Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 30
July 2, 2017
Gone Too Soon: 5 TV Shows That Shoulda Lasted Longer
A debuting television show is a lot like a turkey in November. It has a chance of getting a pardon, but the odds are pretty crappy. Every year, “pilot season” brings every studio in Hollywood to a frenzy of activity: for a time the airwaves are positively flooded with the brainchildren of what seem like hundreds of different writers and producers, all hoping they've produced the next ten-year mega hit.
Inevitably, however, the cold mathematics of the ratings game come into play, and many of these children are taken out to the shed and put to the axe, often before they've had time to toddle along for more than a few episodes. In some cases this is absolutely as it should be. Hollywood has churned out a lot, and I mean a lot, of shit over the years, some of it so horrendously bad you wonder how the fuck it got green-lighted in the first place. I know: a few years ago I worked on the pilot for a "Wonder Woman" TV series, and despite costing $12 million to produce, it couldn't even find a buyer and has never been aired, for the simple reason that it didn't deserve to see daylight. But along with all the unwanted orphans that can't find a network buyer, and the no-hopers whose cancellation amounted to mere mercy-killing, there are a number of shows whose demise was not only premature, but arguably tragic. They represent the great “what-ifs” and “might have beens” of television history.
Whenever I look at lists of shows considered to have been wrongly cancelled before they got a second season, I always see Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, and My So-Called Life in the top ten. Briscoe County, Jr. is usually somewhere in the rankings as well, along with the highly influential Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and a few others, some dating back decades, others as recent as a year or two ago. There seems to be a rough consensus among critics which shows fall into the “gone way too soon” category, and I am neither prepared nor equipped to dispute that consensus. I do, however, have a few picks of my own that I'd like to share with you. Please note that these are not series which were merely canceled or taken off the air before their time (a separate category); they are series which were canceled either during or after the conclusion of their inaugural season, which lends them a special pathos – and a place in my heart.
Kindred: The Embraced (1996). Produced by Aaron Spelling and E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans, Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful female reporter who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop played by C. Thomas Howell, who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend in the pilot. Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots of soapy melodrama. At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd wear for Halloween...when you were twelve. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show, for though it only lasted eight episodes, it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week (and indeed, those eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series). Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. (Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with “Charmed.”)
Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982). On this list you will see shows which died because of low ratings, unrealistic expectations, bad network decisions or insoluble budget problems. But “Tales of the Gold Monkey” may be one of the only series in TV history whose epitaph reads, “Died of A Pissing Contest.” In the early eighties, the runaway success of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” led executives at ABC to wonder how they could cash in on the craze for old-school, fedora-and-bullwhip-style adventure. Well, it so happened that veteran producer Donald P. Bellisario had just such a script on hand, and before you could say, “Indiana Jones,” “Tales of the Gold Monkey” was born. Set on the fictional South Seas island of Bora Gora in the 1930s, the show followed the adventures of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) who makes a meager and very dangerous living flying cargo in his twin-engined seaplane. Jake has a sidekick with a drinking problem, a would-be girlfriend who is actually an American spy, a priest who is actually a German spy, and a sexy nemesis who works for the Japanese. Also a one-eyed dog with whom he has a running disagreement. Though similar in tone and feel to the low-budget cliffhanger adventure movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s, “Monkey” is really more similar to its stablemate “Magnum, P.I.” in terms of structure – there is narration (provided by Jake), self-depreciating humor to leaven all the action, and a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the characters. Of course, even by the standards of the 1980s this show was cheesy in the extreme and many of the plots were preposterous (I remember, as a small boy, shouting with laughter at the sight of a samurai fighting a carnivorous monkey), but it had a kind of innocent charm that made it emotionally irresistible. Indeed, “Tales” was expected to be on the airwaves for years, but Bellisario clashed with studio brass over the content and direction of the series, and ultimately the executives decided to pull the plug after the first season rather than put up with him. This grieved me as a boy of ten, and it grieves me now. Cheesy and preposterous is just my game.
Alien Nation (1990). Turning successful movies into successful TV shows is problematic at best, and its no wonder that for every “M*A*S*H,” you get ten insta-cancels like “Gung Ho,” “Clueless,” and “My Big Fat Greek Family.” The odds of “Alien Nation” being any good were even longer, because the movie upon which it wasn't any damn good to begin with. The 1988 studio picture was a classic case of a wasted premise, to wit: a huge population of humanoid aliens, marooned on earth when their spaceship crashes in the Nevada desert, have been incorporated into American society as immigrants. These immigrants, originally bred to be slaves, are stronger and more adaptable than humans, but have all sort of weird eccentricities and emotional baggage and are often the brunt of xenophobia and racism from their human hosts. Unfortunately, instead of jumping into this amusing and fascinating world like a gleeful anthropologist, the film elected to settle for second-rate buddy-cop drama. You can therefore be forgiven for having less than zero expectations about the spinoff. And in fact the pilot episode was full of 80s-era silliness and shlock. (I found it particularly hard to get past the elongated, spotted heads of the aliens when they were delivering really dramatic dialogue.) Like “Kindred,” however, it got better as it went along. For starters, it made the main human character, an LADP detective played by Gary Graham, something of a bigot, and then forced him, as he becomes increasingly close to his “newcomer” partner, to confront his own bigotry. More broadly, however, the show tackled such very earth-like subjects as immigration, cultural assimilation, inter-racial relationships, and so forth, by using the aliens as metaphors for any minority group you care to name; and it did this without idealizing them. The newcomers are as flawed and fucked-up as humans, and therefore people we can relate to. This show was cancelled after its first season not because of ratings, but because Fox Network, then in its infancy, couldn't afford to produce a second – a cruel fate when one considers the season finale was a cliffhanger. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby a series of five two-hour TV movies (all with the original cast) continued and more or less resolved the story-lines, but I can't help but wish this cheesy but daring and likeable show had been allowed to live out its life in the manner originally intended: as a weekly episodic.
Blade: The Series (2006). Those of you who know me may be surprised by this choice, since I am hardly an unqualified fan of the “Blade” movie trilogy; but like the “Alien Nation” series, which dove head-first into the premise hinted at by its parent film, thus staying true to its roots while establishing its own identity, “Blade: The Series” was determined be its own bad self from the first frame of the pilot to the conclusion of its thirteenth and final episode. “BTS” is the story of Krista Starr, a tough-yet-sexy Iraq veteran hellbent on discovering who murdered her troubled brother Zach. Her investigation leads to a wealthy Detroit socialite named Marcus van Sciver, who just happens to also be absolute ruler of the local vampire clan. Trying to kill Sciver, she encounters Blade, a human-vampire hybrid who lives to exterminate everything with pointy teeth. The two enter into an uneasy, peril-fraught alliance to bring down Sciver, which becomes all the more perilous when the ubervamp takes a shine to Krista and “turns” her. Krista struggles to adjust to life as a bloodsucker and a double agent while simultaneously fighting unwanted romantic feelings for the charming Marcus. This series was dark, brutal and relentlessly violent, not to mention explicit almost to the point of gratuitousness with both its gore and its sex, and oftimes it was difficult to find a sympathetic character anywhere. Blade, who speaks in a growl and has three facial expressions (sneer, snarl, glare), is a borderline psychopath and not always easy to root for – he doesn't just kill vampires, he kills their human servants (“familiars”) and often does it with great deal of sadism – in one sequence, he impales a nude blonde familiar with the remark, “Be a good pet and stay,” and then proceeds to cut the eye out of a second familiar, quipping, “Don't worry, I only need one.” The truth is that Blade is more than a bit of a bully – somewhere to the right of Wolverine and only just short of The Punisher in terms of his obsessive, pitiless fanaticism. But moral flaws aside, this show was a beautiful aesthetic experience – costume and set design, lighting, cinematography, writing, and most of the acting were all executed at the level of a mid-budget feature film. Ending with a cliffhanger of sorts after thirteen episodes, a second season was regarded as a fait accompli, but the series was unexpectedly canceled, probably due more to production costs than its rather modest ratings. Too bad. The world of “Blade” was rich and complex and deserved more time and more exploration.
The Lone Gunmen (2001). The only true spinoff of “The X-Files” ("Millennium" probably doesn't count) lasted half a season and didn't leave much of a legacy, but if you follow this somewhat unlikely TV series from inception to conclusion you won't be sorry. “Gunmen” is the story of Frohike, Langley and Byers, three recurring characters on “The X-Files” whose passion for conspiracy theories and technological acumen make them useful to Mulder and Scully in their investigations of the paranormal. Well, “TLG” follows the antics of these plucky but irascible nerds as they chase down stories for their conspiracy-theorist weekly, The Lone Gunmen. It is similar to “X-Files” in its visual aesthetic and the quality of its overall production, and features a number of crossovers, including appearances by David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi, but the nature of the characters lends itself more to farce than drama. The Gunmen are dorky, quarrelsome, prone to bumbling, and nearly always broke – the shittiness of their “surveillance vehicle” (a broken-down old van) is a running gag. What's more, they've got an “intern” named Jimmy Bond who is a disaster-prone moron, and a sexy friend-cum-nemesis named Eve Harlow, who is continously tripping them up (when not providing reluctant help, that is). All in all this show was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for the actors who portrayed the Gunmen, while funny and likeable enough, lacked the force and charisma to really carry a series; or so it seemed until the cliffhanger ending, which left me hungering for more and wishing like hell the fucking thing hadn't been canceled after all. Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), the story was brought to a very decisive end post cancellation, by virtue of a reappearance of the five main characters on an episode of “The X-Files.” Sometimes you have to lose a series before you realize that you wish it had gotten a longer lease on life, and “The Lone Gunmen” was such a show. Not perfect, not even great, but containing the seeds of possible near-greatness within it. Perhaps it didn't deserve a second season, but it sure as hell deserved to finish its first one.
Battlestar Galactica (1979). If you weren't a kid in the late 70s, you simply have no idea how much anticipation and excitement “Battlestar Galactica” inspired before its debut. Back in those days we only had three networks, which meant that during prime time, you had precisely three choices on your dial at any given moment: ABC, NBC and CBS. Just three shows from which to choose your next hour of scripted entertainment. That's almost unimaginable now, but it was the hard reality of TV-land back then, and “Battlestar Galactica” had more buzz behind it on than any show I can recall before or since. CBS had sunk a fortune into this concept, which was intended to cash in on both the popularity of “Star Wars” and the legacy of “Star Trek,” while retaining the glamour then associated with the television mini-series. The idea behind “Galactica” was straightforward: following a treacherous sneak-attack, the human race is driven from its many colony worlds and reduced to passenger status on a single fugitive fleet of rickety spaceships protected by a lone military craft, the Battlestar Galactica. Pursued by the evil robotic Cylons as they flee across the universe looking for their mysterious planet of origin (the Earth!), the humans, led by Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) face all kind of perils from both within and without, essentially hopping from one disaster to another, and all the while juggling romantic relationships and family melodrama. “Galactica” was the very definition of lavish, with enormous sets, beautiful costumes, a gigantic cast, much location shooting and all sorts of special effects: even the credit sequence was opulent. Unfortunately, it suffered from poor continuity, bad writing, cheesy acting, surprisingly unimaginative plots (mostly transparent ripoffs of popular Hollywood movies); and the ratings, which had been very high at the start, began to decline as the season wore on. After its conclusion, the executives at CBS crunched some numbers and decided “Galactica” hadn't returned on their huge investment, so they pulled the plug. Their decision was unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, the quality of the series had improved dramatically down the home stretch: the last four or five episodes are really quite good, and proof of Dirk (Starbuck) Benedict's assertion that the first season of any show is simply a quest to “find its spine.” Second, the decision to cancel eventually led to the abysmal spinoff “Galactica 80,” which was a rather cynical attempt to bring back the show's audience to a low-budget spinoff using mostly different actors in a different setting. The attempt failed, “Galactia 80” was quickly canceled and even more quickly forgotten, and any hope of reviving the parent series proper faded away with it. Of course, many years later, the series got a “reboot” on the SyFy network to much critical acclaim, but I cannot watch the last few episodes of the “classic Galactica's” first season without lamenting the lack of existence of a second. I truly feel that the producers had “found the spine” and were moving on to bigger and better things. I only wish they'd had the chance to showcase them.
Of course there are many television series which avoided this list by managing to gasp out a second season, or part of one, before they got the chop, and still others which managed three, four or even five seasons yet still ended prematurely. I could fill pages with shows that, however long they ran, still exited the stage before I wanted them to. But there is and always will be a special pathos about promising TV shows which die in or after their freshman seasons. A lucky series shows us what can be done; the luckless only what might have been.
Inevitably, however, the cold mathematics of the ratings game come into play, and many of these children are taken out to the shed and put to the axe, often before they've had time to toddle along for more than a few episodes. In some cases this is absolutely as it should be. Hollywood has churned out a lot, and I mean a lot, of shit over the years, some of it so horrendously bad you wonder how the fuck it got green-lighted in the first place. I know: a few years ago I worked on the pilot for a "Wonder Woman" TV series, and despite costing $12 million to produce, it couldn't even find a buyer and has never been aired, for the simple reason that it didn't deserve to see daylight. But along with all the unwanted orphans that can't find a network buyer, and the no-hopers whose cancellation amounted to mere mercy-killing, there are a number of shows whose demise was not only premature, but arguably tragic. They represent the great “what-ifs” and “might have beens” of television history.
Whenever I look at lists of shows considered to have been wrongly cancelled before they got a second season, I always see Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, and My So-Called Life in the top ten. Briscoe County, Jr. is usually somewhere in the rankings as well, along with the highly influential Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and a few others, some dating back decades, others as recent as a year or two ago. There seems to be a rough consensus among critics which shows fall into the “gone way too soon” category, and I am neither prepared nor equipped to dispute that consensus. I do, however, have a few picks of my own that I'd like to share with you. Please note that these are not series which were merely canceled or taken off the air before their time (a separate category); they are series which were canceled either during or after the conclusion of their inaugural season, which lends them a special pathos – and a place in my heart.
Kindred: The Embraced (1996). Produced by Aaron Spelling and E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans, Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful female reporter who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop played by C. Thomas Howell, who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend in the pilot. Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots of soapy melodrama. At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd wear for Halloween...when you were twelve. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show, for though it only lasted eight episodes, it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week (and indeed, those eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series). Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. (Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with “Charmed.”)
Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982). On this list you will see shows which died because of low ratings, unrealistic expectations, bad network decisions or insoluble budget problems. But “Tales of the Gold Monkey” may be one of the only series in TV history whose epitaph reads, “Died of A Pissing Contest.” In the early eighties, the runaway success of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” led executives at ABC to wonder how they could cash in on the craze for old-school, fedora-and-bullwhip-style adventure. Well, it so happened that veteran producer Donald P. Bellisario had just such a script on hand, and before you could say, “Indiana Jones,” “Tales of the Gold Monkey” was born. Set on the fictional South Seas island of Bora Gora in the 1930s, the show followed the adventures of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) who makes a meager and very dangerous living flying cargo in his twin-engined seaplane. Jake has a sidekick with a drinking problem, a would-be girlfriend who is actually an American spy, a priest who is actually a German spy, and a sexy nemesis who works for the Japanese. Also a one-eyed dog with whom he has a running disagreement. Though similar in tone and feel to the low-budget cliffhanger adventure movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s, “Monkey” is really more similar to its stablemate “Magnum, P.I.” in terms of structure – there is narration (provided by Jake), self-depreciating humor to leaven all the action, and a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the characters. Of course, even by the standards of the 1980s this show was cheesy in the extreme and many of the plots were preposterous (I remember, as a small boy, shouting with laughter at the sight of a samurai fighting a carnivorous monkey), but it had a kind of innocent charm that made it emotionally irresistible. Indeed, “Tales” was expected to be on the airwaves for years, but Bellisario clashed with studio brass over the content and direction of the series, and ultimately the executives decided to pull the plug after the first season rather than put up with him. This grieved me as a boy of ten, and it grieves me now. Cheesy and preposterous is just my game.
Alien Nation (1990). Turning successful movies into successful TV shows is problematic at best, and its no wonder that for every “M*A*S*H,” you get ten insta-cancels like “Gung Ho,” “Clueless,” and “My Big Fat Greek Family.” The odds of “Alien Nation” being any good were even longer, because the movie upon which it wasn't any damn good to begin with. The 1988 studio picture was a classic case of a wasted premise, to wit: a huge population of humanoid aliens, marooned on earth when their spaceship crashes in the Nevada desert, have been incorporated into American society as immigrants. These immigrants, originally bred to be slaves, are stronger and more adaptable than humans, but have all sort of weird eccentricities and emotional baggage and are often the brunt of xenophobia and racism from their human hosts. Unfortunately, instead of jumping into this amusing and fascinating world like a gleeful anthropologist, the film elected to settle for second-rate buddy-cop drama. You can therefore be forgiven for having less than zero expectations about the spinoff. And in fact the pilot episode was full of 80s-era silliness and shlock. (I found it particularly hard to get past the elongated, spotted heads of the aliens when they were delivering really dramatic dialogue.) Like “Kindred,” however, it got better as it went along. For starters, it made the main human character, an LADP detective played by Gary Graham, something of a bigot, and then forced him, as he becomes increasingly close to his “newcomer” partner, to confront his own bigotry. More broadly, however, the show tackled such very earth-like subjects as immigration, cultural assimilation, inter-racial relationships, and so forth, by using the aliens as metaphors for any minority group you care to name; and it did this without idealizing them. The newcomers are as flawed and fucked-up as humans, and therefore people we can relate to. This show was cancelled after its first season not because of ratings, but because Fox Network, then in its infancy, couldn't afford to produce a second – a cruel fate when one considers the season finale was a cliffhanger. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby a series of five two-hour TV movies (all with the original cast) continued and more or less resolved the story-lines, but I can't help but wish this cheesy but daring and likeable show had been allowed to live out its life in the manner originally intended: as a weekly episodic.
Blade: The Series (2006). Those of you who know me may be surprised by this choice, since I am hardly an unqualified fan of the “Blade” movie trilogy; but like the “Alien Nation” series, which dove head-first into the premise hinted at by its parent film, thus staying true to its roots while establishing its own identity, “Blade: The Series” was determined be its own bad self from the first frame of the pilot to the conclusion of its thirteenth and final episode. “BTS” is the story of Krista Starr, a tough-yet-sexy Iraq veteran hellbent on discovering who murdered her troubled brother Zach. Her investigation leads to a wealthy Detroit socialite named Marcus van Sciver, who just happens to also be absolute ruler of the local vampire clan. Trying to kill Sciver, she encounters Blade, a human-vampire hybrid who lives to exterminate everything with pointy teeth. The two enter into an uneasy, peril-fraught alliance to bring down Sciver, which becomes all the more perilous when the ubervamp takes a shine to Krista and “turns” her. Krista struggles to adjust to life as a bloodsucker and a double agent while simultaneously fighting unwanted romantic feelings for the charming Marcus. This series was dark, brutal and relentlessly violent, not to mention explicit almost to the point of gratuitousness with both its gore and its sex, and oftimes it was difficult to find a sympathetic character anywhere. Blade, who speaks in a growl and has three facial expressions (sneer, snarl, glare), is a borderline psychopath and not always easy to root for – he doesn't just kill vampires, he kills their human servants (“familiars”) and often does it with great deal of sadism – in one sequence, he impales a nude blonde familiar with the remark, “Be a good pet and stay,” and then proceeds to cut the eye out of a second familiar, quipping, “Don't worry, I only need one.” The truth is that Blade is more than a bit of a bully – somewhere to the right of Wolverine and only just short of The Punisher in terms of his obsessive, pitiless fanaticism. But moral flaws aside, this show was a beautiful aesthetic experience – costume and set design, lighting, cinematography, writing, and most of the acting were all executed at the level of a mid-budget feature film. Ending with a cliffhanger of sorts after thirteen episodes, a second season was regarded as a fait accompli, but the series was unexpectedly canceled, probably due more to production costs than its rather modest ratings. Too bad. The world of “Blade” was rich and complex and deserved more time and more exploration.
The Lone Gunmen (2001). The only true spinoff of “The X-Files” ("Millennium" probably doesn't count) lasted half a season and didn't leave much of a legacy, but if you follow this somewhat unlikely TV series from inception to conclusion you won't be sorry. “Gunmen” is the story of Frohike, Langley and Byers, three recurring characters on “The X-Files” whose passion for conspiracy theories and technological acumen make them useful to Mulder and Scully in their investigations of the paranormal. Well, “TLG” follows the antics of these plucky but irascible nerds as they chase down stories for their conspiracy-theorist weekly, The Lone Gunmen. It is similar to “X-Files” in its visual aesthetic and the quality of its overall production, and features a number of crossovers, including appearances by David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi, but the nature of the characters lends itself more to farce than drama. The Gunmen are dorky, quarrelsome, prone to bumbling, and nearly always broke – the shittiness of their “surveillance vehicle” (a broken-down old van) is a running gag. What's more, they've got an “intern” named Jimmy Bond who is a disaster-prone moron, and a sexy friend-cum-nemesis named Eve Harlow, who is continously tripping them up (when not providing reluctant help, that is). All in all this show was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for the actors who portrayed the Gunmen, while funny and likeable enough, lacked the force and charisma to really carry a series; or so it seemed until the cliffhanger ending, which left me hungering for more and wishing like hell the fucking thing hadn't been canceled after all. Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), the story was brought to a very decisive end post cancellation, by virtue of a reappearance of the five main characters on an episode of “The X-Files.” Sometimes you have to lose a series before you realize that you wish it had gotten a longer lease on life, and “The Lone Gunmen” was such a show. Not perfect, not even great, but containing the seeds of possible near-greatness within it. Perhaps it didn't deserve a second season, but it sure as hell deserved to finish its first one.
Battlestar Galactica (1979). If you weren't a kid in the late 70s, you simply have no idea how much anticipation and excitement “Battlestar Galactica” inspired before its debut. Back in those days we only had three networks, which meant that during prime time, you had precisely three choices on your dial at any given moment: ABC, NBC and CBS. Just three shows from which to choose your next hour of scripted entertainment. That's almost unimaginable now, but it was the hard reality of TV-land back then, and “Battlestar Galactica” had more buzz behind it on than any show I can recall before or since. CBS had sunk a fortune into this concept, which was intended to cash in on both the popularity of “Star Wars” and the legacy of “Star Trek,” while retaining the glamour then associated with the television mini-series. The idea behind “Galactica” was straightforward: following a treacherous sneak-attack, the human race is driven from its many colony worlds and reduced to passenger status on a single fugitive fleet of rickety spaceships protected by a lone military craft, the Battlestar Galactica. Pursued by the evil robotic Cylons as they flee across the universe looking for their mysterious planet of origin (the Earth!), the humans, led by Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) face all kind of perils from both within and without, essentially hopping from one disaster to another, and all the while juggling romantic relationships and family melodrama. “Galactica” was the very definition of lavish, with enormous sets, beautiful costumes, a gigantic cast, much location shooting and all sorts of special effects: even the credit sequence was opulent. Unfortunately, it suffered from poor continuity, bad writing, cheesy acting, surprisingly unimaginative plots (mostly transparent ripoffs of popular Hollywood movies); and the ratings, which had been very high at the start, began to decline as the season wore on. After its conclusion, the executives at CBS crunched some numbers and decided “Galactica” hadn't returned on their huge investment, so they pulled the plug. Their decision was unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, the quality of the series had improved dramatically down the home stretch: the last four or five episodes are really quite good, and proof of Dirk (Starbuck) Benedict's assertion that the first season of any show is simply a quest to “find its spine.” Second, the decision to cancel eventually led to the abysmal spinoff “Galactica 80,” which was a rather cynical attempt to bring back the show's audience to a low-budget spinoff using mostly different actors in a different setting. The attempt failed, “Galactia 80” was quickly canceled and even more quickly forgotten, and any hope of reviving the parent series proper faded away with it. Of course, many years later, the series got a “reboot” on the SyFy network to much critical acclaim, but I cannot watch the last few episodes of the “classic Galactica's” first season without lamenting the lack of existence of a second. I truly feel that the producers had “found the spine” and were moving on to bigger and better things. I only wish they'd had the chance to showcase them.
Of course there are many television series which avoided this list by managing to gasp out a second season, or part of one, before they got the chop, and still others which managed three, four or even five seasons yet still ended prematurely. I could fill pages with shows that, however long they ran, still exited the stage before I wanted them to. But there is and always will be a special pathos about promising TV shows which die in or after their freshman seasons. A lucky series shows us what can be done; the luckless only what might have been.
June 26, 2017
All or Nothing
Only a Sith speaks in absolutes.
---Obi-Wan Kenobi
One of the many problems we face today as a nation is the impossibility of taking a stand on anything without immediately being tagged with a particular political allegiance. The environment, abortion, illegal immigration,health care, gay rights, gun control – it scarcely matters. Say you are in favor of this or against that; that you believe in this or are skeptical of that; that you support this, or oppose that; and you will automatically be branded as belonging to either the “liberal” or the “conservative” camps. This applies just as strongly to political figures and TV pundits themselves. Criticize a Republican and you must be a Democrat; criticize a Democrat and you must be a Republican. Express dislike for Israel's foreign or domestic policies and you are an anti-Semite; attack those of Saudi Arabia and you are an Islamophobe. There is no wiggle room, no in-between, no gray area. Anyone, anywhere, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sex, or creed can be reduced to a one-word identity and defined down to his or her smallest particulars simply by voicing an opinion on a single issue or person.
Setting aside the terrible mental inflexibility of such a reflex – and it really is a reflex, for it is an automatic response not subject to any conscious thought – the process of judging people in their entirety based on a lone viewpoint on a lone issue is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in our political life, which is the refusal to think. It seems to me that the vast majority of Americans have lost the ability to come to a position on anything without being told what to think beforehand by “trusted sources.” But which sources one trusts is mirrored by their own political prejudices: no one, or very few people at any rate, seems to believe in the concept of objective truth any longer, the idea that a fact is a fact no matter how you spin it, and is immune from disbelief. After all, we do live, physically, in an objective world: disbelieving in the rain will not keep you dry. Why should this simple rule of life fail to apply to the political world?
Two phrases which have spring up within the last year – “alternative facts” and “fake news” – both reflect the present relationship Americans have with reality. The first term is terrifyingly Orwellian because it presents facts as having no more validity than opinions. It is also eerily reminiscent of the Nazi idea that there was no such thing as science per se, only science specific to racial types. It is also similar to the Communistic idea that literature and even art were only valid if they had been produced by Communists or those sympathetic to them. In each case the validity of the concept at hand, science or art, was judged based on ideology alone. If this sort of thinking doesn't frighten you, consider the ramifications of a choose-your-own-reality scenario. Consider that all of human civilization, going back 6,000 years is essentially an acculumlation of knowledge, which is to say, a vast piling-up of theories and facts over time. Obviously some of that knowledge was lost or suppressed, but each successive generation since the end of the Dark Ages has added to the total body of knowledge in every field; together they form links in a chain, or steps in a staircase, or rungs on a ladder – however you want to visualize it. The present link, step or rung upon which our society rests exists only because of the innumerable others which precede it. And for every one of these which is sturdy enough to stand the test of time, there are dozens if not hundreds which were ultimately shattered by the crucible-like process of scientific examination. For example, the Roman Church used to maintain that the speed at which an object fell was determined by its weight. This belief persisted for hundreds of years, until Galielo dropped a marble and a lead ball off the Tower of Piza to demonstrate that both objects fell at the same speed. He was very nearly burned at the stake for doing this, but eventually the simplicity of the method he used became inarguable. Anyone could pick up two objects of different weight and see for himself that Galileo's claims were true when he or she let go of them. And today nobody – no sane person – would argue otherwise, because a fact has more weight than an opinion, or for that matter, a theory. A proveable fact is an objective thing. Like the afformentioned rain, it exists whether you believe in it or not.
“Fake news” has a more legitimate origin than alternative fact. Everyone has always known that the press often gets its facts mixed up – the novelist Lawrence Sanders once quipped that the worst insult an American could throw at another was, “You believe what you read in the papers?” As I have explained before in this blog, the accuracy of information bears an inverse proportion to the speed at which it is disseminated, and newspapers disseminated information with very great speed – until the last few decades it was common for the bigger papers to have both a morning and an evening edition, which requires a lot of fast writing. On top of this, the steady decline of journalism over the last 30-odd years, inspired by and coupled with the rise of the internet (a much faster way of getting information, and thereby a much faster way of getting the wrong information), as well as the increasing domination of corporations over the news media, has led to a profusion of stories which were deliberately exaggerated, twisted, under-reported, over-reported, or otherwise changed by the media outlets who reported them. The distrust people have of the news is, I'm afraid, somewhat justified. Nevertheless, actual fake news – meaning news which is simply lies, as opposed to stories which are not entirely accurate, or which have been slanted politically in some way – is only as influential as it is today because Americans have largely lost the power of critical thinking. They are not able, or or not willing, to discriminate between, say, The National Equirer and The New York Times in terms of veracity. What's more, as with “alternative facts,” they are no longer willing to accept that any news article could be accurate if it disagrees with their opinion. As before, the power of opinion – of belief – is elevated over the power of the objective fact, or at least the legitimate process by which objective facts are discovered.
Carl Sagan once said, in some exasperation, that people should stop asking whether he “believed” in UFO's or astrology or ghosts, and ask instead if there was scientific proof that lent itself to a conclusion on any of these things. He was trying to point out the absurdity of asking a scientist whether he or she “believed,” when the whole process of scientific thought was designed to make the idea of “belief” unnecessary. In science, first you theorize, and then, using the empirical method, you try to prove or you disprove. You then report your findings and submit them to other scientists for scrutiny, knowing they will test your hypothesis and repeat your methods to see if they can obtain the same results. It's not a question of "belief," it's a question of fact.
At the same time, and somewhat ironically, it has long been scientifically established that facts are no match for belief. Most people accept science only insomuch as it fails to contradict their opinions. No one today would argue anymore that man cannot fly, but many otherwise intelligent people argue, with no scientific basis and in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that vaccines do more harm to society than good. Others maintain that the age of the earth is 3,000 years and not a day more, because this is what it says in the Bible or some other religious text. They reject radiocarbon dating and every other means which which the age of the Earth has been roughly established, yet accept immediately any scientific theory or law which does not conflict with their faith. They pick and choose what they believe, rather as if they were at a sort of buffet table, with no sense of hypocrisy or contradiction. In both cases, the mind has taken the easier course. It has abandoned the ability to come to its own conclusions and lets religious faith, or racial-ethnic bigotry, or political beliefs, short-circuit the thinking process.
