Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 34
July 5, 2016
Those of Damned Memory
Never meet your heroes.
-- Michael Bentt
When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was Tales of the Gold Monkey, an action-adventure saga set in the South Seas in 1938. The hero was Jake Cutter, a handsome, cigar-chewing ex-fighter pilot who was portrayed by Stephen Collins. Due to a conflict of wills between the show's hard-nosed producer, Donald Bellisario, and its network, ABC, the series was abruptly canceled after its first season, but I never forgot it, and when Tales was finally released on DVD a few years ago, I wasted no time buying it and revisiting the famed Monkey Bar on the fictional island of Bora Gora, where Jake could always be found, smoking cheap cigars and arguing with his one-eyed dog.
Cut to late 2014, when Collins' then-wife, the actress Faye Grant, who had met him on the set of Tales, handed over an audio tape to the LAPD in which Collins' could supposedly be heard confessing to a marriage counselor that he had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with a female minor many years before. A nasty scandal followed, not leastwise because Collins had portrayed a paragon of fatherly virtue on the long-running television show 7th Heaven. One consequence of the scandal was that 7th Heaven was immediately pulled from the broadcast lineup on UP TV, a "faith friendly" network which relied on "7H" re-runs to pad its schedule. Another, on a strictly personal level, was that I received several private communications, not always tactfully put, from people asking me how I felt about the news. Did the allegations against Collins affect my feelings for Tales of the Gold Monkey? Would I continue to watch the show? Did I regret writing such a fabulous review of it on Amazon? How did it feel to know one of my childhood heroes had been portrayed by a man alleged to have sexually abused a minor right around the same time the show was being produced?
My answers have been consistent between then and now: No, my feelings for the show haven't changed. Yes, I would continue to watch it. No, I did not regret encouraging others to do so. As for the fourth question, the answer is direct and somewhat vulgar: It felt like shit. It felt like shit in October, 2014, and it feels just as shitty now, in July of 2016. But the questions themselves provoked a much more important question which still troubles me, particularly in the wake of the much larger and uglier scandal involving Bill Cosby, which is just now beginning to play out in the courts. Where, precisely, do we draw the line between the artist as a human being, and the art he creates? And what long-term risks are run when we place prohibitions on art because the artist himself has become tainted?
You will note above that I mentioned UP TV's decision to pull 7th Heaven from its lineup, and thus, in effect, remove Stephen Collins from public view.
A similar reaction took place in regards to Cosby Show re-runs on multiple networks, but there the reaction went deeper. An effort is actually being made to have Cosby's star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame removed, just as Penn State removed the statue of Joe Paterno in the wake of revelations that "Joe Pa" knew of, but did little to stop, sexual crimes being perpetrated by a member of his staff. The idea is not merely to prevent the show, or the individual, from being seen, heard or remembered, but to obliterate public references to them, to revoke their honors, to perform, in other words, what the Romans would have called damnatio memoriae -- a "condemnation of memory."
Damnatio memoriae was the somewhat Orwellian Roman practice of obliterating all public references to a once-powerful individual, so as to erase them not only from formal history but from human memory. Statues, murals, coins, scrolls -- anything which bore the likeness or the name of the damned person was defaced or destroyed, so that in a very short period of time it would be almost physically impossible, in an era where photography and audio recordings did not exist, to prove he or she had existed at all. It is safe to say that the banishment of Collins and Cosby from the airwaves, and the attempt to revoke Cosby's star and Paterno's statue, are part of our own version of Damnatio memoraie, but in all cases there is a deeper and somewhat less honorable motive at work than the desire to punish a wrongdoer for a shameful act. The real motive is to allow us, the public, to forget that we once idolized someone who is now in disgrace.
I never cared much for Bill Cosby or Joe Paterno, but I did admire Stephen Collins with the sort of starry-eyed admiration only a kid can have for someone who portrays his hero, and the trouble with Collins does make me wonder to what extent the past can or should be be rewritten or even erased by the circumstances of the present. Does The Cosby Show become less funny or less culturally important because Bill Cosby may have been a serial rapist while it was being shot? Do Tales and 7th Heaven disappear into the Orwellian memory hole because Collins admitted to three "inappropriate" sexual acts with minors? Should Paterno's entire legacy as a coach be obliterated because of his failure to stop a sexual predator? The answer in many people's minds seems to be yes: the inconvenient past is subject to the condemnation of memory. But this only leads to another question: where does it stop? Stephen Collins had a role in the classic film All The President's Men; must we pull airings of that from the television, too? And what about the idea of rebooting "Tales," which went around Hollywood a few years ago? Out of the question now! It seems that nothing whatever can grow from the soil of which are retroactively tainted by the alleged crimes of their stars, despite the fact that the shows themselves, both as concepts and as entities, are entirely separate from the actors cast to star in them. It is evidently not enough for people to say, "I'm not going to watch that show because such-and-such did so-and-so"; it now seems that people must go a step further and say, "Liability extends to the show itself and not just the actor. If the actor is disgraced, the show is disgraced. If the actor is erased from history, then the show must be erased, too."
This frightens me in many ways, not merely because it is unfair to everyone else involved -- Malcom Jamal-Warner, who played Cosby's son on TCS, noted that by pulling it from syndication "they are taking money out of my pocket, too" -- but because of the implications for every other aspect of human life. It seems to me that the statement that the past is malleable, that its ugly or embarrassing aspects can be removed as easily as a wart, belongs, or ought to belong, more to the Oceania of 1984 than to the America of 2016. Because once this practice of toppling statues and prying up Stars on Boulevards starts, it may be impossible to stop, and the really frightful fact is that it
can be applied anywhere; to books, to paintings, to music, and, as Orwell repeatedly warned us, even to people and history themselves. At present, in this country, there is ongoing a systematic defacement of Civil War-era monuments, statues, plaques and so forth which is positively reminiscent both of the afformentioned ancient Rome and of the former Soviet Union circa 1991. Some would have you believe this is a de-glorification of the Confederacy, but as with any damnatio memoraie the true purpose is not the righting of a wrong but the destruction of unpleasant reminders and inconvenient -- or humiliating -- facts.
I myself will continue to watch "Tales" because I enjoy it, and because I can differentiate in my mind the actions of Collins the man from the doings of the fictional Jake Cutter. As Orwell said, the first thing you ask of a wall is that it stand up, which is a separate question from what larger purpose the wall serves. Well, the first thing we ask of television is that it entertain. This is independent of the larger question of whether an actor or a director is a despicable person or has committed despicable deeds. History shows us that many actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and suchlike have been disagreeable, dubious or even monstrous human beings. Erroll Flynn liked his women young -- as in "statutory rape" young -- but I will never take less pleasure in Robin Hood as a consequence. Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, but I won't switch off his music when it comes on the radio. Salvador Dali was a psychopath and a sexual deviant, but I won't hurry past his exhibits at the Getty or LACMA as a result. It is not a question of suppressing knowledge of their faults or of excusing those faults; quite the opposite, it is a question of placing one's admiration on the side of the creation rather than the creator. I think there are times when it is perhaps permissible to lump the artist in with his art, but by and large I believe we ought to differentiate the two. It should be possible for someone to say, "I love The Cosby Show -- I think it is funny and of enormous historical importance due to its groundbreaking portrayal of a black family as upper middle class rather than poor," while at the same time abominating the alleged acts of Cosby himself. The act of watching and enjoying his show is distinct, or at least can be distinct, from supporting the man.
The desire to destroy unpleasant reminders is as old humankind (who hasn't thrown away or incinerated photographs or letters from an ex?) but the habit of refusing to listen to music, or to read a book, or to see a movie or view a painting, simply because we dislike the artist rather than because we dislike his art, is relatively new one and has only been steadily gaining acceptability since about the time of the Russian Revolution. It began in large part because of the necessity for mental conformity among left-wing intellectuals who had to fall in line with Marxist (meaning Soviet) ideology. On the political right it seems to have begun somewhat later, during the Cold War. More recently it has seeped into all forms of thought, political or no, and can be found in people who have no political feelings whatever. It is a form of mental leprosy which is rooted in the belief that nothing anyone who disagrees with us or offends us says could be interesting or possess any validity. We see this diseased thinking most often in matters where someone's political or religious beliefs have been injured, but as the cases of Collins and Cosby (et al) show us, it also extends into subtler and more dangerous arenas. For what is more threatening to our own security than the idea of a malleable past, which can be reshaped, rewritten, sanitized at will? For anything to progress -- an art form, a person, a nation -- the past must remain objective and immutable, to serve as guidance for the future. It is by our failures -- placing trust in the wrong people, for example, or idolizing a human being we know to be as fallible as ourselves -- that we often learn the most painful, and the most valuable lessons.
-- Michael Bentt
When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was Tales of the Gold Monkey, an action-adventure saga set in the South Seas in 1938. The hero was Jake Cutter, a handsome, cigar-chewing ex-fighter pilot who was portrayed by Stephen Collins. Due to a conflict of wills between the show's hard-nosed producer, Donald Bellisario, and its network, ABC, the series was abruptly canceled after its first season, but I never forgot it, and when Tales was finally released on DVD a few years ago, I wasted no time buying it and revisiting the famed Monkey Bar on the fictional island of Bora Gora, where Jake could always be found, smoking cheap cigars and arguing with his one-eyed dog.
Cut to late 2014, when Collins' then-wife, the actress Faye Grant, who had met him on the set of Tales, handed over an audio tape to the LAPD in which Collins' could supposedly be heard confessing to a marriage counselor that he had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with a female minor many years before. A nasty scandal followed, not leastwise because Collins had portrayed a paragon of fatherly virtue on the long-running television show 7th Heaven. One consequence of the scandal was that 7th Heaven was immediately pulled from the broadcast lineup on UP TV, a "faith friendly" network which relied on "7H" re-runs to pad its schedule. Another, on a strictly personal level, was that I received several private communications, not always tactfully put, from people asking me how I felt about the news. Did the allegations against Collins affect my feelings for Tales of the Gold Monkey? Would I continue to watch the show? Did I regret writing such a fabulous review of it on Amazon? How did it feel to know one of my childhood heroes had been portrayed by a man alleged to have sexually abused a minor right around the same time the show was being produced?
My answers have been consistent between then and now: No, my feelings for the show haven't changed. Yes, I would continue to watch it. No, I did not regret encouraging others to do so. As for the fourth question, the answer is direct and somewhat vulgar: It felt like shit. It felt like shit in October, 2014, and it feels just as shitty now, in July of 2016. But the questions themselves provoked a much more important question which still troubles me, particularly in the wake of the much larger and uglier scandal involving Bill Cosby, which is just now beginning to play out in the courts. Where, precisely, do we draw the line between the artist as a human being, and the art he creates? And what long-term risks are run when we place prohibitions on art because the artist himself has become tainted?
You will note above that I mentioned UP TV's decision to pull 7th Heaven from its lineup, and thus, in effect, remove Stephen Collins from public view.
A similar reaction took place in regards to Cosby Show re-runs on multiple networks, but there the reaction went deeper. An effort is actually being made to have Cosby's star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame removed, just as Penn State removed the statue of Joe Paterno in the wake of revelations that "Joe Pa" knew of, but did little to stop, sexual crimes being perpetrated by a member of his staff. The idea is not merely to prevent the show, or the individual, from being seen, heard or remembered, but to obliterate public references to them, to revoke their honors, to perform, in other words, what the Romans would have called damnatio memoriae -- a "condemnation of memory."
Damnatio memoriae was the somewhat Orwellian Roman practice of obliterating all public references to a once-powerful individual, so as to erase them not only from formal history but from human memory. Statues, murals, coins, scrolls -- anything which bore the likeness or the name of the damned person was defaced or destroyed, so that in a very short period of time it would be almost physically impossible, in an era where photography and audio recordings did not exist, to prove he or she had existed at all. It is safe to say that the banishment of Collins and Cosby from the airwaves, and the attempt to revoke Cosby's star and Paterno's statue, are part of our own version of Damnatio memoraie, but in all cases there is a deeper and somewhat less honorable motive at work than the desire to punish a wrongdoer for a shameful act. The real motive is to allow us, the public, to forget that we once idolized someone who is now in disgrace.
I never cared much for Bill Cosby or Joe Paterno, but I did admire Stephen Collins with the sort of starry-eyed admiration only a kid can have for someone who portrays his hero, and the trouble with Collins does make me wonder to what extent the past can or should be be rewritten or even erased by the circumstances of the present. Does The Cosby Show become less funny or less culturally important because Bill Cosby may have been a serial rapist while it was being shot? Do Tales and 7th Heaven disappear into the Orwellian memory hole because Collins admitted to three "inappropriate" sexual acts with minors? Should Paterno's entire legacy as a coach be obliterated because of his failure to stop a sexual predator? The answer in many people's minds seems to be yes: the inconvenient past is subject to the condemnation of memory. But this only leads to another question: where does it stop? Stephen Collins had a role in the classic film All The President's Men; must we pull airings of that from the television, too? And what about the idea of rebooting "Tales," which went around Hollywood a few years ago? Out of the question now! It seems that nothing whatever can grow from the soil of which are retroactively tainted by the alleged crimes of their stars, despite the fact that the shows themselves, both as concepts and as entities, are entirely separate from the actors cast to star in them. It is evidently not enough for people to say, "I'm not going to watch that show because such-and-such did so-and-so"; it now seems that people must go a step further and say, "Liability extends to the show itself and not just the actor. If the actor is disgraced, the show is disgraced. If the actor is erased from history, then the show must be erased, too."
This frightens me in many ways, not merely because it is unfair to everyone else involved -- Malcom Jamal-Warner, who played Cosby's son on TCS, noted that by pulling it from syndication "they are taking money out of my pocket, too" -- but because of the implications for every other aspect of human life. It seems to me that the statement that the past is malleable, that its ugly or embarrassing aspects can be removed as easily as a wart, belongs, or ought to belong, more to the Oceania of 1984 than to the America of 2016. Because once this practice of toppling statues and prying up Stars on Boulevards starts, it may be impossible to stop, and the really frightful fact is that it
can be applied anywhere; to books, to paintings, to music, and, as Orwell repeatedly warned us, even to people and history themselves. At present, in this country, there is ongoing a systematic defacement of Civil War-era monuments, statues, plaques and so forth which is positively reminiscent both of the afformentioned ancient Rome and of the former Soviet Union circa 1991. Some would have you believe this is a de-glorification of the Confederacy, but as with any damnatio memoraie the true purpose is not the righting of a wrong but the destruction of unpleasant reminders and inconvenient -- or humiliating -- facts.
I myself will continue to watch "Tales" because I enjoy it, and because I can differentiate in my mind the actions of Collins the man from the doings of the fictional Jake Cutter. As Orwell said, the first thing you ask of a wall is that it stand up, which is a separate question from what larger purpose the wall serves. Well, the first thing we ask of television is that it entertain. This is independent of the larger question of whether an actor or a director is a despicable person or has committed despicable deeds. History shows us that many actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and suchlike have been disagreeable, dubious or even monstrous human beings. Erroll Flynn liked his women young -- as in "statutory rape" young -- but I will never take less pleasure in Robin Hood as a consequence. Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, but I won't switch off his music when it comes on the radio. Salvador Dali was a psychopath and a sexual deviant, but I won't hurry past his exhibits at the Getty or LACMA as a result. It is not a question of suppressing knowledge of their faults or of excusing those faults; quite the opposite, it is a question of placing one's admiration on the side of the creation rather than the creator. I think there are times when it is perhaps permissible to lump the artist in with his art, but by and large I believe we ought to differentiate the two. It should be possible for someone to say, "I love The Cosby Show -- I think it is funny and of enormous historical importance due to its groundbreaking portrayal of a black family as upper middle class rather than poor," while at the same time abominating the alleged acts of Cosby himself. The act of watching and enjoying his show is distinct, or at least can be distinct, from supporting the man.
The desire to destroy unpleasant reminders is as old humankind (who hasn't thrown away or incinerated photographs or letters from an ex?) but the habit of refusing to listen to music, or to read a book, or to see a movie or view a painting, simply because we dislike the artist rather than because we dislike his art, is relatively new one and has only been steadily gaining acceptability since about the time of the Russian Revolution. It began in large part because of the necessity for mental conformity among left-wing intellectuals who had to fall in line with Marxist (meaning Soviet) ideology. On the political right it seems to have begun somewhat later, during the Cold War. More recently it has seeped into all forms of thought, political or no, and can be found in people who have no political feelings whatever. It is a form of mental leprosy which is rooted in the belief that nothing anyone who disagrees with us or offends us says could be interesting or possess any validity. We see this diseased thinking most often in matters where someone's political or religious beliefs have been injured, but as the cases of Collins and Cosby (et al) show us, it also extends into subtler and more dangerous arenas. For what is more threatening to our own security than the idea of a malleable past, which can be reshaped, rewritten, sanitized at will? For anything to progress -- an art form, a person, a nation -- the past must remain objective and immutable, to serve as guidance for the future. It is by our failures -- placing trust in the wrong people, for example, or idolizing a human being we know to be as fallible as ourselves -- that we often learn the most painful, and the most valuable lessons.
June 11, 2016
REGENERATION: A War Movie For People Who Hate Them
Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.
-- Siegfried Sassoon
Nobody much cares about World War One. The subject, like the war itself, is so depressing, so embarrassing to the human species, and such a vicious indictment of modern civilization generally, that few people can stomach any serious discussion of it. What comes to mind when you think of "The Great War?" Yellowish clouds of poison gas. Corpses rotting in nests of rusty barbed wire. Shell holes the size of tract homes, filled with dirty water. Rats, lice and influenza. Skulls grinning out of the mud. Not exactly heartening stuff. And neither is the 1997 film REGENERATION, but you are doing yourself, and the innumerable men massacred in that half-forgotten war, a grave disservice if you don't take the opportunity to see it.
REGENERATION, though based on a novel by Pat Barker -- a writer of much repute in Britain, though she is almost unknown in America -- is both a true story and a fairly accurate representation of the relationship between two of the most famous poets to come out of WWI. It takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1917, at Craiglockhart Hospital, a "loony bin" for shell-shocked British soldiers run by Cpt. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Rivers is a decent and dedicated psychiatrist who fights a ceaseless, exhausting battle to cure the mentally ravaged men brought into his care. The most difficult case on his roster, however, is actually the sanest man he's ever met, the poet turned war hero Lt. Siegfried Sassoon (Stuart Bunce), who has been sent to the mental hospital not because of an emotional trauma but because he has begun to publicly oppose the war. (Therefore he must be crazy, right?) Rivers is told by his superiors that "Sass" is not to be released until he recants his antiwar screed, so a flummoxed Rivers sets to work trying to convince the angry young hero that his duty lies in returning to the conflict he has come to abominate. As the two men engage in a clash of wills, Sassoon strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, fellow inmate and aspiring poet Lt. Wilfred Owen (James Wilby), and tries to convince the shy, sensitive young man, who takes refuge from his own trauma in his verses, to start writing about the war - a decision that led to some of the greatest poetry ever written. While this is going on, Rivers has his hands full with an even angrier patient, Lt. Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) who has lost both his voice and his memory following an incident in the trenches, and doesn't seem to want either of them back.
On the surface the film is ostensibly about Sassoon, but in reality he is merely a catalyst for events. Though Bunce gives quite a good performance in his rather limited screen-time, managing to convey inner conflict and outward anger, REGENERATION is really about the other characters, and all of them deliver. Miller's Billy Prior is a simmering mass of barely-contained fury, but it is not until the fury is partially released that we begin to understand how literally pathetic this young infantry officer is - self-doubting, grief-stricken, longing for fatherly guidance and feminine affection. Balancing this is Wilby's shy, almost naïve potrayal of Owens, who seems to represent everything good in humanity - gentleness, kindness, intelligence, appreciation for beauty. And then there is Rivers' cool, professional façade, disguising growing dismay and anguish - not merely over the war, but over his own role as a "mechanic" whose job is to repair malfunctioning pieces of war-machinery and return them to the slaughter. [I have seldom seen an actor deliver so subtle a performance; with every stammer, facial tick, strained smile and bead of upper-lip sweat Pryce manages to convey someone who is breaking apart both emotionally and physically yet unwilling to show it. It is the quintessential portrayal of the British "stiff upper lip" under full-scale assault.]
