Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 32

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Parental Wheel: or, Why Doing Chores Isn't Slavery, for Crissake

I recently read somewhere that only 28% of modern American children are required by their parents to perform chores around the house. This figure is down from something like 82% just a few decades ago. The decline is so steep, and has occurred so rapidly, that a number of parents have taken to posting pictures of their kids performing household tasks to show their commitment to teaching their little ones responsibility, and many of these images have gone viral. As is always the case nowadays however, the images have provoked a backlash.

"Are you raising a slave?" Wrote one of many irate trolls lurking in the comments section. "Did you have children to take care of the things that you don't want to do around the house?"

The idea that teaching children to do chores is selfish, or even abusive, is so patently ridiculous that it would seem to require no ridicule: the position makes fun of itself. And yet we live in an age where absurd and sub-moronic notions are not only taken seriously by large segments of our population, they are enforced by social pressure and even, in some cases, law. Now, I don't normally use this platform as a chance to weigh in on social issues. You'll notice that I haven't once mentioned politics here, despite the fact that we are presently engaged in an election race that may prove critical to the future of the country we all share. People need refuges from the ceaseless flood of criticism and vitriol that pours out of the Internet every day, and I flatter myself that some of the random topics I've discussed here -- everything from ghost stories to essays on writing techniques -- have provided a few people with moments of much-needed distraction from, well, all of that shit. But this is something I felt compelled to talk about, because it brings a much larger problem with our society into specific relief.

America has forgotten how to deal with kids.

I'm not sure precisely when this began to happen, but I remember one particular incident, which took place during my second time in graduate school, when the problem asserted itself into my consciousness in a subtle yet very direct way. The class was discussing The Wizard of Oz (the novel, not the film), and I made a passing remark that I thought Dorothy was quite the uppity little snark for a girl of ten or so, raised on a farm at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the other students, a parent, took exception to this. She stated that children of Dorothy's age were very difficult; she exampled having to use the promise of chocolate cookies just to get her own young daughter to put on her shoes.

I started laughing. "That may be your parenting technique, and it may fit the era we live in, but I assure you that in 1900, on a farm in the Midwest, children did not get cookies for putting on their shoes."

This statement did not endear me to many people in the classroom but it was the stark and simple truth. The rule on American farms, going back to Colonial times, was, "You don't work, you don't eat." This applied especially to children. They were expected to aid in the farm work as soon as they could walk, and they were not rewarded for their aid. They were simply punished for slacking, and "punishment" was often ferocious.
There was neither negotiation nor bribery involved. You didn't work, you didn't eat, and in place of food you got a belt over the butt. Sometimes with the buckle still attached. I should add that this attitude was not limited to farms. Kids were walloped, starved and worked like stevedores as a matter of course almost everywhere. In many cases it was a habit brought over from the Old Country, in others it was simply a matter of survival. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was probably the most common maxim of the poor, working, and middle classes in America for 250 years or more.

When this began to change is a matter of some figuring.
Certainly if you look at the early-middle history of this country -- indeed, well into the 1900s -- our children were, if anything, treated with severity that often crossed the border into outright brutality. Child labor of the most bestial type was not formally ended in the U.S. until 1938, and as late as 1944, a 14 year-old boy was executed by the State of South Carolina for his alleged participation in a robbery. Federal laws to curtail child abuse did not exist prior to 1974, and the line between physical discipline, such as spanking, and physical abuse that left kids with black eyes, broken teeth and even internal injuries, was blurry and indistinct. As late as my college years I remember friends and fraternity brothers discussing the whuppings they'd taken from their dads -- some of which continued into their late teens. And while this sort of thing was hardly universal, it was common enough that no one regarded it with surprise.

At the same time, I think it fairly evident that two successive generations of parents, rather than newfound laws, put paid to the old, harsh, disciplinary model of raising children. Those raised in the 50s and 60s, who had their own children in the 70s and early 1980s, had a much different attitude toward kids than their own parents did. The standard of living in the United States was unprecedentedly high, America was no longer an agricultural nation, child labor had been abolished and mandatory schooling sucked up the now-unemployable kids, relieving the parents of the necessity of being with them all day. What's more, capitalism had begun to actively encourage the indulgence of children via the buying of toys and certain foodstuffs specifically designed to please children. The 60s -70s were in any case a time of social unrest, where traditional models of behavior were being rejected wholesale. The very notion of punishment in the criminal justice system was being replaced with "rehabilitation," and popular culture began to question even fundamental concepts, like patriotism, sexual morality and gender roles. A softening of attitudes on children was inevitable and probably beneficial in many ways, but the successive generation -- those who had children in the later 1980s and afterward -- continued this trend into an extreme which does not seem to have found its limit. How else can we explain the idea that forcing children to do something as harmless as household chores is exploitative, or even abusive? How else can we explain why prosaic pictures of kids mopping floors, doing dishes and taking out the trash are going viral?

