Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 31
January 23, 2017
When to Shut Up: Why Prequels Usually Suck
Don't complete your own revolution.
--- Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo
I know that I promised I would return with a blog continuing my attack on the American monetary system, but I find that post-Christmas, my desire to talk about finances is at an all-time low. Since yours probably is too, I shall lay turn away from the windmill that is the Federal Reserve, and, like Don Quixote, tilt again at it later. God knows it will still be there. In the mean time I've decided to tackle a more approachable subject: Hollywood. Or, specifically, Hollywood's recent obsession with what are known as “origin stories.”
The name “origin story” is a little deceptive and needs fast explaining. It denotes a story which details the origin of a character, but it connotes a story which is written after the character's debut in a book, movie or television series. (In “The Godfather” we are introduced to Vito Corleone, but only in “The Godfather, Part II,” we learn the circumstances by which he came to power – his childhood and early life.) However, an origin story is not limited to explaining the backstory of characters; it can also explain the backstory of a universe, or focus on a set of events which led to the circumstances obtaining later in a story's timeline. (For example, the third film in the Kate Beckinsale series Underworld, called Rise of the Lycans, is actually set before the previous two films.)
Origin stories, which in movies are usually called prequels, have always been with us, and I am not opposed to them per se, but I've found that unless they are very skilfilly done (see the afformentioned “The Godfather, Part II”), they tend to do more harm than good. And in most cases they can only be skilfully handled if the writer's motivation is passion rather than profit – if he or she feels a need, not just a want but a need, to expand upon the character or the story. In recent years there has been a veritable orgy of backstory in film which has spilled over into the literary world as well; but the motivation for writing it seems to be the opposite of ideal: profit rather than passion. Of course money is not always the reasoning behind such excursions into prequel; in some instances it is simply sentimentality or bad judgement; but regardless of the reason, the outcome tends to be either forgettable, regrettable, or just plain awful.
To understand the core of my grudge against origin stories, it is necessary to understand the so-called “iceberg theory” of Ernest Hemingway, also known as “the theory of omission.” As Hemingway himself said: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” This theory, that less is more, that what is implied is often stronger than what is explicitly stated, is implicit in most great storytelling. The fact is, what we do not know about our characters and universe is often the source of our greatest pleasure, since, as Stephen King told us in Danse Macabre, our minds tend to fill in gaps in information with details far more imaginative and satisfying than anything even the best writers could conceive. If you have been moved by a series of any kind, be it film, television or written word, you've probably speculated a great deal about the characters and universe of that series; you may have also experienced the peculiar emotion which occurs when some cherished theory of yours, possibly held for years, gets smashed to bits by a new storyline that makes nonsense of it.
When I was growing up – and today, for that matter – one of my favorite films was “Alien.” What I loved most about the story was its underlying sense of mystery. Our heroes are hauling mineral ore across the galaxy when diverted to an obscure, uninhabited planet by a mysterious distress signal. They set down and find, upon its barren surface, a huge, derelict alien spacecraft. Within that spacecraft are multitudes of eggs, one of which hatches, with very unfortunate result. For “Alien” the central plot point is the hatching, but for me, a tiny part of the audience, the appeal lay in wondering about these things:
1. Where did the alien ship come from?
2. Why did it land on this barren planet?
3. How long was it there?
4. Are the eggs native to the planet, were they cargo on the ship, or were they lain after the ship's crew was dead?
5. What was the exact text of the “SOS” which turned out to be a warning?
“Alien” presents us with a huge mystery which it never even attempts to solve, and the result is a far more effective and terrifying story than if these questions had been answered, because one of the central themes of the movie is primal fear – and our strongest primal fear is probably fear of the unknown. Ignorance and mystery inspire horror, because horror is the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and humans, by virtue of the hard experience we call instinct or race memory, tend to fear the worst. Also, by some perversity of nature, we tend to enjoy the feeling of being intrigued, teased, titillated, even. As with certain hobbies and activities, the fun lies in the process and not in its completion – the riddle, and not its answer. Well, the unanswered riddles from this film haunted and intrigued and delighted me...for about 30 years. Then one day Ridley Scott & Co. decided to make a prequel, called “Prometheus,” and I felt my heart sink. On the one hand, the movie might supply these long-craved answers; on the other hand, well...they might supply those long-craved answers. It was a case of be careful what you wish for. As it happens, “Prometheus” tells, or rather begins to tell, the story of how the derelict spacecraft came to be resting on that haunted-looking planet. It answers two of the questions above, and sets up the answer to at least two more...and, I find, it disappoints the living shit out of me every time I think about it. The writers were unable to provide steak equal to the sizzle of the questions posed by the original film; all they did was demystify something most cinephiles consider sacred. It turns out that King was right: what's in the dark is all the more frightening because we can't see it. “Alien,” to me, is so much more effective if you pretend that “Prometheus” never existed, because it re-enshrines the story in darkness and conundrum, and leaves that uneasy question mark hanging in space. Where no one can hear you scream.
Speaking of sacred, let's talk for a moment about The Force. It is one of the cornerstone-concepts of the “Star Wars” universe, yet in the first two movies of that series the total explanations we get of it boil down to a handful of short sentences, such as: “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." And indeed, we neither need nor want deeper explanations than this: the unifying theory of the original “Star Wars” films is simplicity. The story is almost pathetically simple, and the central theme as old as King Arthur, but this is in large part why it works. Just as we accept Merlin's magic as being part of the world of Camelot without experiencing any desire to know where magical power comes from, we accept these fortune-cookie explanations of The Force because it is just magic by another name, and magic is self-justifying. A world that possesses magic, like Middle Earth or the Harry Potter universe, does not as a rule question the source of that magic – it's simply a fait accompli at page one, a deus ex machina we swallow smoothly and whole. And yet George Lucas didn't see it that way when, in 1999, he decided to pin a scientific explanation on The Force. The Force, he tells us in “The Phantom Menace,” is actually caused by microscopic life-forms called midi-chlorians that reside within the cells of all living things, but it some things more than others. When I heard Liam Neeson utter this line in a small-town Pennsylvania theater all those years ago, I recall the immediate sound from the audience was groans of unbelief, as if they had just seen something holy recklessly profaned. And it is hard not to see the midi-chlorians as anything but profanation, given the deliberately mystical tone The Force occupies in the original S.W. trilogy. What Lucas accomplished here was as vulgar as explaining how a magic trick works to a nine year-old; it cheapens what should be a wondrous experience. And this is a hallmark of bad writing -- refusal to give the audience credit for making the leap with you.
The iceberg theory as it applies to film had a fine exemplar in John Carptenter's horror classic “Halloween,” a film which, in a very real if extremely simplified sense, is simply the Book of Job updated to 1979. As with “Alien,” one of the central strengths of the movie is in the unanswered mystery shrouding its antagonist, Michael Meyers. In “Halloween,” we see a young Meyers stalk and murder his older sister at the opening of the film, but we never get an explanation as to why he did it, or what he was like before he committed the murder, or why he escapes from the nut-hatch 13 years later and tries to relive the crime with a new set of victims. The only explanation we get is from Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, who identifies Myers as “purely and simply evil” and, therefore, not really human at all (he often refers to Meyers as "it" rather than "him"). Loomis has a few different speeches on his favorite ex-patient, but nothing he says is really scientific. Science, to Loomis, breaks down at the point of contact with Meyers' skin, and beyond that we're in the devil's country, where you don't need fancy talk and theories, you need a freaking gun. Indeed, at the end of the movie, when Michael's would-be victim, Laurie, sobs to Loomis, “Was that the boogeyman?” the little Englishman dryly replies, “As a matter of fact...it was.”
The Boogeyman! Think to your own first experience with that dread name. Your older brother or sister said to you one night when you were six, “Don't let the Boogeyman get you!” to which you fearfully replied, “What's the Boogeyman?” And they said with a leer, “He comes and gets little kids!” And this ended the conversation – your mind did not require any further knowledge. The origin of the Boogeyman and his motives for wanting to “get” you were both irrelevant; knowledge of his existence was sufficient to be afraid of him, and the fact that he came with no physical description or known method of “getting” merely provoked your brain to supplying the grisly details. This sense of restraint is the genius of Carpenter's film. The less we know about Myers and his motivations, the more frightening they are; the less we know about why this is happening, the more terrifying the moral is -- that no one is safe, that bad things can happen to good people, that the answer to the question “Why is this happening to me?” is, horribly, “Because! Just because!” to the tune of a plunging kitchen knife.
And yet – ! A few years ago Rob Zombie took it upon himself to “re-imagine” Halloween in a two-part explosion of violence by the same name. In addition to showing more gore and graphic violence in any given thirty seconds than the original film did in its whole two hours, Zombie's films take the precisely opposite tack that Carpenter's did, and attempt, almost from their first frame, to break down Michael's motivations and influences and let us know exactly who he is and why he is doing what he's doing. Michael, we are shown, is the son of a (very) broken and (very) abusive home, and there is a direct emotional-psychological cause for his eventual transformation into a mouth-breathing spree-killer; indeed, his psychiatrist laments, “I failed you!” to his homicidal ex-patient, which is, again, the polar-opposite reaction of the original Loomis, who realized that no psychological technique would have availed him anything against The Boogeyman. The Boogeyman is too elemental, too much a force of nature, to be reasoned with or "reached." By playing down this force of nature and turning it into a mere set of causes, A + B = C, we once again rob it of its most valuable element, which is mystery. Why? is so much more devastating a question when left unanswered!
Lest you think I'm picking on the celluloid set, it's not only in film that we find our needless origin stories of late. On the contrary, they have quite a place in literature of all kinds, including the “Hannibal Lecter” series by Thomas Harris. In the first of these four novels the Lecter character is introduced to us in a way very similar to Michael Meyers, in that while we know something about his crimes, we do not really understand his motivations or their root cause. In the second book we are told a little more, given a more extended tease, as it were; but the larger questions are, once again, deliberately unanswered. Lecter jeers his curious interrogator; “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling – I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.” And indeed, Harris is wise enough not to try here. He's content to leave Lecter somewhere just beyond the comforting frontiers of scientific understanding, an existential question with no definite answer. Unfortunately, this is a course he abandoned completely with the fourth book, “Hannibal Rising.” In this unfortunate tome, Harris does indeed “reduce to a set of influences” the hitherto enigmatic and mysterious doctor. By the end of the book we know everything about him and how he came to be the way he is, down to the last dull detail. The macabre vista of atrocities which were implied by chilling little half-sentences jabbed here and there like slivers of ice in the first two books (“And how is Officer Stewart? I heard he retired after he saw my basement.”) was blotted out by an avalanche of minutiae. The mystery, having been solved, ceased to be interesting.
Origin stories are everywhere and coming in increasingly unusual forms. “Rogue One,” the latest Star Wars story, is just that, “A Star Wars story,” skived off from the fatty tissue surrounding the original film, “A New Hope.” In essence, this film exists to an answer to a question no one asked, specifically, what did those lines (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR.”) really entail? The answer wasn't necessary to the integrity of the original trilogy or the prequels, it was supplied because there is money in exploiting the nostalgia surrounding the S.W. franchise. However you liked or disliked the result, the fact remains that the story didn't need to be told, and at the same time it filled in details which were, perhaps anyway, better left to the audience's imagination. I know that most people liked “Rogue One,” and I certainly didn't hate it (I preferred it to “The Force Awakens” by a wide margin), but again, I question the necessity of filling in every nook and cranny in a story -- of, as it were, mapping out the exact size of the iceberg. Let the idea retain some mystery, some borderlands beyond which the rest is unexplored and left to our imaginations. As a friend of mine who is passionate about fantasy games told me recently, “What sells fantasy is the same thing that turns a lot of people off of it – the deep lore.” But it's important to note that “the deep lore” in fantasy is always thickest where it is unwritten. Most of the concepts which underpinned Frank Herbert's DUNE series were either left out of, or only very lightly touched upon, in the first book in the series, and a similar thing could be said of Tolkien's Middle Earth saga, George R.R. Martin's “Game of Thrones” series and Rowling's Harry Potter books. In each instance, the author left large quantities of information about their respective universes out of the stories themselves, which they then published separately in supplementary texts -- the literary equivalent of “DVD special features” you do not have to watch to enjoy the film.
Now, it so happens that I too am a writer, and that one of my principal flaws as a young one was precisely the sin I am castigating here -- over-explanations of story brought about, in part, by lack of trust in the readership's intelligence. (My brother is enormously fond of pointing out that, at the age of 12, I felt it necessary to explain to those in the theater around me during Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader was being sarcastic when he uttered the line, "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.") It was not until many years later that a tough lesson drove home what it means to run into iceberg theory Titanic style. I had written a huge backstory for a character and decided to use it to introduce him to the audience. My editor said, "Very fine writing -- now cut all of it." He went on to explain that the subsequent actions of the character made his backstory plain; there was no need to elucidate it. "Show don't tell" is an old rule for novelists but it is, I admit, also very difficult to follow, especially when your readership (or viewership) is hungry for details. The lesson, however, was plain: keeping the audience a little hungry is better than feeding them too much. The hungry come back for more.
At the beginning of this blog I quoted a line from Irving Stone's epic novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” In that memorable sequence, Leonardo da Vinci scolds Michelangelo for taking his new style of painting to such unreachable levels of expertise and mastery that he had, in effect, left nowhere for any other artist to go – including, we are to suppose, Michelangelo himself. He had “completed his own revolution,” and as I write these lines, it seems to me that is the trend nowadays. At every turn, we see a lantern lighting the way, but somehow this does not suit our nature. Our minds seem to crave dark corners in which to project our fears and fantasies and to unleash our imaginations– we don't always want or need a damned lantern. But this frenzy for origin stories continues, here as elsewhere: “Game of Thrones” is in negotiations for a prequel series set when the Targeryans ruled Westeros, there are origin-movies about Han Solo and Boba Fett already in pre-production, and one of the most popular detective series in Europe, “Detective Montalbano” (which has run for 16 years), recently spun off an origin series called simply “Young Montalbano,” which delves deeply into the hitherto undiscussed past of the eponymous Sicilian hero. So on and on – and on, so that now there are several "origin stories" in print about The Godfather, too.
As I said before, I am not actually opposed to origin stories as a rule. They are tempting targets for a reason: they seem to shine with infinite possibility, and in some cases I believe they can add a great deal to the canon of a series; but in those instances their author usually had something definite to say, and a powerful reason for wanting to say it. “Grendel” is a prequel to “Beowulf” but adds rather than subtracts to the lore of its inspiration by giving us an epic from the perspective of its villain: it infringes very little, if at all, on its predecessor. On the other hand, stories that are told simply because there is space left over to tell them, or for purely financial reasons, tend not merely to debase their own selves but to damage the integrity of the originals upon which they are founded. A friend of mine, criticizing the Metallica album “St. Anger,” said to me, “This is the sort of music that, if you're in a band, you don't want people to hear – it's garage practice, jam session stuff. It's cutting-room floor, out-takes, blooper reel shit. It's a 'you at six in the morning with no coffee and no makeup' type of deal.” In other words, the album's crime was not in existing but rather being shown in public. Well, it seems to me many of these origin stories fall into just that category – their crime lies not in the fact that someone dreamed them up (quite the contrary!), but in the fact that they were made canonical, and so “closed off” yet another avenue for our individual imaginations. If some of the joy of the journey is in the journey itself, then it seems to me that some of the joy of the story is in the wider world that story inhabits and implies. It is a beautiful thing to start a revolution, and to maintain it; but its completion is perhaps best left in the hands of its audience and not its author.
--- Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo
I know that I promised I would return with a blog continuing my attack on the American monetary system, but I find that post-Christmas, my desire to talk about finances is at an all-time low. Since yours probably is too, I shall lay turn away from the windmill that is the Federal Reserve, and, like Don Quixote, tilt again at it later. God knows it will still be there. In the mean time I've decided to tackle a more approachable subject: Hollywood. Or, specifically, Hollywood's recent obsession with what are known as “origin stories.”
The name “origin story” is a little deceptive and needs fast explaining. It denotes a story which details the origin of a character, but it connotes a story which is written after the character's debut in a book, movie or television series. (In “The Godfather” we are introduced to Vito Corleone, but only in “The Godfather, Part II,” we learn the circumstances by which he came to power – his childhood and early life.) However, an origin story is not limited to explaining the backstory of characters; it can also explain the backstory of a universe, or focus on a set of events which led to the circumstances obtaining later in a story's timeline. (For example, the third film in the Kate Beckinsale series Underworld, called Rise of the Lycans, is actually set before the previous two films.)
Origin stories, which in movies are usually called prequels, have always been with us, and I am not opposed to them per se, but I've found that unless they are very skilfilly done (see the afformentioned “The Godfather, Part II”), they tend to do more harm than good. And in most cases they can only be skilfully handled if the writer's motivation is passion rather than profit – if he or she feels a need, not just a want but a need, to expand upon the character or the story. In recent years there has been a veritable orgy of backstory in film which has spilled over into the literary world as well; but the motivation for writing it seems to be the opposite of ideal: profit rather than passion. Of course money is not always the reasoning behind such excursions into prequel; in some instances it is simply sentimentality or bad judgement; but regardless of the reason, the outcome tends to be either forgettable, regrettable, or just plain awful.
To understand the core of my grudge against origin stories, it is necessary to understand the so-called “iceberg theory” of Ernest Hemingway, also known as “the theory of omission.” As Hemingway himself said: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” This theory, that less is more, that what is implied is often stronger than what is explicitly stated, is implicit in most great storytelling. The fact is, what we do not know about our characters and universe is often the source of our greatest pleasure, since, as Stephen King told us in Danse Macabre, our minds tend to fill in gaps in information with details far more imaginative and satisfying than anything even the best writers could conceive. If you have been moved by a series of any kind, be it film, television or written word, you've probably speculated a great deal about the characters and universe of that series; you may have also experienced the peculiar emotion which occurs when some cherished theory of yours, possibly held for years, gets smashed to bits by a new storyline that makes nonsense of it.
When I was growing up – and today, for that matter – one of my favorite films was “Alien.” What I loved most about the story was its underlying sense of mystery. Our heroes are hauling mineral ore across the galaxy when diverted to an obscure, uninhabited planet by a mysterious distress signal. They set down and find, upon its barren surface, a huge, derelict alien spacecraft. Within that spacecraft are multitudes of eggs, one of which hatches, with very unfortunate result. For “Alien” the central plot point is the hatching, but for me, a tiny part of the audience, the appeal lay in wondering about these things:
1. Where did the alien ship come from?
2. Why did it land on this barren planet?
3. How long was it there?
4. Are the eggs native to the planet, were they cargo on the ship, or were they lain after the ship's crew was dead?
5. What was the exact text of the “SOS” which turned out to be a warning?
“Alien” presents us with a huge mystery which it never even attempts to solve, and the result is a far more effective and terrifying story than if these questions had been answered, because one of the central themes of the movie is primal fear – and our strongest primal fear is probably fear of the unknown. Ignorance and mystery inspire horror, because horror is the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and humans, by virtue of the hard experience we call instinct or race memory, tend to fear the worst. Also, by some perversity of nature, we tend to enjoy the feeling of being intrigued, teased, titillated, even. As with certain hobbies and activities, the fun lies in the process and not in its completion – the riddle, and not its answer. Well, the unanswered riddles from this film haunted and intrigued and delighted me...for about 30 years. Then one day Ridley Scott & Co. decided to make a prequel, called “Prometheus,” and I felt my heart sink. On the one hand, the movie might supply these long-craved answers; on the other hand, well...they might supply those long-craved answers. It was a case of be careful what you wish for. As it happens, “Prometheus” tells, or rather begins to tell, the story of how the derelict spacecraft came to be resting on that haunted-looking planet. It answers two of the questions above, and sets up the answer to at least two more...and, I find, it disappoints the living shit out of me every time I think about it. The writers were unable to provide steak equal to the sizzle of the questions posed by the original film; all they did was demystify something most cinephiles consider sacred. It turns out that King was right: what's in the dark is all the more frightening because we can't see it. “Alien,” to me, is so much more effective if you pretend that “Prometheus” never existed, because it re-enshrines the story in darkness and conundrum, and leaves that uneasy question mark hanging in space. Where no one can hear you scream.
Speaking of sacred, let's talk for a moment about The Force. It is one of the cornerstone-concepts of the “Star Wars” universe, yet in the first two movies of that series the total explanations we get of it boil down to a handful of short sentences, such as: “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." And indeed, we neither need nor want deeper explanations than this: the unifying theory of the original “Star Wars” films is simplicity. The story is almost pathetically simple, and the central theme as old as King Arthur, but this is in large part why it works. Just as we accept Merlin's magic as being part of the world of Camelot without experiencing any desire to know where magical power comes from, we accept these fortune-cookie explanations of The Force because it is just magic by another name, and magic is self-justifying. A world that possesses magic, like Middle Earth or the Harry Potter universe, does not as a rule question the source of that magic – it's simply a fait accompli at page one, a deus ex machina we swallow smoothly and whole. And yet George Lucas didn't see it that way when, in 1999, he decided to pin a scientific explanation on The Force. The Force, he tells us in “The Phantom Menace,” is actually caused by microscopic life-forms called midi-chlorians that reside within the cells of all living things, but it some things more than others. When I heard Liam Neeson utter this line in a small-town Pennsylvania theater all those years ago, I recall the immediate sound from the audience was groans of unbelief, as if they had just seen something holy recklessly profaned. And it is hard not to see the midi-chlorians as anything but profanation, given the deliberately mystical tone The Force occupies in the original S.W. trilogy. What Lucas accomplished here was as vulgar as explaining how a magic trick works to a nine year-old; it cheapens what should be a wondrous experience. And this is a hallmark of bad writing -- refusal to give the audience credit for making the leap with you.
The iceberg theory as it applies to film had a fine exemplar in John Carptenter's horror classic “Halloween,” a film which, in a very real if extremely simplified sense, is simply the Book of Job updated to 1979. As with “Alien,” one of the central strengths of the movie is in the unanswered mystery shrouding its antagonist, Michael Meyers. In “Halloween,” we see a young Meyers stalk and murder his older sister at the opening of the film, but we never get an explanation as to why he did it, or what he was like before he committed the murder, or why he escapes from the nut-hatch 13 years later and tries to relive the crime with a new set of victims. The only explanation we get is from Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, who identifies Myers as “purely and simply evil” and, therefore, not really human at all (he often refers to Meyers as "it" rather than "him"). Loomis has a few different speeches on his favorite ex-patient, but nothing he says is really scientific. Science, to Loomis, breaks down at the point of contact with Meyers' skin, and beyond that we're in the devil's country, where you don't need fancy talk and theories, you need a freaking gun. Indeed, at the end of the movie, when Michael's would-be victim, Laurie, sobs to Loomis, “Was that the boogeyman?” the little Englishman dryly replies, “As a matter of fact...it was.”
The Boogeyman! Think to your own first experience with that dread name. Your older brother or sister said to you one night when you were six, “Don't let the Boogeyman get you!” to which you fearfully replied, “What's the Boogeyman?” And they said with a leer, “He comes and gets little kids!” And this ended the conversation – your mind did not require any further knowledge. The origin of the Boogeyman and his motives for wanting to “get” you were both irrelevant; knowledge of his existence was sufficient to be afraid of him, and the fact that he came with no physical description or known method of “getting” merely provoked your brain to supplying the grisly details. This sense of restraint is the genius of Carpenter's film. The less we know about Myers and his motivations, the more frightening they are; the less we know about why this is happening, the more terrifying the moral is -- that no one is safe, that bad things can happen to good people, that the answer to the question “Why is this happening to me?” is, horribly, “Because! Just because!” to the tune of a plunging kitchen knife.
And yet – ! A few years ago Rob Zombie took it upon himself to “re-imagine” Halloween in a two-part explosion of violence by the same name. In addition to showing more gore and graphic violence in any given thirty seconds than the original film did in its whole two hours, Zombie's films take the precisely opposite tack that Carpenter's did, and attempt, almost from their first frame, to break down Michael's motivations and influences and let us know exactly who he is and why he is doing what he's doing. Michael, we are shown, is the son of a (very) broken and (very) abusive home, and there is a direct emotional-psychological cause for his eventual transformation into a mouth-breathing spree-killer; indeed, his psychiatrist laments, “I failed you!” to his homicidal ex-patient, which is, again, the polar-opposite reaction of the original Loomis, who realized that no psychological technique would have availed him anything against The Boogeyman. The Boogeyman is too elemental, too much a force of nature, to be reasoned with or "reached." By playing down this force of nature and turning it into a mere set of causes, A + B = C, we once again rob it of its most valuable element, which is mystery. Why? is so much more devastating a question when left unanswered!
Lest you think I'm picking on the celluloid set, it's not only in film that we find our needless origin stories of late. On the contrary, they have quite a place in literature of all kinds, including the “Hannibal Lecter” series by Thomas Harris. In the first of these four novels the Lecter character is introduced to us in a way very similar to Michael Meyers, in that while we know something about his crimes, we do not really understand his motivations or their root cause. In the second book we are told a little more, given a more extended tease, as it were; but the larger questions are, once again, deliberately unanswered. Lecter jeers his curious interrogator; “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling – I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.” And indeed, Harris is wise enough not to try here. He's content to leave Lecter somewhere just beyond the comforting frontiers of scientific understanding, an existential question with no definite answer. Unfortunately, this is a course he abandoned completely with the fourth book, “Hannibal Rising.” In this unfortunate tome, Harris does indeed “reduce to a set of influences” the hitherto enigmatic and mysterious doctor. By the end of the book we know everything about him and how he came to be the way he is, down to the last dull detail. The macabre vista of atrocities which were implied by chilling little half-sentences jabbed here and there like slivers of ice in the first two books (“And how is Officer Stewart? I heard he retired after he saw my basement.”) was blotted out by an avalanche of minutiae. The mystery, having been solved, ceased to be interesting.
Origin stories are everywhere and coming in increasingly unusual forms. “Rogue One,” the latest Star Wars story, is just that, “A Star Wars story,” skived off from the fatty tissue surrounding the original film, “A New Hope.” In essence, this film exists to an answer to a question no one asked, specifically, what did those lines (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR.”) really entail? The answer wasn't necessary to the integrity of the original trilogy or the prequels, it was supplied because there is money in exploiting the nostalgia surrounding the S.W. franchise. However you liked or disliked the result, the fact remains that the story didn't need to be told, and at the same time it filled in details which were, perhaps anyway, better left to the audience's imagination. I know that most people liked “Rogue One,” and I certainly didn't hate it (I preferred it to “The Force Awakens” by a wide margin), but again, I question the necessity of filling in every nook and cranny in a story -- of, as it were, mapping out the exact size of the iceberg. Let the idea retain some mystery, some borderlands beyond which the rest is unexplored and left to our imaginations. As a friend of mine who is passionate about fantasy games told me recently, “What sells fantasy is the same thing that turns a lot of people off of it – the deep lore.” But it's important to note that “the deep lore” in fantasy is always thickest where it is unwritten. Most of the concepts which underpinned Frank Herbert's DUNE series were either left out of, or only very lightly touched upon, in the first book in the series, and a similar thing could be said of Tolkien's Middle Earth saga, George R.R. Martin's “Game of Thrones” series and Rowling's Harry Potter books. In each instance, the author left large quantities of information about their respective universes out of the stories themselves, which they then published separately in supplementary texts -- the literary equivalent of “DVD special features” you do not have to watch to enjoy the film.
Now, it so happens that I too am a writer, and that one of my principal flaws as a young one was precisely the sin I am castigating here -- over-explanations of story brought about, in part, by lack of trust in the readership's intelligence. (My brother is enormously fond of pointing out that, at the age of 12, I felt it necessary to explain to those in the theater around me during Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader was being sarcastic when he uttered the line, "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.") It was not until many years later that a tough lesson drove home what it means to run into iceberg theory Titanic style. I had written a huge backstory for a character and decided to use it to introduce him to the audience. My editor said, "Very fine writing -- now cut all of it." He went on to explain that the subsequent actions of the character made his backstory plain; there was no need to elucidate it. "Show don't tell" is an old rule for novelists but it is, I admit, also very difficult to follow, especially when your readership (or viewership) is hungry for details. The lesson, however, was plain: keeping the audience a little hungry is better than feeding them too much. The hungry come back for more.
At the beginning of this blog I quoted a line from Irving Stone's epic novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” In that memorable sequence, Leonardo da Vinci scolds Michelangelo for taking his new style of painting to such unreachable levels of expertise and mastery that he had, in effect, left nowhere for any other artist to go – including, we are to suppose, Michelangelo himself. He had “completed his own revolution,” and as I write these lines, it seems to me that is the trend nowadays. At every turn, we see a lantern lighting the way, but somehow this does not suit our nature. Our minds seem to crave dark corners in which to project our fears and fantasies and to unleash our imaginations– we don't always want or need a damned lantern. But this frenzy for origin stories continues, here as elsewhere: “Game of Thrones” is in negotiations for a prequel series set when the Targeryans ruled Westeros, there are origin-movies about Han Solo and Boba Fett already in pre-production, and one of the most popular detective series in Europe, “Detective Montalbano” (which has run for 16 years), recently spun off an origin series called simply “Young Montalbano,” which delves deeply into the hitherto undiscussed past of the eponymous Sicilian hero. So on and on – and on, so that now there are several "origin stories" in print about The Godfather, too.
As I said before, I am not actually opposed to origin stories as a rule. They are tempting targets for a reason: they seem to shine with infinite possibility, and in some cases I believe they can add a great deal to the canon of a series; but in those instances their author usually had something definite to say, and a powerful reason for wanting to say it. “Grendel” is a prequel to “Beowulf” but adds rather than subtracts to the lore of its inspiration by giving us an epic from the perspective of its villain: it infringes very little, if at all, on its predecessor. On the other hand, stories that are told simply because there is space left over to tell them, or for purely financial reasons, tend not merely to debase their own selves but to damage the integrity of the originals upon which they are founded. A friend of mine, criticizing the Metallica album “St. Anger,” said to me, “This is the sort of music that, if you're in a band, you don't want people to hear – it's garage practice, jam session stuff. It's cutting-room floor, out-takes, blooper reel shit. It's a 'you at six in the morning with no coffee and no makeup' type of deal.” In other words, the album's crime was not in existing but rather being shown in public. Well, it seems to me many of these origin stories fall into just that category – their crime lies not in the fact that someone dreamed them up (quite the contrary!), but in the fact that they were made canonical, and so “closed off” yet another avenue for our individual imaginations. If some of the joy of the journey is in the journey itself, then it seems to me that some of the joy of the story is in the wider world that story inhabits and implies. It is a beautiful thing to start a revolution, and to maintain it; but its completion is perhaps best left in the hands of its audience and not its author.
January 9, 2017
What Lies Beneath Economic Bullshit?
When I was in first grade, I used to take a nickel to school every morning with which to buy milk at lunchtime. In those days -- and yes, sadly I am old enough to have lived through a period I can refer to as "those days" -- milk was a huge part of a schoolkid's diet, and anyone who forgot his nickel was in a sorry state, for the cafeteria at Brookmont Elementary School did not hand out half-pints of milk to first graders on credit. Well, it so happened that one day -- I think I was in third grade by this time -- I went to school and discovered, to my horror, that the price of the half-pint had gone up from five to ten cents over the weekend, and nobody had bothered to inform my mother, who had equipped me only with a shiny nickel. No amount of pleading could persuade the Easter Island-faced cafeteria attendant to accept half-payment, so I went milkless that Monday. Two years later, the very same thing happened again: the price of milk had again risen, this time to fifteen cents, though by that time the importance of milk in the diet had faded, replaced by the allure of Capri Sun, or, on special occasions when a quarter could be obtained, Coca-Cola in a fluted bottle of clear green glass. The issue of rising prices flummoxed me, however, and I asked my father to explain why more and more money had been required to obtain the same amount of milk. Dad lowered his newspaper long enough to explain, in the very precise way a parent uses when they don't really understand the subject about which they are speaking, that there was this thing called inflation, which lowered the value of money over time. Later -- much later -- I discovered that inflation was caused by an imbalance between the amount of money in circulation and the amount of goods actually for sale. If there was too much money in the country, the purchasing power of money would inevitably decrease; if there were not enough money, on other hand, the value of cash would rise. Supply and demand, I was told, dictated the value of everything -- both money and products. Therefore (drum roll) my milk had tripled in price in just a few years because there were too many nickels in America; or perhaps not enough milk.
This seemed to make sense, but it led me to the inevitable question(s): How could there be too much money in the country? Who determines how much money is produced, and why would they produce so much that its overall value would decrease? Who sets the value of money, and who benefits from having money lose its value? You didn't have to be a genius to see that if inflation went up continuously, as it seemed to be doing year after year, decade after decade, that any fixed sum of money you had saved or received regularly via a paycheck or a pension would decrease accordingly in value, until it was virtually worthless. And it raised an even larger question: why was the trend only one way -- toward increasing worthlessness? Inflation seemed to be constantly rising; sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but it was always going up (and even when it went down, the overall trend was skyward). Therefore, if I understood the theory correctly, the amount of money in circulation had to be likewise increasing, because God knew the amount of goods for sale in America wasn't going down.
Trying to answer some of these questions led me to a series of astonishing discoveries. At least they were astonishing to me, who had never been interested in and therefore knew very little about basic economic realities.
Money, it turned out, came in two distinct categories; commodity money and fiat currency. Commodity money is backed up by gold or silver -- either the money itself is made of gold or silver, or it is redeemable for gold or silver; and the total amount of money in existence is determined solely by the total amount of gold or silver in the government's coffers. If your government has a billion dollars in gold in its vaults, you can print up to a billion dollars of currency, and not one penny more, elsewise that currency would be worthless -- literally counterfeit.
Fiat currency, on the other hand, is money which is in itself worthless (paper, for example, or coins made of largely worthless metals) whose value is backed by the government that issued it. Its value comes from "faith and credit" in the government itself. In "olden times," as we used to say when a nickel bought me milk, all governmental currency was commodity money. The concept of fiat currency is relatively new, and indeed, the United States itself remained partially on the gold standard until the Nixon presidency. Yet the differences between commodity and fiat are crucial. Under a commodity money system, the value of your money is determined by two outside factors -- i.e. by the price of gold or silver on the international market, and how much gold or silver your government has in its coffers. Under a fiat system, it is determined by "faith and credit." Under a commodity system, the government cannot issue more money than it has precious metal to back it up. Under a fiat system, the government can print as much money as it damn well pleases. And it is the fiat system that we use today, which is one of the reasons why the price of my milk kept going up, so that now, if my 8 year-old niece wants a half-pint of milk with her lunch, she will pay a buck instead of a nickel.
This was not always the case, and it is instructive to look at the Consumer Price Index between the Revolutionary War and WWI, when America was on either the commodity system or a modified version of one. Because during that time, the purchasing power of a dollar remained almost exactly the same. There was some inflation and deflation in that time, especially during war and economic crisis, but the overall trend over those 137 years was a flat line, so that a dollar in 1914 bought you the same basic amount of goods and services as it would have in 1776. (Yes, you read that correctly: a dollar issued by the Continental Congress during the first year of the War of Independence had the same purchasing power as a dollar during the first year of the First World War!)
Today, in the age of fiat currency and central banks which print trillions of dollars out of thin air and pump them into circulation without any corresponding collateral, this stability seems almost incredible. We expect that inflation will rise. We expectthat purchasing power will go down. And we expect these trends always to continue in the same direction. We know we have fiat currency, and we know its value is regulated by supply and demand and "faith and credit," but we still don't know who benefits from this system -- not the ordinary man, certainly. He can only be hurt by inflation. So why does the government, whose sole justification is to serve the needs of the ordinary man, use this system?
Trying to get to the bottom of this question led to another awful realization which I will share momentarily, though you've probably guessed the answer by now. At any rate it led me into a thicket of economic terminology designed to numb the brain and glaze the eyeballs. I concluded very rapidly that most of the terms and phrases used by economists were designed specifically to baffle and bewilder the ordinary person and drive them away from the subject, but I can be quite dogged when I want to be and gradually I got a sense of just what all this fancy, scientific-sounding bullshit actually meant. In particular there were recurring phrases I did not understand, and whose definitions did not leave me with any clear meaning, but which in time I have come to define in my own crude way. What follows is a short list of some of the most common terms you'll hear bandied about by economists, politicians and pundits; grasping them is key to grasping why our economy is always in the soup and why the temperature of that soup is almost always rising.
BULLSHIT TERM #1: FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING. Simply put, this is a practice by which banks can lend money that don't actually have. You read that right, but I'll say it again. This is a practice by which banks can lend money they don't actually have, and do it with full knowledge they don't have it. When I was with the District Attorney's Office, we called this "writing bad checks," and we put people in jail for it, often for months, occasionally for years. But banks do this on an infinitely larger scale, lending out huge sums of money with only a fraction of that money actually on hand, and nobody gets arrested, because the basic principle of fiat currency is that it, unlike commodity money, it doesn't require a physical commodity, like gold, to back it up. Therefore there are no limits, theoretically, on how much fiat currency can be printed. And I need for you to pay particular attention to the former point about what would happen to you for "writing bad checks," because it is a recurring theme in all discussions of economics and government: if you do it, it's a crime. If they do it...well, it's policy.
