect and protect the rights of the minority." In the end, societal harmony is all about roughly balancing the needs of both sides. The great misunderstanding comes when people mistake rough balance for perfect balance, and assume because we haven't achieved perfection, we may as well slant entirely in favor of the supposedly oppressed party. When, in other words, we go so far in the direction of protecting the minority that the rights of the majority are no longer respected. And this where we find ourselves now. I have my own theories as to how we got here, but the important thing is to fight against this tendency whenever we find it -- at work, in government, and online, too. When someone tries to jam up the works by barking, "I'm offended!" you probably have a moral obligation to pause and ask yourself whether you've given legitimate reason for offense. But if the answer is no, "So fucking what!" is a perfectly reasonable response.
--- axiom
I am once again interrupting my series on how to fix America, this time for the purposes of venting my spleen.
I must start by saying that as a rule, I dislike posting rants, for the simple reason that all that negativity poisons an online atmosphere which already dripping with the stuff: I much prefer silly-ass humor, or scholarly analysis, or random observations about life, or any other damn thing at all so long as it is constructive, to listening to somebody rave, or rave myself. But sometimes, goddamn it, you've got to -- in the words of Emperor Palpatine -- "Use your aggressive feelings...and let the hate flow through you." So, here comes my hate.
Like a lot of people, I live in two worlds. On the one hand, I am a former parole officer and district attorney investigator; I even worked in corrections for a time. I'm a black belt and not too shabby with a revolver or a shotgun, either. I lift weights, have several tattoos and read piles of books about war, crime and the Mafia. In college, I was in a fraternity and drank enough beer to kill a Tyrannosaurus.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fucking nerd.
This statement requires a little expansion. Those other things came later in life, but I was always a nerd. I started watching Star Trekin my highchair and never stopped. I saw Star Wars when I was five, triggering another obsession, and when I was eight years old my Mom introduced me to Dr. Who -- about three decades before most of the rest of America had ever heard of it. I loved the original Battlestar Galactica and owned enough Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia to fill a bookshelf (even today, I can occasionally still find twenty-sided dice in the corners of the house I grew up in). I owned (and still own) an Atari 400 and 800 XL computer before I ever heard of Nintendo, and I had troves of toys and comic books. These things were common enough in every childhood back in the 70s and 80s, but I continued my interest in them long after most of my friends and classmates had moved onto other interests -- sports, rock music, sneakers, clothes, girls. And even when I finally took an interest in such things, I retained my essential nerdiness. It has never gone away, nor would I ever wish it to.
Because of said condition, I have joined a number of fan groups on Facebook -- groups that celebrate and discuss various facets of nerd-dom, from Sherlock Holmes to Friday the 13th: The Series. One of them focuses on the original Star Trek, and it has been an enjoyable experience. It's always nice to commune with people that remind you that you're not alone in your nerdy obsessions. The other day I posted my thoughts about an episode called "This Side of Paradise," in which the redoubtable Mr. Spock falls victim to parasitic spores that cause his emotional controls to collapse. In these epistles I try very hard to be thoughtful and respectful, to listen to dissenting opinions carefully and, in general, to keep things in the positive spirit which this group, and others like it, represent. My post, which concentrated on the writing and the acting, was extremely well-received; only one person took it upon himself to make trouble. He was offended, you see, because I hadn't "understood the anti-religious implications" of the spores. In his mind, their intoxicating effect represented organized religion, which offered a false and mindless "paradise" in which no advancement could take place, and which had to be destroyed by bringing people violently back to "reality." He went on to level several insults at religion and religious people generally. Several people took issue with his tone and general attitude, and the group's administrator stepped in immediately, which is what group admins are supposed to do in these circumstances; except that rather than admonish the troll, she shut down all commentary on the thread. Her evident reasoning was the troll's feelings might be hurt by others ganging-up on him for -- well, being a fucking troll. The fact that he had started everything with his needlessly combative and condescending attitude didn't matter. He felt offended, and he had voiced his grievance first, so everyone else had to be muzzled to please him.
This incident is obviously extremely trivial in and of itself, and I wouldn't mention it here, except that I feel it is part of a much larger problem besetting our society, to wit: people seem to think that the act of being offended grants them certain special rights. Say the magic words, "I'm offended!" and poof!, a shield forms around you, protecting you from any further words, symbols, facial expressions, etc. that might hurt your widdle feewings.
The most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is that in every case, the person who claimed to be offended first is the only one granted the benefit of these rights. In essence, it is like a gunfight in the Old West: whoever "draws" the "offended" card before the other wins. But the cultural effect of this nonsense is even worse than its cause. Because now, institutions -- schools, businesses, the government, and yes, even Facebook nerd-groups -- are so eager to slap special privilege on the offended that they no longer take into account the possible absurdity of the incident which supposedly caused offense. It is enough simply to experience a feeling of offense, regardless of its validity, and the whistle blows.
If we take my troll as an example, this is a person who was offended by the fact my take on an episode of a 50 year-old television program didn't correspond with his own. He took it upon himself to take me to task for this -- which he evidently had a right to do, because of the aforementioned special rights. At the same time, he was shielded by his rights from the counter-attacks launched by others on my behalf. The fact that he was alone in his opinion meant nothing to the conscientious admin. The entire commentary had to be shut down just to please him. The feelings of the others meant nothing.
Imagine a scenario in which a hundred people sit in a room at a comedy club. A joke is told by one person to the crowd, ninety-eight of which find funny. One person shouts, "I find that offensive!" Whereupon the police immediately enter the club, shut down the premises, and send everyone home. That, roughly, is what happens at universities, businesses, and yes, online groups in America on a daily basis. I've seen it happen myself over and over again in "real" (meaning not online) life. And what frightens me about shit like this is not so much that it happens -- fools and the cowards that enable them will always be with us -- but that so many people accept it without objection as "normal." History has repeatedly shown us that the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority. Because where the strong may rule solely through their strength, which is bad, the weak can only rule through viciousness, which is worse. Cultural rules such as "don't hit a man when he's down" were imposed by the strong to protect the weak. On the other hand, underhanded fighting, ambushes, hitting below the belt, etc., are all historically the methods of the weaker party. They were devised by the weak to attack the strong. And while it is certainly fair for a weaker party to "fight dirty" if "fighting dirty" will roughly even the odds, it becomes extremely dangerous to continue those methods when the weaker party ends up in power. Which brings me to the quotation with which I began this missive.