When I was a kid I was regarded by many of my friends as having the easiest and most luxurious deal of anyone in my own little peer group, even though by economic standards my family was probably slightly less well-off than many of our neighbors. This was, in part, because the household chores I was expected to perform (in tandem with my brother) included only taking out the trash, shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, helping to unload the groceries, and periodic (and reluctant) assistance with other forms of house and yard work. I never had to do the laundry, and I was never called upon to perform the unholy grail of childhood chores -- the dishes. I'm pretty sure I wasn't even asked to make my own bed. Nevertheless I felt horribly oppressed and put-upon, a veritable martyr among suburban boys. Growing up just outside Washington, D.C., where we moved from Chicago when I was five, I experienced the extreme distinctiveness of the seasons as they exist in the Mid-Atlantic states. During three of those four seasons I was constantly at work (so it seemed at the time) battling the elements on behalf of my family. When I think of my childhood it cannot be separated from memories of shoveling endless amounts of snow from walkways and our horrifically steep driveway of rough-hewn concrete; mowing the lawn with a WW-2 era push-mower that had no engine; and raking enormities of leaves -- an especially odious task when they were soaked through by icy rains, which rendered each lawn bag as heavy as a human body. I also remember an especially Vietnam-like chore, scraping away incorrectly-applied wallpaper from about a third of the house, which took literally years to complete. And with all this, and much more, I was ridiculed as having it "soft" compared to many of my friends and schoolmates, many of whom were expected to handle all this, plus even the most minute household cleaning tasks -- vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, dish-duty, you name it. As for the kids who took part-time jobs at twelve, or helped out, unpaid, with their fathers' construction or painting businesses -- forget it. I was not even a joke to these guys. I was the sort of effeminate, weak, flabby-faced aristocrat that got beheaded in droves come the French Revolution.

Now, I hated doing chores, avoided them whenever possible and half-assed them at any opportunity. If I sweat blood dragging those 100-lb piles of leaves up the hill and over the yard to the curb, it was only because I neglected to rake the fucking things until after the rains had saturated them. If my shins stung for days after I used the weed-whacker on the crab grass around the front steps, it was only because I waited to trim said grass until it was a foot high. If I got poison ivy helping my father and brother do yard work, the faint spray of rash I got over part of my belly (which didn't even itch) was trifling compared to the hideous purple blotches that broke out over their entire bodies. I was lazy, I was selfish, and I saw little hypocrisy in dragging feet while unloading the groceries and then demanding to know why dinner wasn't ready on time. In short, I was a typical suburban baby-of-the-family, who would have most definitely benefited from a strict policy of "don't work, don't eat."
Yet the chores I was expected to do, which were regarded as extremely modest during the 70s and 80s, are evidently regarded by many today as a form of parental selfishness, even slavery.

I find this both incredible and disheartening in the extreme, for I know my parents weren't hard enough on me, nor I on myself, and indeed, I knew it at the time, especially when I saw the adult self-sufficiency of so many of my schoolmates. When I arrived at college, at the just-minted age of eighteen, and I discovered, in very short order, the things I could not do, it was appalling and humiliating. I could not use a hot pot. I did not know how long it took to cook macaroni or even precisely how to do it. I didn't understand the difference between bleach and detergent. I couldn't get dishes cleaned properly. I didn't know how to open a bank account or use an ATM card. I couldn't use any tools aside from a hammer or screwdriver, and those badly. I could not even pump my own gas. And to my surprise there were others even more helpless than I. Not many, but a few: guys that couldn't keep jobs on the grounds crew because they couldn't get a power-mower started, or replace the blade on a weed-whacker, or shovel snow without damaging the concrete beneath it. It didn't take the genius of Sherlock Holmes to deduce they had even softer upbringings than I did. And I noticed, too, that these types were just the sort to quit the fastest when the going -- any going -- got rough.

By the time I was twenty I had taught myself the basics of adult living, and even took pleasure (alas, so short-lived!) in grocery shopping and writing and mailing bills, because it made me feel so grown up. Then I went to work for a country club and discovered what children who have absolutely no sense of responsibility are like. I could write an entire blog on that experience, but I'll just say that the children of Columbia Country Club made a terrific argument for the retroactive abortion. They were monsters. The rudest, brattiest, nastiest, most selfish and entitled little shits I had ever come across. Not one of them had ever raked leaves, mowed a lawn, shoveled snow, washed dishes, done their own laundry, taken out the garbage or helped cook dinner. Not one of them was subjected to any meaningful form of discipline or had any sense of the value of money or hard work. They made me, at the same age, look like fucking Oliver Twist. And none of their parents were concerned by this or even necessarily aware of it. It doesn't take much imagination to see what kind of adults they became -- or what kind of children they bore. The results are all around us.

I freely admit that I learn life lessons with pathetic slowness, but over the course of time I began to understand to the fullest degree the value of having expectations set upon me at a young age. The old saw that chores "build character," which I ridiculed mercilessly when I was a boy, is in fact literally true. Unless you have sweat yourself, you do not know the price of sweat. Unless you have worked for your money, you won't know its value. And unless you have been taught to perform a task yourself, you will never know how hard it is nor enjoy the feeling of quiet pride that you can in fact perform it. Your expectations will be unrealistic and your ability to appreciate anything diminished. My only regret -- now -- about all that mowing, raking and shoveling is that I didn't do more of it.

The key word in that statement is "now." Probably no child enjoys doing chores. Probably no child actually appreciates the lessons they are being taught by doing them, either. This is entirely irrelevant, but somehow as a nation been conditioned to believe that if a kid is unhappy, if he is throwing a tantrum or crying or has a quivering underlip, that somehow his parents have failed -- as if their only duty was to appease, rather than to raise, their baby! God knows parenthood must be appallingly difficult, but the basic idea behind parenthood could not be simpler: raise your kids so that they become responsible adults. And the best way of doing this is inculcating them with the value of work and the necessity of personal accountability. I have never been a parent, but in addition to working at that wretched country club I have been a parole officer, and I can tell you emphatically what happens to those who do not understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. And this is precisely what our society has forgotten. We have gone to such ridiculous lengths to re-invent the parental wheel that we've abandoned the first order of parental business, which is that kids learn by example. Weak, indulgent parenting leads to weak, self-indulgent children. Tough love, in the form of chores and -- gasp! -- discipline, is a case of long-term benefit, of watering an acorn now so that years later it grows into an oak and not, as is so often the case nowadays, a pussy willow.