When one looks at the political situation in America today, we can see that thinking is at a minimum, but the speed which people arrive at sweeping conclusions is at a maximum. If I express disgust for Donald Trump as a human being, I must be a Democrat or a “liberal.” If I express more or less equal disgust for Hilary Clinton, I must be a Republican or a “conservative.” If I take a single viewpoint contrary to the general trend of political thought in a party, then I am 100% in the camp of the opposing party. In no instance am I allowed am I allowed any deviation at all. The slightest disagreement, even on a minor issue, amounts to total apostasy, total rejection. It is noteworthy that both the Communists and, to a lesser extent, the Nazis, embraced this sort of absolutist thinking completely. Communists were permitted to repeat the exact party line; any disagreement, even on minor points, and one was branded a “right-wing deviationist” and shot. The Nazis, whose ideology was more nebulous, also shot a few of their deviationists, though generally they merely threatened or disgraced them – stints in concentration camps were quite effective for ironing out differences of dogma. At the moment, in America, neither of the major parties nor the government itself possesses the ability to shoot us for disagreeing with them, but I am by no means assured they would not do so if the power was theirs. The Founding Fathers understood better than any humans before – or, sadly, since – the temptation of libido dominandi, a concept identified by the dictionary as “the will to power; the desire to dominate; the lust for government.” They knew that a certain breed of man will always attempt to force its opinions and belief-systems onto others, with violence if necessary; and to organize them for his own selfish ends. The entire Constitution was written to restrain the power of government over the individual – in other words, to protect us from our own government. Unfortunately, it was beyond the power of the Founders to protect us from ourselves. They did not anticipate a generation of Americans who were unwilling to think, but perfectly willing to take action anyway.
In my Facebook feed, I am often confronted by videos in which an interviewer asks people of a certain political persuasion if they agree with certain statements made by a political figure of the same persuasion. A typical question would be, “Hilary Clinton says such and such about the national debt – do you think she's right?” Invariably the interviewee, in this case a Democrat, gushes with enthusiastic approval, and just as invariably, it is revealed at the end of the interview that the actual quotation came from Donald Trump, or George W. Bush, or some other right-wing figure. These sort of tricks are also played on Republicans with equal success, but the political loyalties of those questioned is not important. What is important is the fact that in each case, the response was conditioned not by what was said but by who they believed said it. It is noteworthy that these videos are always exhibited for the purposes of making the ordinary Democrat or Republican look stupid; but their effect on me is not amusement but horror. One of the slogans of the Nazi Party was, “The Führer is always right.” In America today, anyone on your side is always right, and everyone on anyone else's side is always wrong. The actual opinions they hold are irrelevant. Party loyalty has become tribal. But if this is true, it also begs a question: if Americans are so ignorant of their own political ideology as to be unable to recognize its exact opposite, why are they so fanatically loyal to it? If a person can't tell you why he's a Democrat, or a Republican (or a Democratic Socialist or a Green or a Libertarian), why do they cling so tightly to that identity?
It is my personal belief that political affiliations have become entirely emotional in origin. In the vast majority of cases, one does not coldly and soberly judge the various parties on their merits and then, on the basis of that analysis, make a rational decision to join one or the other. No, one comes to political identity in the same way one generally comes to religion or love; through subjective feelings which have nothing whatsoever to do with logic. Exactly why the emotions of one person are triggered by the slogans and symbols of the “right” and others by the slogans and symbols of the “left” remains a mystery, but the key point is that that the triggers exist. Humans began as aggressive, ritualistic, territorial animals with a strong hostility to strangers; as civilization emerged they maintained all these characteristics while transferring their tribal loyalties to the nation-state; and for whatever reason, they have now transferred that loyalty to the political parties which exist within those states. But loyalty, like love, is an feeling, and as I've stated above, subjective feelings – beliefs – are far more powerful than facts or logic. Only this can explain why people who can't even summarize their own party platform would simultaneously insist that it is superior to that of the opposing party, and then resist all arguments to the contrary, no matter how well-reasoned. Indeed, the very fact that it is possible to systematically demolish someone's arguments for being a Democrat or a Republican (or what have you), without in any way effecting their devotion to that body, is absolute proof of this.
If you doubt me here, I ask you to perform the following experiment: try, on the same day, to convince a friend that that computer X is a better bargain than computer Y; and also, that he should not love his abusive, irresponsible, alcoholic mother. In the first case, he is likely to respond positively to a purely intellectual argument, because there are no emotions – no loyalties – at stake. But when it comes to his mother, reason goes out the window, and only loyalty remains. Muster 1,000 perfectly valid reasons why he should not love his mom, and his subjective feelings toward her will not change one iota. What's more, he will probably hate you for trying to change them. In one case, truth has power, and in the other, it is utterly powerless.
It seems to me that primitive instincts served mankind well for much of his formative development. The ability to make snap judgements based on sudden emotional stimulus was key to survival on the ancient savanna – run or fight, kill or show mercy, listen or pick up the club. Hostility to strangers was a survival mechanism, as was territoriality and periodic aggression. Ritual helped create traditions which cemented bonds within the tribe, and submission to a strong leader eliminated argument and reduced discord, allowing a group of thirty to move as one. Back then, too much thinking could get you killed. But in this age, when the turn of two keys can release enough nuclear missiles into the air to turn the planet into a lifeless, radioactive cinder hanging in space, we can no longer afford knee-jerk responses to threatening stimuli. The balance we've established over this earth is too delicate, too fragile to sustain for much longer a population which has the power to kill but refuses to engage the power to think. The absolutism of our ancestors has no place in the nuclear era. It is not too much but too little thinking which will doom us.
George Orwell spent most of his literary career worrying about the decline of objective truth, the increasing unwillingness of human beings to think for themselves. He foresaw that this unwillingness would sooner or later lead to an actual inability; that the brain, like the muscles, must be exercised using critical thinking or else it will fall into the flabby and detestable habit of not thinking at all, but simply reacting, reflexively, to emotional stimulus. I'm sorry to see we have already arrived at this point, or at least to its outermost edge. Whether we draw back into sanity or proceed into the abyss which has consumed other great societies depends entirely on whether we continue to let ourselves be ruled by our passions, or governed by our thoughts.
---Obi-Wan Kenobi
One of the many problems we face today as a nation is the impossibility of taking a stand on anything without immediately being tagged with a particular political allegiance. The environment, abortion, illegal immigration,health care, gay rights, gun control – it scarcely matters. Say you are in favor of this or against that; that you believe in this or are skeptical of that; that you support this, or oppose that; and you will automatically be branded as belonging to either the “liberal” or the “conservative” camps. This applies just as strongly to political figures and TV pundits themselves. Criticize a Republican and you must be a Democrat; criticize a Democrat and you must be a Republican. Express dislike for Israel's foreign or domestic policies and you are an anti-Semite; attack those of Saudi Arabia and you are an Islamophobe. There is no wiggle room, no in-between, no gray area. Anyone, anywhere, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sex, or creed can be reduced to a one-word identity and defined down to his or her smallest particulars simply by voicing an opinion on a single issue or person.
Setting aside the terrible mental inflexibility of such a reflex – and it really is a reflex, for it is an automatic response not subject to any conscious thought – the process of judging people in their entirety based on a lone viewpoint on a lone issue is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in our political life, which is the refusal to think. It seems to me that the vast majority of Americans have lost the ability to come to a position on anything without being told what to think beforehand by “trusted sources.” But which sources one trusts is mirrored by their own political prejudices: no one, or very few people at any rate, seems to believe in the concept of objective truth any longer, the idea that a fact is a fact no matter how you spin it, and is immune from disbelief. After all, we do live, physically, in an objective world: disbelieving in the rain will not keep you dry. Why should this simple rule of life fail to apply to the political world?
Two phrases which have spring up within the last year – “alternative facts” and “fake news” – both reflect the present relationship Americans have with reality. The first term is terrifyingly Orwellian because it presents facts as having no more validity than opinions. It is also eerily reminiscent of the Nazi idea that there was no such thing as science per se, only science specific to racial types. It is also similar to the Communistic idea that literature and even art were only valid if they had been produced by Communists or those sympathetic to them. In each case the validity of the concept at hand, science or art, was judged based on ideology alone. If this sort of thinking doesn't frighten you, consider the ramifications of a choose-your-own-reality scenario. Consider that all of human civilization, going back 6,000 years is essentially an acculumlation of knowledge, which is to say, a vast piling-up of theories and facts over time. Obviously some of that knowledge was lost or suppressed, but each successive generation since the end of the Dark Ages has added to the total body of knowledge in every field; together they form links in a chain, or steps in a staircase, or rungs on a ladder – however you want to visualize it. The present link, step or rung upon which our society rests exists only because of the innumerable others which precede it. And for every one of these which is sturdy enough to stand the test of time, there are dozens if not hundreds which were ultimately shattered by the crucible-like process of scientific examination. For example, the Roman Church used to maintain that the speed at which an object fell was determined by its weight. This belief persisted for hundreds of years, until Galielo dropped a marble and a lead ball off the Tower of Piza to demonstrate that both objects fell at the same speed. He was very nearly burned at the stake for doing this, but eventually the simplicity of the method he used became inarguable. Anyone could pick up two objects of different weight and see for himself that Galileo's claims were true when he or she let go of them. And today nobody – no sane person – would argue otherwise, because a fact has more weight than an opinion, or for that matter, a theory. A proveable fact is an objective thing. Like the afformentioned rain, it exists whether you believe in it or not.
“Fake news” has a more legitimate origin than alternative fact. Everyone has always known that the press often gets its facts mixed up – the novelist Lawrence Sanders once quipped that the worst insult an American could throw at another was, “You believe what you read in the papers?” As I have explained before in this blog, the accuracy of information bears an inverse proportion to the speed at which it is disseminated, and newspapers disseminated information with very great speed – until the last few decades it was common for the bigger papers to have both a morning and an evening edition, which requires a lot of fast writing. On top of this, the steady decline of journalism over the last 30-odd years, inspired by and coupled with the rise of the internet (a much faster way of getting information, and thereby a much faster way of getting the wrong information), as well as the increasing domination of corporations over the news media, has led to a profusion of stories which were deliberately exaggerated, twisted, under-reported, over-reported, or otherwise changed by the media outlets who reported them. The distrust people have of the news is, I'm afraid, somewhat justified. Nevertheless, actual fake news – meaning news which is simply lies, as opposed to stories which are not entirely accurate, or which have been slanted politically in some way – is only as influential as it is today because Americans have largely lost the power of critical thinking. They are not able, or or not willing, to discriminate between, say, The National Equirer and The New York Times in terms of veracity. What's more, as with “alternative facts,” they are no longer willing to accept that any news article could be accurate if it disagrees with their opinion. As before, the power of opinion – of belief – is elevated over the power of the objective fact, or at least the legitimate process by which objective facts are discovered.
Carl Sagan once said, in some exasperation, that people should stop asking whether he “believed” in UFO's or astrology or ghosts, and ask instead if there was scientific proof that lent itself to a conclusion on any of these things. He was trying to point out the absurdity of asking a scientist whether he or she “believed,” when the whole process of scientific thought was designed to make the idea of “belief” unnecessary. In science, first you theorize, and then, using the empirical method, you try to prove or you disprove. You then report your findings and submit them to other scientists for scrutiny, knowing they will test your hypothesis and repeat your methods to see if they can obtain the same results. It's not a question of "belief," it's a question of fact.
At the same time, and somewhat ironically, it has long been scientifically established that facts are no match for belief. Most people accept science only insomuch as it fails to contradict their opinions. No one today would argue anymore that man cannot fly, but many otherwise intelligent people argue, with no scientific basis and in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that vaccines do more harm to society than good. Others maintain that the age of the earth is 3,000 years and not a day more, because this is what it says in the Bible or some other religious text. They reject radiocarbon dating and every other means which which the age of the Earth has been roughly established, yet accept immediately any scientific theory or law which does not conflict with their faith. They pick and choose what they believe, rather as if they were at a sort of buffet table, with no sense of hypocrisy or contradiction. In both cases, the mind has taken the easier course. It has abandoned the ability to come to its own conclusions and lets religious faith, or racial-ethnic bigotry, or political beliefs, short-circuit the thinking process.
When one looks at the political situation in America today, we can see that thinking is at a minimum, but the speed which people arrive at sweeping conclusions is at a maximum. If I express disgust for Donald Trump as a human being, I must be a Democrat or a “liberal.” If I express more or less equal disgust for Hilary Clinton, I must be a Republican or a “conservative.” If I take a single viewpoint contrary to the general trend of political thought in a party, then I am 100% in the camp of the opposing party. In no instance am I allowed am I allowed any deviation at all. The slightest disagreement, even on a minor issue, amounts to total apostasy, total rejection. It is noteworthy that both the Communists and, to a lesser extent, the Nazis, embraced this sort of absolutist thinking completely. Communists were permitted to repeat the exact party line; any disagreement, even on minor points, and one was branded a “right-wing deviationist” and shot. The Nazis, whose ideology was more nebulous, also shot a few of their deviationists, though generally they merely threatened or disgraced them – stints in concentration camps were quite effective for ironing out differences of dogma. At the moment, in America, neither of the major parties nor the government itself possesses the ability to shoot us for disagreeing with them, but I am by no means assured they would not do so if the power was theirs. The Founding Fathers understood better than any humans before – or, sadly, since – the temptation of libido dominandi, a concept identified by the dictionary as “the will to power; the desire to dominate; the lust for government.” They knew that a certain breed of man will always attempt to force its opinions and belief-systems onto others, with violence if necessary; and to organize them for his own selfish ends. The entire Constitution was written to restrain the power of government over the individual – in other words, to protect us from our own government. Unfortunately, it was beyond the power of the Founders to protect us from ourselves. They did not anticipate a generation of Americans who were unwilling to think, but perfectly willing to take action anyway.
In my Facebook feed, I am often confronted by videos in which an interviewer asks people of a certain political persuasion if they agree with certain statements made by a political figure of the same persuasion. A typical question would be, “Hilary Clinton says such and such about the national debt – do you think she's right?” Invariably the interviewee, in this case a Democrat, gushes with enthusiastic approval, and just as invariably, it is revealed at the end of the interview that the actual quotation came from Donald Trump, or George W. Bush, or some other right-wing figure. These sort of tricks are also played on Republicans with equal success, but the political loyalties of those questioned is not important. What is important is the fact that in each case, the response was conditioned not by what was said but by who they believed said it. It is noteworthy that these videos are always exhibited for the purposes of making the ordinary Democrat or Republican look stupid; but their effect on me is not amusement but horror. One of the slogans of the Nazi Party was, “The Führer is always right.” In America today, anyone on your side is always right, and everyone on anyone else's side is always wrong. The actual opinions they hold are irrelevant. Party loyalty has become tribal. But if this is true, it also begs a question: if Americans are so ignorant of their own political ideology as to be unable to recognize its exact opposite, why are they so fanatically loyal to it? If a person can't tell you why he's a Democrat, or a Republican (or a Democratic Socialist or a Green or a Libertarian), why do they cling so tightly to that identity?
It is my personal belief that political affiliations have become entirely emotional in origin. In the vast majority of cases, one does not coldly and soberly judge the various parties on their merits and then, on the basis of that analysis, make a rational decision to join one or the other. No, one comes to political identity in the same way one generally comes to religion or love; through subjective feelings which have nothing whatsoever to do with logic. Exactly why the emotions of one person are triggered by the slogans and symbols of the “right” and others by the slogans and symbols of the “left” remains a mystery, but the key point is that that the triggers exist. Humans began as aggressive, ritualistic, territorial animals with a strong hostility to strangers; as civilization emerged they maintained all these characteristics while transferring their tribal loyalties to the nation-state; and for whatever reason, they have now transferred that loyalty to the political parties which exist within those states. But loyalty, like love, is an feeling, and as I've stated above, subjective feelings – beliefs – are far more powerful than facts or logic. Only this can explain why people who can't even summarize their own party platform would simultaneously insist that it is superior to that of the opposing party, and then resist all arguments to the contrary, no matter how well-reasoned. Indeed, the very fact that it is possible to systematically demolish someone's arguments for being a Democrat or a Republican (or what have you), without in any way effecting their devotion to that body, is absolute proof of this.
If you doubt me here, I ask you to perform the following experiment: try, on the same day, to convince a friend that that computer X is a better bargain than computer Y; and also, that he should not love his abusive, irresponsible, alcoholic mother. In the first case, he is likely to respond positively to a purely intellectual argument, because there are no emotions – no loyalties – at stake. But when it comes to his mother, reason goes out the window, and only loyalty remains. Muster 1,000 perfectly valid reasons why he should not love his mom, and his subjective feelings toward her will not change one iota. What's more, he will probably hate you for trying to change them. In one case, truth has power, and in the other, it is utterly powerless.
It seems to me that primitive instincts served mankind well for much of his formative development. The ability to make snap judgements based on sudden emotional stimulus was key to survival on the ancient savanna – run or fight, kill or show mercy, listen or pick up the club. Hostility to strangers was a survival mechanism, as was territoriality and periodic aggression. Ritual helped create traditions which cemented bonds within the tribe, and submission to a strong leader eliminated argument and reduced discord, allowing a group of thirty to move as one. Back then, too much thinking could get you killed. But in this age, when the turn of two keys can release enough nuclear missiles into the air to turn the planet into a lifeless, radioactive cinder hanging in space, we can no longer afford knee-jerk responses to threatening stimuli. The balance we've established over this earth is too delicate, too fragile to sustain for much longer a population which has the power to kill but refuses to engage the power to think. The absolutism of our ancestors has no place in the nuclear era. It is not too much but too little thinking which will doom us.
George Orwell spent most of his literary career worrying about the decline of objective truth, the increasing unwillingness of human beings to think for themselves. He foresaw that this unwillingness would sooner or later lead to an actual inability; that the brain, like the muscles, must be exercised using critical thinking or else it will fall into the flabby and detestable habit of not thinking at all, but simply reacting, reflexively, to emotional stimulus. I'm sorry to see we have already arrived at this point, or at least to its outermost edge. Whether we draw back into sanity or proceed into the abyss which has consumed other great societies depends entirely on whether we continue to let ourselves be ruled by our passions, or governed by our thoughts.
June 14, 2017
The Other D-Day
For a warlike people, Americans are woefully ignorant of their own military history. Indeed, if pressed, the ordinary American could probably not name five major battles this country has engaged in since 1776. But there are a few which manage to shine through the fog of inexplicable disinterest we possess about our wars, and of this select number, one shines brighter than all the rest. That battle is known colloquially as D-Day.
In military parlance, "D-Day" simply means the day a particular operation is scheduled to commence. There was a D-Day for every amphibious invasion and offensive conducted by the U.S. military in WW2 -- and God knows there were plenty of those, scattered across nearly the whole surface of the planet. In the minds of our people, however, D-Day means only one operation, one attack -- that carried out on June 6, 1944 upon the beaches of Normandy.
On that day, eight Allied divisions and supporting commando forces landed by sea or by air in France, which had been under German occupation since the summer of 1940. These divisions, whose total numerical strength was 150,000 -- though the combat elements made up only a smallish percentage of that -- were transported by the mightiest naval armada ever assembled, some 3,427 ships of every conceivable type, from battleships to tugs, and supported by the most powerful air force ever to take flight -- 3,100 bombers and 5,000 fighters. Of course, the eight divisions which hit the beaches were only the tip of the spear; the Allies had a staggering 78 more divisions in England, with more than 50,000 vehicles, all waiting to cross into France when and if the beaches were taken.
Opposing them on those beaches were some six or seven German divisions (50,000 troops) scattered along the coast in defensive fortifications, and supported -- in theory -- by about 225 aircraft (the German air force in France, not strong to begin with, had been almost completely destroyed in the weeks leading up to D-Day via relentless attacks on German airfields). These 50,000 were not alone, of course; the total German strength in France was actually 59 divisions (about 850,000 men), but these had to cover the entire nation of France, including the Franco-Spanish border and the Mediterranean coast, and many were of low quality, under-strength, and lacking in motor transport. Hitler had long viewed France as a sort of gigantic "rest and training area" for his army; now his "rest and training army" had to fight what the Western Allies viewed as "the decisive battle of the war."
The outcome of D-Day is, of course, well known. Despite suffering 10,000 casualties in the first 24 hours, the Allies were able to establish a beach-head in France, and from that point, were able to begin packing it with men, guns, tanks, and supplies on a breath-taking scale -- two million men and two million tons of supplies were brought over in the first sixty days of the campaign alone. And though they were unable to break out of Normandy until early August, the Allies' success on D-Day made the outcome of the Western campaign a foregone conclusion: the Germans simply could not supply enough men, guns and tanks to crush the beach-heads or even contain them indefinitely. When the dam finally burst, the flood of Allied military power swept all the way to Germany, whose Western border was breached for the first time in September.
Thus D-Day. So long as America exists, and perhaps even afterward, it is a day which will live in human memory. And rightly so, for it was thelogistical military feat of human history, a monstrously large operation involving literally millions of people and uncountable amounts of equipment which was as finely calibrated as a Swiss watch. Yet great as it is, it remains only half of one of the greatest stories ever told -- and, in the minds and arguments of some, the lesser half. There was another D-Day, another "decisive battle of the war," and to this day, Americans remain almost entirely ignorant of its existence. And since we are just days before its 73rd anniversary, now seems an opportune moment to discuss it.
Above I stated that Germany failed in the Normandy campaign because its army in France was too small for the task it was supposed to achieve; also because once the landings had succeeded, Hitler was unable to counter the Allied build-up with one of his own -- unable, so to speak, to wall off the Allied armies in Normandy like the unfortunate victim in "The Cask of Amontillado." Yet when one looks at the fighting strength of the German army in June of 1944, one sees it musters 287 divisions of all types. Thus less than quarter of Hitler's strength was in France when the first Allied paratrooper jumped into Normandy in the early morning of June 6. This begs a question: if the landings, which everyone knew were coming, were to be "the decisive battle of the war," why didn't Hitler put more military muscle in France to meet them?
The reason for this is quite simple. The vast majority of Hitler's army was in Russia, and had been since June 22, 1941, when he threw three-quarters of it -- some 3.5 million men, along with the majority of his air force, artillery and tank fleet -- into the task of annihilating the Soviet Union. Hitler had hoped to smash the Red colossus in one quick, savage campaign, and thus free his eastern borders from the perpetual threat posed by Stalin -- the one man in Europe arguably greedier and more ruthless than Hitler himself. But the attack ultimately bogged down deep in the Russian hinterland, casualties mounted, and the Red Army slowly and inexorably began to push the Germans backward. To paraphrase a Ukrainian historian, Hitler was like a python who had bitten deep into his prey, only to discover that he could neither swallow the victim whole nor withdraw his fangs.
By the summer of 1944, the German army in the U.S.S.R. was badly battered and covering far more territory than it could comfortably hold; it was also outnumbered and outgunned on both the ground and in the air. Nevertheless, it remained a dangerous and cohesive fighting force comprising 150 German divisions (2.46 million men), which held an immense front running from Finland down to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), all the way to the Black Sea just west of Odessa, on the Rumanian border. This force was assembled into four army groups, the most powerful of which was Army Group Center, consisting of four armies or roughly 800,000 men, with about 1,300 tanks, 10,000 guns and 1,000 aircraft. The Soviets had longed viewed the destruction of Army Group Center as the key to the entire Eastern war, and had twice tried to destroy it, but had never been able to achieve this goal. So in April of '44, when weather conditions made attack impossible for several months, they took the respite period to assemble a gigantic force for the express purpose of bringing about this long-awaited annihilation. They knew the Western Allies were due to land in France in early or mid-June, and Stalin and promised an all-out attack to coincide; however, he also wanted the attack to come on the precise anniversary of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R -- June 22.
The total strength of the Red Army at this time was 6.4 million men. Of these, Stalin's generals massed 1.67 million for an attack code-named BAGRATION, after a Russian hero of the Napoleonic wars. These soldiers were backed up by 5,800 tanks, 39,000 guns and around 7,000 aircraft of all types. Like their Western counterparts, they benefited from elaborate deception operations designed to fool the Germans into thinking their attack would come elsewhere. And on the morning of June 22, 1944 -- precisely three years since Hitler had launched his invasion -- they blitzed the semicircular German line on a massive front stretching roughly 660 miles in length.
Like the Normandy campaign, BAGRATION, later known as "The Battle of White Russia," lasted almost exactly two months. Unlike Normandy, this battle developed with astonishing rapidity. In the sixty days in question, the Red Army finally drove the hated German invader off Soviet soil, pushing as far west as Warsaw, which had been in Hitler's hands since 1939. More died in that sixty day period, however, than Hitler's dream of establishing an empire in the East. Army Group Center, which had once penetrated to the very suburbs of Moscow,, had been wiped off the face of the earth. Four strong German armies were virtually or totally destroyed, along with nearly all their arms and equipment. No less than 28 German divisions had ceased to exist -- the historian David Glantz estimated the numerical casualties at somewhere between 400 - 450,000 men -- and a staggering 31 German generals were captured, some seventeen of whom later joined the "National Committee For a Free Germany," a Soviet puppet organization comprised of German turncoats who denounced Hitler and Nazism in radio broadcasts and put their signatures to Soviet leaflets encouraging German soldiers to desert. Hitler, looking at a map, described the area where the Army Group had occupied as "nothing but a hole." The fact is, despite the D-Day landings, on the morning of June 22, 1944, the German dictator could boast that, in spite of all setbacks, his armies still ruled most of Europe. By August 22, many of those armies had been destroyed, and much of Europe liberated -- or conquered -- by Allied troops. Germany was caught like a hazelnut between the jaws of a giant cracker; Roosevelt held one handle and Stalin the other. The war still had nine long and almost unbelievably bloody months to go, but the outcome could no longer be doubted. Nazi Germany was finished. Not surprisingly, the Russians maintain to this day that White Russia, and not Normandy, was "the decisive battle of the war."
There is much evidence to argue this claim. The Western Allies put 150,000 men into France on D-Day and in the days immediately following. The Soviets employed ten times in this many to liberate White Russia (modern-day Belarus). Of course, both of these victories had to be paid for with oceans of human blood. The Normandy battles cost the Western Allies 226,386 casualties, including 72,000 killed and missing. In that same period, the Red Army reported a staggering 770,888 total losses (killed, wounded, missing, sick) on the front of Army Group Center alone. This is three-quarters of the total number of casualties suffered by the United States in the whole of World War 2 on all fronts.
But as badly as the Allies had suffered, the Germans had been even more seriously damaged. Entire army groups had been wiped out. Irreplaceable officers and men killed or captured. Incalculable amounts of planes, guns, tanks and equipment lost. And any hope of military victory -- or even a negotiated settlement of the war -- finished for good.
We Americans take justified pride in the contribution our country made to Allied victory in WW2. We carried the Pacific war on our backs, took over the air war in Europe when it seemed hopeless, and it was our industrial might -- an endless flood of guns, planes, tanks, equipment, food and raw materials -- which kept both Britain and Soviet Russia fighting when they were at their lowest points between 1940 - 1942. Yet it would be a mistake to believe, or rather to continue to choose to believe, that "the decisive battle of the war" was fought and won by us alone, or even by the Western Allies acting in concert. Victory in WW2 cannot be discussed without giving a prominent place, and perhaps even the place of honor, to the Soviet Union. It was their soldiers took most of the casualties, and who fought, tied down and ultimately destroyed 3/4 of the German army. It is true that those soldiers served a regime almost morally identical to Nazism, and that said regime was guilty of terrible military aggression against its neighbors and innumerable crimes against humanity; but in the final analysis this does not change the fact that it was only in concert with their efforts that "the decisive battle of the war" was fought...and won.
Something to ponder as another June 22 approaches.
In military parlance, "D-Day" simply means the day a particular operation is scheduled to commence. There was a D-Day for every amphibious invasion and offensive conducted by the U.S. military in WW2 -- and God knows there were plenty of those, scattered across nearly the whole surface of the planet. In the minds of our people, however, D-Day means only one operation, one attack -- that carried out on June 6, 1944 upon the beaches of Normandy.
On that day, eight Allied divisions and supporting commando forces landed by sea or by air in France, which had been under German occupation since the summer of 1940. These divisions, whose total numerical strength was 150,000 -- though the combat elements made up only a smallish percentage of that -- were transported by the mightiest naval armada ever assembled, some 3,427 ships of every conceivable type, from battleships to tugs, and supported by the most powerful air force ever to take flight -- 3,100 bombers and 5,000 fighters. Of course, the eight divisions which hit the beaches were only the tip of the spear; the Allies had a staggering 78 more divisions in England, with more than 50,000 vehicles, all waiting to cross into France when and if the beaches were taken.
Opposing them on those beaches were some six or seven German divisions (50,000 troops) scattered along the coast in defensive fortifications, and supported -- in theory -- by about 225 aircraft (the German air force in France, not strong to begin with, had been almost completely destroyed in the weeks leading up to D-Day via relentless attacks on German airfields). These 50,000 were not alone, of course; the total German strength in France was actually 59 divisions (about 850,000 men), but these had to cover the entire nation of France, including the Franco-Spanish border and the Mediterranean coast, and many were of low quality, under-strength, and lacking in motor transport. Hitler had long viewed France as a sort of gigantic "rest and training area" for his army; now his "rest and training army" had to fight what the Western Allies viewed as "the decisive battle of the war."
The outcome of D-Day is, of course, well known. Despite suffering 10,000 casualties in the first 24 hours, the Allies were able to establish a beach-head in France, and from that point, were able to begin packing it with men, guns, tanks, and supplies on a breath-taking scale -- two million men and two million tons of supplies were brought over in the first sixty days of the campaign alone. And though they were unable to break out of Normandy until early August, the Allies' success on D-Day made the outcome of the Western campaign a foregone conclusion: the Germans simply could not supply enough men, guns and tanks to crush the beach-heads or even contain them indefinitely. When the dam finally burst, the flood of Allied military power swept all the way to Germany, whose Western border was breached for the first time in September.