BULLSHIT TERM #2: QUANTITATIVE EASING. Godfrey Bloom calls it "counterfeiting and theft." David Stockman calls it "fraud." Andrew Huszar calls it "the greatest backdoor bailout of Wall Street of all time." But it's been practiced on Many Wall Streets all over the world, from Japan to Britain, and many consider it the fix-all of any economic crisis. "Q.E." as it is known, is quite simply the process of printing more money to lower the overall value of currency and degrade existing debt. In other words, it is a deliberate increase in inflation. Say you're a bad rich boy and owe $10,000,000 to your creditors. Through the process of Easing, you still owe the same amount on paper, but the actual value of your money is lowered to the point where your debt burden shrinks in proportion. (The more worthless your dollars, the easy it is for you to shoulder your debts.) The reason Huszar calls this a "backdoor bailout" is that it favors only the rich, who remain rich despite inflation because of what might be called the power of very large numbers: inflation does not make rich people poor, it simply makes them a little less rich. The poor, on the other hand, end up simply being unable to buy milk...or bread...or gasoline. Or much of anything at all. The reason Bloom calls this "counterfeiting" and Stockman "fraud" is because if an ordinary person were to print money on his own, he would immediately be imprisoned, on the grounds that phony money in circulation weakens the overall value of the dollar. Indeed, for much of history counterfeiters had their hands hacked off or were even executed for doing just precisely this. But when central banks print trillions of dollars, pounds or yen out of thin air with nothing to back them up except the "faith and credit" of the government, causing inflation to rise and purchasing power to plummet...it isn't called fraud or counterfeiting, it's called "quantitative easing." It sounds great, but the people it helps are precisely the people whose greed and incompetence created the seeming need for Quantitative Easing in the first place: bankers and the super-rich. Meanwhile, those who have small savings or live on a fixed income, like retirees, find our buying power has plummeted, because our savings are now devalued.
BULLSHIT TERM #3: MORAL HAZARD - I was once at a poker tournament which did not require a buy-in. We were playing for a monetary prize, but the chips issued to us had no actual monetary value. This encouraged what card players call "suck out poker" -- competitors betting and bluffing recklessly, going all-in with weak hands and refusing to fold even when they had nothing, simply because they had nothing to lose. Well, in economic terms this is called "moral hazard," and is the practice of taking risks solely because one is protected from the potential consequences. Government bailouts and quantitative easing are two prime examples of things which create moral hazard in economics. When a bank engages in, say, issuing sub-prime mortgages, it knows perfectly well that it is creating a situation in which economic collapse is inevitable, but it is free to do so anyway, because it knows the government will claim it is "too big to fail" and bail it out...with taxpayer money. The banks literally cannot lose, so they keep playing.
BULLSHIT TERM #4: MARK TO MARKET ACCOUNTING - This is a process whereby a business can claim projected profits as actual profits, i.e. they can claim that the money they expect to make on a product or service, based on current market prices, is money they actually made. In financial companies this method of accounting supposedly makes sense, but when used in other businesses it takes on a whole different aspect, one which looks suspiciously like fraud. Why fraud? Because theoretical profits are recorded on the books as actual ones, so that investors (potential stockholders, for example) looking at the company's books will be fooled as to the profitability of the company. This sleight-of-hand is part of what sank Enron a few years back, and if you tried this shit in your own life, you'd be arrested on any number of charges, including filing false tax returns. Again, however, there is a double standard at work.
BULLSHIT TERM #5: SPECIAL PURPOSE ENTITIES - These are shell companies set up by a parent company for specific business purposes. Seems logical enough, but as usual, there's a potential dark side. "Special purpose entities" -- what the Mafia would call "front companies" -- can and often are used for nefarious purposes, to play a sort of shell-game with the truth. In the case of the above-mentioned Enron, S.P.E.'s were employed in huge numbers -- literally by the hundreds -- to hide the debts of the parent company. By doing this, and by using mark-to-market accounting, they managed to put on an appearance of financial strength, keep their stock prices inflated, and hide their liabilities from investors and from Wall Street. The trouble is -- as with all Ponzi schemes and shell games -- there inevitably comes a moment of critical mass, when one ball too many is added to the juggling and everything comes crashing down. I don't mean to sound redundant, but if they call it a "front for laundering money" when the Mafia does it, and an "S.P.E." when a big company does it, well, there's a reason for that
I chose these terms more or less at random, and I'm sure that many would dispute the cavalier way in which I have defined them. Nevertheless I feel justified in doing so. When I was working for the District Attorney's Office, I came to grasp that a great deal of the fancy-Dan terminology spewed by lawyers in court was bullshit; the basic concepts of our legal system are simple and easy to understand when not obscured by clouds of complex-sounding legal jargon. By and large, that jargon exists solely to intimidate the ordinary man into believing the law, which belongs to everyone ought to be the sole province of lawyers. It exists further to couch inherently unjust and corrupt practices in impressive-sounding Latin, so that few people understand the actual nature of what is being said and done. Well, the same principle applies to economics and finance. The terminology is deliberately arcane, so the most hypocritical, ridiculous and outright criminal behavior take on an air of almost scientific respectability. As George Orwell noted, clarity is the enemy of the lie, just as obscurity is the enemy of truth. And this brings us not only to our earlier question but a host of others. Why does the government, and Wall Street, hide simple economic truths behind terms deliberately designed to confuse and mislead? Why do they reinforce a system whose shortsighted greed leads to things like the housing bubble and the Great Recession? A system which continuously increases inflation even though such increases only benefit the mega-rich? A system which rewards bankers for taking stupid risks which endanger the economy yet places the financial burden of the business failures which follow those risks on the taxpayer and not the bank?
The answer would seem to be, "To benefit the rich, of course!" And this is, in fact, true; but it is not the whole answer nor even the crucial part. The real one can be summed up in one dread title: THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM. Understanding what the Fed does for us -- or rather, to us -- is key to grasping most of the evils which presently plague our economy, our society, and to a great extent, human life on this planet. Bold statement? Yes. But backed up by grim battalions of facts. And this will be the subject of my next piece, eloquently titled: WHY THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS THE EMPIRE IN "STAR WARS" (AND WE ARE THE REBELLION!).
This seemed to make sense, but it led me to the inevitable question(s): How could there be too much money in the country? Who determines how much money is produced, and why would they produce so much that its overall value would decrease? Who sets the value of money, and who benefits from having money lose its value? You didn't have to be a genius to see that if inflation went up continuously, as it seemed to be doing year after year, decade after decade, that any fixed sum of money you had saved or received regularly via a paycheck or a pension would decrease accordingly in value, until it was virtually worthless. And it raised an even larger question: why was the trend only one way -- toward increasing worthlessness? Inflation seemed to be constantly rising; sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but it was always going up (and even when it went down, the overall trend was skyward). Therefore, if I understood the theory correctly, the amount of money in circulation had to be likewise increasing, because God knew the amount of goods for sale in America wasn't going down.
Trying to answer some of these questions led me to a series of astonishing discoveries. At least they were astonishing to me, who had never been interested in and therefore knew very little about basic economic realities.
Money, it turned out, came in two distinct categories; commodity money and fiat currency. Commodity money is backed up by gold or silver -- either the money itself is made of gold or silver, or it is redeemable for gold or silver; and the total amount of money in existence is determined solely by the total amount of gold or silver in the government's coffers. If your government has a billion dollars in gold in its vaults, you can print up to a billion dollars of currency, and not one penny more, elsewise that currency would be worthless -- literally counterfeit.
Fiat currency, on the other hand, is money which is in itself worthless (paper, for example, or coins made of largely worthless metals) whose value is backed by the government that issued it. Its value comes from "faith and credit" in the government itself. In "olden times," as we used to say when a nickel bought me milk, all governmental currency was commodity money. The concept of fiat currency is relatively new, and indeed, the United States itself remained partially on the gold standard until the Nixon presidency. Yet the differences between commodity and fiat are crucial. Under a commodity money system, the value of your money is determined by two outside factors -- i.e. by the price of gold or silver on the international market, and how much gold or silver your government has in its coffers. Under a fiat system, it is determined by "faith and credit." Under a commodity system, the government cannot issue more money than it has precious metal to back it up. Under a fiat system, the government can print as much money as it damn well pleases. And it is the fiat system that we use today, which is one of the reasons why the price of my milk kept going up, so that now, if my 8 year-old niece wants a half-pint of milk with her lunch, she will pay a buck instead of a nickel.
This was not always the case, and it is instructive to look at the Consumer Price Index between the Revolutionary War and WWI, when America was on either the commodity system or a modified version of one. Because during that time, the purchasing power of a dollar remained almost exactly the same. There was some inflation and deflation in that time, especially during war and economic crisis, but the overall trend over those 137 years was a flat line, so that a dollar in 1914 bought you the same basic amount of goods and services as it would have in 1776. (Yes, you read that correctly: a dollar issued by the Continental Congress during the first year of the War of Independence had the same purchasing power as a dollar during the first year of the First World War!)
Today, in the age of fiat currency and central banks which print trillions of dollars out of thin air and pump them into circulation without any corresponding collateral, this stability seems almost incredible. We expect that inflation will rise. We expectthat purchasing power will go down. And we expect these trends always to continue in the same direction. We know we have fiat currency, and we know its value is regulated by supply and demand and "faith and credit," but we still don't know who benefits from this system -- not the ordinary man, certainly. He can only be hurt by inflation. So why does the government, whose sole justification is to serve the needs of the ordinary man, use this system?
Trying to get to the bottom of this question led to another awful realization which I will share momentarily, though you've probably guessed the answer by now. At any rate it led me into a thicket of economic terminology designed to numb the brain and glaze the eyeballs. I concluded very rapidly that most of the terms and phrases used by economists were designed specifically to baffle and bewilder the ordinary person and drive them away from the subject, but I can be quite dogged when I want to be and gradually I got a sense of just what all this fancy, scientific-sounding bullshit actually meant. In particular there were recurring phrases I did not understand, and whose definitions did not leave me with any clear meaning, but which in time I have come to define in my own crude way. What follows is a short list of some of the most common terms you'll hear bandied about by economists, politicians and pundits; grasping them is key to grasping why our economy is always in the soup and why the temperature of that soup is almost always rising.
BULLSHIT TERM #1: FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING. Simply put, this is a practice by which banks can lend money that don't actually have. You read that right, but I'll say it again. This is a practice by which banks can lend money they don't actually have, and do it with full knowledge they don't have it. When I was with the District Attorney's Office, we called this "writing bad checks," and we put people in jail for it, often for months, occasionally for years. But banks do this on an infinitely larger scale, lending out huge sums of money with only a fraction of that money actually on hand, and nobody gets arrested, because the basic principle of fiat currency is that it, unlike commodity money, it doesn't require a physical commodity, like gold, to back it up. Therefore there are no limits, theoretically, on how much fiat currency can be printed. And I need for you to pay particular attention to the former point about what would happen to you for "writing bad checks," because it is a recurring theme in all discussions of economics and government: if you do it, it's a crime. If they do it...well, it's policy.
BULLSHIT TERM #2: QUANTITATIVE EASING. Godfrey Bloom calls it "counterfeiting and theft." David Stockman calls it "fraud." Andrew Huszar calls it "the greatest backdoor bailout of Wall Street of all time." But it's been practiced on Many Wall Streets all over the world, from Japan to Britain, and many consider it the fix-all of any economic crisis. "Q.E." as it is known, is quite simply the process of printing more money to lower the overall value of currency and degrade existing debt. In other words, it is a deliberate increase in inflation. Say you're a bad rich boy and owe $10,000,000 to your creditors. Through the process of Easing, you still owe the same amount on paper, but the actual value of your money is lowered to the point where your debt burden shrinks in proportion. (The more worthless your dollars, the easy it is for you to shoulder your debts.) The reason Huszar calls this a "backdoor bailout" is that it favors only the rich, who remain rich despite inflation because of what might be called the power of very large numbers: inflation does not make rich people poor, it simply makes them a little less rich. The poor, on the other hand, end up simply being unable to buy milk...or bread...or gasoline. Or much of anything at all. The reason Bloom calls this "counterfeiting" and Stockman "fraud" is because if an ordinary person were to print money on his own, he would immediately be imprisoned, on the grounds that phony money in circulation weakens the overall value of the dollar. Indeed, for much of history counterfeiters had their hands hacked off or were even executed for doing just precisely this. But when central banks print trillions of dollars, pounds or yen out of thin air with nothing to back them up except the "faith and credit" of the government, causing inflation to rise and purchasing power to plummet...it isn't called fraud or counterfeiting, it's called "quantitative easing." It sounds great, but the people it helps are precisely the people whose greed and incompetence created the seeming need for Quantitative Easing in the first place: bankers and the super-rich. Meanwhile, those who have small savings or live on a fixed income, like retirees, find our buying power has plummeted, because our savings are now devalued.
BULLSHIT TERM #3: MORAL HAZARD - I was once at a poker tournament which did not require a buy-in. We were playing for a monetary prize, but the chips issued to us had no actual monetary value. This encouraged what card players call "suck out poker" -- competitors betting and bluffing recklessly, going all-in with weak hands and refusing to fold even when they had nothing, simply because they had nothing to lose. Well, in economic terms this is called "moral hazard," and is the practice of taking risks solely because one is protected from the potential consequences. Government bailouts and quantitative easing are two prime examples of things which create moral hazard in economics. When a bank engages in, say, issuing sub-prime mortgages, it knows perfectly well that it is creating a situation in which economic collapse is inevitable, but it is free to do so anyway, because it knows the government will claim it is "too big to fail" and bail it out...with taxpayer money. The banks literally cannot lose, so they keep playing.
BULLSHIT TERM #4: MARK TO MARKET ACCOUNTING - This is a process whereby a business can claim projected profits as actual profits, i.e. they can claim that the money they expect to make on a product or service, based on current market prices, is money they actually made. In financial companies this method of accounting supposedly makes sense, but when used in other businesses it takes on a whole different aspect, one which looks suspiciously like fraud. Why fraud? Because theoretical profits are recorded on the books as actual ones, so that investors (potential stockholders, for example) looking at the company's books will be fooled as to the profitability of the company. This sleight-of-hand is part of what sank Enron a few years back, and if you tried this shit in your own life, you'd be arrested on any number of charges, including filing false tax returns. Again, however, there is a double standard at work.
BULLSHIT TERM #5: SPECIAL PURPOSE ENTITIES - These are shell companies set up by a parent company for specific business purposes. Seems logical enough, but as usual, there's a potential dark side. "Special purpose entities" -- what the Mafia would call "front companies" -- can and often are used for nefarious purposes, to play a sort of shell-game with the truth. In the case of the above-mentioned Enron, S.P.E.'s were employed in huge numbers -- literally by the hundreds -- to hide the debts of the parent company. By doing this, and by using mark-to-market accounting, they managed to put on an appearance of financial strength, keep their stock prices inflated, and hide their liabilities from investors and from Wall Street. The trouble is -- as with all Ponzi schemes and shell games -- there inevitably comes a moment of critical mass, when one ball too many is added to the juggling and everything comes crashing down. I don't mean to sound redundant, but if they call it a "front for laundering money" when the Mafia does it, and an "S.P.E." when a big company does it, well, there's a reason for that
I chose these terms more or less at random, and I'm sure that many would dispute the cavalier way in which I have defined them. Nevertheless I feel justified in doing so. When I was working for the District Attorney's Office, I came to grasp that a great deal of the fancy-Dan terminology spewed by lawyers in court was bullshit; the basic concepts of our legal system are simple and easy to understand when not obscured by clouds of complex-sounding legal jargon. By and large, that jargon exists solely to intimidate the ordinary man into believing the law, which belongs to everyone ought to be the sole province of lawyers. It exists further to couch inherently unjust and corrupt practices in impressive-sounding Latin, so that few people understand the actual nature of what is being said and done. Well, the same principle applies to economics and finance. The terminology is deliberately arcane, so the most hypocritical, ridiculous and outright criminal behavior take on an air of almost scientific respectability. As George Orwell noted, clarity is the enemy of the lie, just as obscurity is the enemy of truth. And this brings us not only to our earlier question but a host of others. Why does the government, and Wall Street, hide simple economic truths behind terms deliberately designed to confuse and mislead? Why do they reinforce a system whose shortsighted greed leads to things like the housing bubble and the Great Recession? A system which continuously increases inflation even though such increases only benefit the mega-rich? A system which rewards bankers for taking stupid risks which endanger the economy yet places the financial burden of the business failures which follow those risks on the taxpayer and not the bank?
The answer would seem to be, "To benefit the rich, of course!" And this is, in fact, true; but it is not the whole answer nor even the crucial part. The real one can be summed up in one dread title: THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM. Understanding what the Fed does for us -- or rather, to us -- is key to grasping most of the evils which presently plague our economy, our society, and to a great extent, human life on this planet. Bold statement? Yes. But backed up by grim battalions of facts. And this will be the subject of my next piece, eloquently titled: WHY THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS THE EMPIRE IN "STAR WARS" (AND WE ARE THE REBELLION!).
December 27, 2016
DEAR 2016: STOP KILLING MY CHILDHOOD ICONS, YOU BASTARD
So, as I sit here digesting breakfast and turning coffee into urine, Carrie Fisher has died. It's enough to make a man throw up his hands, remove his just-buttoned clothes, and crawl back in bed. A few weeks ago, when yet another icon of my childhood went prematurely West, I had a mental image of the Grim Reaper, his scythe resting on one bony, cloak-shrouded shoulder, whistling through his lipless mouth as he tallied up his kills for 2016. But never mind the Reaper image now; today I feel as if there's an overcaffeineated sniper sitting in the upper deck of some grandiose red-carpet event in Hollywood, picking the heroes of my formative years off one at a time. I'm not surprised, mind you; I knew 2016 wasn't finished tallying its Butcher's Bill, but I'd hoped Fisher was a case of misdirection -- a heart-attack scare to have us looking her way while he sneaked away and killed George Michael. But no, not a bit of it, the greedy fucker had to do for them both.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm 44 years old, which is old enough to have gone through several celebrity mass extinctions already. First, when I was in my pre-teens, came the deaths of all my parents' icons -- heroes of WW2, movie stars, journalists, figures from the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement, radio personalities from their earliest childhood. In the majority of cases I had no idea who these people were and didn't much care, though there were notable exceptions -- I can tell you exactly where I was when my brother told me John Lennon had been shot, for example. A broader awareness that I was living through one of those generational transition-periods only occurred about a decade later, when the character actors who I had grown up watching on TV and in the movies began to expire of natural causes with numbing regularity. Having lived out the years 1980 - 1990 from the ages of 8 - 18, I had grown up watching a lot of TV which predated my birth or my conscious awareness -- shows from the 60s and early 70s. The older actors on these shows, as well as the elder politicians who had guided the country during my earliest youth, and war heroes which I was now old enough to know existed and to admire or at least respect, were now old men and women and beginning to die off. It made me somewhat sad, but I took the position that these people had all immortalized themselves through their accomplishments, so what difference did it really make if their flesh-and-blood selves were no longer with us? It wasn't like I was ever going to physically meet the casts of Welcome Back Cotter, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, What's Happening, Good Times, Sanford & Son, Barney Miller, Three's Company, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island or any of the other shows I grew up watching anytime soon. Ditto my movie-star heroes. Whether they lived in the world as I did made little difference so long as I could pick up a remote control and summon up permanently ageless images of them.
Truth be told, I've found a lot of philosophical comfort in the idea that cameras, both still and moving, can trap us at a particular moment in time like genies in a bottle. We may turn into mummified wrecks in just a few decades, but a simple device can freeze us at a particular moment of development, and now, due to technology, the image itself never needs to fade or decay due to acids in the paper. It can be electronically reproduced an infinite number of times, without any cost, and sent anywhere in the world instantaneously with the press of a button. In principle this also obtains in regards to television episodes, movies and even to music. Thanks DVDs, to Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes and what not, we are no longer hostage to the capricious programming schedules that plagued me as a youth, or to record stores that might or might not have the rare album we wanted in stock. The whole history of entertainment, going back a hundred-odd years is now available, literally, at our fingertips, often at very little cost. Take, for example, one of my many hobbies -- listening to the great programs from the Golden Age of Radio (The Shadow, Suspense, Escape, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, etc., etc.). Intellectually I am aware that every last performer, every last writer, producer, musician, and even the fucking production assistants involved in these shows are long in their graves. Emotionally, however, it doesn't matter, because when I press play on my iPod, they immediately spring to life once more, as young, as strong, and as vital as they ever were. And, on a more selfish note, the fact that they have achieved this sort of immortality gives me, as a writer, hope that I might someday achieve the same, and I am comforted.
But then -- then you have a year like 2016, and my whole comfy-cozy security-blanket of an philosophy goes up in flames.
As I said before, I know that people die. Even famous ones. As Thomas More says in A Man For All Seasons, "Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead!" True. And because of this, no year goes by without a steady attrition of famous names in the obituaries. Yet whether it is fact or merely perception driven by internet hysteria, 2016 does seem as if it is operating against my childhood heroes as if it bears them some kind of deeply personal grudge. A complete list, as of December 27, would go on forever, so I've decided to commemorate those whose passing effected me the most.
Prince. When the news of Prince's death reached me, I had just completed a long hike around the Hollywood Reservoir and was tired, sweaty and ready for a shower and possibly a cold beer. At first, I admit I had no reaction at all except a lift of the eyebrows. Though I knew the usual number of his songs ("1999," "Let's Go Crazy," "Raspberry Beret" etc.) by heart, I had never bought one of his albums or even one of his singles; I had never watched Purple Rain even though it was one of The auditory-cinematic moments of the 80s; and in fact I'd found him, overall, to be unpleasantly arrogant and self-reverential, not to mention inconsistent in the quality of his music. Nevertheless, in the brief interval between initially reading the news off my phone and getting to my car, my eyes began to mist over with tears, and I had to concentrate hard on my driving to avoid an accident on the way home. I began to realize that when one of the pillars of your childhood -- he more or less wrote the soundtrack to my formative period --dies, it doesn't really matter whether you were a fan of his or not, cared for his music or not, or even liked the personality he exuded in interviews and television appearances. The pillar has been broken. That's what matters. It cut me especially deep when I read sentiments on Twitter and the like which, remarking on Prince's death, read, "Don't worry -- we still share the same planet as Beyonce." Huh? What? How the fuck can you mention a performance artist who doesn't write her own lyrics, arrange her own music, or choreograph her own dance moves with someone who played 27 musical instruments, many at the very highest level of technical ability? Who wrote his own songs, at a rate of one per day for 33 years? Arranged, produced, engineered and mastered his own albums? Don't make me fucking laugh. Prince was that rarest and now most endangered of breeds: a genius within his own field, someone who didn't need an army to produce masterpieces. Mourn him, folks, because in an increasingly corporate era of music, we may not see his like again.
Abe Vigoda and Ron Glass. Depending on when you were born, these names may not mean much to you, but their deaths stung me. Vigoda, a long-faced, floppy-eared, sad-eyed actor who seemed to have been born old, is best known for playing Tessio in The Godfather, but I knew him best as Detective Phil Fish on Barney Miller a 70s-era sit-com about a group of NYPD detectives, mostly racial, ethnic or class archetypes, who do everything well except police work. Fish was a grumpy, world-weary Jew, hen-pecked by his unseen wife; Ron Glass, on the other hand, played Ron Harris, a smooth-talking, lady-killing black detective with expensive tastes and bad judgement. (He went on to achieve notoriety with a new generation as Shepherd Book on Firefly.) Both were nightly sights in my house -- from Monday through Friday anyway -- when I was growing up.
John Glenn. The term "American hero" is bandied about so much it has lost all value, but Glenn really was an American hero. Trained as an engineer, he flew as a fighter pilot in two wars, earning six Distinguished Flying Crosses and the nickname "Magnet Ass" because his fighter often landed with as many as 250 holes in it, courtesy of enemy flak. He shot down three MiGs over Korea in 1953 -- the last three American aerial victories of the conflict -- and then served as a test pilot, a job generally regarded as being even more dangerous than combat flying. Tapped as one of the "Mercury Seven," he became the first American to orbit the Earth and had a long and distinguished career in NASA. He then ran for, and served in, the United States Senate for 24 years. In 1998, while still in the Senate, he became the oldest astronaut in history, flying aboard the space shuttle Discovery at the age of 77. He was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, a 33rd degree Mason, and remained married to his wife for 73 years until the day he died. I met Glenn once, in '92, during Senate hearings I attended as part of a college assignment, and was struck by the smile he had on his face -- an inward sort of smile, as if he were perpetually chuckling at an inside joke.
Gene Wilder. If you have no feelings for Gene Wilder you've ever never owned a television or you simply have no heart. Though beloved by most for portraying Willy Wonka or Young Frankenstein, my own favorite Wilder performance was as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles. With his mop of gold curls, startling blue eyes and homely, highly mobile face, he made the perfect counterpoint to Cleavon Little's black sheriff. And I'll never forget the way he delivered that line: "Yeah, I was the Kid...it got so that every pissant prairie punk who thought he could shoot a gun would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid. I must've killed more men than Cecil B Demille. Got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word 'draw' in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street, and I heard a voice behind me say, 'Reach for it Mister!' I spun around and there I was face to face with a six-year-old kid. Well I just threw my guns down and walked away. (pause) Little bastard shot me in the ass!!"
Tom Huddleston. Another veteran of Blazing Saddles, the bald, round-faced, heavyset, cigar-chewing Huddleston was such a staple on TV and in film, usually playing pompous blowhards, that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't recognize his face. He will probably go down in history, however, as being The Big Lebowski in, well, The Big Lebowski.
John McLaughlin. Did I say pompous blowhard? McLaughlin ran his self-titled political show The McLaughlin Group for 34 years. Growing up in Washington, D.C., you could not escape this insufferable know-it-all, who bullied and upbraided his fellow journalists for a half hour each week, but also made some of them (i.e. Pat Buchanan) famous. At first merely a local phenomenon, McLaughlin eventually became such fixture in Washington politics that he was tapped to appear (as himself) in Independence Day. Although my father knew the man professionally and told me he was a jerk who "could dish it out but couldn't take it," he was disappointed when his own guest appearance on the show got cancelled. The fact is, in an age when most "journalists" have become mere talking heads reading off telepromters, McLaughin actually knew his stuff.
George Kennedy. Another staple of American film, Kennedy was a master of both heavy drama and slapstick comedy, bringing a rugged, straight-man demeanor to both with equal ability. In "serious" films he held his own when up against Burt Lancaster, Charleton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, and others, and won an Oscar for playing Dragline opposite Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, but I confess I'll remember him as the earnest, bumbling Captain Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun trilogy. I had a chance to attend a memorial showing of some of his films this year at the Aero and Egyptian Theaters here in L.A., and he was very warmly remembered by those who had worked for him.
Kenny Baker. Baker played R2D2 in six Star Wars films. He was "the ghost in the machine," which was possible only because he stood 3'8" tall, proving once and for all that you don't need height to have impact. Anyone who saw the original trilogy in the theaters fell in love with the feisty little droid, who endured C3PO, Darth Vader, Jawas, swamp monsters, Ewoks, and all sorts of additional drama while trying to save the universe.
Morley Safer. When I was growing up, 60 Minutes was the one program no adult ever seemed to miss, and I confess that I not only watched, but enjoyed this gutsy, scrappy "TV news magazine." The mainstays of the show were Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, Andy Rooney...and Morley Safer, who like many great American journalists, was actually Canadian. It's true that the show sensationalized the profession of journalism and favored a confrontational style of interviewing that was only dubiously ethical, but there is no doubt that in its endless run on television, Safer -- who was on the show from 1970 until a week before his death -- did a lot of good as well. He is best remembered by many as the man who brought "the Vietnam war into the living room," but that was before my time. I myself associate him with skewering interviews of various sweaty-browed politicians and businessmen caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His loss ended an era that, given the ongoing decline of journalism, may never return.
Robert Vaughn. The words "Silky menace" and "Robert Vaughn" go hand in hand. Few guys acted with more aristocratic hauteur and -- if necessary -- ice-cold nastiness than Vaughn. My mom and dad knew him as The Man From U.N.C.L.E." but I remember him from such films as The Magnificent Seven, where he played a gun-for-hire nursing a terrible secret, and 'Bullitt' in which he airily told Steve McQueen, "Integrity is something we sell to the public." In The Bridge at Remagen he played sympathetic German officer Paul Krueger, who fights the Americans on one hand and his own high command on the other. Even as an old man he retained the same cold fire, dueling with Steven Hill (who also fucking died this year!) in several memorable episodes of Law & Order. Some actors are interchangeable; some are unique. Vaughn didn't have extreme range, but what he could do he did better than just about anyone else.
Alan Rickman. Do I really need to write a eulogy for an actor this goddamn good? Most people in Rickman's profession would give a finger to be remembered for one, signature role in a 30 or 40 year career. Rickman had about half a dozen. There was his letter-perfect turn as suave villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard, his over-the-top performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, seven films worth of mean-spirited Snape nastiness in the Harry Potter franchise, washed up sci-fi actor Alexander Dane in the cult hit Galaxy Quest and, in perhaps his subtlest turn, Harry the Almost Cheating Husband in Love, Actually. Waking up to discover him dead was like coming down on Christmas morning to find the tree on fire and the presents melted into glue.
George Michael. As I said, I'm basically an 80's kid, and if you were in any way conscious during the 80's you both loved and hated George Michael. You hated him because for what seemed like aeons he was inescapable on both radio and video with a relentless series of horribly catchy hits, each more cloying -- and yet somehow pleasurable -- than the last. Already a star when he left Wham!, he annihilated the charts and conquered an unwilling world with Faith, a solo album that, beneath its pop-music gloss, has real profundity in it and is one of those records that gains rather than loses luster with time. After a deliberate un-glamming of himself in the early 90s, an ugly fight with Sony Records over his contract, and an embarrassing arrest here in La La Land just a few years back, Michael faded from the public eye, but recently there were intimations of a comeback. Alas, it will never happen now. As John Greenleaf Whitter once wrote: "Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
And this brings me back to Carrie Fisher. I first met this lady in 1977, when my father took me to Star Wars at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. I was only five years old, but her Princess Leia made quite the impression on me -- ram horn hairdo, flowing white robes, refusal to be cowed by Darth Vader, Governor Tarkin, Han Solo, or Chewbacca, to whom she referred to as a "walking carpet." A few years later she charmed me further in The Empire Strikes Back, giving a more nuanced performance as the coldly efficient Rebel leader smitten with an emotionally unavailable space pirate. And then came Return of the Jedi, and her notorious turn in the "slave bikini," which accelerated the puberty of millions of adolescent boys, your humble correspondent included. After that she faded from our collective radar screen for many years amidst stories of manic depression and heavy drug abuse, only to refashion herself as a novelist and autobiographer of surprising subtlety and depth. "I am a spy in the house of me," she wrote. "I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life." And I, Carrie, am somewhat nonplussed by the event that was your death.
I realize, on the one hand, how absurd it is to mourn for people you didn't know, who, if you ever happened to meet them, might offer you a pained, insincere, slightly bored smile while you mumbled, star-struck, at what an effect they'd had on your life. No matter how polite they are, the fact remains that the relationship you have, or think you have, with them, is entirely one-way: you grew up watching them; they, on the other hand, did not grow up watching you. You are not a familiar, welcome face. You are just some random dude making cow-eyes at them, possibly in a very unglamorous setting -- the CVS on Sunset Boulevard, for example, or a coffee shop on King's Road and Beverly. I know this to be true because I work in the entertainment industry and I live in Los Angeles and those two situations have allowed me to bump into a number of famous folks, some of whom I idolized as a youth, and the result is not always heartwarming. It may seem staggeringly obvious, but actors and comedians and musicians are human beings, and have the usual battery of human failings, and just because they played a great guy or a great gal on TV, or sang a sweet tune, or wrote a kick-ass comedy sketch you still quote after your third beer, doesn't mean they're nice folks. Some -- shocker! -- are what Al Pacino once referred to as "large-type assholes."
At the same time, I also recognize the absurdity of personifying a year in the way I have done with the title of this blog. A "year" is a construct of the human mind; it has no physical reality, no consciousness, no intent. As I said above, I realize, intellectually, that this steady stream of deaths is simply a statistical oddity -- and perhaps not even that, perhaps only the perception of one. People have got to die sometime, and random chance will ultimately see to it that one "year" claims more of their lives than another. So it must be here.
And yet! My mental, emotional image of 2016 remains the same. I still see Death striding eagerly and almost gleefully down an alley somewhere in Hollywood, his trusty scythe gripped in bony hands, his sightless eyes peering into lighted windows of the homes where the celebrities of my youth reside. The hourglass around his neck still has a few sands within it, and he there remain a few names on the list tucked into his belt. Who else can he claim before the clock retires this version of him for good? I can't answer that, but I can say this to him in closing:
If you take Sean Connery, we riot.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm 44 years old, which is old enough to have gone through several celebrity mass extinctions already. First, when I was in my pre-teens, came the deaths of all my parents' icons -- heroes of WW2, movie stars, journalists, figures from the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement, radio personalities from their earliest childhood. In the majority of cases I had no idea who these people were and didn't much care, though there were notable exceptions -- I can tell you exactly where I was when my brother told me John Lennon had been shot, for example. A broader awareness that I was living through one of those generational transition-periods only occurred about a decade later, when the character actors who I had grown up watching on TV and in the movies began to expire of natural causes with numbing regularity. Having lived out the years 1980 - 1990 from the ages of 8 - 18, I had grown up watching a lot of TV which predated my birth or my conscious awareness -- shows from the 60s and early 70s. The older actors on these shows, as well as the elder politicians who had guided the country during my earliest youth, and war heroes which I was now old enough to know existed and to admire or at least respect, were now old men and women and beginning to die off. It made me somewhat sad, but I took the position that these people had all immortalized themselves through their accomplishments, so what difference did it really make if their flesh-and-blood selves were no longer with us? It wasn't like I was ever going to physically meet the casts of Welcome Back Cotter, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, What's Happening, Good Times, Sanford & Son, Barney Miller, Three's Company, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island or any of the other shows I grew up watching anytime soon. Ditto my movie-star heroes. Whether they lived in the world as I did made little difference so long as I could pick up a remote control and summon up permanently ageless images of them.
Truth be told, I've found a lot of philosophical comfort in the idea that cameras, both still and moving, can trap us at a particular moment in time like genies in a bottle. We may turn into mummified wrecks in just a few decades, but a simple device can freeze us at a particular moment of development, and now, due to technology, the image itself never needs to fade or decay due to acids in the paper. It can be electronically reproduced an infinite number of times, without any cost, and sent anywhere in the world instantaneously with the press of a button. In principle this also obtains in regards to television episodes, movies and even to music. Thanks DVDs, to Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes and what not, we are no longer hostage to the capricious programming schedules that plagued me as a youth, or to record stores that might or might not have the rare album we wanted in stock. The whole history of entertainment, going back a hundred-odd years is now available, literally, at our fingertips, often at very little cost. Take, for example, one of my many hobbies -- listening to the great programs from the Golden Age of Radio (The Shadow, Suspense, Escape, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, etc., etc.). Intellectually I am aware that every last performer, every last writer, producer, musician, and even the fucking production assistants involved in these shows are long in their graves. Emotionally, however, it doesn't matter, because when I press play on my iPod, they immediately spring to life once more, as young, as strong, and as vital as they ever were. And, on a more selfish note, the fact that they have achieved this sort of immortality gives me, as a writer, hope that I might someday achieve the same, and I am comforted.
But then -- then you have a year like 2016, and my whole comfy-cozy security-blanket of an philosophy goes up in flames.
As I said before, I know that people die. Even famous ones. As Thomas More says in A Man For All Seasons, "Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead!" True. And because of this, no year goes by without a steady attrition of famous names in the obituaries. Yet whether it is fact or merely perception driven by internet hysteria, 2016 does seem as if it is operating against my childhood heroes as if it bears them some kind of deeply personal grudge. A complete list, as of December 27, would go on forever, so I've decided to commemorate those whose passing effected me the most.
Prince. When the news of Prince's death reached me, I had just completed a long hike around the Hollywood Reservoir and was tired, sweaty and ready for a shower and possibly a cold beer. At first, I admit I had no reaction at all except a lift of the eyebrows. Though I knew the usual number of his songs ("1999," "Let's Go Crazy," "Raspberry Beret" etc.) by heart, I had never bought one of his albums or even one of his singles; I had never watched Purple Rain even though it was one of The auditory-cinematic moments of the 80s; and in fact I'd found him, overall, to be unpleasantly arrogant and self-reverential, not to mention inconsistent in the quality of his music. Nevertheless, in the brief interval between initially reading the news off my phone and getting to my car, my eyes began to mist over with tears, and I had to concentrate hard on my driving to avoid an accident on the way home. I began to realize that when one of the pillars of your childhood -- he more or less wrote the soundtrack to my formative period --dies, it doesn't really matter whether you were a fan of his or not, cared for his music or not, or even liked the personality he exuded in interviews and television appearances. The pillar has been broken. That's what matters. It cut me especially deep when I read sentiments on Twitter and the like which, remarking on Prince's death, read, "Don't worry -- we still share the same planet as Beyonce." Huh? What? How the fuck can you mention a performance artist who doesn't write her own lyrics, arrange her own music, or choreograph her own dance moves with someone who played 27 musical instruments, many at the very highest level of technical ability? Who wrote his own songs, at a rate of one per day for 33 years? Arranged, produced, engineered and mastered his own albums? Don't make me fucking laugh. Prince was that rarest and now most endangered of breeds: a genius within his own field, someone who didn't need an army to produce masterpieces. Mourn him, folks, because in an increasingly corporate era of music, we may not see his like again.