Implicit in the idea of "don't hit a man when he's down" (or "don't raise your hand to a woman," "help old ladies across the street," "be kind to animals," etc.) is the idea that with strength comes responsibility. Those in power have obligations -- not only not to use their power wickedly, but to use it actively for good. That is what I mean by "the methods of the strong" (also known as "The Spider-Man Principle"). The first principle of any democracy is "the majority rules, but protects the rights of the minority." The first principle of a dictatorship or oligarchy is, "The minority rules through intimidation." If we look at a place like North Korea, we can safely calculate that only a small percentage of the population actually supports the Kim Jong government or wants it in power; at the same time there is little prospect of it toppling any time soon. The weak have employed the methods of cruelty and intimidation to keep hold of their privileges, and the majority is helpless. There are few if any situations in life which justify the tyranny of the minority, yet increasingly, in America, we tend to find ourselves muzzled and held hostage by the weakest person in the group.
Now, some of what I'm saying may strike you as hypocritical given the anti-bullying stance I have frequently taken in this blog, and indeed, those of you who have been victimized by bullying in any form -- racial, sexual, political, monetary, religious, physical, etc. -- are probably in a stew right now, saying, "The 'strong' don't always behave themselves!" This is very true, and it is why democracies and republics, and yes, even our schools, have built-in safeguards which ensure, at least in theory, that the rights of the minority will be protected. In practice, of course, they often fail (how much bullying occurs in our schools right under the noses of teachers and administrators?), but the fact they exist at all means our hearts were once in the right place; so what remains is merely to make them more vigorous, more effective. It ought to be possible to wage war against bullying while simultaneously not allowing the bullied to become, in effect, bullies themselves. We must always remember that in "free" societies, the majority will rule; yet majority rule is a two-sided coin, and the obverse reads, "but it must respect and protect the rights of the minority." In the end, societal harmony is all about roughly balancing the needs of both sides. The great misunderstanding comes when people mistake rough balance for perfect balance, and assume because we haven't achieved perfection, we may as well slant entirely in favor of the supposedly oppressed party. When, in other words, we go so far in the direction of protecting the minority that the rights of the majority are no longer respected. And this where we find ourselves now. I have my own theories as to how we got here, but the important thing is to fight against this tendency whenever we find it -- at work, in government, and online, too. When someone tries to jam up the works by barking, "I'm offended!" you probably have a moral obligation to pause and ask yourself whether you've given legitimate reason for offense. But if the answer is no, "So fucking what!" is a perfectly reasonable response.
January 7, 2018
AMERICA: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE (AND BACK AGAIN), PART II
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- Herman Goering
It is obvious who benefits from the existence of the Empire: arms manufacturers and their employees. The entire professional military and intelligence class, which is large and growing larger every year. Corporations of all types who can only operate with impunity overseas if they are backed up by the American military. Wealthy individuals whose fortunes ride on strength of those corporations' stock. The ordinary American benefits little, if it all. But he does foot the bill. From a financial standpoint, the maintenance of this Empire represents a staggering burden on our people. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven most powerful nations combined: $652.6 billion is the projected budget for 2018, or one-fifth of our gross national product. Of that, $150 billion is spent operating our vast network of foreign bases. When one considers the sorry, near disastrous condition of America's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and even airports all crumbling and falling apart -- the terrible condition of many of our inner cities, and the 45 million Americans who live in poverty every day, justification for this sort of expense becomes increasingly difficult, especially when one considers the fact that you are six times more likely to be killed by a shark than a terrorist bomb. And yet the justifications continue, and the majority of Americans seem to swallow them almost unexamined. Why?
What has happened since the Korean War (1950 - 1953) is not merely a massive increase in the size, power and influence of our military and its adjunct, the intelligence community; it is a change in how Americans see themselves as a nation and their role in the world, a process I refer to as “the normalization of Empire.” During the era of the Republic, America saw itself (rightly or wrongly) as a nation which minded its business and expected the rest of the world to do the same (for the purposes of this essay I am setting aside the treatment of the Natives and the Mexican War, which I will address later). We had little interest in foreign affairs and rested comfortably on the knowledge that two very broad oceans, and the willingness of the population to answer any legitimate call to arms, protected us from any possible aggression. The rapid expansion and contraction of America's armed forces after the Civil War, WW1 and WW2 was not merely an expression of the American willingness to fight if a fight was deemed necessary, but our distrust of large standing armies and the whole culture of militarism which inevitably results from them. One man who clearly grasped the danger of militarism invading the American psyche was President Eisenhower, whose farewell speech in 1961 contained an explicit warning:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Ike's warning went unheeded, and the power of the “military-industrial complex” (and the intelligence community, which is certainly an important part of the same) continued to grow, shaping not only domestic issues such as the budget, but “the very structure of our society.” The ordinary American, who gains nothing from it, became increasingly invested emotionally in the idea of America as a superpower (empire) with a worldwide presence. Expressing hope that such presence could be lessened or eliminated entirely became tantamount to cowardice or even a form of low-grade treason. Nowhere was this reality reversal more evident than in the Republican Party. Prior to WW2, Republicans had held fast to the principles of small government, isolationism and demilitarization. With the onset of the Cold War, the GOP took upon itself to upend each and every one of these identifying principles: government expansionism, an aggressive foreign policy and a massive increase in military funding became their watchwords and remain so to this day. But the Democratic Party is only superficially different in its outlook. No candidate in the last national election was more openly hawkish than Hillary Clinton, and Obama's tenure in office, though marked by a certain comparative flaccidity in its military policy, was sometimes referred to as “the drone Presidency” due to his propensity for using those weapons all over the planet, including against American citizens. Moreover, while the Patriot Act was signed into law by the Republican Bush (43), the National Defense Authorization Act was penned by Obama, thus forming bookends which crush many of our most vital civil liberties between them. Both parties have endorsed warrantless mass surveillance of the population and both have waged aggressive war against the press, and in particular the "whistleblowers" who enable the press in its watchdog-role vis-a-vis the government. The ultimate result of 9/11 was thus not merely to expand the Empire and bring the imperial mentality to our foreign policy, but to turn the metaphorical screws inward, and begin the process of undercutting and destabilizing our freedoms at home -- not only with the passive acceptance, but the actual support of the brainwashed American citizen.
It follows that the features of the Empire are superficially those of the Republic; but upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that each foundational principal of the 1776 – 1898 period has been set neatly on its head:
1. Political power is concentrated increasingly in the executive branch of government, with an unelected, appointed-for-life federal judiciary simultaneously cutting into the power of the legislature branch from the opposite direction.