For a movie with very little depicted violence, "Regeneration" is almost incredibly brutal, and the images of that brutality stick to you like scars. A soldier calmly darns one of his socks while yards away, in a gray slime-filled wasteland, bullet-riddled comrades writhe in agony. Two men shovel what is left of a dead friend into a canvas sack, sobbing with grief and disgust. A party of British soldiers ties a disobedient 17 year-old recruit to a stake in no-man's-land knowing he will be shot by German snipers. But the worst brutality is in the hospital itself: Rivers, looking for ideas on how to cure his patients of mutism, attends a clinic that boasts a 100% success rate: the mute soldiers are strapped to chairs and tortured with electrical shock until their voices come back - as screams. Watching the film, one can well understand why Sassoon wanted to turn his pistol on the British parliament, who he viewed as nothing but a gang of avaricious war-criminals. This movie has been issued under several titles ("Behind the Lines" being one of the others) but it may as well have been called "Damage", "Wreckage", or "Consequences." It is, in the last analysis, about what happens to the soldiers after the shooting stops - or at any rate, while both sides are reloading. And just because a man isn't in the firing line doesn't make him any less of a casualty -- a grim fact which is as true in 2016 as it was in 1916, and is something to keep in mind with another Memorial Day just behind us.
Many movies deal with war, and the more romantically and stylishly the deal with its violence, the more popular they seem to be. REGENERATION does not approach violence romantically or stylishly; in fact it is far less interested in violence than it is in showing what violence does to the men who perpetrate and survive it. But it is not a self-righteous antiwar flick. Rivers' coolly logical pro-war arguments (even if he doesn't really believe them) and Sassoon's passionate but impractical antiwar screeds are both given respectful treatment, with the understanding, so rare nowadays, that sometimes, in an argument, both men can be right.
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
- Wilfred Owen
Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.
-- Siegfried Sassoon
Nobody much cares about World War One. The subject, like the war itself, is so depressing, so embarrassing to the human species, and such a vicious indictment of modern civilization generally, that few people can stomach any serious discussion of it. What comes to mind when you think of "The Great War?" Yellowish clouds of poison gas. Corpses rotting in nests of rusty barbed wire. Shell holes the size of tract homes, filled with dirty water. Rats, lice and influenza. Skulls grinning out of the mud. Not exactly heartening stuff. And neither is the 1997 film REGENERATION, but you are doing yourself, and the innumerable men massacred in that half-forgotten war, a grave disservice if you don't take the opportunity to see it.
REGENERATION, though based on a novel by Pat Barker -- a writer of much repute in Britain, though she is almost unknown in America -- is both a true story and a fairly accurate representation of the relationship between two of the most famous poets to come out of WWI. It takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1917, at Craiglockhart Hospital, a "loony bin" for shell-shocked British soldiers run by Cpt. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Rivers is a decent and dedicated psychiatrist who fights a ceaseless, exhausting battle to cure the mentally ravaged men brought into his care. The most difficult case on his roster, however, is actually the sanest man he's ever met, the poet turned war hero Lt. Siegfried Sassoon (Stuart Bunce), who has been sent to the mental hospital not because of an emotional trauma but because he has begun to publicly oppose the war. (Therefore he must be crazy, right?) Rivers is told by his superiors that "Sass" is not to be released until he recants his antiwar screed, so a flummoxed Rivers sets to work trying to convince the angry young hero that his duty lies in returning to the conflict he has come to abominate. As the two men engage in a clash of wills, Sassoon strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, fellow inmate and aspiring poet Lt. Wilfred Owen (James Wilby), and tries to convince the shy, sensitive young man, who takes refuge from his own trauma in his verses, to start writing about the war - a decision that led to some of the greatest poetry ever written. While this is going on, Rivers has his hands full with an even angrier patient, Lt. Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) who has lost both his voice and his memory following an incident in the trenches, and doesn't seem to want either of them back.
On the surface the film is ostensibly about Sassoon, but in reality he is merely a catalyst for events. Though Bunce gives quite a good performance in his rather limited screen-time, managing to convey inner conflict and outward anger, REGENERATION is really about the other characters, and all of them deliver. Miller's Billy Prior is a simmering mass of barely-contained fury, but it is not until the fury is partially released that we begin to understand how literally pathetic this young infantry officer is - self-doubting, grief-stricken, longing for fatherly guidance and feminine affection. Balancing this is Wilby's shy, almost naïve potrayal of Owens, who seems to represent everything good in humanity - gentleness, kindness, intelligence, appreciation for beauty. And then there is Rivers' cool, professional façade, disguising growing dismay and anguish - not merely over the war, but over his own role as a "mechanic" whose job is to repair malfunctioning pieces of war-machinery and return them to the slaughter. [I have seldom seen an actor deliver so subtle a performance; with every stammer, facial tick, strained smile and bead of upper-lip sweat Pryce manages to convey someone who is breaking apart both emotionally and physically yet unwilling to show it. It is the quintessential portrayal of the British "stiff upper lip" under full-scale assault.]
For a movie with very little depicted violence, "Regeneration" is almost incredibly brutal, and the images of that brutality stick to you like scars. A soldier calmly darns one of his socks while yards away, in a gray slime-filled wasteland, bullet-riddled comrades writhe in agony. Two men shovel what is left of a dead friend into a canvas sack, sobbing with grief and disgust. A party of British soldiers ties a disobedient 17 year-old recruit to a stake in no-man's-land knowing he will be shot by German snipers. But the worst brutality is in the hospital itself: Rivers, looking for ideas on how to cure his patients of mutism, attends a clinic that boasts a 100% success rate: the mute soldiers are strapped to chairs and tortured with electrical shock until their voices come back - as screams. Watching the film, one can well understand why Sassoon wanted to turn his pistol on the British parliament, who he viewed as nothing but a gang of avaricious war-criminals. This movie has been issued under several titles ("Behind the Lines" being one of the others) but it may as well have been called "Damage", "Wreckage", or "Consequences." It is, in the last analysis, about what happens to the soldiers after the shooting stops - or at any rate, while both sides are reloading. And just because a man isn't in the firing line doesn't make him any less of a casualty -- a grim fact which is as true in 2016 as it was in 1916, and is something to keep in mind with another Memorial Day just behind us.
Many movies deal with war, and the more romantically and stylishly the deal with its violence, the more popular they seem to be. REGENERATION does not approach violence romantically or stylishly; in fact it is far less interested in violence than it is in showing what violence does to the men who perpetrate and survive it. But it is not a self-righteous antiwar flick. Rivers' coolly logical pro-war arguments (even if he doesn't really believe them) and Sassoon's passionate but impractical antiwar screeds are both given respectful treatment, with the understanding, so rare nowadays, that sometimes, in an argument, both men can be right.
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
- Wilfred Owen
June 10, 2016
The Sun Also Rises; or, How to Enjoy Ernest Hemingway
"Everyone behaves badly -- given the chance." -- Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises
A frequent knock on Ernest Hemingway is that he was a terrific, even masterful writer of short stories, but a boring novelist. After reading about fifty of his short stories, I tested this theory by tackling A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and discovered I half-agreed with the assessment. Everything to do with the war itself Hemingway captured brilliantly and memorably. Everything to do with the romance between the main characters I found painfully shallow, dull and silly. Nevertheless I read the book on the first attempt. I can't say the same for THE SUN ALSO RISES. Over the course of about 30 years I must have made a half-dozen attempts to read this book through and always gave up out of sheer boredom after a half-dozen chapters. At the tender age of 42, however, I have finally succeeded in finishing it, and came to a small epiphany about Hemingway, to wit: the key to enjoying him as a novelist is to possess some degree of life experience, because not only will that help you grasp what his books are are really about, it will also give you the patience to endure some of his more tedious passages.
THE SUN ALSO RISES begins in Paris during the early 1920s. The protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, is a writer who works for a cable news service. During the First World War Jake suffered a wound which left him unable to have sex yet fully capable of sexual desire, and this places him permenently and uncomfortably in the friendship zone with his great love, Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful socialite who is just coming off an expensive divorce. Lady Ashley is rather a nasty piece of work: despite having already found herself a fiance of sorts, she frequently takes lovers, only to discard them as casually as cigarette butts, and then find new ones. This is the fate of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist on the cusp of fame who is naive about women and can't let go of the affair. Cohn's inability to do this creates increasing instability amongst the group of dissipate young exparriates with whom Jake runs: their unspoken code is to wallow in pleasure, take nothing seriously and above all, never admit to any genuine emotions. Jake must confront the damage Lady Ashely's selfish antics are doing to his own life and reputation while watching Cohn self-destruct. He must also come to grips with his own unresolved feelings for the woman he loves but can never have.
If this description sounds a little vague, that's because the book itself is vague. It has a simple plot, almost no character development, and a meandering structure which, I suppose, reflects its characters' somewhat meaningless lives. Much has been made of the quote at the beginning of the book, uttered by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation: "You are all a lost generation." She was referring, of course, to those who emerged from the terrible and utterly pointless slaughter of the First World War, alive but not necessarily physically or morally intact. They had no religious faith, no patriotism, no deep feelings or beliefs, not even much grasp of the actual nature of friendship, and THE SUN ALSO RISES seems to uses the group of Jake, Cohn, Lady Brett, Mike and Bill to serve as an analogy for that mentality. This is a book full of ennui, anomie and nihilism, masquerading as a good time.
The flaws of this novel and its strengths are very closely found up. Hemingway understood the expatriate crowd very well, being one of them in real life, and I'm guessing the book is quite accurate in depicting their facetious existentialism, their refusal -- at least publicly -- to take any aspect of life seriously. There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle comments about the dark side of the human condition which make for great if tragic reading: like the Romans in Howard Fast's SPARTACUS, these are people so hollow they must contunually fill themselves with distraction -- with food, drink, sex, travel, and the simulacrum of excitement, just to feel even half-alive. Psychologically it's a fascinating picture of human dissipation, tinged with tragedy. It also paints a very interesting picture of Europe in the Jazz Age, something Hemingway did brilliantly and often subtly, by concentrating on small rather than large details -- how people amused themselves, what they talked about, what they spent their money on. On the other hand...well, who cares? The stakes of the novel are very low, because it's hard to give a damn about people this frivolous and blunted. Like the soap opera characters of my youth, those beautiful men and women whose tears were always trickling onto their money, the cast here is almost impossible sympathize with. Jake Barnes is a half-decent sort with some identifiable motives -- frustrated longing, jealousy, and a weak desire to do the right thing, whatever that is -- but Cohn is an awful, whiny snot, Lady Ashley is a psychopath, Bill and Mike are drunken, mean-spirited bullies, and to be honest, sometimes I wished someone would come along with a pistol and put the lot of them out of their misery. It's true that unlike, say, the characters in a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, these people actually have a reason to be jaded, but not having suffered through the mud, lice and poison gas of the Great War, I can't really relate.
Reading THE SUN ALSO RISES at 42, however, made a big difference to me. As a high-schooler or a twentysomething all I could see was the shallowness of the puddle that is this novel; I didn't grasp its potentially reflective aspects. If Hemingway was good at anything, it was making observations about life via his novels, and as we get older and become harder and more cynical, we often see resemblances between ourselves and those we despised when we were younger. Jake Barnes is not much of a protagonist, but in many ways I am not much of a man. On countless small points, and a few fairishly large ones, I have "sold out" -- which in practical terms never entails getting a paycheck, but rather precisely the opposite: a surrender of one's ideals to the dull, gray-faced gods of pragmatism. Somehow the ideals of or youth never survive contact with reality, and seen in that sense, THE SUN ALSO RISES is not simply entertainment. It is a warning. Exactly what you do with that warning is up to you.
A frequent knock on Ernest Hemingway is that he was a terrific, even masterful writer of short stories, but a boring novelist. After reading about fifty of his short stories, I tested this theory by tackling A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and discovered I half-agreed with the assessment. Everything to do with the war itself Hemingway captured brilliantly and memorably. Everything to do with the romance between the main characters I found painfully shallow, dull and silly. Nevertheless I read the book on the first attempt. I can't say the same for THE SUN ALSO RISES. Over the course of about 30 years I must have made a half-dozen attempts to read this book through and always gave up out of sheer boredom after a half-dozen chapters. At the tender age of 42, however, I have finally succeeded in finishing it, and came to a small epiphany about Hemingway, to wit: the key to enjoying him as a novelist is to possess some degree of life experience, because not only will that help you grasp what his books are are really about, it will also give you the patience to endure some of his more tedious passages.
THE SUN ALSO RISES begins in Paris during the early 1920s. The protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, is a writer who works for a cable news service. During the First World War Jake suffered a wound which left him unable to have sex yet fully capable of sexual desire, and this places him permenently and uncomfortably in the friendship zone with his great love, Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful socialite who is just coming off an expensive divorce. Lady Ashley is rather a nasty piece of work: despite having already found herself a fiance of sorts, she frequently takes lovers, only to discard them as casually as cigarette butts, and then find new ones. This is the fate of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist on the cusp of fame who is naive about women and can't let go of the affair. Cohn's inability to do this creates increasing instability amongst the group of dissipate young exparriates with whom Jake runs: their unspoken code is to wallow in pleasure, take nothing seriously and above all, never admit to any genuine emotions. Jake must confront the damage Lady Ashely's selfish antics are doing to his own life and reputation while watching Cohn self-destruct. He must also come to grips with his own unresolved feelings for the woman he loves but can never have.
If this description sounds a little vague, that's because the book itself is vague. It has a simple plot, almost no character development, and a meandering structure which, I suppose, reflects its characters' somewhat meaningless lives. Much has been made of the quote at the beginning of the book, uttered by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation: "You are all a lost generation." She was referring, of course, to those who emerged from the terrible and utterly pointless slaughter of the First World War, alive but not necessarily physically or morally intact. They had no religious faith, no patriotism, no deep feelings or beliefs, not even much grasp of the actual nature of friendship, and THE SUN ALSO RISES seems to uses the group of Jake, Cohn, Lady Brett, Mike and Bill to serve as an analogy for that mentality. This is a book full of ennui, anomie and nihilism, masquerading as a good time.
The flaws of this novel and its strengths are very closely found up. Hemingway understood the expatriate crowd very well, being one of them in real life, and I'm guessing the book is quite accurate in depicting their facetious existentialism, their refusal -- at least publicly -- to take any aspect of life seriously. There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle comments about the dark side of the human condition which make for great if tragic reading: like the Romans in Howard Fast's SPARTACUS, these are people so hollow they must contunually fill themselves with distraction -- with food, drink, sex, travel, and the simulacrum of excitement, just to feel even half-alive. Psychologically it's a fascinating picture of human dissipation, tinged with tragedy. It also paints a very interesting picture of Europe in the Jazz Age, something Hemingway did brilliantly and often subtly, by concentrating on small rather than large details -- how people amused themselves, what they talked about, what they spent their money on. On the other hand...well, who cares? The stakes of the novel are very low, because it's hard to give a damn about people this frivolous and blunted. Like the soap opera characters of my youth, those beautiful men and women whose tears were always trickling onto their money, the cast here is almost impossible sympathize with. Jake Barnes is a half-decent sort with some identifiable motives -- frustrated longing, jealousy, and a weak desire to do the right thing, whatever that is -- but Cohn is an awful, whiny snot, Lady Ashley is a psychopath, Bill and Mike are drunken, mean-spirited bullies, and to be honest, sometimes I wished someone would come along with a pistol and put the lot of them out of their misery. It's true that unlike, say, the characters in a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, these people actually have a reason to be jaded, but not having suffered through the mud, lice and poison gas of the Great War, I can't really relate.
Reading THE SUN ALSO RISES at 42, however, made a big difference to me. As a high-schooler or a twentysomething all I could see was the shallowness of the puddle that is this novel; I didn't grasp its potentially reflective aspects. If Hemingway was good at anything, it was making observations about life via his novels, and as we get older and become harder and more cynical, we often see resemblances between ourselves and those we despised when we were younger. Jake Barnes is not much of a protagonist, but in many ways I am not much of a man. On countless small points, and a few fairishly large ones, I have "sold out" -- which in practical terms never entails getting a paycheck, but rather precisely the opposite: a surrender of one's ideals to the dull, gray-faced gods of pragmatism. Somehow the ideals of or youth never survive contact with reality, and seen in that sense, THE SUN ALSO RISES is not simply entertainment. It is a warning. Exactly what you do with that warning is up to you.
May 31, 2016
Coming to Greif; or, The Power of Bad Ideas
When I was in law enforcement I had many occasions to wonder at the stupidity of human beings. This wonderment was later expanded to include human organizations, not excluding law enforcement itself. It struck me as grotesque, though undeniable, that in any bureacracy, there is a paralyzing inertia surrounding common sense, while stupidity -- manifesting in the form of bad decisions -- seems to possess irresistable momentum. When I began to work in the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles, I saw many examples of this in the form of inexplicably awful movies and television shows which had been produced at the expense of much better ideas. The cry of "How did this get made?" is not one uttered merely by audiences appalled by the stream of trash flowing out of Hollywood; it is heard over and over again by the people actually involved in producing that trash.
One can find hundreds of historical examples in any field which would prove the terrible, hypnotic fascination that bad ideas seem to hold for humans and human agencies. Everything from America's foreign policy to pug-fugly fashion trends like the man-bun owe their existence to this phenomenon, but there is one example in particular which not only exemplifies it, but offers insight as to how it may be avoided in our personal and professional lives.
In 1936, the Air Ministry of Nazi Germany issued an order for the development of a long range heavy bomber. Such bombers already existed in the air forces of Britain and America, and now Germany, which was rearming at a furious pace and developing a highly sophisticated and powerful air force under the cold and watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, wanted in on the fun. Competing companies bid on the project, and the contract was awarded to the Heinkel aeronatutics firm. Heinkel had no shortage of brains in its trust and perhaps the foremost of these, a man named Siegfried Günter, came up with a knife-edge design for what officially named the He 177 Grief (Griffin). The choice to name the big bomber after a mythological beast composed of several different animals was no accident, for Günter had combined a number of technological innovations in his design, including remote-control defensive armament and a surface evaporation cooling system. The conception was daring. Whether it was also good remained to be seen.
One of the key figures in the development of the Luftwaffe (air force) was General Ernst Udet. Udet was a remarkable man, a WWI fighter ace who'd spent the interwar years as a barnstormer and actor, and who'd been tapped by his old buddy Hermann Goering to take a key role in the development of the new German air force Hitler had created in 1935. Udet's vision for this air force was very different, however, than that of his opposite numbers in Britain and America, who believed in the power of heavy bombers to win wars. Instead, Udet was somewhat obsessed with smaller bombers -- much faster, much lighter aircraft with shorter range and smaller payloads, which, instead of attacking large fixed targets like factories, shipyards, and railways, would hover over the battlefield and serve as a kind of "flying artillery" for the army. Udet was particularly enamored by dive-bombers, and began to insist that every bomber Germany manufactured, regardless of size, possess the ability to dive so as to increase its accuracy. This was to apply even to the Griffin, which was so massive that there were already concerns that no existing set of engines in the German arsenal could actually get it off the ground. Indeed, the directive to make the Griffin capable of diving attacks required a strengthening of the airframe which increased the aircraft's weight still further, which in turn exacerbated the power problem. A vicious cycle had been initiated, and led to the second sign that the Greif would come to grief; trouble with the engines.
The Germans are rightly famous for their engines, whether mounted in aircraft, motorcycle or automobile, and they had some very good ones, made by Daimler-Benz, which would have been perfectly suited for the Griffin -- so long as the aircraft bombed from a horizontal position. Pressed into the dive-bombing role they would not work nearly as well, and burdened by Udet's directive, the designers offered a compromise. Instead of the conventional arrangement for a heavy bomber -- four engines driving four propellers -- they decided to use four engines to drive only two propellers. This was accomplished by welding the engines together and attaching them to a single drive shaft, which had the theoretical advantage of reducing the drag coeficient in a dive. It seemed fiendishly clever idea, but as with anything growing from a flawed concept, it turned out to be merely fiendish. The twinned engines were not only difficult to service mechanically, they had a nasty tendency to catch fire while in flight -- so much so that their unhappy crews soon dubbed the Griffin "the Luftwaffe Lighter," or, even more pointedly, "The Flying Coffin." And the vicious cycle got more vicious yet. The innovative surface evaporation system designed by Günter turned out to be insufficient to cool the troublesome engines, which necessitated the installation of conventional radiators which, in turn, added to the weight of the aircraft...which placed more strain on the engines, which caused yet more fires. But immolation while airborne was only one of the possible self-inflicted ends for such men. Because its structual issues had never been entirely resolved, rough handling of the Griffin could lead to disintegration of the aircraft while in flight even if the engines didn't catch fire. "Somehow the He 177 always conveyed an impression of fragility despite its size," noted an Allied test pilot who flew a captured model. Thus, the bomber which Udet had intended to be rugged enough to survive dives at a sixty-degree angle had to be flown even more gingerly than a conventional, level-flying bomber. The whole was considerably less than the sum of its parts.