Abe Vigoda and Ron Glass. Depending on when you were born, these names may not mean much to you, but their deaths stung me. Vigoda, a long-faced, floppy-eared, sad-eyed actor who seemed to have been born old, is best known for playing Tessio in The Godfather, but I knew him best as Detective Phil Fish on Barney Miller a 70s-era sit-com about a group of NYPD detectives, mostly racial, ethnic or class archetypes, who do everything well except police work. Fish was a grumpy, world-weary Jew, hen-pecked by his unseen wife; Ron Glass, on the other hand, played Ron Harris, a smooth-talking, lady-killing black detective with expensive tastes and bad judgement. (He went on to achieve notoriety with a new generation as Shepherd Book on Firefly.) Both were nightly sights in my house -- from Monday through Friday anyway -- when I was growing up.
John Glenn. The term "American hero" is bandied about so much it has lost all value, but Glenn really was an American hero. Trained as an engineer, he flew as a fighter pilot in two wars, earning six Distinguished Flying Crosses and the nickname "Magnet Ass" because his fighter often landed with as many as 250 holes in it, courtesy of enemy flak. He shot down three MiGs over Korea in 1953 -- the last three American aerial victories of the conflict -- and then served as a test pilot, a job generally regarded as being even more dangerous than combat flying. Tapped as one of the "Mercury Seven," he became the first American to orbit the Earth and had a long and distinguished career in NASA. He then ran for, and served in, the United States Senate for 24 years. In 1998, while still in the Senate, he became the oldest astronaut in history, flying aboard the space shuttle Discovery at the age of 77. He was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, a 33rd degree Mason, and remained married to his wife for 73 years until the day he died. I met Glenn once, in '92, during Senate hearings I attended as part of a college assignment, and was struck by the smile he had on his face -- an inward sort of smile, as if he were perpetually chuckling at an inside joke.
Gene Wilder. If you have no feelings for Gene Wilder you've ever never owned a television or you simply have no heart. Though beloved by most for portraying Willy Wonka or Young Frankenstein, my own favorite Wilder performance was as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles. With his mop of gold curls, startling blue eyes and homely, highly mobile face, he made the perfect counterpoint to Cleavon Little's black sheriff. And I'll never forget the way he delivered that line: "Yeah, I was the Kid...it got so that every pissant prairie punk who thought he could shoot a gun would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid. I must've killed more men than Cecil B Demille. Got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word 'draw' in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street, and I heard a voice behind me say, 'Reach for it Mister!' I spun around and there I was face to face with a six-year-old kid. Well I just threw my guns down and walked away. (pause) Little bastard shot me in the ass!!"
Tom Huddleston. Another veteran of Blazing Saddles, the bald, round-faced, heavyset, cigar-chewing Huddleston was such a staple on TV and in film, usually playing pompous blowhards, that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't recognize his face. He will probably go down in history, however, as being The Big Lebowski in, well, The Big Lebowski.
John McLaughlin. Did I say pompous blowhard? McLaughlin ran his self-titled political show The McLaughlin Group for 34 years. Growing up in Washington, D.C., you could not escape this insufferable know-it-all, who bullied and upbraided his fellow journalists for a half hour each week, but also made some of them (i.e. Pat Buchanan) famous. At first merely a local phenomenon, McLaughlin eventually became such fixture in Washington politics that he was tapped to appear (as himself) in Independence Day. Although my father knew the man professionally and told me he was a jerk who "could dish it out but couldn't take it," he was disappointed when his own guest appearance on the show got cancelled. The fact is, in an age when most "journalists" have become mere talking heads reading off telepromters, McLaughin actually knew his stuff.
George Kennedy. Another staple of American film, Kennedy was a master of both heavy drama and slapstick comedy, bringing a rugged, straight-man demeanor to both with equal ability. In "serious" films he held his own when up against Burt Lancaster, Charleton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, and others, and won an Oscar for playing Dragline opposite Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, but I confess I'll remember him as the earnest, bumbling Captain Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun trilogy. I had a chance to attend a memorial showing of some of his films this year at the Aero and Egyptian Theaters here in L.A., and he was very warmly remembered by those who had worked for him.
Kenny Baker. Baker played R2D2 in six Star Wars films. He was "the ghost in the machine," which was possible only because he stood 3'8" tall, proving once and for all that you don't need height to have impact. Anyone who saw the original trilogy in the theaters fell in love with the feisty little droid, who endured C3PO, Darth Vader, Jawas, swamp monsters, Ewoks, and all sorts of additional drama while trying to save the universe.
Morley Safer. When I was growing up, 60 Minutes was the one program no adult ever seemed to miss, and I confess that I not only watched, but enjoyed this gutsy, scrappy "TV news magazine." The mainstays of the show were Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, Andy Rooney...and Morley Safer, who like many great American journalists, was actually Canadian. It's true that the show sensationalized the profession of journalism and favored a confrontational style of interviewing that was only dubiously ethical, but there is no doubt that in its endless run on television, Safer -- who was on the show from 1970 until a week before his death -- did a lot of good as well. He is best remembered by many as the man who brought "the Vietnam war into the living room," but that was before my time. I myself associate him with skewering interviews of various sweaty-browed politicians and businessmen caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His loss ended an era that, given the ongoing decline of journalism, may never return.
Robert Vaughn. The words "Silky menace" and "Robert Vaughn" go hand in hand. Few guys acted with more aristocratic hauteur and -- if necessary -- ice-cold nastiness than Vaughn. My mom and dad knew him as The Man From U.N.C.L.E." but I remember him from such films as The Magnificent Seven, where he played a gun-for-hire nursing a terrible secret, and 'Bullitt' in which he airily told Steve McQueen, "Integrity is something we sell to the public." In The Bridge at Remagen he played sympathetic German officer Paul Krueger, who fights the Americans on one hand and his own high command on the other. Even as an old man he retained the same cold fire, dueling with Steven Hill (who also fucking died this year!) in several memorable episodes of Law & Order. Some actors are interchangeable; some are unique. Vaughn didn't have extreme range, but what he could do he did better than just about anyone else.
Alan Rickman. Do I really need to write a eulogy for an actor this goddamn good? Most people in Rickman's profession would give a finger to be remembered for one, signature role in a 30 or 40 year career. Rickman had about half a dozen. There was his letter-perfect turn as suave villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard, his over-the-top performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, seven films worth of mean-spirited Snape nastiness in the Harry Potter franchise, washed up sci-fi actor Alexander Dane in the cult hit Galaxy Quest and, in perhaps his subtlest turn, Harry the Almost Cheating Husband in Love, Actually. Waking up to discover him dead was like coming down on Christmas morning to find the tree on fire and the presents melted into glue.
George Michael. As I said, I'm basically an 80's kid, and if you were in any way conscious during the 80's you both loved and hated George Michael. You hated him because for what seemed like aeons he was inescapable on both radio and video with a relentless series of horribly catchy hits, each more cloying -- and yet somehow pleasurable -- than the last. Already a star when he left Wham!, he annihilated the charts and conquered an unwilling world with Faith, a solo album that, beneath its pop-music gloss, has real profundity in it and is one of those records that gains rather than loses luster with time. After a deliberate un-glamming of himself in the early 90s, an ugly fight with Sony Records over his contract, and an embarrassing arrest here in La La Land just a few years back, Michael faded from the public eye, but recently there were intimations of a comeback. Alas, it will never happen now. As John Greenleaf Whitter once wrote: "Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
And this brings me back to Carrie Fisher. I first met this lady in 1977, when my father took me to Star Wars at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. I was only five years old, but her Princess Leia made quite the impression on me -- ram horn hairdo, flowing white robes, refusal to be cowed by Darth Vader, Governor Tarkin, Han Solo, or Chewbacca, to whom she referred to as a "walking carpet." A few years later she charmed me further in The Empire Strikes Back, giving a more nuanced performance as the coldly efficient Rebel leader smitten with an emotionally unavailable space pirate. And then came Return of the Jedi, and her notorious turn in the "slave bikini," which accelerated the puberty of millions of adolescent boys, your humble correspondent included. After that she faded from our collective radar screen for many years amidst stories of manic depression and heavy drug abuse, only to refashion herself as a novelist and autobiographer of surprising subtlety and depth. "I am a spy in the house of me," she wrote. "I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life." And I, Carrie, am somewhat nonplussed by the event that was your death.
I realize, on the one hand, how absurd it is to mourn for people you didn't know, who, if you ever happened to meet them, might offer you a pained, insincere, slightly bored smile while you mumbled, star-struck, at what an effect they'd had on your life. No matter how polite they are, the fact remains that the relationship you have, or think you have, with them, is entirely one-way: you grew up watching them; they, on the other hand, did not grow up watching you. You are not a familiar, welcome face. You are just some random dude making cow-eyes at them, possibly in a very unglamorous setting -- the CVS on Sunset Boulevard, for example, or a coffee shop on King's Road and Beverly. I know this to be true because I work in the entertainment industry and I live in Los Angeles and those two situations have allowed me to bump into a number of famous folks, some of whom I idolized as a youth, and the result is not always heartwarming. It may seem staggeringly obvious, but actors and comedians and musicians are human beings, and have the usual battery of human failings, and just because they played a great guy or a great gal on TV, or sang a sweet tune, or wrote a kick-ass comedy sketch you still quote after your third beer, doesn't mean they're nice folks. Some -- shocker! -- are what Al Pacino once referred to as "large-type assholes."
At the same time, I also recognize the absurdity of personifying a year in the way I have done with the title of this blog. A "year" is a construct of the human mind; it has no physical reality, no consciousness, no intent. As I said above, I realize, intellectually, that this steady stream of deaths is simply a statistical oddity -- and perhaps not even that, perhaps only the perception of one. People have got to die sometime, and random chance will ultimately see to it that one "year" claims more of their lives than another. So it must be here.
And yet! My mental, emotional image of 2016 remains the same. I still see Death striding eagerly and almost gleefully down an alley somewhere in Hollywood, his trusty scythe gripped in bony hands, his sightless eyes peering into lighted windows of the homes where the celebrities of my youth reside. The hourglass around his neck still has a few sands within it, and he there remain a few names on the list tucked into his belt. Who else can he claim before the clock retires this version of him for good? I can't answer that, but I can say this to him in closing:
If you take Sean Connery, we riot.
December 24, 2016
Unhappy New Year: The "Other" Battle of the Bulge
This week marks the 72nd anniversary of the Ardennes Campaign, better known to us as "the Battle of the Bulge." Few battles in American history carry a greater weight of fame, and it is not difficult to understand why, for the history of the Bulge plays out like a hack writer pitching an over-the-top WW2 movie: "The Germans are just about licked, see? Then, out of nowhere, they clobber us with a huge sneak attack. Infantry! Tanks! Paratroopers! Jet fighters! Commandos dressed up in American uniforms! It's panic. It's chaos. It's a red hot mess. And then, at the critical moment, just when the Nazis are about to break through, the good old Band of Brothers hole up in a town called Bastogne and fend them off! The Germans demand surrender, but the American general says, 'Nuts!' And on Christmas Day, General Patton arrives, and...."
Well, you get the picture. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, on rare occasions it's actually more glamorous, melodramatic, and unbelievable. Of course the full truth about the Bulge may never be known, since the battle itself was followed by a frenzy of records-destroying, ass-covering, and fact fudging by American generals, the likes of which wasn't seen again until Vietnam. Their problem was not with the outcome of the battle, but that Allied intelligence, which innumerable spy movies would have you believe was about a quarter of an IQ point less omniscient than God, had somehow failed to notice Hitler had amassed three huge armies at the very weakest spot of the American line -- a blunder which was to cost 89,500 U.S. casualties, including 19,000 dead.
Mind you, I don't really blame our generals for taking their Orwellian approach to history. Americans as a whole have an unwillingness, bordering on an incapacity, to accept that their military can be defeated -- even in a battle of wits. It is noteworthy that the only really crushing defeats suffered by the United States Army which are known to our public were inflicted on it by the Confederate States Army during the Civil War -- in other words, by other Americans. When it comes to foreigners getting the better of us, we don't want to hear that shit. In the Bulge, the Germans fooled us badly, caught us smirking and slacking, and kicked us in the jewels about as hard as they possibly could, but that is not the way we as a nation choose to compose our narrative. Instead, we see it as the ultimate underdog story, a sort of Rocky with tanks and guns, where the desperate heroes are bloodied and battered but, in the end, gloriously triumphant. This version has the advantage of being broadly true, but it is also symptomatic of that larger, moral problem -- our willingness, even eagerness, to edit history when runs contrary to the paradoxical image we have of ourselves -- perennial underdogs who are also perpetual winners.
This problem is moral because if one happens to be one of the American soldiers who fought in a battle the generals, and by extension the public, don't want to remember, then one finds oneself out in the historical cold. This was the fate of the 29,000 Americans doomed to fall under the ghastly heading of "casualties" during the so-called Other Battle of the Bulge, known in American histories as "The Alsace Campaign" and by the Germans, who initiated it, as "Operation North Wind."
When the fight kicked off, on New Year's Eve, 1944, the "real" Bulge battle had been raging for fifteen days, and had drawn fully half of the American forces in Europe into its maelstrom. Hitler saw in this shift an opportunity to administer yet another kick to Uncle Sam's groin, for as Eisenhower concentrated more and more combat power for the purposes of containing and destroying the German armies in the Bulge, he suffered a corresponding depletion of that power elsewhere. The "elsewhere" Hitler had in mind for Operation North Wind was Alsace, the much fought-over province which had just been reconquered by newly-liberated France. At a conference on December 28, just three days before the attack, Hitler claimed to his generals that the purpose of North Wind was not for "prestige" but simply a matter of "destroying and exterminating enemy forces wherever we find them." One of the principal German commanders of the coming battle, Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, secretly disagreed with his master in this regard. "Heini" was determined to capture the capital of the province, Strasbourg, and to fly the swastika from its cathedral as a sort of thank-you gift to Der Fuehrer for placing him in command of a field army. This determination was to have fateful consequences for everyone involved in the looming fight, most especially the soldiers of the U.S. Sixth Army Group, commanded by General Jacob Devers. If the name Devers doesn't ring a bell, that's understandable: though he was one of only two Army Group commanders in Europe, he remained a mere three-star general until near the end of the war, largely because Eisenhower both disliked and distrusted him. This feeling, which was reciprocated, was also to have a deep influence on the battle, yet another example of how the "power of personality" is perhaps greater and more terrible than that of bombs.
Nordwind, as the Germans called it, kicked off at just about the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1944. About twenty German divisions, attacking in successive waves along a 68-mile front that slanted northwest to southeast from Rohrbach to the Rhine River, and along the Rhine itself from the area immediately east of Strasbourg up to the German city of Karlsruhe, slammed into Sixth Army Group (7th U.S. Army, 1st French Army, XXI Corps of 1st U.S. Army) which had been stripped down to the metal by "Ike" to provide troops for the Battle of the Bulge. And indeed, "Ike" was unsympathetic to Devers' pleas for reinforcements. Allied intelligence, which had failed so miserably to predict the Bulge attack, knew all about "North Wind," and Eisenhower had already instructed "Jake" to withdraw if pressed, even if it meant yielding moist of Alsace to the Germans -- including Strasbourg. Eisenhower believed, not without cause, that this new German attack was intended to ease American pressure on the "Bulge," and to shift forces again would be to play Hitler's game. Devers, by temperament and to some extent by blood (his grandmother was from Alsace), was reluctant to obey, and he had key allies in this regard -- namely the French, who were appalled by the idea of giving up Strasbourg merely to save Eisenhower the trouble of defending it. As the historian Charles Whiting has noted, "Strasbourg was second only to Paris in French hearts," and more specifically in the heart of Charles de Gaulle, who informed Eisenhower that he would not permit the city to fall into German hands, even if it meant ordering the French First Army to operate independently of American command. What followed was an ugly and sometimes ridiculous argument between supposed allies which sucked in not only Eisenhower and de Gaulle, but Winston Churchill, who flew out to join a conference of his fellow "great men" on January 3, 1945. Ike accused the Frenchman of allowing political considerations to dictate military tactics, and threatened to withhold American supplies form the French Army, which was utterly dependent on them, if he refused to obey orders; de Gaulle countered by threatening to close French railways and communications systems to American troops. Churchill backed de Gaulle, a rather odd move for a man who would later be accused of trying to having him assassinated, and Eisenhower caved. Derided by his detractors of being a "political general" who was more interested in placating his allies than standing up for his countrymen, Ike countermanded his earlier orders to Devers. From now on, Americans would stand, fight, and die for the honor of France.
Die they did. The "other Battle of the Bulge" raged for twenty-five days, and the U.S. VI Corps, consisting of four "ordinary" infantry divisions (42nd, 45th, 70th and 79th), and commanded by a tough, crafty sonofabitch named Ted Brooks, bore the brunt of the fighting, which was almost unbelievably savage. As the History of the 14th Armored Division recalls: "You heard shouting and and stifled screams and the identifying brrrrp brrrrp brrrrp of (German) machine guns, the steady cracking of machine guns and small arms fire coming from the windows, crevices, and the church steeple, the deep rumple of tanks. Some tanks no longer moved, black hulks among the charred ruins of homes. White phosphorus shells burst in the streets, with sudden yellow flames and smoke pouring from half-timber buildings. Buildings that only smoked because there was nothing more to burn and made the town look like a ghost town, and still the shells came in. The mortars that never gave a warning, endlessly plopping in, scattering mortar and rubbish. There was the catching voice, crying 'Medic!' The surrounding fields no longer had a mantle of clear white snow. It was now stained with soot from powder, pockmarked with craters and soiled with blood."
Pushed all the way back back to the Moder River, Brooks held the line there, stopping the Germans at Haugenau despite intense pressure -- Devers later stated that Brooks had fought "one of the great defensive actions of all time." If so, it had come at a terrifying cost: 29,000 Americans killed, wounded or captured, for an average 1,160 casualties per day. The Germans, driven forward by discipline, love of country (Alsace-Lorriane had been German from 1870 - 1918, and again from 1940 - 1944) and fear of Himmler's wrath, lost 23,000 men in the same period, and never got to hoist the swastika over Strasbourg cathedral. As for the French, their casualties were about 2,000, a figure it is impossible to contemplate without feelings of irony, when one considers First French Army was probably better than a quarter of a million strong during the time in question. Charles de Gaulle seems to have purchased the honor of France with American blood, a fact he was to forget after the war -- if ever he acknowledged it in the first place.
It is interesting to note that Wikipedia lists the result of Operation North Wind as a "tactical Allied retreat." This is, of course, true; the Sixth Army Group was pushed back, at its furthest point, almost thirty-five miles, and the total territory lost to the Germans was between half and two-thirds as much as was yielded during the "real" Battle of the Bulge. Avoidance of the word defeat, however, is emblematic, for while one could make a very powerful argument that North Wind was not a defeat but merely a change in footwork, so to speak, it's hard to put a happy face on the results. The Germans advanced, and the Americans retreated. The Germans lost 23,000 men, but the Americans lost 29,000. The Germans failed to recapture Strasbourg, but Hitler had never said Strasbourg was the goal of the offensive in the first place, and in any event, the argument over how -- or whether -- to defend it left a bitter taste in the mouth of everyone who had a hand in it. The real legacy of Operation North Wind was the bare essence of war itself -- death and destruction without the satisfying, Hollywood-scripted climax offered by the Bulge. Judged by those lights, it's easy to understand why Nordwind has no place in the American memory. And yet I have to ask -- do battles like this, ugly, inconclusive brawls that leave landscapes desolated and cemeteries full, deserve less attention, simply because they don't reinforce our view our ourselves as invincible underdogs? Doesn't the soldier who dies defending a town with the unfortunate name of Bitche deserve as much praise as one who lost his life fighting for Bastogne? Hasn't the G.I. from a a nameless infantry division who lost an eye, a hand or his testicles during a "tactical retreat" earned just as much right to an HBO mini-series as a paratrooper from a famous outfit?
Today is Christmas Eve, and with New Year's right around the corner perhaps it would do us all some good to reflect a moment on those men who weren't "lucky" enough to have fought in one of the battles we Americans have made a collective agreement to remember. It seems to me their blood looked no different, steaming in the snow of Alsace, than that of our genuine heroes.
Well, you get the picture. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, on rare occasions it's actually more glamorous, melodramatic, and unbelievable. Of course the full truth about the Bulge may never be known, since the battle itself was followed by a frenzy of records-destroying, ass-covering, and fact fudging by American generals, the likes of which wasn't seen again until Vietnam. Their problem was not with the outcome of the battle, but that Allied intelligence, which innumerable spy movies would have you believe was about a quarter of an IQ point less omniscient than God, had somehow failed to notice Hitler had amassed three huge armies at the very weakest spot of the American line -- a blunder which was to cost 89,500 U.S. casualties, including 19,000 dead.
Mind you, I don't really blame our generals for taking their Orwellian approach to history. Americans as a whole have an unwillingness, bordering on an incapacity, to accept that their military can be defeated -- even in a battle of wits. It is noteworthy that the only really crushing defeats suffered by the United States Army which are known to our public were inflicted on it by the Confederate States Army during the Civil War -- in other words, by other Americans. When it comes to foreigners getting the better of us, we don't want to hear that shit. In the Bulge, the Germans fooled us badly, caught us smirking and slacking, and kicked us in the jewels about as hard as they possibly could, but that is not the way we as a nation choose to compose our narrative. Instead, we see it as the ultimate underdog story, a sort of Rocky with tanks and guns, where the desperate heroes are bloodied and battered but, in the end, gloriously triumphant. This version has the advantage of being broadly true, but it is also symptomatic of that larger, moral problem -- our willingness, even eagerness, to edit history when runs contrary to the paradoxical image we have of ourselves -- perennial underdogs who are also perpetual winners.
This problem is moral because if one happens to be one of the American soldiers who fought in a battle the generals, and by extension the public, don't want to remember, then one finds oneself out in the historical cold. This was the fate of the 29,000 Americans doomed to fall under the ghastly heading of "casualties" during the so-called Other Battle of the Bulge, known in American histories as "The Alsace Campaign" and by the Germans, who initiated it, as "Operation North Wind."
When the fight kicked off, on New Year's Eve, 1944, the "real" Bulge battle had been raging for fifteen days, and had drawn fully half of the American forces in Europe into its maelstrom. Hitler saw in this shift an opportunity to administer yet another kick to Uncle Sam's groin, for as Eisenhower concentrated more and more combat power for the purposes of containing and destroying the German armies in the Bulge, he suffered a corresponding depletion of that power elsewhere. The "elsewhere" Hitler had in mind for Operation North Wind was Alsace, the much fought-over province which had just been reconquered by newly-liberated France. At a conference on December 28, just three days before the attack, Hitler claimed to his generals that the purpose of North Wind was not for "prestige" but simply a matter of "destroying and exterminating enemy forces wherever we find them." One of the principal German commanders of the coming battle, Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, secretly disagreed with his master in this regard. "Heini" was determined to capture the capital of the province, Strasbourg, and to fly the swastika from its cathedral as a sort of thank-you gift to Der Fuehrer for placing him in command of a field army. This determination was to have fateful consequences for everyone involved in the looming fight, most especially the soldiers of the U.S. Sixth Army Group, commanded by General Jacob Devers. If the name Devers doesn't ring a bell, that's understandable: though he was one of only two Army Group commanders in Europe, he remained a mere three-star general until near the end of the war, largely because Eisenhower both disliked and distrusted him. This feeling, which was reciprocated, was also to have a deep influence on the battle, yet another example of how the "power of personality" is perhaps greater and more terrible than that of bombs.
Nordwind, as the Germans called it, kicked off at just about the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1944. About twenty German divisions, attacking in successive waves along a 68-mile front that slanted northwest to southeast from Rohrbach to the Rhine River, and along the Rhine itself from the area immediately east of Strasbourg up to the German city of Karlsruhe, slammed into Sixth Army Group (7th U.S. Army, 1st French Army, XXI Corps of 1st U.S. Army) which had been stripped down to the metal by "Ike" to provide troops for the Battle of the Bulge. And indeed, "Ike" was unsympathetic to Devers' pleas for reinforcements. Allied intelligence, which had failed so miserably to predict the Bulge attack, knew all about "North Wind," and Eisenhower had already instructed "Jake" to withdraw if pressed, even if it meant yielding moist of Alsace to the Germans -- including Strasbourg. Eisenhower believed, not without cause, that this new German attack was intended to ease American pressure on the "Bulge," and to shift forces again would be to play Hitler's game. Devers, by temperament and to some extent by blood (his grandmother was from Alsace), was reluctant to obey, and he had key allies in this regard -- namely the French, who were appalled by the idea of giving up Strasbourg merely to save Eisenhower the trouble of defending it. As the historian Charles Whiting has noted, "Strasbourg was second only to Paris in French hearts," and more specifically in the heart of Charles de Gaulle, who informed Eisenhower that he would not permit the city to fall into German hands, even if it meant ordering the French First Army to operate independently of American command. What followed was an ugly and sometimes ridiculous argument between supposed allies which sucked in not only Eisenhower and de Gaulle, but Winston Churchill, who flew out to join a conference of his fellow "great men" on January 3, 1945. Ike accused the Frenchman of allowing political considerations to dictate military tactics, and threatened to withhold American supplies form the French Army, which was utterly dependent on them, if he refused to obey orders; de Gaulle countered by threatening to close French railways and communications systems to American troops. Churchill backed de Gaulle, a rather odd move for a man who would later be accused of trying to having him assassinated, and Eisenhower caved. Derided by his detractors of being a "political general" who was more interested in placating his allies than standing up for his countrymen, Ike countermanded his earlier orders to Devers. From now on, Americans would stand, fight, and die for the honor of France.
Die they did. The "other Battle of the Bulge" raged for twenty-five days, and the U.S. VI Corps, consisting of four "ordinary" infantry divisions (42nd, 45th, 70th and 79th), and commanded by a tough, crafty sonofabitch named Ted Brooks, bore the brunt of the fighting, which was almost unbelievably savage. As the History of the 14th Armored Division recalls: "You heard shouting and and stifled screams and the identifying brrrrp brrrrp brrrrp of (German) machine guns, the steady cracking of machine guns and small arms fire coming from the windows, crevices, and the church steeple, the deep rumple of tanks. Some tanks no longer moved, black hulks among the charred ruins of homes. White phosphorus shells burst in the streets, with sudden yellow flames and smoke pouring from half-timber buildings. Buildings that only smoked because there was nothing more to burn and made the town look like a ghost town, and still the shells came in. The mortars that never gave a warning, endlessly plopping in, scattering mortar and rubbish. There was the catching voice, crying 'Medic!' The surrounding fields no longer had a mantle of clear white snow. It was now stained with soot from powder, pockmarked with craters and soiled with blood."
Pushed all the way back back to the Moder River, Brooks held the line there, stopping the Germans at Haugenau despite intense pressure -- Devers later stated that Brooks had fought "one of the great defensive actions of all time." If so, it had come at a terrifying cost: 29,000 Americans killed, wounded or captured, for an average 1,160 casualties per day. The Germans, driven forward by discipline, love of country (Alsace-Lorriane had been German from 1870 - 1918, and again from 1940 - 1944) and fear of Himmler's wrath, lost 23,000 men in the same period, and never got to hoist the swastika over Strasbourg cathedral. As for the French, their casualties were about 2,000, a figure it is impossible to contemplate without feelings of irony, when one considers First French Army was probably better than a quarter of a million strong during the time in question. Charles de Gaulle seems to have purchased the honor of France with American blood, a fact he was to forget after the war -- if ever he acknowledged it in the first place.
It is interesting to note that Wikipedia lists the result of Operation North Wind as a "tactical Allied retreat." This is, of course, true; the Sixth Army Group was pushed back, at its furthest point, almost thirty-five miles, and the total territory lost to the Germans was between half and two-thirds as much as was yielded during the "real" Battle of the Bulge. Avoidance of the word defeat, however, is emblematic, for while one could make a very powerful argument that North Wind was not a defeat but merely a change in footwork, so to speak, it's hard to put a happy face on the results. The Germans advanced, and the Americans retreated. The Germans lost 23,000 men, but the Americans lost 29,000. The Germans failed to recapture Strasbourg, but Hitler had never said Strasbourg was the goal of the offensive in the first place, and in any event, the argument over how -- or whether -- to defend it left a bitter taste in the mouth of everyone who had a hand in it. The real legacy of Operation North Wind was the bare essence of war itself -- death and destruction without the satisfying, Hollywood-scripted climax offered by the Bulge. Judged by those lights, it's easy to understand why Nordwind has no place in the American memory. And yet I have to ask -- do battles like this, ugly, inconclusive brawls that leave landscapes desolated and cemeteries full, deserve less attention, simply because they don't reinforce our view our ourselves as invincible underdogs? Doesn't the soldier who dies defending a town with the unfortunate name of Bitche deserve as much praise as one who lost his life fighting for Bastogne? Hasn't the G.I. from a a nameless infantry division who lost an eye, a hand or his testicles during a "tactical retreat" earned just as much right to an HBO mini-series as a paratrooper from a famous outfit?
Today is Christmas Eve, and with New Year's right around the corner perhaps it would do us all some good to reflect a moment on those men who weren't "lucky" enough to have fought in one of the battles we Americans have made a collective agreement to remember. It seems to me their blood looked no different, steaming in the snow of Alsace, than that of our genuine heroes.
December 17, 2016
What Do You Watch At Christmastime?
Christmas is almost upon us, and the time has come for me to dust off my favorite Christmas-themed DVDs. Now, it's true that the speedy passage of time often makes me wonder aloud, "Christ, is it time to watch these bloody things again?" But this feeling of dismay never prevents me from viewing the films and television episodes in question. Indeed, I watch them whether I'm in the mood to do so or not. Like eggnog, mistletoe, and hideous green-and-red sweaters, they are simply part of the fabric of Christmastime, and you've just gotta deal with it.
MAGNUM, P.I. : "Operation Silent Night" (Season 4, Episode 10). I grew up with MAGNUM and this episode is a fine example of the mix of witty writing, superb chemistry and deep but never sloppy vein of sentimentality that ran all through the long-running series. On Christmas Eve, T.C. (Larry Mosley) is transporting his buddies Magnum (Tom Selleck) and Rick (Larry Manetti), as well as frenemy Higgins (John Hillerman), to various spots in the Hawaiian islands in his trusty helicopter. T.C. is, as always, feeling angry at being used as a flying chauffeur, especially since he's planning on flying home in the morning to see his family in New Orleans for the first time in years. T.C.'s evil humor triggers the usual four-way squabbling between the group, which intensifies when engine trouble forces them to set down on a deserted little island in the middle of nowhere. It turns out the island is deserted because the U.S. Navy uses it for gunnery practice, but our heroes don't know that -- yet. They're too busy fighting, trying ridiculous ways to get off the island, and making grisly discoveries left over from WW2. A perfect balance of comedy, dramatic tension and Christmas spirit (the scene where Magnum insists on a proper military funeral for the long-dead Japanese Zero pilot discovered in his wrecked fighter is beautiful and touching), this episode is really about family -- and how adversity forces these four people to recognize how much they love each other, even if they really do prefer to fight most of the time.
SHERLOCK HOLMES: "The Blue Carbuncle" (Season 1, Episode 7). Dozens of men, including some of the very best actors ever to walk the earth, have played Sherlock Holmes over the last century or so, but there really is only one Holmes, and it was Jeremy Brett. His turn on Grenada TV's superb HOLMES series (41 episodes, five of which were feature-length films, shot from 1984 - 1994) is a masterclass in acting. It's a horrific pity that Brett died so young -- before the Internet, really, and certainly before cable TV had the omnipresence it has today; elsewise he'd be as beloved and revered as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen or any of the other Elder Statesmen of Acting. The difficulty of playing Holmes, of course, is in making such a cold-blooded, unfeeling character, one prone to arrogance, rudeness and a complex form of self-pity, likeable to an audience. And Arthur Conan-Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle," written by John Hawkesworth and Paul Finney, must have been a particular challenge, because it takes place at Christmastime, a holiday which runs somewhat contrary to Holmes' rather Scrooge-like outer nature. Yet Brett pulls it off and delivers one of the most touching -- yet unsappy -- Christmas tales of my experience. In this tale, a thief steals the famous Blue Carbuncle gem from the Countess Morcar. A convicted jewel thief, now working as a plumber, is arrested for the crime, but Scotland Yard can't find the stone itself, and the plumber insists on his innocence. Holmes is more than surprised, then, when a local commissionaire appears on Christmas Eve and tells him he's found the Carbuncle -- located in the belly of a Christmas goose, no less! Holmes, with trusty sidekick Watson (David Burke) at his side, immediately investigate, but this mystery taxes even the genius of the world's best detective. And when he finally solves the puzzle, he's presented with a moral dilemma which forces the icy logician to choose between bringing a criminal to justice or dispensing a more humane, Christmas-themed justice of his own. The last scenes of this episode are deeply moving, and the atmosphere of 1880s London in December strongly reminiscent of Dickens. Which leads me to....
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1984): There are nearly as many versions of this story as there are actors who have played Sherlock Holmes; originally penned in 1843 by Charles Dickens, this is arguably one of the most famous stories in history, and ne'er has it been done as well, much less better, than in Clive Donner's made-for-TV adaptation starring the late great George C. Scott. Though best-remembered for his brilliant portrayal of General Patton in the film of the same name, I would argue that Scott, who had an enormously storied career, was never better than in his portrayal of the heartless, ruthless miser-businessman Ebenezer Scrooge. Scott was notoriously tough and uncompromising in real life, and he brings those qualities to Scrooge, who defends himself stubbornly against the three Ghosts (four, if you include Jacob Marley) who come to reclaim his soul from the abyss of greed into which it has sunk. It would be pretentious of me to outline the plot of such a well-known story, but I can say that Scott's blistering performance is well-supported by David Warner (as Bob Cratchit), Edward Woodward (as the cheerfully menacing Ghost of Christmas Past), Frank Finlay (a badass Jacob Marley), Susannah York (tough but loveable Mrs. Cratchit), Anthony Walters (adorable as Tiny Tim), and Roger Rees (Fred Hollywell). There are so many goosebump-inducing, tear-jerking moments in this gem as to defy description, so I'll just say that the scene near the end, where Scrooge shows up to his hitherto estranged nephew's home -- well, the reaction of Rees to his dread uncle's appearance ("My God! It's uncle Ebenezer!" gets me every time. So too the entire film.
A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983): I'm sorry, but if you don't like this movie you either don't understand childhood, have no sense of nostalgia for a simpler, less cynical era, or you just fucking lack a pulse. This instant classic is the story of Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), a kid growing up in 1940s near the Great Lakes, whose sole desire in the world is to own a Red Ryder B.B. gun. Ralphie's dream is frustrated at every step by the seeming indifference of his old man (the crustily wonderful Darren McGavin), and the complete disapproval of his mother (perfectly portrayed by Melinda Dillon), teacher (Tedde Moore), and hell, even the Santa Claus at the mall (Jeff Gillen). I don't know what I love more about this movie: Ralphie's single-minded obsession with obtaining the rifle as a Christmas present (he stops at nothing), the hilarious narration of adult Ralphie (voiced brilliantly by Jean Shepherd), Old Man Parker and his various fetishes (lamps, turkeys and swearing, in that order), the brutality of winter in the Midwest, or the trouble Ralph has with neighborhood bully Scott Farkus (Zack Ward). Somehow writers Jean Shepherd and Leigh Brown and writer-director Bob Clark have captured childhood at its very essence in this movie. Ralphie's belief that owning the B.B. gun will somehow complete him is not so much a comment on hollow materialism as it is a frank statement of the reality of American childhood, but this movie is not about bullshit, social-commentary subtext; it's about the simplistic yet utterly honest way children think about their parents, kid brothers, teachers, friends and life in general; and it's about love and the strange forms it takes, especially at Christmastime, when we express our love with bowling balls, hideous lamps, and Red Ryder B.B. guns.
M*A*S*H: "Dear Sis" (Season 7, Episode 15) and "Death Takes A Holiday" (Season 9, Episode 5). When a show runs as long as M*A*S*H, it's bound to touch on certain themes/holidays more than once. M*A*S*H touched on Christmas stories a number of times in its 11-year run, but never more poignantly than in these two stories. The first, "Dear Sis," is written from the point of view of the hospital's company chaplain, Father Mulcahy (William Christopher), at Christmas. The chaplain, writing his nun-sister, bemoans the feeling of uselessness that beset him at all times, but especially now. No one comes to confession; no one attends his services; he can't perform surgery and he wonders what good he's doing in this miserable, bone-chilling, war-torn landscape. Hawkeye (Alan Alda) intervenes to make Mulcahy realize that he provides more strength to the rest of the company than he realizes, but it's a tiny act of compassion the priest gives to the snotty, insufferable, miserly Maj. Winchester (David Ogden Stiers) that makes this episode a goosbumper: “You saved me, Father. You lowered a bucket into the well of my despair and you raised me up to the light of day."