2. The legislature itself is largely in the hands of a professional political class which is extremely wealthy and bears little resemblance to its constituency: the average net worth of a U.S. Senator is one million dollars. The Citizens United case has essentially held up public office for sale to the highest bidder, to the point where it is foreseeable that corporations, rather than the States, might one day be represented in our legislature.
3. The political parties no longer have any significant differences in terms of their overall foreign and military policies: acceptance of the empire, and its attendant oppression of civil liberty, is universal.
4. The country is militarized to a high degree, with large standing armies which increasingly exert their cultural influence by displays of strength and various means of cultural propaganda.
5. Foreign policy is aggressive and backed up by economic, clandestine, and military operations carried out regularly all over the planet in complete disregard for the sovereignty of foreign nations: no country in history has dropped more bombs than the United States of America. No country in history has funded more coups or deliberately brought down foreign governments judged to be hostile, potentially hostile, or simply economically inconvenient.
6. The course of foreign policy is set not by politicians but by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and large corporations with overseas interests. This is particularly true since the election of Donald Trump, who is gutting the State Department, leaving the CIA and Pentagon to set the course of foreign policy.
7. The monetary system is almost entirely controlled by a privately controlled central bank called the Federal Reserve, which does not use the gold standard, encourages inflation, and feeds into the general climate of militarism “because war is good for business.”
If you want to see the American Empire, it isn't necessary to travel overseas to some enormous military base (“mini-Americas,” they are called) or ride with a carrier battle group, or drop in on a secret CIA prison somewhere in the back of the beyond. Nor do you have to sit in on the councils of political and corporate power. All you need do is pick up a history book to grasp what America was when it was truly a republic, and how different life was, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy, than it is today, in the age of Empire. To see how attitudes have shifted, not merely among the politicos and the generals but among the ordinary citizen, who can no longer conceive of what life is like without mass surveillance, without endless war, without systemic corruption and the near-extinction of the Bill of Rights. As brutal as the settlement period of the American West was, there has probably never been a period in our history when so many people lived in such a state of complete personal freedom, especially after 1865 -- free from oppressive taxes and government regulations. This period was so central to the development of the American identity that we mythologized it in our popular culture as the "Wild West." But it is precisely this sort of freedom that empire-builders in government and corporate America despise and fear the most. The very last thing they want is an armed populace who will accept only the most token restraints on its collective freedoms, and who actually expect to receive something concrete and specific for such taxes as they are forced to pay. Had the "spirit of the West" been kept alive after 1900 it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the federal-corporate octopus to lay its tentacles into every aspect of American life, to take away freedoms and return them one by one as paid, licensed privileges.
But the trouble with Americans is that we have no sense of history and little interest in it. We are concerned primarily with the here and now, and to a lesser extent, with the future. This makes us perennial optimists and tends to prevent the sort of long-simmering domestic grudges that wrack the rest of the world, but it also prevents us from understanding the extent to which we have changed, and declined, as a nation. As I stated before, the whole process of transitioning from Republic to Empire is one of gradual societal habituation. What was strange becomes normal over time; and what is normal, in the end, not only seems safe to us but somehow inherently right. The word “conservative,” stripped of its present political meaning, is defined as “holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” The change to imperium was a process that took many years, here advancing in great leaps, there crawling ahead by inches, but always in such a way as to remain largely below the awareness of the ordinary American. There is an old adage that if one wants to boil a frog, one need only slowly turn up the temperature; so it is with our people. The changes took place, but so subtly and so gradually, and often with such seemingly good intentions, that few people noticed. What would have been unimaginable in 1776 – or 1876, for that matter – has become commonplace in 2017. Millions can no longer imagine, and do not even want to imagine, what America might be like if we were no longer the key player on the world stage, if we no longer held on to this oversized military and colossal foreign empire.
I stated above that a republic may transition into an empire, but an empire cannot evolve into a new third form; it must either be destroyed, as Rome was, or eventually collapse in on itself, as the British Empire did. Of the two choices, the second is far more attractive, because America, unlike Britain, is an enormous country of nearly unlimited natural resources, which gains almost nothing, and loses much, from the existence of its empire. We have very little to fear from the end of it, and much to gain by its demise. So the question must be answered, “How do we restore the Republic?”
-- Herman Goering
It is obvious who benefits from the existence of the Empire: arms manufacturers and their employees. The entire professional military and intelligence class, which is large and growing larger every year. Corporations of all types who can only operate with impunity overseas if they are backed up by the American military. Wealthy individuals whose fortunes ride on strength of those corporations' stock. The ordinary American benefits little, if it all. But he does foot the bill. From a financial standpoint, the maintenance of this Empire represents a staggering burden on our people. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven most powerful nations combined: $652.6 billion is the projected budget for 2018, or one-fifth of our gross national product. Of that, $150 billion is spent operating our vast network of foreign bases. When one considers the sorry, near disastrous condition of America's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and even airports all crumbling and falling apart -- the terrible condition of many of our inner cities, and the 45 million Americans who live in poverty every day, justification for this sort of expense becomes increasingly difficult, especially when one considers the fact that you are six times more likely to be killed by a shark than a terrorist bomb. And yet the justifications continue, and the majority of Americans seem to swallow them almost unexamined. Why?
What has happened since the Korean War (1950 - 1953) is not merely a massive increase in the size, power and influence of our military and its adjunct, the intelligence community; it is a change in how Americans see themselves as a nation and their role in the world, a process I refer to as “the normalization of Empire.” During the era of the Republic, America saw itself (rightly or wrongly) as a nation which minded its business and expected the rest of the world to do the same (for the purposes of this essay I am setting aside the treatment of the Natives and the Mexican War, which I will address later). We had little interest in foreign affairs and rested comfortably on the knowledge that two very broad oceans, and the willingness of the population to answer any legitimate call to arms, protected us from any possible aggression. The rapid expansion and contraction of America's armed forces after the Civil War, WW1 and WW2 was not merely an expression of the American willingness to fight if a fight was deemed necessary, but our distrust of large standing armies and the whole culture of militarism which inevitably results from them. One man who clearly grasped the danger of militarism invading the American psyche was President Eisenhower, whose farewell speech in 1961 contained an explicit warning:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Ike's warning went unheeded, and the power of the “military-industrial complex” (and the intelligence community, which is certainly an important part of the same) continued to grow, shaping not only domestic issues such as the budget, but “the very structure of our society.” The ordinary American, who gains nothing from it, became increasingly invested emotionally in the idea of America as a superpower (empire) with a worldwide presence. Expressing hope that such presence could be lessened or eliminated entirely became tantamount to cowardice or even a form of low-grade treason. Nowhere was this reality reversal more evident than in the Republican Party. Prior to WW2, Republicans had held fast to the principles of small government, isolationism and demilitarization. With the onset of the Cold War, the GOP took upon itself to upend each and every one of these identifying principles: government expansionism, an aggressive foreign policy and a massive increase in military funding became their watchwords and remain so to this day. But the Democratic Party is only superficially different in its outlook. No candidate in the last national election was more openly hawkish than Hillary Clinton, and Obama's tenure in office, though marked by a certain comparative flaccidity in its military policy, was sometimes referred to as “the drone Presidency” due to his propensity for using those weapons all over the planet, including against American citizens. Moreover, while the Patriot Act was signed into law by the Republican Bush (43), the National Defense Authorization Act was penned by Obama, thus forming bookends which crush many of our most vital civil liberties between them. Both parties have endorsed warrantless mass surveillance of the population and both have waged aggressive war against the press, and in particular the "whistleblowers" who enable the press in its watchdog-role vis-a-vis the government. The ultimate result of 9/11 was thus not merely to expand the Empire and bring the imperial mentality to our foreign policy, but to turn the metaphorical screws inward, and begin the process of undercutting and destabilizing our freedoms at home -- not only with the passive acceptance, but the actual support of the brainwashed American citizen.