Thus D-Day. So long as America exists, and perhaps even afterward, it is a day which will live in human memory. And rightly so, for it was thelogistical military feat of human history, a monstrously large operation involving literally millions of people and uncountable amounts of equipment which was as finely calibrated as a Swiss watch. Yet great as it is, it remains only half of one of the greatest stories ever told -- and, in the minds and arguments of some, the lesser half. There was another D-Day, another "decisive battle of the war," and to this day, Americans remain almost entirely ignorant of its existence. And since we are just days before its 73rd anniversary, now seems an opportune moment to discuss it.
Above I stated that Germany failed in the Normandy campaign because its army in France was too small for the task it was supposed to achieve; also because once the landings had succeeded, Hitler was unable to counter the Allied build-up with one of his own -- unable, so to speak, to wall off the Allied armies in Normandy like the unfortunate victim in "The Cask of Amontillado." Yet when one looks at the fighting strength of the German army in June of 1944, one sees it musters 287 divisions of all types. Thus less than quarter of Hitler's strength was in France when the first Allied paratrooper jumped into Normandy in the early morning of June 6. This begs a question: if the landings, which everyone knew were coming, were to be "the decisive battle of the war," why didn't Hitler put more military muscle in France to meet them?
The reason for this is quite simple. The vast majority of Hitler's army was in Russia, and had been since June 22, 1941, when he threw three-quarters of it -- some 3.5 million men, along with the majority of his air force, artillery and tank fleet -- into the task of annihilating the Soviet Union. Hitler had hoped to smash the Red colossus in one quick, savage campaign, and thus free his eastern borders from the perpetual threat posed by Stalin -- the one man in Europe arguably greedier and more ruthless than Hitler himself. But the attack ultimately bogged down deep in the Russian hinterland, casualties mounted, and the Red Army slowly and inexorably began to push the Germans backward. To paraphrase a Ukrainian historian, Hitler was like a python who had bitten deep into his prey, only to discover that he could neither swallow the victim whole nor withdraw his fangs.
By the summer of 1944, the German army in the U.S.S.R. was badly battered and covering far more territory than it could comfortably hold; it was also outnumbered and outgunned on both the ground and in the air. Nevertheless, it remained a dangerous and cohesive fighting force comprising 150 German divisions (2.46 million men), which held an immense front running from Finland down to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), all the way to the Black Sea just west of Odessa, on the Rumanian border. This force was assembled into four army groups, the most powerful of which was Army Group Center, consisting of four armies or roughly 800,000 men, with about 1,300 tanks, 10,000 guns and 1,000 aircraft. The Soviets had longed viewed the destruction of Army Group Center as the key to the entire Eastern war, and had twice tried to destroy it, but had never been able to achieve this goal. So in April of '44, when weather conditions made attack impossible for several months, they took the respite period to assemble a gigantic force for the express purpose of bringing about this long-awaited annihilation. They knew the Western Allies were due to land in France in early or mid-June, and Stalin and promised an all-out attack to coincide; however, he also wanted the attack to come on the precise anniversary of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R -- June 22.
The total strength of the Red Army at this time was 6.4 million men. Of these, Stalin's generals massed 1.67 million for an attack code-named BAGRATION, after a Russian hero of the Napoleonic wars. These soldiers were backed up by 5,800 tanks, 39,000 guns and around 7,000 aircraft of all types. Like their Western counterparts, they benefited from elaborate deception operations designed to fool the Germans into thinking their attack would come elsewhere. And on the morning of June 22, 1944 -- precisely three years since Hitler had launched his invasion -- they blitzed the semicircular German line on a massive front stretching roughly 660 miles in length.
Like the Normandy campaign, BAGRATION, later known as "The Battle of White Russia," lasted almost exactly two months. Unlike Normandy, this battle developed with astonishing rapidity. In the sixty days in question, the Red Army finally drove the hated German invader off Soviet soil, pushing as far west as Warsaw, which had been in Hitler's hands since 1939. More died in that sixty day period, however, than Hitler's dream of establishing an empire in the East. Army Group Center, which had once penetrated to the very suburbs of Moscow,, had been wiped off the face of the earth. Four strong German armies were virtually or totally destroyed, along with nearly all their arms and equipment. No less than 28 German divisions had ceased to exist -- the historian David Glantz estimated the numerical casualties at somewhere between 400 - 450,000 men -- and a staggering 31 German generals were captured, some seventeen of whom later joined the "National Committee For a Free Germany," a Soviet puppet organization comprised of German turncoats who denounced Hitler and Nazism in radio broadcasts and put their signatures to Soviet leaflets encouraging German soldiers to desert. Hitler, looking at a map, described the area where the Army Group had occupied as "nothing but a hole." The fact is, despite the D-Day landings, on the morning of June 22, 1944, the German dictator could boast that, in spite of all setbacks, his armies still ruled most of Europe. By August 22, many of those armies had been destroyed, and much of Europe liberated -- or conquered -- by Allied troops. Germany was caught like a hazelnut between the jaws of a giant cracker; Roosevelt held one handle and Stalin the other. The war still had nine long and almost unbelievably bloody months to go, but the outcome could no longer be doubted. Nazi Germany was finished. Not surprisingly, the Russians maintain to this day that White Russia, and not Normandy, was "the decisive battle of the war."
There is much evidence to argue this claim. The Western Allies put 150,000 men into France on D-Day and in the days immediately following. The Soviets employed ten times in this many to liberate White Russia (modern-day Belarus). Of course, both of these victories had to be paid for with oceans of human blood. The Normandy battles cost the Western Allies 226,386 casualties, including 72,000 killed and missing. In that same period, the Red Army reported a staggering 770,888 total losses (killed, wounded, missing, sick) on the front of Army Group Center alone. This is three-quarters of the total number of casualties suffered by the United States in the whole of World War 2 on all fronts.
But as badly as the Allies had suffered, the Germans had been even more seriously damaged. Entire army groups had been wiped out. Irreplaceable officers and men killed or captured. Incalculable amounts of planes, guns, tanks and equipment lost. And any hope of military victory -- or even a negotiated settlement of the war -- finished for good.
We Americans take justified pride in the contribution our country made to Allied victory in WW2. We carried the Pacific war on our backs, took over the air war in Europe when it seemed hopeless, and it was our industrial might -- an endless flood of guns, planes, tanks, equipment, food and raw materials -- which kept both Britain and Soviet Russia fighting when they were at their lowest points between 1940 - 1942. Yet it would be a mistake to believe, or rather to continue to choose to believe, that "the decisive battle of the war" was fought and won by us alone, or even by the Western Allies acting in concert. Victory in WW2 cannot be discussed without giving a prominent place, and perhaps even the place of honor, to the Soviet Union. It was their soldiers took most of the casualties, and who fought, tied down and ultimately destroyed 3/4 of the German army. It is true that those soldiers served a regime almost morally identical to Nazism, and that said regime was guilty of terrible military aggression against its neighbors and innumerable crimes against humanity; but in the final analysis this does not change the fact that it was only in concert with their efforts that "the decisive battle of the war" was fought...and won.
Something to ponder as another June 22 approaches.
May 19, 2017
Homesick in Hollywood
When I started freelancing in Hollywood some years ago, I signed so many nondisclosure agreements that I felt like I was joining the CIA. As a result of these agreements I can't really talk about what I do, which means I can't even offer you a good excuse for why I haven't written anything for this blog in the last few weeks. So instead, I'm just going to talk about how ridiculously homesick I am. Bear with me. It's possible that this is not as silly as it sounds.
I moved to Los Angeles almost ten years ago, and I thought that whatever homesickness I might experience for the East would be shallow and short-lived. (After all, if I hadn't wanted to leave, I wouldn't have come here in the first place.) And, by and large, I was proven correct. Except for a certain silly nostalgia for snow, which I certainly didn't experience when I was shoveling it out of my parents' driveway, I rapidly became so immersed in learning the geography and folkways of my new city that there was no time to feel mushy about Maryland, where I grew up, or Pennsylvania, where I settled after college. But a decade is a long time, even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, and lately I have begun to wonder if it is really possible to transplant yourself into a culture and a climate so fundamentally different from the one in which you were raised.
I once read a book about a Soviet defector to the United States. While cataloguing his reasons for defection, he referenced an instance in which the defense minister of the USSR was scheduled to visit his airbase. This being in Siberia, the road between the landing strip and the base was barren and depressing, and the minister supposedly “a lover of nature and all its verdancy.” The base commander, obviously hoping to score points with the boss, ordered his entire regiment to cease all military training and spend several months digging up trees and replanting them along the roadside. Everyone knew replanting trees in the middle of the summer was impossible, but the trees were nevertheless wrenched from their homes in the forest, transported by trucks to the barren road, and sunk into deep pits. Not surprisingly, within a week all of them were dead, so the commander had another hundred or so dug up put in their place. They too withered and died, and after several more sweaty and fruitless attempts, the commander, “finally realizing the laws of Nature would not bend even for communists,” ordered the deceased trees painted green. When the driver detailed to whisk the defense minister from the runway to the base pointed out that the old man would certainly not be taken in by this charade, the commander said, “Oh hell, just drive fast – he'll never notice.”
As it happened the minister didn't notice, because he never arrived; matters of state forced him to cancel the visit. The dead, green-painted trees were left to rot along the road and the regiment washed the dirt from its collective hands and finally resumed its military duties. Unfortunately, after spending months as unwilling gardeners, the pilots were so out of practice at flying that several of them soon crashed, including one who hit a passing city bus while attempting a takeoff, decapitating some 20 passengers.
I never think about this incident without realizing that a large part of the commander's problem stemmed from the fact that he did not understand the importance of roots. Pulling a living thing – be it a tree or a fighter pilot – out of the environment from which it (or he) grew and trying to graft it somewhere else is an unnatural act, and unless it is carried off with great care it will inevitably lead to failure and disaster.
I lived thirty years of my life in the East, but if I remember my basic biology correctly, there is no longer one particle of my being which remains from that time. Every hair follicle, every skin cell, my toenails, even my scars – everything which presently comprises me has formed here in California. So I suppose that, and my driver's license, make me a Californian and more specifically, a Los Angelino. Certainly I've picked up many of the local habits. I see more movies, eat healthier, and complain more about traffic than I ever did back East. I'm also far more physically active: last year I went hiking 99 times and swimming 95, to say nothing of time spent in the gym, and yes, I even occasionally do yoga. I no longer refer to highways as highways but as freeways, and I do not identify them in the Eastern manner, i.e. by their numbers; instead I use the prefix “the” beforehand, as in, “You take the 134 to the 405 to the 101.” I drink bottled water instead of tap, and at one point I had not one but two fedora hats, not because they were stylish but because they kept the sun off both my face and my neck. I probably don't go more than a few months without seeing a famous or semi-famous actor (the last was Keifer Sutherland, who passed by my table at a restaurant singing the lyrics to “Stand By Me” under his breath – no kidding) and I even work in the entertainment industry myself, which truly cements the cliché.
And make no mistake. Grumbling and grousing aside, I really do enjoy living in California. I can go swimming beneath palm trees in February, drive down the street to hike any number of hills and mountains, visit an infinity of beaches, see my favorite movies in 100 year-old theaters, and my favorite actors, in person, in playhouses so intimate you can hear them breathing between lines. Sporting events and concerts are almost easier to go to than to avoid; music and food festivals run year round; and my inner nerd can satisfying his deepest longings by visiting the shooting locations of the television shows I grew up watching. Museums of every type abound, there are so many restaurants in this town that even visiting every one in your own immediate neighborhood is impossible, and there are things you can do here that you can only do here and pretty much nowhere else on earth, like sit in the audience during the taping of a TV show. Being bored here is essentially a personal choice.
And yet.
When I think about that Soviet defector – Viktor Belenko was his name – I am always reminded of the fact that when he finally made his way into the U.S., he literally thought he'd discovered paradise. Private automobiles, television sets, transistor radios, garbage disposals, comfortable clothing, the freedom to travel from one state to another without a passport, the freedom to denounce the government without fearing arrest or execution – all of it was new to him. (It took him months to overcome his belief that the supermarkets he saw on every street were not fabrications created by the CIA.) He realized that he actually had the chance, in America, to do everything he'd ever wanted to do with his life. To become the person he'd always wanted to be. Yet at one point, about a year or two after he defected, and despite the near-certainty that if he did so he would be tortured and shot, he very nearly returned to the USSR of his own free will.
It turns out that, like a tree uprooted from the forest or an animal imprisoned in a zoo, a human being can stand only so much time away from what he considers to be his natural environment without suffering severe spiritual and psychological consequences. In Belenko's case, he longed to hear and speak Russian again, to hear Russian music, to eat Russian food, to wander the muddy, cobblestoned, smoke-tinged streets of Russian villages, and to sit in leaky, drafty railway stations jammed with peasants and soldiers who looked and spoke and thought just exactly like him, singing Russian folks songs as they waited for trains that might never arrive. “He was hearing and being drawn not only by the call of the Mother Country,” his biographer wrote. “But the Call of the Wild.”
Don't get me wrong. I am not in any way comparing the East to Soviet Russia, or myself to the heroic Belenko. I'm just saying that when I think about small-town living in Pennsylvania, or suburban existence in Maryland, one of the first things that hits me is the lack of diversion relative to my present circumstances. Even where I grew up, which was a stone's throw from both D.C. and Northern Virginia, the options now seem extremely limited in comparison. If I were to pack my things and move back there today, I can honestly say I don't know what the hell I'd do with myself on weekends, especially in the wintertime. I'm certain restlessness and boredom would bedevil me worse even than the loneliness which one must always endure when showing up to a place where one has few readily available friends. Nor would the transition back to the East coast way of doing things be easy. Easterners are punctual; Californians perpetually tardy. Easterners walk and talk fast; Californians amble and ramble. Easterners confront quickly; Californians tend to shrug things off. Easterners are conditioned and toughened by seasonal changes; Californians, who have no seasons, live in a kind of endless summer where winter never pays for spring. The Easterner is formal; the Californian hopelessly casual. I'm honestly not sure if I could withstand twenty degree temperatures again, or days of freezing rain in November, or the horrible necessity of scraping ice from a car windshield while wondering if the battery is dead. After Cali, I don't know if the political monomania I grew up with inside the Beltway would be endurable now, any more than the ill-informed, frighteningly opinionated talk I constantly heard in the bars and diners of York, Pennsylvania. And I do know that sinking back into the whole rigamarole of suits, ties and dress shoes after a decade of T-shirts and jeans would feel like joining the army at the age of forty-four. Like Belenko, I'm probably better off where I am than where I used to be.
And yet.
Lately I have been experiencing the Call of the Wild myself. Or perhaps just the call of the East.
You know the sound, or rather the almost complete absence of sound, which occurs very late at night during a snowstorm? The streetlamps are haloed with moisture; snowflakes flicker through the glaring light. Rooftops, cars, front lawns, the street, all blanketed in unbroken, virgin white, and there is no movement anywhere save that of the snow, which you can only see against the light, and no sound save that of your boots and your breathing and maybe your heartbeat. It's been ten years – ten years! – since I didn't hear that sound.
You know what else I miss hearing? A few days after the blizzard, when the snow finally starts to melt, and you wake up to the sound of icicles dripping and drain-pipes gurgling and car-wheels spinning in the slush. There's nothing quite like taking a walk when it's forty degrees and every gutter is full of melting snow and every drain-pipe is spitting a steady stream of water that sparkles like liquid crystal in the sun. I can't describe the sound but you'd know it if you heard it and I haven't heard it in way, way too goddamned long.
There are sensations, too, that only exist in the East in winter. Like the way a bowl of hot soup feels percolating in your belly after you just spent two hours shoveling snow and scattering salt and cursing so that your breath smoked like a chimney. And speaking of chimneys, in the East they are actually put to use. Every Easterner who grew up with a fireplace knows the complex rituals involved in building and maintaining a good fire – gathering the kindling in the yard, buying the bundles from that joint down the road, saving that one log with the rope handles to burn last, because you enjoy watching rope burn. Listening to the squeak and crackle and hiss and pop. Watching as if hypnotized the intricate patterns of the flame. And the old newspaper you use to start the blaze, and the warm ashes beneath the grate the next morning, and the tedious job of cleaning them out when they finally go cold.
And then there are the summers. I just called California land of endless summer, and by and large it is, but there are Western summers and there are Eastern ones. In the West, summer is a monolith – every day is the same, sunny and dry and so, so hot. In the East summer is like a jewel with a hundred facets. There are days when the humidity closes around you like an iron maiden, when the mosquitoes and gnats hum fit to make your eyes water, when your skin sticks to the car seat and happiness is a glass of Coke with six ice cubes, or the can of beer that's wedged so far back in the vegetable crisper it has frost around the ring-tab. I don't miss those, but I miss other things – thunder, for example. I've heard thunder maybe four times in the 3,424 days I've lived out here, and I can't remember the last time I saw any lightning. And what about thunderstorms – the rain coming down in buckets out of nowhere, sometimes while the sun is still shining? There's nothing quite like watching a thunderstorm through a window, or better yet, from beneath a portico or an awning somewhere. The streets empty so fast you'd think the raindrops were shrapnel, the birds and insects stop their music, the trees and bushes lash about, the gutters overflow, and that lovely scent blows in through the screens. You know the one I mean. It's the smell of rain, but also of green things growing, of wet earth. Of life. And there is something that happens in the early evenings after a thunderstorm – a sort of smokey hush falls over the land, except that the smoke is mist, curling over the grass and the trunks of the trees, lending a pearlescent finish to the grass. If you've never sat on a porch in the evening after a thunderstorm, watching the darkness gather as the cicadas slowly burr back to life and somebody's grandfather or great-uncle draws on their pipe, making soft orange light among the shadows, you haven't lived. And what about fireflies? A huge wood-fringed field alight with the greenish-yellow flame of innumerable fireflies, calling to each other silently as night comes on? Do you know I have seen fireflies only once in the last decade, and it was during a weekend trip to my old graduate school in Pennsylvania? What the fuck kind of place doesn't have fireflies?
Then there is fall, the season with two faces. The first half of it is so beautiful as to defy description. Like the time you were driving in West Virginia and saw the Appalachians when the leaves were turning? Shades and intensities of green shading to yellow-gold and then to copper and finally that dark wine-red, immensities of leaves rippling over the horizon, and that somehow spicy smell blowing in along with the wind through the open car windows? Or the nights in high school you'd go to the football games with the lights glaring and the crowd howling and the air so cool and crisp you could practically cut a slice for yourself to take home? Or the times you'd look up and see the sky filled with honking, cackling, cawing birds from horizon to horizon, thousands of them all flying south like some immense fleet of bombing planes? That was the first face. The second was early darkness and bare trees and days and days ice-cold rain, rain so that you thought it would never stop raining, and the back of your collar and the cuffs of your jeans always wet, and before the fireplace there was a row of shoes and boots that never seemed to dry? But you enjoyed the way the logs hissed and popped and crackled as they burned on the grate, and the gold shadows on the darkened walls, and your homework spread like a deck of cards across the floor, and Judy Collins on the radio, and that was fall, the two faces together, and you miss them both.
And Spring. Christ, Spring. There is no spring in California. We have 200 days of Summer and then we have this runty thing called not-Summer which is not really a season but the scrapings and leftovers of one, a kind of shabu-shabu that can't rightly be called a season. No ice-cold morning that turns blazing hot by noon and then near-freezing again by sunset, with sunshine one minute and rain the next and always the gusty fragrant air that smells simultaneously of melting snow and flowering plants. No feeling of waking up with the air playing the curtains above your head and the birds singing lustily and your body responding in the ancient manner to the irresistible urge to procreate or die trying. What is spring to me? Spring is sprinklers huffing and chuffing and bare, muddy feet and the first time you hear the tinkling tune of the ice cream truck. Spring is the that first whiff of woodsmoke from the neighbor's barbeque, the first time you hear the rip-roar of the neighbor's lawnmower and think, shit, it's that time again. Spring is when the cicadas come out of their years-long sleep by the billions and set up a racket so deafening you don't even hear it after the first night. Spring is when the air has a taste and the taste is good, though sometimes it makes your teeth ache, just like that ice cream.
Of course by now you think I'm sentimentalizing, nostalgifying, looking at the past, or rather the region, with rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I am. My last winter in Pennsylvania, the temperature hovered around seven degrees for weeks at a time. That well and truly sucked. And so do chapped lips and cracked hands and dandruff, and icy-cold wet socks, and shoveling snow and scraping ice off side-view mirrors; and so do weeks of endless, discouraging drizzle. Gaining fifteen pounds every winter blows goats. So does that choking, paralyzing humidity that comes with summer, and so do gnats, and so do mosquitoes (especially those huge striped bastards that take about a thimbleful of blood out of you and contrive to ruin every picnic). Getting stung by a yellow jacket is no fun either, and wearing a tight collar and a tie when your neck is raw from a blunt razor and it's ninety-six degrees outside is not much better. Poison ivy and poison oak and poison sumac were less fun than a trip to the dentist, and the power outages that inevitably followed the really big thunderstorms – especially when it was 93 degrees outside – were somewhat less than joyous occasions. Few sailors can swear the way I did on a succession of mornings back East when the cold murdered my car battery, and I never have to worry about that anymore. Nor do I have to sweat that horrible, tight-lipped political correctness as it exists in the workplace back East -- here in L.A. we have discussions around the ole water cooler that would give any East Coast H.R. director a fucking heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelash. The truth is that if I remain here I will never again have to purchase a bag of salt to scatter on the front steps, or handle a snow shovel, or buy a rake, or blow hot air down a frozen pipe. I'm 14 miles from the beach, three and half from the Hollywood sign. Sometimes, in airports, when people ask me where I live, I puff up and respond, “L.A.” as if daring them to top me. In many ways this is a good place, a good home, a good life. I tell myself that every day. I tell myself I'm happy here, and that it would be foolish to leave. And yet....
And yet I can't help wonder if, after almost ten years, my roots aren't starting to wither up and die in the strange soil of SoCal. If the call of the East isn't starting to drown out all the sober, logic, reasonable arguments I have to stay here in the West. If it wouldn't do my heart some good to shovel some snow, swat a few mosquitoes, and stand out in the back yard in my bare feet in the middle of a thunderstorm, listening to the sound of the rain.
I moved to Los Angeles almost ten years ago, and I thought that whatever homesickness I might experience for the East would be shallow and short-lived. (After all, if I hadn't wanted to leave, I wouldn't have come here in the first place.) And, by and large, I was proven correct. Except for a certain silly nostalgia for snow, which I certainly didn't experience when I was shoveling it out of my parents' driveway, I rapidly became so immersed in learning the geography and folkways of my new city that there was no time to feel mushy about Maryland, where I grew up, or Pennsylvania, where I settled after college. But a decade is a long time, even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, and lately I have begun to wonder if it is really possible to transplant yourself into a culture and a climate so fundamentally different from the one in which you were raised.
I once read a book about a Soviet defector to the United States. While cataloguing his reasons for defection, he referenced an instance in which the defense minister of the USSR was scheduled to visit his airbase. This being in Siberia, the road between the landing strip and the base was barren and depressing, and the minister supposedly “a lover of nature and all its verdancy.” The base commander, obviously hoping to score points with the boss, ordered his entire regiment to cease all military training and spend several months digging up trees and replanting them along the roadside. Everyone knew replanting trees in the middle of the summer was impossible, but the trees were nevertheless wrenched from their homes in the forest, transported by trucks to the barren road, and sunk into deep pits. Not surprisingly, within a week all of them were dead, so the commander had another hundred or so dug up put in their place. They too withered and died, and after several more sweaty and fruitless attempts, the commander, “finally realizing the laws of Nature would not bend even for communists,” ordered the deceased trees painted green. When the driver detailed to whisk the defense minister from the runway to the base pointed out that the old man would certainly not be taken in by this charade, the commander said, “Oh hell, just drive fast – he'll never notice.”
As it happened the minister didn't notice, because he never arrived; matters of state forced him to cancel the visit. The dead, green-painted trees were left to rot along the road and the regiment washed the dirt from its collective hands and finally resumed its military duties. Unfortunately, after spending months as unwilling gardeners, the pilots were so out of practice at flying that several of them soon crashed, including one who hit a passing city bus while attempting a takeoff, decapitating some 20 passengers.
I never think about this incident without realizing that a large part of the commander's problem stemmed from the fact that he did not understand the importance of roots. Pulling a living thing – be it a tree or a fighter pilot – out of the environment from which it (or he) grew and trying to graft it somewhere else is an unnatural act, and unless it is carried off with great care it will inevitably lead to failure and disaster.
I lived thirty years of my life in the East, but if I remember my basic biology correctly, there is no longer one particle of my being which remains from that time. Every hair follicle, every skin cell, my toenails, even my scars – everything which presently comprises me has formed here in California. So I suppose that, and my driver's license, make me a Californian and more specifically, a Los Angelino. Certainly I've picked up many of the local habits. I see more movies, eat healthier, and complain more about traffic than I ever did back East. I'm also far more physically active: last year I went hiking 99 times and swimming 95, to say nothing of time spent in the gym, and yes, I even occasionally do yoga. I no longer refer to highways as highways but as freeways, and I do not identify them in the Eastern manner, i.e. by their numbers; instead I use the prefix “the” beforehand, as in, “You take the 134 to the 405 to the 101.” I drink bottled water instead of tap, and at one point I had not one but two fedora hats, not because they were stylish but because they kept the sun off both my face and my neck. I probably don't go more than a few months without seeing a famous or semi-famous actor (the last was Keifer Sutherland, who passed by my table at a restaurant singing the lyrics to “Stand By Me” under his breath – no kidding) and I even work in the entertainment industry myself, which truly cements the cliché.
And make no mistake. Grumbling and grousing aside, I really do enjoy living in California. I can go swimming beneath palm trees in February, drive down the street to hike any number of hills and mountains, visit an infinity of beaches, see my favorite movies in 100 year-old theaters, and my favorite actors, in person, in playhouses so intimate you can hear them breathing between lines. Sporting events and concerts are almost easier to go to than to avoid; music and food festivals run year round; and my inner nerd can satisfying his deepest longings by visiting the shooting locations of the television shows I grew up watching. Museums of every type abound, there are so many restaurants in this town that even visiting every one in your own immediate neighborhood is impossible, and there are things you can do here that you can only do here and pretty much nowhere else on earth, like sit in the audience during the taping of a TV show. Being bored here is essentially a personal choice.
And yet.
When I think about that Soviet defector – Viktor Belenko was his name – I am always reminded of the fact that when he finally made his way into the U.S., he literally thought he'd discovered paradise. Private automobiles, television sets, transistor radios, garbage disposals, comfortable clothing, the freedom to travel from one state to another without a passport, the freedom to denounce the government without fearing arrest or execution – all of it was new to him. (It took him months to overcome his belief that the supermarkets he saw on every street were not fabrications created by the CIA.) He realized that he actually had the chance, in America, to do everything he'd ever wanted to do with his life. To become the person he'd always wanted to be. Yet at one point, about a year or two after he defected, and despite the near-certainty that if he did so he would be tortured and shot, he very nearly returned to the USSR of his own free will.
It turns out that, like a tree uprooted from the forest or an animal imprisoned in a zoo, a human being can stand only so much time away from what he considers to be his natural environment without suffering severe spiritual and psychological consequences. In Belenko's case, he longed to hear and speak Russian again, to hear Russian music, to eat Russian food, to wander the muddy, cobblestoned, smoke-tinged streets of Russian villages, and to sit in leaky, drafty railway stations jammed with peasants and soldiers who looked and spoke and thought just exactly like him, singing Russian folks songs as they waited for trains that might never arrive. “He was hearing and being drawn not only by the call of the Mother Country,” his biographer wrote. “But the Call of the Wild.”
Don't get me wrong. I am not in any way comparing the East to Soviet Russia, or myself to the heroic Belenko. I'm just saying that when I think about small-town living in Pennsylvania, or suburban existence in Maryland, one of the first things that hits me is the lack of diversion relative to my present circumstances. Even where I grew up, which was a stone's throw from both D.C. and Northern Virginia, the options now seem extremely limited in comparison. If I were to pack my things and move back there today, I can honestly say I don't know what the hell I'd do with myself on weekends, especially in the wintertime. I'm certain restlessness and boredom would bedevil me worse even than the loneliness which one must always endure when showing up to a place where one has few readily available friends. Nor would the transition back to the East coast way of doing things be easy. Easterners are punctual; Californians perpetually tardy. Easterners walk and talk fast; Californians amble and ramble. Easterners confront quickly; Californians tend to shrug things off. Easterners are conditioned and toughened by seasonal changes; Californians, who have no seasons, live in a kind of endless summer where winter never pays for spring. The Easterner is formal; the Californian hopelessly casual. I'm honestly not sure if I could withstand twenty degree temperatures again, or days of freezing rain in November, or the horrible necessity of scraping ice from a car windshield while wondering if the battery is dead. After Cali, I don't know if the political monomania I grew up with inside the Beltway would be endurable now, any more than the ill-informed, frighteningly opinionated talk I constantly heard in the bars and diners of York, Pennsylvania. And I do know that sinking back into the whole rigamarole of suits, ties and dress shoes after a decade of T-shirts and jeans would feel like joining the army at the age of forty-four. Like Belenko, I'm probably better off where I am than where I used to be.
And yet.
Lately I have been experiencing the Call of the Wild myself. Or perhaps just the call of the East.
You know the sound, or rather the almost complete absence of sound, which occurs very late at night during a snowstorm? The streetlamps are haloed with moisture; snowflakes flicker through the glaring light. Rooftops, cars, front lawns, the street, all blanketed in unbroken, virgin white, and there is no movement anywhere save that of the snow, which you can only see against the light, and no sound save that of your boots and your breathing and maybe your heartbeat. It's been ten years – ten years! – since I didn't hear that sound.
You know what else I miss hearing? A few days after the blizzard, when the snow finally starts to melt, and you wake up to the sound of icicles dripping and drain-pipes gurgling and car-wheels spinning in the slush. There's nothing quite like taking a walk when it's forty degrees and every gutter is full of melting snow and every drain-pipe is spitting a steady stream of water that sparkles like liquid crystal in the sun. I can't describe the sound but you'd know it if you heard it and I haven't heard it in way, way too goddamned long.