"Death Takes A Holiday," while even darker, nevertheless properly communicates the spirit of Christmas as I understand it. In this jarring story, a married-with-children soldier who has been shot through the head on Christmas Day is taken to the hospital, where B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), labors to keep him breathing even though his brain has been destroyed. B.J.'s theory is that no family should have to remember Christmas "as the day that daddy died." Joined in his private crusade by Hawkeye and Margaret (Loretta Swit), B.J. finds himself in conflict with Col. Potter (Harry Morgan) and Father Mulcahy, who have different reasons for questioning what B.J. is doing. The acting in this episode is superb, aided by a crackling script written by Mike Farrell himself (who also directed). When B.J. snarls, "You can't have him!" to Mulcahy, who is trying to administer the Last Rites, the priest's response is epic: "I try to stay out of the way because what you people do here is so important but, understand, at a time like this, what I have to do is just as important. And no one, not you nor anyone else is going to stand between me and the performance of my sacred office." As if this wasn't enough, there is a terrific sub-plot involving the normally villainous Maj. Winchester and his attempt to perform an anonymous act of charity, which -- no good deed being unpunished -- leads to him being further ostracized by the unit. This sub-plot concludes with a beautiful moment between Winchester and Corporal Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), in which they use each others' first names which, after all these years, touches me just as it did when I was a little kid.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: "Amends" (Season 3, Episode 10, written & directed by Joss Whedon). It has been said by many that BUFFY was never better than during its various "holiday/birthday" episodes, and "Amends" is certainly evidence in support of that argument. The story revolves around the character of Angel, Buffy's on-again, off-again love interest, who left the show for his own spin-off series at the end of this particular season. For those not familiar with the lore of the show, Angel (David Boreanaz) is an vampire from the 18th century who was so vicious, so diabolically evil, that after 150 years of vile atrocities he was cursed with a soul as punishment for all the horrible things he had done. Explaining the brooding misery in which he lives to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Angel says, "You don't know what it's like to have done the things I've done...and to care." With Buffy's help, Angel uses his superhuman abilities for good, helping her slay demons and right wrongs, but he carries a core of guilt for his long history of wanton violence that he cannot escape. In "Amends," which takes place on Christmas Eve, Angel finds himself tormented by the ghost of one of his victims, Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte). Forcing all of his guilt and self-loathing to the surface by making him re-experience his atrocities, and driving him to the brink of madness, Jenny eventually offers him a way out...by encouraging him to commit suicide. If this sounds grim, it is; the episode is unsparing in its depiction of the gleeful sadism with which Angelus (the evil version of Angel) dispatched his helpless victims. The Christmas-spirit moments come later, when Buffy discovers that Jenny's ghost is perhaps not what it appears to be, and tries to save Angel's life. I can't say more without giving away the store, but the ending of this episode is not what you'd expect, but somehow falls fully within the spirit of Christmas.
Well, that about sums up my list. It's hardly exhaustive and I suppose some will mock me for not including, for example, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE or MIRACLE ON 34th STREET, to the pile, but Christmas is all about family tradition...and these are mine. I wish you the best as you indulge in yours.
MAGNUM, P.I. : "Operation Silent Night" (Season 4, Episode 10). I grew up with MAGNUM and this episode is a fine example of the mix of witty writing, superb chemistry and deep but never sloppy vein of sentimentality that ran all through the long-running series. On Christmas Eve, T.C. (Larry Mosley) is transporting his buddies Magnum (Tom Selleck) and Rick (Larry Manetti), as well as frenemy Higgins (John Hillerman), to various spots in the Hawaiian islands in his trusty helicopter. T.C. is, as always, feeling angry at being used as a flying chauffeur, especially since he's planning on flying home in the morning to see his family in New Orleans for the first time in years. T.C.'s evil humor triggers the usual four-way squabbling between the group, which intensifies when engine trouble forces them to set down on a deserted little island in the middle of nowhere. It turns out the island is deserted because the U.S. Navy uses it for gunnery practice, but our heroes don't know that -- yet. They're too busy fighting, trying ridiculous ways to get off the island, and making grisly discoveries left over from WW2. A perfect balance of comedy, dramatic tension and Christmas spirit (the scene where Magnum insists on a proper military funeral for the long-dead Japanese Zero pilot discovered in his wrecked fighter is beautiful and touching), this episode is really about family -- and how adversity forces these four people to recognize how much they love each other, even if they really do prefer to fight most of the time.
SHERLOCK HOLMES: "The Blue Carbuncle" (Season 1, Episode 7). Dozens of men, including some of the very best actors ever to walk the earth, have played Sherlock Holmes over the last century or so, but there really is only one Holmes, and it was Jeremy Brett. His turn on Grenada TV's superb HOLMES series (41 episodes, five of which were feature-length films, shot from 1984 - 1994) is a masterclass in acting. It's a horrific pity that Brett died so young -- before the Internet, really, and certainly before cable TV had the omnipresence it has today; elsewise he'd be as beloved and revered as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen or any of the other Elder Statesmen of Acting. The difficulty of playing Holmes, of course, is in making such a cold-blooded, unfeeling character, one prone to arrogance, rudeness and a complex form of self-pity, likeable to an audience. And Arthur Conan-Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle," written by John Hawkesworth and Paul Finney, must have been a particular challenge, because it takes place at Christmastime, a holiday which runs somewhat contrary to Holmes' rather Scrooge-like outer nature. Yet Brett pulls it off and delivers one of the most touching -- yet unsappy -- Christmas tales of my experience. In this tale, a thief steals the famous Blue Carbuncle gem from the Countess Morcar. A convicted jewel thief, now working as a plumber, is arrested for the crime, but Scotland Yard can't find the stone itself, and the plumber insists on his innocence. Holmes is more than surprised, then, when a local commissionaire appears on Christmas Eve and tells him he's found the Carbuncle -- located in the belly of a Christmas goose, no less! Holmes, with trusty sidekick Watson (David Burke) at his side, immediately investigate, but this mystery taxes even the genius of the world's best detective. And when he finally solves the puzzle, he's presented with a moral dilemma which forces the icy logician to choose between bringing a criminal to justice or dispensing a more humane, Christmas-themed justice of his own. The last scenes of this episode are deeply moving, and the atmosphere of 1880s London in December strongly reminiscent of Dickens. Which leads me to....
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1984): There are nearly as many versions of this story as there are actors who have played Sherlock Holmes; originally penned in 1843 by Charles Dickens, this is arguably one of the most famous stories in history, and ne'er has it been done as well, much less better, than in Clive Donner's made-for-TV adaptation starring the late great George C. Scott. Though best-remembered for his brilliant portrayal of General Patton in the film of the same name, I would argue that Scott, who had an enormously storied career, was never better than in his portrayal of the heartless, ruthless miser-businessman Ebenezer Scrooge. Scott was notoriously tough and uncompromising in real life, and he brings those qualities to Scrooge, who defends himself stubbornly against the three Ghosts (four, if you include Jacob Marley) who come to reclaim his soul from the abyss of greed into which it has sunk. It would be pretentious of me to outline the plot of such a well-known story, but I can say that Scott's blistering performance is well-supported by David Warner (as Bob Cratchit), Edward Woodward (as the cheerfully menacing Ghost of Christmas Past), Frank Finlay (a badass Jacob Marley), Susannah York (tough but loveable Mrs. Cratchit), Anthony Walters (adorable as Tiny Tim), and Roger Rees (Fred Hollywell). There are so many goosebump-inducing, tear-jerking moments in this gem as to defy description, so I'll just say that the scene near the end, where Scrooge shows up to his hitherto estranged nephew's home -- well, the reaction of Rees to his dread uncle's appearance ("My God! It's uncle Ebenezer!" gets me every time. So too the entire film.
A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983): I'm sorry, but if you don't like this movie you either don't understand childhood, have no sense of nostalgia for a simpler, less cynical era, or you just fucking lack a pulse. This instant classic is the story of Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), a kid growing up in 1940s near the Great Lakes, whose sole desire in the world is to own a Red Ryder B.B. gun. Ralphie's dream is frustrated at every step by the seeming indifference of his old man (the crustily wonderful Darren McGavin), and the complete disapproval of his mother (perfectly portrayed by Melinda Dillon), teacher (Tedde Moore), and hell, even the Santa Claus at the mall (Jeff Gillen). I don't know what I love more about this movie: Ralphie's single-minded obsession with obtaining the rifle as a Christmas present (he stops at nothing), the hilarious narration of adult Ralphie (voiced brilliantly by Jean Shepherd), Old Man Parker and his various fetishes (lamps, turkeys and swearing, in that order), the brutality of winter in the Midwest, or the trouble Ralph has with neighborhood bully Scott Farkus (Zack Ward). Somehow writers Jean Shepherd and Leigh Brown and writer-director Bob Clark have captured childhood at its very essence in this movie. Ralphie's belief that owning the B.B. gun will somehow complete him is not so much a comment on hollow materialism as it is a frank statement of the reality of American childhood, but this movie is not about bullshit, social-commentary subtext; it's about the simplistic yet utterly honest way children think about their parents, kid brothers, teachers, friends and life in general; and it's about love and the strange forms it takes, especially at Christmastime, when we express our love with bowling balls, hideous lamps, and Red Ryder B.B. guns.
M*A*S*H: "Dear Sis" (Season 7, Episode 15) and "Death Takes A Holiday" (Season 9, Episode 5). When a show runs as long as M*A*S*H, it's bound to touch on certain themes/holidays more than once. M*A*S*H touched on Christmas stories a number of times in its 11-year run, but never more poignantly than in these two stories. The first, "Dear Sis," is written from the point of view of the hospital's company chaplain, Father Mulcahy (William Christopher), at Christmas. The chaplain, writing his nun-sister, bemoans the feeling of uselessness that beset him at all times, but especially now. No one comes to confession; no one attends his services; he can't perform surgery and he wonders what good he's doing in this miserable, bone-chilling, war-torn landscape. Hawkeye (Alan Alda) intervenes to make Mulcahy realize that he provides more strength to the rest of the company than he realizes, but it's a tiny act of compassion the priest gives to the snotty, insufferable, miserly Maj. Winchester (David Ogden Stiers) that makes this episode a goosbumper: “You saved me, Father. You lowered a bucket into the well of my despair and you raised me up to the light of day."
"Death Takes A Holiday," while even darker, nevertheless properly communicates the spirit of Christmas as I understand it. In this jarring story, a married-with-children soldier who has been shot through the head on Christmas Day is taken to the hospital, where B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), labors to keep him breathing even though his brain has been destroyed. B.J.'s theory is that no family should have to remember Christmas "as the day that daddy died." Joined in his private crusade by Hawkeye and Margaret (Loretta Swit), B.J. finds himself in conflict with Col. Potter (Harry Morgan) and Father Mulcahy, who have different reasons for questioning what B.J. is doing. The acting in this episode is superb, aided by a crackling script written by Mike Farrell himself (who also directed). When B.J. snarls, "You can't have him!" to Mulcahy, who is trying to administer the Last Rites, the priest's response is epic: "I try to stay out of the way because what you people do here is so important but, understand, at a time like this, what I have to do is just as important. And no one, not you nor anyone else is going to stand between me and the performance of my sacred office." As if this wasn't enough, there is a terrific sub-plot involving the normally villainous Maj. Winchester and his attempt to perform an anonymous act of charity, which -- no good deed being unpunished -- leads to him being further ostracized by the unit. This sub-plot concludes with a beautiful moment between Winchester and Corporal Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), in which they use each others' first names which, after all these years, touches me just as it did when I was a little kid.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: "Amends" (Season 3, Episode 10, written & directed by Joss Whedon). It has been said by many that BUFFY was never better than during its various "holiday/birthday" episodes, and "Amends" is certainly evidence in support of that argument. The story revolves around the character of Angel, Buffy's on-again, off-again love interest, who left the show for his own spin-off series at the end of this particular season. For those not familiar with the lore of the show, Angel (David Boreanaz) is an vampire from the 18th century who was so vicious, so diabolically evil, that after 150 years of vile atrocities he was cursed with a soul as punishment for all the horrible things he had done. Explaining the brooding misery in which he lives to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Angel says, "You don't know what it's like to have done the things I've done...and to care." With Buffy's help, Angel uses his superhuman abilities for good, helping her slay demons and right wrongs, but he carries a core of guilt for his long history of wanton violence that he cannot escape. In "Amends," which takes place on Christmas Eve, Angel finds himself tormented by the ghost of one of his victims, Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte). Forcing all of his guilt and self-loathing to the surface by making him re-experience his atrocities, and driving him to the brink of madness, Jenny eventually offers him a way out...by encouraging him to commit suicide. If this sounds grim, it is; the episode is unsparing in its depiction of the gleeful sadism with which Angelus (the evil version of Angel) dispatched his helpless victims. The Christmas-spirit moments come later, when Buffy discovers that Jenny's ghost is perhaps not what it appears to be, and tries to save Angel's life. I can't say more without giving away the store, but the ending of this episode is not what you'd expect, but somehow falls fully within the spirit of Christmas.
Well, that about sums up my list. It's hardly exhaustive and I suppose some will mock me for not including, for example, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE or MIRACLE ON 34th STREET, to the pile, but Christmas is all about family tradition...and these are mine. I wish you the best as you indulge in yours.
December 8, 2016
Remember Pearl Harbor?
My parents were lucky. They had four sons, three of whom saw heavy combat, all of whom survived. We were lucky. A lot of families weren't. -- Robert D. MacDougal, USMC (Ret.)
On December 11, 2004, just a few days after the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack which plunged America into World War Two, I interviewed Dr. Robert D. MacDougal at his home in York, Pennsylvania, as part of York College's Oral History Project. Dr. MacDougal served in the Marine Corps from 1942 – 1946, primarily as a combat pilot attached to Mag 24, a Marine Corps dive-bomber squadron which saw extensive service in the Pacific during the Second World War. Since today is Pearl Harbor Day, I found myself thinking of Dr. MacDougal -- an affable, witty, soft-spoken and unpretentous man who made quite an impression on me -- and after a brief internet search was saddened to see that he had died in 2013 at the age of 92. What follows is a partial transcript of that audio-taped interview which is a small part of his legacy. In the interests of brevity I have excerpted many passages about his marriage, religious beliefs and his time in medical school. In the interests of honesty I have not changed his use of the word "Japs" to the less provocative "Japanese." And the interests of decency I apologize for my own use of the word while interviewing him -- it was a very long interview, and frankly the WW2-era lingo he was using began to rub off on me.
MW: What is your full name?
RM: Robert D. McDougal.
MW: Where were you born
RM: Hammonton, New Jersey, middle of South Jersey, on a farm.
MW: Farm country?
RM: Mostly orchard.
MW: Did you grow up there?
RM: Yes.
MW: Did you have any interest when you were growing up in the military at all?
RM: None. (laughter)
MW: Pretty emphatic on that subject! What did your father do for a living?
RM: He was director of Atlantic County agricultural....the superintendent of Atlantic County Schools, for agricultural education.
MW: Did you have any siblings?
RM: Yes. I had three.
MW: I forgot to ask you, when was your birthday?
RM: 10/22/20.
MW: So, were you in school, attending Rutgers, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?
RM: Yes.
MW: What were you studying at Rutgers?
RM: Agriculture. I was gonna be a dairy husbandry man. I was majoring in dairy husbandry.
MW: Were you following in your dad’s footsteps then?
RM: No. In orchard farming, you have your whole income during the summer, then you gotta spread that out through the rest of the year, and I sort of liked the fact that you get a monthly milk check when you’re in dairy farming, so I decided to go for that.
MW: So, you were in school. Do you remember where you were when you heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor?
RM: Yes, I went to school with my two brothers, my twin brother Howard, and my older brother Charles – and we were studying Sunday afternoon, and the radio was going, and there was an announcement, “We interrupt this program,” to tell us about the Pearl Harbor bombing. It was Sunday afternoon.
MW: Now, did you have an idea at that moment, that you were going to enlist, or did it take a little time after that?
RM: It took a little time, but in my experience, I knew we were gonna have a war, somewhat. I was hoping against it, but I sort of thought we would be entangled in the European war.
MW: Right, that was already going.
RM: Yes.
MW: So, were you drafted or did you end up enlisting on your own?
RM: Six weeks after Pearl Harbor I was in the Navy. I mean, I had signed up in the Navy, for their Naval Air Corps, uh, service.
MW: What attracted to you about the idea of flying?
RM: We lived on a farm and Atlantic City was on the coast and Philadelphia was across the Delaware, and their was a route of Ford Trimotors (aircraft), went right over the house, farm, and I used to run out to watch those; sometimes they had to fly very low, because of the weather. They didn’t have the instruments in those days they have now. And they enticed me to go out. And Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic solo; he was my mentor, I think. In my sophomore year at Rutgers I threatened to leave college and join the Navy Air Corps, like a friend of mine had done, and my mother insisted that I finish and get my degree. In those days your parents had to sign for you to enlist, and mother declined to sign for me.
MW: Where was your naval training?
RM: My primary, I learned to fly, at Anacostia, which is part of D.C.
MW: How long was your flight training?
RM: I was called to service for training, in May of 1942, and got my commission in the Marines, in April of ’43.
MW: So you joined the Navy, but got your commission in the Marine Corps?
RM: We were given a choice to take a commission in the Navy or the Marines, and I chose the Marines.
MW: What made you make that decision?
RM: Marines were seeing more action. It seemed that they needed instructors to train – it seemed the Navy men were being called to instruct rather than to combat.
MW: So at that point you were pretty much trying to get in the war, so to speak, you were not interesting in being an instructor, you wanted to go fly?
RM: That’s true, yes. I wanted to get....the war had to be won, I wanted to do my part in it.
MW: How did you family feel about you becoming a pilot? A combat pilot?
RM: They didn’t say much about it. They didn’t like it very much, but they didn’t say. My mother didn’t comment one way or the other. She knew I loved to fly.
MW: When you were training to be a pilot, what kind of courses did you have to take?
RM: Navy had their own course, naval indoctrination, and rules of behavior and things like this, that was the primary course. But we had navigational courses, learned to navigate, and there was physical training. They wanted to make the pilots super pilots, supermen. So there was, a lot of it was, we were indoctrinated in ordinance, and military organization, and what the Navy’s organization was, what the officers were called, as compared with the Marines and the army, they had different names, and saluting, and basic training in Navy experiences.
MW: So basically, they sort of made you into a sailor first, or a Marine, and then they taught you how to fly?
RM: That’s right. It was called Pre-Flight School, and that was at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
MW: What kind of planes did you train on?
RM: Well, the first ones were open cockpit, and Three N was Navy built, built that plane, it was getting pretty old at that time, and there was the SN 2, and I’m trying to think of the name of it, wait a second....(flips through notebook)....it’s the, airplane company that makes the large airplanes now. 737s, and all that.
MW: Boeing?
RM: They came out with a trainer, and it was a good one, an open cockpit biplane, and I had 75 hours in those.
MW: The first time you flew solo, how did you feel about that?
RM: The training was pretty good with this instructor. Sort of routine. You’re on your own, though, but uh, were trained in landings and take-offs and things like that. They didn’t train us much in cross-country work, they wanted us to concentrate on short-field landings, and like, come in on carrier landings, and hit the circle, things like that.
MW: So weren’t afraid of heights or anything like that?
RM: No. But I was airsick the first 20 hours I flew.
MW: (laughter)
RM: My first flight in the Navy was a gung-ho instructor and he did everything that plane would do, loop and rolls and spins and all that, and it didn’t take long for me to throw lunch over the side.
MW: Maybe that was his plan.
RM: Maybe. But even in solos sometimes I made myself sick.
MW: Did that stop?
RM: No, I wanted to be a pilot, didn’t bother me.
MW: I guess it’s part of it.
RM: I guess the Navy was used to it, too. I washed off my airplane.
MW: (laughter) When did you graduate from flight school?
RM: April of ’43.
MW: Now, when you graduated, were you sent out immediately, to the Pacific, or what did they do with you?
RM: After I got my commission, no, we went to organization training, which was, I was, I wanted to be a fighter, single engine. I didn’t want to go into multi-engine transports, I wanted to get into single engine where the battle was, and they assigned me to dive bombers, and I went to Daytona Beach, trained in dive bombers, and it was the old Douglas Dauntless at that time, was the plane the Navy was using at that time. And they sent back their ‘war-wearies’ to training schools like Daytona, and we trained on SBD 1’s and SBD 2’s, which were not as powerful and they had telescopic sights rather than electronic sights.
MW: So, when all your training was completed, you’ve now been trained as a dive bomber pilot, I guess, what did they do with you then, did they send you out to the fleet, or to a Marine base?
RM: No. First thing after I finished at Daytona, all Navy pilots had to do ten carrier landings, so they shipped me off to Benview (phonetic) near Chicago, where the Navy had a base there, and they trained all their pilots up there, and they had these converted ships on Lake Michigan, and the carriers would train the pilots to come aboard. But during the time in Daytona we did field carrier landings, went through the pattern of coming aboard a ship, and uh, the flight officer, the signal officer, waved ya in if you were low, he’d signal to you if you were low, and if you were high, too high, and if you were at the right place, he’d tell you to cut, and you’d cut your engine and come down, and land. So, it was about the same thing on board ship, you had to be pretty, not many areas where mistakes could be made.
MW: Deck wasn’t all that big, huh?
RM: Yeah, was a short deck. I did have one experience in those, on my third or fourth landing, I came aboard and they trained us to never touch your brakes, when you come aboard the carrier. So, they gave me the cut sign and I cut my throttle, and uh, sort of, something happened, and I started to go towards the side, go overboard the side, and uh, I hit right rudder and straightened it out, but I wasn’t stopping, and I didn’t know why the cables didn’t stop me, so I was just about to hit the brakes when I hit the barrier and nosed-up. I wasn’t hurt and I had my greenhouse (cockpit) open and I was cussing on what had happened, and the doctor came out and asked me if I was all right, and he said, “Your hook broke” and that’s what happened, and I thought, maybe I’d made a mistake somewhere. They had a “T” on the side of the ship where, for occasions like that, they’d just push the plane back over the side, and I guess they put a new prop on it. And uh, the next guy to finish his ten landings, I was to take his plane, and I finished my ten carrier landings. I had leave after that, and the poor guy that was supposed to fly my damaged airplane off, he had to wait four or five hours before he could go on leave. So, that was one of my notable experiences.
MW: So, once you were checked to do your carrier landings, you had leave. When you got back from leave did they assign you out then?
RM: Yes.
MW: Where was your first assignment?
RM: San Diego. And then, I guess that a holding place for pilots until they get ‘em assigned to fleet, or to marine combat planes.
MW: Where were you assigned, once you were –
RM: I went to El Toro, it’s near LA, Los Angeles. And we did more dive-bombing, more organizational things, and we were assigned to sections and, uh, special training, and things.
MW: When you were done with that did they send you out?
RM: Yeah, our next was Pearl Harbor. And uh, at Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t send the whole squadron out at one time, they had to send ‘em out in echelons, and I was in the first echelon.
MW: From Pearl Harbor, where did you go?
RM: Next I went to Johnston Island, I was on patrol duty there, and it was all over-water flying, we were escorting subs in and out for their refueling at Johnston Island.
MW: Where is Johnston Island, I’m not familiar with that.
RM: It’s about 700 miles SSW of Pearl.
MW: So you were flying escort for the submarines?
RM: Yes. And did dawn and evening patrol in the mornings and evenings.
MW: When you were out flying your patrol, was there a time when you, uh, presumably the first few times you’re flying out, or even the first many times you’re flying out, you don’t necessary see anything ‘enemy.’ Was there a time when you first had an encounter?
RM: Well, we were told we could look for submarines, the conning tower, or the, uh....
MW: Periscope?
RM: Periscope. The Japs used to lie off Johnston Island, they’d lay off the coral reef, observe us. During one dawn patrol, there was an oil slick off the coral reef there, but the Navy said, you see an oil slick, it was a sub, but you don’t know where it is, it could be 25 miles away, so I didn’t drop a depth charge. That was my sort of encounter, I just found an oil slick.
MW: So how long were you doing that kind of patrolling?
RM: Six months. It was interesting. I developed a syllabus and we did more training, and developed a way to approach a target from two sides rather than just one side, and we’d split the anti-aircraft fire of the enemy that way, and thought we had the game whipped on that, but the only trouble was, half the squadron went to Johnston Island, the other half went to Palmyra, so only half the squadron was trained in the syllabus that we had, that I had worked up for the squadron.
MW: So, sometimes you would fly alone, and sometimes you would fly as a group?
RM: Yes. Patrol was all alone.
MW: You stayed there six months, what happened then?
RM: Well, I had one interesting hop while I was there. It was a night flight, there was a squadron of Naval ships coming by, and they were about 75 to 100 miles from Johnston Island on a certain course, and they wanted, and it was getting dark, it was, and they didn’t have any plane escort, so they wanted some escort, to watch for Japanese subs, because they feared they were in the area. So, Johnston Island had some twin engines there, and they did most of the patrol duty like the TBD, Catalina, planes like that, they were amphibious planes, but they weren’t available at the time, so they asked the squadron for two fliers to escort the flotilla. And this was about 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon, so the other fella and I – everybody went for the beer and they can’t drink with alcohol on their breath – and I didn’t drink and this other fella didn’t drink, so we were chosen to go and I led the flight, and you did dead reckoning in those times, and you looked for wind trails and the water, if it had whitecaps and things like this, and we had plotting boards on board and we could plot our course, and time how long it took to get out there, where this convoy was. Our reckoning was good and we arrived on time and patrolled until we got dark, we couldn’t see (inaudible) after that, so we had another course to get back to Johnston Island for that time we patrolled, the escort patrol. It was sort of hairy for single engine planes to be out like that, and Johnston Island was about 5,000 feet long and a quarter mile wide, an airstrip and a few Quonset huts, plus there was a few refueling for our own subs, and restocking. We got back all right, it was interesting, it tested our knowledge of navigation and training over water. You lose your windsocks and wind-trails and whitecaps and things like that at night. So it was an interesting hop. But at times patrolling you’d come down from dawn patrol, and sort of buzz the airfield and strip and come down low, and buzz the strip for some excitement, and come in for a landing. I remember, one time I got tired of the routine and buzzed the field and as I was pulling off, I did a barrel roll, I used to do one of those every once in a while with a depth charge under me every once in a while, I broke up muster for the Marines on the island (laughs).
MW: They weren’t too happy about that, or maybe they were?
RM: Well, it was some excitement for the day. (laughs)
MW: Did you guys get in trouble when you did stunts like that, or did –
RM: Naw, I think they like to see somebody who has a lot of some daredevil spirit, to ‘em.
MW: Sort of the culture of flying?
RM: I guess. I never had no trouble, nobody said anything about it to me. We used to do gunnery too, we’d train on firing our forward-firing guns in the cockpit, we had two .50 caliber machine guns there, fired through the prop, they were timed. One plane would fly and trail a sock, it was cotton, a wind sock. We’d make approaches on that and fire our guns at it. I often wondered why I wasn’t hitting like I should, I was doing everything great and our munitions, cartridges, the bullet was colored for which pilot, when it went through the sock it would leave its color there. So one day I found out I had hit the cable the guy was towing and I found out I was leading too much.
MW: You didn’t shoot the sock off, did you?
RM: Yeah, we lost the sock, because I hit the cable with my .50 calibers.
MW: So when you were finished, after 6 months, what happened then?
RM: Then we regrouped, the squadron regrouped, and we learned to fly with each other for about six weeks, and we were sent out to the South Pacific, and our first, our planes were new airplanes, SBD 5’s and 6’s, and uh, it was an airplane carrier, just built for carrying planes out into the South Pacific. And we landed at Espirtu Santu after about a week on board this carrier, and we crossed the equator, it was hot, so we’d take our sleeping bags and go out and sleep on the flight deck, under the wing of an airplane, which was very interesting.
MW: I bet. You must have seen some interesting stars when you were on the ship.
RM: Oh, yeah. (laughs)
MW: So what was going on where you were reassigned?
RM: Well, we took the planes down off the carrier, the plane carrier, and got ‘em ready for combat, got the guns all set, the sights all lined up, the engines all, and the aux tanks we had to have put on ‘em. But we were there in Espirtu Santu for about a month, and then we took off for Bougainville.
MW: There was some pretty heavy fighting going on there, wasn’t there?
RM: Yes. Guadalcanal had just been neutralized, and we were headed, that was our first landing at Guadalcanal. We ran into some horrible weather. They brought in an Army Air Corps DC 3, called a C-47, and they had equipment for navigating, but these planes we had had radar on ‘em, we could find ships with radar and find our target and things like that, but no one, we weren’t supposed to announce that we had it. And I, we became pretty good friends, my section that I was leading with, pilots and gunners and all that, and we had to go through a front because, the Army was waiting for us to help Macarthur in the Philippines....no, wait, that’s wrong. They wanted us at Bougainville because there was still some combat in that area, and we were on our way to Bougainville, but on the way we ran into a (storm) front, and the Army Air Corps plane was trying to take us over the front, tried to take us under the front, and couldn’t, so we had to punch through the front. We all closed in, we could just about see the lead plane flying close aboard, and there were, I think there were 36 of us, airplanes. And he was trying to take us over, he got, he was climbing and he got a little slow for us and one of the leaders in one of the sections thought he was gonna spin-in because he got so slow, so he dropped his nose to pick up speed, and that whole section, I thought, Jeez, that’s the end of Dewey, I don’t know what he’s gonna do now. About half an hour, an hour later, there was a break in the clouds, and there was Dewey was a real good friend of mine, in fact I introduced him when we were at El Toro, we went to Laguna Beach for a USO dance one night, and he and I were sittin’ across the hall, and people were dancing, and I spotted a blonde and a brunette and I said, I’m goin’ over, and I’m bringin’ em back, see if we can, so Dewey waited, and I brought ‘em back, these two gals over, and we danced the rest of the evening. My gal was a blonde and his was a brunette. And we had a good time. And a few days later the first echelon shoved off for Pearl. And about two weeks later, the second echelon came and Dewey was in the second echelon, and uh, Dewey came to my room at Eva Airfield, which is a Marine field at Pearl, and said, “Mac, I think I did you some dirt.” I said, “What’s that?” He says, “You know that blonde you danced with all night, that Sunday night?” I said, “Yeah, she was a nice girl, pretty.” And uh, he says, “Well, uh, I became engaged to her.” (laughs) And I said, “You didn’t do me any dirt, the gal I’m gonna marry is back home.” When the war was over, he married her. He later became governor of Oklahoma, and then died as a Senator in Washington (Sen. Dewey Bartlett)
MW: Did a lot of the pilots, back then, was it very common for the pilots, you know, you watch war movies and everybody’s (smoking), it was much more common in those days, wasn’t it?
RM: Yes it was quite common. Stars in the movies were smokers and all that, and its an interesting part of my tour in Bougainville. On the way to Guadalcanal, going through that storm, the lead plane, we weren’t supposed to break radio silence, but there was an island close by and beware of a sudden turn. And we were in the clouds, and I called back and said, “Gunners, get on your hay rigs.” That’s what we called our radar. And we found the island, it was about 20 miles off at 10 o’clock, and we called the lead plane, and we were up so high my gunner turned his on, and you couldn’t go over a certain altitude, and his became inoperative. So one of the gunners called, one of the pilots called, and told where the mountain was, called back, said, “How do you know?” Griff was my friend, he was in my section. He says, “We know.” (laughs) We arrived at Guadalcanal safely. But uh, Dewey Bartlett was leading his. And he was so shook up by it he had to have his gunner light his cigarette for him
MW: Close call. But, uh, once you were down there, once you’d been established, did they have you flying combat missions, or did they have you flying patrol?
RM: Yes. We did combat. We kept the rest of Bougainville Island neutralized, and then we went over to Kavyang, which is about an hour and a half, two hour flight over the target, which is a pretty potent target, and we bombed that, and back, it was about a five-hour flight over and back. I had 39 missions altogether, but at Bougainville I may have had about 25.
MW: The first time you flew, where you knew you were going to be bombing a target going into combat, did you have a particular feeling about it, or at that point, had you been flying so long that it was –
RM: It was pretty much routine, but I finally felt that I was in the swing of things.
MW: You sort of, kind of had to wait awhile, all the training –
RM: Training and patrolling, things like that.
MW: What did you guys think, I mean you flew against the Japanese, did you ever encounter their air force, or was it just ground fire?
RM: Up to that point it was some ground fire. We uh, I was coming out of my dive one time, and I was pulling out over the water, and I was pretty low, and all of the sudden there was an explosion in my airplane, cockpit filled with smoke and everything, and I said, “Boy they got me zeroed in now,” I started making evasive flights, getting closer to water and all that. About 10 seconds later, same thing happened again, I opened my hatch to look for the damage. I couldn’t find any damage or anything, the engine was working perfectly and all that, I kept on flying, the smoke cleared, I didn’t know what had happened. But they had trained us when we come out of our dive, we could strafe, but you got to interrupt it, a second or two, cool your engine, er, your guns off, and I did that, and then, when you finished firing, you’d open the chambers so they could cool. And when I got back to Bougainville, they looked me up, came to my tent and said, “Lieutenant, your guns misfired, and that’s what that, the explosions that occurred. The two .50 calibers exploded, filled the plane up with smoke.
MW: So the guns actually blew up?
RM: The guns had to be replaced. But they replaced those, but, I thought I was hit, that time, it was sort of scary.
MW: I can imagine! Having the guns blow up.
RM: While we were at Bougainville, they decided that MacArthur was gonna invade the Philippines, and “Return.” And they wanted, they figured out how they were gonna do it but they didn’t know how to get their – they needed close air support. So we trained for close air support. And we found a small hill that we’d bomb in Bougainville, they’d put a target there, they’d see how close we could come to hitting it, we were being observed by the Army, on how close we could come to our target. And I guess we did pretty good, ‘cause uh, they sent us up from Bougainville up to the Philippines.
MW: So now you’re in the Philippines, this is during the invasion?
RM: Yeah, Luzon, I think. Leyte had been neutralized.
MW: This would have been in late 1944, early 1945?
RM: Earlier ’45. January, 1945, we got up there.
MW: Now, when you were, I’m curious about something, I didn’t know this before. I know in the Army Air Corps, they would fly a certain number of missions, and if they made it, they would be rotated back for instructor duty, or something. Did the Navy and the Marines have that policy, or did you just keep flying?
RM: They would rotate us back, give us some Stateside duty, and then assign us another squadron or another duty, back out in the Pacific. There’s an interesting thing about Bougainville, they were giving the pilots, when you said light duty, had so many missions, the Navy had a program where the, uh, pilots and their gunners would get some R & R in Sydney, Australia, which was about a 3 or 4 hour flight on a transport to Sydney. And the night before we were to leave for Sydney, we were supposed to get a week of R & R. And the night before my gunner came to my tent and said, “Lieutenant, you got cigarettes?” And I said, “That orange crate over there got about two or three cartons.” And you could get cigarettes over there at the PX or wherever they had it, I forget whether it was ship’s quarters or what it was, PX I guess, and he said, and we all knew a carton of cigarettes would get you a bottle of hootch. I guess it was bootleg hootch, or whatever it was anyhow, we could get a fifth of whiskey for each carton of cigarettes. So my gunner said, “I’ll have cigarettes on the transport in the morning.” So we’re sitting on bench seats on either side of the transport, the center was all cargo, and he came over to me and said, “Lieutenant, see that parachute bag there? Well, that’s all your cigarettes.” And he must have had a hundred cartons! A parachute bag is about that big, that wide, and about that tall (indicates something about the size of a large backpack) and he had it loaded with cigarettes. I don’t know where he got ‘em, each carton and everything. And I said, “What am I gonna do with all those!” And he said, “Sell ‘em, we’ll trade ‘em for hootch!” (laughter) So, uh, I was not on Aussie soil more than 20 minutes before an Australian comes up to me and says, (feigning Australian accent) “Got any cigarettes, Yank?” So we gave him all of ‘em, and he was good, and he got us each a bottle of hootch and the parachute bag was full of whiskey when he got back.
MW: So you guys had a little barter exchange?
RM: Well, interesting, yes, we were there, the Marines were there, doing the flying, and the Army and the Marines were keeping Bougainville neutralized. And they’re all gettin’ paid, you know, but they had no place to spend their money. So, we got back to Bougainville, and I said, “You got those cigarettes for me, now you get rid of ‘em, and I’ll give you half and I’ll take half.” So, about a week or two he came to my tent and he says, “Here’s your money, Lieutenant.” And it’s twelve hundred dollars. He charged fifty-five dollars a bottle.
MW: He charged $55 a bottle?