It follows that the features of the Empire are superficially those of the Republic; but upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that each foundational principal of the 1776 – 1898 period has been set neatly on its head:
1. Political power is concentrated increasingly in the executive branch of government, with an unelected, appointed-for-life federal judiciary simultaneously cutting into the power of the legislature branch from the opposite direction.
2. The legislature itself is largely in the hands of a professional political class which is extremely wealthy and bears little resemblance to its constituency: the average net worth of a U.S. Senator is one million dollars. The Citizens United case has essentially held up public office for sale to the highest bidder, to the point where it is foreseeable that corporations, rather than the States, might one day be represented in our legislature.
3. The political parties no longer have any significant differences in terms of their overall foreign and military policies: acceptance of the empire, and its attendant oppression of civil liberty, is universal.
4. The country is militarized to a high degree, with large standing armies which increasingly exert their cultural influence by displays of strength and various means of cultural propaganda.
5. Foreign policy is aggressive and backed up by economic, clandestine, and military operations carried out regularly all over the planet in complete disregard for the sovereignty of foreign nations: no country in history has dropped more bombs than the United States of America. No country in history has funded more coups or deliberately brought down foreign governments judged to be hostile, potentially hostile, or simply economically inconvenient.
6. The course of foreign policy is set not by politicians but by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and large corporations with overseas interests. This is particularly true since the election of Donald Trump, who is gutting the State Department, leaving the CIA and Pentagon to set the course of foreign policy.
7. The monetary system is almost entirely controlled by a privately controlled central bank called the Federal Reserve, which does not use the gold standard, encourages inflation, and feeds into the general climate of militarism “because war is good for business.”
If you want to see the American Empire, it isn't necessary to travel overseas to some enormous military base (“mini-Americas,” they are called) or ride with a carrier battle group, or drop in on a secret CIA prison somewhere in the back of the beyond. Nor do you have to sit in on the councils of political and corporate power. All you need do is pick up a history book to grasp what America was when it was truly a republic, and how different life was, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy, than it is today, in the age of Empire. To see how attitudes have shifted, not merely among the politicos and the generals but among the ordinary citizen, who can no longer conceive of what life is like without mass surveillance, without endless war, without systemic corruption and the near-extinction of the Bill of Rights. As brutal as the settlement period of the American West was, there has probably never been a period in our history when so many people lived in such a state of complete personal freedom, especially after 1865 -- free from oppressive taxes and government regulations. This period was so central to the development of the American identity that we mythologized it in our popular culture as the "Wild West." But it is precisely this sort of freedom that empire-builders in government and corporate America despise and fear the most. The very last thing they want is an armed populace who will accept only the most token restraints on its collective freedoms, and who actually expect to receive something concrete and specific for such taxes as they are forced to pay. Had the "spirit of the West" been kept alive after 1900 it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the federal-corporate octopus to lay its tentacles into every aspect of American life, to take away freedoms and return them one by one as paid, licensed privileges.
But the trouble with Americans is that we have no sense of history and little interest in it. We are concerned primarily with the here and now, and to a lesser extent, with the future. This makes us perennial optimists and tends to prevent the sort of long-simmering domestic grudges that wrack the rest of the world, but it also prevents us from understanding the extent to which we have changed, and declined, as a nation. As I stated before, the whole process of transitioning from Republic to Empire is one of gradual societal habituation. What was strange becomes normal over time; and what is normal, in the end, not only seems safe to us but somehow inherently right. The word “conservative,” stripped of its present political meaning, is defined as “holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” The change to imperium was a process that took many years, here advancing in great leaps, there crawling ahead by inches, but always in such a way as to remain largely below the awareness of the ordinary American. There is an old adage that if one wants to boil a frog, one need only slowly turn up the temperature; so it is with our people. The changes took place, but so subtly and so gradually, and often with such seemingly good intentions, that few people noticed. What would have been unimaginable in 1776 – or 1876, for that matter – has become commonplace in 2017. Millions can no longer imagine, and do not even want to imagine, what America might be like if we were no longer the key player on the world stage, if we no longer held on to this oversized military and colossal foreign empire.
I stated above that a republic may transition into an empire, but an empire cannot evolve into a new third form; it must either be destroyed, as Rome was, or eventually collapse in on itself, as the British Empire did. Of the two choices, the second is far more attractive, because America, unlike Britain, is an enormous country of nearly unlimited natural resources, which gains almost nothing, and loses much, from the existence of its empire. We have very little to fear from the end of it, and much to gain by its demise. So the question must be answered, “How do we restore the Republic?”
AMERICA: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE (AND BACK AGAIN)
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.
-- George Orwell, "1984"
A few weeks ago I published an essay called "The Man With The Hammer," which discussed the tendency of America to act as if military power alone can solve all of its problems. I maintain that this way of thinking has become a sort of pathology in the last hundred years, and has perverted America into something she was never meant to be. I ended the essay with the words, "Before we can answer the question, 'What has America become?' it is necessary to ask the question, 'What was America in the first place?'" And to address that that question, I think is necessary to know something of America's only real historical analog: Rome.
When I refer to Rome, of course, I am immediately confronted with yet another necessity: that of defining just precisely what I mean when I use the word. “Rome” can mean the city itself; the Kingdom of Rome; the Roman Republic; the Roman Empire; and the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium. For the purposes of this essay, I define “Rome” to mean two things: The Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.), and the Roman Empire (27 B.C. - 476 A.D.), for it is those two which seem to most closely mirror America in its past and present.