There are sensations, too, that only exist in the East in winter. Like the way a bowl of hot soup feels percolating in your belly after you just spent two hours shoveling snow and scattering salt and cursing so that your breath smoked like a chimney. And speaking of chimneys, in the East they are actually put to use. Every Easterner who grew up with a fireplace knows the complex rituals involved in building and maintaining a good fire – gathering the kindling in the yard, buying the bundles from that joint down the road, saving that one log with the rope handles to burn last, because you enjoy watching rope burn. Listening to the squeak and crackle and hiss and pop. Watching as if hypnotized the intricate patterns of the flame. And the old newspaper you use to start the blaze, and the warm ashes beneath the grate the next morning, and the tedious job of cleaning them out when they finally go cold.
And then there are the summers. I just called California land of endless summer, and by and large it is, but there are Western summers and there are Eastern ones. In the West, summer is a monolith – every day is the same, sunny and dry and so, so hot. In the East summer is like a jewel with a hundred facets. There are days when the humidity closes around you like an iron maiden, when the mosquitoes and gnats hum fit to make your eyes water, when your skin sticks to the car seat and happiness is a glass of Coke with six ice cubes, or the can of beer that's wedged so far back in the vegetable crisper it has frost around the ring-tab. I don't miss those, but I miss other things – thunder, for example. I've heard thunder maybe four times in the 3,424 days I've lived out here, and I can't remember the last time I saw any lightning. And what about thunderstorms – the rain coming down in buckets out of nowhere, sometimes while the sun is still shining? There's nothing quite like watching a thunderstorm through a window, or better yet, from beneath a portico or an awning somewhere. The streets empty so fast you'd think the raindrops were shrapnel, the birds and insects stop their music, the trees and bushes lash about, the gutters overflow, and that lovely scent blows in through the screens. You know the one I mean. It's the smell of rain, but also of green things growing, of wet earth. Of life. And there is something that happens in the early evenings after a thunderstorm – a sort of smokey hush falls over the land, except that the smoke is mist, curling over the grass and the trunks of the trees, lending a pearlescent finish to the grass. If you've never sat on a porch in the evening after a thunderstorm, watching the darkness gather as the cicadas slowly burr back to life and somebody's grandfather or great-uncle draws on their pipe, making soft orange light among the shadows, you haven't lived. And what about fireflies? A huge wood-fringed field alight with the greenish-yellow flame of innumerable fireflies, calling to each other silently as night comes on? Do you know I have seen fireflies only once in the last decade, and it was during a weekend trip to my old graduate school in Pennsylvania? What the fuck kind of place doesn't have fireflies?
Then there is fall, the season with two faces. The first half of it is so beautiful as to defy description. Like the time you were driving in West Virginia and saw the Appalachians when the leaves were turning? Shades and intensities of green shading to yellow-gold and then to copper and finally that dark wine-red, immensities of leaves rippling over the horizon, and that somehow spicy smell blowing in along with the wind through the open car windows? Or the nights in high school you'd go to the football games with the lights glaring and the crowd howling and the air so cool and crisp you could practically cut a slice for yourself to take home? Or the times you'd look up and see the sky filled with honking, cackling, cawing birds from horizon to horizon, thousands of them all flying south like some immense fleet of bombing planes? That was the first face. The second was early darkness and bare trees and days and days ice-cold rain, rain so that you thought it would never stop raining, and the back of your collar and the cuffs of your jeans always wet, and before the fireplace there was a row of shoes and boots that never seemed to dry? But you enjoyed the way the logs hissed and popped and crackled as they burned on the grate, and the gold shadows on the darkened walls, and your homework spread like a deck of cards across the floor, and Judy Collins on the radio, and that was fall, the two faces together, and you miss them both.
And Spring. Christ, Spring. There is no spring in California. We have 200 days of Summer and then we have this runty thing called not-Summer which is not really a season but the scrapings and leftovers of one, a kind of shabu-shabu that can't rightly be called a season. No ice-cold morning that turns blazing hot by noon and then near-freezing again by sunset, with sunshine one minute and rain the next and always the gusty fragrant air that smells simultaneously of melting snow and flowering plants. No feeling of waking up with the air playing the curtains above your head and the birds singing lustily and your body responding in the ancient manner to the irresistible urge to procreate or die trying. What is spring to me? Spring is sprinklers huffing and chuffing and bare, muddy feet and the first time you hear the tinkling tune of the ice cream truck. Spring is the that first whiff of woodsmoke from the neighbor's barbeque, the first time you hear the rip-roar of the neighbor's lawnmower and think, shit, it's that time again. Spring is when the cicadas come out of their years-long sleep by the billions and set up a racket so deafening you don't even hear it after the first night. Spring is when the air has a taste and the taste is good, though sometimes it makes your teeth ache, just like that ice cream.
Of course by now you think I'm sentimentalizing, nostalgifying, looking at the past, or rather the region, with rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I am. My last winter in Pennsylvania, the temperature hovered around seven degrees for weeks at a time. That well and truly sucked. And so do chapped lips and cracked hands and dandruff, and icy-cold wet socks, and shoveling snow and scraping ice off side-view mirrors; and so do weeks of endless, discouraging drizzle. Gaining fifteen pounds every winter blows goats. So does that choking, paralyzing humidity that comes with summer, and so do gnats, and so do mosquitoes (especially those huge striped bastards that take about a thimbleful of blood out of you and contrive to ruin every picnic). Getting stung by a yellow jacket is no fun either, and wearing a tight collar and a tie when your neck is raw from a blunt razor and it's ninety-six degrees outside is not much better. Poison ivy and poison oak and poison sumac were less fun than a trip to the dentist, and the power outages that inevitably followed the really big thunderstorms – especially when it was 93 degrees outside – were somewhat less than joyous occasions. Few sailors can swear the way I did on a succession of mornings back East when the cold murdered my car battery, and I never have to worry about that anymore. Nor do I have to sweat that horrible, tight-lipped political correctness as it exists in the workplace back East -- here in L.A. we have discussions around the ole water cooler that would give any East Coast H.R. director a fucking heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelash. The truth is that if I remain here I will never again have to purchase a bag of salt to scatter on the front steps, or handle a snow shovel, or buy a rake, or blow hot air down a frozen pipe. I'm 14 miles from the beach, three and half from the Hollywood sign. Sometimes, in airports, when people ask me where I live, I puff up and respond, “L.A.” as if daring them to top me. In many ways this is a good place, a good home, a good life. I tell myself that every day. I tell myself I'm happy here, and that it would be foolish to leave. And yet....
And yet I can't help wonder if, after almost ten years, my roots aren't starting to wither up and die in the strange soil of SoCal. If the call of the East isn't starting to drown out all the sober, logic, reasonable arguments I have to stay here in the West. If it wouldn't do my heart some good to shovel some snow, swat a few mosquitoes, and stand out in the back yard in my bare feet in the middle of a thunderstorm, listening to the sound of the rain.
April 28, 2017
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE: CHAPTER TWO
It's Friday, which seems an opportune moment to release the next chapter in the saga of The Road to Nowhere, a book which takes place on what might be called a permanent Friday. The response to the first installment exceeded all my expectations, so this one is longer and a little more graphic, though (Cenobite voice) there are many, many sights left to show you, and really, your walk down my own personal Memory Lane has only just begun. (In case you haven't guessed, I have decided to ease into this topic in the manner one boils a frog, i.e. by slowly turning up the temperature.)
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Miles Watson
What the hell did you expect to find?
Aphrodite on a barstool by your side?
-- The Gin Blossoms
2.
I think I mentioned that it is always raining in Axis. Now strictly speaking this is not true; sometimes it is sleeting, sometimes it is snowing and on rare occasions it hails. We know the sun exists, but only braggarts and liars claim to have seen it over the town. It may be found in the west, over Gettysburg, or up north, near Harrisburg, or to the east in Philadelphia, or to the south, across the state line, in Baltimore; but it isn't here, and it rarely visits at any point after the middle of October or before the beginning of May. Perhaps it knows something we don't.
I mention this merely to set the scene for a particular Thursday. I awake at about four o'clock in the evening to the familiar sound of rain pummeling the tin roof beneath my window. The room, lighted by a single lamp with a crimson bulb, smells like stale beer and damp clothes and yesterday's marijuana. I don't smoke much marijuana but lately I've been hitting the pipe a little to ease the pain I feel over losing a girl named Becky Branch. When I met Becky I suspected she was out of my league: I was right. But if I touch the flame of the Zippo to the bowl and incinerate the crushed powdered weed within and suck the resultant smoke into my lungs, this fact does not sting so much. In fact I can now recall the conversation I had with Brother Knowitall about her a few weeks ago with some melancholy amusement:
Miles, you fool, stay away from that girl. She'll eat you for breakfast. She'll wreck you to pieces. She'll leave you for dead.
Says who?
Says me. And I know women.
And you think I don't?
I think you know your right hand, which certainly does not qualify as a woman, and I think you know your left hand, which does not even qualify as a hand. And I think that porno from 1985 you have stuck in your VCR has little value except to prove that chest hair and big gold medallions went out of style for a reason. Run don't walk, my child.
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Miles, remember your basic biology. The wolf only mates with the she-wolf. The eagle does not mate with the sparrow, nor the praying mantis with the maggot. This school has an abundant supply of ordinary girls who you can date without any risk to yourself, provided you pack a Trojan Magnum in your holster.
You flatter me, sir.
I do not. The Magnum reference was necessary to complete the metaphor. Packing a magnum in a holster makes sense. A Trojan Magnum would probably fit you like a tent. Now, and if I may return to my original point,
the girl you pine for is above your pay grade and will lead you to ruin.
But she's into me, man; she told me so.
The issue, Grasshopper, is not whether she is into you but how many guys want to get into her. There is a depressingly finite number of hotter-than-hot women on this campus and if you date one you will never be able leave her side, even to get her a beer, without having to fight your way back through a bristling mass of rival erections. You'll never be able to rest easy or lower your guard, not for one minute. A mobster in Witness Protection will sweat less than you. You cover the back door and they'll be coming through the windows; you cover the windows and they'll come up through the basement where the mushrooms grow. And if she notices you hovering she'll think you're jealous and weak and she'll dump you for that. But if you trust her sooner of later she'll have one too many at the bar when you're at your night class or away for the weekend and some other stud will move in for the kill. Heed me well, young fellow m'lad, for I know of what I speak.
Of course Brother Knowitall proved to be right. I could never relax around Becky, I always felt like a spring wound so tight it would break, I was forever giving the death-stare to smirking would-be Lotharios who formed around her like horny lichens whenever she paused long enough to gather them, and so the whole thing crashed and burned with that sudden, spectacular fury that only Soviet nuclear plants and collegiate relationships can achieve. Which was why, when I wake up from my nap, heavy-headed and foul-mouthed,
I drink half a stale, lukewarm American Lite that is sitting on my nightstand – just to cleanse my palate, you understand – and then reach for the Mary Jane, which is what I have beside me in bed instead of Becky Branch. When I am appropriately numb I eat the congealed taco lying in my mini-refrigerator, pull on my wet boots and heavy coat, and stumble out into weather last seen in Blade Runner. Twenty minutes later, winded, wet and high, I take my seat in Introduction to Africa, though the way I'm dripping and shivering it might have been Introduction to Antarctica instead.
The class is held in one of those faceless, horribly bright rooms high in the Mac Building on the furthest edge of campus – indeed, if I had to walk any fucking further I would be in Africa. I wouldn't mind it so much if the class were interesting, but it is taught by Professor Akintola, who might be the most boring human being ever to glaze over an eyeball. Certainly he is the worst teacher. He marches officiously into class at precisely five-twenty, closes and locks the door, and proceeds, silently and with little disapproving flicks of his pencil-stub, to take the roll. As soon as it is complete he switches on the overhead projector, places his lecture notes upon it, and then covers all but the opening line of the notes with a sheet of construction paper. He then reads the that line aloud three times. When he has done this he shifts the paper a half-inch and exposes the next sentence, which he also reads three times. He does this continuously from five twenty-five until six-fifty, when the class mercifully ends. Today is no different. Oddly enough, in taking this class for a month I have developed a kind of auto-writing ability which allows me to ignore everything Professor Akintola says while simultaneously transcribing it accurately into my notebook. My first words today are:
Today we will be studying the four ethnolinguistic supergroups of Africa, which are Afro-Asiatic, Niger Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Other, as well as the fifteen subgroups which comprise these four supergroups.
While my hand jockeys across the rain-dampened paper my brain is performing other calculations.
There are three girls in my Africa class I want to sleep with, which I feel is a reasonable proportion considering the size of the class. The first sits in front of me, a redhead with a snubbed nose and a weak chin but a lovely body, and a glint of sexual mischief in her strangely maroon eyes. She is known as Jenny of the Baskervilles because, it is rumored, she howls like a hellhound when she hits orgasm, but I've yet to discover if this rumor is true. The second is on my right, a blonde who is the picture of classical beauty: crystal blue eyes, impossibly high cheekbones, bee-stung lips the color of rose petals, and a shimmering cascade of gold hair that pours over her lovely neck in a silken torrent. She's a haughty one and won't look at me, not even a glance, which seems fair enough, because surely she can detect in my green-eyed gaze the desire I have to see that magnificent head of hair flowing over my pillow. She is known simply, unimaginatively and accurately, as Golden Goddess. The last of the three is Mystery Girl Kathy, who sits on the opposite side of the room. I call her Mystery because her last name is just that; I'm not even sure she spells it with a k, it's just that a k seems to fit somehow. Kathy has a model's hairline, the kind with the little v-shaped dip in the center of the brow, and the hair itself is a lustrous brown with hints of other colors in its reaches; it reminds me of the wood in a very expensive dinner table, which has been lacquered and polished to such a gleam that it seems to have as much depth as water. Her skin is very white and smooth-looking and she has the heftiest set of breasts I've ever seen, at once enormous and curiously gravity-defying. I would very much like to get to know those breasts but Kathy and I have yet to exchange a word because who can get one in edgewise when Professor Akintola is talking?
After an hour about the ethnolinguic supergroups of Africa my hand is aching and my bladder fit to burst, because the Professor does not allow us to use the restrooms unless we raise our hands and ask permission, and I'll be goddamned if at the age of twenty-two I am going to ask anyone permission to take a piss; on top of this I'm no closer to knowing the pleasures of Kathy's bountiful bosom; furthermore my notebook is crammed with words like Bantoid, Sudanic and Malayo-Polynesian, which are meaningless to me and don't seem likely to land me a job if and when I ever graduate. At the same time as all of this I am possessed with a terrible thirst for beer. Surely no man dying the desert, no vampire freshly burst forth from the grave, no fish flopping on a dusty dock ever thirsted more than I am thirsting right now. I simply cannot stop fantasizing about a brimming pint glass of yellow lager, served so cold there are tiny fragments of ice glittering in the creamy head. I will need this medicament to wash down the hot wings which I am also fantasizing about along with Kathy's fulsome tits. I am wondering if I might pigeonhole Kathy after class and invite her to Murph's Study Hall for said repast, but when Akintola finally, reluctantly unlocks the door at six-fifty I realize if I don't get to the men's room I am going to burst, which would spoil my chances with Kathy and Jenny of the Baskervilles and the Golden Goddess, too. And of course when I finally emerge, she is long gone, because no one lingers after Introduction to Africa.
Well, if I can't have a woman I will go to the pub and act on my other fantasies. The rain is turning to sleet and it is cold as shit and pitch-black save for the glare of the lamps in the school parking lot but the beer and the wing sauce will warm me and now is the grand moment when the longest possible time exists before I have to return to Introduction to Africa – one hundred and twenty glorious hours. And perhaps the gods are with me after all, because when I push open the door into the dim and smokey air of Murphy's Study Hall, what to my wandering eye should appear but Kathy, standing there at the back bar? Our gazes meet and lock over her cigarette, and it doesn't even require any courage to go over and strike up a conversation because we have the bond of mutual suffering that is Professor Akintola. It's as if we the both of us opened the puzzle box in Hellraiser and know the secret agonies which lie within; except we do it twice a week from five-twenty to six-fifty. Fellow sufferer Kathy introduces me to a friend of hers, a fit but fleshy ash-blonde, with a ruddy face and red-painted fingernails, who is known as Jenny the Harp. When I ask her why she is called Jenny the Harp she says: Because my last name is Harp, and that is good enough for me.
Pints all around. I have forgotten my hunger for wings because I'm sandwiched between two girls who drink like sponges and don't mind standing close enough that we're hip-to-hip-to-hip, and you can't be hungry and horny at the same time. At least I can't. It's loud in the bar because in Axis, Thursday is the official-unofficial start to the weekend, and as usual some moron has put “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” on the juke at maximum volume, which ranks right up there with “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” and “Oh, What A Night” for songs I'd like to prohibit from public play on penalty of death; yet it doesn't matter that I can hardly hear a word, because we are in that peculiar rhythm where what is said is not anywhere near as important as the fact that we are staring into each other's eyes at a distance of about six inches while we say it. It is at times like these I find myself at my most witty and debonair.
Thump, thump, thump go the empty pint glasses on the beer-wet bar, and the glasses get refilled almost as fast as they go down. The girls are suitably impressed at how fast I command fresh libations when everyone else is waiting, dry-tongued, for their own refills. I inform them that the bartender is Brother Giganimus, who owes me $50 for a Redskins bet that went bad (for him) and in the hopes of sleazing his way out of payment he is plying us with alcohol instead. The girls say we fraternity boys are all right sometimes, maybe, tonight, yes I'd like another, and another, and one more, and one for luck, and one for the road, goddamn, and in the blink of an eye it's last call and the three of us stumble out to Kathy's little red car, glistening under its inch-thick coat of sleet. Our breath fogs the air and it must be about forty degrees and we can't feel it, not a goddamned thing. Jenny the Harp says, Into the garbage chute, flyboy, and grabs me by my ass and shoves me into the back seat of the car. Before I know it we're up in Wyndham Hills, because Kathy – I managed to glean this much by lip-reading while we were in the bar – is a townie who flunked out of some expensive college last year and has been forced by her parents to move home and attend Keystone State, just a stone's throw from her old front door and probably the absolute goddamn last place on earth she wants to be.
Because I have eaten nothing since noon but that half-fossilized taco and am now literally sloshing with beer at every sharp turn, I am so fuck-drunk that the movement of the car is like falling down a mine-shaft and landing on a roller-coaster. I keep willing myself not to puke because Kathy's car is very small and I must have a hundred ounces of lager in there and a good thirty more in my bladder and who knows where it will end if I start losing it now. They might throw me from the car while it is moving, and if the cops find my body by the roadside clad in a Keystone State fraternity jacket they will probably shrug and leave me for the rats. Besides, I have a reputation to uphold. Not that these girls really know me but I am trying to build a reputation with them and I doubt it will be a good one if they emerge from this car soaked by gallons of recycled brew.
Don't puke, I keep telling myself; don't puke don't puke don't puke oh crap I think I'm gonna puke. Kathy pull over I've gotta be sick. Nah, hold it like a man, she says, and Jenny the Harp laughs and says, Sick? You're gonna be sick? Men don't get sick, men barf.
The issue of whether men get sick or not is violently debated. So much so that I forget that I am sick and soon an expensive-looking house looms in the darkness; the three of us go inside and down into a spacious basement in which there is a fold-out couch and a very large television, about six feet wide and six feet deep. I am tripping over everything, including my own feet, and Kathy says, shhhhhhh, my mom is upstairs and asleep. So the three of us crawl under the covers of the fold-out bed with all our clothes on except our wet boots, which lay in a soldierly row at the foot of the bed, and Kathy puts on a movie. I'm lusting badly after Kathy but she seems indifferent to me now, and soon falls asleep on her side, facing away, which is probably just as well because ruddy-faced Jen is all over me. Evidently my rhetorical ability, placed in defense of a man's ability to get sick, has flipped her switch.
Her painted hands play my body like an instrument beneath my clothes but just like an instrument, when I'm played I make noise. And when I make too much of it Kathy stirs and rolls over and squints sleepily at us, either annoyed by the commotion or suspicious that it is taking place. Every time she slips back off into dreamland Jenny the Harp resumes her strumming. She smells very strongly of cigarettes and beer and chlorine, and I remember something about her being on the swim team but right now it doesn't seem very important. My jeans are down around my knees and the thing romance writers refer to as my manhood is buried in her fist, and that seems terribly important. Yet every time she's close to getting me where we both want me to go the harp that is me cries out, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, and Kathy stirs once more and says, sharply, What are you doing?
And before I can answer, Jenny says:
Nothing.
Except that she's got her hand around my manhood, which is a difficult thing to disguise even under the covers, especially when Kathy wrenches said sheets away to reveal everything, manhood, fist, bare knees, the whole guilty kaboodle, and shouts, in a voice so loud it hurts my eardrums,
BITCH.
Kathy's hand describes a sudden, violent ninety degree arc into Jenny's mouth, and the impact is as loud as a gunshot. In an instant the two girls are at each other like rabid wildcats, hitting and slapping and cursing with me in the middle, and never mind waking Kathy's mom. The whole thing might be funny if someone hadn't just rolled knee-first into my groin, which was not only exposed but in an unusually vulnerable condition. The knee upsets the delicate truce I had with my stomach and in an instant I'm fighting my way through a tangle if flying female limbs toward the basement bathroom. Unfortunately the pants around my ankles act as a sort of tripwire and I go down hard, face-first, onto a sheet of ice-cold linoleum tile. Behind me I hear an overlapping chorus of BITCH! SLUT! CUNT! delivered in drunken, rage-fueled sopranos fit to wake the dead, never mind Kathy's mom. A backward glance reveals that Kathy has gotten Jenny's baggy gray sweatshirt up over her head and is hockey-punching the bejeezus out of her. Now my head strikes doorway; this must be the bathroom. I wrench open the door and let fly. It's less that I am vomiting or barfing or being sick so much as I am turning inside out. Well, they say you don't buy beer, you rent it, and my hour is up. When at last the flood has exhausted itself I force open my eyes and, in the feeble gleam of the night-light, see that I have hit absolutely everything but the toilet.
I am glad that in my present position, on hands and knees, naked from waist to ankles, no longer erect but quite the opposite, I cannot see the mirror. I rest my forehead on the freezing porcelain toilet-rim and listen to my throbbing heartbeat over the sounds of the girls fighting until the sounds change: sobbing, running feet, a slamming door, a car-motor roaring to life, and then silence. Silence and silence and silence. I keep waiting for Kathy's mother, or the police, or the Pennsylvania National Guard, to come down the stairs and find me bare-assed on the floor with foam running out of my jaws, but nothing happens, and in time I manage to climb to my feet, pull up my pants, and rinse out my mouth with the Listerine resting on the edge of the sink. At least I hope it was Listerine; for all I can see through streaming eyes in five watts of light, it may have been a Massengill Disposable Douche.
The downstairs looks like a hand grenade went off in it but Kathy is back in bed, curled up beneath the sheets and blankets as if nothing has happened, snoring peaceably. I stand over her, swaying, tasting beer and vomit and what I pray is Listerine, and contemplate the ruin of my hopes for the evening. An hour ago I was thinking threesome, and now I'm thinking What will Kathy's mom do when she sees the bathroom? I wonder if I can slip out of the house and walk back to Nowhere Road before one of them wakes up and decides to hockey punch me. But it's three-thirty in the morning and I'm exhausted and drunk and I can hear the sleet hammering against the patio bricks through the sliding glass doors that open on the backyard, and I haven't the faintest idea where I am or how to get home. If I try and hoof it in this shit they'll find me by the roadside looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. So I do the only thing I can do. I crawl into bed beside her and fall asleep.
In the morning the sun finds us groggy and puffy-faced and foul-mouthed and we trudge in silence up the stairs, tugging at our clothing where it has left deep red marks on our flesh in the night, and we make coffee in the big spacious kitchen with its copper cookware catching the light the same alluring way Kathy's hair does, except that light is not alluring when you're hung over. Kathy's mother emerges, oyster-eyed, and Kathy explains quietly how the three of us had to crash here after a night of hard drinking and we all passed out in the basement, no big deal, nothing to see here. She doesn't say I caught Jenny the Harp playing with Miles' cock and beat the shit out of her, Mom. Kathy's mother nods and asks me if I want cream and sugar with my coffee but there is a look in her eyes which makes me deeply uncomfortable, as if what she's really saying is, I'll goddamned bet nothing happened, Christ a'mighty look at this boy, he reeks of beer and cigarette smoke and he's got the same look in his eye that your father had the night I got knocked up with you. And I think but don't say, Jumping Jesus, how many Manhattans did you have last night, Mystery Girl Kathy's Mom, that you didn't hear the riot taking place in your own basement? So there is a lot of things not being said in the beautiful kitchen, and I finish my coffee so fast I can no longer taste vomit or cigarette smoke on my tongue because I quickly develop second degree burns on my gums and tongue and the inside of my cheeks. Kathy slips into her fleece-lined acrylic pullover and fetches her keys and we slip into her little red car, away from mom's disapproving stare. Now that she's out of the house and driving she seems completely at ease. She lights up a cigarette and cracks the window to let out the smoke, and her voice is just a bit sultry when she speaks, like she's narrating a Victoria's Secret commercial. It seems strange that she's flirting with me now, after pummeling her good friend because she found said friend in possession of my penis, but I'm wise in the ways of women (never mind what Brother Knowitall says) and I know that they are all crazy, you can't make sense of what they say or do or when or why they say it or do it. Women, I've discovered, are like weather, and the best you can do with weather is dress for it.
We arrive at Nowhere Road in just a few minutes and now the prodigal sun is up and brilliant and reflects in every puddle on the street and sidewalk, and the air is marvelously clean and cold and crisp. No trace of the paper mill, which I'd still like to vaporize with an air strike on general principles. I realize with horror there are too many people on the streets for a Friday morning and that today is one of those god-damned community cleanup days, when Greek organizations try to make up for a year's worth of their members destroying the property values of the neighborhood by picking up trash for forty-five minutes. Every one of my fraternity brothers is milling around my house with sleepy resentful hung-over faces and when they see me driven up to the doorstep by a woman they grin and wink and elbow each other. Some of them whistle and shout things which they wouldn't say if their mothers were present. Kathy seems unfazed and slightly amused by this, probably because she thinks she can hockey punch any of them into groveling broken-toothed submission, which may be true. Kathy says says she looks forward to hanging out with me again sometime. I agree that I too look forward to such a thing, though maybe it would be best if we left Jenny the Harp behind, and Kathy smiles and says, Oh, Jenny, as if their vicious battle for control of my cock was nothing worth mentioning, much less worrying about. (I hope this is no reflection on said cock.) And now I find myself rather eager to return to Introduction to Africa next Tuesday, which has got to be the first time anyone has experienced that particular desire. Including Professor Akintola.
I climb out of the car and tell everyone around me to fuck off, they can stick their community service deep in their collective digestive tract, I'm going to have a shower and a nap while they pick cigarette butts and condom wrappers off these wretched streets, but when I try to run for the stairs I'm tackled into a heap of dead leaves and slush and then frog-marched down Nowhere Road so that I can commence forking over my share of payment for a year's worth of sins.
It is a typical Friday morning.
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Miles Watson
What the hell did you expect to find?
Aphrodite on a barstool by your side?
-- The Gin Blossoms
2.
I think I mentioned that it is always raining in Axis. Now strictly speaking this is not true; sometimes it is sleeting, sometimes it is snowing and on rare occasions it hails. We know the sun exists, but only braggarts and liars claim to have seen it over the town. It may be found in the west, over Gettysburg, or up north, near Harrisburg, or to the east in Philadelphia, or to the south, across the state line, in Baltimore; but it isn't here, and it rarely visits at any point after the middle of October or before the beginning of May. Perhaps it knows something we don't.
I mention this merely to set the scene for a particular Thursday. I awake at about four o'clock in the evening to the familiar sound of rain pummeling the tin roof beneath my window. The room, lighted by a single lamp with a crimson bulb, smells like stale beer and damp clothes and yesterday's marijuana. I don't smoke much marijuana but lately I've been hitting the pipe a little to ease the pain I feel over losing a girl named Becky Branch. When I met Becky I suspected she was out of my league: I was right. But if I touch the flame of the Zippo to the bowl and incinerate the crushed powdered weed within and suck the resultant smoke into my lungs, this fact does not sting so much. In fact I can now recall the conversation I had with Brother Knowitall about her a few weeks ago with some melancholy amusement:
Miles, you fool, stay away from that girl. She'll eat you for breakfast. She'll wreck you to pieces. She'll leave you for dead.
Says who?
Says me. And I know women.
And you think I don't?
I think you know your right hand, which certainly does not qualify as a woman, and I think you know your left hand, which does not even qualify as a hand. And I think that porno from 1985 you have stuck in your VCR has little value except to prove that chest hair and big gold medallions went out of style for a reason. Run don't walk, my child.
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Miles, remember your basic biology. The wolf only mates with the she-wolf. The eagle does not mate with the sparrow, nor the praying mantis with the maggot. This school has an abundant supply of ordinary girls who you can date without any risk to yourself, provided you pack a Trojan Magnum in your holster.
You flatter me, sir.
I do not. The Magnum reference was necessary to complete the metaphor. Packing a magnum in a holster makes sense. A Trojan Magnum would probably fit you like a tent. Now, and if I may return to my original point,
the girl you pine for is above your pay grade and will lead you to ruin.
But she's into me, man; she told me so.
The issue, Grasshopper, is not whether she is into you but how many guys want to get into her. There is a depressingly finite number of hotter-than-hot women on this campus and if you date one you will never be able leave her side, even to get her a beer, without having to fight your way back through a bristling mass of rival erections. You'll never be able to rest easy or lower your guard, not for one minute. A mobster in Witness Protection will sweat less than you. You cover the back door and they'll be coming through the windows; you cover the windows and they'll come up through the basement where the mushrooms grow. And if she notices you hovering she'll think you're jealous and weak and she'll dump you for that. But if you trust her sooner of later she'll have one too many at the bar when you're at your night class or away for the weekend and some other stud will move in for the kill. Heed me well, young fellow m'lad, for I know of what I speak.