By 1942 it was clear the Griffin had been an expensive failure. Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe's supreme commander, Hermann Goering, believed the project to be salvageable. He withdrew Udet's edict that the aircraft had to be capable of dive-bombing, and the engineers and designers at Heinkel dutifully reconfigured the entire aircraft and all of its systems. Substantial improvements were in fact made, if only slowly, but now something interesting else happened, something which demonstrates that there is perhaps no amount of elbow-grease which can salvage a bad idea, even after its worst elements have been surgically removed.
The point of a heavy bomber is, as earlier stated, to attack large fixed targets -- in other words, to cripple or destroy the enemy's capacity for war production. Failing that, it can be used as a weapon of terror, via the mass bombing of enemy cities. But after 1942, which was the year the Griffin went into mass production, Germany all but abandoned mass bombing by aeroplane, whether for military or psychological purposes. A shortage of trained aircrew, spare parts, and aviation gasoline, coupled with an increasing emphasis on fighter production -- to stop enemy air raids on Germany -- had led to a corresponding decrease in the use of bombers. And those bombers the Luftwaffe did tend to employ were the proven, reliable ones -- not the notoriously cranky Griffins. The truth was, after 1942 there was scarcely a need for Germany to manufacture any heavy bombers at all, much less ones which boasted a nickname like "Flying Coffin." Nevertheless, in that same year of 1942, some 166 Griffins rolled off production lines, and in 1943 that total rose to 415. In 1944, the last year in which figures are available, 565 more Griffins were manufactured. Not many of these monsters saw combat. Indeed, when Hitler briefly tried to resume massed bombing attacks against London in January of 1944, less than ten percent of the 600 aircraft ultimately employed were Griffins, and the operational performance of those that did participate was extremely poor -- on one mission alone, eight of fourteen bombers returned to base after suffering spontaneous engine fires. But the fact was that even if the Heinkel 177 had been a world-beater, by 1944 there simply wasn't enough fuel available to keep them in the air. In June of that year, all Griffin squadrons were withdrawn from Russia for lack of fuel, yet they continued to roll off the production lines. Albert Speer, Germany's minister of armaments and munitions, noted wryly in his memoirs that the insistence on manfacturing heavy bombers long after Germany had lost the ability to use them led to the grotquesque sight of freshly-manufactured aircraft being destroyed in the same factories which they were built, simply because there was no place to put them and no one to fly them.
All this demands a question: why, in a land of shortages like Germany, was so much time, money, manpower and material used on aircraft which served no purpose, which could not contribute to victory and which, in a sense, were actively contributing to defeat by robbing other, more successful weapons of those resources? Why wasn't the project simply terminated in 1942, when it became clear that the Greif caused nothing but grief? Why were almost 1,200 of these feckless beasts created, when a superb aircraft like the Heinkel 219, which had the potential to alter the air war in Germany's favor, reached a pathetic production total of only 294 units?
The answer as to why this is the case lies not within the complex tangle of the Nazi bureacracy but within human nature itself. For this example is one of thousands I might have given from any aspect of human affairs. Who among us hasn't doubled down on a bad bet, fought to stay in a dying relationship, slapped more coats of paint on an irredeemably ugly house, stuck it out an unsatisfying job, or poured still more money into a four-wheeled lemon when what we really needed to do was buy a new car? And there is no aspect of life, not even the largest-scale affairs, which are not subject to this strange tendency to stick with bad ideas to the bitter end. Why did John Travolta, at the height of his success in Hollywood, throw it all away by staking it all on an abysmal film like BATTLEFIELD EARTH? Why did the border state slave owners refuse Lincoln's offer of compensated emancipation in 1862, when it must have been obvious to the dullest among them that the only other alternative was an uncompensated abolition that would have -- and did -- ruin them financially? Why did a succession of American presidents dig us deeper and deeper into the morass of Vietnam when it was plain to anyone with a functioning brain that the underlying strategy for the war was faulty? Why did Mao cling to agricultural reforms that caused 20 million people to starve to death in a single year? Why did I once remain in an unhappy relationship for years when I knew not only that it had no future, but that its present was intolerable?
Logic would dictate that in life, successful behavior would be self-perpetuating while failure, on the other hand, would be repulsive. In practice however the exact opposite situation tends to obtain: success is seldom exploited, but failure is almost always reinforced, in a pattern of behavior we often refer to as "throwing good money after bad." We don't abandon ideas when we realize they won't work; in fact, it is at the precise moment we realize they aren't working that we begin to fully embrace them.
I have studied this problem from all angles and the nearest thing I can come to in regards to an answer is that human beings seem to have an innate need, a sort of genertic predisposition, to get returns on their investments. If a person spends X amount of sweat, blood, tears, time or money on a project -- any project -- they expect a proportionate reward, and if they do not get it, instead of calling the entire project a loss and chalking it up to a lesson learned, they redouble their efforts. The deeper the hole, the harder the digging. This applies everywhere, from romantic relationships to business investments to governmental policy to the practice of warfare. And what is truly grotesque is that by the same token, good ideas are seldom backed by anywhere near this much effort. As I noted above, the Heinkel firm produced a superlative twin-engined fighter aircraft, the He 219 "Eagle Owl," at the same time it was making the Griffin; yet in the year 1944, nearly three Griffins were produced for every Eagle Owl, and in the end the ratio of Griffins to Eagle Owls in the Luftwaffe was 4 -1. It seems that in a sense, success is its own worst enemy, for when a project is successful it requires no justification to continue, no extra resources or emergency meetings, no frantic burning of midnight oil. Human beings thrive on stress, and indeed -- as Sebastian Junger pointed out in his book TRIBE, though the moral has always been plain to anyone who has lived in demanding or dangerous physical conditions for any length of time -- that both depression and suicide rates plummet in times of crisis, because it is crisis that we find our métier. There is something about the possibility of disaster which spurs human beings to prodigies of effort, which is, of course, why our species has survived all of its trevails to date; but when possibility of disaster is replaced by the mere possibility of failure, of being shown up or embarrassed or proven wrong, the same instinct seems to prevail. Thus a good idea can starve while a bad one chokes on the fat of the land.
It seems to me that the only way to break this particular cycle is through twinned methods. The first is to train ourselves to recognize when an idea is fatally bad, which is not always as easy as it sounds, since most bad ideas come dressed as good ones. We can do this by understanding that a bad idea is full of dusty details, and the worse the idea, the worse the metaphorical dust. Thus, the more small problems we tackle, the less aware we tend to be of the larger problems, which are obscured by that dust. It is possible to appear to be making progress via a series of petty victories, when in fact those victories amount to nothing more than tightening bolts on a sinking ship. The crucial step lies in finding time to take the longer view. Extending my nautical metaphor, I would put it this way: tinkering with the boiler may be necessary, but unless someone is in the pilothouse, steering the ship, the possibility of reaching the destination is slim, while possibility of smashing into an iceberg is large. A fatally flawed idea is often easily spotted...provided someone is up there with spyglass in hand, looking for the damned thing.
The second, trickier yet, is to disengage from the bad idea once it is recognized as such, which is actually much harder than it sounds, since it entails overcoming both our ego, which refuses to recognize defeat, and our genetic instinct to draw a dividend from our labors. Because it is easier to recognize a bad idea than to abandon it, we must be constantly aware of our level of investment, so that we never reach the point where abandonment becomes emotionally impossible for us. The key word here is "aware." In our society awareness, and to some extent even consciousness, are increasingly difficult states of being to occupy. The flood of information and of noise which constantly batters our brains makes organization of thought extremely difficult. As I said above, the devil is really in the details -- rather, the devil is in making the details, the day-to-day, our only reality. Taking that long, spyglass-view of life requires very deliberate effort; acting on the knowledge the view gives us takes ten times as much. But it can be done.
The art of cutting losses is just that: an art, and like all arts it begins as a craft, a trade, something which requires study and practice and self-effacement. Elsewise, as with all those before us who were crushed by the power of bad ideas, we will ultimately come to Greif.
Note: in writing this blog I used a number of sources, including Captain D.H. Brown's WINGS OF THE LUFTWAFFE, Munson's GERMAN AIRCRAFT OF WW2, and John Killen's A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LUFTWAFFE, among others.
One can find hundreds of historical examples in any field which would prove the terrible, hypnotic fascination that bad ideas seem to hold for humans and human agencies. Everything from America's foreign policy to pug-fugly fashion trends like the man-bun owe their existence to this phenomenon, but there is one example in particular which not only exemplifies it, but offers insight as to how it may be avoided in our personal and professional lives.
In 1936, the Air Ministry of Nazi Germany issued an order for the development of a long range heavy bomber. Such bombers already existed in the air forces of Britain and America, and now Germany, which was rearming at a furious pace and developing a highly sophisticated and powerful air force under the cold and watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, wanted in on the fun. Competing companies bid on the project, and the contract was awarded to the Heinkel aeronatutics firm. Heinkel had no shortage of brains in its trust and perhaps the foremost of these, a man named Siegfried Günter, came up with a knife-edge design for what officially named the He 177 Grief (Griffin). The choice to name the big bomber after a mythological beast composed of several different animals was no accident, for Günter had combined a number of technological innovations in his design, including remote-control defensive armament and a surface evaporation cooling system. The conception was daring. Whether it was also good remained to be seen.
One of the key figures in the development of the Luftwaffe (air force) was General Ernst Udet. Udet was a remarkable man, a WWI fighter ace who'd spent the interwar years as a barnstormer and actor, and who'd been tapped by his old buddy Hermann Goering to take a key role in the development of the new German air force Hitler had created in 1935. Udet's vision for this air force was very different, however, than that of his opposite numbers in Britain and America, who believed in the power of heavy bombers to win wars. Instead, Udet was somewhat obsessed with smaller bombers -- much faster, much lighter aircraft with shorter range and smaller payloads, which, instead of attacking large fixed targets like factories, shipyards, and railways, would hover over the battlefield and serve as a kind of "flying artillery" for the army. Udet was particularly enamored by dive-bombers, and began to insist that every bomber Germany manufactured, regardless of size, possess the ability to dive so as to increase its accuracy. This was to apply even to the Griffin, which was so massive that there were already concerns that no existing set of engines in the German arsenal could actually get it off the ground. Indeed, the directive to make the Griffin capable of diving attacks required a strengthening of the airframe which increased the aircraft's weight still further, which in turn exacerbated the power problem. A vicious cycle had been initiated, and led to the second sign that the Greif would come to grief; trouble with the engines.
The Germans are rightly famous for their engines, whether mounted in aircraft, motorcycle or automobile, and they had some very good ones, made by Daimler-Benz, which would have been perfectly suited for the Griffin -- so long as the aircraft bombed from a horizontal position. Pressed into the dive-bombing role they would not work nearly as well, and burdened by Udet's directive, the designers offered a compromise. Instead of the conventional arrangement for a heavy bomber -- four engines driving four propellers -- they decided to use four engines to drive only two propellers. This was accomplished by welding the engines together and attaching them to a single drive shaft, which had the theoretical advantage of reducing the drag coeficient in a dive. It seemed fiendishly clever idea, but as with anything growing from a flawed concept, it turned out to be merely fiendish. The twinned engines were not only difficult to service mechanically, they had a nasty tendency to catch fire while in flight -- so much so that their unhappy crews soon dubbed the Griffin "the Luftwaffe Lighter," or, even more pointedly, "The Flying Coffin." And the vicious cycle got more vicious yet. The innovative surface evaporation system designed by Günter turned out to be insufficient to cool the troublesome engines, which necessitated the installation of conventional radiators which, in turn, added to the weight of the aircraft...which placed more strain on the engines, which caused yet more fires. But immolation while airborne was only one of the possible self-inflicted ends for such men. Because its structual issues had never been entirely resolved, rough handling of the Griffin could lead to disintegration of the aircraft while in flight even if the engines didn't catch fire. "Somehow the He 177 always conveyed an impression of fragility despite its size," noted an Allied test pilot who flew a captured model. Thus, the bomber which Udet had intended to be rugged enough to survive dives at a sixty-degree angle had to be flown even more gingerly than a conventional, level-flying bomber. The whole was considerably less than the sum of its parts.
By 1942 it was clear the Griffin had been an expensive failure. Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe's supreme commander, Hermann Goering, believed the project to be salvageable. He withdrew Udet's edict that the aircraft had to be capable of dive-bombing, and the engineers and designers at Heinkel dutifully reconfigured the entire aircraft and all of its systems. Substantial improvements were in fact made, if only slowly, but now something interesting else happened, something which demonstrates that there is perhaps no amount of elbow-grease which can salvage a bad idea, even after its worst elements have been surgically removed.
The point of a heavy bomber is, as earlier stated, to attack large fixed targets -- in other words, to cripple or destroy the enemy's capacity for war production. Failing that, it can be used as a weapon of terror, via the mass bombing of enemy cities. But after 1942, which was the year the Griffin went into mass production, Germany all but abandoned mass bombing by aeroplane, whether for military or psychological purposes. A shortage of trained aircrew, spare parts, and aviation gasoline, coupled with an increasing emphasis on fighter production -- to stop enemy air raids on Germany -- had led to a corresponding decrease in the use of bombers. And those bombers the Luftwaffe did tend to employ were the proven, reliable ones -- not the notoriously cranky Griffins. The truth was, after 1942 there was scarcely a need for Germany to manufacture any heavy bombers at all, much less ones which boasted a nickname like "Flying Coffin." Nevertheless, in that same year of 1942, some 166 Griffins rolled off production lines, and in 1943 that total rose to 415. In 1944, the last year in which figures are available, 565 more Griffins were manufactured. Not many of these monsters saw combat. Indeed, when Hitler briefly tried to resume massed bombing attacks against London in January of 1944, less than ten percent of the 600 aircraft ultimately employed were Griffins, and the operational performance of those that did participate was extremely poor -- on one mission alone, eight of fourteen bombers returned to base after suffering spontaneous engine fires. But the fact was that even if the Heinkel 177 had been a world-beater, by 1944 there simply wasn't enough fuel available to keep them in the air. In June of that year, all Griffin squadrons were withdrawn from Russia for lack of fuel, yet they continued to roll off the production lines. Albert Speer, Germany's minister of armaments and munitions, noted wryly in his memoirs that the insistence on manfacturing heavy bombers long after Germany had lost the ability to use them led to the grotquesque sight of freshly-manufactured aircraft being destroyed in the same factories which they were built, simply because there was no place to put them and no one to fly them.
All this demands a question: why, in a land of shortages like Germany, was so much time, money, manpower and material used on aircraft which served no purpose, which could not contribute to victory and which, in a sense, were actively contributing to defeat by robbing other, more successful weapons of those resources? Why wasn't the project simply terminated in 1942, when it became clear that the Greif caused nothing but grief? Why were almost 1,200 of these feckless beasts created, when a superb aircraft like the Heinkel 219, which had the potential to alter the air war in Germany's favor, reached a pathetic production total of only 294 units?
The answer as to why this is the case lies not within the complex tangle of the Nazi bureacracy but within human nature itself. For this example is one of thousands I might have given from any aspect of human affairs. Who among us hasn't doubled down on a bad bet, fought to stay in a dying relationship, slapped more coats of paint on an irredeemably ugly house, stuck it out an unsatisfying job, or poured still more money into a four-wheeled lemon when what we really needed to do was buy a new car? And there is no aspect of life, not even the largest-scale affairs, which are not subject to this strange tendency to stick with bad ideas to the bitter end. Why did John Travolta, at the height of his success in Hollywood, throw it all away by staking it all on an abysmal film like BATTLEFIELD EARTH? Why did the border state slave owners refuse Lincoln's offer of compensated emancipation in 1862, when it must have been obvious to the dullest among them that the only other alternative was an uncompensated abolition that would have -- and did -- ruin them financially? Why did a succession of American presidents dig us deeper and deeper into the morass of Vietnam when it was plain to anyone with a functioning brain that the underlying strategy for the war was faulty? Why did Mao cling to agricultural reforms that caused 20 million people to starve to death in a single year? Why did I once remain in an unhappy relationship for years when I knew not only that it had no future, but that its present was intolerable?
Logic would dictate that in life, successful behavior would be self-perpetuating while failure, on the other hand, would be repulsive. In practice however the exact opposite situation tends to obtain: success is seldom exploited, but failure is almost always reinforced, in a pattern of behavior we often refer to as "throwing good money after bad." We don't abandon ideas when we realize they won't work; in fact, it is at the precise moment we realize they aren't working that we begin to fully embrace them.
I have studied this problem from all angles and the nearest thing I can come to in regards to an answer is that human beings seem to have an innate need, a sort of genertic predisposition, to get returns on their investments. If a person spends X amount of sweat, blood, tears, time or money on a project -- any project -- they expect a proportionate reward, and if they do not get it, instead of calling the entire project a loss and chalking it up to a lesson learned, they redouble their efforts. The deeper the hole, the harder the digging. This applies everywhere, from romantic relationships to business investments to governmental policy to the practice of warfare. And what is truly grotesque is that by the same token, good ideas are seldom backed by anywhere near this much effort. As I noted above, the Heinkel firm produced a superlative twin-engined fighter aircraft, the He 219 "Eagle Owl," at the same time it was making the Griffin; yet in the year 1944, nearly three Griffins were produced for every Eagle Owl, and in the end the ratio of Griffins to Eagle Owls in the Luftwaffe was 4 -1. It seems that in a sense, success is its own worst enemy, for when a project is successful it requires no justification to continue, no extra resources or emergency meetings, no frantic burning of midnight oil. Human beings thrive on stress, and indeed -- as Sebastian Junger pointed out in his book TRIBE, though the moral has always been plain to anyone who has lived in demanding or dangerous physical conditions for any length of time -- that both depression and suicide rates plummet in times of crisis, because it is crisis that we find our métier. There is something about the possibility of disaster which spurs human beings to prodigies of effort, which is, of course, why our species has survived all of its trevails to date; but when possibility of disaster is replaced by the mere possibility of failure, of being shown up or embarrassed or proven wrong, the same instinct seems to prevail. Thus a good idea can starve while a bad one chokes on the fat of the land.
It seems to me that the only way to break this particular cycle is through twinned methods. The first is to train ourselves to recognize when an idea is fatally bad, which is not always as easy as it sounds, since most bad ideas come dressed as good ones. We can do this by understanding that a bad idea is full of dusty details, and the worse the idea, the worse the metaphorical dust. Thus, the more small problems we tackle, the less aware we tend to be of the larger problems, which are obscured by that dust. It is possible to appear to be making progress via a series of petty victories, when in fact those victories amount to nothing more than tightening bolts on a sinking ship. The crucial step lies in finding time to take the longer view. Extending my nautical metaphor, I would put it this way: tinkering with the boiler may be necessary, but unless someone is in the pilothouse, steering the ship, the possibility of reaching the destination is slim, while possibility of smashing into an iceberg is large. A fatally flawed idea is often easily spotted...provided someone is up there with spyglass in hand, looking for the damned thing.
The second, trickier yet, is to disengage from the bad idea once it is recognized as such, which is actually much harder than it sounds, since it entails overcoming both our ego, which refuses to recognize defeat, and our genetic instinct to draw a dividend from our labors. Because it is easier to recognize a bad idea than to abandon it, we must be constantly aware of our level of investment, so that we never reach the point where abandonment becomes emotionally impossible for us. The key word here is "aware." In our society awareness, and to some extent even consciousness, are increasingly difficult states of being to occupy. The flood of information and of noise which constantly batters our brains makes organization of thought extremely difficult. As I said above, the devil is really in the details -- rather, the devil is in making the details, the day-to-day, our only reality. Taking that long, spyglass-view of life requires very deliberate effort; acting on the knowledge the view gives us takes ten times as much. But it can be done.
The art of cutting losses is just that: an art, and like all arts it begins as a craft, a trade, something which requires study and practice and self-effacement. Elsewise, as with all those before us who were crushed by the power of bad ideas, we will ultimately come to Greif.
Note: in writing this blog I used a number of sources, including Captain D.H. Brown's WINGS OF THE LUFTWAFFE, Munson's GERMAN AIRCRAFT OF WW2, and John Killen's A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LUFTWAFFE, among others.
May 15, 2016
Heroes & Thieves: The Economics of Artistry
There is a widespread belief nowadays that it is not necessary to pay for music, for books, for movies -- indeed, for anything that is artistically produced or created. This belief is most commonly found among the oft (and overly) bashed Millennial Generation, but it is by no means confined to them. In a sense this belief was probably inevitable. Technology has expanded the definition of art to include a staggering variety of content. It is no longer limited to paintings and sculptures or to literary works or music. Broadly speaking, art is where you find it, and people now find art in video games, in podcasts, in YouTube channels, on social media, even on apps like Instagram. But concurrent with this expansion in the definition of art -- which could now perhaps be defined as anything requiring creativity to produce content -- is the credo that all of it should be free, and that if it isn't offered for free, it is completely acceptable to steal it.