The city of Rome was founded in 753 B.C., and for a period of 244 years was ruled by a series of kings. These kings were the literal definition of despots: they held unto themselves all executive, legal, and religious power. Though a Roman Senate existed, it did so in a largely advisory capacity, and the common man had no say whatever in the doings of government. During the period of the kingdom, Rome extended its power to the lands beyond its walls and became a strong regional power in Italy, but her final king, Tarquinus, was so wantonly despotic that he was eventually deposed and sent into exile. This action ended the Kingdom of Rome and ushered in the age of the Roman Republic.
Republics are so common today, at least in name, that it is easy to forget that there was a time when none existed – when every form of government on the planet was either tribal or tyrannical in nature. The Roman Republic was something very nearly unique, for while it wasn't the first republic to exist (that honor probably falls on Athens), it was almost certainly the most successful – both in terms of longevity, power and cultural influence. The principal novelties of the Republic, what made them both the bafflement and the envy of the ancient world, were:
1. Executive power was vested not in a lone figure, but in two consuls, who would serve as counterweights to each other's political ambitions.
2. These consuls were elected by the citizens of Rome and served in office for only a single year, alternating power between them from month to month.
3. They were advised by a Senate which eventually included members of the plebeian (common) class, and these senators received no pay.
4. Service in the armed forces was considered a civic duty for all classes, but terms of service were short (one year) and large standing armies were frowned upon except in times of war.
5. Thanks to near-universal political-military service, both the aristocrat and the ordinary Roman had a stake in the outcome of all Rome's endeavors. A vote for war meant going to war yourself, or sending a loved one.
6. Italy, and in particular Rome, were almost completely demilitarized: Roman legions were forbidden to cross south the Rubicon River in northern Italy. Roman generals had to temporarily give up their commands when they entered the city (become "24 hour civilians"). No weapon larger than a dagger was permissible in Rome itself.
7. Political figures were judged by the manner in which they comported themselves not only publicly, but in private; moral strength was considered a prerequisite for holding office.
8. There existed a strong, relatively stable monetary system.
The Roman Republic lasted 482 years, finally dissolving in 27 B.C. The cause of its collapse was not external; quite the contrary. When Caesar's nephew Octavian was declared the first emperor of Rome (Augustus) that year, Rome's military power was greater than it had ever been, and its colonial holdings rimmed the entire Mediterranean and extended deeply into Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, ensuring that Roman influence on the world stage was also at a maximum. No, the death of the Republic was part of a long, slow erosion of the “novelties” enumerated above – a gradual slide from republicanism back into despotism, and a concomitant decline of the moral, social and cultural institutions which had made the Republic possible. There were many contributing factors to this descent, but foremost among them was the decision to embark on a series of spectacular foreign conquests which had to be maintained by powerful armies – which, in turn, had to be commanded by able, ruthless men whose ambitions could not always be contained by republican law and tradition. Simply put, the decision to operate a demilitarized, semi-democratic Republic at home while simultaneously maintaining a huge foreign empire held down by powerful armies, put an enormous strain on the fabric which held the Republic together. It was a form of schizophrenia, and it could not long endure. After Octavian became Augustus Caesar,
1. Executive, legal and religious power was vested almost entirely in the emperor himself. There was no settled means of succession, but most emperors tried to pass the crown to a relative, making rule more or less hereditary. (Needless to say, the emperor was not elected.) In short, Rome had rejected the concept of kings, only to replace them with even more powerful emperors.
2. The Senate became a figurehead whose members served primarily for reasons of social prestige and wealth-acquisition, or to position themselves as possible candidates for emperor.
3. Militarization increased (the term of service became 25 years, leading to large standing armies) but the percentage of Italians in the armed forces declined steadily until, by the fifth century A.D., only 5% of Rome's legionaries hailed from the Italian peninsula. The rest were foreign citizens of the Empire or mercenaries. In part because of this, the ordinary Roman no longer held a stake in the success or failure of Roman endeavors abroad. He gained little from the Empire's victories or defeats, because neither he nor his loved ones were involved.
5. The instability of succession often led to military revolts and civil wars that frequently saw would-be emperors "cross the Rubicon" to march on Rome.
5. Moral strength became increasingly irrelevant, with the emperors generally claiming divinity, and thus free to engage in sensational debaucheries and cruelties (witness Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Caracalla, etc.).
6. The monetary system became increasingly unstable.
The Roman Empire (as I've defined it here) lasted 503 years – slightly longer than the Republic – but despite its awesome power and influence, which extended from the British Isles to Africa, from Spain to Syria and beyond – it was constantly wracked with every manner of corruption, strife and tumult, and its declining period exceeded its heyday by a ratio of roughly three and a half years to one. It is not for us to say whether Rome's acquisition of a foreign empire led to the decline of its republican institutions, or whether the decline of those institutions is what spawned the empire; the end result was the same. Today, the word “Rome” is synonymous with architectural genius, cultural dominance and politico-military organization of the highest order; it is also synonymous with arrogance, cruelty and moral and sexual degeneracy. And it is interesting to note that of the latter traits, nearly all trace their roots to the imperial rather than the republican period. Rome produced fewer great philosophers and statesmen under the Empire than she did under the Republic, in large part because veneration of character, intellect and public spirit had been replaced a worship of power, money and pleasure for its own sake. Most importantly, when the Empire fell (in 476 A.D.), it was destroyed from the outside, by barbarian armies. History shows that a nation-state may transition more or less peacefully from a republic to an empire, but it cannot evolve from an empire into a successful third form. Either the empire is utterly destroyed, as Rome was, or it collapses back onto itself and slowly begins to reform a democratic-republican tradition. (This is a generalization, but largely an accurate one.)
By this point one is tempted to ask, “What has any of this to do with America?” The answer is frightfully simple. The history of Rome and the history of America follow surprisingly similar trajectories. Rome was a kingdom that threw off its king and embraced a Republican tradition at a time when no other nation was doing so; later, it abandoned that tradition in the name of empire, a decision which brought enormous short-term benefits and held horrific long-term consequences. And it is precisely this path upon which America is now treading.
The history of America, like that of Rome, can be divided, if crudely, into two distinct periods: the American Republic (1776 – 1898) and the American Empire (1898 – present). The former period answers the question, “What was America in the first place?” The latter, “What has America become?”