RM: Yeah! Guys would pay it, too. They liked their whiskey, it was pretty good whiskey. So I sent $1200 home and put my sister through college.
MW: Wow! (laughs)
RM: Twelve hundred dollars, that’s how cheap –
MW: Well, I was gonna say, $55 a bottle back then, I’m trying to do the conversion rate in my head, that’s an enormous amount of money.
RM: Yeah, it was twelve, I got twelve hundred dollars.
MW: That would be too much money for a bottle of whiskey today! Much less back then. (laughs)
RM: Yeah, well, we had Sidwell, one of the Army guys came to him and said, “Sidwell,” he says, “I got $45. How ‘bout a bottle for $45?” He (Sidwell) says, “This is no five and dime soldier, shove off.” (laughs) He insisted on his fifty-five bucks.
MW: War.
RM: That’s the way my mother, had three boys in the service, teaching, and a daughter to put through college. So she was glad to get the twelve hundred dollars. So it paid her tuition. For four years.
MW: That’s terrific. Now, let me ask questions about everyday life. You spent a lot of time in the Pacific. Obviously, it gets pretty hot. How did you guys deal with stuff like—
RM: Mosquitoes and all that?
MW: Mosquitoes....
RM: We all slept under mosquito nets. We slept in tents. We got to Bougainville and one tent was there and it had rotted or something, and they put another tent over it. That made it a lot cooler, to have dead air space between the two tents. It was a lot cooler, the sun would come down, it wouldn’t heat up your tent as much.
MW: So you sort of learned the tricks.
RM: Yeah.
MW: What was the food like.
RM: In Bougainville it was pretty good. They had an officer’s mess. I think our gunners could eat there too. It was across the field, we’d walk over there and eat our meals there. They also had a sort of an officer’s club there too, they could get their drinks there and things like this, play cards and all that.
MW: What about your mail? Did it take a long time to get mail?
RM: Mail, it took about a week.
MW: Really?
RM: Yeah. It was pretty good. I would write to my future wife, two or three times a week. We weren’t supposed to say anything about combat or anything. We later got married when we got back.
MW: I’m surprised. I would have thought the mail system would be slower. That’s pretty impressive.
RM: I think that the, they had a lot of airplanes flying down there. I think it took about a week, maybe two weeks. They all came by air. You couldn’t write, you had to use their stationery from PX, it was light and stuff.
MW: I’ve actually seen it. It’s very thin, almost like onionskin paper, almost transparent. So: it seems like you guys, you were fairly well supplied, made yourselves as comfortable as you could under the circumstances.
RM: Yeah. It was livable. There were mosquitoes and there were, ah, what’s this one spider that would sting and cause a lot of pain. There were tarantulas there –
MW: I hate spiders.
RM: Oh, I forget. My memory is, I can’t recall my words like I used to.
MW: Well, it’s probably been awhile since you’ve seen a tarantula.
RM: Yeah, and there’s that one that was poisonous, it would sting. Oh, I wish I could remember the name of it. One of the fellas woke up one morning with one of these things under his T-shirt.
MW: (laughs)
RM: (laughs) He just laid still until the thing did what it wanted and left.
MW: That’s a nice way to wake up.
RM: Yeah, we got recruits, pilot recruits, come in, relief pilots, and this is their first time in the South Pacific, combat, and everything, and they’d sort of go to the officer’s club afterwards and drink pretty heavily, and we had to take care of those new recruits.
MW: (laughs) So you were the salty old veterans by this time?
RM: Yeah, and we had one guy that came in, just made his way back to the tent, and flopped on his cot, and couldn’t be awakened. He was out. Somebody came in, he was drunk too, came in, looked him up, wanted to wake him up, couldn’t wake him, so he took a big board (inaudible) and whacked him on the fanny. He never moved. (laughs) He was anesthetized. (laughs)
MW: Out to the world. I guess that bootleg whiskey came in handy!
RM: But you know, he vomited in his cot, and everything, and if we weren’t there he would have aspirated and died.
MW: I guess he should have cut it off a little sooner. So; you guys are flying and doing these combat missions, what were the casualties like in your outfit, did you –
RM: Casualties were pretty fair. They weren’t horrifically terrible. We lost some, uh, we had one at Johnston Island, I don’t know how it happened, I think he was flying too close to the water, but he had to ditch or something like that, he didn’t survive....We had an interesting, while we were at Pearl Harbor, there was a new Marine fighter squadron, and they wanted some practice intercepting a flight of bombers, so it was a Sunday afternoon, and I was off for the day, and I was off for the day in Pearl Harbor, having a good time, and part of the squadron went up and they flew this hop, training hop, for these Corsair fighter pilots. And as they were flying there was this young Marine lieutenant, and he was making an overhead run, he coming in the opposite direction, he just turned his plane over on its back and then came down, came up underneath as and firing, that was our training. Well, he blacked out, and he ran, came up under two of our airplanes, big explosion and, we lost two gunners, and two pilots were able to get out, parachuted out, and this is an interesting thing, I don’t know how it happened, but one of those pilots, knew that we flew with life rafts under our parachutes, and he parachuted out, and the other fellow got a burned hand while he was trying to open his hatch, and uh, it was pretty sad, pretty good explosion. Of course, never heard from the Corsair pilot, but this one pilot and his gunner saw this one, fell in the water, his name was Lieutenant Hassler, and he’d been in one previous crash before at El Toro, and he came through that, he parachuted out. But uh, I think he got into a downdraft and was about to hit, he couldn’t control his airplane and was about to run into a mountain or something, but he parachuted out. But this time he landed in the water, Pearl Harbor, and they saw this light in his raft, and we had life rafts for two people to get in, our dive bombers, in case we would ditch. And that was, if you ditch, you went for that parachute behind the gunner, there was a compartment, and you’d open the compartment and pull the life raft out. But this pilot, flew down to this fella in the water, and this gunner put his flap down, and flew as slow as he could without stalling, the gunner got out, and opened his hatch, and pulled that life raft out, got back in the airplane, he was on the wing of the airplane in flight, the pilot told him when to drop, and he dropped it within 25 feet of this pilot. And he was cussin’ the guy for bad aim when he got back to shore, he was saying, “You coulda hit me, you coulda come closer than that!” Anyhow, he had all this gear on and everything, and he had to make his way over to that raft. He finally got in inflated, he was hangin’ on the edge of this raft, just out of breath and just bushed, couldn’t move. He looked over the side and there were sharks flying around him, swimming around him, rather. (makes terrified noise) That was his expression when he spotted those sharks.
MW: I don’t blame him.
RM: But I don’t know if this pilot and his gunner got cited for bravery and heroics or not, but they often wrote about them getting cited for it.
MW: Let me ask you a question about that. You flew, I guess, quite a few missions, did you ever receive, did they give air medals out in the Navy and Marine Corps, or – ?
RM: Yeah, you got recognized with ribbons and things (inaudible). I can’t remember mine.
MW: Was that important to you, or no?
RM: No.
MW: (laughs)
RM: I just had job to do and I did it. I think I could have gotten a lot more ribbons than I did.
MW: You just didn’t care.
RM: No, I didn’t care.
MW: So, when you guys went to, now you’re in Luzon, what was the fighting like there?
RM: We were in Luzon, and, excuse me, MacArthur had landed a few days before, and they were on their mission to take Manila from Luzon Bay, I think was the name of the bay he landed in and walked ashore, and had his picture taken walkin’ ashore, and all that. He was a showman, MacArthur was a showman, and didn’t get much respect from the Marines.
MW: (laughs)
RM: So, the old saying at that time, when MacArthur was removed from the Philippines, he said, “I shall return.” So the Marines coined a phrase: “With the help of God and a few Marines, MacArthur returned to the Philippines.” (laughs) And we kept his left flank covered and neutralized, the Japs couldn’t attack his forces on their way to Manila. We did a pretty good job until close air support, until after a couple of days they saw how close we could hit, and how close they could accept us coming to them, and we were, they really got to call on us, we kept planes in the air all day long, supporting his troops, and I remember one of my hops, they called and said, There’s a motor pool north of Manila that comes out at nights and fires mortars into Manila at night, we want that neutralized. So I was leading a flight, and I was up about 7,000 feet and could find the target. So I, two days before this flight, I was called from my tent for the dentist, for this Mag 24, wanted me to get to his tent, he was gonna check my teeth. And he found I had four molars that were embedded, and he says you gotta take those out. Well he was a captain and I was a lieutenant, I couldn’t tell him no, I wasn’t gonna let him do that. Well here we are on this rice paddy in this hot tent, his pulling two of my molars, my wisdom teeth, and he couldn’t get ‘em out, he was there with a hammer and chisel, gettin’ these things out of my jaw.
MW: I don’t suppose there was any anesthetic....
RM: And all the other guys waiting around on in this hot tent in these benches, waitin’ for their turn.
MW: Well, needless to say I left there with a sore jaw. Two days later I couldn’t get my mouth open more than I could get my finger in. That was when I had this hop to find this motor pool. And it was down amongst these small hills, and these clouds, small fair-weather clouds around it, of course, that means updrafts and downdrafts, so it was rough down there. So I was down there for about 15 minutes lookin’ for this target and I finally found it but not before I got airsick. Told my gunner, “Close your hatch.” And I blew my K-rations. But we got up, went up, got the fella, got to where my guys were circling, and led ‘em down to the target. Two days later we went past the target and the fires were still burning, so it was a—
MW: So you clobbered ‘em.
RM: Yeah, we clobbered ‘em. One other that I remember we had this cave that kept these guys down, Japs had a cave that they were firing from and sending out heavy mortars and things like this, and they wanted to find this cave. And uh, course, knock it out. So there was a ground watcher, he was watching us, instructing us in where things were, and I found this cave, and I was about the fourth guy in, the first section went in, the fourth guy, I had it in my sights, and boy, I just pulled up a little bit and released my bomb, and the combat officer, observer, was telling where each bomb went, and he said, “Number four airplane, your bomb was right in that cave, blew it all apart!” I guess I could have gotten a citation for it, but, I didn’t bother.
MW: You just didn’t care, did you?
RM: No.
MW: I’m curious about something. When you, the first time you drop a bomb on the enemy, what did it feel like?
RM: Well, that’s one time (inaudible), you feel like, “I survived that one, and tomorrow’s another day, and I’m where I wanted to be.” I wanted to be in combat, I just thought that was the place to be.
MW: What did you think of the Japanese back then, I mean, as far as opponents went, did you guys respect them as opponents, or was it just—
RM: They were out there to get killed, that’s all I thought about it. (laughs)
MW: (laughs)
RM: And, uh, I, later on, I felt badly about how we treated the Japs, but when I read about how they treated their US soldiers and Marines when they were captured, they were horrible. They beheaded and tortured and everything else. They were worse than we were. And so, uh, I was happy I could be of help to winning the war.
MW: So, when the fighting in Luzon went on, how long were you there?
RM: I was there for three months when I came home, I got there in early January, I guess the first week of January and left there in March.
MW: That’s when you came back?
RM: Yeah, I think I had about 20 or 30 missions on Luzon.
MW: So, where were you, was it a particularly special event, everyone remembers where they were when they heard, say, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, what they were doing and so on. When you heard the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was that considered a real big event at the time?
RM: Oh yeah. I had just had an appendectomy, and I was in the hospital at the time, and one of my friends told me that Hiroshima had just been bombed, and the casualties were horrific. And I greeted that with, “Well, I’m scheduled to go out to Tokyo, when I leave here, and maybe I won’t have to go now.” And I didn’t.
MW: So there was a certain amount of relief –
RM: Yeah.
MW: -- when the Japs surrendered. Where were you, do you remember where you were, when you heard they had given up?
RM: I was recovering from my appendectomy, they gave me two weeks off, and then I went back to duty, and when they gave up, I was married at that time, and I went to my home in South Jersey, and went to Atlantic City, well, it was Ocean City in New Jersey, on the boardwalk they were having parades and everything else. I was on the boardwalk just observing all the enjoyment everybody was going through, and celebrations. I was sittin’ by the sidelines, and some gal, and there were a lot of soldiers around, and she points out, “There’s a Marine!” It was hugs and kisses all over the place, for awhile. I was the only Marine there. But I was sore from my appendectomy, didn’t matter.
MW: Back in your time, did they still make as much fun of the Army as they do now?
RM: (laughs) I guess, but they fought side by side and all that. The Marines were more gung-ho for getting into battle, and doin’ what they had to do, and do it well.
MW: But I guess you would have had experience with several different services. You started with the Navy, you got your commission in the Marine Corps, and you worked for the Army, so to speak, for Macarthur. Did the services get along well? I mean, besides the kidding around?
RM: We were all Americans. That’s all I figured. We’re buddies. We had a job to do.
MW: People like to talk about that, but I never really –
RM: No. In combat you work with who you have to work, and....you’re fellow Americans, that’s the way I figured it. ‘Cause this ground watcher, he was an Army guy, he was with Macarthur.
MW: The guy directing the planes in?
MW: Once the Japanese surrendered, how long did you stay in the service?
RM: They surrendered on my wife’s birthday, something like that, and I was, I got my points, I was able to muster out, in November.
MW: Did you use the GI bill to finish school?
RM: Oh yeah. I went to medical school.
MW: So the GI bill paid for that?
RM: I had my B.S. degree in Diary Husbandry. And in one of my flights from Floyd Bennet field to Diego, I got in this flophouse hotel, and it wasn’t very nice, but it was a bed and breakfast, and I wasn’t much of a praying man at that time, but this was after the armistice, and I said, “Well, MacDougal, you gotta make up your mind now, you’re married now, you got a responsibility.” So I found myself prayin’. I said. “Lord, I got three options, help me make a decision. I could go back to dairy farming, establish a farm. Or I could stay with flying, because I loved to fly, but it wasn’t too, I thought it was all four-engine stuff, type, and I liked to fly single engines, or I could go into medicine, ‘cause my brother was into medicine, he put the bee in my bonnet, “Why don’t you go back to school and take up medicine?” I thought I didn’t have the brains to do it. So the next morning I woke up and there wasn’t anything in sight but medicine. I didn’t think of farming or flying, it was there. And I was married and got out of the service, and went back to Rutgers, and found my old apartment that my brothers and I had been in, it was empty. My wife and I took up residence in that apartment. I was going to day school and night school to get my requirements in. She got a job in New York City, she was, she worked for a company in New Brunswick for about a month or so, then she got this job in New York City as a model. She was a beautiful gal, redhead, and tall, very nice. And she modeled in New York City, and went to school. She made pretty good money, and I was gettin’ pretty good marks, too. I was taking these tough courses, and getting some good grades, I didn’t think I was smart enough to do that, so I surprised myself (laughs). And there was only one medical school, I applied to six or seven medical schools, and there was only one that didn’t respond, and it said, “No way.” So I went to see Dr. Parkinson at Temple, and I brought my marks down to him and told him I had applied, and he was sort of impressed with my good marks and he says, “Well, you haven’t finished all your requirements yet.” And I said, “I’ve finished on the first day the next class starts of medical school.” Bring your marks down. And I missed the first day of medical school, and he said, “You’re in.”
MW: There’s a couple questions here I wanted to ask at the end. How does your military experience influence your thinking on, I mean, America has been in a number of wars and conflicts, obviously, since WWII, and we’re in one now. How does being in combat, and having actually experienced, influenced how you think about when America decides to get involved in Korea and Vietnam or....
RM: My idea is, I’m an American. And I offered my life to preserve America. But I didn’t have to give my life, I was one of those fortunate ones. I felt America is worth fighting for, even giving your life for. And the wars we’ve had since, some of ‘em were questionable whether we needed to, but we had to preserve democracy. Some of these yay-hoos, like Saddam Hussein and those guys, they’re off their gourd! And when they said, They had weapons of mass destruction, I sort of believed it, because, heretofore, there’d been no question, uh, Vietnam war also, and there was a lot of, “I’m not fightin’ for any country in the South Pacific, I’m gonna dodge it if I can.” And we’ve got a lot of people who did dodge it, (inaudible) like this. I felt like, the United States, loses a war, and the communists get control, we’re gonna be in deep, deep swamp. So we’ve got to do what we have to do, to preserve America, because it’s the one country in this world, I thought, was a righteous country, was developed righteously, was founded righteously, and was run righteously. Even though we talk about, one of the wisest things our forefathers did, was to separate state and church, that was very wise, ‘cause, you get into some religions, and there’s where you find the fanatics. They run countries after a while. So, you gotta preserve the world for democracy. It’s the only one that has any semblance of righteousness. There is unrighteousness in any country, any government. There’s cheaters and crooks and things like that, but America is the greatest country in the world.
On December 11, 2004, just a few days after the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack which plunged America into World War Two, I interviewed Dr. Robert D. MacDougal at his home in York, Pennsylvania, as part of York College's Oral History Project. Dr. MacDougal served in the Marine Corps from 1942 – 1946, primarily as a combat pilot attached to Mag 24, a Marine Corps dive-bomber squadron which saw extensive service in the Pacific during the Second World War. Since today is Pearl Harbor Day, I found myself thinking of Dr. MacDougal -- an affable, witty, soft-spoken and unpretentous man who made quite an impression on me -- and after a brief internet search was saddened to see that he had died in 2013 at the age of 92. What follows is a partial transcript of that audio-taped interview which is a small part of his legacy. In the interests of brevity I have excerpted many passages about his marriage, religious beliefs and his time in medical school. In the interests of honesty I have not changed his use of the word "Japs" to the less provocative "Japanese." And the interests of decency I apologize for my own use of the word while interviewing him -- it was a very long interview, and frankly the WW2-era lingo he was using began to rub off on me.
MW: What is your full name?
RM: Robert D. McDougal.
MW: Where were you born
RM: Hammonton, New Jersey, middle of South Jersey, on a farm.
MW: Farm country?
RM: Mostly orchard.
MW: Did you grow up there?
RM: Yes.
MW: Did you have any interest when you were growing up in the military at all?
RM: None. (laughter)
MW: Pretty emphatic on that subject! What did your father do for a living?
RM: He was director of Atlantic County agricultural....the superintendent of Atlantic County Schools, for agricultural education.
MW: Did you have any siblings?
RM: Yes. I had three.
MW: I forgot to ask you, when was your birthday?
RM: 10/22/20.
MW: So, were you in school, attending Rutgers, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?
RM: Yes.
MW: What were you studying at Rutgers?
RM: Agriculture. I was gonna be a dairy husbandry man. I was majoring in dairy husbandry.
MW: Were you following in your dad’s footsteps then?
RM: No. In orchard farming, you have your whole income during the summer, then you gotta spread that out through the rest of the year, and I sort of liked the fact that you get a monthly milk check when you’re in dairy farming, so I decided to go for that.
MW: So, you were in school. Do you remember where you were when you heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor?
RM: Yes, I went to school with my two brothers, my twin brother Howard, and my older brother Charles – and we were studying Sunday afternoon, and the radio was going, and there was an announcement, “We interrupt this program,” to tell us about the Pearl Harbor bombing. It was Sunday afternoon.
MW: Now, did you have an idea at that moment, that you were going to enlist, or did it take a little time after that?
RM: It took a little time, but in my experience, I knew we were gonna have a war, somewhat. I was hoping against it, but I sort of thought we would be entangled in the European war.
MW: Right, that was already going.
RM: Yes.
MW: So, were you drafted or did you end up enlisting on your own?
RM: Six weeks after Pearl Harbor I was in the Navy. I mean, I had signed up in the Navy, for their Naval Air Corps, uh, service.
MW: What attracted to you about the idea of flying?
RM: We lived on a farm and Atlantic City was on the coast and Philadelphia was across the Delaware, and their was a route of Ford Trimotors (aircraft), went right over the house, farm, and I used to run out to watch those; sometimes they had to fly very low, because of the weather. They didn’t have the instruments in those days they have now. And they enticed me to go out. And Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic solo; he was my mentor, I think. In my sophomore year at Rutgers I threatened to leave college and join the Navy Air Corps, like a friend of mine had done, and my mother insisted that I finish and get my degree. In those days your parents had to sign for you to enlist, and mother declined to sign for me.
MW: Where was your naval training?
RM: My primary, I learned to fly, at Anacostia, which is part of D.C.
MW: How long was your flight training?
RM: I was called to service for training, in May of 1942, and got my commission in the Marines, in April of ’43.
MW: So you joined the Navy, but got your commission in the Marine Corps?
RM: We were given a choice to take a commission in the Navy or the Marines, and I chose the Marines.
MW: What made you make that decision?
RM: Marines were seeing more action. It seemed that they needed instructors to train – it seemed the Navy men were being called to instruct rather than to combat.
MW: So at that point you were pretty much trying to get in the war, so to speak, you were not interesting in being an instructor, you wanted to go fly?
RM: That’s true, yes. I wanted to get....the war had to be won, I wanted to do my part in it.
MW: How did you family feel about you becoming a pilot? A combat pilot?
RM: They didn’t say much about it. They didn’t like it very much, but they didn’t say. My mother didn’t comment one way or the other. She knew I loved to fly.
MW: When you were training to be a pilot, what kind of courses did you have to take?
RM: Navy had their own course, naval indoctrination, and rules of behavior and things like this, that was the primary course. But we had navigational courses, learned to navigate, and there was physical training. They wanted to make the pilots super pilots, supermen. So there was, a lot of it was, we were indoctrinated in ordinance, and military organization, and what the Navy’s organization was, what the officers were called, as compared with the Marines and the army, they had different names, and saluting, and basic training in Navy experiences.
MW: So basically, they sort of made you into a sailor first, or a Marine, and then they taught you how to fly?
RM: That’s right. It was called Pre-Flight School, and that was at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
MW: What kind of planes did you train on?
RM: Well, the first ones were open cockpit, and Three N was Navy built, built that plane, it was getting pretty old at that time, and there was the SN 2, and I’m trying to think of the name of it, wait a second....(flips through notebook)....it’s the, airplane company that makes the large airplanes now. 737s, and all that.
MW: Boeing?
RM: They came out with a trainer, and it was a good one, an open cockpit biplane, and I had 75 hours in those.
MW: The first time you flew solo, how did you feel about that?
RM: The training was pretty good with this instructor. Sort of routine. You’re on your own, though, but uh, were trained in landings and take-offs and things like that. They didn’t train us much in cross-country work, they wanted us to concentrate on short-field landings, and like, come in on carrier landings, and hit the circle, things like that.
MW: So weren’t afraid of heights or anything like that?
RM: No. But I was airsick the first 20 hours I flew.
MW: (laughter)
RM: My first flight in the Navy was a gung-ho instructor and he did everything that plane would do, loop and rolls and spins and all that, and it didn’t take long for me to throw lunch over the side.
MW: Maybe that was his plan.
RM: Maybe. But even in solos sometimes I made myself sick.
MW: Did that stop?
RM: No, I wanted to be a pilot, didn’t bother me.
MW: I guess it’s part of it.
RM: I guess the Navy was used to it, too. I washed off my airplane.
MW: (laughter) When did you graduate from flight school?
RM: April of ’43.
MW: Now, when you graduated, were you sent out immediately, to the Pacific, or what did they do with you?
RM: After I got my commission, no, we went to organization training, which was, I was, I wanted to be a fighter, single engine. I didn’t want to go into multi-engine transports, I wanted to get into single engine where the battle was, and they assigned me to dive bombers, and I went to Daytona Beach, trained in dive bombers, and it was the old Douglas Dauntless at that time, was the plane the Navy was using at that time. And they sent back their ‘war-wearies’ to training schools like Daytona, and we trained on SBD 1’s and SBD 2’s, which were not as powerful and they had telescopic sights rather than electronic sights.
MW: So, when all your training was completed, you’ve now been trained as a dive bomber pilot, I guess, what did they do with you then, did they send you out to the fleet, or to a Marine base?
RM: No. First thing after I finished at Daytona, all Navy pilots had to do ten carrier landings, so they shipped me off to Benview (phonetic) near Chicago, where the Navy had a base there, and they trained all their pilots up there, and they had these converted ships on Lake Michigan, and the carriers would train the pilots to come aboard. But during the time in Daytona we did field carrier landings, went through the pattern of coming aboard a ship, and uh, the flight officer, the signal officer, waved ya in if you were low, he’d signal to you if you were low, and if you were high, too high, and if you were at the right place, he’d tell you to cut, and you’d cut your engine and come down, and land. So, it was about the same thing on board ship, you had to be pretty, not many areas where mistakes could be made.
MW: Deck wasn’t all that big, huh?
RM: Yeah, was a short deck. I did have one experience in those, on my third or fourth landing, I came aboard and they trained us to never touch your brakes, when you come aboard the carrier. So, they gave me the cut sign and I cut my throttle, and uh, sort of, something happened, and I started to go towards the side, go overboard the side, and uh, I hit right rudder and straightened it out, but I wasn’t stopping, and I didn’t know why the cables didn’t stop me, so I was just about to hit the brakes when I hit the barrier and nosed-up. I wasn’t hurt and I had my greenhouse (cockpit) open and I was cussing on what had happened, and the doctor came out and asked me if I was all right, and he said, “Your hook broke” and that’s what happened, and I thought, maybe I’d made a mistake somewhere. They had a “T” on the side of the ship where, for occasions like that, they’d just push the plane back over the side, and I guess they put a new prop on it. And uh, the next guy to finish his ten landings, I was to take his plane, and I finished my ten carrier landings. I had leave after that, and the poor guy that was supposed to fly my damaged airplane off, he had to wait four or five hours before he could go on leave. So, that was one of my notable experiences.
MW: So, once you were checked to do your carrier landings, you had leave. When you got back from leave did they assign you out then?
RM: Yes.
MW: Where was your first assignment?
RM: San Diego. And then, I guess that a holding place for pilots until they get ‘em assigned to fleet, or to marine combat planes.
MW: Where were you assigned, once you were –
RM: I went to El Toro, it’s near LA, Los Angeles. And we did more dive-bombing, more organizational things, and we were assigned to sections and, uh, special training, and things.
MW: When you were done with that did they send you out?
RM: Yeah, our next was Pearl Harbor. And uh, at Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t send the whole squadron out at one time, they had to send ‘em out in echelons, and I was in the first echelon.
MW: From Pearl Harbor, where did you go?
RM: Next I went to Johnston Island, I was on patrol duty there, and it was all over-water flying, we were escorting subs in and out for their refueling at Johnston Island.
MW: Where is Johnston Island, I’m not familiar with that.
RM: It’s about 700 miles SSW of Pearl.
MW: So you were flying escort for the submarines?
RM: Yes. And did dawn and evening patrol in the mornings and evenings.
MW: When you were out flying your patrol, was there a time when you, uh, presumably the first few times you’re flying out, or even the first many times you’re flying out, you don’t necessary see anything ‘enemy.’ Was there a time when you first had an encounter?
RM: Well, we were told we could look for submarines, the conning tower, or the, uh....
MW: Periscope?
RM: Periscope. The Japs used to lie off Johnston Island, they’d lay off the coral reef, observe us. During one dawn patrol, there was an oil slick off the coral reef there, but the Navy said, you see an oil slick, it was a sub, but you don’t know where it is, it could be 25 miles away, so I didn’t drop a depth charge. That was my sort of encounter, I just found an oil slick.
MW: So how long were you doing that kind of patrolling?
RM: Six months. It was interesting. I developed a syllabus and we did more training, and developed a way to approach a target from two sides rather than just one side, and we’d split the anti-aircraft fire of the enemy that way, and thought we had the game whipped on that, but the only trouble was, half the squadron went to Johnston Island, the other half went to Palmyra, so only half the squadron was trained in the syllabus that we had, that I had worked up for the squadron.
MW: So, sometimes you would fly alone, and sometimes you would fly as a group?
RM: Yes. Patrol was all alone.
MW: You stayed there six months, what happened then?
RM: Well, I had one interesting hop while I was there. It was a night flight, there was a squadron of Naval ships coming by, and they were about 75 to 100 miles from Johnston Island on a certain course, and they wanted, and it was getting dark, it was, and they didn’t have any plane escort, so they wanted some escort, to watch for Japanese subs, because they feared they were in the area. So, Johnston Island had some twin engines there, and they did most of the patrol duty like the TBD, Catalina, planes like that, they were amphibious planes, but they weren’t available at the time, so they asked the squadron for two fliers to escort the flotilla. And this was about 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon, so the other fella and I – everybody went for the beer and they can’t drink with alcohol on their breath – and I didn’t drink and this other fella didn’t drink, so we were chosen to go and I led the flight, and you did dead reckoning in those times, and you looked for wind trails and the water, if it had whitecaps and things like this, and we had plotting boards on board and we could plot our course, and time how long it took to get out there, where this convoy was. Our reckoning was good and we arrived on time and patrolled until we got dark, we couldn’t see (inaudible) after that, so we had another course to get back to Johnston Island for that time we patrolled, the escort patrol. It was sort of hairy for single engine planes to be out like that, and Johnston Island was about 5,000 feet long and a quarter mile wide, an airstrip and a few Quonset huts, plus there was a few refueling for our own subs, and restocking. We got back all right, it was interesting, it tested our knowledge of navigation and training over water. You lose your windsocks and wind-trails and whitecaps and things like that at night. So it was an interesting hop. But at times patrolling you’d come down from dawn patrol, and sort of buzz the airfield and strip and come down low, and buzz the strip for some excitement, and come in for a landing. I remember, one time I got tired of the routine and buzzed the field and as I was pulling off, I did a barrel roll, I used to do one of those every once in a while with a depth charge under me every once in a while, I broke up muster for the Marines on the island (laughs).
MW: They weren’t too happy about that, or maybe they were?
RM: Well, it was some excitement for the day. (laughs)
MW: Did you guys get in trouble when you did stunts like that, or did –
RM: Naw, I think they like to see somebody who has a lot of some daredevil spirit, to ‘em.
MW: Sort of the culture of flying?
RM: I guess. I never had no trouble, nobody said anything about it to me. We used to do gunnery too, we’d train on firing our forward-firing guns in the cockpit, we had two .50 caliber machine guns there, fired through the prop, they were timed. One plane would fly and trail a sock, it was cotton, a wind sock. We’d make approaches on that and fire our guns at it. I often wondered why I wasn’t hitting like I should, I was doing everything great and our munitions, cartridges, the bullet was colored for which pilot, when it went through the sock it would leave its color there. So one day I found out I had hit the cable the guy was towing and I found out I was leading too much.
MW: You didn’t shoot the sock off, did you?
RM: Yeah, we lost the sock, because I hit the cable with my .50 calibers.
MW: So when you were finished, after 6 months, what happened then?
RM: Then we regrouped, the squadron regrouped, and we learned to fly with each other for about six weeks, and we were sent out to the South Pacific, and our first, our planes were new airplanes, SBD 5’s and 6’s, and uh, it was an airplane carrier, just built for carrying planes out into the South Pacific. And we landed at Espirtu Santu after about a week on board this carrier, and we crossed the equator, it was hot, so we’d take our sleeping bags and go out and sleep on the flight deck, under the wing of an airplane, which was very interesting.
MW: I bet. You must have seen some interesting stars when you were on the ship.
RM: Oh, yeah. (laughs)
MW: So what was going on where you were reassigned?
RM: Well, we took the planes down off the carrier, the plane carrier, and got ‘em ready for combat, got the guns all set, the sights all lined up, the engines all, and the aux tanks we had to have put on ‘em. But we were there in Espirtu Santu for about a month, and then we took off for Bougainville.
MW: There was some pretty heavy fighting going on there, wasn’t there?
RM: Yes. Guadalcanal had just been neutralized, and we were headed, that was our first landing at Guadalcanal. We ran into some horrible weather. They brought in an Army Air Corps DC 3, called a C-47, and they had equipment for navigating, but these planes we had had radar on ‘em, we could find ships with radar and find our target and things like that, but no one, we weren’t supposed to announce that we had it. And I, we became pretty good friends, my section that I was leading with, pilots and gunners and all that, and we had to go through a front because, the Army was waiting for us to help Macarthur in the Philippines....no, wait, that’s wrong. They wanted us at Bougainville because there was still some combat in that area, and we were on our way to Bougainville, but on the way we ran into a (storm) front, and the Army Air Corps plane was trying to take us over the front, tried to take us under the front, and couldn’t, so we had to punch through the front. We all closed in, we could just about see the lead plane flying close aboard, and there were, I think there were 36 of us, airplanes. And he was trying to take us over, he got, he was climbing and he got a little slow for us and one of the leaders in one of the sections thought he was gonna spin-in because he got so slow, so he dropped his nose to pick up speed, and that whole section, I thought, Jeez, that’s the end of Dewey, I don’t know what he’s gonna do now. About half an hour, an hour later, there was a break in the clouds, and there was Dewey was a real good friend of mine, in fact I introduced him when we were at El Toro, we went to Laguna Beach for a USO dance one night, and he and I were sittin’ across the hall, and people were dancing, and I spotted a blonde and a brunette and I said, I’m goin’ over, and I’m bringin’ em back, see if we can, so Dewey waited, and I brought ‘em back, these two gals over, and we danced the rest of the evening. My gal was a blonde and his was a brunette. And we had a good time. And a few days later the first echelon shoved off for Pearl. And about two weeks later, the second echelon came and Dewey was in the second echelon, and uh, Dewey came to my room at Eva Airfield, which is a Marine field at Pearl, and said, “Mac, I think I did you some dirt.” I said, “What’s that?” He says, “You know that blonde you danced with all night, that Sunday night?” I said, “Yeah, she was a nice girl, pretty.” And uh, he says, “Well, uh, I became engaged to her.” (laughs) And I said, “You didn’t do me any dirt, the gal I’m gonna marry is back home.” When the war was over, he married her. He later became governor of Oklahoma, and then died as a Senator in Washington (Sen. Dewey Bartlett)
MW: Did a lot of the pilots, back then, was it very common for the pilots, you know, you watch war movies and everybody’s (smoking), it was much more common in those days, wasn’t it?
RM: Yes it was quite common. Stars in the movies were smokers and all that, and its an interesting part of my tour in Bougainville. On the way to Guadalcanal, going through that storm, the lead plane, we weren’t supposed to break radio silence, but there was an island close by and beware of a sudden turn. And we were in the clouds, and I called back and said, “Gunners, get on your hay rigs.” That’s what we called our radar. And we found the island, it was about 20 miles off at 10 o’clock, and we called the lead plane, and we were up so high my gunner turned his on, and you couldn’t go over a certain altitude, and his became inoperative. So one of the gunners called, one of the pilots called, and told where the mountain was, called back, said, “How do you know?” Griff was my friend, he was in my section. He says, “We know.” (laughs) We arrived at Guadalcanal safely. But uh, Dewey Bartlett was leading his. And he was so shook up by it he had to have his gunner light his cigarette for him
MW: Close call. But, uh, once you were down there, once you’d been established, did they have you flying combat missions, or did they have you flying patrol?
RM: Yes. We did combat. We kept the rest of Bougainville Island neutralized, and then we went over to Kavyang, which is about an hour and a half, two hour flight over the target, which is a pretty potent target, and we bombed that, and back, it was about a five-hour flight over and back. I had 39 missions altogether, but at Bougainville I may have had about 25.
MW: The first time you flew, where you knew you were going to be bombing a target going into combat, did you have a particular feeling about it, or at that point, had you been flying so long that it was –
RM: It was pretty much routine, but I finally felt that I was in the swing of things.
MW: You sort of, kind of had to wait awhile, all the training –
RM: Training and patrolling, things like that.
MW: What did you guys think, I mean you flew against the Japanese, did you ever encounter their air force, or was it just ground fire?
RM: Up to that point it was some ground fire. We uh, I was coming out of my dive one time, and I was pulling out over the water, and I was pretty low, and all of the sudden there was an explosion in my airplane, cockpit filled with smoke and everything, and I said, “Boy they got me zeroed in now,” I started making evasive flights, getting closer to water and all that. About 10 seconds later, same thing happened again, I opened my hatch to look for the damage. I couldn’t find any damage or anything, the engine was working perfectly and all that, I kept on flying, the smoke cleared, I didn’t know what had happened. But they had trained us when we come out of our dive, we could strafe, but you got to interrupt it, a second or two, cool your engine, er, your guns off, and I did that, and then, when you finished firing, you’d open the chambers so they could cool. And when I got back to Bougainville, they looked me up, came to my tent and said, “Lieutenant, your guns misfired, and that’s what that, the explosions that occurred. The two .50 calibers exploded, filled the plane up with smoke.
MW: So the guns actually blew up?
RM: The guns had to be replaced. But they replaced those, but, I thought I was hit, that time, it was sort of scary.
MW: I can imagine! Having the guns blow up.
RM: While we were at Bougainville, they decided that MacArthur was gonna invade the Philippines, and “Return.” And they wanted, they figured out how they were gonna do it but they didn’t know how to get their – they needed close air support. So we trained for close air support. And we found a small hill that we’d bomb in Bougainville, they’d put a target there, they’d see how close we could come to hitting it, we were being observed by the Army, on how close we could come to our target. And I guess we did pretty good, ‘cause uh, they sent us up from Bougainville up to the Philippines.
MW: So now you’re in the Philippines, this is during the invasion?
RM: Yeah, Luzon, I think. Leyte had been neutralized.
MW: This would have been in late 1944, early 1945?