Of course Brother Knowitall proved to be right. I could never relax around Becky, I always felt like a spring wound so tight it would break, I was forever giving the death-stare to smirking would-be Lotharios who formed around her like horny lichens whenever she paused long enough to gather them, and so the whole thing crashed and burned with that sudden, spectacular fury that only Soviet nuclear plants and collegiate relationships can achieve. Which was why, when I wake up from my nap, heavy-headed and foul-mouthed,
I drink half a stale, lukewarm American Lite that is sitting on my nightstand – just to cleanse my palate, you understand – and then reach for the Mary Jane, which is what I have beside me in bed instead of Becky Branch. When I am appropriately numb I eat the congealed taco lying in my mini-refrigerator, pull on my wet boots and heavy coat, and stumble out into weather last seen in Blade Runner. Twenty minutes later, winded, wet and high, I take my seat in Introduction to Africa, though the way I'm dripping and shivering it might have been Introduction to Antarctica instead.
The class is held in one of those faceless, horribly bright rooms high in the Mac Building on the furthest edge of campus – indeed, if I had to walk any fucking further I would be in Africa. I wouldn't mind it so much if the class were interesting, but it is taught by Professor Akintola, who might be the most boring human being ever to glaze over an eyeball. Certainly he is the worst teacher. He marches officiously into class at precisely five-twenty, closes and locks the door, and proceeds, silently and with little disapproving flicks of his pencil-stub, to take the roll. As soon as it is complete he switches on the overhead projector, places his lecture notes upon it, and then covers all but the opening line of the notes with a sheet of construction paper. He then reads the that line aloud three times. When he has done this he shifts the paper a half-inch and exposes the next sentence, which he also reads three times. He does this continuously from five twenty-five until six-fifty, when the class mercifully ends. Today is no different. Oddly enough, in taking this class for a month I have developed a kind of auto-writing ability which allows me to ignore everything Professor Akintola says while simultaneously transcribing it accurately into my notebook. My first words today are:
Today we will be studying the four ethnolinguistic supergroups of Africa, which are Afro-Asiatic, Niger Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Other, as well as the fifteen subgroups which comprise these four supergroups.
While my hand jockeys across the rain-dampened paper my brain is performing other calculations.
There are three girls in my Africa class I want to sleep with, which I feel is a reasonable proportion considering the size of the class. The first sits in front of me, a redhead with a snubbed nose and a weak chin but a lovely body, and a glint of sexual mischief in her strangely maroon eyes. She is known as Jenny of the Baskervilles because, it is rumored, she howls like a hellhound when she hits orgasm, but I've yet to discover if this rumor is true. The second is on my right, a blonde who is the picture of classical beauty: crystal blue eyes, impossibly high cheekbones, bee-stung lips the color of rose petals, and a shimmering cascade of gold hair that pours over her lovely neck in a silken torrent. She's a haughty one and won't look at me, not even a glance, which seems fair enough, because surely she can detect in my green-eyed gaze the desire I have to see that magnificent head of hair flowing over my pillow. She is known simply, unimaginatively and accurately, as Golden Goddess. The last of the three is Mystery Girl Kathy, who sits on the opposite side of the room. I call her Mystery because her last name is just that; I'm not even sure she spells it with a k, it's just that a k seems to fit somehow. Kathy has a model's hairline, the kind with the little v-shaped dip in the center of the brow, and the hair itself is a lustrous brown with hints of other colors in its reaches; it reminds me of the wood in a very expensive dinner table, which has been lacquered and polished to such a gleam that it seems to have as much depth as water. Her skin is very white and smooth-looking and she has the heftiest set of breasts I've ever seen, at once enormous and curiously gravity-defying. I would very much like to get to know those breasts but Kathy and I have yet to exchange a word because who can get one in edgewise when Professor Akintola is talking?
After an hour about the ethnolinguic supergroups of Africa my hand is aching and my bladder fit to burst, because the Professor does not allow us to use the restrooms unless we raise our hands and ask permission, and I'll be goddamned if at the age of twenty-two I am going to ask anyone permission to take a piss; on top of this I'm no closer to knowing the pleasures of Kathy's bountiful bosom; furthermore my notebook is crammed with words like Bantoid, Sudanic and Malayo-Polynesian, which are meaningless to me and don't seem likely to land me a job if and when I ever graduate. At the same time as all of this I am possessed with a terrible thirst for beer. Surely no man dying the desert, no vampire freshly burst forth from the grave, no fish flopping on a dusty dock ever thirsted more than I am thirsting right now. I simply cannot stop fantasizing about a brimming pint glass of yellow lager, served so cold there are tiny fragments of ice glittering in the creamy head. I will need this medicament to wash down the hot wings which I am also fantasizing about along with Kathy's fulsome tits. I am wondering if I might pigeonhole Kathy after class and invite her to Murph's Study Hall for said repast, but when Akintola finally, reluctantly unlocks the door at six-fifty I realize if I don't get to the men's room I am going to burst, which would spoil my chances with Kathy and Jenny of the Baskervilles and the Golden Goddess, too. And of course when I finally emerge, she is long gone, because no one lingers after Introduction to Africa.
Well, if I can't have a woman I will go to the pub and act on my other fantasies. The rain is turning to sleet and it is cold as shit and pitch-black save for the glare of the lamps in the school parking lot but the beer and the wing sauce will warm me and now is the grand moment when the longest possible time exists before I have to return to Introduction to Africa – one hundred and twenty glorious hours. And perhaps the gods are with me after all, because when I push open the door into the dim and smokey air of Murphy's Study Hall, what to my wandering eye should appear but Kathy, standing there at the back bar? Our gazes meet and lock over her cigarette, and it doesn't even require any courage to go over and strike up a conversation because we have the bond of mutual suffering that is Professor Akintola. It's as if we the both of us opened the puzzle box in Hellraiser and know the secret agonies which lie within; except we do it twice a week from five-twenty to six-fifty. Fellow sufferer Kathy introduces me to a friend of hers, a fit but fleshy ash-blonde, with a ruddy face and red-painted fingernails, who is known as Jenny the Harp. When I ask her why she is called Jenny the Harp she says: Because my last name is Harp, and that is good enough for me.
Pints all around. I have forgotten my hunger for wings because I'm sandwiched between two girls who drink like sponges and don't mind standing close enough that we're hip-to-hip-to-hip, and you can't be hungry and horny at the same time. At least I can't. It's loud in the bar because in Axis, Thursday is the official-unofficial start to the weekend, and as usual some moron has put “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” on the juke at maximum volume, which ranks right up there with “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” and “Oh, What A Night” for songs I'd like to prohibit from public play on penalty of death; yet it doesn't matter that I can hardly hear a word, because we are in that peculiar rhythm where what is said is not anywhere near as important as the fact that we are staring into each other's eyes at a distance of about six inches while we say it. It is at times like these I find myself at my most witty and debonair.
Thump, thump, thump go the empty pint glasses on the beer-wet bar, and the glasses get refilled almost as fast as they go down. The girls are suitably impressed at how fast I command fresh libations when everyone else is waiting, dry-tongued, for their own refills. I inform them that the bartender is Brother Giganimus, who owes me $50 for a Redskins bet that went bad (for him) and in the hopes of sleazing his way out of payment he is plying us with alcohol instead. The girls say we fraternity boys are all right sometimes, maybe, tonight, yes I'd like another, and another, and one more, and one for luck, and one for the road, goddamn, and in the blink of an eye it's last call and the three of us stumble out to Kathy's little red car, glistening under its inch-thick coat of sleet. Our breath fogs the air and it must be about forty degrees and we can't feel it, not a goddamned thing. Jenny the Harp says, Into the garbage chute, flyboy, and grabs me by my ass and shoves me into the back seat of the car. Before I know it we're up in Wyndham Hills, because Kathy – I managed to glean this much by lip-reading while we were in the bar – is a townie who flunked out of some expensive college last year and has been forced by her parents to move home and attend Keystone State, just a stone's throw from her old front door and probably the absolute goddamn last place on earth she wants to be.
Because I have eaten nothing since noon but that half-fossilized taco and am now literally sloshing with beer at every sharp turn, I am so fuck-drunk that the movement of the car is like falling down a mine-shaft and landing on a roller-coaster. I keep willing myself not to puke because Kathy's car is very small and I must have a hundred ounces of lager in there and a good thirty more in my bladder and who knows where it will end if I start losing it now. They might throw me from the car while it is moving, and if the cops find my body by the roadside clad in a Keystone State fraternity jacket they will probably shrug and leave me for the rats. Besides, I have a reputation to uphold. Not that these girls really know me but I am trying to build a reputation with them and I doubt it will be a good one if they emerge from this car soaked by gallons of recycled brew.
Don't puke, I keep telling myself; don't puke don't puke don't puke oh crap I think I'm gonna puke. Kathy pull over I've gotta be sick. Nah, hold it like a man, she says, and Jenny the Harp laughs and says, Sick? You're gonna be sick? Men don't get sick, men barf.
The issue of whether men get sick or not is violently debated. So much so that I forget that I am sick and soon an expensive-looking house looms in the darkness; the three of us go inside and down into a spacious basement in which there is a fold-out couch and a very large television, about six feet wide and six feet deep. I am tripping over everything, including my own feet, and Kathy says, shhhhhhh, my mom is upstairs and asleep. So the three of us crawl under the covers of the fold-out bed with all our clothes on except our wet boots, which lay in a soldierly row at the foot of the bed, and Kathy puts on a movie. I'm lusting badly after Kathy but she seems indifferent to me now, and soon falls asleep on her side, facing away, which is probably just as well because ruddy-faced Jen is all over me. Evidently my rhetorical ability, placed in defense of a man's ability to get sick, has flipped her switch.
Her painted hands play my body like an instrument beneath my clothes but just like an instrument, when I'm played I make noise. And when I make too much of it Kathy stirs and rolls over and squints sleepily at us, either annoyed by the commotion or suspicious that it is taking place. Every time she slips back off into dreamland Jenny the Harp resumes her strumming. She smells very strongly of cigarettes and beer and chlorine, and I remember something about her being on the swim team but right now it doesn't seem very important. My jeans are down around my knees and the thing romance writers refer to as my manhood is buried in her fist, and that seems terribly important. Yet every time she's close to getting me where we both want me to go the harp that is me cries out, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, and Kathy stirs once more and says, sharply, What are you doing?
And before I can answer, Jenny says:
Nothing.
Except that she's got her hand around my manhood, which is a difficult thing to disguise even under the covers, especially when Kathy wrenches said sheets away to reveal everything, manhood, fist, bare knees, the whole guilty kaboodle, and shouts, in a voice so loud it hurts my eardrums,
BITCH.
Kathy's hand describes a sudden, violent ninety degree arc into Jenny's mouth, and the impact is as loud as a gunshot. In an instant the two girls are at each other like rabid wildcats, hitting and slapping and cursing with me in the middle, and never mind waking Kathy's mom. The whole thing might be funny if someone hadn't just rolled knee-first into my groin, which was not only exposed but in an unusually vulnerable condition. The knee upsets the delicate truce I had with my stomach and in an instant I'm fighting my way through a tangle if flying female limbs toward the basement bathroom. Unfortunately the pants around my ankles act as a sort of tripwire and I go down hard, face-first, onto a sheet of ice-cold linoleum tile. Behind me I hear an overlapping chorus of BITCH! SLUT! CUNT! delivered in drunken, rage-fueled sopranos fit to wake the dead, never mind Kathy's mom. A backward glance reveals that Kathy has gotten Jenny's baggy gray sweatshirt up over her head and is hockey-punching the bejeezus out of her. Now my head strikes doorway; this must be the bathroom. I wrench open the door and let fly. It's less that I am vomiting or barfing or being sick so much as I am turning inside out. Well, they say you don't buy beer, you rent it, and my hour is up. When at last the flood has exhausted itself I force open my eyes and, in the feeble gleam of the night-light, see that I have hit absolutely everything but the toilet.
I am glad that in my present position, on hands and knees, naked from waist to ankles, no longer erect but quite the opposite, I cannot see the mirror. I rest my forehead on the freezing porcelain toilet-rim and listen to my throbbing heartbeat over the sounds of the girls fighting until the sounds change: sobbing, running feet, a slamming door, a car-motor roaring to life, and then silence. Silence and silence and silence. I keep waiting for Kathy's mother, or the police, or the Pennsylvania National Guard, to come down the stairs and find me bare-assed on the floor with foam running out of my jaws, but nothing happens, and in time I manage to climb to my feet, pull up my pants, and rinse out my mouth with the Listerine resting on the edge of the sink. At least I hope it was Listerine; for all I can see through streaming eyes in five watts of light, it may have been a Massengill Disposable Douche.
The downstairs looks like a hand grenade went off in it but Kathy is back in bed, curled up beneath the sheets and blankets as if nothing has happened, snoring peaceably. I stand over her, swaying, tasting beer and vomit and what I pray is Listerine, and contemplate the ruin of my hopes for the evening. An hour ago I was thinking threesome, and now I'm thinking What will Kathy's mom do when she sees the bathroom? I wonder if I can slip out of the house and walk back to Nowhere Road before one of them wakes up and decides to hockey punch me. But it's three-thirty in the morning and I'm exhausted and drunk and I can hear the sleet hammering against the patio bricks through the sliding glass doors that open on the backyard, and I haven't the faintest idea where I am or how to get home. If I try and hoof it in this shit they'll find me by the roadside looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. So I do the only thing I can do. I crawl into bed beside her and fall asleep.
In the morning the sun finds us groggy and puffy-faced and foul-mouthed and we trudge in silence up the stairs, tugging at our clothing where it has left deep red marks on our flesh in the night, and we make coffee in the big spacious kitchen with its copper cookware catching the light the same alluring way Kathy's hair does, except that light is not alluring when you're hung over. Kathy's mother emerges, oyster-eyed, and Kathy explains quietly how the three of us had to crash here after a night of hard drinking and we all passed out in the basement, no big deal, nothing to see here. She doesn't say I caught Jenny the Harp playing with Miles' cock and beat the shit out of her, Mom. Kathy's mother nods and asks me if I want cream and sugar with my coffee but there is a look in her eyes which makes me deeply uncomfortable, as if what she's really saying is, I'll goddamned bet nothing happened, Christ a'mighty look at this boy, he reeks of beer and cigarette smoke and he's got the same look in his eye that your father had the night I got knocked up with you. And I think but don't say, Jumping Jesus, how many Manhattans did you have last night, Mystery Girl Kathy's Mom, that you didn't hear the riot taking place in your own basement? So there is a lot of things not being said in the beautiful kitchen, and I finish my coffee so fast I can no longer taste vomit or cigarette smoke on my tongue because I quickly develop second degree burns on my gums and tongue and the inside of my cheeks. Kathy slips into her fleece-lined acrylic pullover and fetches her keys and we slip into her little red car, away from mom's disapproving stare. Now that she's out of the house and driving she seems completely at ease. She lights up a cigarette and cracks the window to let out the smoke, and her voice is just a bit sultry when she speaks, like she's narrating a Victoria's Secret commercial. It seems strange that she's flirting with me now, after pummeling her good friend because she found said friend in possession of my penis, but I'm wise in the ways of women (never mind what Brother Knowitall says) and I know that they are all crazy, you can't make sense of what they say or do or when or why they say it or do it. Women, I've discovered, are like weather, and the best you can do with weather is dress for it.
We arrive at Nowhere Road in just a few minutes and now the prodigal sun is up and brilliant and reflects in every puddle on the street and sidewalk, and the air is marvelously clean and cold and crisp. No trace of the paper mill, which I'd still like to vaporize with an air strike on general principles. I realize with horror there are too many people on the streets for a Friday morning and that today is one of those god-damned community cleanup days, when Greek organizations try to make up for a year's worth of their members destroying the property values of the neighborhood by picking up trash for forty-five minutes. Every one of my fraternity brothers is milling around my house with sleepy resentful hung-over faces and when they see me driven up to the doorstep by a woman they grin and wink and elbow each other. Some of them whistle and shout things which they wouldn't say if their mothers were present. Kathy seems unfazed and slightly amused by this, probably because she thinks she can hockey punch any of them into groveling broken-toothed submission, which may be true. Kathy says says she looks forward to hanging out with me again sometime. I agree that I too look forward to such a thing, though maybe it would be best if we left Jenny the Harp behind, and Kathy smiles and says, Oh, Jenny, as if their vicious battle for control of my cock was nothing worth mentioning, much less worrying about. (I hope this is no reflection on said cock.) And now I find myself rather eager to return to Introduction to Africa next Tuesday, which has got to be the first time anyone has experienced that particular desire. Including Professor Akintola.
I climb out of the car and tell everyone around me to fuck off, they can stick their community service deep in their collective digestive tract, I'm going to have a shower and a nap while they pick cigarette butts and condom wrappers off these wretched streets, but when I try to run for the stairs I'm tackled into a heap of dead leaves and slush and then frog-marched down Nowhere Road so that I can commence forking over my share of payment for a year's worth of sins.
It is a typical Friday morning.
April 23, 2017
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
A man shouldn't write what he doesn't know. So said Ernest Hemingway. What he might have added is that a man shouldn't write what he does know if he's not ready to write about it. That is to say, if he hasn't come to a place of sufficient emotional distance where he can write about it clearly and honestly, without giving in to the desire to rewrite history. Because let's face it: when composing a memoir, you face the constant temptation of making yourself look better, or at least less awful, than you really were, but contrary to popular opinion, this tendency grows weaker rather than stronger with the passage of time. Now that I have been dragged, kicking and screaming (and whimpering) into middle age, I find myself wanting to do what numerous people have been asking me to do for years, and that is write about my college experiences. Which I know so very well.
As George Orwell once wrote, everyone has a particular time and place in which their habits and outlook on life are formed forever. Certainly my childhood and teenage years had massive impact, as they do on everyone; just as certainly the years I spent in law enforcement, and then the ones I spent recuperating from same. And the decade I've lived in Los Angeles has certainly left its mark, as well as its scars, on my personality, psyche and soul. But college was different. I did not merely get older, or mature, or regress, or transition from boyhood to manhood. In college I became me. For better and for worse.
When people get to know me now, there is an inevitable moment when they will say -- sometimes with a smile of admiration, sometimes with a look of horror or disgust -- "What happened to you to make you like this?" The usual reply, a quotation from Hannibal Lecter, is, "Nothing happened to me. I happened." But that is untrue. A lot happened to me, and a great deal of it is difficult to believe unless you went to my alma mater in the 1980s or 1990s and saw it for yourself. And indeed, I have no intention of trying to convince anyone that the things that happened to me, and that I saw, during those years actually transpired. What follows is not written for the doubters and disbelievers, the ones who smirk and say, "Yeah, sure," because their own collegiate experience was tepid and safe by comparison. It's written for the people who were actually there as young men and women, but are now reaching middle age and beginning to feel an itch to remember the sights, the sounds, the peculiar feel of that terrible yet fascinating place, in that particular moment in time when we were both adults and children simultaneously. When we were both blundering forward and dragging back, and doing so noisily, painfully, and drunk off our collective ass.
I had originally intended to sit down and write a three-volume "coming of age" series of novels about my generation, who went to school in a wild-west atmosphere of silliness and debauchery and graduated in an age of unparalleled prosperity and peace, only to slam face-first into 9/11 and all the horrors which came after. Recent events in my personal life have compelled me to get cracking much earlier than I'd intended and to the detriment of other projects I am working on. But before I do, I wanted to test the waters and see if the interest for such material is there, if the enormities of people who have asked me "to write something about our schooldays" over the years really wanted what they were asking for. So here it is. The opening chapter of the first book, raw and unpolished, still hot to the touch. For reasons which will soon become pathetically obvious I have changed the names and the descriptions of the people involved, and set the doings in the fictional town of Axis, at the fictional school called Keystone State University. In other words, and with the exception of myself, I have changed everything that could possibly lead to an identification of anyone involved -- unless you were there, of course, in which case you will speculate endlessly whether I am talking about you. (I'll save you the trouble of wondering. I am.)
If there is sufficient reaction to this post, the next chapter, considerably longer, will appear next week. This is really more of a prologue, an exercise in setting-the-stage. If such interest fails to materialize, consider it an experiment that didn't work. Much like the author himself.
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Miles Watson
It's a nowhere road
It's a nowhere road
No matter where it goes
It's a nowhere road
It's a nowhere road and I'm tired
It's a nowhere job and I'm fired
It don't matter what they say
You can't get there going this way
-- Fastball
“Nowhere Road”
1.
On Nowhere Road, called by some Jackson Street, there is a particular house which stands in spite of everything. It stands in spite. It has survived blizzards and floods, infestation by vermin, the privations wrought by world wars and the desolating effects of time – a great deal of time, by American standards, for the house is 112 years old. For a large portion of those years, longer than anyone can remember, in fact, it has been rented out exclusively to college students, who in their own way are very much like vermin, at least as far as their effect on property values. It is because of them that the road is called Nowhere, because, let's face it, that is precisely where most of them seem to be going.
If asked, the students would insist that Nowhere is not where they are going but where they are. That the town of Axis, in which Keystone State University is located, is an absolute shithole, forsaken by man and cursed by each and every one of the gods; and that it's a great pity that Nazis, Reds, Islamic terrorists or whoever we're fighting this week did not locate and destroy it when they had the chance. Yes, many a student of K.S.U. has stood sweating in a stone-walled party basement, inhaling cigarette smoke and watching asbestos drift down like snow into beer which is mostly foam, and made remarks like:
Christ I wish Adolf or Osama or somebody had laid waste to this place before I ever saw it.
To which someone would reply:
You shouldn't talk like that, Miles.
To which they would reply:
Admit it, you want to see it fucking destroyed too. Goddamn motherless shithole. I mean, go outside and what do you see? A row of guys pissing on the fence. Girls squatting in the bushes. Puke an inch deep in the alley. Garbage everywhere. Broken crack pipes and spent shell casings in the gutters. Fights in the middle of the streets. Welfare queens on every porch. The houses are all a piece of shit, the downtown looks like Dresden in 1945, and it's worth your life to walk through Penn Park after six if you're white. I did it the other night and I thought the brothas were going to lynch me. Worth your life and no mistake.
Well, it's worth your life to go to the East Side of town if you're black at any time of day. Half the town is in the fucking Klan. Every truck has a bumper sticker that says “I Have A Dream” and has a picture of the White House with a Confederate Flag flying over it. So there.
All right, so it's an equal opportunity shithole. If you're white the blacks hate you and if you're black the whites hate you and if you're neither everybody hates you. This only furthers my argument that the city should be destroyed. The smell of the paper mill alone is a crime against nature. Never mind giving all our bombs to the Israelis, we ought to save a missile for that fucking place. When I was in Jersey I drove by a hog-rendering plant down the road and it smelled like fucking Chanel No. 5 compared to that paper mill. I can practically feel the tumors growing in my lungs.
That's the cigarette you're smoking. Try smoking one with a fucking filter, Watson.
I never smoked anything before I came here. I didn't even drink. It's this place. This place fucks up everything it touches. It's like Midas but in reverse.
Right, it's not you smoking and drinking of your own free will, it's the town making you do it.
Look, if you were possessed by a demon, they would burn you at the stake for your own good. It's the same with this town. Fire and fire alone will purify it.
And what will purify you, Miles?
After five years in this motherless shithole? Nothing. Now get me another beer.
This conversation, in some form or other, is repeated almost every day in Axis, at least among the collegiate population, much of which lives off campus on Nowhere Road. Certainly there are variations on this theme uttered everywhere on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, when the beer flows even more freely from the taps during the rest of the week; but it is not everywhere with which we are concerned, nor everyone. It is Nowhere. And in particular it is the domicile I mentioned above, Nowhere House, because it is in Nowhere House that I lived. And in a sense never left.
Nowhere House is three stories tall and solidly built. It has a flat tin-sheeted roof which lies beneath its uppermost windows, a wooden balcony that sways in every storm, and a small, discouraged-looking yard with an ancient barbeque pit so crammed with old bones it looks like the floor of an abandoned slaughterhouse. Like every house on Nowhere Road it has been subdivided into “apartments” which are in fact single rooms of appalling squalor, and which sit atop an enormous basement of rough-walled stone jammed with the detritus of many generations of occupants. If you had the time and were so inclined, you could find among all those half-rotted cardboard boxes pulp magazines from the 1950s, broken exercise equipment, suitcases stuffed with moth-eaten clothing, wormy old pieces of furniture, broken mirrors and moisture-bloated family albums full of yellowed photographs. It is notable that none of this shit is ever removed; it just sits there year after year, decade after decade, gathering dust and mold and cobwebs and providing affordable housing for the rats. Occasionally it is disturbed (kicked, overturned, rummaged-through, even smashed by baseball bats wielded by alcohol-fueled drunks) but it is never removed, and more junk accumulates over time, until at last, in some of the very oldest houses, you can't turn around in the basement anymore. This is what is known as a collegiate problem, and a collegiate problem demands a collegiate solution. Which is to lock the door at the top of the stairs and leave the whole fucking shebang it in permanent darkness, like an Egyptian tomb, with the exception that all the treasure inside is worthless. Nowhere House is not quite at that stage yet; you can still hold a party there, which is to say you can jam fifty drunks and a keg among the trash, rig a radio to one of the shelves, and pretend to have fun until the police arrive. In wet weather – and it is always raining in Axis, or it least it seems that way – little white mushrooms grow in the long, straggling cracks in the cement floor, looking rather like the pimples around a teenagers' mouth. These mushrooms, unlike the junk, are never disturbed, and not merely because they are poisonous: they are considered to have squatter's rights. Indeed, there is a certain backhanded affection for them. Once, when I was pledging my fraternity, I got in trouble with the pledge-master for being out in the bars after curfew, and was dragged down into a basement of his house and locked in for the night. (Like the junk.) I dug the Zippo from my pocket and, amidst the flickering light and shifting shadows, had a conversation with the mushrooms, which is to say I spoke to them, though they did not condescend to respond. I can't remember most of what I said, on account of drunkenness, but I do remember the last words I slurred before all those mason jars of Rolling Rock sank me into sleep:
Just as Sauron left Shelob to her own devices in the mountains of Ephel Dúath on the borders of Mordor , verily – hic! – so I leave you undisturbed, for your evil predates mine.
At that time I frequently slogged past Nowhere House without realizing it was my destiny to live there. Sometimes, late at night, I would see a light burning in the third-story window that overlooked the intersection of Jackson and Manor Streets, and I was reminded of that lyric from R.E.O. Speedwagon's “Can't Fight This Feeling”:
And even as I wander
I'm keeping you in sight
You're a candle in the window
On a cold, dark winter's night
And I'm getting closer than I ever thought I might
But I did not realize the full irony of the last line. Did not realize that one day I would be living in that house, on that floor, and that the candle in the window was and would be a thirty-watt bulb in the ceiling of my landing that never, ever needed to be replaced (for all I know the same fucking bulb is still screwed into the same socket, always burning and never burning out, immortal and everlasting, amen). One day arrived, however, as it always does, and it became my home, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Junk in the basement, cracks in the floor, the mushrooms of Mordor – all of it became the common property of myself and my six roommates. Had I reflected further upon the matter I might have realized that we had also become the common property of the house, but if consequences had entered into our heads we none of us would have elected to live in a place called Nowhere House, on a street called Nowhere Road.
As George Orwell once wrote, everyone has a particular time and place in which their habits and outlook on life are formed forever. Certainly my childhood and teenage years had massive impact, as they do on everyone; just as certainly the years I spent in law enforcement, and then the ones I spent recuperating from same. And the decade I've lived in Los Angeles has certainly left its mark, as well as its scars, on my personality, psyche and soul. But college was different. I did not merely get older, or mature, or regress, or transition from boyhood to manhood. In college I became me. For better and for worse.
When people get to know me now, there is an inevitable moment when they will say -- sometimes with a smile of admiration, sometimes with a look of horror or disgust -- "What happened to you to make you like this?" The usual reply, a quotation from Hannibal Lecter, is, "Nothing happened to me. I happened." But that is untrue. A lot happened to me, and a great deal of it is difficult to believe unless you went to my alma mater in the 1980s or 1990s and saw it for yourself. And indeed, I have no intention of trying to convince anyone that the things that happened to me, and that I saw, during those years actually transpired. What follows is not written for the doubters and disbelievers, the ones who smirk and say, "Yeah, sure," because their own collegiate experience was tepid and safe by comparison. It's written for the people who were actually there as young men and women, but are now reaching middle age and beginning to feel an itch to remember the sights, the sounds, the peculiar feel of that terrible yet fascinating place, in that particular moment in time when we were both adults and children simultaneously. When we were both blundering forward and dragging back, and doing so noisily, painfully, and drunk off our collective ass.
I had originally intended to sit down and write a three-volume "coming of age" series of novels about my generation, who went to school in a wild-west atmosphere of silliness and debauchery and graduated in an age of unparalleled prosperity and peace, only to slam face-first into 9/11 and all the horrors which came after. Recent events in my personal life have compelled me to get cracking much earlier than I'd intended and to the detriment of other projects I am working on. But before I do, I wanted to test the waters and see if the interest for such material is there, if the enormities of people who have asked me "to write something about our schooldays" over the years really wanted what they were asking for. So here it is. The opening chapter of the first book, raw and unpolished, still hot to the touch. For reasons which will soon become pathetically obvious I have changed the names and the descriptions of the people involved, and set the doings in the fictional town of Axis, at the fictional school called Keystone State University. In other words, and with the exception of myself, I have changed everything that could possibly lead to an identification of anyone involved -- unless you were there, of course, in which case you will speculate endlessly whether I am talking about you. (I'll save you the trouble of wondering. I am.)
If there is sufficient reaction to this post, the next chapter, considerably longer, will appear next week. This is really more of a prologue, an exercise in setting-the-stage. If such interest fails to materialize, consider it an experiment that didn't work. Much like the author himself.
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Miles Watson
It's a nowhere road
It's a nowhere road
No matter where it goes
It's a nowhere road
It's a nowhere road and I'm tired
It's a nowhere job and I'm fired
It don't matter what they say
You can't get there going this way
-- Fastball
“Nowhere Road”
1.
On Nowhere Road, called by some Jackson Street, there is a particular house which stands in spite of everything. It stands in spite. It has survived blizzards and floods, infestation by vermin, the privations wrought by world wars and the desolating effects of time – a great deal of time, by American standards, for the house is 112 years old. For a large portion of those years, longer than anyone can remember, in fact, it has been rented out exclusively to college students, who in their own way are very much like vermin, at least as far as their effect on property values. It is because of them that the road is called Nowhere, because, let's face it, that is precisely where most of them seem to be going.