In 1775, the thirteen states which now extend from Maine to Florida were colonies of the British crown. But George III, laboring from beneath the weight of his insanity, proved to be too much of a despot for the ruling classes in those colonies to bear. By the following year, a full-fledged rebellion had begun; this rebellion, now known as the American Revolution, lasted until 1783, when the Crown recognized the independence of the former colonies, now loosely organized into a confederation called the United States of America. I say “loosely organized,” because until 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, the central government was so weak that it was unable to perform even basic functions. After 1789, America was no longer confederated but federated, meaning the flaccid “old” government now had a central nervous system to stiffen its spine. But not too strong of one; the Founding Fathers had learned the lessons King George had taught them, and were determined to set up a system predicated on the Republican traditions of the Greeks and Romans. The salient features of this newly-minted Republic were:
1. Political power was divided more or less equally between three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), with each acting as a check on the powers of the others.
2. The executive and all members of the legislature were elected and served clearly-defined terms.
3. The country was demilitarized, with only a tiny standing army, consisting entirely of volunteers; the citizens themselves, via their militias, provided the rest of the armed strength of the nation. (Large armies and sustained periods of war were viewed as threats to democracy.)
4. Foreign policy could be summed up in Thomas Jefferson's words, “Commerce with all, alliance with none.” George Washington's parting words to the American people warned against "foreign entanglements."
5. The course of foreign policy was set by civilian government. Diplomacy was left to diplomats, not soldiers.
6. The monetary system was based on the gold standard, which kept the purchasing power of money fairly stable and discouraged the government from spending money it did not have.
The American Republic lasted 122 years. Many different dates could be chosen as the exact moment of its finis, but the Spanish-American War is probably the best. What happened was simply this. For 400 years, European powers had been conquering huge sections of the planet for the purpose of exploiting their resources (both human and material), and obtaining strategically located seaports and military bases which could protect their trade routes. In 1898, America – a still-young nation bursting with vitality and strength, having conquered the last of the Indian tribes and pushed Mexican territory back to the Rio Grande -- entered a contentious public debate about whether it, too, should join the fraternity of nations with overseas empires. Looking close to home, she rapped figurative knuckles against the shell of the old Spanish Empire and found it rang hollow. American politicians and businessmen saw in “expansionism” the opportunity to strip Spain of the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and this they did. While Cuba was eventually “returned” to its own people, the U.S. retained title to the other lands, and swiftly garrisoned and fortified them, thus establishing the first real foreign bases in its history. These bases positioned the U.S. to become a “player” in Asian affairs and further strengthened its position the Caribbean. During the period 1899 – 1901, U.S. forces helped crush the Boxer Rebellion in China, siding with the oppressors over the oppressed for purely economic reasons. President Teddy Roosevelt, coming to office in '01, made a decision to vastly expand the United States Navy, which was in keeping with Roosevelt's belief that America must be able to strike militarily anywhere in the world. The nation also became more aggressively involved in international affairs (T.R.'s infamous “gunboat diplomacy” in Central and South America) and more friendly to the concept of central banking, which the Founding Fathers had warned would lead only to the destabilization of the currency and to war. In accordance with this policy, the gold standard was largely abandoned, giving rise to inflation which has never stopped: a dollar, today, is worth about 1/100th of what it was worth in 1913.
Finally, in 1917, and despite the explicit promises of Woodrow Wilson not to do so, America declared war on Germany. The ostensible provocation for this act was the German policy of sinking non-belligerent ships in the Atlantic, including American ones, as part of its attempt to blockade the British Isles. In reality, the true motive for America's entry into the contest came from the domestic arms industry, which saw an opportunity to make a fortune off the conflict, and from a clique of Teddy Roosevelt-style politicians and power-brokers who hungered for America to take a larger role on the world stage. Yet America's participation in the war so disillusioned the population of the country that we rapidly fell back into old-school isolationism once again; indeed, the period 1919 – 1941 was marked by repeated efforts to bring the U.S. back into balance with its original ideals of “trade with all, alliance with none.” Even the military, which had blown up to enormous proportions during the war, rapidly shrank into a shadow of its former power. This was a crucial time in the history of the newly-minted Empire, during which we might have returned to the essential principles of Republicanism – demilitarization, non-alliance, non-interference in the affairs of others, and a strong currency whose purchasing power would remain stable. It was not to be. The Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, meant that America had to once again plunge into the morass of world affairs; this time, however, there was no withdrawal. The outcome of WW2 had left only two world powers in existence: the United States and the Soviet Union, and America took it upon itself to counter the USSR's influence both economically, politically and militarily. To do this it had to massively expand its armed forces, and establish an extensive network of military bases all over the planet. Many would argue this was simple necessity; America had to prepare for the possibility of a third World War.
If that were the only motivation for such a huge military presence abroad, however, why was this presence not eliminated, or at least seriously reduced, when the Cold War ended?
While it is true that there was a smallish decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this decline lasted only a decade and has spiked to unprecedented proportions following the events of September 11, 2001. As of two years ago, America maintained no less than 684 military bases in 74 countries; but even this hardly tells the full tale of U.S. involvement overseas, because American troops are stationed in an additional 76 nations without “formal” bases to support them, bringing the total number of nations partially occupied by U.S. forces to 150. When one considers that there are only 195 nations on the planet Earth, the magnitude of our power and reach are finally brought home. Are we to believe that the containment of terrorism and a tiny handful of rogue states requires more military might than the did the massive and ultra-powerful Soviet Union? The very notion is absurd on its face. Yet every year military budgets go up. Every year more bases are opened in more foreign lands, more troops deployed, more carrier battle groups commissioned. Today's generals have more money and more technological terrors and spy capabilities than their Cold War antecedents ever dreamed of, yet no one feels safer, and indeed, they are not meant to. We live -- have lived, for sixteen years -- in a state of constant tension and anxiety, with one enemy giving way to another and another and another, in a succession as numbing as it is unending. But the identity of the enemy of the moment scarcely matters. The main thing is that there be an enemy, always. Otherwise how to explain this massive military expenditure, this unending attack on our civil liberties? In a democratic society, such things are only justifiable as a security measure. If a sense of security is achieved, the justification for empire and its attendant oppression disappears. Which brings us to the next question, "Who benefits?"
-- George Orwell, "1984"
A few weeks ago I published an essay called "The Man With The Hammer," which discussed the tendency of America to act as if military power alone can solve all of its problems. I maintain that this way of thinking has become a sort of pathology in the last hundred years, and has perverted America into something she was never meant to be. I ended the essay with the words, "Before we can answer the question, 'What has America become?' it is necessary to ask the question, 'What was America in the first place?'" And to address that that question, I think is necessary to know something of America's only real historical analog: Rome.