In an ideal world, the argument that creative content ought to be free might at least be worth discussing, but we live in a reality where the vast majority of content creators -- artists -- need to be financially remunerated so they can keep making their art. And based on the discussions I've had with many people, and what I read on threads and forums and see on social media every day, I'm convinced very few people grasp the harsh economics that dictate reality for those of us who produce content -- art, if I may be so bold.
There is a belief in America which vastly predates the Internet, to wit, that it is acceptable to bootleg music, because record labels are at heart just corporations and you can't steal from a corporation, because what is a corporation but a bunch of thieves? Sinatra -- or Madonna, for that matter -- wasn't going to sleep on any less silken sheets because you got a bootlegged tape of their music. Later, this belief extended itself into the video and cable era: copied VHS tapes and stolen cable signals weren't considered theft because of the same "Robin Hood" style moral out-clause -- and this naturally extended once again into the age of the Pirate Bay and the midnight torrent. The rationale is -- and I am quoting myself here, just so you don't think I'm riding a moral high horse: "So you're gonna download a Disney movie without paying for it? Well, fuck Disney. They make billions and billions of dollars, they're not gonna miss your money."
I'm not going get into the whole debate of whether stealing from corporations in the Robin Hood-style, or what you may think is the Robin Hood-style, is in fact a moral prerogative. Corporations are large and powerful entities and well capable of defending themselves and protecting their bottom line. I have another bottom to worry about. My own.
I am a novelist. A pretty goddamn good one, frankly. And because writing novels is all I've ever wanted to do since I was a little kid with scabby knees and a Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox, I'd like to do it full time for the rest of my life. I have worked very hard to achieve this dream and am well on my way, but the road is very long and extremely bumpy, and the biggest bump looks awfully like a dollar sign covered in barbed wire. We live in a world ruled -- wrongly and badly ruled, but ruled nevertheless -- by money, and it is the iron law of money that when it comes to selling creative content, you've got to spend it to make it. Disney can do this. Miles Watson finds it a little more difficult.
There are many Miles Watsons in the word of created content -- novelists, short story writers, musicians, comedians, producers of web series, YouTube auteurs, graphic novelists, etc., etc. People who are, in the words of the publishing industry, either "small, indie, or mid-list." These are people who are creating content either wholly or partially on their own dime, without benefit, or without very much benefit, from underwriting organizations like record labels, publishers, agents, producers, studios, and so on. These are the people who are most grievously injured by the refusal of some people to pay for their work. And while it seems to be understood, by some people anyway, that we "small fry" creators are not corporations and don't have corporate resources, the logic which allows people to steal from corporations is nevertheless applied when stealing from us -- because of the fallback clause that "art ought to be free."
It's difficult not to get pissed off when confronted by this assertion, because of the ignorance implied in the idea that, in a society like ours, which is totally ruled by market principles, that "something for nothing" is a workable theory. Also by the almost psychopathic selfishness which is implied in said assertion. I think it would be more productive, however, to simply explain why the economics of free content do not work, are not sustainable, and in the end hurt the thief as much as the artist he is stealing from.
The idea that art ought to be free stems at least in part from a near-total ignorance of the artistic process itself, and much of this ignorance is rooted in the disproportion between the time and money it takes to make "content," and the time spent in enjoying it. A half-hour sit-com shoots for a week to produce 22 minutes of television; a weekly drama shoots for eight to nine days to produce one 43 minute episode; the ordinary film shoots for about forty to sixty days (not including pre-production and post-production) which take many months, to yield a two-hour movie. Likewise, a record album can take up to a year in the making to produce ten songs with an average listening time of three minutes and a total listening time of between 30 and 40 minutes. As for literal works of art, well, it took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel, which I once walked through in about a half an hour, ushered by a tour guide whose mind was clearly on her lunch. The fact that art is so difficult to produce but consumed so quickly creates a powerful impression, albeit a false one, that the process which creates the art is equally speedy, which in turn tends to devalue the art. This applies especially in my own field. How long does it take you to read a novel? If you're reading this, you're on Goodreads, which means you like to read, which means you probably read fast, which means the ordinary novel doesn't survive longer than a week or so in your hands. And if we use that as a standard -- roughly one week to read an ordinarily-sized novel -- the next thing we have to ask is: how long does it take to write what you read?
Writers, like other artists, work at different rates, each according to his talent, discipline, habits, genre, temperament, emotional commitment and contractual deadlines. There is, however, one factor which outweighs all the others in determining how prolific he will be or can be: the writer's economic situation. Stephen King is extraordinarily prolific because he is a workaholic with a restless imagination, but also because he is a very wealthy man and can devote as much time as he likes to writing. He was not nearly as prolific at the beginning of his career, when economic necessity demanded he hold down a teaching job which consumed much of his time and energy. And this is roughly where I find myself now. It takes me about one year to finish the first draft of a novel. That is, to conceive it, to organize the story in my mind, to compose a few crude outlines, to begin the book, and write it through to the end, with the inevitable delays that happen because of work, family, relationship, illness, travel, the usual emotional struggles a writer endures while writing, and so on. My books tend to be anywhere from 85,000 - 125,000 words when I finish the initial draft. (Put in practical terms, that's between 350 and 450 pages of printer paper.) Then there's the drafting process, the editing process, formatting the book, cover design, layout, and so forth. All of this takes money (many editors, for example, charge $7 a page). It also costs time, and that time, in my case, adds up to about twelve months. So, what took me 52 weeks to write took you one to read -- assuming you read the damn thing at all, which brings me to my next point.
Once the final draft is complete, the last "i" dotted and the last "t" crossed, this is when the real work begins -- "work" in this case meaning promotion -- trying to get you to read what I've written. This means social media promotion of the book, the use of paid promotional services, the hosting of book parties, attendance at book conventions and expos, buying copies at wholesale prices to sell through my own website, giveaways on Amazon and Goodreads, and so on. All of this costs money. And there is no saving money cutting out the middleman, because for lower-level authors, the middleman is yourself. I returned yesterday from Book Expo America, hosted in Chicago, where my novel "Cage Life" was featured. This trip was entertaining and I hope, productive. It was also costly. And while I was taking it, I did not write a single word. Promotion, like a day job, sucks up a lot of creative oxygen. Ideally, of course, I would produce two novels a year. But to do this I would have to be free of my job(s) and write full time, as I did when I was a screenwriter. And of course I cannot do that without A) the money a day job provides, or B) an audience willing to pay for my work. I am trying hard to build B), but building B) -- and here is where that nasty catch comes in -- costs money, which in turn necessitates A). At least for now. I need people to pay for what I do so that I can keep doing it. And this is where the argument that "content should be free" breaks down. Because content, or art, or whatever you want to call it, costs money to make. I can't afford to ladle it out for free. I need to be remunerated for it, if only so I can do more advertising and promotion -- never mind a clear profit. When you torrent a novel, or an audio book, or a song or an album or any other damn thing, you are denying its creator the money he or she needs to continue plying his or her trade, which is entertaining you. Simply put, if a writer is not getting paid for their content, then it is hampering their ability to produce more content. I like to think that the people who read my books will want to read more of my books. And I, in turn, want to write more books for them. But because I have a job, because I have other obligations besides writing, the process of writing takes longer than I want it to. So stealing content becomes an act of hostility, even of vandalism, while paying for it becomes an act of support.
Of course it's true that most people, if asked, would say that they "support" art, artists, and artistry. But in an age where people think that clicking "like" on Facebook is a meaningful act, "support" has become a meaningless word. Call me a crusty old fuck, but I believe that support, like love, is a verb; it is an action, not a concept, not an emotional state of being. Support does not mean jockeying a mouse across a mousepad, support means just that: support. And you support the artist by paying for his content. (If you don't like the content you paid for, you have the Sith-like pleasure of the bad review, to which you have every right.)
Don't mistake me here. I am not, n - o - t, NOT saying that because someone labored sweatily over their art that you are obligated to pay for it. No, and again no. A fry cook labors over his hamburger, a plumber over his pipe, a stenographer over his machine, an anesthetist over his pump, a soldier over his rifle, and nobody asks them how hard or how long they worked, only whether they carried out their appointed task -- cooking that burger, fixing that pipe, transcribing that hearing, anesthetizing that patient, assembling that rifle. My job is to entertain, and I should only be paid if I do just exactly that. But if -- if! -- you actually like my work, you have a moral obligation to do just exactly that, and support me with your money, so I can keep entertaining you. Back in the 60s, the social revolutionaries used to say, "You're part of the solution or you're part of the problem." People who illegally torrent artists they claim to love, and then wonder why that artist hasn't produced a new book or a new album or a new graphic novel in years, are part of the motherfucking problem, and they need to grasp that fact. Otherwise all that will remain is those who have corporate backing, and who the hell wants that?
In an ideal world, the argument that creative content ought to be free might at least be worth discussing, but we live in a reality where the vast majority of content creators -- artists -- need to be financially remunerated so they can keep making their art. And based on the discussions I've had with many people, and what I read on threads and forums and see on social media every day, I'm convinced very few people grasp the harsh economics that dictate reality for those of us who produce content -- art, if I may be so bold.
There is a belief in America which vastly predates the Internet, to wit, that it is acceptable to bootleg music, because record labels are at heart just corporations and you can't steal from a corporation, because what is a corporation but a bunch of thieves? Sinatra -- or Madonna, for that matter -- wasn't going to sleep on any less silken sheets because you got a bootlegged tape of their music. Later, this belief extended itself into the video and cable era: copied VHS tapes and stolen cable signals weren't considered theft because of the same "Robin Hood" style moral out-clause -- and this naturally extended once again into the age of the Pirate Bay and the midnight torrent. The rationale is -- and I am quoting myself here, just so you don't think I'm riding a moral high horse: "So you're gonna download a Disney movie without paying for it? Well, fuck Disney. They make billions and billions of dollars, they're not gonna miss your money."
I'm not going get into the whole debate of whether stealing from corporations in the Robin Hood-style, or what you may think is the Robin Hood-style, is in fact a moral prerogative. Corporations are large and powerful entities and well capable of defending themselves and protecting their bottom line. I have another bottom to worry about. My own.
I am a novelist. A pretty goddamn good one, frankly. And because writing novels is all I've ever wanted to do since I was a little kid with scabby knees and a Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox, I'd like to do it full time for the rest of my life. I have worked very hard to achieve this dream and am well on my way, but the road is very long and extremely bumpy, and the biggest bump looks awfully like a dollar sign covered in barbed wire. We live in a world ruled -- wrongly and badly ruled, but ruled nevertheless -- by money, and it is the iron law of money that when it comes to selling creative content, you've got to spend it to make it. Disney can do this. Miles Watson finds it a little more difficult.
There are many Miles Watsons in the word of created content -- novelists, short story writers, musicians, comedians, producers of web series, YouTube auteurs, graphic novelists, etc., etc. People who are, in the words of the publishing industry, either "small, indie, or mid-list." These are people who are creating content either wholly or partially on their own dime, without benefit, or without very much benefit, from underwriting organizations like record labels, publishers, agents, producers, studios, and so on. These are the people who are most grievously injured by the refusal of some people to pay for their work. And while it seems to be understood, by some people anyway, that we "small fry" creators are not corporations and don't have corporate resources, the logic which allows people to steal from corporations is nevertheless applied when stealing from us -- because of the fallback clause that "art ought to be free."
It's difficult not to get pissed off when confronted by this assertion, because of the ignorance implied in the idea that, in a society like ours, which is totally ruled by market principles, that "something for nothing" is a workable theory. Also by the almost psychopathic selfishness which is implied in said assertion. I think it would be more productive, however, to simply explain why the economics of free content do not work, are not sustainable, and in the end hurt the thief as much as the artist he is stealing from.
The idea that art ought to be free stems at least in part from a near-total ignorance of the artistic process itself, and much of this ignorance is rooted in the disproportion between the time and money it takes to make "content," and the time spent in enjoying it. A half-hour sit-com shoots for a week to produce 22 minutes of television; a weekly drama shoots for eight to nine days to produce one 43 minute episode; the ordinary film shoots for about forty to sixty days (not including pre-production and post-production) which take many months, to yield a two-hour movie. Likewise, a record album can take up to a year in the making to produce ten songs with an average listening time of three minutes and a total listening time of between 30 and 40 minutes. As for literal works of art, well, it took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel, which I once walked through in about a half an hour, ushered by a tour guide whose mind was clearly on her lunch. The fact that art is so difficult to produce but consumed so quickly creates a powerful impression, albeit a false one, that the process which creates the art is equally speedy, which in turn tends to devalue the art. This applies especially in my own field. How long does it take you to read a novel? If you're reading this, you're on Goodreads, which means you like to read, which means you probably read fast, which means the ordinary novel doesn't survive longer than a week or so in your hands. And if we use that as a standard -- roughly one week to read an ordinarily-sized novel -- the next thing we have to ask is: how long does it take to write what you read?
Writers, like other artists, work at different rates, each according to his talent, discipline, habits, genre, temperament, emotional commitment and contractual deadlines. There is, however, one factor which outweighs all the others in determining how prolific he will be or can be: the writer's economic situation. Stephen King is extraordinarily prolific because he is a workaholic with a restless imagination, but also because he is a very wealthy man and can devote as much time as he likes to writing. He was not nearly as prolific at the beginning of his career, when economic necessity demanded he hold down a teaching job which consumed much of his time and energy. And this is roughly where I find myself now. It takes me about one year to finish the first draft of a novel. That is, to conceive it, to organize the story in my mind, to compose a few crude outlines, to begin the book, and write it through to the end, with the inevitable delays that happen because of work, family, relationship, illness, travel, the usual emotional struggles a writer endures while writing, and so on. My books tend to be anywhere from 85,000 - 125,000 words when I finish the initial draft. (Put in practical terms, that's between 350 and 450 pages of printer paper.) Then there's the drafting process, the editing process, formatting the book, cover design, layout, and so forth. All of this takes money (many editors, for example, charge $7 a page). It also costs time, and that time, in my case, adds up to about twelve months. So, what took me 52 weeks to write took you one to read -- assuming you read the damn thing at all, which brings me to my next point.
Once the final draft is complete, the last "i" dotted and the last "t" crossed, this is when the real work begins -- "work" in this case meaning promotion -- trying to get you to read what I've written. This means social media promotion of the book, the use of paid promotional services, the hosting of book parties, attendance at book conventions and expos, buying copies at wholesale prices to sell through my own website, giveaways on Amazon and Goodreads, and so on. All of this costs money. And there is no saving money cutting out the middleman, because for lower-level authors, the middleman is yourself. I returned yesterday from Book Expo America, hosted in Chicago, where my novel "Cage Life" was featured. This trip was entertaining and I hope, productive. It was also costly. And while I was taking it, I did not write a single word. Promotion, like a day job, sucks up a lot of creative oxygen. Ideally, of course, I would produce two novels a year. But to do this I would have to be free of my job(s) and write full time, as I did when I was a screenwriter. And of course I cannot do that without A) the money a day job provides, or B) an audience willing to pay for my work. I am trying hard to build B), but building B) -- and here is where that nasty catch comes in -- costs money, which in turn necessitates A). At least for now. I need people to pay for what I do so that I can keep doing it. And this is where the argument that "content should be free" breaks down. Because content, or art, or whatever you want to call it, costs money to make. I can't afford to ladle it out for free. I need to be remunerated for it, if only so I can do more advertising and promotion -- never mind a clear profit. When you torrent a novel, or an audio book, or a song or an album or any other damn thing, you are denying its creator the money he or she needs to continue plying his or her trade, which is entertaining you. Simply put, if a writer is not getting paid for their content, then it is hampering their ability to produce more content. I like to think that the people who read my books will want to read more of my books. And I, in turn, want to write more books for them. But because I have a job, because I have other obligations besides writing, the process of writing takes longer than I want it to. So stealing content becomes an act of hostility, even of vandalism, while paying for it becomes an act of support.
Of course it's true that most people, if asked, would say that they "support" art, artists, and artistry. But in an age where people think that clicking "like" on Facebook is a meaningful act, "support" has become a meaningless word. Call me a crusty old fuck, but I believe that support, like love, is a verb; it is an action, not a concept, not an emotional state of being. Support does not mean jockeying a mouse across a mousepad, support means just that: support. And you support the artist by paying for his content. (If you don't like the content you paid for, you have the Sith-like pleasure of the bad review, to which you have every right.)
Don't mistake me here. I am not, n - o - t, NOT saying that because someone labored sweatily over their art that you are obligated to pay for it. No, and again no. A fry cook labors over his hamburger, a plumber over his pipe, a stenographer over his machine, an anesthetist over his pump, a soldier over his rifle, and nobody asks them how hard or how long they worked, only whether they carried out their appointed task -- cooking that burger, fixing that pipe, transcribing that hearing, anesthetizing that patient, assembling that rifle. My job is to entertain, and I should only be paid if I do just exactly that. But if -- if! -- you actually like my work, you have a moral obligation to do just exactly that, and support me with your money, so I can keep entertaining you. Back in the 60s, the social revolutionaries used to say, "You're part of the solution or you're part of the problem." People who illegally torrent artists they claim to love, and then wonder why that artist hasn't produced a new book or a new album or a new graphic novel in years, are part of the motherfucking problem, and they need to grasp that fact. Otherwise all that will remain is those who have corporate backing, and who the hell wants that?
April 26, 2016
A Puerto Rican in Hitler's Army: The Strange Case of Ramon F. (Part 1)
Note: In 2004 I conducted a number of interviews with veterans of WW2 for The Oral History Project. The most fascinating of these was with "Ramon F," who told me a story so unique that I had to conduct extensive research to verify its accuracy. Please note that Ramon's answers to my questions are about as far from "politically correct" as it is possible to be, and some of his opinions will upset or outrage readers. It is in part because of this, rather than in spite of it, that I am relating his tale here, for there is no understanding the Second World War without knowing what it was that motivated the Axis soldier to fight -- and in Ramon's case, what motivated him to continue his support of the Axis cause long after it had been defeated.
Understanding Ramon's story involves grasping the political situation in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. In 1936, a civil war broke out in Spain between the elected leftist government and its supporters (sometimes referred to as the Popular Front) and a coalition of right-wing interests (sometimes called the Nationalists) looking to establish a Fascist state in Spain. The Fascists won the war, and their leader, General Fransisco Franco, became dictator, largely through military aid from Mussolini and Hitler. Though Spain was a Fascist state from 1939 onward, it never joined the Axis and remained neutral during WW2. However, in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Franco permitted volunteers from the military and Fascist party to join the German army to fight against communism. For political reasons the Spanish could not fight under the Spanish flag in Russia, so the German army put them in German uniforms and formed them into the 250th Infantry Division, known colloquially as "The Spanish Blue Division" because its members wore blue undershirts to indicate their membership in the "Falange," the Fascist Party of Spain. The 250th Division fought in Russia from 1941 to late 1943, when it was withdrawn to Spain, and during that time some 50,000 Spaniards served in its ranks. Among them was Ramon F. This is his story in his own words.
Q) When and where were you born?
A: I was born in the town of Monsanto in central Portugal in 1922, but was sent to live with some relatives that had settled in Puerto Rico, around 1927.
Q) Where were you raised?
A: Most of what I remember pertaining my childhood and adolescence relates to the tropical island that welcomed me at age 5, Puerto Rico. For a fact I speak, read and write in English and Spanish fluently but my Portuguese is very limited.
Q) What did your father do for a living?
A: My father's name was Gustavo Adolfo, he was a wine maker, my mother's name was Carmen Molina.
Q) Being Portuguese, what was your feeling on the Spanish civil war?
A:Not a thing moved me about the events in far away Europe until 1936, when I received word that my uncle Luis had been shot by the communists in Spain.
Our [Portuguese] leader Antonio Salazar supported the nationalist (pro Franco) against the Popular Front (communists). He allowed the representatives of the Nationalist Army to negotiate the movement of men and supplies from Germany via Portugal. I crossed the border with one such shipment and immediately joined the "Falange" (I was 14 years old but because of my size and build appeared much older and was able to sneak in like you say in America). I was not involved in the general fighting and served mostly in guard duty at supply depots, that was the beginning of my relation with support services "servicios de intendencia" which would eventually be my branch of service in Russia many years later. When the war ended in 1939 I stayed in Spain working odd jobs and enjoying my first taste of personal independence.
Q) What were your feelings about Fascism & National Socialism (Nazism)?