Halloween Horror from WW2: A Documented Ghost Story

What follows is quoted directly from the book FORK-TAILED DEVIL: THE P-38 by the respected aviation historian Martin Caiden. It was included as the epilogue to his very serious and thorough study of one of the most famous fighter planes of the Second World War, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It is clear that he did not feel it belonged in the main body of a scholarly work; yet he was just as clearly unwilling to let this bizarre and chilling story go untold. I have carried it with me for thirty years, and am sharing it with you know, because if ever there was a time to tell this tale, it is Halloween.

This is what he wrote exactly as he wrote it, down to the italics:

"This is something I have pursued for more than twenty-five years. The kind of story that raises the hackles on the back of your neck. There's an immediate urge to dismiss it as preposterous, impossible.

"Because it is preposterous and impossible. Yet the records are there. A document tells what happened in deliberately cold and official terms. A field in North Africa during the war. An event took place that was so impossible that the commanding officer at the airfield demanded, and got, the signatures of hundreds of witnesses who saw the whole impossible incident. The writer insists on nothing, makes no claim as to truth or impossibility. This is what happened. As it happened. As it was seen and sworn to by hundreds of ground crewmen, and pilots, enlisted men and officers.

"A flight of P-38s had gone out on patrol. They left to cross the Mediterranean. They mixed it up with German fighters and there was a brief scrap. When the P-38s reformed one aircraft was missing. No one could recall, in the furious melee, watching him go down. They looked around, and then they started home.

"They arrived back at their field in North Africa. The one pilot who failed to return was listed as missing in action. Not yet, though. Not until his fuel ran out. Not until there wasn't even a glimmer of a chance.

"The clocked ticked slowly. Then, beyond the point of any fuel. Another two hours went by. They put his name on the list of the missing.

"It happens. That's war.

"Then the air raid alert sounded. Radar picked up a single aircraft, unknown, coming in toward the field at a fairly low altitude and high speed. Anti-aircraft guns started tracking. Some pilots ran for their planes.

"Then they saw the intruder. A P-38, alone. Coming in along a shallow dive, engines thundering. It failed to respond to radio calls. There was no response to flares fired hurriedly in the air.

"A strange approach; that flat and unwavering dive. The P-38 crossed to the center of the field.

"Suddenly the airplane seemed to stagger. It fell apart in midair, a tumble of wreckage falling toward the ground. No flash of fire, no explosion. Just that startling breakup of machinery.

"They saw a body fall clear of the wreckage. Pilots muttered, called aloud their thoughts without thinking. Then a parachute opened. Silk blossomed full. But the body hung limp in the harness.

"Close to the wreckage, the pilot collapsed. No one saw him move. Crash trucks raced to the scene.

"Those who came later saw their friends stunned, disbelieving, shaking their heads. They talked about it through the night. The next morning the light of dawn hadn't changed a thing.

"It was impossible.

"The fuel tanks of the P-38, the same airplane that was hours beyond any remaining fuel, were bone dry.

"They had been dry for several hours.

"The pilot whose parachute opened, that lowered him to his home field, had a bullet hole in his forehead. He had been dead for hours.

"Impossible.

"Yet it happened.

"And no one knows how."

The Sound of Halloween Horror

It occurred to me, as I was pondering the many facets of Halloween, that one of the most important aspects of the whole shenanigan is its music. It is, after all, sound which is the principal element of horror. Don't believe me? Watch the most terrifying sequence of any horror movie you care to name with the sound off. Now, turn the volume up and repeat it with your eyes closed. Which is the scarier experience?

As with films, there is a list of too-obvious-to mention choices in regards to fright-flick soundtracks. The first would be the original HALLOWEEN, which is arguably the most palpitating ever set to wax. PSYCHO is a serious candidate for top honors as well, and JAWS -- considered by many the scariest movie of all time -- is another that could easily make a claim for the throne. But it seems to me these selections are a bit too easy and obvious. So I'd like to give a shout out (scream out?) to some scores which are either somewhat obscure, or are attached to movies so famous that the music that powered them is often forgotten in all the shrieking.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Okay, so the film wasn't exactly bringing home Oscars by the wheelbarrow; but the score, by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, is a terrific exercise in down-the-spine creepiness. Showing a lot of the simple themes that mark Carpenter's music, it nevertheless manages a diversity of sound that is very impressive. And it is just ever so slightly reminiscent of the original HALLOWEEN theme, without seeming exploitative or derivative. (John Carpenter's talents as a composer and musician, as opposed to his writer-director chops, are only just now being fully appreciated.)

The Thing. Ennio Morricone penned this exercise in sinister minimalism, and it is just as nasty today as it was in 1982. Relying on slow, low-register double beats that resemble a dying heart that won't quite give up the ghost, it reinforces the classic film's atmosphere of isolation, mounting paranoia, and certain doom (not to mention bone-freezing cold). And yes, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth also contributed.

Hellraiser I & II. Christopher Young is not a household name, but his scores for HELLRAISER and HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II are classics. A perfect combination of creepy music-box simplicity and near-bombastic splendor, it precisely conveys the feelings aroused by the sight of the cursed Puzzle Box, as well as the diabolical Cenobites the box summons. The sequel score throws in the carnival-like nature of hell as it is depicted in the second film.

Night Sins - Okay, so this isn't a movie but a mini-series, and it's not horror but suspense. Whatever. The atmosphereof NIGHT SINS is pure horror -- horror meaning "the anticipation of a terrifying outcome" -- and composer Mark Snow, who is rightly famous for his wonderful work on THE X-FILES, brews up more magic here, with an elegiac score that demonstrates how important music is to setting a tone -- in this case, paranoia, delusions of religious and other kinds of grandeur, and (as with THE THING), isolation in the cold.