When I refer to Rome, of course, I am immediately confronted with yet another necessity: that of defining just precisely what I mean when I use the word. “Rome” can mean the city itself; the Kingdom of Rome; the Roman Republic; the Roman Empire; and the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium. For the purposes of this essay, I define “Rome” to mean two things: The Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.), and the Roman Empire (27 B.C. - 476 A.D.), for it is those two which seem to most closely mirror America in its past and present.
The city of Rome was founded in 753 B.C., and for a period of 244 years was ruled by a series of kings. These kings were the literal definition of despots: they held unto themselves all executive, legal, and religious power. Though a Roman Senate existed, it did so in a largely advisory capacity, and the common man had no say whatever in the doings of government. During the period of the kingdom, Rome extended its power to the lands beyond its walls and became a strong regional power in Italy, but her final king, Tarquinus, was so wantonly despotic that he was eventually deposed and sent into exile. This action ended the Kingdom of Rome and ushered in the age of the Roman Republic.
Republics are so common today, at least in name, that it is easy to forget that there was a time when none existed – when every form of government on the planet was either tribal or tyrannical in nature. The Roman Republic was something very nearly unique, for while it wasn't the first republic to exist (that honor probably falls on Athens), it was almost certainly the most successful – both in terms of longevity, power and cultural influence. The principal novelties of the Republic, what made them both the bafflement and the envy of the ancient world, were:
1. Executive power was vested not in a lone figure, but in two consuls, who would serve as counterweights to each other's political ambitions.
2. These consuls were elected by the citizens of Rome and served in office for only a single year, alternating power between them from month to month.
3. They were advised by a Senate which eventually included members of the plebeian (common) class, and these senators received no pay.
4. Service in the armed forces was considered a civic duty for all classes, but terms of service were short (one year) and large standing armies were frowned upon except in times of war.
5. Thanks to near-universal political-military service, both the aristocrat and the ordinary Roman had a stake in the outcome of all Rome's endeavors. A vote for war meant going to war yourself, or sending a loved one.
6. Italy, and in particular Rome, were almost completely demilitarized: Roman legions were forbidden to cross south the Rubicon River in northern Italy. Roman generals had to temporarily give up their commands when they entered the city (become "24 hour civilians"). No weapon larger than a dagger was permissible in Rome itself.
7. Political figures were judged by the manner in which they comported themselves not only publicly, but in private; moral strength was considered a prerequisite for holding office.
8. There existed a strong, relatively stable monetary system.
The Roman Republic lasted 482 years, finally dissolving in 27 B.C. The cause of its collapse was not external; quite the contrary. When Caesar's nephew Octavian was declared the first emperor of Rome (Augustus) that year, Rome's military power was greater than it had ever been, and its colonial holdings rimmed the entire Mediterranean and extended deeply into Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, ensuring that Roman influence on the world stage was also at a maximum. No, the death of the Republic was part of a long, slow erosion of the “novelties” enumerated above – a gradual slide from republicanism back into despotism, and a concomitant decline of the moral, social and cultural institutions which had made the Republic possible. There were many contributing factors to this descent, but foremost among them was the decision to embark on a series of spectacular foreign conquests which had to be maintained by powerful armies – which, in turn, had to be commanded by able, ruthless men whose ambitions could not always be contained by republican law and tradition. Simply put, the decision to operate a demilitarized, semi-democratic Republic at home while simultaneously maintaining a huge foreign empire held down by powerful armies, put an enormous strain on the fabric which held the Republic together. It was a form of schizophrenia, and it could not long endure. After Octavian became Augustus Caesar,
1. Executive, legal and religious power was vested almost entirely in the emperor himself. There was no settled means of succession, but most emperors tried to pass the crown to a relative, making rule more or less hereditary. (Needless to say, the emperor was not elected.) In short, Rome had rejected the concept of kings, only to replace them with even more powerful emperors.
2. The Senate became a figurehead whose members served primarily for reasons of social prestige and wealth-acquisition, or to position themselves as possible candidates for emperor.
3. Militarization increased (the term of service became 25 years, leading to large standing armies) but the percentage of Italians in the armed forces declined steadily until, by the fifth century A.D., only 5% of Rome's legionaries hailed from the Italian peninsula. The rest were foreign citizens of the Empire or mercenaries. In part because of this, the ordinary Roman no longer held a stake in the success or failure of Roman endeavors abroad. He gained little from the Empire's victories or defeats, because neither he nor his loved ones were involved.
5. The instability of succession often led to military revolts and civil wars that frequently saw would-be emperors "cross the Rubicon" to march on Rome.
5. Moral strength became increasingly irrelevant, with the emperors generally claiming divinity, and thus free to engage in sensational debaucheries and cruelties (witness Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Caracalla, etc.).
6. The monetary system became increasingly unstable.
The Roman Empire (as I've defined it here) lasted 503 years – slightly longer than the Republic – but despite its awesome power and influence, which extended from the British Isles to Africa, from Spain to Syria and beyond – it was constantly wracked with every manner of corruption, strife and tumult, and its declining period exceeded its heyday by a ratio of roughly three and a half years to one. It is not for us to say whether Rome's acquisition of a foreign empire led to the decline of its republican institutions, or whether the decline of those institutions is what spawned the empire; the end result was the same. Today, the word “Rome” is synonymous with architectural genius, cultural dominance and politico-military organization of the highest order; it is also synonymous with arrogance, cruelty and moral and sexual degeneracy. And it is interesting to note that of the latter traits, nearly all trace their roots to the imperial rather than the republican period. Rome produced fewer great philosophers and statesmen under the Empire than she did under the Republic, in large part because veneration of character, intellect and public spirit had been replaced a worship of power, money and pleasure for its own sake. Most importantly, when the Empire fell (in 476 A.D.), it was destroyed from the outside, by barbarian armies. History shows that a nation-state may transition more or less peacefully from a republic to an empire, but it cannot evolve from an empire into a successful third form. Either the empire is utterly destroyed, as Rome was, or it collapses back onto itself and slowly begins to reform a democratic-republican tradition. (This is a generalization, but largely an accurate one.)
By this point one is tempted to ask, “What has any of this to do with America?” The answer is frightfully simple. The history of Rome and the history of America follow surprisingly similar trajectories. Rome was a kingdom that threw off its king and embraced a Republican tradition at a time when no other nation was doing so; later, it abandoned that tradition in the name of empire, a decision which brought enormous short-term benefits and held horrific long-term consequences. And it is precisely this path upon which America is now treading.