A:Fascism to me is synonymous with "order". The people in the West do not know nor understand this. I think it is mainly due because of their form of rule, democracy has a way of undermining the fundamental values of nation, race and destiny. People like me who lived under dictatorship understood, stood up for and were willing to die for these principles; not because we were forced to do so... but because we chose to do so of our own free
> will. I see today's generations and shudder with fear at their total lack of ideals, of love of nation and the willingness to sacrifice individually for the benefit of the nation. True and I must give you this, there is very little in the form of leaders and ideals worth following today, yet I think that you owe it to yourself to seek a path that is both fresh and a reflection of your individuality, different... there is much more to life than following the crowd in their vices and the total degeneration of
the individual. Your grandfathers fought against us for what they believed was right and we respected them for that, but they never thought about us in the same way. We were and are still portrayed as vicious murderers and
automatons who had no will of our own and in this they were very wrong. At the other side of the macrocosm that is life you have exactly the same, we were also sons, brothers, husbands and most importantly men who like
your grandfathers fought not so much for political ideals but for love of nation and people.
Q: And your feelings about communism?
A: The Spanish equivalent for a "lowlife" is "tierra" which means "earth". I wouldn't call a communist "tierra, earth", it would be insulting....to the earth. The "earth" gives forth produce, beautiful flowers that feast our senses, food for sustenance and receives us when we pass away. A communist to me is the most unessential element in existence, to be dealt with in the very same way they deal with those unfortunate enough to live under
their yoke of terror. Franco shot most of them and I fully agree with that solution.
Q: How did you hear about the Spanish division being raised for service in Russia?
A: On June 22, 1941 [the day Germany invaded the USSR] the news spread like wildfire. Enough volunteers showed up to form not 1 but 5 or more divisions had Franco desired to do so. On June
24, I and hundreds of thousands marched to Alcalá street demanding that Spain contribute to the Great European Crusade Against Bolshevism.
Q: How did you volunteer?
A: Being in superb physical condition and being a bona fide member of the "Falange" (which had it's privileges) all I had to do was to falsify my age on my birth certificate and I made one of the first 18,000 volunteers. By
July we were on our way to Germany.
Q: What was your family's reaction?
A: Horror! Having lost my uncle Luis they did not desire for me to join.
Q) What was your training like? (and where)
A: We trained at Graffenwohr in Germany, we were there for 5 weeks. We received exactly the same training as regular German soldiers. We learned to handle every weapon in the German arsenal, from a Walther P38 to an 88 mm antitank gun. Since we were already versed in combat it was thought we did not need to spend anymore time than that. We had a very violent clash of
cultures, you see we Portuguese and Spaniards are for the most part a fun loving people and Germans did not understand this. We would serenade Russian women with our guitars and got along generally well with the civilian population, we didn't wear our uniforms according to regulation, we grew beards, however we were very professional soldiers and the Germans and
the Russians would find out soon enough. One thing I regret is that I could never master the German language no matter how hard I tried.
Q: What was your first impression of the Germans when you met them? What were they like as soldiers & people?
A: First impression I got was, are there any small German soldiers? They were huge men. As a people they were the absolute example of nationalism and national unity. As soldiers they were second to none, I saw them
fighting and it was second nature to them. It would seem they were trained form childhood to fight and survive.
Q: What was first impression of Russia?
A: Abysmal, like going back a century in time, no decent roads, no utilities. They had no creature comforts with them to facilitate life. In my opinion this ability to survive and simplify life was essential in making the Russian soldier of WW2 the most resourceful soldier we had to face. These men could survive the most extreme conditions and hardships imaginable, unlike American and British soldiers who never lacked the essential supplies to wage war and who also had access to all the commodities imaginable, Russians could survive on almost nothing. They would have made the Spartans very happy.
Q: What military duty (duties) did you have in your unit?
A: I served in 250th supply troop. I was in charge of keeping accounts of all stocks and responsible for keeping adequate reserves available. You had
to be ingenious, I would order twice the requirements and would build a reserve which assured we had plenty in case of delivery problems. I would also drive a truck in the supply column when nobody else was available.
Q: Where in Russia did you serve?
A: Army Group North [Note: a grouping of German armies which fought near Leningrad during Ramon's time in Russia). We fought most of our actions near the Volkchov river, Krosny Bor and our first action was at place called Kapella Nova in october 1941. Since you would be marching one way or another (we were not motorized) it is very difficult to give you a chronological record of our actions.
Q: What were the Russian winters like?
A: I can't even put it into words. Picture yourself coming out of the shower naked, running a fever and stepping outside in a blizzard. Any exposed body part would freeze in a minute, ears, nose and our boots had no
insulating material which resulted in a lot of frostbite cases. The only defense was to wear two pairs of socks and keep the feet as dry as possible, provided your boots ran a size bigger than you normally wore. We often found out our feet swelled feet prevented us from putting our boots back on again after we took them of for treatment which consisted of a balm that was applied to the skin. We found out the Russians coated bullets with mercury (the liquid used in thermometers) since this substance is impervious to temperature changes and remains liquid and thus prevented the weapons action from
becoming jammed, this would also cause a horrible burning sensation when you were hit. Also they would dip their weapons in boiling water to remove the
standard lubricants that would freeze solid and jam all weapons operating mechanisms, in other words they used no lubricants whatsoever. We soon found
out the cold would make metal brittle and the surface would adhere to exposed skin. Artillery barrels would become distorted by the cold and you had to readjust your firing range by 3 to 5 degrees over the estimated
coordinates, otherwise your shells would fall on your own troops.
Q: How did your German comrades feel about the foreigners serving with them?
A: Uneasy at first. I personally don't blame them for I happen to have the same line of thinking about foreigners, however when they saw our
fighting qualities and our fervent hatred of anything communist they understood where we came from. I have talked with modern day American soldiers and
judging their actions, behavior in combat and training methods I would never want them fighting in a war next to me, and I don't mean to sound offensive
but some of these kids go into battle under the influence of drugs any alcohol. Also they rely too much on computers for everything, from range finding,
battlefield orientation and I seriously suspect they have ever trained to function if ever the computer system fails. I doubt they trained like us, we were capable of performing the duties of the next in rank proficiently
in case he was killed or wounded, I think today's modern armies have lost the capacity to instill individuality and initiative into the individual soldier.
Q: You were very young went you volunteered; how did you respond to the pressures and horrors of being at war?
A: One word sums this up"CAMARADERIE". A man knew he could depend blindly on his comrades. After the war this same camaraderie helped axis soldiers
survive the brutal treatment of the Allies (Russians, American and the French swine) for all of them committed hideous atrocities against our soldiers and civilians.
Q: What did you make of your Soviet opponents?
A: The toughest foe we ever faced. I never faced Americans or British soldiers but I doubt they could hold a candle to the Soviets. They were resilient, experts at camouflage, hand to hand combat and their weapons
were very reliable and designed for to endure the brutal conditions of their land.
Q: " Soviet civilians?
A: Like I said before we got along well with them. We would even share our provisions with them. I saw German and Spanish doctors caring for these people and giving them their first medical checkup ever. What hit us the
hardest was when their village leaders would come to us and ask if it was all right to re-open their churches and resume worshiping their faith. A little later they would bring out their icons from hiding and set up little
altars, sometimes they would join us or the German soldiers in our masses. One thing I want to clear up now and forever, German soldiers were not atheists as attested by most pseudo historians. They had chaplains, held daily mass and that included the Waffen SS. All that crap about us being some sort of non-believers in Christ is a lot of crap! The Russian people were for the most a very simple people. Those of us who saw the "workers paradise" up close learned to hate the communist
government not the people facing us in combat, unfortunately it was them or us but to say we actually hated the Russian people was just not true. The one
exception were partisans, these we would kill without regret.
Q: How did your religious faith serve you in the war?
A: Although political and ideological ideals serve as some sort of goal to chase after and give you a sense of belonging in the general sense, a deeply rooted spiritual link to a higher plane is necessary in war most of all. If you don't believe in some higher supreme being when you go to war... you will by the end of your first encounter; a mortar explosion in the midst of a group, all but one are unharmed... why him and not me or anyone else? It
> > doesn't make sense. We Latin people are staunch Catholics and had our chaplains that held mass daily, with Russian civilians attending.
Q: Much is made of atrocities committed by German troops in Russia; did you ever witness anything of this nature?
A: The only "atrocities " I witnessed were the ones committed by the Russians against our men, for which we extracted a very heavy price. Most you hear is about German atrocities here and there but believe me, the
Bolshevist swine were not human.
Q: Did you receive any awards, ribbons, commendations, of any kind from either the Spanish government or the German government?
A: An Eastern Front award was granted to all who served [Note: the "Eastern Front Service Medal," known cynically in the German Army as the "Frozen Meat Medal," was awarded to all Axis troops who served in the first winter of the Russian campaign, i.e. 1941 - 1942.] Being in a supply detachment I had very few occasions to play the role of hero. Although some division members won not only Spanish awards but also German decorations.
Q: What were the circumstances in which you were wounded?
A: We were delivering supplies to a company of the 262 infantry regiment near Krosny Bor in september 1943. We left our trucks on the road and carried the supplies down and up an impassable ravine. It got dark as we
were leaving and a Russian attack caught us halfway out, we were urged out by the commander, our 35 men clashed with a Russian patrol in the dark and a firefight started. We continued ahead in the darkness using our
compasses for orientation and came to a point some 350 yards from the ravine. We had to cross an open open field to the right of our position, which I vehemently opposed as being too risky. I went out with 3 men and found a small embankment that ran parallel to the field for 200 yards and then broke due east the last 150 yards back into the village. We followed this route of escape and made our way back into the town for some 50 yards due east until we came a street leading back to the
western part and the ravine. We made our way to a 2 story building that must have been some sort of warehouse; upon entering we found the ground floor had no exit to the ravine, cautiously we climbed the stairs and found the whole backside had been torn by an explosion. Peering into the darkness we could make out the outline of our trucks on the road, one by one we jumped
into the darkness and regrouped at the bottom of the ravine. As luck would have it as my turn came and I jumped I landed on a debris covered crater at
the base of the house and plunged some 12 feet down the crater. My comrades rushed after me and pulled me out, I found it hard to get out of the ravine and felt a numbness in my legs but paid no heed. back at camp I
collapsed and was rushed to the dressing station and from there to a German field hospital where I was examined and diagnosed with a broken back and
dislocated hip. The doctor's could find no explanation as to how I was able to make it back from the place I felled in back to the road up the steep ravine. I was commended for a wound award of some sort but firmly refused because I sincerely felt the way I was injured ( accidentally) was not worthy of any recognition, specially when my comrades were dying in combat.
Q: How were you received when you returned home?
A: Mixed emotions, but mostly it was a very warm affair. I personally have never cared for "official" recognition of any kind. We could feel the love and gratefulness of our people and that was enough to most of us. We
were dying to see our loved ones though.
Q: As the war turned against Germany, what were your emotional reactions?
A: Anger; that the western powers failed to see the writing on the wall and support our fight against the common enemy. One look at Europe's map immediately after WW2 makes you wonder what the western powers were fighting for and for what interests, certainly it was not for freedom, nor democracy. Jews ruled in Russia, Jews ruled (and still do) in the Western nations (especially in America) and that was whom they were fighting for. Two thirds of Europe under communist rule is definitely not my idea of freedom.
Q: Does the Spanish gov't compensate its veterans from the war in any way? Does the German gov't compensate its foreign volunteers in any way?
A: Are you kidding me?! We are one chapter of history they wish they could obliterate in the same way they have obliterated freedom of expression in their "Canosa Republische" of Germany. Even in Spain we were denied
pensions after the war!
Q: Are there any monuments to their service [the Blue Division] anywhere?
Yes, the most famous one being "El valle de los Caidos" (The valley of the fallen) built by Franco using communist prisoners of war (for once these vermin did something good in their useless lives). I have also included
pictures of 2 memorials, one in Madrid and another at Grigorowo in Russia. Yet the most enduring memorial to those who made the supreme sacrifice fighting Bolshevism is in the hearts of those of us who not only
remember them but also try to tell the truth about them.
Q: Did you/do you keep in touch with any of your former comrades?
A: Unfortunately not. And there are not too many left alive as I write, especially Portuguese for we were not that many to begin with.
Q: How do you feel about the way WW 2 Germany is portrayed now in movies and books?
A: Writers like Mexican Salvador Borrego and Rumanian Trian Romanescu have never been available in the English language and it is a pity for these men have told the truth about the origins and backstage causes of WW2 for decades. When your first taste of WW2 Europe is a book like rise and fall of the third Reich, written by a communist Jew named [William] Shirer and received by
mindless masses of people hungry to find out what happened and accepted as "the gospel" on the Third Reich it is a small wonder people are so misinformed about us and our struggle. As WW2 and it's aftermath fade into the realm of history we near the time when the last of us who served in that maelstrom will also fade into eternity... closing the final page perhaps forever on one of the most misunderstood chapters in humanity's struggle
to be free. It will be up to the new generations to carry on the struggle for truth so that the memory of our dead is finally vindicated by history.
Q: What did you do after the war?
A: Went back home to Portugal and stayed there for 3 years before coming down here [Puerto Rico] I served as a mercenary in Africa for a time as well, but aggravated my old back injury and had to return home.
Q: How do you feel about postwar Germany's treatment of its veterans?
A: Shameful, much like Americans treated their Vietnam vets. Waffen SS veterans were particularly mistreated, denied pensions which were rightfully theirs, making them the "resident evil" of a nation that was more concerned with appeasing Jews than with rewarding those who gave the most for nation and folk [people].
Q: Would you do it again if you had the chance?
A: Give me a rifle and show me the way to the front! I have no qualms about my past nor what I did, our generation was one of splendid young men who had conviction and faith in our cause.
Q: What do you think the world would be like if Germany had been victorious in Russia?
A: We would have contained the spread of Bolshevism, the historical implications of which are endless and open to speculation. Then we could have turned most of our might against the Western powers which would have never been able to defeat us.
Q: If you could change one modern perception about the cause you fought for, what would it be?
A: The "holohoax". Never in the history of humanity has truth been so distorted, digested by the masses and accepted as gospel in such proportions. Most people find it easier to let others do their thinking for them and accept the general concepts of history. It is up to the
individual to seek answers, to discern the mirages placed before their eyes by the Jewish controlled media and realize that history always has two sides; the victors and that of the vanquished.
This ends the formal interview I conducted with Ramon in 2004, but it was not the end of our discussion. You will note that I did not argue with any of his assertions, not even with the "holohoax" comment, and that some of my questions were fairly provocative and bound to produce inflammatory responses. The truth was, at the time I was eager to get the most controversial answers I could, because I figured I'd get an "A" on the project if I did (and I was right). Ramon, however, was a man of fierce convictions and did not need to be tricked into revealing his true feelings, however injurious they may have been to mine. The truth was I found him so complex, so fascinating, and occasionally, so horrifying, that I kept going back for more. In the next installment of this blog I will share more of what I learned about the man I came to think of as The Last (and Most Unlikely) Nazi.
Understanding Ramon's story involves grasping the political situation in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. In 1936, a civil war broke out in Spain between the elected leftist government and its supporters (sometimes referred to as the Popular Front) and a coalition of right-wing interests (sometimes called the Nationalists) looking to establish a Fascist state in Spain. The Fascists won the war, and their leader, General Fransisco Franco, became dictator, largely through military aid from Mussolini and Hitler. Though Spain was a Fascist state from 1939 onward, it never joined the Axis and remained neutral during WW2. However, in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Franco permitted volunteers from the military and Fascist party to join the German army to fight against communism. For political reasons the Spanish could not fight under the Spanish flag in Russia, so the German army put them in German uniforms and formed them into the 250th Infantry Division, known colloquially as "The Spanish Blue Division" because its members wore blue undershirts to indicate their membership in the "Falange," the Fascist Party of Spain. The 250th Division fought in Russia from 1941 to late 1943, when it was withdrawn to Spain, and during that time some 50,000 Spaniards served in its ranks. Among them was Ramon F. This is his story in his own words.
Q) When and where were you born?
A: I was born in the town of Monsanto in central Portugal in 1922, but was sent to live with some relatives that had settled in Puerto Rico, around 1927.
Q) Where were you raised?
A: Most of what I remember pertaining my childhood and adolescence relates to the tropical island that welcomed me at age 5, Puerto Rico. For a fact I speak, read and write in English and Spanish fluently but my Portuguese is very limited.
Q) What did your father do for a living?
A: My father's name was Gustavo Adolfo, he was a wine maker, my mother's name was Carmen Molina.
Q) Being Portuguese, what was your feeling on the Spanish civil war?
A:Not a thing moved me about the events in far away Europe until 1936, when I received word that my uncle Luis had been shot by the communists in Spain.
Our [Portuguese] leader Antonio Salazar supported the nationalist (pro Franco) against the Popular Front (communists). He allowed the representatives of the Nationalist Army to negotiate the movement of men and supplies from Germany via Portugal. I crossed the border with one such shipment and immediately joined the "Falange" (I was 14 years old but because of my size and build appeared much older and was able to sneak in like you say in America). I was not involved in the general fighting and served mostly in guard duty at supply depots, that was the beginning of my relation with support services "servicios de intendencia" which would eventually be my branch of service in Russia many years later. When the war ended in 1939 I stayed in Spain working odd jobs and enjoying my first taste of personal independence.
Q) What were your feelings about Fascism & National Socialism (Nazism)?
A:Fascism to me is synonymous with "order". The people in the West do not know nor understand this. I think it is mainly due because of their form of rule, democracy has a way of undermining the fundamental values of nation, race and destiny. People like me who lived under dictatorship understood, stood up for and were willing to die for these principles; not because we were forced to do so... but because we chose to do so of our own free
> will. I see today's generations and shudder with fear at their total lack of ideals, of love of nation and the willingness to sacrifice individually for the benefit of the nation. True and I must give you this, there is very little in the form of leaders and ideals worth following today, yet I think that you owe it to yourself to seek a path that is both fresh and a reflection of your individuality, different... there is much more to life than following the crowd in their vices and the total degeneration of
the individual. Your grandfathers fought against us for what they believed was right and we respected them for that, but they never thought about us in the same way. We were and are still portrayed as vicious murderers and
automatons who had no will of our own and in this they were very wrong. At the other side of the macrocosm that is life you have exactly the same, we were also sons, brothers, husbands and most importantly men who like
your grandfathers fought not so much for political ideals but for love of nation and people.
Q: And your feelings about communism?
A: The Spanish equivalent for a "lowlife" is "tierra" which means "earth". I wouldn't call a communist "tierra, earth", it would be insulting....to the earth. The "earth" gives forth produce, beautiful flowers that feast our senses, food for sustenance and receives us when we pass away. A communist to me is the most unessential element in existence, to be dealt with in the very same way they deal with those unfortunate enough to live under
their yoke of terror. Franco shot most of them and I fully agree with that solution.
Q: How did you hear about the Spanish division being raised for service in Russia?
A: On June 22, 1941 [the day Germany invaded the USSR] the news spread like wildfire. Enough volunteers showed up to form not 1 but 5 or more divisions had Franco desired to do so. On June
24, I and hundreds of thousands marched to Alcalá street demanding that Spain contribute to the Great European Crusade Against Bolshevism.
Q: How did you volunteer?
A: Being in superb physical condition and being a bona fide member of the "Falange" (which had it's privileges) all I had to do was to falsify my age on my birth certificate and I made one of the first 18,000 volunteers. By
July we were on our way to Germany.
Q: What was your family's reaction?
A: Horror! Having lost my uncle Luis they did not desire for me to join.
Q) What was your training like? (and where)
A: We trained at Graffenwohr in Germany, we were there for 5 weeks. We received exactly the same training as regular German soldiers. We learned to handle every weapon in the German arsenal, from a Walther P38 to an 88 mm antitank gun. Since we were already versed in combat it was thought we did not need to spend anymore time than that. We had a very violent clash of
cultures, you see we Portuguese and Spaniards are for the most part a fun loving people and Germans did not understand this. We would serenade Russian women with our guitars and got along generally well with the civilian population, we didn't wear our uniforms according to regulation, we grew beards, however we were very professional soldiers and the Germans and
the Russians would find out soon enough. One thing I regret is that I could never master the German language no matter how hard I tried.
Q: What was your first impression of the Germans when you met them? What were they like as soldiers & people?
A: First impression I got was, are there any small German soldiers? They were huge men. As a people they were the absolute example of nationalism and national unity. As soldiers they were second to none, I saw them
fighting and it was second nature to them. It would seem they were trained form childhood to fight and survive.
Q: What was first impression of Russia?