The Omen. Jerry Goldsmith's song "Ave Satani" alone would probably qualify him for this list, but the entire score -- as well as the score of the sequel, DAMIEN: OMEN II -- is a minor masterpiece. It's no easy thing to establish a theme for a character -- Satan -- who we never actually see in the film, but Goldsmith pulls it off: a few notes of sound are all we need to know the Prince of Darkness is about to pull the switch on somebody.

The Keep. Tangerine Dream was probably the seminal electronica band of the 70s and 80s, if such a distinction exists, and their work on Michael Mann's flawed but ultra-atmospheric movie is probably the best thing about it. The sound they provide is lush, lavish and occasionally awesome; hurling subtlety out the nearest window, it basically throws down a gauntlet and says, "We don't care if you like it, but if you're watching this flick, you can't escape it."

The Exorcist. This film is so iconic that mentioning it here might seem ridiculous, save for the fact that the score has been half-forgotten in the blaze of emotions summoned up by the movie itself. It's understandable, actually, because the ultimate product is quite minimalistic. But give Mike Oldfeld's Tubular Bells" a listen some dark and rainy night in the late fall when you're home alone with a Ouija board, and tell me it doesn't summon up images of possessed girls puking pea soup and priests going airborne down steps in Georgetown. The real story here, however, is that the original score for the film, penned by the iconic Lalo Schiffren, was actually rejected by the studio as being "too scary." Yup, you read that right -- too scary for a fucking horror movie.

A Nightmare on Elm Street. I'm mentioning this not because the movie needs exposure but because the score is one of the very, very few to be associated with a particular character as opposed to a film or a sequence. What I mean by this is that the theme to JAWS makes one think of the movie; the theme to PSYCHO makes one think of the shower scene; but the theme to NIGHTMARE evokes one thing and one thing alone: Freddy Krueger. A sadistic, psychopathic revenant who hunts children in their own dreams is a pretty gnarly idea, and Freddy's theme matches its master. Props to Charles Bernstein for dreaming this one up.

Friday the 13th. Harry Manfredini's legacy was complete the moment he finished his work on this terrifying soundtrack, which is slightly reminiscent of JAWS in its relentless use of deep, threatening basso notes, overlaid with shrieking, shrilling, knife-like sounds that harken images of PSYCHO. On top of this it delivers one of the most iconic six-noise signatures in the history of film: "ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha." Like NIGHTMARE, it is a signature theme that evokes the hockey-mask clad face of Jason Voorhees (and never mind that Jason didn't don his mask until Part 3). This music is relentless, exhausting, and designed to unsettle your ears.

Candyman. Some composers go for the jugular with the nearest thing handy; others prefer a subtler approach. In this case, Phillip Glass delivers a haunting melody with is well in keeping with the tragic nature of this film's villain, the vengeful ghost of a black man (Tony Todd) who was cruelly and savagely murdered by a white mob. Like all good horror music, it takes familiar-sounding notes and sharpens them just enough to give them a sinister edge, without once overdoing it.

There are a number of scores I could add to this list, but in keeping with my "rule of ten" I am going to leave them in their graves for the moment. Truth be told, I'm leaving for a Ghost concert at the Wiltern in about 45 minutes, and I need to adjust the scary-ass skull make up I am wearing so I can frighten the Uber driver.

More Halloween Horror

Fifteen days to Halloween leaves time for more contemplation of my favorite non-holiday holiday. Looking back at my earlier blog, I realized I'd only scratched the surface regarding lesser-known, lesser-appreciated or just plain cultic horror flicks. Throw in my appearance last Friday on a podcast whose topic was horror movies, and I arrive today freshly armed with ten more films that may add spice (or at least diversity) to your usual Halloween lineup of classic scare-fare. Here goes.

EUROPA REPORT (2013). I'm not normally a fan of "found footage" flicks but this well-designed, well-executed excursion in spacefright is definitely worth a look. EUROPA is the story of a mission to one of the supposedly life-capable moons of Jupiter, and how it goes very, very wrong. A variation on the "locked door" horror tale, which when handled by science-fiction (ALIEN, EVENT HORIZON, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) usually amounts to "people trapped on a claustrophobic ship getting picked off one by one," the movie takes the unusual course of having simple bad luck take the place of a conventional villain, and just when you're comfortable with misfortune, that's when the story switches gears. While hardly a classic, it does what it sets out to do, which more than I can say for many movies in this genre with much higher budgets.

RAVENOUS (1999). Like so many horror films, RAVENOUS came and went in theaters without a murmur, due in no small part to very stupid trailers that turned off many potential watchers (including myself); but it has gradually gathered a loyal following in the years since, and justly so. It opens during the Mexican War, with an American soldier (Guy Pierce) feted for an act of heroism he didn't precisely commit. His commanding officer suspects the truth and banishes him to a remote, snow-bound fort on the Western frontier. Shortly after his arrival the lone survivor of a Donner-party style disaster arrives, pleading for the garrison to come to the aid of his still-stranded friends. What follows is an offbeat, black-humorous, and occasionally touching horror film that puts deeply flawed characters up against an unusual foe -- the American Indian "wendigo" myth, which has only occasionally been tapped by American cinema.