RM: Earlier ’45. January, 1945, we got up there.
MW: Now, when you were, I’m curious about something, I didn’t know this before. I know in the Army Air Corps, they would fly a certain number of missions, and if they made it, they would be rotated back for instructor duty, or something. Did the Navy and the Marines have that policy, or did you just keep flying?
RM: They would rotate us back, give us some Stateside duty, and then assign us another squadron or another duty, back out in the Pacific. There’s an interesting thing about Bougainville, they were giving the pilots, when you said light duty, had so many missions, the Navy had a program where the, uh, pilots and their gunners would get some R & R in Sydney, Australia, which was about a 3 or 4 hour flight on a transport to Sydney. And the night before we were to leave for Sydney, we were supposed to get a week of R & R. And the night before my gunner came to my tent and said, “Lieutenant, you got cigarettes?” And I said, “That orange crate over there got about two or three cartons.” And you could get cigarettes over there at the PX or wherever they had it, I forget whether it was ship’s quarters or what it was, PX I guess, and he said, and we all knew a carton of cigarettes would get you a bottle of hootch. I guess it was bootleg hootch, or whatever it was anyhow, we could get a fifth of whiskey for each carton of cigarettes. So my gunner said, “I’ll have cigarettes on the transport in the morning.” So we’re sitting on bench seats on either side of the transport, the center was all cargo, and he came over to me and said, “Lieutenant, see that parachute bag there? Well, that’s all your cigarettes.” And he must have had a hundred cartons! A parachute bag is about that big, that wide, and about that tall (indicates something about the size of a large backpack) and he had it loaded with cigarettes. I don’t know where he got ‘em, each carton and everything. And I said, “What am I gonna do with all those!” And he said, “Sell ‘em, we’ll trade ‘em for hootch!” (laughter) So, uh, I was not on Aussie soil more than 20 minutes before an Australian comes up to me and says, (feigning Australian accent) “Got any cigarettes, Yank?” So we gave him all of ‘em, and he was good, and he got us each a bottle of hootch and the parachute bag was full of whiskey when he got back.
MW: So you guys had a little barter exchange?
RM: Well, interesting, yes, we were there, the Marines were there, doing the flying, and the Army and the Marines were keeping Bougainville neutralized. And they’re all gettin’ paid, you know, but they had no place to spend their money. So, we got back to Bougainville, and I said, “You got those cigarettes for me, now you get rid of ‘em, and I’ll give you half and I’ll take half.” So, about a week or two he came to my tent and he says, “Here’s your money, Lieutenant.” And it’s twelve hundred dollars. He charged fifty-five dollars a bottle.
MW: He charged $55 a bottle?
RM: Yeah! Guys would pay it, too. They liked their whiskey, it was pretty good whiskey. So I sent $1200 home and put my sister through college.
MW: Wow! (laughs)
RM: Twelve hundred dollars, that’s how cheap –
MW: Well, I was gonna say, $55 a bottle back then, I’m trying to do the conversion rate in my head, that’s an enormous amount of money.
RM: Yeah, it was twelve, I got twelve hundred dollars.
MW: That would be too much money for a bottle of whiskey today! Much less back then. (laughs)
RM: Yeah, well, we had Sidwell, one of the Army guys came to him and said, “Sidwell,” he says, “I got $45. How ‘bout a bottle for $45?” He (Sidwell) says, “This is no five and dime soldier, shove off.” (laughs) He insisted on his fifty-five bucks.
MW: War.
RM: That’s the way my mother, had three boys in the service, teaching, and a daughter to put through college. So she was glad to get the twelve hundred dollars. So it paid her tuition. For four years.
MW: That’s terrific. Now, let me ask questions about everyday life. You spent a lot of time in the Pacific. Obviously, it gets pretty hot. How did you guys deal with stuff like—
RM: Mosquitoes and all that?
MW: Mosquitoes....
RM: We all slept under mosquito nets. We slept in tents. We got to Bougainville and one tent was there and it had rotted or something, and they put another tent over it. That made it a lot cooler, to have dead air space between the two tents. It was a lot cooler, the sun would come down, it wouldn’t heat up your tent as much.
MW: So you sort of learned the tricks.
RM: Yeah.
MW: What was the food like.
RM: In Bougainville it was pretty good. They had an officer’s mess. I think our gunners could eat there too. It was across the field, we’d walk over there and eat our meals there. They also had a sort of an officer’s club there too, they could get their drinks there and things like this, play cards and all that.
MW: What about your mail? Did it take a long time to get mail?
RM: Mail, it took about a week.
MW: Really?
RM: Yeah. It was pretty good. I would write to my future wife, two or three times a week. We weren’t supposed to say anything about combat or anything. We later got married when we got back.
MW: I’m surprised. I would have thought the mail system would be slower. That’s pretty impressive.
RM: I think that the, they had a lot of airplanes flying down there. I think it took about a week, maybe two weeks. They all came by air. You couldn’t write, you had to use their stationery from PX, it was light and stuff.
MW: I’ve actually seen it. It’s very thin, almost like onionskin paper, almost transparent. So: it seems like you guys, you were fairly well supplied, made yourselves as comfortable as you could under the circumstances.
RM: Yeah. It was livable. There were mosquitoes and there were, ah, what’s this one spider that would sting and cause a lot of pain. There were tarantulas there –
MW: I hate spiders.
RM: Oh, I forget. My memory is, I can’t recall my words like I used to.
MW: Well, it’s probably been awhile since you’ve seen a tarantula.
RM: Yeah, and there’s that one that was poisonous, it would sting. Oh, I wish I could remember the name of it. One of the fellas woke up one morning with one of these things under his T-shirt.
MW: (laughs)
RM: (laughs) He just laid still until the thing did what it wanted and left.
MW: That’s a nice way to wake up.
RM: Yeah, we got recruits, pilot recruits, come in, relief pilots, and this is their first time in the South Pacific, combat, and everything, and they’d sort of go to the officer’s club afterwards and drink pretty heavily, and we had to take care of those new recruits.
MW: (laughs) So you were the salty old veterans by this time?
RM: Yeah, and we had one guy that came in, just made his way back to the tent, and flopped on his cot, and couldn’t be awakened. He was out. Somebody came in, he was drunk too, came in, looked him up, wanted to wake him up, couldn’t wake him, so he took a big board (inaudible) and whacked him on the fanny. He never moved. (laughs) He was anesthetized. (laughs)
MW: Out to the world. I guess that bootleg whiskey came in handy!
RM: But you know, he vomited in his cot, and everything, and if we weren’t there he would have aspirated and died.
MW: I guess he should have cut it off a little sooner. So; you guys are flying and doing these combat missions, what were the casualties like in your outfit, did you –
RM: Casualties were pretty fair. They weren’t horrifically terrible. We lost some, uh, we had one at Johnston Island, I don’t know how it happened, I think he was flying too close to the water, but he had to ditch or something like that, he didn’t survive....We had an interesting, while we were at Pearl Harbor, there was a new Marine fighter squadron, and they wanted some practice intercepting a flight of bombers, so it was a Sunday afternoon, and I was off for the day, and I was off for the day in Pearl Harbor, having a good time, and part of the squadron went up and they flew this hop, training hop, for these Corsair fighter pilots. And as they were flying there was this young Marine lieutenant, and he was making an overhead run, he coming in the opposite direction, he just turned his plane over on its back and then came down, came up underneath as and firing, that was our training. Well, he blacked out, and he ran, came up under two of our airplanes, big explosion and, we lost two gunners, and two pilots were able to get out, parachuted out, and this is an interesting thing, I don’t know how it happened, but one of those pilots, knew that we flew with life rafts under our parachutes, and he parachuted out, and the other fellow got a burned hand while he was trying to open his hatch, and uh, it was pretty sad, pretty good explosion. Of course, never heard from the Corsair pilot, but this one pilot and his gunner saw this one, fell in the water, his name was Lieutenant Hassler, and he’d been in one previous crash before at El Toro, and he came through that, he parachuted out. But uh, I think he got into a downdraft and was about to hit, he couldn’t control his airplane and was about to run into a mountain or something, but he parachuted out. But this time he landed in the water, Pearl Harbor, and they saw this light in his raft, and we had life rafts for two people to get in, our dive bombers, in case we would ditch. And that was, if you ditch, you went for that parachute behind the gunner, there was a compartment, and you’d open the compartment and pull the life raft out. But this pilot, flew down to this fella in the water, and this gunner put his flap down, and flew as slow as he could without stalling, the gunner got out, and opened his hatch, and pulled that life raft out, got back in the airplane, he was on the wing of the airplane in flight, the pilot told him when to drop, and he dropped it within 25 feet of this pilot. And he was cussin’ the guy for bad aim when he got back to shore, he was saying, “You coulda hit me, you coulda come closer than that!” Anyhow, he had all this gear on and everything, and he had to make his way over to that raft. He finally got in inflated, he was hangin’ on the edge of this raft, just out of breath and just bushed, couldn’t move. He looked over the side and there were sharks flying around him, swimming around him, rather. (makes terrified noise) That was his expression when he spotted those sharks.
MW: I don’t blame him.
RM: But I don’t know if this pilot and his gunner got cited for bravery and heroics or not, but they often wrote about them getting cited for it.
MW: Let me ask you a question about that. You flew, I guess, quite a few missions, did you ever receive, did they give air medals out in the Navy and Marine Corps, or – ?
RM: Yeah, you got recognized with ribbons and things (inaudible). I can’t remember mine.
MW: Was that important to you, or no?
RM: No.
MW: (laughs)
RM: I just had job to do and I did it. I think I could have gotten a lot more ribbons than I did.
MW: You just didn’t care.
RM: No, I didn’t care.
MW: So, when you guys went to, now you’re in Luzon, what was the fighting like there?
RM: We were in Luzon, and, excuse me, MacArthur had landed a few days before, and they were on their mission to take Manila from Luzon Bay, I think was the name of the bay he landed in and walked ashore, and had his picture taken walkin’ ashore, and all that. He was a showman, MacArthur was a showman, and didn’t get much respect from the Marines.
MW: (laughs)
RM: So, the old saying at that time, when MacArthur was removed from the Philippines, he said, “I shall return.” So the Marines coined a phrase: “With the help of God and a few Marines, MacArthur returned to the Philippines.” (laughs) And we kept his left flank covered and neutralized, the Japs couldn’t attack his forces on their way to Manila. We did a pretty good job until close air support, until after a couple of days they saw how close we could hit, and how close they could accept us coming to them, and we were, they really got to call on us, we kept planes in the air all day long, supporting his troops, and I remember one of my hops, they called and said, There’s a motor pool north of Manila that comes out at nights and fires mortars into Manila at night, we want that neutralized. So I was leading a flight, and I was up about 7,000 feet and could find the target. So I, two days before this flight, I was called from my tent for the dentist, for this Mag 24, wanted me to get to his tent, he was gonna check my teeth. And he found I had four molars that were embedded, and he says you gotta take those out. Well he was a captain and I was a lieutenant, I couldn’t tell him no, I wasn’t gonna let him do that. Well here we are on this rice paddy in this hot tent, his pulling two of my molars, my wisdom teeth, and he couldn’t get ‘em out, he was there with a hammer and chisel, gettin’ these things out of my jaw.
MW: I don’t suppose there was any anesthetic....
RM: And all the other guys waiting around on in this hot tent in these benches, waitin’ for their turn.
MW: Well, needless to say I left there with a sore jaw. Two days later I couldn’t get my mouth open more than I could get my finger in. That was when I had this hop to find this motor pool. And it was down amongst these small hills, and these clouds, small fair-weather clouds around it, of course, that means updrafts and downdrafts, so it was rough down there. So I was down there for about 15 minutes lookin’ for this target and I finally found it but not before I got airsick. Told my gunner, “Close your hatch.” And I blew my K-rations. But we got up, went up, got the fella, got to where my guys were circling, and led ‘em down to the target. Two days later we went past the target and the fires were still burning, so it was a—
MW: So you clobbered ‘em.
RM: Yeah, we clobbered ‘em. One other that I remember we had this cave that kept these guys down, Japs had a cave that they were firing from and sending out heavy mortars and things like this, and they wanted to find this cave. And uh, course, knock it out. So there was a ground watcher, he was watching us, instructing us in where things were, and I found this cave, and I was about the fourth guy in, the first section went in, the fourth guy, I had it in my sights, and boy, I just pulled up a little bit and released my bomb, and the combat officer, observer, was telling where each bomb went, and he said, “Number four airplane, your bomb was right in that cave, blew it all apart!” I guess I could have gotten a citation for it, but, I didn’t bother.
MW: You just didn’t care, did you?
RM: No.
MW: I’m curious about something. When you, the first time you drop a bomb on the enemy, what did it feel like?
RM: Well, that’s one time (inaudible), you feel like, “I survived that one, and tomorrow’s another day, and I’m where I wanted to be.” I wanted to be in combat, I just thought that was the place to be.
MW: What did you think of the Japanese back then, I mean, as far as opponents went, did you guys respect them as opponents, or was it just—
RM: They were out there to get killed, that’s all I thought about it. (laughs)
MW: (laughs)
RM: And, uh, I, later on, I felt badly about how we treated the Japs, but when I read about how they treated their US soldiers and Marines when they were captured, they were horrible. They beheaded and tortured and everything else. They were worse than we were. And so, uh, I was happy I could be of help to winning the war.
MW: So, when the fighting in Luzon went on, how long were you there?
RM: I was there for three months when I came home, I got there in early January, I guess the first week of January and left there in March.
MW: That’s when you came back?
RM: Yeah, I think I had about 20 or 30 missions on Luzon.
MW: So, where were you, was it a particularly special event, everyone remembers where they were when they heard, say, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, what they were doing and so on. When you heard the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was that considered a real big event at the time?
RM: Oh yeah. I had just had an appendectomy, and I was in the hospital at the time, and one of my friends told me that Hiroshima had just been bombed, and the casualties were horrific. And I greeted that with, “Well, I’m scheduled to go out to Tokyo, when I leave here, and maybe I won’t have to go now.” And I didn’t.
MW: So there was a certain amount of relief –
RM: Yeah.
MW: -- when the Japs surrendered. Where were you, do you remember where you were, when you heard they had given up?
RM: I was recovering from my appendectomy, they gave me two weeks off, and then I went back to duty, and when they gave up, I was married at that time, and I went to my home in South Jersey, and went to Atlantic City, well, it was Ocean City in New Jersey, on the boardwalk they were having parades and everything else. I was on the boardwalk just observing all the enjoyment everybody was going through, and celebrations. I was sittin’ by the sidelines, and some gal, and there were a lot of soldiers around, and she points out, “There’s a Marine!” It was hugs and kisses all over the place, for awhile. I was the only Marine there. But I was sore from my appendectomy, didn’t matter.
MW: Back in your time, did they still make as much fun of the Army as they do now?
RM: (laughs) I guess, but they fought side by side and all that. The Marines were more gung-ho for getting into battle, and doin’ what they had to do, and do it well.
MW: But I guess you would have had experience with several different services. You started with the Navy, you got your commission in the Marine Corps, and you worked for the Army, so to speak, for Macarthur. Did the services get along well? I mean, besides the kidding around?
RM: We were all Americans. That’s all I figured. We’re buddies. We had a job to do.
MW: People like to talk about that, but I never really –
RM: No. In combat you work with who you have to work, and....you’re fellow Americans, that’s the way I figured it. ‘Cause this ground watcher, he was an Army guy, he was with Macarthur.
MW: The guy directing the planes in?
MW: Once the Japanese surrendered, how long did you stay in the service?
RM: They surrendered on my wife’s birthday, something like that, and I was, I got my points, I was able to muster out, in November.
MW: Did you use the GI bill to finish school?
RM: Oh yeah. I went to medical school.
MW: So the GI bill paid for that?
RM: I had my B.S. degree in Diary Husbandry. And in one of my flights from Floyd Bennet field to Diego, I got in this flophouse hotel, and it wasn’t very nice, but it was a bed and breakfast, and I wasn’t much of a praying man at that time, but this was after the armistice, and I said, “Well, MacDougal, you gotta make up your mind now, you’re married now, you got a responsibility.” So I found myself prayin’. I said. “Lord, I got three options, help me make a decision. I could go back to dairy farming, establish a farm. Or I could stay with flying, because I loved to fly, but it wasn’t too, I thought it was all four-engine stuff, type, and I liked to fly single engines, or I could go into medicine, ‘cause my brother was into medicine, he put the bee in my bonnet, “Why don’t you go back to school and take up medicine?” I thought I didn’t have the brains to do it. So the next morning I woke up and there wasn’t anything in sight but medicine. I didn’t think of farming or flying, it was there. And I was married and got out of the service, and went back to Rutgers, and found my old apartment that my brothers and I had been in, it was empty. My wife and I took up residence in that apartment. I was going to day school and night school to get my requirements in. She got a job in New York City, she was, she worked for a company in New Brunswick for about a month or so, then she got this job in New York City as a model. She was a beautiful gal, redhead, and tall, very nice. And she modeled in New York City, and went to school. She made pretty good money, and I was gettin’ pretty good marks, too. I was taking these tough courses, and getting some good grades, I didn’t think I was smart enough to do that, so I surprised myself (laughs). And there was only one medical school, I applied to six or seven medical schools, and there was only one that didn’t respond, and it said, “No way.” So I went to see Dr. Parkinson at Temple, and I brought my marks down to him and told him I had applied, and he was sort of impressed with my good marks and he says, “Well, you haven’t finished all your requirements yet.” And I said, “I’ve finished on the first day the next class starts of medical school.” Bring your marks down. And I missed the first day of medical school, and he said, “You’re in.”
MW: There’s a couple questions here I wanted to ask at the end. How does your military experience influence your thinking on, I mean, America has been in a number of wars and conflicts, obviously, since WWII, and we’re in one now. How does being in combat, and having actually experienced, influenced how you think about when America decides to get involved in Korea and Vietnam or....
RM: My idea is, I’m an American. And I offered my life to preserve America. But I didn’t have to give my life, I was one of those fortunate ones. I felt America is worth fighting for, even giving your life for. And the wars we’ve had since, some of ‘em were questionable whether we needed to, but we had to preserve democracy. Some of these yay-hoos, like Saddam Hussein and those guys, they’re off their gourd! And when they said, They had weapons of mass destruction, I sort of believed it, because, heretofore, there’d been no question, uh, Vietnam war also, and there was a lot of, “I’m not fightin’ for any country in the South Pacific, I’m gonna dodge it if I can.” And we’ve got a lot of people who did dodge it, (inaudible) like this. I felt like, the United States, loses a war, and the communists get control, we’re gonna be in deep, deep swamp. So we’ve got to do what we have to do, to preserve America, because it’s the one country in this world, I thought, was a righteous country, was developed righteously, was founded righteously, and was run righteously. Even though we talk about, one of the wisest things our forefathers did, was to separate state and church, that was very wise, ‘cause, you get into some religions, and there’s where you find the fanatics. They run countries after a while. So, you gotta preserve the world for democracy. It’s the only one that has any semblance of righteousness. There is unrighteousness in any country, any government. There’s cheaters and crooks and things like that, but America is the greatest country in the world.
November 26, 2016
Why Journalists Keep Getting It Wrong
Adolf Hitler was once asked by one of his henchmen why he despised his own generals -- seemingly a strange thing for a dictator-warlord to do. The answer is famously recorded in the henchman's diary:
"They (the generals) were uneducated and did not even understand their own profession of arms – the least one could expect of them....the fact that they knew so little about the purely material questions of war was absolutely against them."
In recent weeks, America's hate-need relationship (as opposed to a love-hate relationship) with its own press has reminded me of Hitler's quip. If asked about the press -- "the media" as it is now generally known -- the average American might respond in somewhat similar terms:
"They are uneducated and don't even understand their own profession of journalism. The fact that they know so little about their own country speaks absolutely against them."
Notwithstanding the fact that it's drawn from a quotation by Hitler, I believe this a fair approximation of modern sentiment. I also believe it an accurate assessment of the actual state of journalism in this country today. The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives. Only by accepting this stark fact can we even begin to explain the miserable failure of the press to either predict or to understand the sweeping political events which have taken place in America and elsewhere over the past few months.
Before we go any further, I ought to state here for the record that I have no personal axe to grind against journalism. On the contrary, I am the son of journalists -- my father covered the White House for the Chicago Sun-Times while my mother worked freelance. I grew up surrounded by reporters, some of them quite famous, and my first two jobs were actually for newspapers. A movie like All The President's Men plays more to my sense of childhood nostalgia than any sense of drama. The innate sense of contempt and loathing, mingled with distrust, that so many people have toward "the media" is not something I was born or raised with. On the other hand, having grown up the way I did, I am not one to romanticize the press. So when I offer an assessment of the Fourth Estate in America, I believe it to be closer to true objectivity than many others could offer.
Now, I think anyone who has given the matter any thought at all would agree that American journalism is in a bad way (I am paraphrasing Orwell here to balance the scale after quoting Hitler). The only questions, then, are when did this happen, how did we get here, and how do we reverse the process. Not surprisingly, we must answer all the questions to answer any one of them, so we may as well begin at the beginning.
We ought to start by saying that in recent times -- say, the last century or so -- there were essentially two different types of journalism: print and electric. "Print" was newspapers and news magazines; electric was first radio and then radio and television. And while television journalism became more and more prevalent as the 20th century advanced and then moved toward its conclusion, all the real prestige, the real integrity and class status, remained with print journalists. They were the "real" reporters, with real traditions going back literally centuries -- almost to the invention of the printing press. The TV boys, while glamorous and often at least locally famous, were merely "talking heads" selected more for looks and impressive-sounding voices than journalistic ability. In any case, the "heads" merely readthe news; the print boys went out and got it. This class system was reinforced by entities such as The Gridiron Club, a snooty and very influential private journalistic organization based in Washington, D.C. which was open only to the very best print journalists -- talking heads need not apply. My father was a member of this club and served on its board for a time, and I still remember the scoffing sound he made when I asked why famous people like the CBS, NBC and ABC news anchors weren't allowed. That sound carried with it not merely an entire conversation but an actual professional philosophy. There was snobbery involved, but not only snobbery; the fact was, talking heads weren't allowed because they just didn't have the same level of credibility to their journalism. It was a question of standards, and to my father and his peers, standards were everything.
I cannot stress enough how important integrity was to the old-school reporters around whom I was raised. It was not necessarily a question of personal integrity: many were hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing bastards who'd shove their mother into the path of an oncoming subway train to get a story. But they would get the story right. They would not lie or libel, they would not show fear or favoritism, they would not let their personal prejudices or political leanings influence their articles. They would ask the tough questions, but honor private bargains, and they would respect confidences uttered beneath that sacred three-word caveat "off the record" no matter how earth-shaking they might have been. They might run away in the most cowardly manner from a bar fight on M Street, but to follow a story they'd willingly fly into a combat zone or a plague-struck, third-world shithole, almost without flinching. They would protect their sources, if necessary by going to prison, and they would not tolerate abuses of their ethics by their peers. I can still remember a crusty old editor from The Washington Post explaining to my high school class the brutal interrogation methods he'd used to break the alibi of Janet Cooke, a reporter who'd won the Pulitzer Prize for a story that turned out to be fake. When he described the way Cooke had broken down in tears after confessing she'd lied, the editor's voice rang with righteous satisfaction. No one could be allowed to damage the credibility of the Fourth Estate, he seemed to be saying. The maintenance of public trust in the press was more important than whether or not Janet Cooke was allowed to use the restroom while being "interviewed."
It must be remembered that following the fall of Richard Nixon, the only American institution which really retained the trust of the American people was the press. The presidency, the Pentagon, the FBI and CIA -- all had been cast into disrepute by the enormous scandals which emerged from Vietnam and Watergate. And who had broken those scandals? The Fourth Estate. The press saw itself -- rightly -- as democracy's watchdog, a pen which was mightier than any sword the government could raise against it. And like any empire at the height of its power, it grew complacent about the future.
My father died young, but not so young that he failed to witness the first signs of decline in the institution to which he had devoted his life. I can still remember the anger he expressed when, visiting him in the hospital in 1993, I thoughtlessly brought him a copy of USA Today. "McPaper!" he sneered, and tossed the thing almost violently into the trash. This was followed by a peremptory order to return with a "proper" newspaper. When I did so -- it was probably a copy of The Washington Post, though The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times would have qualified, along with a few others -- he asked me, in a deeply troubled tone, if I was actually prone to reading "McPaper," which he regarded as "fluff" and "light in the ass" -- basically a step above a tabloid.
This question followed by a half-command, half-plea to keep myself "properly informed." And this in turn led to a diatribe against the 24 hour news cycle. I began to realize that in my father's weakened state, some of the fears he had previously suppressed or perhaps just dismissed regarding the future of journalism were coming to the surface.
I knew even at the time that the Gulf War had changed the nature of journalism, had pushed the public's preference for obtaining news permanently from the "print" to the "talking head" camp. To feed the public's ravenous desire for information at a very anxious and troubling time, CNN had created the 24 hour news cycle, with Wolf Blitzer at its helm. My father considered Blitzer "light in the ass" (not a reference to sexuality, but to the "weight" he carried as a journalist) and found it difficult to believe he had become a news superstar based on his ability to read information we had already been told a hundred times before off a teleprompter. But his real grievance was not against Blitzer or CNN but the threat that 24 hour news posed to the truthfulness and integrity of journalism. Having worked in two newsrooms myself (Chicago Sun-Times and Investor's Business Daily), I knew perhaps as well as my father did what a "slow news day" meant -- that there were simply times when not a whole helluva lot was happening in the world. Slow news days have always presented a tough challenge to the reporter with integrity, for a journalist's job is not to make the news but to report it, and if nothing's happening -- well, then nothing's happening. But if one created a 24 hours news program, then one was responsible for filling those 24 hours with news, even when there was none to be had. And the only way this could be done in practice was to use endless repetition of existing stories to fill up as much time as possible (which not only inflates their importance but artificially extends their time in the public eye). That... and to create news by giving disproportionate coverage to incidents and subjects which would not have made the cut for the traditional news cycle -- incidents usually selected for their sensational or "hot button" nature.
The Gulf War ended, but the 24 hour news cycle did not. It flourished everywhere, on every network, but not having a war to cover, did precisely the thing my father feared it would do most -- it began to create stories instead of merely reporting on them. O.J. Simpson, Joey Buttafucco and Amy Fisher, Scott Petersen, Casey Anthony, Paris Hilton -- there was no sleazy, tawdry non-story mean enough to escape the rabid frenzy of 24 hour "journalism." And concomitant with this was the rise of Fox News, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch and did not even pretend toward journalistic objectivity.** It was simply and flagrantly a propaganda organ of the right-wing establishment, pushing a specific an unvarying agenda designed to keep its viewers continuously angry, continuously afraid, and continuously misinformed. And the success of Fox News in the ratings department -- and remember that ratings = money, and money = success, and success breeds emulation -- ensured that the competing networks would have to adapt at least partially to the Fox style if they wanted to stay in business. It goes without saying -- though I'll say it anyway -- that this led to a concomitant drop in journalistic integrity everywhere. The new paradigm demanded a new sort of reporter, one who was quicker on the trigger and much less interested in the accuracy of his aim. To be first with a story was far more important than being accurate.
On top of this came the Internet, and then, in very short order, the cellular phone. The former broke the ancient monopoly that the press once had on information; freedom of the press had formerly meant "freedom of the press for anyone with a press;"
now anyone with an Ethernet cable could spread his or her own views across the planet with the push of a button, and never mind their intelligence, level of education or sincerity (or even sanity). As for the latter, the portable nature of the mobile device allowed news to be disseminated to people not only at all hours, but at virtually any place on Earth. This increased the speed and the range of the news; it also increased the speed and the range of lies, disinformation and baseless rumor. Whatever the flaws of the pre-24 news cycle, pre-Internet, pre-cell phone press, the standards to which it held itself were well-established and acted both as a means of maintaining credibility with itself and with the public, and as a sort of sewer grate which kept out shoddy and irresponsible journalism. By democratizing the press -- by allowing anyone with money to set up an online "news agency," be it HuffPo or Breitbart or what have you -- this filter was destroyed. Never mind having to endure the unbiased or moderately biased views of big news agencies and newspapers; it was now possible for people of any political leaning to pick and choose precisely what sort of information they were exposed to, simply by virtue of filtering out everything else. There are no figures available, but I suppose the majority of those now calling themselves journalists in the United States would not meet the standards set by my father and his peers for that word -- would not even come within screaming distance of them. They are editorialists at best; propagandists most likely; professional liars and manipulators at worst. But they call themselves journalists and this status is accepted by the majority of those who read their "journalism." The ability to distinguish between hacks and reporters is gone.
All this explains, if only superficially, why the quality and integrity of journalism has declined so sharply in the last twenty-five years. It does not explain how the individual journalist has become so disconnected from his own country that none of the major agencies, print or electronic, seem to be able to predict anything they do not want to happen; to take seriously anyone with a different viewpoint; or to grasp the actual motivations of those who disagree with them. Two momentous political events in particular have brought this failing into sharp relief: the first was "Brexit," the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. The second was the rise and the election to the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump.
I once asked my father to describe the "average" big-city reporter. He replied quickly, "White, liberal, Eastern-educated, admirer of John F. Kennedy." This was in 1992 or '93, and I would imagine that today's reporters would name another popular Democratic figure -- Obama, say -- than Kennedy. But the rest of the assessment probably holds. And since the majority of journalists were center or left thereof in their political leanings, it also holds that the age-old Republican grudge about the "liberal media" is not anywhere near as facetious as it might seem. Nevertheless, the old line journalists were trapped by their ethics into keeping most of their biases firmly in check when working a story: this can be easily proven by the sheer number of Democratic politicians who have been destroyed or disgraced over the years by journalists who probably voted for them. The point I am trying to make here is that while the "1.0" reporters of my father's generation tended toward the center-left (or just plain left), they managed to remain relatively even-handed in their writing. And the fairness they tried to impart into their pieces forced them to actually listen to, and weigh the merits of, viewpoints they opposed in their personal lives. This in turn forced them into seeing the world as or near the way it actually was, as opposed to the way they wanted it to be -- a process which not surprisingly made them better journalists.
The modern reporter -- the "2.0" version -- shares or exceeds the liberalism of his predecessors, but seems to lack the ability to be even-handed when discussing social political issues. In many ostensibly objective news articles, to say nothing of the op-ed pieces, the contempt and even hatred of the modern reporter is so evident from the very first lines of the story as to be almost palpable. We can trace some of this back to the general failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking to our young people, but much blame falls upon the modern system of journalism, for not inculcating its cub reporters with a hard, unwavering faith in journalistic ethics -- the foremost of which is impartiality. Hope clouds observation, and when one is hoping for a particular outcome in a political situation, it cannot help but blind the person in question to the possibility of unpleasant alternatives. Which brings us to Brexit, and to Trump, and why journalists keep getting it wrong where and when it matters.
Americans as a general rule do not understand what the European Union is, but the cries of agony from the big-city newspapers and from many of the network pundits were sufficient to remind us that it was, and remains, a darling of the political left. This is largely because the basic ideas behind the E.U. are in line with the basic goals of liberalism -- to eliminate borders, reduce national distinctions, centralize power, redistribute wealth, ease trade and impose uniform regulations on the membership. It is not a reach to say that in the E.U. we see the rough outline -- not quite a prototype, but a detailed sketch -- of a future world government, in which "nations" are eventually reduced to the status of member provinces, and surrender a corresponding amount of sovereignty to a lone central government. It's no surprise that many people view the E.U. as a preview of the world's future, and find this future deeply appealing. It should not be a surprise that just as many do not, but here is where journalistic bias rears its ugly single-eyed head -- and, as with Brexit itself, the reasons are as much geographical and economic as political in nature.
During the height of "1.0" journalism's power, the big American newspapers maintained bureaus in every major city in America as well as many foreign capitals. This allowed them a very broad view of what the ordinary person was thinking and feeling -- in Nashville as well as Miami, in Seattle as well as Dallas. Ditto the British press, which once had heavy representation outside of London. As newspaper readership declined, however, many bureaus closed down, until even the major American news outlets operated only in New York and Los Angeles, with perhaps a lone bureau in London to keep the international flavor. In terms of television journalism this had never been a question anyway -- NY, DC and LA were the domestic foci, and minor local affiliates took up the rest of the slack known as the United States of America. London, for Americans, was a prestige post, a sort of grooming-station for those meant for great journalistic things; but for British journalism it came more or less the center of the universe -- only four newspapers in the U.K. are currently headquartered outside London. It should go without saying that restricting the hubs of reportage to a few cosmopolitan cities thousands of miles apart from each other is a bad idea, for if big cities are guilty of a single besetting sin it is considering themselves the center of the universe, and passing on this prejudice to their inhabitants -- especially the transplanted ones. Someone who lives in Georgetown, or Manhattan, or the West Side of L.A. has absolutely nothing in common with those who live in St. Louis, or Harrisburg, or Baton Rouge, and when he thinks of those people at all, it is usually in terms of pity or contempt -- because they are not as witty, urbane and sophisticated as he is. One has only to spend a day in any of these self-appointed centers of gravity to grasp the fantastic chauvinism of their inhabitants, their deep-seated belief that anything they do is right because they do it, any thought they have is correct because they think it. And the insularity of these cosmopolitan lifestyles, the uniformity of political, economic and social identities and outlooks within them, tends to create a reassuring echo-chamber effect. A reporter asks the man on the street, "Do you support Brexit?" and the man replies, "Of course not." Fifty such interviews, fifty such replies, and the matter seems settled. But what matters is not the reply but the question, "What man, and what street?" An American reporter asking this question in Manhattan is going to get very different answers than if he asked it, say, in Cleveland -- but alas, there are no national reporters in Cleveland, because why bother? Who gives a shit about those bumpkins anyway? They belong to the "flyover states" and don't matter. Likewise, a British reporter will get very different answers to the same question if he travels to Slough or Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne, than he would have received in London. But did the British reporters bother to visit Slough, Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne? The shock which Brexit dealt to the journalistic establishment gives us our answer -- no. Not, at any rate, on a scale large enough to dissuade British P.M. David Cameron from putting the matter to a general vote in the first place. No doubt Cameron believed the gesture a safe one -- even a formality -- but this only goes to show the size of the disconnect between the British press and the people it purports to cover and to serve. And this disconnect is just as bad or worse in the United States. The idea of Brexit was at first dismissed, then subjected to harsh ridicule -- and then, when it became clear that it had become reality -- to a kind of mean-spirited hysteria, which betrayed not only the bias of the press toward the "remain" camp but a refusal to learn anything from its own failure to predict what had just come to pass. One is reminded here of the famous words of the German poet Christian Morgenstern:
Thus in his considered view
What did not suit could not be true
The dangers of a biased and limited world-view have manifested in what amounts to reportage which is little better than wishful thinking, tinged with the a near-religious smugness that the press itself, sympathizing with the political left, is on the "right side of history." This certainty is of course true of all political persuasions, but since left-thinking is predominant in journalism the burden is especially heavy there. Certainly the weight of it forced the collective gaze of the press downward, at its own reflection, so to speak, when it ought to have been straight ahead. And this brings us to the matter of Donald Trump.
In the opening of this blog I stated, "The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives." That this is a fact rather than an opinion can be discerned by the way the press not only failed to predict Trump's rise -- proving that they were either ignorant of, or dismissed as unimportant, the deep vein of anger which fueled so many who supported him -- but responded to his victory in the election not with self-examination (or self-recrimination), but rather self-righteous fury. Despite all their education, all their urbanity and sophistication, despite the fact they were on the "right side of history" and knew in their hearts they were backing the right horse, the outcome they had desired had not come to pass. And this sullen fact was all they seemed to grasp. The reasons for the outcome were, and remain, almost entirely lost on them. One has only to read the op-ed pieces in the East and West Coast papers to see the truth of this.
In his famous essay "The Lion and the Unicorn," George Orwell offered a harsh but penetrating analysis of the British ruling class of the 1930s. He accused them of deliberately retreating into stupidity to spare themselves the pain of grasping the fact that their continued hold on power had no moral justification. A similar charge could be levied at the American and British press of today, to wit, that to spare themselves the pain of realizing that fully half the voting public does not share their ideology or want the future that they find so alluring, they have retreated into that same dangerous combination of "arrogance and ignorance" they once found so loathsome in George W. Bush. And what are "arrogance and ignorance" but two components, perhaps the only two components, of stupidity itself?
If you accept my judgement that journalism is broken -- and I think that recent events have proven this almost beyond debate -- then it falls upon me to suggest solutions as to how to fix it. This I intend to do, but in the interest of keeping this blog shorter than, say, Lord of the Rings, I will break off here and continue this discussion in another entry, to be released in a few days. In the mean time I will continue to scan the headlines for evidence that the press has learned a lesson from Trump's victory, and that it is beginning the first stages of a long-overdue self-audit.
But I won't hold my breath.
"They (the generals) were uneducated and did not even understand their own profession of arms – the least one could expect of them....the fact that they knew so little about the purely material questions of war was absolutely against them."