If asked, the students would insist that Nowhere is not where they are going but where they are. That the town of Axis, in which Keystone State University is located, is an absolute shithole, forsaken by man and cursed by each and every one of the gods; and that it's a great pity that Nazis, Reds, Islamic terrorists or whoever we're fighting this week did not locate and destroy it when they had the chance. Yes, many a student of K.S.U. has stood sweating in a stone-walled party basement, inhaling cigarette smoke and watching asbestos drift down like snow into beer which is mostly foam, and made remarks like:
Christ I wish Adolf or Osama or somebody had laid waste to this place before I ever saw it.
To which someone would reply:
You shouldn't talk like that, Miles.
To which they would reply:
Admit it, you want to see it fucking destroyed too. Goddamn motherless shithole. I mean, go outside and what do you see? A row of guys pissing on the fence. Girls squatting in the bushes. Puke an inch deep in the alley. Garbage everywhere. Broken crack pipes and spent shell casings in the gutters. Fights in the middle of the streets. Welfare queens on every porch. The houses are all a piece of shit, the downtown looks like Dresden in 1945, and it's worth your life to walk through Penn Park after six if you're white. I did it the other night and I thought the brothas were going to lynch me. Worth your life and no mistake.
Well, it's worth your life to go to the East Side of town if you're black at any time of day. Half the town is in the fucking Klan. Every truck has a bumper sticker that says “I Have A Dream” and has a picture of the White House with a Confederate Flag flying over it. So there.
All right, so it's an equal opportunity shithole. If you're white the blacks hate you and if you're black the whites hate you and if you're neither everybody hates you. This only furthers my argument that the city should be destroyed. The smell of the paper mill alone is a crime against nature. Never mind giving all our bombs to the Israelis, we ought to save a missile for that fucking place. When I was in Jersey I drove by a hog-rendering plant down the road and it smelled like fucking Chanel No. 5 compared to that paper mill. I can practically feel the tumors growing in my lungs.
That's the cigarette you're smoking. Try smoking one with a fucking filter, Watson.
I never smoked anything before I came here. I didn't even drink. It's this place. This place fucks up everything it touches. It's like Midas but in reverse.
Right, it's not you smoking and drinking of your own free will, it's the town making you do it.
Look, if you were possessed by a demon, they would burn you at the stake for your own good. It's the same with this town. Fire and fire alone will purify it.
And what will purify you, Miles?
After five years in this motherless shithole? Nothing. Now get me another beer.
This conversation, in some form or other, is repeated almost every day in Axis, at least among the collegiate population, much of which lives off campus on Nowhere Road. Certainly there are variations on this theme uttered everywhere on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, when the beer flows even more freely from the taps during the rest of the week; but it is not everywhere with which we are concerned, nor everyone. It is Nowhere. And in particular it is the domicile I mentioned above, Nowhere House, because it is in Nowhere House that I lived. And in a sense never left.
Nowhere House is three stories tall and solidly built. It has a flat tin-sheeted roof which lies beneath its uppermost windows, a wooden balcony that sways in every storm, and a small, discouraged-looking yard with an ancient barbeque pit so crammed with old bones it looks like the floor of an abandoned slaughterhouse. Like every house on Nowhere Road it has been subdivided into “apartments” which are in fact single rooms of appalling squalor, and which sit atop an enormous basement of rough-walled stone jammed with the detritus of many generations of occupants. If you had the time and were so inclined, you could find among all those half-rotted cardboard boxes pulp magazines from the 1950s, broken exercise equipment, suitcases stuffed with moth-eaten clothing, wormy old pieces of furniture, broken mirrors and moisture-bloated family albums full of yellowed photographs. It is notable that none of this shit is ever removed; it just sits there year after year, decade after decade, gathering dust and mold and cobwebs and providing affordable housing for the rats. Occasionally it is disturbed (kicked, overturned, rummaged-through, even smashed by baseball bats wielded by alcohol-fueled drunks) but it is never removed, and more junk accumulates over time, until at last, in some of the very oldest houses, you can't turn around in the basement anymore. This is what is known as a collegiate problem, and a collegiate problem demands a collegiate solution. Which is to lock the door at the top of the stairs and leave the whole fucking shebang it in permanent darkness, like an Egyptian tomb, with the exception that all the treasure inside is worthless. Nowhere House is not quite at that stage yet; you can still hold a party there, which is to say you can jam fifty drunks and a keg among the trash, rig a radio to one of the shelves, and pretend to have fun until the police arrive. In wet weather – and it is always raining in Axis, or it least it seems that way – little white mushrooms grow in the long, straggling cracks in the cement floor, looking rather like the pimples around a teenagers' mouth. These mushrooms, unlike the junk, are never disturbed, and not merely because they are poisonous: they are considered to have squatter's rights. Indeed, there is a certain backhanded affection for them. Once, when I was pledging my fraternity, I got in trouble with the pledge-master for being out in the bars after curfew, and was dragged down into a basement of his house and locked in for the night. (Like the junk.) I dug the Zippo from my pocket and, amidst the flickering light and shifting shadows, had a conversation with the mushrooms, which is to say I spoke to them, though they did not condescend to respond. I can't remember most of what I said, on account of drunkenness, but I do remember the last words I slurred before all those mason jars of Rolling Rock sank me into sleep:
Just as Sauron left Shelob to her own devices in the mountains of Ephel Dúath on the borders of Mordor , verily – hic! – so I leave you undisturbed, for your evil predates mine.
At that time I frequently slogged past Nowhere House without realizing it was my destiny to live there. Sometimes, late at night, I would see a light burning in the third-story window that overlooked the intersection of Jackson and Manor Streets, and I was reminded of that lyric from R.E.O. Speedwagon's “Can't Fight This Feeling”:
And even as I wander
I'm keeping you in sight
You're a candle in the window
On a cold, dark winter's night
And I'm getting closer than I ever thought I might
But I did not realize the full irony of the last line. Did not realize that one day I would be living in that house, on that floor, and that the candle in the window was and would be a thirty-watt bulb in the ceiling of my landing that never, ever needed to be replaced (for all I know the same fucking bulb is still screwed into the same socket, always burning and never burning out, immortal and everlasting, amen). One day arrived, however, as it always does, and it became my home, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Junk in the basement, cracks in the floor, the mushrooms of Mordor – all of it became the common property of myself and my six roommates. Had I reflected further upon the matter I might have realized that we had also become the common property of the house, but if consequences had entered into our heads we none of us would have elected to live in a place called Nowhere House, on a street called Nowhere Road.
April 10, 2017
CGI and Race
Once you understand the system out here, what's amazes you is not that so many bad movies get made. It's that any good movies get made at all.
– Cory Watson
Two days ago I was making the 6,200 mile journey from London to Los Angeles via Dreamliner. The actual distance between the two cities is 5,437 miles, but for reasons unknown to me the chosen fight path, over Canada, Greenland and Iceland, adds a solid 800 miles to the trip. The result is a dull ten to twelve hours in an airplane seat, wedged between two Cockneys (on my right) and a gaggle of Germans whose rapid-fire banter told me I ought to have paid more attention when I was studying their language in high school. To pass the seemingly interminable journey, I read, played video games on my laptop, and watched no less than four movies, including Roland Emmerich's Independence Day: Resurgence, the original Matrix, and James Cameron's Aliens. It is the first film, a recent sequel to the 1997 Roland Emmerich blockbuster, which got me thinking about two seemingly unconnected topics: computer generated imagery, and the issue of race, sex and ethnicity in Hollywood.
Hollywood, where I have lived and worked for ten years, is no stranger to controversies regarding ethnicity and skin color, going all the way back to Birth of a Nation, which made its debut in theaters 102 years ago. And indeed, in the last few decades there has been a concerted effort to prise open the lock which the white Caucasian has traditionally maintained on the film industry, particularly in terms of casting, but also in terms of production, direction, screenwriting, and so forth. The rise of such non-white stars as Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, and Viola Davis, and of directors such as Ang Lee, M. Night Shamalayn, Jordan Peele and Kathryn Bigelow, are all indicative of a tectonic shift in the external appearance of American film and the industry which drives it. The very existence of a black film mogul like Tyler Perry would have, just a few short years ago, been almost unthinkable outside of, well, a Hollywood movie, and by Hollywood standards, the 2017 Oscars were a veritable orgy of diversity in regards to both nominations and wins. At the same time, no one would argue with a straight face that Hollywood has changed internally in regards to how it views the role of so-called “minorities” or people of color in film. According to a piece in the Los Angeles Times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people who hand out Oscar nominations and decide who goes home with the gold statue, is 94% white and 77% male. Non-white and female directors remain pathetically infrequent in terms of overall numbers. And in a recent article by Vulture, “people of color directed less than ten percent of the last decade's top-grossing films,” while the Hollywood Reporter discovered that women directed only seven percent of the top 250 movies of 2016, a decline of two percent from 2015. This year there has been fresh controversy about the process of “whitewashing,” or casting white people in roles which were originally intended for non-whites. The casting choices for films like Ghost in the Shell, The Great Wall, and Doctor Strange, just to name a few, is at least evidence for argument that many of Hollywood's recent changes toward diversity are, if you will pardon the pun, no more than skin deep.
When I watched Independence Day: Resurgence, my initial reaction, aside from a feeling that the movie itself was a real piece of crap, was that the writers (or possibly the casting director) had bent over backwards to make the film a “full spectrum” project. In what can only be described as a huge cast are four women cast in “strong” roles – the President of the United States, a heroic doctor, and two fighter pilots – three Asians (a general and fighter pilot among them), and three blacks, including a squadron commander and a doctor. And among the white folks, no less than three are Jewish. On the surface (I use the word specifically), it would seem that this movie, abysmal as it was, is proof positive that the times, they are a changin'; that honest efforts are being made to reflect the fact that America, like the world itself, is not composed entirely of people of European ancestry. So the question has to be asked: why didn't it work? Why does the diversity of casting in Independence Day feel as inauthentic as a wooden nickel or a three dollar bill? Why do the people of color feel like tokens put in place to satisfy a racial quota, and the strong female characters like, well, “strong female characters” rather than genuine human beings?
At the risk of making a clumsy segue, let me take a moment to talk about one of the reasons why Independence Day: Resurgence fails as a film. There are a number of severe problems with it, including the basic story, the script, the lead character (Liam Helmsworth doing his best to imitate both Chris Pratt and Chris Pine and failing at both), the overly fractured narrative, etc. and so on; but what turned me off as much as anything else was the excessive use of computer generated imagery, or CGI. Obviously, a story about an alien ship the size of North America on a mission to destroy Earth was going to rely very heavily on digitally-generated visual effects, but it was obvious to me as I watched that Hollywood has yet to find a way to integrate even the most advanced CGI into a frame crowded with flesh-and-blood human beings. The human eye remains far too sophisticated a piece of biomechanical equipment to be deceived into believing that all those pixelated tidal waves, nuclear explosions, toppling buildings, zooming spaceships and so forth are actually real. As a result, all the mayhem I was witnessing – cities being annihilated, dogfights wheeling over the sky, a huge monster battling U.S. Air Force fighters in the Nevada desert – left me as bored as if I were watching someone else play a particularly noisy and mindless video game. Despite a huge budget of $150 million, the movie felt, if you will forgive the vulgarism, fake as fuck.
On the other hand, Aliens, a much older (1986) film using far more primitive special effects, including scale models and rear-projection, struck me over and over again not only with its excellence in acting, production design, screenwriting, etc. but with its sense of absolute authenticity. It shares this quality with its predecessor, Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien, in that every frame of the film strikes the viewer as not only something that could be, but something which actually is. The sets, props, costumes, weapons, and even the aliens themselves all look absolutely real, in no small part because they were. And this despite the fact that the budgets for these two films combined add up to $29.5 million, which, even with inflation factored in, make them each about 1/10 as expensive as the forgettable Resurgence. But the differences are not merely that Scott and Cameron utilized practical effects rather than CGI which didn't then exist; they lie within the fact that the characters in both movies strike the viewer, then as now, as real people. The black engineer in Alien, Parker, does not feel like a token black dude; he feels like an engineer who happens to be black, just as the two female characters, Ripley and Lambert, feel not like archetypes but rather real women of widely differing temperament. And the characters of color in Aliens – Apone, Frost and Vasquez – likewise do not strike us as Cameron's attempt to add some token color to a white cast, but as organic outgrowths of a good script. That is to say, the characters do not feel like characters at all, but like people. Their sex, color and ethnicity do not feel contrived but organic and necessary, which is precisely the opposite achieved by the characters in Resurgence, who strike me as the result of a Hollywood executive ticking sex, race and ethnicity off a checklist. And just as my two physical eyes cannot be fooled by computer generated charlatanism, my mystical third eye is not fooled Hollywood's clumsy attempts to force racial and sexual diversity into a story in an inauthentic manner. I did not believe Sela Ward as the president in Resurgence, any more than I believed the two extremely pretty and extremely young women (one Asian, one white) as fighter pilots, or, for that matter, the extremely young black guy as a fighter squadron leader. Nor did I buy the Jewish nerd suddenly finding his inner warrior when he hefts an alien machine gun. Like a bad placebo, it goes down bitter, and the mind, obeying an age-old impulse that saved many a caveman from slow death, orders the mouth to spit it out.
As a writer, albeit one who happens to be of pure North European descent who possesses all the tanning ability of your average vampire, I pride myself the strength of my character generation. On the fact my characters feel real. It goes without saying that to reach a point where I feel that I can make this claim, I suffered through many failed experiments, but I believe that establishing the reality of characters and characterization are the most crucial elements in storytelling, more important even than plot. And the most crucial aspect of that crucial element – the holy of holies, so to speak – is never forcing a character into existence. Strictly speaking, this is achieved by an inversion of logic: in the strictest sense, you do not create a character, you stand aside and let the character create themselves. The act of creation and the act of stepping aside are, as it were, one and the same. This Zen-like process requires understanding what both the character and the story demand. It also involves a principle laid down by Bruce Lee, who once wrote that “The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.” This principle, that thinking gets in the way of execution, applies no less to creativity, where the consciousness of the desire to create “a character” is often the greatest obstacle to the creation of one.
As a novelist and short-story writer, I am well aware when I have succeeded in creating, or more strictly speaking, allowed to be created, a “good” character, i.e. one who feels like a real person, at least to me. Such an awareness is triggered by two specific things. One is a strong physical sense of what the person looks like, and the other in an equally strong sense of the way they behave – the way they dress, act, speak, etc. When I came up with the character of Megan Mullaney in my as-yet-unreleased novel The Hardest Part of January, not only was I struck by how clearly I envisioned her physically, but by my instant, instinctive understanding of what she should do in any situation. I knew that Megan dressed neatly and well, rarely swore, that she spoke without pretense, yet using very precise and well-educated diction, and that her sense of humor was always conveyed in a serious manner. And indeed, in every scene in which she appeared, I was limited in my freedom of action by this understanding. In a very real sense, the character had a will of her own, and when it occasionally conflicted with mine, Megan was invariably the winner. There could be no other outcome without commission of that most egregious of writing sins, “characterization rape.” This somewhat unfortunate term applies to writers who force their characters to behave in a way which is untrue to the character as we understand them; it is most common in series television, where different writers handle the same characters over long periods of time and may have differing opinions as to their essential natures. Indeed, there was a rumor going around this town a few years ago that George Eads left CSI in exasperation over this very issue. But characterization rape is also common among authors who, for whatever reason, try to bend a character's behavior in a direction convenient to the story, rather than the story in the direction of the character's natural actions. And in another form it occurs when producers decide to change the race, ethnicity of sexual orientation of a character for what are presumably commercial reasons – for example, casting the extremely Nordic-appearing Scarlet Johansson in Ghost in the Shell instead of the Asian woman the character was originally intended to be, or when Ridley Scott, who exactly zero people have ever accused of any type of racism, made all the principal Egyptian characters in Exodus: Gods and Kings white Caucasians when DNA has shown us that they were almost certainly racial “hybrids” created by constant interbreeding of numerous races and ethnicities from the region around Egypt. Referring to Ghost, L.A. Times film reporter Jen Yamato wrote scathingly that Johansson's casting was nothing less than “the cultural erasure of of nonwhite identity.” Yet this sort of thing can work in reverse as well. In an attempt to – for lack of a better word – “colorize” films which would be otherwise exclusively white in racial makeup, producers have taken to using actors of color for roles which were originally intended to be white. Thus we have Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury in the Marvel films, Michael Clarke Duncan as The Kingpin in Daredevil, Ken Lueng as Lloyd Bowman in Red Dragon, et cetera and so on. In some instances this is harmless and in others beneficial, but only when the character itself is not altered out of recognition by the change. While casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four was merely pointless, hiring Idris Elba to portray Heimdall in Thor was an utter absurdity, a case of “cultural erasure” which is not less egregious because it was committed against the dominant (i.e. white) culture. These were cases where the act was not so much wrong as the feeling of artifice, of contrivance, they produced. And it is a variation of this sin which plagues Resurgence. Either the writer, the casting directors, the producers, the studio suits – someone, or group of someones, did not allow the characters of this film to grow organically, but instead mandated two of the most fundamental aspects of modern identity – sex and race – to conform with some pre-existing agenda. One can almost hear the studio suit saying around his cigar: “We need X number of Asians and X number of blacks and X number of women....”
Good casting, in my mind, is bound up with two factors, and the first of these, obviously, is how the actor fits into the role. The second, less understood, is the how the role fits the actor – what level of integrity the role itself inherently possesses, and how its shape in turn shapes the actor who portrays it. Bad casting can ruin a film, but bad character generation can ruin it just as swiftly. On the opposing hand, good writing makes the jobs of both casting director and actor much easier. In The Matrix series, there are many important characters of color, and the starring role of Neo, which ultimately went to Keanu Reeves (himself of one quarter nonwhite descent), was in fact originally offered to the afformentioned Will Smith. The Wiechowski brothers clearly had an agenda to racially diversify the universe they were creating, and acted on that agenda. But none of the nonwhite characters – not Morpheus, not the Oracle, not Tank, Dozer, Mifune, Naobi, Link, Seraph, etc. – feel as if they were written simply to fill a racial-ethnic quota. Rather, the world of The Matrix simply reflects that in a war to the death between machines and humanity, the differences in physical appearance between humans are no longer relevant, and never should have been in the first place.
When I write characters, I am often astonished by the degree to which they create themselves in such minute detail, down to the way they play cards, chew food or brood about past wrongs. Often it is a frustrating process, for while it can be directed to a degree, it cannot be controlled without destroying the character's identity. If you plant an acorn, an apple seed and peach pit, you may, by utilizing certain fertilizers or pruning techniques, control the size or to some extent the shape of the trees which spring forth; but you will not produce among them a rosebush, date palm or tomato plant. An acorn can produce an oak and nothing else, and if by some perversion of science you attempted to get a coconut tree instead, you would not only fail but end up producing neither, or worse yet, some mutant abomination which is neither one nor the other. So it is with characters. When I wrote Cage Life, and needed someone to “play” the role of the protagonist's mixed martial arts coach, I did not sit down and say, “There are too many white people in this story. I'd better create a black character.” Instead I simply stood aside and let the character come into being, whereupon I shaped the story to fit him. And this is true of nearly all the best characters in books, television shows and films. They are not bolted together from blueprints, but grow naturally, just as actual human beings do.
Hollywood, like any empire of antiquity, is slow to accept change, and tends to do so grudgingly and only for the sake of outward appearances. For generations it dealt with minorities via the simple expedient of pretending they didn't exist, and on those occasions it was forced to admit their existence it did so in the most condescending ways possible, through characters like Charlie Chan, who was not even portrayed by Asian actor but by a white man in “yellowface” – an appalling trend which continued until fairly recently (see 1985s Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, in which white actor Joel Gray was cast as a Korean martial arts master). In recent years this has become impossible, and a great deal of lip service and even some sincere effort has gone into opening up film and television to nonwhites and, more recently, to gays. Yet as I stated earlier, Hollywood's core attitude toward casting is unchanged, which is why the half-assed expedient of “colorizing” white characters not only continues, but is on the upgrade: Idris Elba is in serious consideration to play the next James Bond, a move which, if it happens, will undoubtedly be hailed by liberals and some minorities as a huge breakthrough. I cannot greet such a move with anything but dismay, because, as a writer, I know one cannot change the race of that character without fundamentally changing his identity, and as a human being, because I know to give the Bond franchise to a black actor without addressing the underlying issues which prevent the creation of a black secret agent with his own identity solves absolutely nothing. In Malcom X, apropos of Jackie Robinson being allowed to play baseball in the “white” league, Baines tells Malcom, “The white man throws you a bone and you're supposed to forget 400 years of oppression.” As far as I'm concerned, the casting of Elba as Bond, should it happen, would amount to little more than bone-throwing from a group which has demonstrated itself unwilling to look at the calendar and acknowledge that it is 2017 and not 1977 – or 1947, for that matter.
The brutal truth is that what is needed in Hollywood is not the colorization of existing white characters, nor scripts which call for “so many blacks, so many Asians” in hopes of satisfying the critics, but entirely new narratives – superheroes, secret agents, and ordinary joes who are “of color” and whose racial-ethnic-sexual identities are not tacked-on but intrinsic to who they are, thus making them seem real. The crucial thing here is to avoid the “CGI effect” that I referred to earlier, the feeling that we are looking not at contrivances designed to satisfy the demands of quota system. And the way this can be done is by getting the population of writers and producers in Hollywood to reflect, to at least a rough extent, the actual racial demographics of the country. Idris Elba does not have to be someone else's 007 when, with skillful writing, he could be his own 003 or 008.
As it stands now, things are changing in Hollywood, but the changes remind me of what a dermatologist once told me about how people tended to deal with skin problems. The first stage was to cover them up with cosmetics, the second to treat the symptoms themselves, and the last to treat the actual cause of the symptoms in hopes of effecting a cure. Most people, he said, were content to do the first, or at most, the second; the really effective method, curing the actual condition, was also the least popular. So it is with this town. The changes we have made are, at this point, are doing nothing to treat the disease. The issue of casting is a surface expression of a much deeper problem in this town, which is that the industry's power players all look like each other and do not reflect, even grossly, the actual demographics of our population. And this is not a question of realization. The people that run Hollywood already know their position is unjustly maintained. Until recently they have simply been able to ignore the knowledge, secure in the fact that they were both anonymous and protected by their own power from any real criticism or change. They are only acting now, disingenuously and through half-measures, because, for the first time in their long history, they are feeling, through layers of protective insulation, the heat of public discontent which threatens their phony but heartfelt self-image as old-time liberals. But it is just possible that, in their haste to preserve this self-image, they will finally manage, if only by accident, to do the right thing. And that, folks, if I may come full circle to the quote with which I opened this blog, is as likely a scenario as any as to how positive change might come about here in La La Land.
– Cory Watson
Two days ago I was making the 6,200 mile journey from London to Los Angeles via Dreamliner. The actual distance between the two cities is 5,437 miles, but for reasons unknown to me the chosen fight path, over Canada, Greenland and Iceland, adds a solid 800 miles to the trip. The result is a dull ten to twelve hours in an airplane seat, wedged between two Cockneys (on my right) and a gaggle of Germans whose rapid-fire banter told me I ought to have paid more attention when I was studying their language in high school. To pass the seemingly interminable journey, I read, played video games on my laptop, and watched no less than four movies, including Roland Emmerich's Independence Day: Resurgence, the original Matrix, and James Cameron's Aliens. It is the first film, a recent sequel to the 1997 Roland Emmerich blockbuster, which got me thinking about two seemingly unconnected topics: computer generated imagery, and the issue of race, sex and ethnicity in Hollywood.
Hollywood, where I have lived and worked for ten years, is no stranger to controversies regarding ethnicity and skin color, going all the way back to Birth of a Nation, which made its debut in theaters 102 years ago. And indeed, in the last few decades there has been a concerted effort to prise open the lock which the white Caucasian has traditionally maintained on the film industry, particularly in terms of casting, but also in terms of production, direction, screenwriting, and so forth. The rise of such non-white stars as Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, and Viola Davis, and of directors such as Ang Lee, M. Night Shamalayn, Jordan Peele and Kathryn Bigelow, are all indicative of a tectonic shift in the external appearance of American film and the industry which drives it. The very existence of a black film mogul like Tyler Perry would have, just a few short years ago, been almost unthinkable outside of, well, a Hollywood movie, and by Hollywood standards, the 2017 Oscars were a veritable orgy of diversity in regards to both nominations and wins. At the same time, no one would argue with a straight face that Hollywood has changed internally in regards to how it views the role of so-called “minorities” or people of color in film. According to a piece in the Los Angeles Times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people who hand out Oscar nominations and decide who goes home with the gold statue, is 94% white and 77% male. Non-white and female directors remain pathetically infrequent in terms of overall numbers. And in a recent article by Vulture, “people of color directed less than ten percent of the last decade's top-grossing films,” while the Hollywood Reporter discovered that women directed only seven percent of the top 250 movies of 2016, a decline of two percent from 2015. This year there has been fresh controversy about the process of “whitewashing,” or casting white people in roles which were originally intended for non-whites. The casting choices for films like Ghost in the Shell, The Great Wall, and Doctor Strange, just to name a few, is at least evidence for argument that many of Hollywood's recent changes toward diversity are, if you will pardon the pun, no more than skin deep.
When I watched Independence Day: Resurgence, my initial reaction, aside from a feeling that the movie itself was a real piece of crap, was that the writers (or possibly the casting director) had bent over backwards to make the film a “full spectrum” project. In what can only be described as a huge cast are four women cast in “strong” roles – the President of the United States, a heroic doctor, and two fighter pilots – three Asians (a general and fighter pilot among them), and three blacks, including a squadron commander and a doctor. And among the white folks, no less than three are Jewish. On the surface (I use the word specifically), it would seem that this movie, abysmal as it was, is proof positive that the times, they are a changin'; that honest efforts are being made to reflect the fact that America, like the world itself, is not composed entirely of people of European ancestry. So the question has to be asked: why didn't it work? Why does the diversity of casting in Independence Day feel as inauthentic as a wooden nickel or a three dollar bill? Why do the people of color feel like tokens put in place to satisfy a racial quota, and the strong female characters like, well, “strong female characters” rather than genuine human beings?
At the risk of making a clumsy segue, let me take a moment to talk about one of the reasons why Independence Day: Resurgence fails as a film. There are a number of severe problems with it, including the basic story, the script, the lead character (Liam Helmsworth doing his best to imitate both Chris Pratt and Chris Pine and failing at both), the overly fractured narrative, etc. and so on; but what turned me off as much as anything else was the excessive use of computer generated imagery, or CGI. Obviously, a story about an alien ship the size of North America on a mission to destroy Earth was going to rely very heavily on digitally-generated visual effects, but it was obvious to me as I watched that Hollywood has yet to find a way to integrate even the most advanced CGI into a frame crowded with flesh-and-blood human beings. The human eye remains far too sophisticated a piece of biomechanical equipment to be deceived into believing that all those pixelated tidal waves, nuclear explosions, toppling buildings, zooming spaceships and so forth are actually real. As a result, all the mayhem I was witnessing – cities being annihilated, dogfights wheeling over the sky, a huge monster battling U.S. Air Force fighters in the Nevada desert – left me as bored as if I were watching someone else play a particularly noisy and mindless video game. Despite a huge budget of $150 million, the movie felt, if you will forgive the vulgarism, fake as fuck.
On the other hand, Aliens, a much older (1986) film using far more primitive special effects, including scale models and rear-projection, struck me over and over again not only with its excellence in acting, production design, screenwriting, etc. but with its sense of absolute authenticity. It shares this quality with its predecessor, Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien, in that every frame of the film strikes the viewer as not only something that could be, but something which actually is. The sets, props, costumes, weapons, and even the aliens themselves all look absolutely real, in no small part because they were. And this despite the fact that the budgets for these two films combined add up to $29.5 million, which, even with inflation factored in, make them each about 1/10 as expensive as the forgettable Resurgence. But the differences are not merely that Scott and Cameron utilized practical effects rather than CGI which didn't then exist; they lie within the fact that the characters in both movies strike the viewer, then as now, as real people. The black engineer in Alien, Parker, does not feel like a token black dude; he feels like an engineer who happens to be black, just as the two female characters, Ripley and Lambert, feel not like archetypes but rather real women of widely differing temperament. And the characters of color in Aliens – Apone, Frost and Vasquez – likewise do not strike us as Cameron's attempt to add some token color to a white cast, but as organic outgrowths of a good script. That is to say, the characters do not feel like characters at all, but like people. Their sex, color and ethnicity do not feel contrived but organic and necessary, which is precisely the opposite achieved by the characters in Resurgence, who strike me as the result of a Hollywood executive ticking sex, race and ethnicity off a checklist. And just as my two physical eyes cannot be fooled by computer generated charlatanism, my mystical third eye is not fooled Hollywood's clumsy attempts to force racial and sexual diversity into a story in an inauthentic manner. I did not believe Sela Ward as the president in Resurgence, any more than I believed the two extremely pretty and extremely young women (one Asian, one white) as fighter pilots, or, for that matter, the extremely young black guy as a fighter squadron leader. Nor did I buy the Jewish nerd suddenly finding his inner warrior when he hefts an alien machine gun. Like a bad placebo, it goes down bitter, and the mind, obeying an age-old impulse that saved many a caveman from slow death, orders the mouth to spit it out.
As a writer, albeit one who happens to be of pure North European descent who possesses all the tanning ability of your average vampire, I pride myself the strength of my character generation. On the fact my characters feel real. It goes without saying that to reach a point where I feel that I can make this claim, I suffered through many failed experiments, but I believe that establishing the reality of characters and characterization are the most crucial elements in storytelling, more important even than plot. And the most crucial aspect of that crucial element – the holy of holies, so to speak – is never forcing a character into existence. Strictly speaking, this is achieved by an inversion of logic: in the strictest sense, you do not create a character, you stand aside and let the character create themselves. The act of creation and the act of stepping aside are, as it were, one and the same. This Zen-like process requires understanding what both the character and the story demand. It also involves a principle laid down by Bruce Lee, who once wrote that “The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.” This principle, that thinking gets in the way of execution, applies no less to creativity, where the consciousness of the desire to create “a character” is often the greatest obstacle to the creation of one.