The history of America, like that of Rome, can be divided, if crudely, into two distinct periods: the American Republic (1776 – 1898) and the American Empire (1898 – present). The former period answers the question, “What was America in the first place?” The latter, “What has America become?”
In 1775, the thirteen states which now extend from Maine to Florida were colonies of the British crown. But George III, laboring from beneath the weight of his insanity, proved to be too much of a despot for the ruling classes in those colonies to bear. By the following year, a full-fledged rebellion had begun; this rebellion, now known as the American Revolution, lasted until 1783, when the Crown recognized the independence of the former colonies, now loosely organized into a confederation called the United States of America. I say “loosely organized,” because until 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, the central government was so weak that it was unable to perform even basic functions. After 1789, America was no longer confederated but federated, meaning the flaccid “old” government now had a central nervous system to stiffen its spine. But not too strong of one; the Founding Fathers had learned the lessons King George had taught them, and were determined to set up a system predicated on the Republican traditions of the Greeks and Romans. The salient features of this newly-minted Republic were:
1. Political power was divided more or less equally between three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), with each acting as a check on the powers of the others.
2. The executive and all members of the legislature were elected and served clearly-defined terms.
3. The country was demilitarized, with only a tiny standing army, consisting entirely of volunteers; the citizens themselves, via their militias, provided the rest of the armed strength of the nation. (Large armies and sustained periods of war were viewed as threats to democracy.)
4. Foreign policy could be summed up in Thomas Jefferson's words, “Commerce with all, alliance with none.” George Washington's parting words to the American people warned against "foreign entanglements."
5. The course of foreign policy was set by civilian government. Diplomacy was left to diplomats, not soldiers.
6. The monetary system was based on the gold standard, which kept the purchasing power of money fairly stable and discouraged the government from spending money it did not have.
The American Republic lasted 122 years. Many different dates could be chosen as the exact moment of its finis, but the Spanish-American War is probably the best. What happened was simply this. For 400 years, European powers had been conquering huge sections of the planet for the purpose of exploiting their resources (both human and material), and obtaining strategically located seaports and military bases which could protect their trade routes. In 1898, America – a still-young nation bursting with vitality and strength, having conquered the last of the Indian tribes and pushed Mexican territory back to the Rio Grande -- entered a contentious public debate about whether it, too, should join the fraternity of nations with overseas empires. Looking close to home, she rapped figurative knuckles against the shell of the old Spanish Empire and found it rang hollow. American politicians and businessmen saw in “expansionism” the opportunity to strip Spain of the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and this they did. While Cuba was eventually “returned” to its own people, the U.S. retained title to the other lands, and swiftly garrisoned and fortified them, thus establishing the first real foreign bases in its history. These bases positioned the U.S. to become a “player” in Asian affairs and further strengthened its position the Caribbean. During the period 1899 – 1901, U.S. forces helped crush the Boxer Rebellion in China, siding with the oppressors over the oppressed for purely economic reasons. President Teddy Roosevelt, coming to office in '01, made a decision to vastly expand the United States Navy, which was in keeping with Roosevelt's belief that America must be able to strike militarily anywhere in the world. The nation also became more aggressively involved in international affairs (T.R.'s infamous “gunboat diplomacy” in Central and South America) and more friendly to the concept of central banking, which the Founding Fathers had warned would lead only to the destabilization of the currency and to war. In accordance with this policy, the gold standard was largely abandoned, giving rise to inflation which has never stopped: a dollar, today, is worth about 1/100th of what it was worth in 1913.
Finally, in 1917, and despite the explicit promises of Woodrow Wilson not to do so, America declared war on Germany. The ostensible provocation for this act was the German policy of sinking non-belligerent ships in the Atlantic, including American ones, as part of its attempt to blockade the British Isles. In reality, the true motive for America's entry into the contest came from the domestic arms industry, which saw an opportunity to make a fortune off the conflict, and from a clique of Teddy Roosevelt-style politicians and power-brokers who hungered for America to take a larger role on the world stage. Yet America's participation in the war so disillusioned the population of the country that we rapidly fell back into old-school isolationism once again; indeed, the period 1919 – 1941 was marked by repeated efforts to bring the U.S. back into balance with its original ideals of “trade with all, alliance with none.” Even the military, which had blown up to enormous proportions during the war, rapidly shrank into a shadow of its former power. This was a crucial time in the history of the newly-minted Empire, during which we might have returned to the essential principles of Republicanism – demilitarization, non-alliance, non-interference in the affairs of others, and a strong currency whose purchasing power would remain stable. It was not to be. The Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, meant that America had to once again plunge into the morass of world affairs; this time, however, there was no withdrawal. The outcome of WW2 had left only two world powers in existence: the United States and the Soviet Union, and America took it upon itself to counter the USSR's influence both economically, politically and militarily. To do this it had to massively expand its armed forces, and establish an extensive network of military bases all over the planet. Many would argue this was simple necessity; America had to prepare for the possibility of a third World War.
If that were the only motivation for such a huge military presence abroad, however, why was this presence not eliminated, or at least seriously reduced, when the Cold War ended?
While it is true that there was a smallish decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this decline lasted only a decade and has spiked to unprecedented proportions following the events of September 11, 2001. As of two years ago, America maintained no less than 684 military bases in 74 countries; but even this hardly tells the full tale of U.S. involvement overseas, because American troops are stationed in an additional 76 nations without “formal” bases to support them, bringing the total number of nations partially occupied by U.S. forces to 150. When one considers that there are only 195 nations on the planet Earth, the magnitude of our power and reach are finally brought home. Are we to believe that the containment of terrorism and a tiny handful of rogue states requires more military might than the did the massive and ultra-powerful Soviet Union? The very notion is absurd on its face. Yet every year military budgets go up. Every year more bases are opened in more foreign lands, more troops deployed, more carrier battle groups commissioned. Today's generals have more money and more technological terrors and spy capabilities than their Cold War antecedents ever dreamed of, yet no one feels safer, and indeed, they are not meant to. We live -- have lived, for sixteen years -- in a state of constant tension and anxiety, with one enemy giving way to another and another and another, in a succession as numbing as it is unending. But the identity of the enemy of the moment scarcely matters. The main thing is that there be an enemy, always. Otherwise how to explain this massive military expenditure, this unending attack on our civil liberties? In a democratic society, such things are only justifiable as a security measure. If a sense of security is achieved, the justification for empire and its attendant oppression disappears. Which brings us to the next question, "Who benefits?"
December 29, 2017
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.
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.
December 16, 2017
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)."
― 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)."
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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