In recent weeks, America's hate-need relationship (as opposed to a love-hate relationship) with its own press has reminded me of Hitler's quip. If asked about the press -- "the media" as it is now generally known -- the average American might respond in somewhat similar terms:
"They are uneducated and don't even understand their own profession of journalism. The fact that they know so little about their own country speaks absolutely against them."
Notwithstanding the fact that it's drawn from a quotation by Hitler, I believe this a fair approximation of modern sentiment. I also believe it an accurate assessment of the actual state of journalism in this country today. The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives. Only by accepting this stark fact can we even begin to explain the miserable failure of the press to either predict or to understand the sweeping political events which have taken place in America and elsewhere over the past few months.
Before we go any further, I ought to state here for the record that I have no personal axe to grind against journalism. On the contrary, I am the son of journalists -- my father covered the White House for the Chicago Sun-Times while my mother worked freelance. I grew up surrounded by reporters, some of them quite famous, and my first two jobs were actually for newspapers. A movie like All The President's Men plays more to my sense of childhood nostalgia than any sense of drama. The innate sense of contempt and loathing, mingled with distrust, that so many people have toward "the media" is not something I was born or raised with. On the other hand, having grown up the way I did, I am not one to romanticize the press. So when I offer an assessment of the Fourth Estate in America, I believe it to be closer to true objectivity than many others could offer.
Now, I think anyone who has given the matter any thought at all would agree that American journalism is in a bad way (I am paraphrasing Orwell here to balance the scale after quoting Hitler). The only questions, then, are when did this happen, how did we get here, and how do we reverse the process. Not surprisingly, we must answer all the questions to answer any one of them, so we may as well begin at the beginning.
We ought to start by saying that in recent times -- say, the last century or so -- there were essentially two different types of journalism: print and electric. "Print" was newspapers and news magazines; electric was first radio and then radio and television. And while television journalism became more and more prevalent as the 20th century advanced and then moved toward its conclusion, all the real prestige, the real integrity and class status, remained with print journalists. They were the "real" reporters, with real traditions going back literally centuries -- almost to the invention of the printing press. The TV boys, while glamorous and often at least locally famous, were merely "talking heads" selected more for looks and impressive-sounding voices than journalistic ability. In any case, the "heads" merely readthe news; the print boys went out and got it. This class system was reinforced by entities such as The Gridiron Club, a snooty and very influential private journalistic organization based in Washington, D.C. which was open only to the very best print journalists -- talking heads need not apply. My father was a member of this club and served on its board for a time, and I still remember the scoffing sound he made when I asked why famous people like the CBS, NBC and ABC news anchors weren't allowed. That sound carried with it not merely an entire conversation but an actual professional philosophy. There was snobbery involved, but not only snobbery; the fact was, talking heads weren't allowed because they just didn't have the same level of credibility to their journalism. It was a question of standards, and to my father and his peers, standards were everything.
I cannot stress enough how important integrity was to the old-school reporters around whom I was raised. It was not necessarily a question of personal integrity: many were hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing bastards who'd shove their mother into the path of an oncoming subway train to get a story. But they would get the story right. They would not lie or libel, they would not show fear or favoritism, they would not let their personal prejudices or political leanings influence their articles. They would ask the tough questions, but honor private bargains, and they would respect confidences uttered beneath that sacred three-word caveat "off the record" no matter how earth-shaking they might have been. They might run away in the most cowardly manner from a bar fight on M Street, but to follow a story they'd willingly fly into a combat zone or a plague-struck, third-world shithole, almost without flinching. They would protect their sources, if necessary by going to prison, and they would not tolerate abuses of their ethics by their peers. I can still remember a crusty old editor from The Washington Post explaining to my high school class the brutal interrogation methods he'd used to break the alibi of Janet Cooke, a reporter who'd won the Pulitzer Prize for a story that turned out to be fake. When he described the way Cooke had broken down in tears after confessing she'd lied, the editor's voice rang with righteous satisfaction. No one could be allowed to damage the credibility of the Fourth Estate, he seemed to be saying. The maintenance of public trust in the press was more important than whether or not Janet Cooke was allowed to use the restroom while being "interviewed."
It must be remembered that following the fall of Richard Nixon, the only American institution which really retained the trust of the American people was the press. The presidency, the Pentagon, the FBI and CIA -- all had been cast into disrepute by the enormous scandals which emerged from Vietnam and Watergate. And who had broken those scandals? The Fourth Estate. The press saw itself -- rightly -- as democracy's watchdog, a pen which was mightier than any sword the government could raise against it. And like any empire at the height of its power, it grew complacent about the future.
My father died young, but not so young that he failed to witness the first signs of decline in the institution to which he had devoted his life. I can still remember the anger he expressed when, visiting him in the hospital in 1993, I thoughtlessly brought him a copy of USA Today. "McPaper!" he sneered, and tossed the thing almost violently into the trash. This was followed by a peremptory order to return with a "proper" newspaper. When I did so -- it was probably a copy of The Washington Post, though The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times would have qualified, along with a few others -- he asked me, in a deeply troubled tone, if I was actually prone to reading "McPaper," which he regarded as "fluff" and "light in the ass" -- basically a step above a tabloid.
This question followed by a half-command, half-plea to keep myself "properly informed." And this in turn led to a diatribe against the 24 hour news cycle. I began to realize that in my father's weakened state, some of the fears he had previously suppressed or perhaps just dismissed regarding the future of journalism were coming to the surface.
I knew even at the time that the Gulf War had changed the nature of journalism, had pushed the public's preference for obtaining news permanently from the "print" to the "talking head" camp. To feed the public's ravenous desire for information at a very anxious and troubling time, CNN had created the 24 hour news cycle, with Wolf Blitzer at its helm. My father considered Blitzer "light in the ass" (not a reference to sexuality, but to the "weight" he carried as a journalist) and found it difficult to believe he had become a news superstar based on his ability to read information we had already been told a hundred times before off a teleprompter. But his real grievance was not against Blitzer or CNN but the threat that 24 hour news posed to the truthfulness and integrity of journalism. Having worked in two newsrooms myself (Chicago Sun-Times and Investor's Business Daily), I knew perhaps as well as my father did what a "slow news day" meant -- that there were simply times when not a whole helluva lot was happening in the world. Slow news days have always presented a tough challenge to the reporter with integrity, for a journalist's job is not to make the news but to report it, and if nothing's happening -- well, then nothing's happening. But if one created a 24 hours news program, then one was responsible for filling those 24 hours with news, even when there was none to be had. And the only way this could be done in practice was to use endless repetition of existing stories to fill up as much time as possible (which not only inflates their importance but artificially extends their time in the public eye). That... and to create news by giving disproportionate coverage to incidents and subjects which would not have made the cut for the traditional news cycle -- incidents usually selected for their sensational or "hot button" nature.
The Gulf War ended, but the 24 hour news cycle did not. It flourished everywhere, on every network, but not having a war to cover, did precisely the thing my father feared it would do most -- it began to create stories instead of merely reporting on them. O.J. Simpson, Joey Buttafucco and Amy Fisher, Scott Petersen, Casey Anthony, Paris Hilton -- there was no sleazy, tawdry non-story mean enough to escape the rabid frenzy of 24 hour "journalism." And concomitant with this was the rise of Fox News, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch and did not even pretend toward journalistic objectivity.** It was simply and flagrantly a propaganda organ of the right-wing establishment, pushing a specific an unvarying agenda designed to keep its viewers continuously angry, continuously afraid, and continuously misinformed. And the success of Fox News in the ratings department -- and remember that ratings = money, and money = success, and success breeds emulation -- ensured that the competing networks would have to adapt at least partially to the Fox style if they wanted to stay in business. It goes without saying -- though I'll say it anyway -- that this led to a concomitant drop in journalistic integrity everywhere. The new paradigm demanded a new sort of reporter, one who was quicker on the trigger and much less interested in the accuracy of his aim. To be first with a story was far more important than being accurate.
On top of this came the Internet, and then, in very short order, the cellular phone. The former broke the ancient monopoly that the press once had on information; freedom of the press had formerly meant "freedom of the press for anyone with a press;"
now anyone with an Ethernet cable could spread his or her own views across the planet with the push of a button, and never mind their intelligence, level of education or sincerity (or even sanity). As for the latter, the portable nature of the mobile device allowed news to be disseminated to people not only at all hours, but at virtually any place on Earth. This increased the speed and the range of the news; it also increased the speed and the range of lies, disinformation and baseless rumor. Whatever the flaws of the pre-24 news cycle, pre-Internet, pre-cell phone press, the standards to which it held itself were well-established and acted both as a means of maintaining credibility with itself and with the public, and as a sort of sewer grate which kept out shoddy and irresponsible journalism. By democratizing the press -- by allowing anyone with money to set up an online "news agency," be it HuffPo or Breitbart or what have you -- this filter was destroyed. Never mind having to endure the unbiased or moderately biased views of big news agencies and newspapers; it was now possible for people of any political leaning to pick and choose precisely what sort of information they were exposed to, simply by virtue of filtering out everything else. There are no figures available, but I suppose the majority of those now calling themselves journalists in the United States would not meet the standards set by my father and his peers for that word -- would not even come within screaming distance of them. They are editorialists at best; propagandists most likely; professional liars and manipulators at worst. But they call themselves journalists and this status is accepted by the majority of those who read their "journalism." The ability to distinguish between hacks and reporters is gone.
All this explains, if only superficially, why the quality and integrity of journalism has declined so sharply in the last twenty-five years. It does not explain how the individual journalist has become so disconnected from his own country that none of the major agencies, print or electronic, seem to be able to predict anything they do not want to happen; to take seriously anyone with a different viewpoint; or to grasp the actual motivations of those who disagree with them. Two momentous political events in particular have brought this failing into sharp relief: the first was "Brexit," the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. The second was the rise and the election to the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump.
I once asked my father to describe the "average" big-city reporter. He replied quickly, "White, liberal, Eastern-educated, admirer of John F. Kennedy." This was in 1992 or '93, and I would imagine that today's reporters would name another popular Democratic figure -- Obama, say -- than Kennedy. But the rest of the assessment probably holds. And since the majority of journalists were center or left thereof in their political leanings, it also holds that the age-old Republican grudge about the "liberal media" is not anywhere near as facetious as it might seem. Nevertheless, the old line journalists were trapped by their ethics into keeping most of their biases firmly in check when working a story: this can be easily proven by the sheer number of Democratic politicians who have been destroyed or disgraced over the years by journalists who probably voted for them. The point I am trying to make here is that while the "1.0" reporters of my father's generation tended toward the center-left (or just plain left), they managed to remain relatively even-handed in their writing. And the fairness they tried to impart into their pieces forced them to actually listen to, and weigh the merits of, viewpoints they opposed in their personal lives. This in turn forced them into seeing the world as or near the way it actually was, as opposed to the way they wanted it to be -- a process which not surprisingly made them better journalists.
The modern reporter -- the "2.0" version -- shares or exceeds the liberalism of his predecessors, but seems to lack the ability to be even-handed when discussing social political issues. In many ostensibly objective news articles, to say nothing of the op-ed pieces, the contempt and even hatred of the modern reporter is so evident from the very first lines of the story as to be almost palpable. We can trace some of this back to the general failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking to our young people, but much blame falls upon the modern system of journalism, for not inculcating its cub reporters with a hard, unwavering faith in journalistic ethics -- the foremost of which is impartiality. Hope clouds observation, and when one is hoping for a particular outcome in a political situation, it cannot help but blind the person in question to the possibility of unpleasant alternatives. Which brings us to Brexit, and to Trump, and why journalists keep getting it wrong where and when it matters.
Americans as a general rule do not understand what the European Union is, but the cries of agony from the big-city newspapers and from many of the network pundits were sufficient to remind us that it was, and remains, a darling of the political left. This is largely because the basic ideas behind the E.U. are in line with the basic goals of liberalism -- to eliminate borders, reduce national distinctions, centralize power, redistribute wealth, ease trade and impose uniform regulations on the membership. It is not a reach to say that in the E.U. we see the rough outline -- not quite a prototype, but a detailed sketch -- of a future world government, in which "nations" are eventually reduced to the status of member provinces, and surrender a corresponding amount of sovereignty to a lone central government. It's no surprise that many people view the E.U. as a preview of the world's future, and find this future deeply appealing. It should not be a surprise that just as many do not, but here is where journalistic bias rears its ugly single-eyed head -- and, as with Brexit itself, the reasons are as much geographical and economic as political in nature.
During the height of "1.0" journalism's power, the big American newspapers maintained bureaus in every major city in America as well as many foreign capitals. This allowed them a very broad view of what the ordinary person was thinking and feeling -- in Nashville as well as Miami, in Seattle as well as Dallas. Ditto the British press, which once had heavy representation outside of London. As newspaper readership declined, however, many bureaus closed down, until even the major American news outlets operated only in New York and Los Angeles, with perhaps a lone bureau in London to keep the international flavor. In terms of television journalism this had never been a question anyway -- NY, DC and LA were the domestic foci, and minor local affiliates took up the rest of the slack known as the United States of America. London, for Americans, was a prestige post, a sort of grooming-station for those meant for great journalistic things; but for British journalism it came more or less the center of the universe -- only four newspapers in the U.K. are currently headquartered outside London. It should go without saying that restricting the hubs of reportage to a few cosmopolitan cities thousands of miles apart from each other is a bad idea, for if big cities are guilty of a single besetting sin it is considering themselves the center of the universe, and passing on this prejudice to their inhabitants -- especially the transplanted ones. Someone who lives in Georgetown, or Manhattan, or the West Side of L.A. has absolutely nothing in common with those who live in St. Louis, or Harrisburg, or Baton Rouge, and when he thinks of those people at all, it is usually in terms of pity or contempt -- because they are not as witty, urbane and sophisticated as he is. One has only to spend a day in any of these self-appointed centers of gravity to grasp the fantastic chauvinism of their inhabitants, their deep-seated belief that anything they do is right because they do it, any thought they have is correct because they think it. And the insularity of these cosmopolitan lifestyles, the uniformity of political, economic and social identities and outlooks within them, tends to create a reassuring echo-chamber effect. A reporter asks the man on the street, "Do you support Brexit?" and the man replies, "Of course not." Fifty such interviews, fifty such replies, and the matter seems settled. But what matters is not the reply but the question, "What man, and what street?" An American reporter asking this question in Manhattan is going to get very different answers than if he asked it, say, in Cleveland -- but alas, there are no national reporters in Cleveland, because why bother? Who gives a shit about those bumpkins anyway? They belong to the "flyover states" and don't matter. Likewise, a British reporter will get very different answers to the same question if he travels to Slough or Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne, than he would have received in London. But did the British reporters bother to visit Slough, Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne? The shock which Brexit dealt to the journalistic establishment gives us our answer -- no. Not, at any rate, on a scale large enough to dissuade British P.M. David Cameron from putting the matter to a general vote in the first place. No doubt Cameron believed the gesture a safe one -- even a formality -- but this only goes to show the size of the disconnect between the British press and the people it purports to cover and to serve. And this disconnect is just as bad or worse in the United States. The idea of Brexit was at first dismissed, then subjected to harsh ridicule -- and then, when it became clear that it had become reality -- to a kind of mean-spirited hysteria, which betrayed not only the bias of the press toward the "remain" camp but a refusal to learn anything from its own failure to predict what had just come to pass. One is reminded here of the famous words of the German poet Christian Morgenstern:
Thus in his considered view
What did not suit could not be true
The dangers of a biased and limited world-view have manifested in what amounts to reportage which is little better than wishful thinking, tinged with the a near-religious smugness that the press itself, sympathizing with the political left, is on the "right side of history." This certainty is of course true of all political persuasions, but since left-thinking is predominant in journalism the burden is especially heavy there. Certainly the weight of it forced the collective gaze of the press downward, at its own reflection, so to speak, when it ought to have been straight ahead. And this brings us to the matter of Donald Trump.
In the opening of this blog I stated, "The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives." That this is a fact rather than an opinion can be discerned by the way the press not only failed to predict Trump's rise -- proving that they were either ignorant of, or dismissed as unimportant, the deep vein of anger which fueled so many who supported him -- but responded to his victory in the election not with self-examination (or self-recrimination), but rather self-righteous fury. Despite all their education, all their urbanity and sophistication, despite the fact they were on the "right side of history" and knew in their hearts they were backing the right horse, the outcome they had desired had not come to pass. And this sullen fact was all they seemed to grasp. The reasons for the outcome were, and remain, almost entirely lost on them. One has only to read the op-ed pieces in the East and West Coast papers to see the truth of this.
In his famous essay "The Lion and the Unicorn," George Orwell offered a harsh but penetrating analysis of the British ruling class of the 1930s. He accused them of deliberately retreating into stupidity to spare themselves the pain of grasping the fact that their continued hold on power had no moral justification. A similar charge could be levied at the American and British press of today, to wit, that to spare themselves the pain of realizing that fully half the voting public does not share their ideology or want the future that they find so alluring, they have retreated into that same dangerous combination of "arrogance and ignorance" they once found so loathsome in George W. Bush. And what are "arrogance and ignorance" but two components, perhaps the only two components, of stupidity itself?
If you accept my judgement that journalism is broken -- and I think that recent events have proven this almost beyond debate -- then it falls upon me to suggest solutions as to how to fix it. This I intend to do, but in the interest of keeping this blog shorter than, say, Lord of the Rings, I will break off here and continue this discussion in another entry, to be released in a few days. In the mean time I will continue to scan the headlines for evidence that the press has learned a lesson from Trump's victory, and that it is beginning the first stages of a long-overdue self-audit.
But I won't hold my breath.
November 19, 2016
To Live and Dine in L.A.
I like time. There's so little and so much of it.
-- Female Oracle
I have exactly two sources of income: the entertainment industry and writing. Both trades are to an extent seasonal -- the former literally, the latter figuratively -- and this leaves me, during certain months, with a little money and a lot of time on my hands.
Now it is said, rightly, that the most precious commodity in the world is time, because in the end, it's all anyone has. So many days. So many hours. So many heartbeats. And then -- bam! The night train to the Big Adios. When you consider how much of that time we squander sitting in traffic, waiting in line, or staring glassy-eyed in front of the television, this realization is sobering and a little frightening. Especially if you're a homebody with a lazy streak about 3/4 of a mile wide. I couldn't tell you the number of hours I've spent re-reading books, re-watching DVDs, and playing video games on my PC, but whatever the figure is, it must be pretty staggering. Well, at some point a few years ago I decided I'd had enough. I resided (and still reside) in one of the largest and most exciting cities on the planet, and I resolved to leave the house and see what made it tick. It was time to use my time more wisely.
The most important factor to consider, before getting off my ass and poking around town with fresh eyes, was the fact Los Angeles is vastly different from the other cities I've lived -- Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example -- in that it is not really a city at all. It is a collection of cities, towns and villages smashed together over 503 square miles, each one with its own geography, architecture, culture, racial-ethnic makeup, and identity. This makes it infinitely interesting but impossible to know, like a schizophrenic with 2,000 different personalities, and this unique multiplicity of identity is part of its allure. Last night, for example, I went to the Landmark Regent Theater in Westwood Village to see Val Kilmer's one man show, Citizen Twain. Westwood Village is on L.A.'s affluent West Side, where I seldom, if ever venture, not being affluent myself. Afterwards I wrote in my journal, "The experience reminded me that after nine years of living here, I really don't know very much about Los Angeles. The city is too vast, too sprawling, too diverse in character to completely explore. I could spend the rest of my life here, moving from one neighborhood to the other, and never find its limits. I think it was Walt Whitman who said the real story of the Civil War had never been told and probably shouldn't be told; well, the true story of Los Angeles is also too big for any one man to encompass."
True, true. Yet that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, right? And I have tried and continue trying. So what I would like to do now is share a little of what I've discovered about my adoptive city, what I I actually do here when not working or writing -- and, I hope, give you some ideas of how to spend your time should you choose to visit -- ideas that aren't necessarily in the travel brochure.
MOVIES
I realize that people can see movies anywhere, but L.A. is the home of movies and has some theaters you'll want to experience for yourself. My own personal favorite is the Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard. This theater is nearly 100 years old but has been recently renovated back to its original splendor. Owned by American Cinemateque, it shows about ten films a month -- indies, classics, new releases, you name it -- and at most of the showings features guest appearances by actors, directors, producers, writers, crew, etc. from the films in question. This is a great way to meet Hollywood types in person in a friendly atmosphere. The tickets are cheap ($11 for non-members, $7 for members) and many of the showings are double or even triple features. Beer is now served at the concession stand and next door is the Pig 'n Whistle, a fairly famous pub restaurant.
The New Beverly Theater, on Beverly Boulevard, not far from CBS Television City and The Grove/Farmer's Market (see below) is also a movie theater worth a visit. It is a smallish theater owned by Quentin Tarantino, which shows mainly obscure or semi-obscure films of the chop-sockey, grindhouse, exploitation / blacksploitation variety -- in other words, mostly 1950s - 1970s drive-in flicks. The gimmick of this theater is that every film is shown in 35mm rather than digitally, and that the previews (all for old movies) are selected from Tarantino's own private collection of movie trailers. Tarantino does all scheduling for the theater himself, which is why I go there only about twice a year (his taste in films and mine are light-years apart) but on occasion it is home to classics such as ALIEN, DIE HARD and the like. It also frequently (and not surprisingly) shows his own films. The menu at this movie theater is very good, very cheap, and even has White Castle hamburgers. Nor are the tickets expensive.
During the summer, the Montalban Theater, on Vine Street in Hollywood, hosts its Rooftop Film Series. Films are shown in the open air, with the audience sitting in deck chairs and listening on headphones. The food and drink (including beer and wine) here are superior, and while the tickets aren't cheap and the audience tends to the trendy, the movie selection is very good -- a mix of comedy, romance, and action-adventure.
PLAYS
Los Angeles is not known for having a thriving theater scene, but it does -- just on a much smaller scale than New York. I mean this literally: due to rules involving payment of actors that are too complex and boring to relate here, most playhouses in Los Angeles are 99 seats or smaller (usually much smaller), which lends a feeling of extreme intimacy to the performances. The real treat of plays in L.A. is that they are usually places for your favorite TV actors to keep their acting muscles toned between projects. I've seen Nicholas Brendon (Xander on BUFFY), James Marsters (Spike on BUFFY and ANGEL), Mike Farrell (B.J. on M*A*S*H) and many others up close and personal, and it's a great deal of fun, especially if you're a nerd like yours truly. If you're in town, some playhouses worth perusing are The Blank (which is more or less run by Noah Wylie) on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Stella Adler on Hollywood Boulevard, and the Greenway Court Theater on Fairfax, which also happens to be almost directly opposite The Silent Movie Theater, which may also interest you.
Griffith Park also hosts the occasional "Shakespeare in the Park" which is fun if you bring the right equipment (beach chairs and picnic food; no alcohol is permitted but everyone drinks, albeit discreetly).
EATS
When people think of California, they tend to think movies, surfing, beaches, earthquakes, left-wing politics, wineries... anything but farming. But much of Cali is devoted to agriculture, and farmer's markets flourish everywhere. My favorite, a sort of home-away-from home, is the The Farmer's Market @ Third & Fairfax, next to CBS Television City. This is a huge yet oddly discreet open-air market about the size of a city block, enclosed by more permanent restaurants and shops. It is home to two bars, some curio shops, a soda fountain, a homemade ice cream parlor, a donut shop, and more food stalls than you can shake a stick at. There are two poulterers, a fish stand, two wholesale butchers, some enormous vegetable and fruit stands, a coffee stand or two, candy and nut stands, and a seeming enormity of restaurants -- Mexican, Brazilian, Spanish, American, Italian, Greek, you name it. Also pizza parlors, a diner and a sandwich joint. There is even a barber shop, run by my former next-door neighbor, which serves beer and plenty of 1930s New Orleans-style atmosphere. You can spend hours here perusing the stands, enjoying the food, or just people-watching. My favorite spots here are Marcel's, a French restaurant which is usually excellent (it also has its own food store), Phil's, with its overpriced but delicious breakfasts and sandwiches, and Loteria, which is home to arguably the best Mexican food anywhere in this town. (The ice cream and donut shops are legit as well, and there is a stand that sells nothing but hot sauce for you cooks out there.) To top all this off, the Market adjoins The Grove, a beautiful open-air shopping mall with its own trolley system, and is home to a multiplex as well as yet more restaurants and a slew of stores. You can kill a hell of a lot of time here, as well as eating and drinking and shopping your fill, without leaving an area of about two city blocks.
Not far from this place, on La Brea Avenue near Melrose, is Pink's Hot Dogs. This is an ultra-famous stand which I wouldn't mention here except that, unlike so many famous eateries, it does live up to its reputation. The Chicago-style brat is just fabulous. The lines are often horrible, it's true, but the stand is open so long each day that it isn't hard to find windows of opportunity. This place also serves Doc Brown cream soda, which is great stuff.
Gladstones, in Malibu, is a flat-out tourist trap with a rather mediocre reputation for service and an inconsistent quality to its food. A huge renovation a few years ago may have improved it, but the real reason to go is the view. This is an open-air, ocean-front restaurant on Malibu Beach, just off the Pacific Coast Highway, and the view, the breeze, and the smell of the sea air are intoxicating. I know some will say that Duke's and other places serve better food without the excessive prices and indifferent service, but for sheer beauty it's hard to beat this joint, especially at sunset.
Downtown L.A. is a bit dicey at night, or can be anyway, but I've always enjoyed the Upstairs Bar at the Ace Hotel, which is next to the cavernous Ace Theater. It's a bit trendy and hipster-y, and I can't say the service is great, but the view of Downtown at night is spectacular and there is a small heated outdoor pool on the deck. You can take some spectacular photos from here, and it also happens to be on the same street as the Orpheum, which is a beautiful little opera-style theater also used for sporting events.
HIKES
Since this town has about 300 days of sunshine a year, outdoor exercise has an appeal that is sometimes lacking in the Midwest or Northeast. I do a lot of walking and hiking, and I can say with some conviction that the most trendy hiking spots are also generally the worst -- too crowded, for one, and on top of this crowded with the wrong sort of people, i.e. trendoids, hipsters and dog-walkers who leave trails of shit in their wake. I spend most of my time at the Lake Hollywood Reservoir in Burbank, Wildwood Canyon Park in Burbank, and Malibu Creek State Park, which is way out near Calabasas.
Lake Hollywood is a nearly century-old reservoir bang in between Burbank and Hollywood, directly beneath the Hollywood Sign. It us surrounded by thick woods which are home to deer, and the lake itself is brimming with watery wildlife such as turtles, fish and all manner of water fowl. It is a beautiful, restful place most days, and offers a sweatier alternative hike up steep Cahuenga Peak to the famous Wisdom Tree and Hollywood Sign. The view from up there is ridiculous: you get a 360-degree view which includes Warner Brothers Studios, the Bob Hope Airport, Griffith Park Observatory, Universal Studios, and the whole of Los Angeles including downtown. Oh, and the entrance gate to the park is one of the shooting locations of the original HALLOWEEN.
Wildwood Canyon is in the hills of Burbank, opposite a golf course. It is a long, steep, ever-ascending dirt trail which will test your resolve massacre about 1,000 calories, but which offers another tremendous view and a feeling of massive satisfaction when you reach the crest. For the hearty of foot, there are a web of interconnected trails which run along the spine of the hills for miles in both directions. On your way home you can stop on San Fernando Boulevard in downtown Burbank and reclaim those calories at any number of restaurants.
Malibu Creek State Park used to be the Fox Lot. It's where PLANET OF THE APES (the original) and M*A*S*H (the series) were filmed, and it is beautiful and vast in size. My favorite hike is up to the old M*A*S*H site, where they shot all the exteriors in the series. The helicopter pad is still there, and while the tents and buildings are of course gone they have been mapped out so you know where they stood. A number of vehicles which were abandoned when the show went off the air remain on site, some rusted out hulks, some fully restored, and the Mess Tent has been rebuilt so you can sit at the plank tables for a breather. There is also a place along the way called Century Lake, where you can go swimming. This place is ideally situated for raids on Malibu, which you can access through the Santa Monica Mountains.
FESTIVALS
At any particular moment there is a festival, or several, going on in L.A. county. A few days ago I attended something called the "Happy Little Festival" at the Angel City Brewery in downtown L.A. This was a flat-out tribute to Bob Ross, he of the "happy little clouds." It was a lot of fun. And this weekend I'm attending the Burbank Winter Wine Festival just down the road. The L.A. TImes Festival of Books is a bit of a bore (I know that's blasphemy for a writer to say, but it is), but the L.A. Time Hero Complex Film Festival often has great movies, shown in the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, as well as great guest speakers -- I saw Leonard Nimoy speak there back in 2010, which was a huge thrill. The Thai New Year Festival in Hollywood is also terrific. It takes place right on the Boulevard in Thai Town, and is an orgy of street food and crafts as well as combat sports (boxing and Muay Thai kickboxing) conducted in a ring set up right in the middle of the world's most famous street. My point here is simply that the chances of a week going by without some kind of street fair or food/drink/book festival occurring here are slim.
ONE MAN SHOWS AND NICHE CONCERTS
A benefit to sharing your city with a zillion actors and musicians is that their pet projects become your entertainment. I've attended William Shatner's "Shatner's World" at the Nokia Theater in L.A., Mike Tyson's one man show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood, and Val Kilmer's "Citizen Twain" at the afformentioned Regent Landmark, to name a few. In each instance I was hugely entertained and got to meet the star in question afterward, which appealed to my name-dropping inner nerd. You should always be on the lookout for this type of performance because you never know, in the cases of the older performers, how many more opportunities you will have to do this.
In regards to music, you can't nerd harder than I did at the "Star Trek: Voyages" concert which was also held at the Pantages. This was an orchestral concert with some heavyweight guest conductors, which features music from the movies and various series played over a film celebrating the Star Trek legacy, and narrated by Michael "Worf" Dorn. I also exulted in John Williams' concert at the Hollywood Bowl, during which he conducted his philharmonic through many of his best movie scores while images from the same played on a huge screen. While these shows go on tour, there is no better place to see them than in their own birthplace: you should always check the music section of the L.A. Times Online for events of this type.
PLACES TO WANDER
Larchmont, in central L.A. ("Mid-City"), between Beverly and Third Streets, is sometimes referred to as "L.A.'s smallest 'hood." Though smack between Hollywood, East Hollywood, Koreatown, etc. it has a friendly, small-town vibe, complete with nose-in parking spaces, and boasts a barber shop, farmer's market, and many great restaurants. It even has an independent bookstore, which is a growing rarity. One word of warning: they WILL ticket if you're even 30 seconds late to the meter, and the WILL tow if you park illegally. Best to avoid those cute nose-in spaces, park a block or two south on the street, and walk.
Koreatown, which more or less adjoins Hollywood, is home to some of the best food in Los Angeles. However, it really helps to go with a Korean, if you happen to know one, because some of the restaurants don't even have English on the menus. But the food -- oh my. And the cuisine is as friendly to vegetarians as carnivores. Thai Town, mentioned above, also adjoining Hollywood, also has insanely good food including those devastatingly delicious Thai iced teas, and some cool Thai markets where you can get herbs and vegetables and so forth you don't really find in America.
Magnolia Street in Burbank is also a great deal of fun. This street is enormous but the good part basically starts at the intersection of Magnolia and Hollywood Way, near Warner Brothers Studios, and runs east for a mile or two before petering out somewhere near the bridge over the Five Freeway. Burbank is home to Disney, ABC, NBC, Universal, and Warners, and this street reflects that fact. Many of the shops sell clothing used on your favorite TV shows; others peddle books specific to screenwriting. Acting studios nestle next to restaurants, a great comic book store, junk, occult and curio shops, and various movie-specific joints like prop rental shops. As I said, clothing stores, especially vintage and secondhand, abound here. Men, women and children will all find something here to their taste.
Lastly, one of my favorite things to do is look up the shooting locations of my favorite television shows and movies and then go visit them. On Halloween night last year, beneath a full moon, I went to all the locations in Hollywood, Burbank and Pasadena where John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN was shot. Also the street Wes Craven used to shoot the exteriors for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. And of course it's easy to hunt down the locations of more obvious films like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, since they're bang in the middle of Hollywood. This is great fun and, if you have access to a car, very cheap, since the driving is probably local to your hotel or Airbnb anyway.
You'll notice I haven't mentioned many obvious spots, such as the Universal City Walk, Griffith Park Observatory, Mulholland Drive, the mall at Highland and Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman's Chinese Theater, studio tours, etc., etc. not because they aren't worth a look but because these are pretty much known to everyone. It's important to note that people who live in L.A. are not generally disdainful of tourists because so many, like me, are transplanted from other areas of the country and don't really have the right to be snotty to "foreigners." But I think if you hit some of the places I mentioned you'll get a better understanding of why people endure the high prices, smog and terrible traffic of Los Angeles. This city may not be angelic, but there's a lot to it if you know where to look.
-- Female Oracle
I have exactly two sources of income: the entertainment industry and writing. Both trades are to an extent seasonal -- the former literally, the latter figuratively -- and this leaves me, during certain months, with a little money and a lot of time on my hands.
Now it is said, rightly, that the most precious commodity in the world is time, because in the end, it's all anyone has. So many days. So many hours. So many heartbeats. And then -- bam! The night train to the Big Adios. When you consider how much of that time we squander sitting in traffic, waiting in line, or staring glassy-eyed in front of the television, this realization is sobering and a little frightening. Especially if you're a homebody with a lazy streak about 3/4 of a mile wide. I couldn't tell you the number of hours I've spent re-reading books, re-watching DVDs, and playing video games on my PC, but whatever the figure is, it must be pretty staggering. Well, at some point a few years ago I decided I'd had enough. I resided (and still reside) in one of the largest and most exciting cities on the planet, and I resolved to leave the house and see what made it tick. It was time to use my time more wisely.
The most important factor to consider, before getting off my ass and poking around town with fresh eyes, was the fact Los Angeles is vastly different from the other cities I've lived -- Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example -- in that it is not really a city at all. It is a collection of cities, towns and villages smashed together over 503 square miles, each one with its own geography, architecture, culture, racial-ethnic makeup, and identity. This makes it infinitely interesting but impossible to know, like a schizophrenic with 2,000 different personalities, and this unique multiplicity of identity is part of its allure. Last night, for example, I went to the Landmark Regent Theater in Westwood Village to see Val Kilmer's one man show, Citizen Twain. Westwood Village is on L.A.'s affluent West Side, where I seldom, if ever venture, not being affluent myself. Afterwards I wrote in my journal, "The experience reminded me that after nine years of living here, I really don't know very much about Los Angeles. The city is too vast, too sprawling, too diverse in character to completely explore. I could spend the rest of my life here, moving from one neighborhood to the other, and never find its limits. I think it was Walt Whitman who said the real story of the Civil War had never been told and probably shouldn't be told; well, the true story of Los Angeles is also too big for any one man to encompass."
True, true. Yet that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, right? And I have tried and continue trying. So what I would like to do now is share a little of what I've discovered about my adoptive city, what I I actually do here when not working or writing -- and, I hope, give you some ideas of how to spend your time should you choose to visit -- ideas that aren't necessarily in the travel brochure.
MOVIES
I realize that people can see movies anywhere, but L.A. is the home of movies and has some theaters you'll want to experience for yourself. My own personal favorite is the Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard. This theater is nearly 100 years old but has been recently renovated back to its original splendor. Owned by American Cinemateque, it shows about ten films a month -- indies, classics, new releases, you name it -- and at most of the showings features guest appearances by actors, directors, producers, writers, crew, etc. from the films in question. This is a great way to meet Hollywood types in person in a friendly atmosphere. The tickets are cheap ($11 for non-members, $7 for members) and many of the showings are double or even triple features. Beer is now served at the concession stand and next door is the Pig 'n Whistle, a fairly famous pub restaurant.
The New Beverly Theater, on Beverly Boulevard, not far from CBS Television City and The Grove/Farmer's Market (see below) is also a movie theater worth a visit. It is a smallish theater owned by Quentin Tarantino, which shows mainly obscure or semi-obscure films of the chop-sockey, grindhouse, exploitation / blacksploitation variety -- in other words, mostly 1950s - 1970s drive-in flicks. The gimmick of this theater is that every film is shown in 35mm rather than digitally, and that the previews (all for old movies) are selected from Tarantino's own private collection of movie trailers. Tarantino does all scheduling for the theater himself, which is why I go there only about twice a year (his taste in films and mine are light-years apart) but on occasion it is home to classics such as ALIEN, DIE HARD and the like. It also frequently (and not surprisingly) shows his own films. The menu at this movie theater is very good, very cheap, and even has White Castle hamburgers. Nor are the tickets expensive.
During the summer, the Montalban Theater, on Vine Street in Hollywood, hosts its Rooftop Film Series. Films are shown in the open air, with the audience sitting in deck chairs and listening on headphones. The food and drink (including beer and wine) here are superior, and while the tickets aren't cheap and the audience tends to the trendy, the movie selection is very good -- a mix of comedy, romance, and action-adventure.