A: Abysmal, like going back a century in time, no decent roads, no utilities. They had no creature comforts with them to facilitate life. In my opinion this ability to survive and simplify life was essential in making the Russian soldier of WW2 the most resourceful soldier we had to face. These men could survive the most extreme conditions and hardships imaginable, unlike American and British soldiers who never lacked the essential supplies to wage war and who also had access to all the commodities imaginable, Russians could survive on almost nothing. They would have made the Spartans very happy.
Q: What military duty (duties) did you have in your unit?
A: I served in 250th supply troop. I was in charge of keeping accounts of all stocks and responsible for keeping adequate reserves available. You had
to be ingenious, I would order twice the requirements and would build a reserve which assured we had plenty in case of delivery problems. I would also drive a truck in the supply column when nobody else was available.
Q: Where in Russia did you serve?
A: Army Group North [Note: a grouping of German armies which fought near Leningrad during Ramon's time in Russia). We fought most of our actions near the Volkchov river, Krosny Bor and our first action was at place called Kapella Nova in october 1941. Since you would be marching one way or another (we were not motorized) it is very difficult to give you a chronological record of our actions.
Q: What were the Russian winters like?
A: I can't even put it into words. Picture yourself coming out of the shower naked, running a fever and stepping outside in a blizzard. Any exposed body part would freeze in a minute, ears, nose and our boots had no
insulating material which resulted in a lot of frostbite cases. The only defense was to wear two pairs of socks and keep the feet as dry as possible, provided your boots ran a size bigger than you normally wore. We often found out our feet swelled feet prevented us from putting our boots back on again after we took them of for treatment which consisted of a balm that was applied to the skin. We found out the Russians coated bullets with mercury (the liquid used in thermometers) since this substance is impervious to temperature changes and remains liquid and thus prevented the weapons action from
becoming jammed, this would also cause a horrible burning sensation when you were hit. Also they would dip their weapons in boiling water to remove the
standard lubricants that would freeze solid and jam all weapons operating mechanisms, in other words they used no lubricants whatsoever. We soon found
out the cold would make metal brittle and the surface would adhere to exposed skin. Artillery barrels would become distorted by the cold and you had to readjust your firing range by 3 to 5 degrees over the estimated
coordinates, otherwise your shells would fall on your own troops.
Q: How did your German comrades feel about the foreigners serving with them?
A: Uneasy at first. I personally don't blame them for I happen to have the same line of thinking about foreigners, however when they saw our
fighting qualities and our fervent hatred of anything communist they understood where we came from. I have talked with modern day American soldiers and
judging their actions, behavior in combat and training methods I would never want them fighting in a war next to me, and I don't mean to sound offensive
but some of these kids go into battle under the influence of drugs any alcohol. Also they rely too much on computers for everything, from range finding,
battlefield orientation and I seriously suspect they have ever trained to function if ever the computer system fails. I doubt they trained like us, we were capable of performing the duties of the next in rank proficiently
in case he was killed or wounded, I think today's modern armies have lost the capacity to instill individuality and initiative into the individual soldier.
Q: You were very young went you volunteered; how did you respond to the pressures and horrors of being at war?
A: One word sums this up"CAMARADERIE". A man knew he could depend blindly on his comrades. After the war this same camaraderie helped axis soldiers
survive the brutal treatment of the Allies (Russians, American and the French swine) for all of them committed hideous atrocities against our soldiers and civilians.
Q: What did you make of your Soviet opponents?
A: The toughest foe we ever faced. I never faced Americans or British soldiers but I doubt they could hold a candle to the Soviets. They were resilient, experts at camouflage, hand to hand combat and their weapons
were very reliable and designed for to endure the brutal conditions of their land.
Q: " Soviet civilians?
A: Like I said before we got along well with them. We would even share our provisions with them. I saw German and Spanish doctors caring for these people and giving them their first medical checkup ever. What hit us the
hardest was when their village leaders would come to us and ask if it was all right to re-open their churches and resume worshiping their faith. A little later they would bring out their icons from hiding and set up little
altars, sometimes they would join us or the German soldiers in our masses. One thing I want to clear up now and forever, German soldiers were not atheists as attested by most pseudo historians. They had chaplains, held daily mass and that included the Waffen SS. All that crap about us being some sort of non-believers in Christ is a lot of crap! The Russian people were for the most a very simple people. Those of us who saw the "workers paradise" up close learned to hate the communist
government not the people facing us in combat, unfortunately it was them or us but to say we actually hated the Russian people was just not true. The one
exception were partisans, these we would kill without regret.
Q: How did your religious faith serve you in the war?
A: Although political and ideological ideals serve as some sort of goal to chase after and give you a sense of belonging in the general sense, a deeply rooted spiritual link to a higher plane is necessary in war most of all. If you don't believe in some higher supreme being when you go to war... you will by the end of your first encounter; a mortar explosion in the midst of a group, all but one are unharmed... why him and not me or anyone else? It
> > doesn't make sense. We Latin people are staunch Catholics and had our chaplains that held mass daily, with Russian civilians attending.
Q: Much is made of atrocities committed by German troops in Russia; did you ever witness anything of this nature?
A: The only "atrocities " I witnessed were the ones committed by the Russians against our men, for which we extracted a very heavy price. Most you hear is about German atrocities here and there but believe me, the
Bolshevist swine were not human.
Q: Did you receive any awards, ribbons, commendations, of any kind from either the Spanish government or the German government?
A: An Eastern Front award was granted to all who served [Note: the "Eastern Front Service Medal," known cynically in the German Army as the "Frozen Meat Medal," was awarded to all Axis troops who served in the first winter of the Russian campaign, i.e. 1941 - 1942.] Being in a supply detachment I had very few occasions to play the role of hero. Although some division members won not only Spanish awards but also German decorations.
Q: What were the circumstances in which you were wounded?
A: We were delivering supplies to a company of the 262 infantry regiment near Krosny Bor in september 1943. We left our trucks on the road and carried the supplies down and up an impassable ravine. It got dark as we
were leaving and a Russian attack caught us halfway out, we were urged out by the commander, our 35 men clashed with a Russian patrol in the dark and a firefight started. We continued ahead in the darkness using our
compasses for orientation and came to a point some 350 yards from the ravine. We had to cross an open open field to the right of our position, which I vehemently opposed as being too risky. I went out with 3 men and found a small embankment that ran parallel to the field for 200 yards and then broke due east the last 150 yards back into the village. We followed this route of escape and made our way back into the town for some 50 yards due east until we came a street leading back to the
western part and the ravine. We made our way to a 2 story building that must have been some sort of warehouse; upon entering we found the ground floor had no exit to the ravine, cautiously we climbed the stairs and found the whole backside had been torn by an explosion. Peering into the darkness we could make out the outline of our trucks on the road, one by one we jumped
into the darkness and regrouped at the bottom of the ravine. As luck would have it as my turn came and I jumped I landed on a debris covered crater at
the base of the house and plunged some 12 feet down the crater. My comrades rushed after me and pulled me out, I found it hard to get out of the ravine and felt a numbness in my legs but paid no heed. back at camp I
collapsed and was rushed to the dressing station and from there to a German field hospital where I was examined and diagnosed with a broken back and
dislocated hip. The doctor's could find no explanation as to how I was able to make it back from the place I felled in back to the road up the steep ravine. I was commended for a wound award of some sort but firmly refused because I sincerely felt the way I was injured ( accidentally) was not worthy of any recognition, specially when my comrades were dying in combat.
Q: How were you received when you returned home?
A: Mixed emotions, but mostly it was a very warm affair. I personally have never cared for "official" recognition of any kind. We could feel the love and gratefulness of our people and that was enough to most of us. We
were dying to see our loved ones though.
Q: As the war turned against Germany, what were your emotional reactions?
A: Anger; that the western powers failed to see the writing on the wall and support our fight against the common enemy. One look at Europe's map immediately after WW2 makes you wonder what the western powers were fighting for and for what interests, certainly it was not for freedom, nor democracy. Jews ruled in Russia, Jews ruled (and still do) in the Western nations (especially in America) and that was whom they were fighting for. Two thirds of Europe under communist rule is definitely not my idea of freedom.
Q: Does the Spanish gov't compensate its veterans from the war in any way? Does the German gov't compensate its foreign volunteers in any way?
A: Are you kidding me?! We are one chapter of history they wish they could obliterate in the same way they have obliterated freedom of expression in their "Canosa Republische" of Germany. Even in Spain we were denied
pensions after the war!
Q: Are there any monuments to their service [the Blue Division] anywhere?
Yes, the most famous one being "El valle de los Caidos" (The valley of the fallen) built by Franco using communist prisoners of war (for once these vermin did something good in their useless lives). I have also included
pictures of 2 memorials, one in Madrid and another at Grigorowo in Russia. Yet the most enduring memorial to those who made the supreme sacrifice fighting Bolshevism is in the hearts of those of us who not only
remember them but also try to tell the truth about them.
Q: Did you/do you keep in touch with any of your former comrades?
A: Unfortunately not. And there are not too many left alive as I write, especially Portuguese for we were not that many to begin with.
Q: How do you feel about the way WW 2 Germany is portrayed now in movies and books?
A: Writers like Mexican Salvador Borrego and Rumanian Trian Romanescu have never been available in the English language and it is a pity for these men have told the truth about the origins and backstage causes of WW2 for decades. When your first taste of WW2 Europe is a book like rise and fall of the third Reich, written by a communist Jew named [William] Shirer and received by
mindless masses of people hungry to find out what happened and accepted as "the gospel" on the Third Reich it is a small wonder people are so misinformed about us and our struggle. As WW2 and it's aftermath fade into the realm of history we near the time when the last of us who served in that maelstrom will also fade into eternity... closing the final page perhaps forever on one of the most misunderstood chapters in humanity's struggle
to be free. It will be up to the new generations to carry on the struggle for truth so that the memory of our dead is finally vindicated by history.
Q: What did you do after the war?
A: Went back home to Portugal and stayed there for 3 years before coming down here [Puerto Rico] I served as a mercenary in Africa for a time as well, but aggravated my old back injury and had to return home.
Q: How do you feel about postwar Germany's treatment of its veterans?
A: Shameful, much like Americans treated their Vietnam vets. Waffen SS veterans were particularly mistreated, denied pensions which were rightfully theirs, making them the "resident evil" of a nation that was more concerned with appeasing Jews than with rewarding those who gave the most for nation and folk [people].
Q: Would you do it again if you had the chance?
A: Give me a rifle and show me the way to the front! I have no qualms about my past nor what I did, our generation was one of splendid young men who had conviction and faith in our cause.
Q: What do you think the world would be like if Germany had been victorious in Russia?
A: We would have contained the spread of Bolshevism, the historical implications of which are endless and open to speculation. Then we could have turned most of our might against the Western powers which would have never been able to defeat us.
Q: If you could change one modern perception about the cause you fought for, what would it be?
A: The "holohoax". Never in the history of humanity has truth been so distorted, digested by the masses and accepted as gospel in such proportions. Most people find it easier to let others do their thinking for them and accept the general concepts of history. It is up to the
individual to seek answers, to discern the mirages placed before their eyes by the Jewish controlled media and realize that history always has two sides; the victors and that of the vanquished.
This ends the formal interview I conducted with Ramon in 2004, but it was not the end of our discussion. You will note that I did not argue with any of his assertions, not even with the "holohoax" comment, and that some of my questions were fairly provocative and bound to produce inflammatory responses. The truth was, at the time I was eager to get the most controversial answers I could, because I figured I'd get an "A" on the project if I did (and I was right). Ramon, however, was a man of fierce convictions and did not need to be tricked into revealing his true feelings, however injurious they may have been to mine. The truth was I found him so complex, so fascinating, and occasionally, so horrifying, that I kept going back for more. In the next installment of this blog I will share more of what I learned about the man I came to think of as The Last (and Most Unlikely) Nazi.
April 16, 2016
The One You Fear: A Little Lesson From My Past
NOTE: In the summers of 1998 and 1999 I was assigned, in my capacity as a Parole Officer, to work with a task force made up of the City PD, county sheriff's department, State Police, and State Parole. Most of what I did was walk a beat with various cops on hot summer nights in the worst parts of town. I was 27 years old, in terrific shape, boxing at a local gym, and convinced I could handle anything that came my way. That feeling ended with a single conversation. I recorded it not long after it happened. I relate it to you now.
The sergeant pointed to the shirtless man standing under the lamppost. “Now there, that's the guy you have to be afraid of.”
I felt confused. The guy I had to be afraid of had the caved-in face of a junkie, a flat chest, pipe-stem arms and no ass at all. He did not look frightening. He looked like a skeleton that had just swallowed a medicine ball. I said so.
“Look again.”
I did. A shiny red scar ran down his belly like a seam. Next to the scar was another, the shape of a nickel. There was a third one on his shoulder, a big angry pinkish-red mass that was covering the remains of a tattoo. It was clearly defined on its edges but inside of it were little round holes where the skin was undamaged. While I looked at the guy I was supposed to be afraid of, but wasn’t yet, I thought how odd it was that he did not know we were watching him. Later I realized he just didn't care.
“Most people you can frighten with your gun," the sergeant said, hitching up his own gunbelt as he said it.
"Not this guy. That scar down his belly? You know how he got that?"
"A knife."
"I don't mean what did it, I mean how he got it."
"How could I know that?"
"The type of the scar. You see a scar that hooks like that, it means somebody gutted him. Put the blade in and then sawed upwards until they hit the sternum. You do that to a man, his guts fall out. His guts fell out, but he didn't die. The docs just pushed them back in. And the scar next to it, you saw that, right? Bullet hole. Somebody drilled him. So he's been stabbed and shot and it didn't put him away. You know how it is with getting hurt?"
I shook my head.
"Pain is like..." He paused to grope for the word. "It's like experience. When you were a kid, you fell and skinned your knee, did you cry?"
"When I was little, yeah."
"Why?"
I couldn't tell if he was kidding me. He had the face of someone who doesn't kid, who doesn't even know how to laugh. "Because it hurt," I said finally.
"You cried because to kids, pain is new. Every kind of pain. There's the first time you skin your knee, the first time you get stomach cramps, the first time you break your finger. Pain is new and new is scary. But you don't cry when you skin your knee now, because that kind of pain is old news. You don't cry when you cramp up or bust your pinky, because you got experience with that kind of pain. It hurts, but it don't scare. Well, you stab a man and he lives, you shoot a man and he lives, and he's got experience with that. The fear you'd feel when it happens, when the knife sticks, when the bullet hits, he doesn't feel it. Not the same way, because he's been through it before and he's still on his hind legs. If I stab you or shoot you, you'd be in a ball on the ground. But he can function. Do you understand what I'm layin' out? There's no kind of pain you can dish out he can't take."
I looked at the guy I was supposed to be afraid of. Still leaning against the lamp post. Still staring out at the world from behind dead eyes. I wondered what he'd felt when he'd seen his guts fall out. If it had been panic and terror they had left no traces on that gaunt, cavernous-cheeked, pockmarked wreck of a face. "What was it happened to his shoulder?"
The sergeant clicked his tongue, which was probably what he did in place of smiling. "He had his wife’s name tattooed there. When they split up he burned it off with a steam iron. He’s crazy, and he doesn’t want to go back to jail. But if you stay on this beat, you’ll have to arrest him someday.”
“And when that happens, I’ll have to shoot him?”
“When that happens, you’ll have to kill him. Or he’ll kill you."
We walked on. It was early; the whole shift was ahead of us, and I had to pay attention to my surroundings. But I couldn’t help thinking about the man with the scars. And that I was afraid of him.
The sergeant pointed to the shirtless man standing under the lamppost. “Now there, that's the guy you have to be afraid of.”
I felt confused. The guy I had to be afraid of had the caved-in face of a junkie, a flat chest, pipe-stem arms and no ass at all. He did not look frightening. He looked like a skeleton that had just swallowed a medicine ball. I said so.
“Look again.”
I did. A shiny red scar ran down his belly like a seam. Next to the scar was another, the shape of a nickel. There was a third one on his shoulder, a big angry pinkish-red mass that was covering the remains of a tattoo. It was clearly defined on its edges but inside of it were little round holes where the skin was undamaged. While I looked at the guy I was supposed to be afraid of, but wasn’t yet, I thought how odd it was that he did not know we were watching him. Later I realized he just didn't care.
“Most people you can frighten with your gun," the sergeant said, hitching up his own gunbelt as he said it.
"Not this guy. That scar down his belly? You know how he got that?"
"A knife."
"I don't mean what did it, I mean how he got it."
"How could I know that?"
"The type of the scar. You see a scar that hooks like that, it means somebody gutted him. Put the blade in and then sawed upwards until they hit the sternum. You do that to a man, his guts fall out. His guts fell out, but he didn't die. The docs just pushed them back in. And the scar next to it, you saw that, right? Bullet hole. Somebody drilled him. So he's been stabbed and shot and it didn't put him away. You know how it is with getting hurt?"
I shook my head.
"Pain is like..." He paused to grope for the word. "It's like experience. When you were a kid, you fell and skinned your knee, did you cry?"
"When I was little, yeah."
"Why?"
I couldn't tell if he was kidding me. He had the face of someone who doesn't kid, who doesn't even know how to laugh. "Because it hurt," I said finally.
"You cried because to kids, pain is new. Every kind of pain. There's the first time you skin your knee, the first time you get stomach cramps, the first time you break your finger. Pain is new and new is scary. But you don't cry when you skin your knee now, because that kind of pain is old news. You don't cry when you cramp up or bust your pinky, because you got experience with that kind of pain. It hurts, but it don't scare. Well, you stab a man and he lives, you shoot a man and he lives, and he's got experience with that. The fear you'd feel when it happens, when the knife sticks, when the bullet hits, he doesn't feel it. Not the same way, because he's been through it before and he's still on his hind legs. If I stab you or shoot you, you'd be in a ball on the ground. But he can function. Do you understand what I'm layin' out? There's no kind of pain you can dish out he can't take."
I looked at the guy I was supposed to be afraid of. Still leaning against the lamp post. Still staring out at the world from behind dead eyes. I wondered what he'd felt when he'd seen his guts fall out. If it had been panic and terror they had left no traces on that gaunt, cavernous-cheeked, pockmarked wreck of a face. "What was it happened to his shoulder?"
The sergeant clicked his tongue, which was probably what he did in place of smiling. "He had his wife’s name tattooed there. When they split up he burned it off with a steam iron. He’s crazy, and he doesn’t want to go back to jail. But if you stay on this beat, you’ll have to arrest him someday.”
“And when that happens, I’ll have to shoot him?”
“When that happens, you’ll have to kill him. Or he’ll kill you."
We walked on. It was early; the whole shift was ahead of us, and I had to pay attention to my surroundings. But I couldn’t help thinking about the man with the scars. And that I was afraid of him.
April 13, 2016
Was Robert Heinlein a Fascist? An Analysis of "Starship Troopers"
Many years ago, my older brother tossed me his dog-eared, soft-backed copy of Robert Heinlein's infamous "Starship Troopers" and remarked with a grin, “Read this. It’s pure Fascism!”
I read it. I was still quite young, probably not even a teenager, but the book’s rapid pace, simple-yet-evocative prose, and somewhat classic themes about “coming of age in uniform” impressed me deeply. In a sense, it was like every cliché-ridden World War II movie I had ever seen, what with its soft-brained but somehow likable protagonist, its tough-as-nails but somehow sensitive drill sergeant, and its cast of familiar stock characters (dead-meat best friend; disapproving father; chaste love interest; officer everyone worships who dies a heroic death, etc.,) and stock situations. And yet there were undertones – and overtones – in the novel which were not present in any of those WW2 films. Heinlein seemed to be advocating a governmental system, and beyond that, an outlook on life, which was at a right-angle to the system and outlook preached in my Civics classes. It resembled my society, and it was descended from my society, but it was clearly not my society. So what was it?
“Fascist,” my brother said. “Fascist,” my mother said. “Fascist,” my creative writing teacher said. That’s what type of society it was. Fascist. But none of them bothered to explain what "Fascism" really meant. And in fact, most of the people who pillory Starship Troopers as a "Fascist" book don’t bother to explain what they mean, either. Possibly because they can’t. Fascism, to them, is like art; they don’t know what it is, but they know it when they see it. Or in this case, read it.