JACK'S BACK (1988). An overlooked James Spader film from the later 80s, JACK'S BACK is much cleverer and more suspenseful than its modest budget would suggest. This is a tough movie to describe without spoiling some of its surprises, so I'll have to keep it brief and vague. Essentially it's the story of twin brothers (both portrayed by Spader) who are the usual estranged mirror-image of each other: one a do-gooding doctor, the other a sullen rebel. The brothers get unwillingly involved with a copycat Jack the Ripper killer terrorizing Los Angeles, and then more willingly with the same woman, who ultimately becomes the Ripper's next target. Throw in a psychic link between Spader and Spader, a huge plot twist about twenty minutes deep, and a pretty clever series of misdirections in re: the identity of the bad guy, and you have a surprisingly good flick that also plays on my built-in sense of 80s nostalgia.

SALVAGE (2009). I unearthed this low-budget semi-precious stone on Netflix, otherwise the source of so much petrified crap. It follows a small group of people who wake up to find their semi-suburban neighborhood on the English coast overrun with shoot-first, ask-questions-never British army commandos on the trail of...what? Well, it seems a shipping container has washed ashore nearby, one which contained a nasty something the British government wanted put away for safekeeping. Except now it's loose, and the poor neighborhood folk are trapped between the monster, which doesn't take prisoners, and the Army, which doesn't want witnesses. I enjoyed the super-ordinary quality of the characters in this story very much: a teenage daughter sent to spend an unhappy weekend with her estranged mother; the hot-mess mother herself, who is promptly caught in bed with some random guy she met at the pub; and the lover, a bumbler who provides both comedy and pathos. Though the social commentary is painfully obvious and the budget limitations weaken the horror, and while the narrative is too fractured for my liking, the sense of suspense this ugly situation generates is real, and the choice to make many of the most frightening moments occur in broad daylight on pleasant suburban streets, was genius.

SCREAM OF FEAR (1961). For decades, Hammer Studios was synonymous with lurid Technicolor horror movies starring (frequently, anyway) Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, set against backdrops of foggy English manors, and involving such iconic monsters as Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, as well as bevies of beautiful women in very low-cut gowns. SCREAM OF FEAR has almost none of this. It's in black and white, set in the decidedly non-threatening South of France, and its sole beautiful woman is in a wheelchair. It's true Christopher Lee is in the film, but he's neither a vampire nor a mummy: just a plain old doctor. The story involves a recently crippled young woman who arrives in France to spend time with her brand-new stepmother at the family's isolated home on the Mediterranean coast. When her father doesn't show up, the young lady gets suspicious that the new wife has perhaps done him in, and may now be gunning for her as well. SCREAM OF FEAR does a wonderful job of racheting up the suspense and robbing the audience of the comfort normally associated with beautiful scenery, and gives us a lovely heroine we both fear for and admire. A good bit of the film seems predictable, but there are twists-upon-twists in the last stages of the movie that I never saw coming, and the ending is savagely satisfying.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004). I'll be honest: I never actually liked the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, and I'm not a big fan of Zack Snyder, so I had less than zero expectations for this remake. It turned out to be a very pleasant surprise -- or unpleasant, since it's about flesh-eating zombies. The lovely Sarah Polley plays a married-with-kid nurse who goes to sleep in ordinary everyday Milwaukee and wakes up in a dystopian nightmare: zombies have overrun the city, law and order have broken down, and she finds herself holed up in a shopping mall with an unlikely group of ill-matched survivors, including a cop, a drug dealer, a pregnant woman and a yuppie snob. Between the zombie horde trying to break into the mall and the internal tensions which threaten to set the group at each other's throats, it's a rough ride, and it stays rough to the final credits -- and beyond! While I was annoyed by the narrative shifting away from Polley somewhat during the middle act of the film, I cared about the characters and enjoyed the pace, which is considerably faster than that of the lumbering original.

MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (2008). Based on one of Clive Barker's nastier short stories from THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, this movie's rather outré title creates a distinct misimpression. This is not a mindless splatterfest or a tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy. It's a finely crafted, highly atmospheric and emotionally affecting film that takes an utterly outrageous premise and makes it seem horrifyingly real. A struggling photographer named Leon (a young Bradley Cooper) in New York City, looking to catch the darkest subject matter possible to attract the attention of a powerful gallery owner (Brooke Shields), stumbles upon a mystery much darker than he bargained for. People are vanishing on the subway after dark, ne'er to be heard from again, and Leon begins to suspect a mysterious man he has occasionally glimpsed in his photos (Vinnie Jones) as the culprit. This suspicion grows into an obsession, and takes Leon into the bowels of the subway system, where he is confronted by an evil much more monstrous than your average everyday serial killer. MEAT TRAIN was the victim of a very unfortunate feud between Clive Barker and a pissant studio executive who deliberately sabotaged its release, but it's quite a good exercise in horror, alternating brutal violence with mounting paranoia and a moving love story. It's got its flaws, most notably a plot hole or two (or three) and an unfortunate use of CGI where practical effects were warranted, but overall it's worth a shot.

DARK WAS THE NIGHT (2014). This is another of the semi-precious stones I dug up on Netflix. It's the tale of a rural cop in the Way Up North (Kevin Durand) who is reeling from a double tragedy -- the death of his son and a subsequent separation from his wife. Amidst this grief comes a series of bizarre and violent occurrences which he firsts suspects are a sophisticated and ugly prank, then perhaps the work of some kind of animal, but turn out to be something much worse than either. This film has some neat jump-scares and a very washed-out, brooding atmosphere redolent small-town, Pacific Northwest isolation, but the real joy is Kevin Durand. His thousand-yard stare and haunted face show a man suffering an enormity of grief in feverish silence; at the same time he has to juggle a new partner (Lukas Haas), a mob of terrified and angry townsfolk, his estranged wife and surviving child...and, oh yeah, deal with the mysterious monster in the woods.

SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT (1972). I wasn't sure if I should list this one, because in truth it isn't a great or even a particularly good movie, but it does have enough atmosphere to merit a look, especially if you care for 70s films and their particular visual aesthetic. This one revolves around an abandoned mansion with a troubled history which is about to be sold at Christmastime to a wealthy new owner -- trouble is, the mansion isn't really abandoned. In fact, it's home to a grudge-bearing, axe-wielding loony with a man's voice and a woman's name. Sound cliched? It isn't, because this is not your usual slasher story but a complex tale of revenge with a surprisingly deep, if somewhat improbable, backstory, and some definite mystery as to the identity of the killer. There is something about celluloid that makes horror films from the 60s - 70s particularly gritty on the screen, and this one is no exception.

THE BLOB (1988). No horror movie list is complete without a couple of outright monster movies, and since monster movies are becoming an increasingly rare sub- with the genre (and never mind DARK WAS THE NIGHT) I'm chucking this one in here. No, it's not the 50s original with Steve McQueen, it's the half-forgotten late-80s remake starring...Kevin Dillon. Sounds like a piece of shit? Well, it was co-written by Frank Darabont, who gave us the screenplay for THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and also directed THE MIST, which would have made this list except it's too well known. Basically the story of a meteor which crashes near a small town in the heartland and releases a mindless blob of protien-devouring goo that gets bigger the more protien (read: flesh) it consumes, the remake was much faster paced that the original, had some wickedly gruesome deaths, and gleefully violated a horror-movie taboo by having the blob devour an annoying child actor. It's true Kevin Dillon's leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding, SFW rebel is an exhausted cliche, but there are some enjoyable turns of plot in this film which, along with its speed and merciless treatment of its characters, keep everything blobbing along nicely.

WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971). Many consider this the best Australian film ever made; it is certainly one of the most unsettling, disturbing movies I've ever seen -- so much so I couldn't finish it the first time I tried watching. Set in the outback in the 1970s, it's the story of a snobbish, unhappy schoolteacher who, on the way to meet his girlfriend in Sydney, finds himself stuck in a remote town called Yabba where there is nothing to do but drink, gamble, fight, screw and kill things. Essentially the story of one man's spiral into total spiritual and physical degredation, it establishes a mood of impending doom which is almost unbearable. More than that, it is a harsh, even brutal expose of Australian life -- both the hypocritical snobbery of the middle class and the self-destructive and vicious ways of the rural poor. Many consider the kangaroo hunt scene, which was real, to be unwatchable, but to me the entire film is unwatchable -- and I mean it in the best possible way. This is a horror film which is all the more horrifying for being so completely real. (This film is also known as OUTBACK.)

Now, I'm not claiming most of these movies to be classics or horror heavyweights of the caliber, say, of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET; no, sir. Most of them don't, if you'll pardon the expression, come to within even screaming distance. But I've found that I get a little weary of dragging out the old faves every year, and like a vampire bored with gorgeous college girls who heads to a trailer park just for the variety, I'm trying to expand my horizons...dark though they may be.

Halloween Horror

It being Halloween month (yes, I celebrate Halloween all month), I was going to list my "greatest horror films of all time," but quickly realized that too many of them are universally popular: do you really need to be told that I think HALLOWEEN, THE THING, HELLRAISER, ALIEN, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET are great flicks, or that I take shameless, fear-filled joy in watching the FRIDAY THE 13TH series -- at least until the fourth or fifth installment? Let's face it: so much of movie-reviewing is simply restating the obvious, and trying to sound clever while you do it. So, to hell with that. Instead, I am going to give you a list of horror films which I consider either minor classics, overlooked gems, or films not normally thought of as belonging to this genre which I believe deserve honorable mention within it.

Here they are:

THE KEEP (1983). Michael Mann's least well-known movie, THE KEEP died a quick and quiet death at the box office when it was originally released, but has developed a loyal cult following since. The story of a troop of German soldiers who occupy a deserted castle in Rumania during WW2 and accidentally awaken its sole, supernatural occupant, this film is a positive feast of horror-movie atmosphere, making lush use of fog, shadow, and light, as well as a wonderfully atmospheric electronica score supplied by Tangerine Dream. Jürgen Prochnow is terrific as the decent, conscience-troubled German captain who cannot understand what is killing his men; Gabriel Byrne rocks as the terrifying SS officer sent to assist him; Ian McKellen and Eva Watson play Jewish folklore experts brought to the Keep against their will to aid the Germans, and Scott Glenn appears as a mysterious and very reluctant hero. The film suffers badly from terrible editing -- the original cut was three hours and the studio hacked it to about 1:45, causing Mann to largely disown the finish product -- and there are a host of other issues, including a barely comprehensible plot, but for me, this one is all about the atmosphere. Seldom has a horror movie lookedso much like a horror movie.