As a novelist and short-story writer, I am well aware when I have succeeded in creating, or more strictly speaking, allowed to be created, a “good” character, i.e. one who feels like a real person, at least to me. Such an awareness is triggered by two specific things. One is a strong physical sense of what the person looks like, and the other in an equally strong sense of the way they behave – the way they dress, act, speak, etc. When I came up with the character of Megan Mullaney in my as-yet-unreleased novel The Hardest Part of January, not only was I struck by how clearly I envisioned her physically, but by my instant, instinctive understanding of what she should do in any situation. I knew that Megan dressed neatly and well, rarely swore, that she spoke without pretense, yet using very precise and well-educated diction, and that her sense of humor was always conveyed in a serious manner. And indeed, in every scene in which she appeared, I was limited in my freedom of action by this understanding. In a very real sense, the character had a will of her own, and when it occasionally conflicted with mine, Megan was invariably the winner. There could be no other outcome without commission of that most egregious of writing sins, “characterization rape.” This somewhat unfortunate term applies to writers who force their characters to behave in a way which is untrue to the character as we understand them; it is most common in series television, where different writers handle the same characters over long periods of time and may have differing opinions as to their essential natures. Indeed, there was a rumor going around this town a few years ago that George Eads left CSI in exasperation over this very issue. But characterization rape is also common among authors who, for whatever reason, try to bend a character's behavior in a direction convenient to the story, rather than the story in the direction of the character's natural actions. And in another form it occurs when producers decide to change the race, ethnicity of sexual orientation of a character for what are presumably commercial reasons – for example, casting the extremely Nordic-appearing Scarlet Johansson in Ghost in the Shell instead of the Asian woman the character was originally intended to be, or when Ridley Scott, who exactly zero people have ever accused of any type of racism, made all the principal Egyptian characters in Exodus: Gods and Kings white Caucasians when DNA has shown us that they were almost certainly racial “hybrids” created by constant interbreeding of numerous races and ethnicities from the region around Egypt. Referring to Ghost, L.A. Times film reporter Jen Yamato wrote scathingly that Johansson's casting was nothing less than “the cultural erasure of of nonwhite identity.” Yet this sort of thing can work in reverse as well. In an attempt to – for lack of a better word – “colorize” films which would be otherwise exclusively white in racial makeup, producers have taken to using actors of color for roles which were originally intended to be white. Thus we have Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury in the Marvel films, Michael Clarke Duncan as The Kingpin in Daredevil, Ken Lueng as Lloyd Bowman in Red Dragon, et cetera and so on. In some instances this is harmless and in others beneficial, but only when the character itself is not altered out of recognition by the change. While casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four was merely pointless, hiring Idris Elba to portray Heimdall in Thor was an utter absurdity, a case of “cultural erasure” which is not less egregious because it was committed against the dominant (i.e. white) culture. These were cases where the act was not so much wrong as the feeling of artifice, of contrivance, they produced. And it is a variation of this sin which plagues Resurgence. Either the writer, the casting directors, the producers, the studio suits – someone, or group of someones, did not allow the characters of this film to grow organically, but instead mandated two of the most fundamental aspects of modern identity – sex and race – to conform with some pre-existing agenda. One can almost hear the studio suit saying around his cigar: “We need X number of Asians and X number of blacks and X number of women....”
Good casting, in my mind, is bound up with two factors, and the first of these, obviously, is how the actor fits into the role. The second, less understood, is the how the role fits the actor – what level of integrity the role itself inherently possesses, and how its shape in turn shapes the actor who portrays it. Bad casting can ruin a film, but bad character generation can ruin it just as swiftly. On the opposing hand, good writing makes the jobs of both casting director and actor much easier. In The Matrix series, there are many important characters of color, and the starring role of Neo, which ultimately went to Keanu Reeves (himself of one quarter nonwhite descent), was in fact originally offered to the afformentioned Will Smith. The Wiechowski brothers clearly had an agenda to racially diversify the universe they were creating, and acted on that agenda. But none of the nonwhite characters – not Morpheus, not the Oracle, not Tank, Dozer, Mifune, Naobi, Link, Seraph, etc. – feel as if they were written simply to fill a racial-ethnic quota. Rather, the world of The Matrix simply reflects that in a war to the death between machines and humanity, the differences in physical appearance between humans are no longer relevant, and never should have been in the first place.
When I write characters, I am often astonished by the degree to which they create themselves in such minute detail, down to the way they play cards, chew food or brood about past wrongs. Often it is a frustrating process, for while it can be directed to a degree, it cannot be controlled without destroying the character's identity. If you plant an acorn, an apple seed and peach pit, you may, by utilizing certain fertilizers or pruning techniques, control the size or to some extent the shape of the trees which spring forth; but you will not produce among them a rosebush, date palm or tomato plant. An acorn can produce an oak and nothing else, and if by some perversion of science you attempted to get a coconut tree instead, you would not only fail but end up producing neither, or worse yet, some mutant abomination which is neither one nor the other. So it is with characters. When I wrote Cage Life, and needed someone to “play” the role of the protagonist's mixed martial arts coach, I did not sit down and say, “There are too many white people in this story. I'd better create a black character.” Instead I simply stood aside and let the character come into being, whereupon I shaped the story to fit him. And this is true of nearly all the best characters in books, television shows and films. They are not bolted together from blueprints, but grow naturally, just as actual human beings do.
Hollywood, like any empire of antiquity, is slow to accept change, and tends to do so grudgingly and only for the sake of outward appearances. For generations it dealt with minorities via the simple expedient of pretending they didn't exist, and on those occasions it was forced to admit their existence it did so in the most condescending ways possible, through characters like Charlie Chan, who was not even portrayed by Asian actor but by a white man in “yellowface” – an appalling trend which continued until fairly recently (see 1985s Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, in which white actor Joel Gray was cast as a Korean martial arts master). In recent years this has become impossible, and a great deal of lip service and even some sincere effort has gone into opening up film and television to nonwhites and, more recently, to gays. Yet as I stated earlier, Hollywood's core attitude toward casting is unchanged, which is why the half-assed expedient of “colorizing” white characters not only continues, but is on the upgrade: Idris Elba is in serious consideration to play the next James Bond, a move which, if it happens, will undoubtedly be hailed by liberals and some minorities as a huge breakthrough. I cannot greet such a move with anything but dismay, because, as a writer, I know one cannot change the race of that character without fundamentally changing his identity, and as a human being, because I know to give the Bond franchise to a black actor without addressing the underlying issues which prevent the creation of a black secret agent with his own identity solves absolutely nothing. In Malcom X, apropos of Jackie Robinson being allowed to play baseball in the “white” league, Baines tells Malcom, “The white man throws you a bone and you're supposed to forget 400 years of oppression.” As far as I'm concerned, the casting of Elba as Bond, should it happen, would amount to little more than bone-throwing from a group which has demonstrated itself unwilling to look at the calendar and acknowledge that it is 2017 and not 1977 – or 1947, for that matter.
The brutal truth is that what is needed in Hollywood is not the colorization of existing white characters, nor scripts which call for “so many blacks, so many Asians” in hopes of satisfying the critics, but entirely new narratives – superheroes, secret agents, and ordinary joes who are “of color” and whose racial-ethnic-sexual identities are not tacked-on but intrinsic to who they are, thus making them seem real. The crucial thing here is to avoid the “CGI effect” that I referred to earlier, the feeling that we are looking not at contrivances designed to satisfy the demands of quota system. And the way this can be done is by getting the population of writers and producers in Hollywood to reflect, to at least a rough extent, the actual racial demographics of the country. Idris Elba does not have to be someone else's 007 when, with skillful writing, he could be his own 003 or 008.
As it stands now, things are changing in Hollywood, but the changes remind me of what a dermatologist once told me about how people tended to deal with skin problems. The first stage was to cover them up with cosmetics, the second to treat the symptoms themselves, and the last to treat the actual cause of the symptoms in hopes of effecting a cure. Most people, he said, were content to do the first, or at most, the second; the really effective method, curing the actual condition, was also the least popular. So it is with this town. The changes we have made are, at this point, are doing nothing to treat the disease. The issue of casting is a surface expression of a much deeper problem in this town, which is that the industry's power players all look like each other and do not reflect, even grossly, the actual demographics of our population. And this is not a question of realization. The people that run Hollywood already know their position is unjustly maintained. Until recently they have simply been able to ignore the knowledge, secure in the fact that they were both anonymous and protected by their own power from any real criticism or change. They are only acting now, disingenuously and through half-measures, because, for the first time in their long history, they are feeling, through layers of protective insulation, the heat of public discontent which threatens their phony but heartfelt self-image as old-time liberals. But it is just possible that, in their haste to preserve this self-image, they will finally manage, if only by accident, to do the right thing. And that, folks, if I may come full circle to the quote with which I opened this blog, is as likely a scenario as any as to how positive change might come about here in La La Land.
March 25, 2017
Fatal Fridays and Father Figures
The death of Canadian actor Chris Wiggins last month, “from complications due to Alzheimer's disease,” went largely unnoticed by the press, the internet, and, near as I can see, the whole goddamn planet. Even I, a fairly devoted fan, did not hear the news until almost a month after the fact. Wiggins had a very long career which spanned radio, television and film, but like many so-called “character actors” he never broke through to the level of notoriety where people recognized him by name. By face, perhaps, and even more often by voice, for Wiggins had one of those deep, dusty, manly-yet-professorial voices which tend to stick pleasantly in your memory; but when he died, there was little in the way of general recognition, much less public mourning. I find this especially hard to swallow, since Wiggins was, in my mind, both a key part of one of the crucial television shows of the modern era, and a template – maybe the template – for the warm-hearted, all-knowing father figure who is so vital to storytelling.
From 1987 until 1990, Wiggins portrayed the character of Jack Marshak on FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES. The title of this not-very-well-remembered show is the source of endless confusion and contributes greatly to the afformentioned fact, which is that it is nowhere near as recognized as it deserves to be. To compress the story into a few words: in the 1980s, the “Jason Voorhees” Friday the 13th film franchise raked in enormities of money for Paramount Pictures, and the powers-that-be there decided to cash in further on the popularity of the name by spawning a television series which made use of it. The executive producer of the film series, Frank Mancuso Jr., had zero interest in carrying the Jason character into television, but he was informed that what was needed was the name, not the hockey-masked villain: he was granted carte blanche and told he could create “anything he wanted,” so long as it was scary and called FRIDAY THE 13TH. This cynical ploy to kick more candy out of the bloody Friday pinata should have failed miserably, for seldom has a show been created with more nakedly dubious and exploitative motives. But as is so often the case in Hollywood, it's the happy accident that ends up making the painting. Free from studio interference, Mancuso and his writing staff came up with a devilishly delicious concept whose influence can be felt to this very hour.
The history of “horror television shows” is long and distinguished, and goes back many decades, far beyond the scope of this particular piece: FRIDAY'S CURSE did not invent, nor did it perfect, horror television, and it clearly had its own progenitors, such as KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and perhaps even THE TWILIGHT ZONE. However, the series' influence, conscious or unconscious, on those that followed, cannot credibly be denied. THE X-FILES had a similar three-person dynamic (Mulder, Scully and Skinner as the crusty, disapproving, but ultimately protective “Dad”) and a similar supernatural-horror theme. FOREVER KNIGHT, though different in conception, used the same composer (Fred Mollin), the same city (Toronto), and many of the same directors and actors in guest roles, while retaining the horror atmosphere and moral complexity involved in fighting evil with what was not always purely “good.” BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER pitted an even tighter family unit, “fathered” by a character very similar to Marshak, against armies of bump-in-the-night monsters, and occasionally touched on the same themes (witness the episode “Lie To Me,” written and directed by Joss Whedon, about a boy dying of cancer who contrives to sell out his friends in order to achieve immortality). Other shows, such as ANGEL, FRINGE, SUPERNATURAL, etc. show the clear stamp of these influences as well. The fact that FRIDAY is not granted more social cachet among fans of horror TV seems largely to the fact that it went off the air before the Internet could make it famous.
The idea behind FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, which, to avoid confusion, I will henceforth call by its Canadian handle of FRIDAY'S CURSE, was this: a wicked old man named Lewis Vendredi made a pact with the devil, to wit, in return for wealth and immortality he would peddle cursed antiques to unsuspecting customers. When Vendredi, in a moment of guilt, renounced the pact, he was sucked into hell, leaving his store and its bulging inventory of accursed objects in the hands of two unsuspecting cousins, Micki Ryan (Louise Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay), who had never met. Only when they met the mysterious Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a former friend of Vendredi's who has only just realized his part in spreading the cursed items throughout the world, do they grasp what they have inherited – and what they have been selling to the hapless public out of the store now named Curious Goods. The three characters promptly pledge themselves to recovering all the items, which, being magical, cannot be destroyed, and must therefore he stored in a special vault beneath the antique store. Of course, this is much easier said than done. The curses vary according to the item, and possess different degrees of nastiness and irony, not to mention owners with different degrees of motivation to keep them. In many cases the owners are benefiting, or think they are benefiting, from use of the items, which makes things even more difficult. Our characters, quickly tightening into a family unit, are spared nothing by the righteousness of their cause: whether trying to recover a china doll that slits throats or a wood-chipper that spits out money in accordance with the net worth of the victim thrown into it, whether laying hands on a radio that predicts murder or a glove that both cures and spreads fatal disease, they are constantly in danger, losing friends and loved ones to the diabolical items, and questioning their will to continue.
FRIDAY'S CURSE was a horror show pure and simple, televised in a late time slot and meant, quite literally, to "produce the effect of girlfriends jumping into boyfriends' laps." And indeed, it was a remarkably gruesome show for its time – there are things they got away with that would probably not escape the prime-time sensors even today, in this era of nearly unlimited license (at the end of the episode “Hate On Your Dial,” for example, the Ku Klux Klan burns several men at the stake, a horror shown in graphic detail). The overriding theme, however – what made it special, what makes it rise above the now-hokey conventions of the 1980s and a relatively modest budget – was not its capacity to frighten or gross-out the viewer but rather the deeply philosophical and gritty view it took of the struggle between good and evil. Though the villains of FRIDAY'S CURSE were frequently of the mustache-twirling, tie-you-to-the-railroad-tracks-and-cackle variety, they were also, on many occasions, just ordinary people who tried to use cursed items to achieve noble or at least understandable ends, such as saving a dying loved one, curing themselves of illness or debility, or obtaining desperately-needed wealth. Sometimes the plots could be downright Byzantine in terms of trying to figure out who the bad guy really was. In “The Shaman's Apprentice,” for example, a First Nations (what we would call Native American) doctor, the subject of racist bullying at his hospital, obtains a cursed gourd which allows him to cure terminal patients in exchange for killing those in his life who have tormented him and frustrated his career. In “Crippled Inside,” a girl who ended up paralyzed after an attempted gang rape is granted increasing mobility with every one of the would-be rapists whom she tracks down and kills. In “The Playhouse,” two abused and neglected children find their only refuge in a fantasy domain which exacts a terrible price for its pleasures. And in the terrifying and deeply disturbing “Better Off Dead,” a doctor murders prostitutes to “feed” a cursed syringe which temporarily cures his daughter of her violent insanity. In many cases there is at least some sense of understanding, if not necessarily sympathy, between the audience and the antagonist – often to the point where our protagonists, by taking away the cursed toys, seem to be nearly equally at fault.
I use the word “protagonists” specifically, for as I mentioned above, the characters of FRIDAY'S CURSE, while heroic in spirit, are often conflicted in their motives and confused in their actions. Unlike so many television programs which return their cast to status quo ante at the beginning of each episode, never showing the weathering effects of their adventures, Micki, Ryan and Jack each go through periods of bitterness, doubt and self-pity over the perils of their mission and the seeming hopelessness of their quest. Each, having suffered a personal loss because of their war with Satan, or seeing the opportunity to grasp happiness for themselves, makes plans to quit the group, only to be pulled, Mafia-style, back into the life. They are, of course, the “good” in the show's “good versus evil” contest, but their good of a more-or-less realistic type. It suffers fatigue. It trembles at the knees. It wakes up at three in the morning wondering if today is the final Friday. And this is where Chris Wiggins really came to the fore, both as an actor and as the character of Jack Marshak.
The word “gravitas” is often thrown around by movie-reviewers when trying to find the right word for that type of charismatic solemnity and gravity – that fatherly strength, that commanding officer's dignity – which makes us look to a particular man for leadership and wisdom in times of stress, tension or trial. Of course women can possess this gravitas too; Dame Judith Dench's performance as Q in the James Bond series carries the same weight, if not more, than some of her male predecessors brought to the role; but I am speaking here not of leadership per se, but masculinity in its paternal hat, the Dad-presence. This is what Wiggins brought to the table as Jack, what elevated the weaker and more shoddily-written episodes to the watchable plane, and made the best of them (“Night Prey,” “Faith Healer,” “The Maestro,” etc.) so hauntingly memorable. Some of it had to do with Wiggins' bearish physiognomy: he was big, bald, bearded, and (as I have mentioned), possessing of both a powerful, mellifluous voice and a presence that was both imposing and comforting. More of it had to do with his acting ability. On a show in which two of the three principle actors were relative novices and sometimes showed it in the early going, Wiggins was the seasoned professional, the crusty old veteran who knew all the angles, gave guidance when guidance was needed, and tackled the most difficult dialogue with skill and aplomb. Indeed, he had that particular gift of being able to deliver pretentious, unrealistic, melodramatic lines in such a manner that seemed at the very least unobtrusive, if not artistic. He also had a properly banal catchphrase, most often uttered with a shrug, when the outcome of a story was unsatisfying or depressing to our protagonists: “We do the best we can.” Jack Marshak was a character written to understand that while evil may be midnight-black in complexion, good – the realization is commonplace, but necessary – is often a muddy and depressing gray, a series of compromises woven around the sullen necessity of an unhappy ending.
In my own lifetime, I have occasionally encountered these wonderful father figure types on television (and I do not mean in the contrived ways that situation comedies normally deliver them – as paragons of virtue). The first time I remember any feeling in this direction was probably Lorne Greene's flared-nostril portrayal of Commander Adama in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but he was rather too perfect to be believable, even if Greene did combine delightful combination of Rushmore-like seriousness with a gentleness that was often touching to witness. No, it wasn't until I witnessed Harry Morgan as the feisty, country-wise Col. Potter on M*A*S*H, that I realized the almost mystical attraction this sort of actor-character had upon me. Later there was Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, and Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER; but Wiggins had, in a sense, the toughest row to hoe. He lacked the military authority of an Adama, Potter or Picard, and he was not advantaged, as Giles was, by the fact his charge was a fatherless teenage girl and therefore all the more receptive to a Dad-presence. What's more, his share of the physical danger was equal to his “children” Micki and Ryan (and later, after Ryan's departure, Johnny Ventura) but, being older and heavier and grayer, he was less well-equipped to meet it. He had no fleet of Vipers to enforce his will, no soldiers or Starfleet officers under his command, no teenage superhero to put iron in his velvet glove. He had only his varied life experiences, his knowledge of mysticism, and his sense of personal honor. Somehow this made him at once less formidable and more approachable – again, more like a real father, whose weaknesses and flaws are laid bare by the worrying effect of life itself.
My maternal grandfather died before I was born. My paternal grandfather I scarcely knew. My own dad passed away when I was twenty-one. I never met Chris Wiggins, and now I never will, but in my affection for the character of Marshak I can feel now -- yes, even now, as a middle-aged man -- the longing (oh! what longing!) for the Dad-presence that never, ever seems to leave us, and in some ways only intensifies as we get older. I find it all the more fascinating that Wiggins himself, though long married, had no children. The Dad-presence, it seems, radiates outward from some of us so strongly that we need not intone the cant to precipitate the response.
In 2014, a blogger named Alyse Wax released a book about FRIDAY'S CURSE called Curious Goods, in which she interviewed just about every living person who had anything to do with the production of the show; unfortunately Mr. Wiggins was by then too ill to participate, a fact I found extremely disappointing.
However, the warmth with which he was remembered by his co-workers, the sage advice he gave that they still recalled over what is now a depressingly large gulf of years, told me that my affection for him as a human being, rather than merely as a character or an actor, was not misplaced. Louise Robey perhaps said it best when she recalled to Miss Wax an incident which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the show's cancellation in 1990 -- not because of ratings, but because as in the case of the original DR. WHO, the series fell afoul of an activist group "concerned" with its "demonic content." Wiggins turned to her and said, "Well, my dear, you've passed your apprenticeship."
Well, to the shade of Chris Wiggins, all I can say is: So have you, my friend. So have you.
From 1987 until 1990, Wiggins portrayed the character of Jack Marshak on FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES. The title of this not-very-well-remembered show is the source of endless confusion and contributes greatly to the afformentioned fact, which is that it is nowhere near as recognized as it deserves to be. To compress the story into a few words: in the 1980s, the “Jason Voorhees” Friday the 13th film franchise raked in enormities of money for Paramount Pictures, and the powers-that-be there decided to cash in further on the popularity of the name by spawning a television series which made use of it. The executive producer of the film series, Frank Mancuso Jr., had zero interest in carrying the Jason character into television, but he was informed that what was needed was the name, not the hockey-masked villain: he was granted carte blanche and told he could create “anything he wanted,” so long as it was scary and called FRIDAY THE 13TH. This cynical ploy to kick more candy out of the bloody Friday pinata should have failed miserably, for seldom has a show been created with more nakedly dubious and exploitative motives. But as is so often the case in Hollywood, it's the happy accident that ends up making the painting. Free from studio interference, Mancuso and his writing staff came up with a devilishly delicious concept whose influence can be felt to this very hour.
The history of “horror television shows” is long and distinguished, and goes back many decades, far beyond the scope of this particular piece: FRIDAY'S CURSE did not invent, nor did it perfect, horror television, and it clearly had its own progenitors, such as KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and perhaps even THE TWILIGHT ZONE. However, the series' influence, conscious or unconscious, on those that followed, cannot credibly be denied. THE X-FILES had a similar three-person dynamic (Mulder, Scully and Skinner as the crusty, disapproving, but ultimately protective “Dad”) and a similar supernatural-horror theme. FOREVER KNIGHT, though different in conception, used the same composer (Fred Mollin), the same city (Toronto), and many of the same directors and actors in guest roles, while retaining the horror atmosphere and moral complexity involved in fighting evil with what was not always purely “good.” BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER pitted an even tighter family unit, “fathered” by a character very similar to Marshak, against armies of bump-in-the-night monsters, and occasionally touched on the same themes (witness the episode “Lie To Me,” written and directed by Joss Whedon, about a boy dying of cancer who contrives to sell out his friends in order to achieve immortality). Other shows, such as ANGEL, FRINGE, SUPERNATURAL, etc. show the clear stamp of these influences as well. The fact that FRIDAY is not granted more social cachet among fans of horror TV seems largely to the fact that it went off the air before the Internet could make it famous.
The idea behind FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, which, to avoid confusion, I will henceforth call by its Canadian handle of FRIDAY'S CURSE, was this: a wicked old man named Lewis Vendredi made a pact with the devil, to wit, in return for wealth and immortality he would peddle cursed antiques to unsuspecting customers. When Vendredi, in a moment of guilt, renounced the pact, he was sucked into hell, leaving his store and its bulging inventory of accursed objects in the hands of two unsuspecting cousins, Micki Ryan (Louise Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay), who had never met. Only when they met the mysterious Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a former friend of Vendredi's who has only just realized his part in spreading the cursed items throughout the world, do they grasp what they have inherited – and what they have been selling to the hapless public out of the store now named Curious Goods. The three characters promptly pledge themselves to recovering all the items, which, being magical, cannot be destroyed, and must therefore he stored in a special vault beneath the antique store. Of course, this is much easier said than done. The curses vary according to the item, and possess different degrees of nastiness and irony, not to mention owners with different degrees of motivation to keep them. In many cases the owners are benefiting, or think they are benefiting, from use of the items, which makes things even more difficult. Our characters, quickly tightening into a family unit, are spared nothing by the righteousness of their cause: whether trying to recover a china doll that slits throats or a wood-chipper that spits out money in accordance with the net worth of the victim thrown into it, whether laying hands on a radio that predicts murder or a glove that both cures and spreads fatal disease, they are constantly in danger, losing friends and loved ones to the diabolical items, and questioning their will to continue.
FRIDAY'S CURSE was a horror show pure and simple, televised in a late time slot and meant, quite literally, to "produce the effect of girlfriends jumping into boyfriends' laps." And indeed, it was a remarkably gruesome show for its time – there are things they got away with that would probably not escape the prime-time sensors even today, in this era of nearly unlimited license (at the end of the episode “Hate On Your Dial,” for example, the Ku Klux Klan burns several men at the stake, a horror shown in graphic detail). The overriding theme, however – what made it special, what makes it rise above the now-hokey conventions of the 1980s and a relatively modest budget – was not its capacity to frighten or gross-out the viewer but rather the deeply philosophical and gritty view it took of the struggle between good and evil. Though the villains of FRIDAY'S CURSE were frequently of the mustache-twirling, tie-you-to-the-railroad-tracks-and-cackle variety, they were also, on many occasions, just ordinary people who tried to use cursed items to achieve noble or at least understandable ends, such as saving a dying loved one, curing themselves of illness or debility, or obtaining desperately-needed wealth. Sometimes the plots could be downright Byzantine in terms of trying to figure out who the bad guy really was. In “The Shaman's Apprentice,” for example, a First Nations (what we would call Native American) doctor, the subject of racist bullying at his hospital, obtains a cursed gourd which allows him to cure terminal patients in exchange for killing those in his life who have tormented him and frustrated his career. In “Crippled Inside,” a girl who ended up paralyzed after an attempted gang rape is granted increasing mobility with every one of the would-be rapists whom she tracks down and kills. In “The Playhouse,” two abused and neglected children find their only refuge in a fantasy domain which exacts a terrible price for its pleasures. And in the terrifying and deeply disturbing “Better Off Dead,” a doctor murders prostitutes to “feed” a cursed syringe which temporarily cures his daughter of her violent insanity. In many cases there is at least some sense of understanding, if not necessarily sympathy, between the audience and the antagonist – often to the point where our protagonists, by taking away the cursed toys, seem to be nearly equally at fault.
I use the word “protagonists” specifically, for as I mentioned above, the characters of FRIDAY'S CURSE, while heroic in spirit, are often conflicted in their motives and confused in their actions. Unlike so many television programs which return their cast to status quo ante at the beginning of each episode, never showing the weathering effects of their adventures, Micki, Ryan and Jack each go through periods of bitterness, doubt and self-pity over the perils of their mission and the seeming hopelessness of their quest. Each, having suffered a personal loss because of their war with Satan, or seeing the opportunity to grasp happiness for themselves, makes plans to quit the group, only to be pulled, Mafia-style, back into the life. They are, of course, the “good” in the show's “good versus evil” contest, but their good of a more-or-less realistic type. It suffers fatigue. It trembles at the knees. It wakes up at three in the morning wondering if today is the final Friday. And this is where Chris Wiggins really came to the fore, both as an actor and as the character of Jack Marshak.
The word “gravitas” is often thrown around by movie-reviewers when trying to find the right word for that type of charismatic solemnity and gravity – that fatherly strength, that commanding officer's dignity – which makes us look to a particular man for leadership and wisdom in times of stress, tension or trial. Of course women can possess this gravitas too; Dame Judith Dench's performance as Q in the James Bond series carries the same weight, if not more, than some of her male predecessors brought to the role; but I am speaking here not of leadership per se, but masculinity in its paternal hat, the Dad-presence. This is what Wiggins brought to the table as Jack, what elevated the weaker and more shoddily-written episodes to the watchable plane, and made the best of them (“Night Prey,” “Faith Healer,” “The Maestro,” etc.) so hauntingly memorable. Some of it had to do with Wiggins' bearish physiognomy: he was big, bald, bearded, and (as I have mentioned), possessing of both a powerful, mellifluous voice and a presence that was both imposing and comforting. More of it had to do with his acting ability. On a show in which two of the three principle actors were relative novices and sometimes showed it in the early going, Wiggins was the seasoned professional, the crusty old veteran who knew all the angles, gave guidance when guidance was needed, and tackled the most difficult dialogue with skill and aplomb. Indeed, he had that particular gift of being able to deliver pretentious, unrealistic, melodramatic lines in such a manner that seemed at the very least unobtrusive, if not artistic. He also had a properly banal catchphrase, most often uttered with a shrug, when the outcome of a story was unsatisfying or depressing to our protagonists: “We do the best we can.” Jack Marshak was a character written to understand that while evil may be midnight-black in complexion, good – the realization is commonplace, but necessary – is often a muddy and depressing gray, a series of compromises woven around the sullen necessity of an unhappy ending.
In my own lifetime, I have occasionally encountered these wonderful father figure types on television (and I do not mean in the contrived ways that situation comedies normally deliver them – as paragons of virtue). The first time I remember any feeling in this direction was probably Lorne Greene's flared-nostril portrayal of Commander Adama in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but he was rather too perfect to be believable, even if Greene did combine delightful combination of Rushmore-like seriousness with a gentleness that was often touching to witness. No, it wasn't until I witnessed Harry Morgan as the feisty, country-wise Col. Potter on M*A*S*H, that I realized the almost mystical attraction this sort of actor-character had upon me. Later there was Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, and Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER; but Wiggins had, in a sense, the toughest row to hoe. He lacked the military authority of an Adama, Potter or Picard, and he was not advantaged, as Giles was, by the fact his charge was a fatherless teenage girl and therefore all the more receptive to a Dad-presence. What's more, his share of the physical danger was equal to his “children” Micki and Ryan (and later, after Ryan's departure, Johnny Ventura) but, being older and heavier and grayer, he was less well-equipped to meet it. He had no fleet of Vipers to enforce his will, no soldiers or Starfleet officers under his command, no teenage superhero to put iron in his velvet glove. He had only his varied life experiences, his knowledge of mysticism, and his sense of personal honor. Somehow this made him at once less formidable and more approachable – again, more like a real father, whose weaknesses and flaws are laid bare by the worrying effect of life itself.
My maternal grandfather died before I was born. My paternal grandfather I scarcely knew. My own dad passed away when I was twenty-one. I never met Chris Wiggins, and now I never will, but in my affection for the character of Marshak I can feel now -- yes, even now, as a middle-aged man -- the longing (oh! what longing!) for the Dad-presence that never, ever seems to leave us, and in some ways only intensifies as we get older. I find it all the more fascinating that Wiggins himself, though long married, had no children. The Dad-presence, it seems, radiates outward from some of us so strongly that we need not intone the cant to precipitate the response.