PLAYS
Los Angeles is not known for having a thriving theater scene, but it does -- just on a much smaller scale than New York. I mean this literally: due to rules involving payment of actors that are too complex and boring to relate here, most playhouses in Los Angeles are 99 seats or smaller (usually much smaller), which lends a feeling of extreme intimacy to the performances. The real treat of plays in L.A. is that they are usually places for your favorite TV actors to keep their acting muscles toned between projects. I've seen Nicholas Brendon (Xander on BUFFY), James Marsters (Spike on BUFFY and ANGEL), Mike Farrell (B.J. on M*A*S*H) and many others up close and personal, and it's a great deal of fun, especially if you're a nerd like yours truly. If you're in town, some playhouses worth perusing are The Blank (which is more or less run by Noah Wylie) on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Stella Adler on Hollywood Boulevard, and the Greenway Court Theater on Fairfax, which also happens to be almost directly opposite The Silent Movie Theater, which may also interest you.
Griffith Park also hosts the occasional "Shakespeare in the Park" which is fun if you bring the right equipment (beach chairs and picnic food; no alcohol is permitted but everyone drinks, albeit discreetly).
EATS
When people think of California, they tend to think movies, surfing, beaches, earthquakes, left-wing politics, wineries... anything but farming. But much of Cali is devoted to agriculture, and farmer's markets flourish everywhere. My favorite, a sort of home-away-from home, is the The Farmer's Market @ Third & Fairfax, next to CBS Television City. This is a huge yet oddly discreet open-air market about the size of a city block, enclosed by more permanent restaurants and shops. It is home to two bars, some curio shops, a soda fountain, a homemade ice cream parlor, a donut shop, and more food stalls than you can shake a stick at. There are two poulterers, a fish stand, two wholesale butchers, some enormous vegetable and fruit stands, a coffee stand or two, candy and nut stands, and a seeming enormity of restaurants -- Mexican, Brazilian, Spanish, American, Italian, Greek, you name it. Also pizza parlors, a diner and a sandwich joint. There is even a barber shop, run by my former next-door neighbor, which serves beer and plenty of 1930s New Orleans-style atmosphere. You can spend hours here perusing the stands, enjoying the food, or just people-watching. My favorite spots here are Marcel's, a French restaurant which is usually excellent (it also has its own food store), Phil's, with its overpriced but delicious breakfasts and sandwiches, and Loteria, which is home to arguably the best Mexican food anywhere in this town. (The ice cream and donut shops are legit as well, and there is a stand that sells nothing but hot sauce for you cooks out there.) To top all this off, the Market adjoins The Grove, a beautiful open-air shopping mall with its own trolley system, and is home to a multiplex as well as yet more restaurants and a slew of stores. You can kill a hell of a lot of time here, as well as eating and drinking and shopping your fill, without leaving an area of about two city blocks.
Not far from this place, on La Brea Avenue near Melrose, is Pink's Hot Dogs. This is an ultra-famous stand which I wouldn't mention here except that, unlike so many famous eateries, it does live up to its reputation. The Chicago-style brat is just fabulous. The lines are often horrible, it's true, but the stand is open so long each day that it isn't hard to find windows of opportunity. This place also serves Doc Brown cream soda, which is great stuff.
Gladstones, in Malibu, is a flat-out tourist trap with a rather mediocre reputation for service and an inconsistent quality to its food. A huge renovation a few years ago may have improved it, but the real reason to go is the view. This is an open-air, ocean-front restaurant on Malibu Beach, just off the Pacific Coast Highway, and the view, the breeze, and the smell of the sea air are intoxicating. I know some will say that Duke's and other places serve better food without the excessive prices and indifferent service, but for sheer beauty it's hard to beat this joint, especially at sunset.
Downtown L.A. is a bit dicey at night, or can be anyway, but I've always enjoyed the Upstairs Bar at the Ace Hotel, which is next to the cavernous Ace Theater. It's a bit trendy and hipster-y, and I can't say the service is great, but the view of Downtown at night is spectacular and there is a small heated outdoor pool on the deck. You can take some spectacular photos from here, and it also happens to be on the same street as the Orpheum, which is a beautiful little opera-style theater also used for sporting events.
HIKES
Since this town has about 300 days of sunshine a year, outdoor exercise has an appeal that is sometimes lacking in the Midwest or Northeast. I do a lot of walking and hiking, and I can say with some conviction that the most trendy hiking spots are also generally the worst -- too crowded, for one, and on top of this crowded with the wrong sort of people, i.e. trendoids, hipsters and dog-walkers who leave trails of shit in their wake. I spend most of my time at the Lake Hollywood Reservoir in Burbank, Wildwood Canyon Park in Burbank, and Malibu Creek State Park, which is way out near Calabasas.
Lake Hollywood is a nearly century-old reservoir bang in between Burbank and Hollywood, directly beneath the Hollywood Sign. It us surrounded by thick woods which are home to deer, and the lake itself is brimming with watery wildlife such as turtles, fish and all manner of water fowl. It is a beautiful, restful place most days, and offers a sweatier alternative hike up steep Cahuenga Peak to the famous Wisdom Tree and Hollywood Sign. The view from up there is ridiculous: you get a 360-degree view which includes Warner Brothers Studios, the Bob Hope Airport, Griffith Park Observatory, Universal Studios, and the whole of Los Angeles including downtown. Oh, and the entrance gate to the park is one of the shooting locations of the original HALLOWEEN.
Wildwood Canyon is in the hills of Burbank, opposite a golf course. It is a long, steep, ever-ascending dirt trail which will test your resolve massacre about 1,000 calories, but which offers another tremendous view and a feeling of massive satisfaction when you reach the crest. For the hearty of foot, there are a web of interconnected trails which run along the spine of the hills for miles in both directions. On your way home you can stop on San Fernando Boulevard in downtown Burbank and reclaim those calories at any number of restaurants.
Malibu Creek State Park used to be the Fox Lot. It's where PLANET OF THE APES (the original) and M*A*S*H (the series) were filmed, and it is beautiful and vast in size. My favorite hike is up to the old M*A*S*H site, where they shot all the exteriors in the series. The helicopter pad is still there, and while the tents and buildings are of course gone they have been mapped out so you know where they stood. A number of vehicles which were abandoned when the show went off the air remain on site, some rusted out hulks, some fully restored, and the Mess Tent has been rebuilt so you can sit at the plank tables for a breather. There is also a place along the way called Century Lake, where you can go swimming. This place is ideally situated for raids on Malibu, which you can access through the Santa Monica Mountains.
FESTIVALS
At any particular moment there is a festival, or several, going on in L.A. county. A few days ago I attended something called the "Happy Little Festival" at the Angel City Brewery in downtown L.A. This was a flat-out tribute to Bob Ross, he of the "happy little clouds." It was a lot of fun. And this weekend I'm attending the Burbank Winter Wine Festival just down the road. The L.A. TImes Festival of Books is a bit of a bore (I know that's blasphemy for a writer to say, but it is), but the L.A. Time Hero Complex Film Festival often has great movies, shown in the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, as well as great guest speakers -- I saw Leonard Nimoy speak there back in 2010, which was a huge thrill. The Thai New Year Festival in Hollywood is also terrific. It takes place right on the Boulevard in Thai Town, and is an orgy of street food and crafts as well as combat sports (boxing and Muay Thai kickboxing) conducted in a ring set up right in the middle of the world's most famous street. My point here is simply that the chances of a week going by without some kind of street fair or food/drink/book festival occurring here are slim.
ONE MAN SHOWS AND NICHE CONCERTS
A benefit to sharing your city with a zillion actors and musicians is that their pet projects become your entertainment. I've attended William Shatner's "Shatner's World" at the Nokia Theater in L.A., Mike Tyson's one man show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood, and Val Kilmer's "Citizen Twain" at the afformentioned Regent Landmark, to name a few. In each instance I was hugely entertained and got to meet the star in question afterward, which appealed to my name-dropping inner nerd. You should always be on the lookout for this type of performance because you never know, in the cases of the older performers, how many more opportunities you will have to do this.
In regards to music, you can't nerd harder than I did at the "Star Trek: Voyages" concert which was also held at the Pantages. This was an orchestral concert with some heavyweight guest conductors, which features music from the movies and various series played over a film celebrating the Star Trek legacy, and narrated by Michael "Worf" Dorn. I also exulted in John Williams' concert at the Hollywood Bowl, during which he conducted his philharmonic through many of his best movie scores while images from the same played on a huge screen. While these shows go on tour, there is no better place to see them than in their own birthplace: you should always check the music section of the L.A. Times Online for events of this type.
PLACES TO WANDER
Larchmont, in central L.A. ("Mid-City"), between Beverly and Third Streets, is sometimes referred to as "L.A.'s smallest 'hood." Though smack between Hollywood, East Hollywood, Koreatown, etc. it has a friendly, small-town vibe, complete with nose-in parking spaces, and boasts a barber shop, farmer's market, and many great restaurants. It even has an independent bookstore, which is a growing rarity. One word of warning: they WILL ticket if you're even 30 seconds late to the meter, and the WILL tow if you park illegally. Best to avoid those cute nose-in spaces, park a block or two south on the street, and walk.
Koreatown, which more or less adjoins Hollywood, is home to some of the best food in Los Angeles. However, it really helps to go with a Korean, if you happen to know one, because some of the restaurants don't even have English on the menus. But the food -- oh my. And the cuisine is as friendly to vegetarians as carnivores. Thai Town, mentioned above, also adjoining Hollywood, also has insanely good food including those devastatingly delicious Thai iced teas, and some cool Thai markets where you can get herbs and vegetables and so forth you don't really find in America.
Magnolia Street in Burbank is also a great deal of fun. This street is enormous but the good part basically starts at the intersection of Magnolia and Hollywood Way, near Warner Brothers Studios, and runs east for a mile or two before petering out somewhere near the bridge over the Five Freeway. Burbank is home to Disney, ABC, NBC, Universal, and Warners, and this street reflects that fact. Many of the shops sell clothing used on your favorite TV shows; others peddle books specific to screenwriting. Acting studios nestle next to restaurants, a great comic book store, junk, occult and curio shops, and various movie-specific joints like prop rental shops. As I said, clothing stores, especially vintage and secondhand, abound here. Men, women and children will all find something here to their taste.
Lastly, one of my favorite things to do is look up the shooting locations of my favorite television shows and movies and then go visit them. On Halloween night last year, beneath a full moon, I went to all the locations in Hollywood, Burbank and Pasadena where John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN was shot. Also the street Wes Craven used to shoot the exteriors for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. And of course it's easy to hunt down the locations of more obvious films like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, since they're bang in the middle of Hollywood. This is great fun and, if you have access to a car, very cheap, since the driving is probably local to your hotel or Airbnb anyway.
You'll notice I haven't mentioned many obvious spots, such as the Universal City Walk, Griffith Park Observatory, Mulholland Drive, the mall at Highland and Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman's Chinese Theater, studio tours, etc., etc. not because they aren't worth a look but because these are pretty much known to everyone. It's important to note that people who live in L.A. are not generally disdainful of tourists because so many, like me, are transplanted from other areas of the country and don't really have the right to be snotty to "foreigners." But I think if you hit some of the places I mentioned you'll get a better understanding of why people endure the high prices, smog and terrible traffic of Los Angeles. This city may not be angelic, but there's a lot to it if you know where to look.
November 11, 2016
My New Books Are OUT -- and Other Good News
As my cousin down South might say, "Some of y'all may need a li'l distraction right about now."
You know, from politics.
So, allow me to attempt one by announcing the following:
First, my debut novel, Cage Life was just named a Shelf Unbound 2016 Best Indie Book runner-up. All future copies of the novel will carry the S.U. award badge on their cover, and I'm hoping this one will soon be joined by others (the novel has been submitted to three other literary contests). Regardless, I'm happy for the honor and I hope it will convince any waverers who can't decide if they want to buy it or not, to give it a chance.
Second, Kirkus Reviews wrote a fairly flattering piece on Cage Life. As Ilsa J. Bick humorously wrote, "Kirkus has this rep for being snarky, cantankerous, a little self-righteous. Having Kirkus say something relatively nice is like having the most popular girl in school suddenly remember your name."
Some of the relatively nice:
"Watson’s book is built around the personal tug of war between one’s origins and aspirations—Mickey needs to deny a part of himself on the path to self-improvement."
"The fight scenes—in and out of the professional cage—are stirringly described, cataclysms of feral but controlled aggression."
"The reader in search of a Mafia thriller, though, will still find lots of action, vividly rendered. Pulsing with violence, this mob tale provides plenty of excitement, despite its literary flaws." (Get that, folks? Literary flaws!)
It's true the guy (girl? Kirkus reviews are anonymous) called my character "almost comically self-destructive," but since that's both true and funny, I can't object. I based him on myself, after all!
Third, I have just released the sequel to Cage Life: it is called Knuckle Down and it is available as both a paperback and an e-book via Amazon (it will soon be available via Barnes & Noble as well). This novel picks up some years after the last one ended, with my trouble-prone protagonist (he's comically self-destructive!) returning to New York City after a long exile. No sooner do the wheels touch down at La Guardia, however, that he gets sucked back into the Mafia maelstrom that chased him out of the Big Apple in the first place. I worked hard to precisely recapture the atmosphere and pace of the first novel,
while deepening the characterization, introducing some new characters (you know, to replace the ones who got whacked) and changing the crux of the story from escaping a seemingly hopeless situation to solving a life-or-death mystery. This series is a tension between the fight world, in which Mick Watts, tries to ply a legitimate trade, and the New York underworld, in which he is repeatedly and unwillingly drawn. Yet, as the guy from Kirkus pointed out, "Watson’s book is built around the personal tug of war between one’s origins and aspirations—Mickey needs to deny a part of himself on the path to self-improvement." In this book he will need all his moral muscle to avoid giving into the dark side of his nature.
Fourth, I have also released a short story collection called Devils You Know. This collection is composed of 13 short stories written over a period of 26 years, and features a mix of genres and styles -- horror, dystopia, satire, crime, historical and literary fiction. It too is available in paperback and e-book, but I decided to make all the individual stories available as well, as 99c - $1.50 electronic downloads, in case you want to test the waters. In recent years, as I have concentrated on novels and screenplays, I had almost forgotten the simple pleasure of the short story. If you have, too, I encourage you to peruse the list and give one of them a try. My "author list" on Goodreads has the full catalogue of my works, as well as instant links to Amazon. And of course, my Amazon author page at
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01BN5LBGW
is there for you as well.
It is said that books provide the ultimate escape from reality. As an author it's my job to provide that escape as and when it is needed, and right now -- if my Facebook feed is any judge -- lots of people are craving some. So, I invite you to escape with me today. "Literary flaws" aside, I'm sure you won't be too disappointed.
You know, from politics.
So, allow me to attempt one by announcing the following:
First, my debut novel, Cage Life was just named a Shelf Unbound 2016 Best Indie Book runner-up. All future copies of the novel will carry the S.U. award badge on their cover, and I'm hoping this one will soon be joined by others (the novel has been submitted to three other literary contests). Regardless, I'm happy for the honor and I hope it will convince any waverers who can't decide if they want to buy it or not, to give it a chance.
Second, Kirkus Reviews wrote a fairly flattering piece on Cage Life. As Ilsa J. Bick humorously wrote, "Kirkus has this rep for being snarky, cantankerous, a little self-righteous. Having Kirkus say something relatively nice is like having the most popular girl in school suddenly remember your name."
Some of the relatively nice:
"Watson’s book is built around the personal tug of war between one’s origins and aspirations—Mickey needs to deny a part of himself on the path to self-improvement."
"The fight scenes—in and out of the professional cage—are stirringly described, cataclysms of feral but controlled aggression."
"The reader in search of a Mafia thriller, though, will still find lots of action, vividly rendered. Pulsing with violence, this mob tale provides plenty of excitement, despite its literary flaws." (Get that, folks? Literary flaws!)
It's true the guy (girl? Kirkus reviews are anonymous) called my character "almost comically self-destructive," but since that's both true and funny, I can't object. I based him on myself, after all!
Third, I have just released the sequel to Cage Life: it is called Knuckle Down and it is available as both a paperback and an e-book via Amazon (it will soon be available via Barnes & Noble as well). This novel picks up some years after the last one ended, with my trouble-prone protagonist (he's comically self-destructive!) returning to New York City after a long exile. No sooner do the wheels touch down at La Guardia, however, that he gets sucked back into the Mafia maelstrom that chased him out of the Big Apple in the first place. I worked hard to precisely recapture the atmosphere and pace of the first novel,
while deepening the characterization, introducing some new characters (you know, to replace the ones who got whacked) and changing the crux of the story from escaping a seemingly hopeless situation to solving a life-or-death mystery. This series is a tension between the fight world, in which Mick Watts, tries to ply a legitimate trade, and the New York underworld, in which he is repeatedly and unwillingly drawn. Yet, as the guy from Kirkus pointed out, "Watson’s book is built around the personal tug of war between one’s origins and aspirations—Mickey needs to deny a part of himself on the path to self-improvement." In this book he will need all his moral muscle to avoid giving into the dark side of his nature.
Fourth, I have also released a short story collection called Devils You Know. This collection is composed of 13 short stories written over a period of 26 years, and features a mix of genres and styles -- horror, dystopia, satire, crime, historical and literary fiction. It too is available in paperback and e-book, but I decided to make all the individual stories available as well, as 99c - $1.50 electronic downloads, in case you want to test the waters. In recent years, as I have concentrated on novels and screenplays, I had almost forgotten the simple pleasure of the short story. If you have, too, I encourage you to peruse the list and give one of them a try. My "author list" on Goodreads has the full catalogue of my works, as well as instant links to Amazon. And of course, my Amazon author page at
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01BN5LBGW
is there for you as well.
It is said that books provide the ultimate escape from reality. As an author it's my job to provide that escape as and when it is needed, and right now -- if my Facebook feed is any judge -- lots of people are craving some. So, I invite you to escape with me today. "Literary flaws" aside, I'm sure you won't be too disappointed.
October 30, 2016
Not Wheels But Wings: or, Thoughts on the Passage of Time
Halloween is a time when adults shamelessly revisit childhood, and I am all for it. Every year I string up orange lights, carve an albino pumpkin the shape of a hockey mask, attend horror-movie festivals, and revisit all my favorite horror classics. If I am very lucky I am invited to one of those Hollywood Make-up Effects parties where the costumes, having been constructed by people who do it for a living, are off-the-chart amazing. I tend to hold on fairly hard to Halloween, because once I let go of it, the inevitable slide into the end of the year begins -- Thanksgiving, Christmas New Year's Eve, each one arriving seemingly on the heels of the other.
It's a cliche that time moves more swiftly as you get older, but cliches are in use for a reason, and this one happens to be truer than most. When I was fifteen, a year may as well have been a decade. Now, at 44, it goes by what seems like a single season. If the progression continues, by the time I'm in my 50s each year will feel like about six weeks.
It is said that there are two types of time, mechanical and human. For a clock, every unit of time -- seconds, minutes, hours -- are all precisely the same. For a human, the speed with which time moves is literally subjective -- not only does it vary from person to person, it varies from mood to mood. "Pain passes slowly, and pleasure's gone too soon," as one song lyric put it, and this is true. Thirty seconds is an eyeblink when you are trying to say goodbye to someone you love, and it feels like three hours when stuck on an elevator with someone you hate. However, the overall trend remains the same -- with each passing year, the years feel shorter.
I am fairly certain I know almost precisely when I realized this. I was 29 years of age, and working as a supervising investigator for the District Attorney's Office in a small town in Pennsylvania. The day in question I was visiting my mom in Maryland for the weekend, and taking a walk on the streets where I had grown up. As you know by now, my career choice was a mistake. I had neither the passion nor the patience for criminal justice and I knew that by sticking to an unsuitable profession I was not only making myself unhappy, I was, as Orwell put it, "outraging my true nature." From a very young age I knew I was supposed to be a writer, I had won awards for it in school, been published in a literary magazine at 17, and at the age of 20 had famous novelists like Reynolds Price and E.L. Doctorow reading my work on the contest circuit.
Yet here I was, nearly thirty, living in a dismal little town doing a tedious job, surrounded by co-workers that, generally speaking, I distrusted and slightly disliked, writing nothing. Time ought to have been dragging; instead it seemed to be flying by. As I walked down a shallow hill, a sentence came into my head: "He was at the end of my twenties when he realized time had not grown wheels but wings."
I'm a writer, so thoughts like that -- snatches of dialogue, chunks of description, outbursts of lyric poetry, parts of scenes or fragments of story ideas -- are not unusual. Stephen King once said the entire idea for Pet Sematary came to him while crossing the road in front of his house. This particular thought, however, struck deeper than most, because my job had never been intended as a career. I had entered the world of law enforcement strictly as a means of garnering life experience which I thought would add substance to my writing. Also, to pay the bills while I composed my first novel. Yet after five years in the trade, I was no closer to beginning that novel than the day I had been handed my badge. The pressures of work had sapped my creative drive...and time was passing more and more quickly. The dismay I was feeling had begun to graduate to fear. Though I was young and fit and vital, it was as though I could feel the cold shadow of death over me -- though perhaps not so much physical death as the death of possibility, the death of dreams. There are periods in life when one is fully conscious of the full range of opportunities and possibilities open to them: we call this period youth, and when it begins to curdle into the earliest part of middle age -- roughly speaking, the thirties -- we become just as conscious that many of those possibilities have faded away. Of course the very act of choosing one course in life eliminates the others, at least temporarily; but as we age some of those losses become permanent. At a certain point it is no longer possible to become, for example, a professional athlete or a fighter pilot. I was 29, and while many courses remained at least theoretically open to me, they seemed to be sliding shut in unison before my disbelieving eyes.
The human sense of time -- the way we measure our lives by the clock -- makes us unique among the species on this planet. Other animals move with time; we, being more conscious of its passage and what that passage represents, fight against it. We are conscious of our own mortality even when we are not threatened by external danger, and this consciousness drives us in different directions. In my case it drove me out of my job. Having resigned, for six months I did almost nothing but write, and though what I was writing was raw, overdrawn and without much structure, the pleasure of tapping into my neglected abilities more than made up for the knowledge that sooner or later I would have to go back to work.
I am not writing a biography here and don't want to bog down in my life story, details of which are already scattered throughout these blogs. Suffice to say (again) that a few years later, having resumed work in my hated field and once again found it intolerable, I decided for the final time that criminal justice was not the answer -- not even to the problem of paying my rent. The time had come to find a new trade while I sharpened my skills and learned the minutia of my craft. So, at the age of 32, I went back to school, to get a second undergraduate degree. I know, I know -- I just said I wasn't writing a biography, but this detail is crucial, because it was during this period, especially the first of my two school years, that I once again experienced a difference in the way I perceived time. For the first time since my middle twenties, it was slowing down.
I can still recall the feeling of surprised joy this realization gave me. It was just five or six weeks into my "freshman" year, and it felt as if I had been in school for six months or more. Not because I was miserable, either: on the contrary, the decision to become a student again -- but this time having my own, rather luxurious apartment, a car, and the life experience of a grown man -- was probably the only stroke of authentic genius I've ever had in my life. I was happy for the first time in probably seven years, and my only fear was that time would somehow find the accelerator again and begin to pass in its familiar, unwanted blur.
Of course this is precisely what happened. My second semester passed a little faster than my first, and my third considerably faster than my second. Before I knew it I was facing graduation and the necessity of getting into graduate school. That was in 2004, and I do believe that each year since has passed slightly with greater perceived speed than the one before, until the last few -- the last two or three in particular -- were gone as soon as glimpsed. When I began keeping a daily journal, in 2006, the time period between writing the January 1 and the December 31st entries seemed enormous. Now it seems like the elapsed time between a bullet leaving a gun and it hitting the goddamn target.
All this demands a question -- actually two questions. Why does time speed up as we age, and why was I able, if only briefly, to slow it down?
As I had absolutely no answers to this, and not even anything that could be described as a theory, I consulted the Scientific American, specifically an article by Jordan Gaines Lewis. Mr. Lewis writes as follows:
"Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events. When the passage of time is measured by “firsts” (first kiss, first day of school, first family vacation), the lack of new experiences in adulthood, James morosely argues, causes “the days and weeks [to] smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
In the early 1960s, Wallach and Green studied this phenomenon in groups of younger (18-20 years) and older (median age 71 years) subjects through the use of metaphors. Young people were more likely to select static metaphors to describe the passage of time (such as “time is a quiet, motionless ocean”). Older folks, on the other hand, described time with swift metaphors (“time is a speeding train”). In research by Joubert (1990), young subjects, when asked, said that they expect time to pass more rapidly when they become older."
The article is worth reading in its entirety, but Gaines concludes that there are five reasons why time, which begins for us as a crawling infant, develops first wheels and then wings. The reasons are:
1. We gauge time by memorable events, and memorable events are more common to youth, when our lives are by definition full of new experiences: with age comes routine.
2. The amount of time passed relative to one's age varies. High school seemed endless to me in part because the four years involved were, at the time of their completion, about one quarter of my life. Four years today would represent less than 10% of my life.
3. Our biological clock slows with age. This is theory, but Gaines allows for the possibility of an "internal pacemaker" which, as we age, does not keep pace with mechanical time, creating a false perception of time acceleration.
4. Children pay more attention to time than adults, because they are constantly counting down the minutes until things like birthdays, Christmastime...and Halloween.
5. Stress. Stress increases with age, and evidently creates a perception that "there is not enough time to get things done."
It is really this last factor which is the crucial one in my mind, for while he may not have meant it this way, I believe Gaines is implying here that this feeling of not having enough time expands to encompass life itself -- that our time is running out, that the reaper will knock his bony fingers on our doors before we've worked our way through our respective bucket lists. It is a fear as old as mankind's ability to contemplate life, and was perhaps best summed up by John Keats 200 years ago in his poem, "When I Have Fears I May Cease To Be:"
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
This more or less answers the first question. What about the second?
It seems that leaving the work force and its attendant grind, for a school environment which offered a totally different set of (welcome) challenges, so disrupted my sense of time that it fell of its track entirely for as long as six months or more. It wasn't just the excitement or the intellectual stimulation; it was the varying nature of my days. Different days brought different classes, different faces, different areas of study. My routines were not routine; they varied even within themselves, giving me a sense that no two weeks were ever completely alike. What was more, the whole experience fell under the heading of "memorable event." Returning to the college, at 32, where you arrived as a newly-minted eighteen year-old, was a tremendous moment for me, a sort of full-circle moment where I realized I had given myself a chance to do what so few people ever do: start life over from scratch. It was only when I began to settle into the groove of my new life that time hit the gas once more.
Obviously the problem here is that one cannot constantly start life over from scratch. We only get so many pages to turn. And until recently I prided myself that I was more active and more diverse in my collection of experiences than most around me anyway. In the last few years I have made a point of trying to collect new experiences almost as another man might collect rare coins or stamps or butterflies, and Los Angeles is a pretty good place to do that. Yet my perception of time has not slowed; therefore I can only conclude that my addiction to everyday routine, which I use to give myself a feeling of security and comfort, is actually working against me. Individual experiences collected weekly or bi-weekly are not enough, it seems, to counteract the gravity created by the sameness of my days. I have to find a way to introduce an element of friendly instability into my life again. I have to keep myself off-balance in the most positive possible way, by taking risks, being impulsive, and going against my own grain whenever possible. Most importantly I must not rest on any imagined laurels in the experience department. Humans survive psychologically in an unstable world by adapting themselves rapidly to change; but as I have learned, this adaptability comes with a price. The quicker we achieve a sense of normalcy about something that was hitherto exciting, the quicker it becomes a bore. And the faster our lives go.
So on a holiday largely designed for children, my advice to you is to try to incorporate some of the lessons of childhood back into your own life. Try to make more memories. Try to pay more attention to time. Get excited about events in the future. Be a little daring, a little impulsive, a little faster to break away from your routines. And above all, allow yourself to be scared. After all...it's Halloween.
It's a cliche that time moves more swiftly as you get older, but cliches are in use for a reason, and this one happens to be truer than most. When I was fifteen, a year may as well have been a decade. Now, at 44, it goes by what seems like a single season. If the progression continues, by the time I'm in my 50s each year will feel like about six weeks.
It is said that there are two types of time, mechanical and human. For a clock, every unit of time -- seconds, minutes, hours -- are all precisely the same. For a human, the speed with which time moves is literally subjective -- not only does it vary from person to person, it varies from mood to mood. "Pain passes slowly, and pleasure's gone too soon," as one song lyric put it, and this is true. Thirty seconds is an eyeblink when you are trying to say goodbye to someone you love, and it feels like three hours when stuck on an elevator with someone you hate. However, the overall trend remains the same -- with each passing year, the years feel shorter.
I am fairly certain I know almost precisely when I realized this. I was 29 years of age, and working as a supervising investigator for the District Attorney's Office in a small town in Pennsylvania. The day in question I was visiting my mom in Maryland for the weekend, and taking a walk on the streets where I had grown up. As you know by now, my career choice was a mistake. I had neither the passion nor the patience for criminal justice and I knew that by sticking to an unsuitable profession I was not only making myself unhappy, I was, as Orwell put it, "outraging my true nature." From a very young age I knew I was supposed to be a writer, I had won awards for it in school, been published in a literary magazine at 17, and at the age of 20 had famous novelists like Reynolds Price and E.L. Doctorow reading my work on the contest circuit.
Yet here I was, nearly thirty, living in a dismal little town doing a tedious job, surrounded by co-workers that, generally speaking, I distrusted and slightly disliked, writing nothing. Time ought to have been dragging; instead it seemed to be flying by. As I walked down a shallow hill, a sentence came into my head: "He was at the end of my twenties when he realized time had not grown wheels but wings."
I'm a writer, so thoughts like that -- snatches of dialogue, chunks of description, outbursts of lyric poetry, parts of scenes or fragments of story ideas -- are not unusual. Stephen King once said the entire idea for Pet Sematary came to him while crossing the road in front of his house. This particular thought, however, struck deeper than most, because my job had never been intended as a career. I had entered the world of law enforcement strictly as a means of garnering life experience which I thought would add substance to my writing. Also, to pay the bills while I composed my first novel. Yet after five years in the trade, I was no closer to beginning that novel than the day I had been handed my badge. The pressures of work had sapped my creative drive...and time was passing more and more quickly. The dismay I was feeling had begun to graduate to fear. Though I was young and fit and vital, it was as though I could feel the cold shadow of death over me -- though perhaps not so much physical death as the death of possibility, the death of dreams. There are periods in life when one is fully conscious of the full range of opportunities and possibilities open to them: we call this period youth, and when it begins to curdle into the earliest part of middle age -- roughly speaking, the thirties -- we become just as conscious that many of those possibilities have faded away. Of course the very act of choosing one course in life eliminates the others, at least temporarily; but as we age some of those losses become permanent. At a certain point it is no longer possible to become, for example, a professional athlete or a fighter pilot. I was 29, and while many courses remained at least theoretically open to me, they seemed to be sliding shut in unison before my disbelieving eyes.
The human sense of time -- the way we measure our lives by the clock -- makes us unique among the species on this planet. Other animals move with time; we, being more conscious of its passage and what that passage represents, fight against it. We are conscious of our own mortality even when we are not threatened by external danger, and this consciousness drives us in different directions. In my case it drove me out of my job. Having resigned, for six months I did almost nothing but write, and though what I was writing was raw, overdrawn and without much structure, the pleasure of tapping into my neglected abilities more than made up for the knowledge that sooner or later I would have to go back to work.
I am not writing a biography here and don't want to bog down in my life story, details of which are already scattered throughout these blogs. Suffice to say (again) that a few years later, having resumed work in my hated field and once again found it intolerable, I decided for the final time that criminal justice was not the answer -- not even to the problem of paying my rent. The time had come to find a new trade while I sharpened my skills and learned the minutia of my craft. So, at the age of 32, I went back to school, to get a second undergraduate degree. I know, I know -- I just said I wasn't writing a biography, but this detail is crucial, because it was during this period, especially the first of my two school years, that I once again experienced a difference in the way I perceived time. For the first time since my middle twenties, it was slowing down.
I can still recall the feeling of surprised joy this realization gave me. It was just five or six weeks into my "freshman" year, and it felt as if I had been in school for six months or more. Not because I was miserable, either: on the contrary, the decision to become a student again -- but this time having my own, rather luxurious apartment, a car, and the life experience of a grown man -- was probably the only stroke of authentic genius I've ever had in my life. I was happy for the first time in probably seven years, and my only fear was that time would somehow find the accelerator again and begin to pass in its familiar, unwanted blur.
Of course this is precisely what happened. My second semester passed a little faster than my first, and my third considerably faster than my second. Before I knew it I was facing graduation and the necessity of getting into graduate school. That was in 2004, and I do believe that each year since has passed slightly with greater perceived speed than the one before, until the last few -- the last two or three in particular -- were gone as soon as glimpsed. When I began keeping a daily journal, in 2006, the time period between writing the January 1 and the December 31st entries seemed enormous. Now it seems like the elapsed time between a bullet leaving a gun and it hitting the goddamn target.
All this demands a question -- actually two questions. Why does time speed up as we age, and why was I able, if only briefly, to slow it down?
As I had absolutely no answers to this, and not even anything that could be described as a theory, I consulted the Scientific American, specifically an article by Jordan Gaines Lewis. Mr. Lewis writes as follows:
"Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events. When the passage of time is measured by “firsts” (first kiss, first day of school, first family vacation), the lack of new experiences in adulthood, James morosely argues, causes “the days and weeks [to] smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
In the early 1960s, Wallach and Green studied this phenomenon in groups of younger (18-20 years) and older (median age 71 years) subjects through the use of metaphors. Young people were more likely to select static metaphors to describe the passage of time (such as “time is a quiet, motionless ocean”). Older folks, on the other hand, described time with swift metaphors (“time is a speeding train”). In research by Joubert (1990), young subjects, when asked, said that they expect time to pass more rapidly when they become older."
The article is worth reading in its entirety, but Gaines concludes that there are five reasons why time, which begins for us as a crawling infant, develops first wheels and then wings. The reasons are:
1. We gauge time by memorable events, and memorable events are more common to youth, when our lives are by definition full of new experiences: with age comes routine.
2. The amount of time passed relative to one's age varies. High school seemed endless to me in part because the four years involved were, at the time of their completion, about one quarter of my life. Four years today would represent less than 10% of my life.
3. Our biological clock slows with age. This is theory, but Gaines allows for the possibility of an "internal pacemaker" which, as we age, does not keep pace with mechanical time, creating a false perception of time acceleration.
4. Children pay more attention to time than adults, because they are constantly counting down the minutes until things like birthdays, Christmastime...and Halloween.
5. Stress. Stress increases with age, and evidently creates a perception that "there is not enough time to get things done."
It is really this last factor which is the crucial one in my mind, for while he may not have meant it this way, I believe Gaines is implying here that this feeling of not having enough time expands to encompass life itself -- that our time is running out, that the reaper will knock his bony fingers on our doors before we've worked our way through our respective bucket lists. It is a fear as old as mankind's ability to contemplate life, and was perhaps best summed up by John Keats 200 years ago in his poem, "When I Have Fears I May Cease To Be:"
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
This more or less answers the first question. What about the second?
It seems that leaving the work force and its attendant grind, for a school environment which offered a totally different set of (welcome) challenges, so disrupted my sense of time that it fell of its track entirely for as long as six months or more. It wasn't just the excitement or the intellectual stimulation; it was the varying nature of my days. Different days brought different classes, different faces, different areas of study. My routines were not routine; they varied even within themselves, giving me a sense that no two weeks were ever completely alike. What was more, the whole experience fell under the heading of "memorable event." Returning to the college, at 32, where you arrived as a newly-minted eighteen year-old, was a tremendous moment for me, a sort of full-circle moment where I realized I had given myself a chance to do what so few people ever do: start life over from scratch. It was only when I began to settle into the groove of my new life that time hit the gas once more.
Obviously the problem here is that one cannot constantly start life over from scratch. We only get so many pages to turn. And until recently I prided myself that I was more active and more diverse in my collection of experiences than most around me anyway. In the last few years I have made a point of trying to collect new experiences almost as another man might collect rare coins or stamps or butterflies, and Los Angeles is a pretty good place to do that. Yet my perception of time has not slowed; therefore I can only conclude that my addiction to everyday routine, which I use to give myself a feeling of security and comfort, is actually working against me. Individual experiences collected weekly or bi-weekly are not enough, it seems, to counteract the gravity created by the sameness of my days. I have to find a way to introduce an element of friendly instability into my life again. I have to keep myself off-balance in the most positive possible way, by taking risks, being impulsive, and going against my own grain whenever possible. Most importantly I must not rest on any imagined laurels in the experience department. Humans survive psychologically in an unstable world by adapting themselves rapidly to change; but as I have learned, this adaptability comes with a price. The quicker we achieve a sense of normalcy about something that was hitherto exciting, the quicker it becomes a bore. And the faster our lives go.
So on a holiday largely designed for children, my advice to you is to try to incorporate some of the lessons of childhood back into your own life. Try to make more memories. Try to pay more attention to time. Get excited about events in the future. Be a little daring, a little impulsive, a little faster to break away from your routines. And above all, allow yourself to be scared. After all...it's Halloween.
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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