THE HIDDEN (1987). Okay, strictly speaking this isn't so much a horror film as a mad, mad mash of action and sci-fi, but it has enough elements of horror to get a pass. THE HIDDEN is the story of a quirky FBI agent named Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) and a hard-bitten LAPD detective named Beck (Michael Nouri) who team up to investigate a series of hyper-violent crimes committed by ordinary people with no prior history of criminality. Twisting and turning through black comedy, buddy-buddy cop convention, science-fiction and outright horror, THE HIDDEN pits our ill-starred heroes against a bank-robbing accountant in a stolen black Ferrari, a hospital patient who won't take no for an answer from anyone, a stripper who carries a machine gun in her purse, and a dog that kills his owner. Yep, you read that right: in this film you never know who, or what, is going to flip its lid and go on a vicious spree of theft and violence, and the fun is in watching the unflappable Gallagher and the baffled Beck try to cope. It also features a host of familiar character actors and perhaps the best car chase in the history of cinema.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974). Often credited as the first slasher film, this movie deserves a much stronger endorsement, for it is anything but a forgettable massacre of acting-school dropouts: in fact, it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. Basically, it's about a lunatic who stalks a group of college girls who have elected to stay in their snowbound sorority house over the holidays -- but the story runs much, much deeper than that. Mingling psychological horror and unbearable suspense with outbursts of sudden violence, we are introduced to several subjects who might -- or might not -- be the killer, as well as well-formed characters we actually give a damn about (Margo Kidder is especially brilliant as a profane love-'em-and-leave-'em type with a lethal wit). A movie that is without gore or nudity and almost completely without blood, BLACK CHRISTMAS remains utterly relentless from the very first frame to the oh-God-anything-but-that ending, and invented a number of what would later become horror movie tropes. It also deeply influenced its better-known descendants, HALLOWEEN and WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. To be blunt, I watched this movie for the first time when I was 35 years old and spent the night propped up against the wall of my bedroom with a 9mm pistol on my nightstand, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat. It also features John Saxon, who later appeared in two of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995). John Carpenter gave us HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and THEY LIVE, so it can be forgiven if you've never heard of his somewhat less successful take on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos. MADNESS is the story of John Trent (Sam Neill), a cynical insurance investigator who has been hired by a publishing magnate to locate their most profitable author, a reclusive horror-writer named Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow, again!), who has vanished while writing his latest novel. Neill suspects the whole disappearance is a publicity stunt, but after reading Cane's Lovecraft-style novels he begins to be troubled by horrible nightmares, and at one point is even attacked by Cane's agent, who has evidently gone insane. Believing Cane has left him a "map" to his location hidden in the covers of his novels, Trent dutifully proceeds to rural New Hampshire to dig up Kane, but is shocked when he finds himself in the supposedly fictional town of Hobb's End, where Kane's novels are set. A series of bizarre incidents with the townspeople rattle Trent badly, but he's still convinced everything he's seeing is a show arranged by the publisher to promote sales..at least until people begin to die violent deaths right in front of him. Murder, however, is the least of Trent's problems, because it seems as if the terrible nightmares he's been having are actually coming to life. People are turning into monsters, time is shifting out of phase, and reality itself seems to be conforming to the events of Kane's latest novel. But can any of this actually be happening? And if it is, how can he prevent the demented author from "writing" the unhappiest ending of all? MADNESS, while by no means a great film, combines a few good jump-scares with a mind-bending plot and an oddly satisfying, tongue-in-cheek climax. Plus, it's got David Warner, too, who cut his horror-movie teeth on THE OMEN.

DAGON (2002). Another spin on Lovecraft, this time directed by Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon, this is a surprisingly well-crafted lower-budget horror film. The story begins on a boat off the coast of rural Spain. A stock market tycoon played by Ezra Godden (evidently chosen for his resemblance to Jeffrey Combs) is vacationing with his hot Spanish girlfriend Barbara and their friends Vicki and Howard. Paul has been having weird dreams set underwater and featuring a mysterious but terrifying girl, which distract him and cause him to quarrel with Barbara. A sudden storm drives their boat onto some rocks and injures Vicki, forcing Paul and Barbara to head inland for help. Arriving at the desolate, run-down, storm-swept town of Imboca, they part ways and both rapidly discover that the inhabitants of the town are fishy...literally. Barbara is kidnapped by a mysterious priest while Paul escapes a mob of what appear to be only partially human townspeople and encounters an old drunk named Ezequiel. Ezequiel, the town's only completely human resident, knows the grisly secret behind the transformations of the townsfolk from peaceable, churchgoing fisherman into monsters who skin outsiders alive and perform gruesome sacrifices to appease a mysterious ocean god: but Paul is more interested in finding his lady love and getting away. When he encounters...literally...the girl of his dreams in town, however, he begins to wonder whether Barbara or the strange, half-human named Uxia is the woman is where his final destiny lies. DAGON is not a masterpeice, but it largely delivers the goods. The cast is small, the decayed, doomed, dark-and-stormy night atmosphere is right out of a Resident Evil video game, and it relies very heavily on innuendo and setup rather than gore for its scares...until it doesn't, whereupon it delivers some of the most gruesome moments I've ever seen in a horror film: a man literally flayed alive as he quotes scripture. The best horror films often amount to nothing more than "good people in a bad situation" and that is definitely the case here.

NEAR DARK (1987). "Bill, that's the worst idea I've ever heard!" So said Lance Henriksen to Bill Paxton when the latter tried to sell him on the idea of a "vampire Western." Fortunately, Henriksen agreed to read the script for NEAR DARK, and the rest is horror history. Granted, this movie flew well under the radar when it was released, but like THE KEEP it has grown a strong cult following; unlike THE KEEP, however, it really is a fine movie in its own right. DARK takes the familiar tale of a group of murderous drifters traveling the dusty backroads of the American heartland and gives it a vampire-shaped twist. Throw in romantic tension between a hot female vampire and a naive farm boy (Adrian Pasdar) she wants to initiate into the group, and you have the setting for entertaining, and occasionally jarring, mayhem. In addition to having the bonus of re-uniting three core members of ALIENS (Henricksen, Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein) as decidedly unglamorous vampires, it features assured direction by a then-unknown Kathryn Bigelow and a lot of snappy, and often very humorous, dialogue, such as when the Henriksen is questioned about how old he is and replies, in true Henriksen deadpan-fashion, "Well, let me put it this way. I fought for the South." After a brief pause he adds, as if revealing an important secret, "We lost." They may have, but you won't if you dig up this bloody little gem.