In 2014, a blogger named Alyse Wax released a book about FRIDAY'S CURSE called Curious Goods, in which she interviewed just about every living person who had anything to do with the production of the show; unfortunately Mr. Wiggins was by then too ill to participate, a fact I found extremely disappointing.
However, the warmth with which he was remembered by his co-workers, the sage advice he gave that they still recalled over what is now a depressingly large gulf of years, told me that my affection for him as a human being, rather than merely as a character or an actor, was not misplaced. Louise Robey perhaps said it best when she recalled to Miss Wax an incident which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the show's cancellation in 1990 -- not because of ratings, but because as in the case of the original DR. WHO, the series fell afoul of an activist group "concerned" with its "demonic content." Wiggins turned to her and said, "Well, my dear, you've passed your apprenticeship."
Well, to the shade of Chris Wiggins, all I can say is: So have you, my friend. So have you.
March 19, 2017
CAGE LIFE takes Top Honors for 2016
I'm pleased to announce that my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, has received the 2016 "Book of the Year" Award from the online British magazine Zealot Script. This is the second honor the book has been awarded since its release almost exactly a year ago. According to the citation, "This award is presented to a specially selected work that we have judged to be the best independently published book of the year." CAGE LIFE had already been awarded a "runner up" in Shelf Unbound magazine's Best Indie Book Awards for the same year, but this time it took home the gold.
The boys at Zealot Script asked me for a statement to go along with the announcement of the award, which appeared today. I thought I would share it with you in lieu of the blog I was going to release this week, which was about the trial and travails of being an independent author:
They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn't exist. Well, the greatest trick an indie author ever pulled is convincing anyone they do exist. Every day, literally every hour, is a struggle, not only against all the other independents out there, but against a publishing system that reserves all of the marketing oxygen for itself. It's a constant war, not against indifference, but complete unawareness. The goal is to sell books, of course, but before you can sell, people have to know what you're selling – indeed, they have to know there's something being sold. When I released CAGE LIFE early last year, I quickly realized that all the agonizing struggles that had come beforehand were simple prologue: the actual battle, marketing the damn thing, had yet to be fought. I knew my work existed; I just had to inform the rest of the world. And hope that they gave a damn.
Winning Zealot Script's “Book of the Year” for 2016 was a beautiful bolt from the blue. After a year in the market, CAGE LIFE had garnered good reviews, sold more than a few copies, and even picked up a small award from a literary magazine, but had yet to achieve the breakthrough moment that I desired. Trying to make myself heard amidst all the other authors trying to make themselves heard was a tougher assignment than I had feared, and I was becoming a little discouraged. Coming home to the Zealot Script trophy was precisely what I needed at the precise moment I needed it the most. And how often does that happen in life?
I know that the focus of Zealot Script is on science fiction and fantasy, genres I read but have yet to tackle as a writer, but I like to think that although CAGE LIFE is a crime novel, it was heavily influenced, at least in terms of the style in which I wrote it, by authors as diverse as Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin, who I read avidly growing up, and still read today. Indeed, one of the reasons I chose to publish the novel independently was because I became deeply frustrated with the traditional publishing world's emphasis on branding (read: constraining) authors, not merely to a particular genre, but to a particular style of delivery. Mine was supposedly too “literary” for the world of the Noirish thriller. I rejected that conclusion, and I'm delighted that Pete Richmond did, too. Indeed, I am very grateful to Mr. Richmond for taking the initiative to reach out to me at a time when I was struggling to get interviews, to the staff of Zealot Script for selecting my novel for the award, and to anyone and everyone in the readership who gives it a chance. Because that is really all any indie author can ever ask for: a chance.
March and April are going to be big months for the novel, as I am running a series of advertising campaigns designed to promote awareness of the book and its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, which, I'm pleased to say, many readers have told me is the superior work. Whether that is true or not, I'm pleased to be taking my writing to the next level, because, having mastered every aspect of obscurity and poverty, I find myself more than ready to try conquering the concept of unlimited wealth and international fame. Or just paying the bills on time.
The boys at Zealot Script asked me for a statement to go along with the announcement of the award, which appeared today. I thought I would share it with you in lieu of the blog I was going to release this week, which was about the trial and travails of being an independent author:
They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn't exist. Well, the greatest trick an indie author ever pulled is convincing anyone they do exist. Every day, literally every hour, is a struggle, not only against all the other independents out there, but against a publishing system that reserves all of the marketing oxygen for itself. It's a constant war, not against indifference, but complete unawareness. The goal is to sell books, of course, but before you can sell, people have to know what you're selling – indeed, they have to know there's something being sold. When I released CAGE LIFE early last year, I quickly realized that all the agonizing struggles that had come beforehand were simple prologue: the actual battle, marketing the damn thing, had yet to be fought. I knew my work existed; I just had to inform the rest of the world. And hope that they gave a damn.
Winning Zealot Script's “Book of the Year” for 2016 was a beautiful bolt from the blue. After a year in the market, CAGE LIFE had garnered good reviews, sold more than a few copies, and even picked up a small award from a literary magazine, but had yet to achieve the breakthrough moment that I desired. Trying to make myself heard amidst all the other authors trying to make themselves heard was a tougher assignment than I had feared, and I was becoming a little discouraged. Coming home to the Zealot Script trophy was precisely what I needed at the precise moment I needed it the most. And how often does that happen in life?
I know that the focus of Zealot Script is on science fiction and fantasy, genres I read but have yet to tackle as a writer, but I like to think that although CAGE LIFE is a crime novel, it was heavily influenced, at least in terms of the style in which I wrote it, by authors as diverse as Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin, who I read avidly growing up, and still read today. Indeed, one of the reasons I chose to publish the novel independently was because I became deeply frustrated with the traditional publishing world's emphasis on branding (read: constraining) authors, not merely to a particular genre, but to a particular style of delivery. Mine was supposedly too “literary” for the world of the Noirish thriller. I rejected that conclusion, and I'm delighted that Pete Richmond did, too. Indeed, I am very grateful to Mr. Richmond for taking the initiative to reach out to me at a time when I was struggling to get interviews, to the staff of Zealot Script for selecting my novel for the award, and to anyone and everyone in the readership who gives it a chance. Because that is really all any indie author can ever ask for: a chance.
March and April are going to be big months for the novel, as I am running a series of advertising campaigns designed to promote awareness of the book and its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, which, I'm pleased to say, many readers have told me is the superior work. Whether that is true or not, I'm pleased to be taking my writing to the next level, because, having mastered every aspect of obscurity and poverty, I find myself more than ready to try conquering the concept of unlimited wealth and international fame. Or just paying the bills on time.
March 12, 2017
HOW JOURNALISTS CAN GET IT RIGHT: FIXING THE NEWS, PART 2
So far I have been speaking in broad terms about how we, the readership, can work to counteract some of the worst abuses of journalism. But these are only temporary, stop-gap measures; a jury-rigged filter to keep the worst nonsense from seeping into our brains. The real fix lies deep in the heart of the profession itself. In the previous article I made six specific accusations against the press, and having done so (and found the press guilty, I might add, in my self-appointed role as judge) it falls upon me to offer suggestions as to how to rehabilitate this most vital aspect of our democracy: not only a free but an objective and professional press.
In regards to the first two, and last two, accusations, that American journalists don't understand their own profession of journalism, are astonishingly ignorant of the country in which they live, and tend to “report” only what they want to happen and not what is manifestly happening, etc., etc., the fixes are actually quite simple, if not necessarily fast-acting or easy to execute. Beginning immediately, every student studying journalism should be required by his professors to study, at some length, the principles and ideas of every popular political ideology in the United States, and be able to state those principles, with objectivity and accuracy, back to the professor, as well as write about them in great detail. This is hardly an unreasonable demand: Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and in some ways a more fanatical Nazi than Hitler himself, once astonished and amused guests at a formal reception before WW2 by three times mounting a table and delivering, extemporaneously, seemingly heartfelt speeches in favor of monarchism, communism and democracy. Goebbels' point, seemingly, was that he could make eloquent arguments in favor of all rival systems of government without having the slightest belief in them. My point, in referencing this, is that Americans no longer seem to possess the courage to explore or try to understand the viewpoints and motivations of those they disagree with -- a key element not only to arguing intelligently with them, but to overcoming them in the political arena. The victory of Trump and "Brexit," the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, are both, in my mind, direct extensions of this willful ignorance born of over-sensitivity. The decayed, degraded, degenerate modern journalist (himself only an extension of a decayed, degraded and degenerate modern society), who, having shielded himself from the true motivations of those he disagrees with, is shocked when huge masses of people disagree with him. To many of our young people, and indeed, many of the professors who teach those young people, the very act of grasping, without exaggerations or distortions, the principles of one's political foes is deemed "offensive" and "micro-aggressive" (cue violin), when it fact it is simply educational. The old saying "Knowledge is power" has been replaced by the Oceanic credo of 1984: "Ignorance is Strength."
I do not wish to be redundant here, but the problem is so cyclical in nature that my point bears repeating, or rather rephrasing. American universities, which used to be oases of free thought and passionate but principled disagreement, are now veritable petri-dishes for breeding oversensitive, under-educated weaklings who can't bear to be exposed to ideas that make them uncomfortable. These weaklings -- it is the right word, I'm sad to say -- go into journalism without understanding or respecting any political belief they themselves don't hold, and not only produce “journalism” which is as weak and narrow-minded as they are, they are praised for their “sensitivity” by their colleagues and readers alike. But journalism, like education, is not and never has been for the sensitive: respect for the prejudices and preconceived notions of the readership -- for their political "sacred cows" and feelings generally -- is absolutely no concern of the journalist's art. On the contrary, the outstanding feature of any reporter is his is insensitivity, or more specifically, his toughness, and a tough reporter, be he conservative, liberal, libertarian, or what have you in his political sympathies, knows that the best way to deliver informed, even-handed journalism is to understand both sides of the story, not merely the one he is covertly in sympathy with.
In tandem with this, every major press organization, regardless of whether it is print or electronic in nature, must re-open the bureaus they once maintained in what Homer Simpson so eloquently called “the great useless mass of land between New York and Los Angeles we call America.” As I have previously stated, the mixture of shock and disbelief with which the big-name press regarded Donald Trump's election came largely from their own deliberate, wilful ignorance of the mood of “the rest” of the United States, which they more or less openly hold in contempt. The deep, searing vein of anger which exists in places like Youngstown, Ohio – a desolation of shuttered shops and dead factories left behind by Obama's economic policies – was either not paid serious heed or simply not grasped at all, because few reporters troubled to go to places like Youngstown, and when they did, few could refrain from depicting the inhabitants as ill-educated, racist bumpkins whose opinions didn't matter a damn anyway. Had the organizations in question stationed reporters in such places year-round, had they bothered to take the American pulse in the non-election years that make up most of our lives, they might have taken Trump, or at least what he represented, more seriously. In my previous article I noted that George Orwell once accused the British ruling class of being unable to grasp the dangers of Fascism, because to do so would have meant studying the theory of socialism, which would have in turn laid bare the gross social and economic inequalities that they, the British ruling class, existed to preserve. "To fight Fascism," Orwell noted. "One must begin by admitting that it contains some good as well as much that is evil." But this beginning never took place. To keep their sense of moral superiority, the British rulers had to remain permanently ignorant, and by this ignorance they led their country to war and their Empire to destruction. So it is with the American press. To understand the Trump phenomenon, or Brexit, or the rise of nationalist movements generally, they would have had to understand the anger which motivated them, which would have not only meant actually wading into the "great, useless mass of land we call America" but realizing that some of the Heartland grievances were actually legitimate. And this was precisely what they did not do. Indeed, they could not, because the deficiency in their political outlook, their innate "sensitivity" and refusal to grant even the possibility that the "other" party might have a point here and there, made it impossible. Their political ideology -- that only big-city-dwellers, Millennials, hipsters, progressives, liberals, gays, university professors, people of color and mixed race actually matter -- had forced them into a line of reasoning as fixed and an unalterable as a railroad track, with the exception that the track led right off a cliff. The number of bloggers and self-appointed pundits who were Googling "white working class" on election night must damn near have broken the Google servers, but even after belatedly discovering the existence of this seething mass of voters, tens of millions strong, their only reaction was to double down on their disdain. The amount of whining, weeping and tantrum-throwing that followed the election was at once amusing and infuriating. Only now, with the inauguration-day smoke beginning to clear, do I see any signs at all that the coastal press (Los Angeles, Washington, New York, Boston) is starting to grasp the necessity of "colonizing" the vast heartland of America. If this nascent policy is followed through -- and "if" is the longest word in the English language -- then within a year we ought be seeing reportage which will make the outcome of the next election far less shocking in its outcome.
As to my third point, that journalism-for-profit has debased the profession and led to an increase in sensationalism which has, in turn, led to further blurring the line between hard news and entertainment, it's necessary for me to explain that for much of their history, electronic news programs, from the earliest days of radio onward, were operated at a loss, simply as a public service. It was not until 60 Minutes debuted in 1968 that networks realized they could make a profit from radio or television news, and while 60 Minutes is in many ways a fine program, it definitely blurred the line between hard news and “news entertainment,” with its slanted coverage, aggressive, confrontational interviews and ambush tactics. Nowadays, it is taken as a matter of course that news programs of any kind be profitable, but news for profit contains a great evil within its core, to wit: what is true often does not sell. Many of the most important stories of modern times, such as the savings-and-loan collapse in the 1990s, or the fact that the Pentagon cannot account for 6.8 trillion (with a t dollars of taxpayer money, hardly entered the public consciousness because no way could be found to “sex them up” in the manner of, say, the O.J. Simpson Trial. The desire people have for salacious gossip and tawdry scandal is never going to go away, but that doesn't mean that legitimate news entities have to give these grotesqueries more coverage than they deserve. We must return, however painfully, to the idea that a large majority of the populace are uninterested in meaningful news, and leave them to TMZ and Extra!. But those with functioning brains, who want to know what the hell is doing and being done in the world, deserve the best, the hardest-hitting, the gutsiest journalism we can give them, and never mind the goddamned profit margin. Now, it so happens that the United States has 540 billionaires, vastly more than the rest of the world combined. These individuals have more money than they could ever possibly spend and many of them look for ways to spend some of it charitably. Surely one or two of them could be convinced, with the right arguments, to pump cash into the hardening arteries of our better news organizations, or failing that, fund their own, one which approaches stories without worrying about the economics of covering them, or whether their reportage will anger some important sponsor whose advertising money must not be lost. Such a news entity, freed from economic concerns, would provide Americans with a quality alternative to the ideologically bigoted trash we are now being served in super-sized helpings. It would also attract many young people, journalistically inclined, who are notweaklings, as well as many old journalistic veterans who have been marginalized and disenfranchised simply because their standards are too high for the great unwashed. The vets could supply the experience, the standards, and the discipline necessary to maintain them; the young could supply the passion and technical, social-media savvy.
Such a union, incidentally, would actually assist us with my fourth point, the idea that the 24 hour news cycle, by virtue of having to keep each of those hours filled with content, changed the character of journalism by forcing scribes to create, rather than merely report, the news. Our imaginary news organization – let's give it the working title "5WH" – would operate along older-fashioned lines, appearing for no more than six, or in times of crisis, perhaps eight hours a day on television. What's more, it would operate under these guidelines:
1. Understand that the first duty of a news agency is to inform the people, while shaping their views is fit only for the op-ed section. This leads us to....
2. Divide the “paper” between hard news and opinion-editorial, and make explicitly clear where the line is drawn, if necessary by the gross expedient of labeling each individual story. This is precisely the opposite of the present trend of mingling news and op-ed in such a way that the distinction no longer exists.
3. Insist on objective, factual reporting at all times. Avoid use of partisan political words and phraseology in reportage. Avoid the impulse to ridicule or condescend those who are interviewed, or, for that matter, to be overly sympathetic with them. Prevent journalists from injecting themselves, their personalities, or their politics into their hard-news stories, except in those cases (undercover/investigative journalism, for example), where it is impossible.
4. Practice public self-assessment and self-criticism, if necessary through the use of an ombudsman, an independent watchdog within the organization with the power to discipline those who fail to meet standards.
5. Invite scrutiny. Never hesitate to admit, and be held accountable for, errors and mistakes. They are going to occur, and when they do, they can be defused by a simple mea culpa, which will restore public confidence. Above all, avoid the practice of doubling down on tainted stories, a la Rolling Stone with its libelous “A Rape on Campus” piece, simply because you wanted the story to be true. Mistakes happen. Admit them, learn from them, and move on. Journalists live to destroy politicians who would rather cover up a minor peccadillo than confess to it, and what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
5. Keep a finger on the pulse of America – not just New York or Los Angeles – by maintaining the afore-mentioned bureaus, or at least individual reporters, in cities and towns across the country, and keep those reporters reporting. Poke. Prod. Dig. Report. Ask questions and listen to the answers. And don't be afraid of Americans from Cleveland. They probably won't bite you. Probably.
6. As I stated in Part 1, anyone with a working internet connection can call themselves a reporter, and I asked that the reader learn to differentiate between the legitimate and the fake before clicking his or her mouse.
But legitimate journalistic agencies should have even less compunction about calling out hacks, frauds, race-baiters, fear-mongers, and the plain morons of the community for what they are. Here, as in all areas of reportage, objectivity is a must: a left-leaning news agency must drop the hammer on left-wing frauds, and vice-versa. Sympathy with someone's political aims must never be allowed to influence the way we grade the reliability of the news.
It will be seen here that many of my suggestions to date, are not solutions in themselves but merely components of solutions, and mostly very broad in character. This is true, because the problem we face is itself both broad in nature and deeply rooted in our societal flaws as a whole. A disease which has been progressing slowly for years will not be cured in a day, a fact which is disheartening at the outset of the struggle. On the other hand, a disease left untreated is invariably fatal -- in this case, to our democracy -- and this disease can be stopped. The task is large, the obstacles many, and the people most effected by the problem either unaware of it or too apathetic to do anything about it. This does not serve as an excuse for the awakened, active individual to do nothing: indeed, it robs him or her of that excuse. Generations of Americans, reaching back to the time of the Revolution, to the Civil War, through the age of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, suffered and in some cases died so that basic human freedoms could be enjoyed by everyone in this country. Perhaps the most basic freedom we enjoy -- the reason "freedom of the press" was enshrined in the First Amendment -- is the right to be told the truth, and to make decisions based on those truths. Freedom of the press, which in this case is synonymous with "the honesty and integrity of the press" is the cornerstone of all democracy. But we cannot have the latter without the former, and we cannot have either unless everyone participates in this fight. In the 1950s, when civics were still taught to every schoolchild in America, one of the slogans was "Freedom is Everybody's Job." This holds no less true of freedom of the press. It's everybody's job. It's your job.
Now go out there and do it.
In regards to the first two, and last two, accusations, that American journalists don't understand their own profession of journalism, are astonishingly ignorant of the country in which they live, and tend to “report” only what they want to happen and not what is manifestly happening, etc., etc., the fixes are actually quite simple, if not necessarily fast-acting or easy to execute. Beginning immediately, every student studying journalism should be required by his professors to study, at some length, the principles and ideas of every popular political ideology in the United States, and be able to state those principles, with objectivity and accuracy, back to the professor, as well as write about them in great detail. This is hardly an unreasonable demand: Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and in some ways a more fanatical Nazi than Hitler himself, once astonished and amused guests at a formal reception before WW2 by three times mounting a table and delivering, extemporaneously, seemingly heartfelt speeches in favor of monarchism, communism and democracy. Goebbels' point, seemingly, was that he could make eloquent arguments in favor of all rival systems of government without having the slightest belief in them. My point, in referencing this, is that Americans no longer seem to possess the courage to explore or try to understand the viewpoints and motivations of those they disagree with -- a key element not only to arguing intelligently with them, but to overcoming them in the political arena. The victory of Trump and "Brexit," the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, are both, in my mind, direct extensions of this willful ignorance born of over-sensitivity. The decayed, degraded, degenerate modern journalist (himself only an extension of a decayed, degraded and degenerate modern society), who, having shielded himself from the true motivations of those he disagrees with, is shocked when huge masses of people disagree with him. To many of our young people, and indeed, many of the professors who teach those young people, the very act of grasping, without exaggerations or distortions, the principles of one's political foes is deemed "offensive" and "micro-aggressive" (cue violin), when it fact it is simply educational. The old saying "Knowledge is power" has been replaced by the Oceanic credo of 1984: "Ignorance is Strength."
I do not wish to be redundant here, but the problem is so cyclical in nature that my point bears repeating, or rather rephrasing. American universities, which used to be oases of free thought and passionate but principled disagreement, are now veritable petri-dishes for breeding oversensitive, under-educated weaklings who can't bear to be exposed to ideas that make them uncomfortable. These weaklings -- it is the right word, I'm sad to say -- go into journalism without understanding or respecting any political belief they themselves don't hold, and not only produce “journalism” which is as weak and narrow-minded as they are, they are praised for their “sensitivity” by their colleagues and readers alike. But journalism, like education, is not and never has been for the sensitive: respect for the prejudices and preconceived notions of the readership -- for their political "sacred cows" and feelings generally -- is absolutely no concern of the journalist's art. On the contrary, the outstanding feature of any reporter is his is insensitivity, or more specifically, his toughness, and a tough reporter, be he conservative, liberal, libertarian, or what have you in his political sympathies, knows that the best way to deliver informed, even-handed journalism is to understand both sides of the story, not merely the one he is covertly in sympathy with.
In tandem with this, every major press organization, regardless of whether it is print or electronic in nature, must re-open the bureaus they once maintained in what Homer Simpson so eloquently called “the great useless mass of land between New York and Los Angeles we call America.” As I have previously stated, the mixture of shock and disbelief with which the big-name press regarded Donald Trump's election came largely from their own deliberate, wilful ignorance of the mood of “the rest” of the United States, which they more or less openly hold in contempt. The deep, searing vein of anger which exists in places like Youngstown, Ohio – a desolation of shuttered shops and dead factories left behind by Obama's economic policies – was either not paid serious heed or simply not grasped at all, because few reporters troubled to go to places like Youngstown, and when they did, few could refrain from depicting the inhabitants as ill-educated, racist bumpkins whose opinions didn't matter a damn anyway. Had the organizations in question stationed reporters in such places year-round, had they bothered to take the American pulse in the non-election years that make up most of our lives, they might have taken Trump, or at least what he represented, more seriously. In my previous article I noted that George Orwell once accused the British ruling class of being unable to grasp the dangers of Fascism, because to do so would have meant studying the theory of socialism, which would have in turn laid bare the gross social and economic inequalities that they, the British ruling class, existed to preserve. "To fight Fascism," Orwell noted. "One must begin by admitting that it contains some good as well as much that is evil." But this beginning never took place. To keep their sense of moral superiority, the British rulers had to remain permanently ignorant, and by this ignorance they led their country to war and their Empire to destruction. So it is with the American press. To understand the Trump phenomenon, or Brexit, or the rise of nationalist movements generally, they would have had to understand the anger which motivated them, which would have not only meant actually wading into the "great, useless mass of land we call America" but realizing that some of the Heartland grievances were actually legitimate. And this was precisely what they did not do. Indeed, they could not, because the deficiency in their political outlook, their innate "sensitivity" and refusal to grant even the possibility that the "other" party might have a point here and there, made it impossible. Their political ideology -- that only big-city-dwellers, Millennials, hipsters, progressives, liberals, gays, university professors, people of color and mixed race actually matter -- had forced them into a line of reasoning as fixed and an unalterable as a railroad track, with the exception that the track led right off a cliff. The number of bloggers and self-appointed pundits who were Googling "white working class" on election night must damn near have broken the Google servers, but even after belatedly discovering the existence of this seething mass of voters, tens of millions strong, their only reaction was to double down on their disdain. The amount of whining, weeping and tantrum-throwing that followed the election was at once amusing and infuriating. Only now, with the inauguration-day smoke beginning to clear, do I see any signs at all that the coastal press (Los Angeles, Washington, New York, Boston) is starting to grasp the necessity of "colonizing" the vast heartland of America. If this nascent policy is followed through -- and "if" is the longest word in the English language -- then within a year we ought be seeing reportage which will make the outcome of the next election far less shocking in its outcome.
As to my third point, that journalism-for-profit has debased the profession and led to an increase in sensationalism which has, in turn, led to further blurring the line between hard news and entertainment, it's necessary for me to explain that for much of their history, electronic news programs, from the earliest days of radio onward, were operated at a loss, simply as a public service. It was not until 60 Minutes debuted in 1968 that networks realized they could make a profit from radio or television news, and while 60 Minutes is in many ways a fine program, it definitely blurred the line between hard news and “news entertainment,” with its slanted coverage, aggressive, confrontational interviews and ambush tactics. Nowadays, it is taken as a matter of course that news programs of any kind be profitable, but news for profit contains a great evil within its core, to wit: what is true often does not sell. Many of the most important stories of modern times, such as the savings-and-loan collapse in the 1990s, or the fact that the Pentagon cannot account for 6.8 trillion (with a t dollars of taxpayer money, hardly entered the public consciousness because no way could be found to “sex them up” in the manner of, say, the O.J. Simpson Trial. The desire people have for salacious gossip and tawdry scandal is never going to go away, but that doesn't mean that legitimate news entities have to give these grotesqueries more coverage than they deserve. We must return, however painfully, to the idea that a large majority of the populace are uninterested in meaningful news, and leave them to TMZ and Extra!. But those with functioning brains, who want to know what the hell is doing and being done in the world, deserve the best, the hardest-hitting, the gutsiest journalism we can give them, and never mind the goddamned profit margin. Now, it so happens that the United States has 540 billionaires, vastly more than the rest of the world combined. These individuals have more money than they could ever possibly spend and many of them look for ways to spend some of it charitably. Surely one or two of them could be convinced, with the right arguments, to pump cash into the hardening arteries of our better news organizations, or failing that, fund their own, one which approaches stories without worrying about the economics of covering them, or whether their reportage will anger some important sponsor whose advertising money must not be lost. Such a news entity, freed from economic concerns, would provide Americans with a quality alternative to the ideologically bigoted trash we are now being served in super-sized helpings. It would also attract many young people, journalistically inclined, who are notweaklings, as well as many old journalistic veterans who have been marginalized and disenfranchised simply because their standards are too high for the great unwashed. The vets could supply the experience, the standards, and the discipline necessary to maintain them; the young could supply the passion and technical, social-media savvy.
Such a union, incidentally, would actually assist us with my fourth point, the idea that the 24 hour news cycle, by virtue of having to keep each of those hours filled with content, changed the character of journalism by forcing scribes to create, rather than merely report, the news. Our imaginary news organization – let's give it the working title "5WH" – would operate along older-fashioned lines, appearing for no more than six, or in times of crisis, perhaps eight hours a day on television. What's more, it would operate under these guidelines:
1. Understand that the first duty of a news agency is to inform the people, while shaping their views is fit only for the op-ed section. This leads us to....
2. Divide the “paper” between hard news and opinion-editorial, and make explicitly clear where the line is drawn, if necessary by the gross expedient of labeling each individual story. This is precisely the opposite of the present trend of mingling news and op-ed in such a way that the distinction no longer exists.
3. Insist on objective, factual reporting at all times. Avoid use of partisan political words and phraseology in reportage. Avoid the impulse to ridicule or condescend those who are interviewed, or, for that matter, to be overly sympathetic with them. Prevent journalists from injecting themselves, their personalities, or their politics into their hard-news stories, except in those cases (undercover/investigative journalism, for example), where it is impossible.
4. Practice public self-assessment and self-criticism, if necessary through the use of an ombudsman, an independent watchdog within the organization with the power to discipline those who fail to meet standards.
5. Invite scrutiny. Never hesitate to admit, and be held accountable for, errors and mistakes. They are going to occur, and when they do, they can be defused by a simple mea culpa, which will restore public confidence. Above all, avoid the practice of doubling down on tainted stories, a la Rolling Stone with its libelous “A Rape on Campus” piece, simply because you wanted the story to be true. Mistakes happen. Admit them, learn from them, and move on. Journalists live to destroy politicians who would rather cover up a minor peccadillo than confess to it, and what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
5. Keep a finger on the pulse of America – not just New York or Los Angeles – by maintaining the afore-mentioned bureaus, or at least individual reporters, in cities and towns across the country, and keep those reporters reporting. Poke. Prod. Dig. Report. Ask questions and listen to the answers. And don't be afraid of Americans from Cleveland. They probably won't bite you. Probably.
6. As I stated in Part 1, anyone with a working internet connection can call themselves a reporter, and I asked that the reader learn to differentiate between the legitimate and the fake before clicking his or her mouse.
But legitimate journalistic agencies should have even less compunction about calling out hacks, frauds, race-baiters, fear-mongers, and the plain morons of the community for what they are. Here, as in all areas of reportage, objectivity is a must: a left-leaning news agency must drop the hammer on left-wing frauds, and vice-versa. Sympathy with someone's political aims must never be allowed to influence the way we grade the reliability of the news.
It will be seen here that many of my suggestions to date, are not solutions in themselves but merely components of solutions, and mostly very broad in character. This is true, because the problem we face is itself both broad in nature and deeply rooted in our societal flaws as a whole. A disease which has been progressing slowly for years will not be cured in a day, a fact which is disheartening at the outset of the struggle. On the other hand, a disease left untreated is invariably fatal -- in this case, to our democracy -- and this disease can be stopped. The task is large, the obstacles many, and the people most effected by the problem either unaware of it or too apathetic to do anything about it. This does not serve as an excuse for the awakened, active individual to do nothing: indeed, it robs him or her of that excuse. Generations of Americans, reaching back to the time of the Revolution, to the Civil War, through the age of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, suffered and in some cases died so that basic human freedoms could be enjoyed by everyone in this country. Perhaps the most basic freedom we enjoy -- the reason "freedom of the press" was enshrined in the First Amendment -- is the right to be told the truth, and to make decisions based on those truths. Freedom of the press, which in this case is synonymous with "the honesty and integrity of the press" is the cornerstone of all democracy. But we cannot have the latter without the former, and we cannot have either unless everyone participates in this fight. In the 1950s, when civics were still taught to every schoolchild in America, one of the slogans was "Freedom is Everybody's Job." This holds no less true of freedom of the press. It's everybody's job. It's your job.
Now go out there and do it.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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