To call "Starship Troopers" Fascist, it is necessary to have a strict definition of the term. To do this we could do worse than go to the creator of the term, Benito Mussolini, who defined it simply as "the marriage of corporation and state," but this is actually of little help to us, since it evokes few if any of the characteristics actually associated with Fascism. In fact, no sooner did the word first appear, 97 years ago, than its meaning was twisted by both its opponents and its adherents, according to their own political lights. For Fascists or those sympathetic to Fascism, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the Union of British Fascists, “Fascism” was simply a movement dedicated to patriotism and efficient government; government which retained many features of capitalist democracy but without all the corruption, waste, and inefficiency inherent in the existing democratic-capitalist system. (See Mosley's "The Case for Fascism," 1932). Socialists, communists and anarchists, however, usually described Fascism as simply “capitalism with the mask off.” They believed that “democracy” as it existed in such places as America, Britain and France was simply a sham designed to keep the capitalist class in power, and that Fascism was merely capitalism with the pretense of democracy thrown away (see Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia," 1952.) Thus, “Fascism” became an insult to anyone with an opposing ideology, and once World War Two began, among all those in the Allied camp – including America, which was considered by many on the Left to be the penultimate Fascist state (the Ultimate being, of course, Germany).
An insult, incidentally, is largely what “Fascist” remains today; elsewise a vague word which, to quote Orwell, simply means “something not desirable.” At best, use of the word summons up images of flag-waving, military parades, blaring loudspeakers, cults of personality, ceaseless wars, secret police, political prisons, fear-and-hate-mongering, etc., etc. but that’s basically it. It remains simply “something not desirable”, something not democratic, dressed up in an operatic uniform.
The actual word “Fasicsm” was taken from Benito Mussolini’s political party, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, which in turn took its name from the Latin word "fasces," which described a bundle of rods which during the days of ancient Rome symbolized the authority of the government. And it is accurate to say that “Fascism” stands for authority of it stands for anything. But this too is of little help to us, because all government relies on and embodies “authority” (or put more bluntly – as George Washington put it – “force”) of some type or other. And in any case, Italian Fascism did not closely resemble the “Fascism” which already existed in Japan under another name, and it was radically different from the “Fascism” that soon came about in Germany. Spanish Fascism had little resemblance to either, and the Rumanian, Hungarian, and Croatian versions all had their own peculiarities as well. Some of the countries were simply “right wing”, and some, like Germany, combined extreme elements of both “right” and “left.” Some had concrete ideologies, some had no real ideologies at all. Some viewed the whole world through the prism of race, and others took little interest in it. Some were reactionary and others revolutionary. Thus, “Fascism” was in many ways similar to “socialism” or “democracy” or any other of a host of words which had so broad a meaning as to be almost meaningless. And yet the Fascist states were quite distinct from the capitalist democracies, from democratic socialism, and from Communism. They existed as a recognizable category despite their individual differences, as a pit-bull and a Doberman are recognizably different breeds and yet unmistakably still dogs.
Fascism is perhaps better understood if we speak of the commonalities of the different Fascist states instead of their differences. What these states had in common was, among other things:
1. They were nationalist or ultra-nationalist.
2. They were dictatorships, or at very least dictatorial oligarchies with a “frontman” dictator.
3. They were militaristic and organized society along military or para-military lines.
4. They controlled education to foster the military virtues of heroism, discipline, obedience and indifference to pain in their children from a young age.
5. They had aggressive and opportunistic foreign policies. (They stressed “Realism” in conducting their affairs, a term which in essence meant the concepts of opportunism, moral relativism, Machiavellianism and Social Darwinism all bound up together. In other words, “Might makes right.”)
6. They expressly rejected the principles behind democracy, internationalism and communism.
7. They were chauvinistic, and manifestly unable or unwilling to empathize with other nations or assume their point of view. (This attitude was not only national policy but a keystone of education.)
In "Starship Troopers," Robert Heinlein paints us a picture of a society which has distinct characteristics, characteristics which manifest themselves in the personality of the protagonist-narrator, Johnnie Rico, and to some extent, in most or all of the characters in the novel, including his father Emilio. These characteristics are also present in the nature the Mobile Infantry and in the society of Terra itself. They are often called “Fascist” – but are they?
The society of Terra is certainly nationalistic if one accepts the definition of that word as something other than patriotic. A patriotic person loves his country and way of life and is willing to defend it, if necessary at the cost of his or her own life, but has no desire to see that way of life imposed upon others, and indeed, takes little interest in the doings of foreigners. He is in a sense isolationist, at least in regards to the fact that his concept of foreign policy is “leave me alone and I’ll do the same to you.” A nationalist, on the other hand, is one who loves his country and way of life, but is either actively threatened by other countries and their way of living, or wishes to see his own way of living imposed upon them. A nationalist identifies strongly in a personal level with his country; he regards its successes as his successes and its failures as his failures.
Johnnie Rico’s attitude toward the Arachnids (“bugs”) is essentially a nationalist outlook. The bugs are competition, a threat, and so they must die. Us or them! “Either we spread and wipe out the bugs or they spread and wipe us out,” he says. The idea that the universe might be shared, that a modus vivendi between the arachnid and the human worked out via diplomacy, literally never occurs to him, because he’s worked out a formula he calls “compound-interest expansion” which says that the inhabitable universe will overflow with one species over the other “in the blink of an eye.” There just isn’t enough real estate to go ‘round. The war, therefore, is a Darwinian struggle between expanding species, a zero-sum game in which the loser is not merely defeated but exterminated. This is a very harsh attitude, but is it necessarily Fascist? That depends largely on the attitude of the bugs themselves. One can be forced into an attitude of us-or-them by the actions of an enemy who is unwilling to negotiate and whose aim is genocide (see the Russo-German War of 1941 – 1945). Frankly, the concept of “opening a dialogue,” so beloved of liberal politicians, is only possible if your enemy is willing to have one. Unfortunately, though the book states emphatically that the warrior caste of the bugs “cannot surrender”, Heinlein is unclear as to whether the pseudo-arachnids are reachable by diplomacy. Unlike Joe Haldemann's novel, "The Forever War," in which the seemingly endless conflict between the humans and the Taurans ends the moment communication between the two races is finally made possible, in this war, no attempts at negotiation seem to come about. No one seems interested in making them. It’s “us or them” and that’s that.
On point one, then, we can cautiously hang the “Fascist” label on "Starship Troopers."
To the second point, the organization of Terran society (which is covered rather extensively in Socratic fashion, first via the character of Mr. DuBois and later, via Major Reid) we must state bluntly that while the society is manifestly not democratic in the present-day American sense of the word, it is not Fascist either. The Terran Federation gives “the franchise” (the vote) only to those who complete a term of military service, on the principle that military service teaches people to place group welfare over that of the individual… but it still gives out the franchise. It is still a democracy, within its own rules of who may vote and who may not: a partial democracy, if you will. In a Fascist state, whether dictatorial or oligarchical or some combination of the two, there is no democracy of any kind, ever. The franchise exists only so long as the leaders cannot safely remove it from the public’s hands; once that moment comes it is always withheld, and all power concentrated in a small clique. There are no exceptions to this. However Fascist in overtone limiting the franchise may be, particularly on the basis of completing military service (and one could argue that this creates a sort of oligarchy all its own, though it must be mentioned that active-duty personnel, according to Reid, cannot vote under Terran law), it remains un-Fascist to have a franchise at all. Democracy has many forms, some stricter or more liberal than others, and the lack of resemblance to our own present state form cannot sustain a charge of Fascism. Point two goes to Heinlein.
On point three, we may safely say that Terran society is militaristic, but only within strict limits. Military service remains voluntary, in a sense it is very actively discouraged (Fleet Sergeant Ho tries very hard to make Johnnie change his mind about wanting to volunteer via his "horror show") and every effort is made to allow those who volunteer to withdraw from service whenever they choose with almost no consequences to themselves. In a truly Fascist state, military service is always compulsory: (in Nazi Germany the army was referred to as “the finishing school” for the ideological training which German boys began at ten.) What’s more, economic prosperity is not limited to those who have served, so it cannot be said that class differences on Earth are based on whether one has the franchise or not. In many ways I fail to see a great distinction between Terran society and, say, the society of Israel, which is highly militarized and which remains mostly democratic in outlook. One can incorporate militarism into one’s societal framework without being Fascist, and I think “Fascism” does not apply to this point either.
On point four, very little effort seems to be made to inculcate civilians with the military virtues or to indoctrinate children that they should serve in the M.I. or any other branch of service. In school, Mr. DuBois ridicules various alternative forms of government, mostly communism, and he also attacks the very concept of “rights” (the “right to life”, for example), which is nakedly Fascist in terms of outlook. His main point of attack on the present-day concept of democracy is that it failed because it failed to teach responsibility to the young – failed to discipline them harshly enough. He does not, however, force the students to parrot-back his ideas, and the class itself is regarded by the students as a joke. The system seems to have a built-in safeguard against turning schools into a recruitment center for the military. (The stupidity of the pupils, and to some extent of Johnnie, probably argues that the educational system of the Federation leaves much to be desired, however, and it has been argued that Fascist states do not as a rule produce great thinkers, except those who were educated originally under different governmental systems. It must be noted, however, that respect for authority seems to be a principal virtue of Terran society and that even Johnnie’s dimwitted classmates regard discipline, obedience and corporal punishment as beneficial and necessary to the maintenance of order. Questioning the methodology of the system seems to be encouraged to some degree, but actively challenging it is not permitted. When the doctor conducting Johnnie's medical exam ridicules the military and suggests that they should “let a medical man run things”, he quickly adds, “Never mind that – you might think I was talking treason, free speech or not.” This certainly has Fascist overtones, for free speech means little if it does not include the right to speak freely about political change. Once Johnnie joins the M.I., however, he is constantly inundated with a particular set of values, which is reflected in the fact that most of the chapters open with quotations (from Churchill, Paine, Kipling, John Paul Jones, and others) which emphasize the need for struggle, sacrifice, and selfless behavior, and for the need to accept pain, suffering and death as the price of freedom. Also absolutism, so long as it occurs within the military framework. There are even Biblical quotes to the effect that one must impart discipline and values very early in life; and DuBois states this directly when he uses the example of housebreaking the dog. Fascist and quasi-Fascist writers and idealogues always used similar themes in their works, but these works were generally directed at civilians. When directed at soldiers they do not rise to the level of a Fascist outlook, however, because soldierly virtues are by their nature composed along these lines: there is not a military organization in the world that could exist, even for a single hour, without them. Point four therefore goes to Heinlein, however narrowly.
On point five, it seems evident that the foreign policy of the Federation, and to some extent Johnnie Rico’s outlook on life, are based partially on a quasi-Fascist outlook of “us or them” with no holds barred and all actions viewed as self-justifying. The book opens with an assault on an alien city meant as a “demonstration of firepower and frightfulness” to let the humanoid race known as the Skinnies know “that they aren’t safe.” True, we later discover that the Skinnies gave the coordinates of Earth to the bugs, so perhaps the Skinnies deserve their fate; but one gets the dual sense that while Johnnie feels no animosity towards them, neither does he feel the slightest qualm about being the instrument of their destruction. Nor does he express dismay or disgust at the idea of the Nova bomb, “which can crack a planet wide-open.” Similarly, the terraforming of Planet P is taken as a matter of course; the ethical and philosophical questions of doing this on a planet which already has life, which caused so many difficulties in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "Red Mars" aren’t even considered here. A sort of “Manifest Destiny” (or "Lebensraum") spirit obtains: necessity is the mother of morality. And yet we must ask, is there a single country today which uses morality as the basis of its foreign policy? And is there a single military which encourages its soldiers to question that foreign policy, or to feel moral revulsion at the methods used to take human life? All foreign policy is inherently “Fascist” in theory, since it is conducted out of perceived self-interest and by no other standard. But that does not mean it must be Fascist in practice. Likewise, All military values are “Fascist” in that they consider concepts such as obedience, discipline, courage, the ability to withstand pain, and skill at taking human life as chief among virtues. It is how the military is used that is Fascist, or non-Fascist in nature, and the foreign policy (interstellar policy) of the Federation does seem Fascist, especially when one asks the question: How would the Terran Federation behave in peacetime? The answer seems to be: It would pursue an interstellar policy which would inevitably lead to war. And the idea that peace exists merely as an interregnum between wars is pure Fascism.
But what about point six? Here we must say that Terran society, at least in the persons of DuBois and Reid, holds in contempt all previous systems of government and rejects their precepts, just as the Fascists did. Communism is called a fraud (DuBois has a field day with the Marxian theory of value) and democracy as we have it now is regarded as a well-intentioned failure. Political evolution has reached its end in the present system – so Reid implies. But Fascism takes more than arrogance; it grows out of nationalism, and the Earth being unified under one government, “nationalism” no longer exists in a meaningful way (there are, we can safely assume, no countries left on earth, merely districts.) We are suddenly confronted by an important question. How can the Federation be Fascist without nationalism? The answer is simple here. Nationalism in Starship Troopers has itself evolved into “racism” in the literal sense of the word. Johnny’s nation is Earth, embodied in the human race. He sees the bugs purely in terms of the threat they could pose that race; just as he sees the universe as “real estate” which rightfully belongs to man, and the bugs as an obstacle to human dominance of the galaxy.
This brings us to point seven, the inability (or unwillingness) to empathize with anyone outside one’s own nationality/race. It is not a sin to elevate one’s own interests over the interests of another, particularly in the realm of international (or interstellar) politics; but there is a point at which such behavior becomes inherently destructive. When Germany's chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, made his notorious remark, during the First World War, that the treaty which safeguarded Belgium’s neutrality was “just a scrap of paper”, he was, in fact, speaking the plain truth. Treaties are just scraps of paper. What he did not grasp, being a Realist, was that scraps of paper are the pillars upon which civilization rests. The Germans (or at least Bethmann-Hollweg) could not empathize with Belgium, invaded simply for being the most convenient route into France. He could not put themselves in the shoes of the Belgian people, any more than the British could sympathize with the Irish, the Indians, the Zulus or any of the other races they enslaved. Likewise, Johnny cannot empathize with the bugs. There is not one moment in "Starship Troopers" when Johnnie wonders what the human race might look like when viewed from the eyes of a pseudo-arachnid. He is either incapable of doing this because of his personality, or he has been conditioned in such a way that he cannot do this. Either way his outlook here is Fascist.
It is necessary to expand on this. One of the distinguishing features of a Fascist state is its philosophy regarding the the use of force. Generally speaking, the more liberal a state, the more reluctant it is to employ harsh criminal penalties (such as execution or torture) upon its citizens or use military power as an instrument of foreign policy. We have already discussed the Federation’s “galactic policy”, but the former issue – the way the Federation deals with its own citizens – gives us a revealing look at its worldview. It is established quite early in the novel that physical discipline is regarded in the Federation as the key element in maintaining social order. One of Johnnie’s classmates notes in DuBois’ class that as a child, if she were paddled at school for some infraction or other, another spanking would await her upon her return home – and rightly so. Johnnie’s classmates take the view that stern parental discipline and stern classroom discipline interweave with an equally stern civic code to create an environment in which the ordinary person will not want to commit crime. For those that do, public floggings demonstrate the folly of criminal action to the perpetrator and reinforce the law-abiding public’s desire to remain on the right side of that law. In itself this is not Fascist; all nations, regardless of their system of government, use the threat of punishment as a deterrent against crime. However, it is interesting that Heinlein chose flogging as the principal nonlethal punishment of the Federation, both for its civilian and its military population, because since antiquity, flogging has generally been regarded as a punishment reserved only for slaves. The use of a whip on a free man stirred controversy even during the days of Ancient Rome, and the widespread use of flogging on antebellum slave plantations was a contributing factor to anti-Southern feeling in the North prior to the American Civil War. Not long afterwards, the abolition of whipping as a means of discipline in the British Army came about in part due to the idea that such punishments were as degrading to those who inflicted them as those who were on the end of the lash – that they ultimately weakened the authority of the government who permitted their use. One of the key sequences in "Starship Troopers," and probably the most notorious, occurs when one of Johnnie’s boot-camp comrades, Ted Hendrick, is court-martialed for striking a superior officer. Hendrick is found guilty by a field tribunal, given a dishonorable discharge, and then chained to a post and flogged before the entire population of Camp Arthur Currie. Later on, Johnnie himself is found guilty of a less serious infraction, and while not discharged, is also flogged. As he is being led to his punishment, his drill instructor, Sergeant Zim, hands him a rubber mouthpiece and informs Johnnie “to bite down on this. It helps. I know.”
Presumably Heinlein put this moment in the story to show that discipline is the same for everyone, and that even the best soldiers may have strayed enough to taste the lash at some point in their careers – that presumably the reader will forgive the Mobile Infantry for its harshness because it applies its punishments fairly. There is no escaping the fact, however, that these sequences, particularly the one with Hendricks, are morally disgusting, and remain so despite the efforts of Heinlein to get the reader to sympathize as much for the soldiers administering the punishments as with the victims. The fact that Heinlein could not see that flogging is by its nature a degradation of the human spirit is troubling, but it is more troubling that the author chose to use the humiliation and degradation of Hendricks to achieve a positive epiphany in Johnnie Rico. At first so upset by his comrade's fate that he wants to quit the Mobile Infantry, Johnnie ultimately comes to regard his moral crisis as simply the last phase of his military training: a psychological obstacle course. In taking this view, he is almost consciously rejecting the empathy he felt for Hendricks: he is, in essence, viewing the empathy itself as a phase of his development he has now outgrown. This is by far the most nakedly Fascistic moment of the entire book, and it is a tribute to Heinlein's skill as a writer that it is also the most subtle.
Viewed overall, the points seem indicate a Fascist interpretation by a “score” of 4 – 3. But this does not in itself really answer the question as to whether Heinlein was actually advocating Fascism as a remedy for society’s ills. Undoubtedly he was not, at least within his own mind. It is clear, for example, that his ideal society had no room for racism, ethnic hatred, religious bigotry, or even much in the way of sexism, and no Fascist state has ever existed that was not based in part on some or all of these attributes. Instead, Heinlein’s views are the views of a writer who is seeking to remove the more attractive and common-sense elements of Fascism (and even Orwell, one of the foremost anti-Fascists of his day, admitted that “Fascism contains some good along with much that is evil.”) and use them as a kind of balustrade to shore up the faltering elements of democracy. He sought a balance between Fascism, or what we might refer to responsibly as Fascism, and democracy: a sort of “Enlightened Fascism”, which retained the best elements of both while shedding their less appealing elements. A question which we might wish to ask ourselves, given the present state of discontent with representative, capitalist democracy in America itself, is whether this sort of thing is actually possible.
And a more important question might be: if it is possible, is it desirable?
"Starship Troopers" is Heinlein’s answer.
I read it. I was still quite young, probably not even a teenager, but the book’s rapid pace, simple-yet-evocative prose, and somewhat classic themes about “coming of age in uniform” impressed me deeply. In a sense, it was like every cliché-ridden World War II movie I had ever seen, what with its soft-brained but somehow likable protagonist, its tough-as-nails but somehow sensitive drill sergeant, and its cast of familiar stock characters (dead-meat best friend; disapproving father; chaste love interest; officer everyone worships who dies a heroic death, etc.,) and stock situations. And yet there were undertones – and overtones – in the novel which were not present in any of those WW2 films. Heinlein seemed to be advocating a governmental system, and beyond that, an outlook on life, which was at a right-angle to the system and outlook preached in my Civics classes. It resembled my society, and it was descended from my society, but it was clearly not my society. So what was it?
“Fascist,” my brother said. “Fascist,” my mother said. “Fascist,” my creative writing teacher said. That’s what type of society it was. Fascist. But none of them bothered to explain what "Fascism" really meant. And in fact, most of the people who pillory Starship Troopers as a "Fascist" book don’t bother to explain what they mean, either. Possibly because they can’t. Fascism, to them, is like art; they don’t know what it is, but they know it when they see it. Or in this case, read it.
To call "Starship Troopers" Fascist, it is necessary to have a strict definition of the term. To do this we could do worse than go to the creator of the term, Benito Mussolini, who defined it simply as "the marriage of corporation and state," but this is actually of little help to us, since it evokes few if any of the characteristics actually associated with Fascism. In fact, no sooner did the word first appear, 97 years ago, than its meaning was twisted by both its opponents and its adherents, according to their own political lights. For Fascists or those sympathetic to Fascism, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the Union of British Fascists, “Fascism” was simply a movement dedicated to patriotism and efficient government; government which retained many features of capitalist democracy but without all the corruption, waste, and inefficiency inherent in the existing democratic-capitalist system. (See Mosley's "The Case for Fascism," 1932). Socialists, communists and anarchists, however, usually described Fascism as simply “capitalism with the mask off.” They believed that “democracy” as it existed in such places as America, Britain and France was simply a sham designed to keep the capitalist class in power, and that Fascism was merely capitalism with the pretense of democracy thrown away (see Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia," 1952.) Thus, “Fascism” became an insult to anyone with an opposing ideology, and once World War Two began, among all those in the Allied camp – including America, which was considered by many on the Left to be the penultimate Fascist state (the Ultimate being, of course, Germany).