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010). I call this a "wash your brain" kind of movie, in that after you see it, you sort of want to...well, wash your brain. As a former member of law enforcement I know all the horrible things human beings can do to each other, and most of them happen in this shattering Korean film. A combination of suspense, horror and action, DEVIL pits a vengeance-obsessed cop (Byung-hun Lee) against the relentless serial killer (Min-sik Choi) who murdered his pregnant wife. Sound familiar? It is, until 45 minutes in, when the cop captures the murderer, leaving you to wonder where the hell the rest of the story can go. Basically, it goes to hell. Lee decides he is going to play a brutal game with his nemesis, letting Choi go only to hunt him down again and again, each time administering more sadistic punishments. The serial killer, who is no slouch in the sadism department (his best friend is a cannibal), retaliates by targeting Lee's nearest and dearest, until the tit-for-tat cycle of violence escalates to an apocalyptic degree. A terrifying look at what happens when a good man gives in to savage impulses, and a bad man refines his own to Satanic levels, I SAW THE DEVIL is not a movie you can easily forget -- even if you try. And Min-sik Choi is one of the most terrifying villains I have ever seen on screen.

THE WICKER MAN (1973). I freely admit that by the time I'd gotten an hour deep into this movie I very nearly turned it off. It was so bizarre, so deliberately weird, and so inexplicably filled with singing that I couldn't grasp what the hell was happening or why I should care. Only my affection for its stars -- Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee -- kept me going, and I'm damned glad it did. THE WICKER MAN is the story of a British policeman named Howie (Woodward) who flies out to the remote, clannish, half-forgotten Scottish island of Summerisle, to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Almost immediately upon landing he begins to suspect the tight-lipped islanders aren't telling him everything, but his frustrated investigation rapidly yields one piece of very disconcerting information: on Summerisle, Christianity is dead and Celtic Paganism is the one true faith. Howie, a devout and somewhat self-righteous Christian, is revolted by this, and by the wanton sexuality of the island's female population. Encountering the island's de facto ruler, Lord Summerisle (Lee), Howie gradually begins to suspect that Rowan Morrison may not have been murdered as he first suspected, but may in fact have been kidnapped preparatory to some Celtic ritual of human sacrifice. Determined to save Rowan's life, he searches the island from one end to the other without success, before deciding on an even more radical plan of action: he will infiltrate the "cult" by masquerading as one of them. Only then will he discover the answer to the question that brought him to Summerisle and has now placed his life in jeopardy: what the devil happened to Rowan Morrison? The last half-hour of this movie is a gradual screw-turning of suspense, culminating in the most shocking end to a film since the original PLANET OF THE APES.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978). Whenever I get depressed about the spate of remakes, reboots and "re-imaginings" coming out of Hollywood, one of the films I can use to buck myself up is Philip Kaufman's 1970s take on the old 50s horror classic. INVASION begins with a lab inspector from the department of health in San Fransisco (Brooke Adams) beginning to notice some unpleasant changes in her live-in boyfriend. She's also noticed a weird new type of flower blossoming all over town, and has even taken a specimen to the lab for analysis. She confides in fellow health inspector (Donald Sutherland), who has an unrequited crush on her, but Donald simply recommends she go speak with his close friend, a glib Dr. Phil-type psychologist played by Leonard Nimoy. The doc remarks that a number of people have come to him in recent weeks expressing feelings that the people they know are NOT the people they know, but have changed in some inexpressible way. They look the same but appear emotionless and cold. When Sutherland's other friends (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) discover hard evidence that people are in fact being "substituted" via a weird and horrible process related to the mysterious plants springing up over town, the evidence vanishes and our gang of reluctant heroes tries to raise the alarm, only to discover that that the substitutes have already insinuated themselves in key positions all over town, and have identified the gang as threats to their nebulous agenda. Some of them just want to escape the city, but Sutherland realizes that unless these "plants" are cut off at the root, the invasion will soon spread its tendrils across the country...and the world. Although this movie suffers from needless exposition and some ragged plot holes, it's pretty damned gripping and works immensely hard -- and succeeds! -- in ramping up the paranoia that drives the story. "Horror" is defined as the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and the outcome of this movie is pretty goddamned terrifying.

EVENT HORIZON (1997). Paul W.S. Anderson is probably nobody's favorite director, but then again, neither is Jack Shoulder, and he directed THE HIDDEN, so perhaps this was his Buster Douglas moment. In any event, Anderson hit an inside-the-park home run with this exercise in sci-fi horror that again gives us the pleasure of Sam Neill's company. Sam plays a recently widowed scientist who (just to add to his woes) designed the Event Horizon, a lightspeed-capable spaceship that disappeared on its maiden voyage seven years earlier. At the opening of the film, a signal has been received from the missing ship, and a rescue craft commanded by a flinty Lawrence Fishburne is dispatched to the furthest regions of the solar system to investigate, with Neill as his unwanted scientific advisor. Discovering the Horizon orbiting Neptune, they board the ship only to find it a sort of haunted house in space: the original crew is missing, and each member of the rescue ship begins to experience terrible hallucinations, which lead to gruesome consequences. When the rescue ship is damaged in an explosion, the now-stranded team begins to realize that the experimental drive Neill created to achieve faster than-light-travel has done a lot more that cheat the laws of physics: it's opened something...or awakened something...or pissed something off. And that something has elaborate and God-awful plans for the crew. EVENT HORIZON does with skill and a certain grim panache what hack and schlock directors try and fail to do with such numbing regularity: it disturbs the audience as opposed to merely disgusting them, by creating well-drawn characters we give a damn about and placing them in an unbearable mess.

There they are. Ten movies which, if nothing else, will serve to remind you of what bloody month it is. Oh, and if anyone has any under-the-radar horror films they've discovered over the years, please feel free to let me know.