An insult, incidentally, is largely what “Fascist” remains today; elsewise a vague word which, to quote Orwell, simply means “something not desirable.” At best, use of the word summons up images of flag-waving, military parades, blaring loudspeakers, cults of personality, ceaseless wars, secret police, political prisons, fear-and-hate-mongering, etc., etc. but that’s basically it. It remains simply “something not desirable”, something not democratic, dressed up in an operatic uniform.
The actual word “Fasicsm” was taken from Benito Mussolini’s political party, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, which in turn took its name from the Latin word "fasces," which described a bundle of rods which during the days of ancient Rome symbolized the authority of the government. And it is accurate to say that “Fascism” stands for authority of it stands for anything. But this too is of little help to us, because all government relies on and embodies “authority” (or put more bluntly – as George Washington put it – “force”) of some type or other. And in any case, Italian Fascism did not closely resemble the “Fascism” which already existed in Japan under another name, and it was radically different from the “Fascism” that soon came about in Germany. Spanish Fascism had little resemblance to either, and the Rumanian, Hungarian, and Croatian versions all had their own peculiarities as well. Some of the countries were simply “right wing”, and some, like Germany, combined extreme elements of both “right” and “left.” Some had concrete ideologies, some had no real ideologies at all. Some viewed the whole world through the prism of race, and others took little interest in it. Some were reactionary and others revolutionary. Thus, “Fascism” was in many ways similar to “socialism” or “democracy” or any other of a host of words which had so broad a meaning as to be almost meaningless. And yet the Fascist states were quite distinct from the capitalist democracies, from democratic socialism, and from Communism. They existed as a recognizable category despite their individual differences, as a pit-bull and a Doberman are recognizably different breeds and yet unmistakably still dogs.
Fascism is perhaps better understood if we speak of the commonalities of the different Fascist states instead of their differences. What these states had in common was, among other things:
1. They were nationalist or ultra-nationalist.
2. They were dictatorships, or at very least dictatorial oligarchies with a “frontman” dictator.
3. They were militaristic and organized society along military or para-military lines.
4. They controlled education to foster the military virtues of heroism, discipline, obedience and indifference to pain in their children from a young age.
5. They had aggressive and opportunistic foreign policies. (They stressed “Realism” in conducting their affairs, a term which in essence meant the concepts of opportunism, moral relativism, Machiavellianism and Social Darwinism all bound up together. In other words, “Might makes right.”)
6. They expressly rejected the principles behind democracy, internationalism and communism.
7. They were chauvinistic, and manifestly unable or unwilling to empathize with other nations or assume their point of view. (This attitude was not only national policy but a keystone of education.)
In "Starship Troopers," Robert Heinlein paints us a picture of a society which has distinct characteristics, characteristics which manifest themselves in the personality of the protagonist-narrator, Johnnie Rico, and to some extent, in most or all of the characters in the novel, including his father Emilio. These characteristics are also present in the nature the Mobile Infantry and in the society of Terra itself. They are often called “Fascist” – but are they?
The society of Terra is certainly nationalistic if one accepts the definition of that word as something other than patriotic. A patriotic person loves his country and way of life and is willing to defend it, if necessary at the cost of his or her own life, but has no desire to see that way of life imposed upon others, and indeed, takes little interest in the doings of foreigners. He is in a sense isolationist, at least in regards to the fact that his concept of foreign policy is “leave me alone and I’ll do the same to you.” A nationalist, on the other hand, is one who loves his country and way of life, but is either actively threatened by other countries and their way of living, or wishes to see his own way of living imposed upon them. A nationalist identifies strongly in a personal level with his country; he regards its successes as his successes and its failures as his failures.
Johnnie Rico’s attitude toward the Arachnids (“bugs”) is essentially a nationalist outlook. The bugs are competition, a threat, and so they must die. Us or them! “Either we spread and wipe out the bugs or they spread and wipe us out,” he says. The idea that the universe might be shared, that a modus vivendi between the arachnid and the human worked out via diplomacy, literally never occurs to him, because he’s worked out a formula he calls “compound-interest expansion” which says that the inhabitable universe will overflow with one species over the other “in the blink of an eye.” There just isn’t enough real estate to go ‘round. The war, therefore, is a Darwinian struggle between expanding species, a zero-sum game in which the loser is not merely defeated but exterminated. This is a very harsh attitude, but is it necessarily Fascist? That depends largely on the attitude of the bugs themselves. One can be forced into an attitude of us-or-them by the actions of an enemy who is unwilling to negotiate and whose aim is genocide (see the Russo-German War of 1941 – 1945). Frankly, the concept of “opening a dialogue,” so beloved of liberal politicians, is only possible if your enemy is willing to have one. Unfortunately, though the book states emphatically that the warrior caste of the bugs “cannot surrender”, Heinlein is unclear as to whether the pseudo-arachnids are reachable by diplomacy. Unlike Joe Haldemann's novel, "The Forever War," in which the seemingly endless conflict between the humans and the Taurans ends the moment communication between the two races is finally made possible, in this war, no attempts at negotiation seem to come about. No one seems interested in making them. It’s “us or them” and that’s that.
On point one, then, we can cautiously hang the “Fascist” label on "Starship Troopers."
To the second point, the organization of Terran society (which is covered rather extensively in Socratic fashion, first via the character of Mr. DuBois and later, via Major Reid) we must state bluntly that while the society is manifestly not democratic in the present-day American sense of the word, it is not Fascist either. The Terran Federation gives “the franchise” (the vote) only to those who complete a term of military service, on the principle that military service teaches people to place group welfare over that of the individual… but it still gives out the franchise. It is still a democracy, within its own rules of who may vote and who may not: a partial democracy, if you will. In a Fascist state, whether dictatorial or oligarchical or some combination of the two, there is no democracy of any kind, ever. The franchise exists only so long as the leaders cannot safely remove it from the public’s hands; once that moment comes it is always withheld, and all power concentrated in a small clique. There are no exceptions to this. However Fascist in overtone limiting the franchise may be, particularly on the basis of completing military service (and one could argue that this creates a sort of oligarchy all its own, though it must be mentioned that active-duty personnel, according to Reid, cannot vote under Terran law), it remains un-Fascist to have a franchise at all. Democracy has many forms, some stricter or more liberal than others, and the lack of resemblance to our own present state form cannot sustain a charge of Fascism. Point two goes to Heinlein.
On point three, we may safely say that Terran society is militaristic, but only within strict limits. Military service remains voluntary, in a sense it is very actively discouraged (Fleet Sergeant Ho tries very hard to make Johnnie change his mind about wanting to volunteer via his "horror show") and every effort is made to allow those who volunteer to withdraw from service whenever they choose with almost no consequences to themselves. In a truly Fascist state, military service is always compulsory: (in Nazi Germany the army was referred to as “the finishing school” for the ideological training which German boys began at ten.) What’s more, economic prosperity is not limited to those who have served, so it cannot be said that class differences on Earth are based on whether one has the franchise or not. In many ways I fail to see a great distinction between Terran society and, say, the society of Israel, which is highly militarized and which remains mostly democratic in outlook. One can incorporate militarism into one’s societal framework without being Fascist, and I think “Fascism” does not apply to this point either.
On point four, very little effort seems to be made to inculcate civilians with the military virtues or to indoctrinate children that they should serve in the M.I. or any other branch of service. In school, Mr. DuBois ridicules various alternative forms of government, mostly communism, and he also attacks the very concept of “rights” (the “right to life”, for example), which is nakedly Fascist in terms of outlook. His main point of attack on the present-day concept of democracy is that it failed because it failed to teach responsibility to the young – failed to discipline them harshly enough. He does not, however, force the students to parrot-back his ideas, and the class itself is regarded by the students as a joke. The system seems to have a built-in safeguard against turning schools into a recruitment center for the military. (The stupidity of the pupils, and to some extent of Johnnie, probably argues that the educational system of the Federation leaves much to be desired, however, and it has been argued that Fascist states do not as a rule produce great thinkers, except those who were educated originally under different governmental systems. It must be noted, however, that respect for authority seems to be a principal virtue of Terran society and that even Johnnie’s dimwitted classmates regard discipline, obedience and corporal punishment as beneficial and necessary to the maintenance of order. Questioning the methodology of the system seems to be encouraged to some degree, but actively challenging it is not permitted. When the doctor conducting Johnnie's medical exam ridicules the military and suggests that they should “let a medical man run things”, he quickly adds, “Never mind that – you might think I was talking treason, free speech or not.” This certainly has Fascist overtones, for free speech means little if it does not include the right to speak freely about political change. Once Johnnie joins the M.I., however, he is constantly inundated with a particular set of values, which is reflected in the fact that most of the chapters open with quotations (from Churchill, Paine, Kipling, John Paul Jones, and others) which emphasize the need for struggle, sacrifice, and selfless behavior, and for the need to accept pain, suffering and death as the price of freedom. Also absolutism, so long as it occurs within the military framework. There are even Biblical quotes to the effect that one must impart discipline and values very early in life; and DuBois states this directly when he uses the example of housebreaking the dog. Fascist and quasi-Fascist writers and idealogues always used similar themes in their works, but these works were generally directed at civilians. When directed at soldiers they do not rise to the level of a Fascist outlook, however, because soldierly virtues are by their nature composed along these lines: there is not a military organization in the world that could exist, even for a single hour, without them. Point four therefore goes to Heinlein, however narrowly.
On point five, it seems evident that the foreign policy of the Federation, and to some extent Johnnie Rico’s outlook on life, are based partially on a quasi-Fascist outlook of “us or them” with no holds barred and all actions viewed as self-justifying. The book opens with an assault on an alien city meant as a “demonstration of firepower and frightfulness” to let the humanoid race known as the Skinnies know “that they aren’t safe.” True, we later discover that the Skinnies gave the coordinates of Earth to the bugs, so perhaps the Skinnies deserve their fate; but one gets the dual sense that while Johnnie feels no animosity towards them, neither does he feel the slightest qualm about being the instrument of their destruction. Nor does he express dismay or disgust at the idea of the Nova bomb, “which can crack a planet wide-open.” Similarly, the terraforming of Planet P is taken as a matter of course; the ethical and philosophical questions of doing this on a planet which already has life, which caused so many difficulties in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "Red Mars" aren’t even considered here. A sort of “Manifest Destiny” (or "Lebensraum") spirit obtains: necessity is the mother of morality. And yet we must ask, is there a single country today which uses morality as the basis of its foreign policy? And is there a single military which encourages its soldiers to question that foreign policy, or to feel moral revulsion at the methods used to take human life? All foreign policy is inherently “Fascist” in theory, since it is conducted out of perceived self-interest and by no other standard. But that does not mean it must be Fascist in practice. Likewise, All military values are “Fascist” in that they consider concepts such as obedience, discipline, courage, the ability to withstand pain, and skill at taking human life as chief among virtues. It is how the military is used that is Fascist, or non-Fascist in nature, and the foreign policy (interstellar policy) of the Federation does seem Fascist, especially when one asks the question: How would the Terran Federation behave in peacetime? The answer seems to be: It would pursue an interstellar policy which would inevitably lead to war. And the idea that peace exists merely as an interregnum between wars is pure Fascism.
But what about point six? Here we must say that Terran society, at least in the persons of DuBois and Reid, holds in contempt all previous systems of government and rejects their precepts, just as the Fascists did. Communism is called a fraud (DuBois has a field day with the Marxian theory of value) and democracy as we have it now is regarded as a well-intentioned failure. Political evolution has reached its end in the present system – so Reid implies. But Fascism takes more than arrogance; it grows out of nationalism, and the Earth being unified under one government, “nationalism” no longer exists in a meaningful way (there are, we can safely assume, no countries left on earth, merely districts.) We are suddenly confronted by an important question. How can the Federation be Fascist without nationalism? The answer is simple here. Nationalism in Starship Troopers has itself evolved into “racism” in the literal sense of the word. Johnny’s nation is Earth, embodied in the human race. He sees the bugs purely in terms of the threat they could pose that race; just as he sees the universe as “real estate” which rightfully belongs to man, and the bugs as an obstacle to human dominance of the galaxy.
This brings us to point seven, the inability (or unwillingness) to empathize with anyone outside one’s own nationality/race. It is not a sin to elevate one’s own interests over the interests of another, particularly in the realm of international (or interstellar) politics; but there is a point at which such behavior becomes inherently destructive. When Germany's chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, made his notorious remark, during the First World War, that the treaty which safeguarded Belgium’s neutrality was “just a scrap of paper”, he was, in fact, speaking the plain truth. Treaties are just scraps of paper. What he did not grasp, being a Realist, was that scraps of paper are the pillars upon which civilization rests. The Germans (or at least Bethmann-Hollweg) could not empathize with Belgium, invaded simply for being the most convenient route into France. He could not put themselves in the shoes of the Belgian people, any more than the British could sympathize with the Irish, the Indians, the Zulus or any of the other races they enslaved. Likewise, Johnny cannot empathize with the bugs. There is not one moment in "Starship Troopers" when Johnnie wonders what the human race might look like when viewed from the eyes of a pseudo-arachnid. He is either incapable of doing this because of his personality, or he has been conditioned in such a way that he cannot do this. Either way his outlook here is Fascist.
It is necessary to expand on this. One of the distinguishing features of a Fascist state is its philosophy regarding the the use of force. Generally speaking, the more liberal a state, the more reluctant it is to employ harsh criminal penalties (such as execution or torture) upon its citizens or use military power as an instrument of foreign policy. We have already discussed the Federation’s “galactic policy”, but the former issue – the way the Federation deals with its own citizens – gives us a revealing look at its worldview. It is established quite early in the novel that physical discipline is regarded in the Federation as the key element in maintaining social order. One of Johnnie’s classmates notes in DuBois’ class that as a child, if she were paddled at school for some infraction or other, another spanking would await her upon her return home – and rightly so. Johnnie’s classmates take the view that stern parental discipline and stern classroom discipline interweave with an equally stern civic code to create an environment in which the ordinary person will not want to commit crime. For those that do, public floggings demonstrate the folly of criminal action to the perpetrator and reinforce the law-abiding public’s desire to remain on the right side of that law. In itself this is not Fascist; all nations, regardless of their system of government, use the threat of punishment as a deterrent against crime. However, it is interesting that Heinlein chose flogging as the principal nonlethal punishment of the Federation, both for its civilian and its military population, because since antiquity, flogging has generally been regarded as a punishment reserved only for slaves. The use of a whip on a free man stirred controversy even during the days of Ancient Rome, and the widespread use of flogging on antebellum slave plantations was a contributing factor to anti-Southern feeling in the North prior to the American Civil War. Not long afterwards, the abolition of whipping as a means of discipline in the British Army came about in part due to the idea that such punishments were as degrading to those who inflicted them as those who were on the end of the lash – that they ultimately weakened the authority of the government who permitted their use. One of the key sequences in "Starship Troopers," and probably the most notorious, occurs when one of Johnnie’s boot-camp comrades, Ted Hendrick, is court-martialed for striking a superior officer. Hendrick is found guilty by a field tribunal, given a dishonorable discharge, and then chained to a post and flogged before the entire population of Camp Arthur Currie. Later on, Johnnie himself is found guilty of a less serious infraction, and while not discharged, is also flogged. As he is being led to his punishment, his drill instructor, Sergeant Zim, hands him a rubber mouthpiece and informs Johnnie “to bite down on this. It helps. I know.”
Presumably Heinlein put this moment in the story to show that discipline is the same for everyone, and that even the best soldiers may have strayed enough to taste the lash at some point in their careers – that presumably the reader will forgive the Mobile Infantry for its harshness because it applies its punishments fairly. There is no escaping the fact, however, that these sequences, particularly the one with Hendricks, are morally disgusting, and remain so despite the efforts of Heinlein to get the reader to sympathize as much for the soldiers administering the punishments as with the victims. The fact that Heinlein could not see that flogging is by its nature a degradation of the human spirit is troubling, but it is more troubling that the author chose to use the humiliation and degradation of Hendricks to achieve a positive epiphany in Johnnie Rico. At first so upset by his comrade's fate that he wants to quit the Mobile Infantry, Johnnie ultimately comes to regard his moral crisis as simply the last phase of his military training: a psychological obstacle course. In taking this view, he is almost consciously rejecting the empathy he felt for Hendricks: he is, in essence, viewing the empathy itself as a phase of his development he has now outgrown. This is by far the most nakedly Fascistic moment of the entire book, and it is a tribute to Heinlein's skill as a writer that it is also the most subtle.
Viewed overall, the points seem indicate a Fascist interpretation by a “score” of 4 – 3. But this does not in itself really answer the question as to whether Heinlein was actually advocating Fascism as a remedy for society’s ills. Undoubtedly he was not, at least within his own mind. It is clear, for example, that his ideal society had no room for racism, ethnic hatred, religious bigotry, or even much in the way of sexism, and no Fascist state has ever existed that was not based in part on some or all of these attributes. Instead, Heinlein’s views are the views of a writer who is seeking to remove the more attractive and common-sense elements of Fascism (and even Orwell, one of the foremost anti-Fascists of his day, admitted that “Fascism contains some good along with much that is evil.”) and use them as a kind of balustrade to shore up the faltering elements of democracy. He sought a balance between Fascism, or what we might refer to responsibly as Fascism, and democracy: a sort of “Enlightened Fascism”, which retained the best elements of both while shedding their less appealing elements. A question which we might wish to ask ourselves, given the present state of discontent with representative, capitalist democracy in America itself, is whether this sort of thing is actually possible.
And a more important question might be: if it is possible, is it desirable?
"Starship Troopers" is Heinlein’s answer.
April 11, 2016
Tinseltown Diaries: My Life As A Reality TV Star
For most people, arrival in Hollywood is the beginning of an entirely new chapter in their lives. It is the commencement of a long, winding, slippery, ill-lighted, rock-strewn, and extremely perilous journey toward a lifelong dream. For me it was directly the opposite. Moving here was not a means by which I would execute my dream. It was an end in itself. Ask anyone moving into an apartment here why they came to this town and they'll say, "I want to be a comedian," or "I want to be an actor" or "I want to direct movies." Ask me and I'd have said, "I'm just happy to be here."
I took my first trip to Los Angeles in 1999 and at some point very shortly thereafter I decided I wanted to live here. Life being what it is, and me being what I am, it took me about eight years to execute this ambition, but all during that while, no matter how much fun I was having or how satisfied with life I might have been, the idea of moving to L.A. always haunted me. I'd watch "L.A. Confidential" or an episode of "Angel" or any other damn thing set there and I'd feel the sort of helpless, hopeless longing you experience when looking at a photograph of an ex-lover you can't exorcise from beneath your skin. I didn't know precisely why I felt this: I was born just outside Chicago and raised just outside D.C., and I knew nothing of the West, of SoCal or even L.A. itself beyond what I'd seen on a few visits to my brother over the years. Nevertheless, I knew my ultimate destiny lay here. So when I arrived, following a four day-journey across virtually the entirety of the United States, I had already fulfilled my principal ambition. Some folks wanted to be screenwriters or stunt men or make-up effects artists or musicians. I wanted to live here. Now I did. And as I stood on my balcony that first night, gazing past the line of wind-rustled palms to the full moon that bathed the city in appropriately dramatic light, I asked myself a question:
"Now what the hell am I going to do?"
Though it hadn't been my actual objective in coming here, it seemed to me that since I was in Tinseltown, a.k.a. La La Land, a.k.a. (ironically) the City of Angels anyway, it would be foolish not to try to work "in the movie business" in whatever capacity they'd have me. I'm a creative person by nature, so it seemed natural to try my hand at that game.
Now, everyone who comes to L.A. trying to break into the entertainment industry will a tale unfold about the degrading, ill-paying, stress-crammed jobs they have worked to pay the rent while they tried to put dream into action. Your humble correspondent was no different. I worked security in Malibu and private investigation in Fresno. I've done light industrial work in Northridge and been an office temp (soooo many times) in Woodland Hills. I slaved in a soul-shatteringly boring insurance cubicle in Van Nuys and once -- I express no shame in admitting this -- was once reduced to the fetal position the prospect of another day at a "legal solutions" business somewhere in the depths of the Valley. The first twenty months I lived here were a brutal, pride-swallowing, ne'er-ceasing struggle against anxiety, depression and the side-effects of drudgery and poverty. Even now, I'm amazed that I endured it. But there are good memories, too, or at very least ridiculous ones, which leaven the gloom of the past. Among these was my first "break."
In the summer of 2008 I got a call from the sleazy talent agency I'd joined in the hitherto futile hopes of landing a part, no matter how small, on a show, no matter how stupid. I was put through to a casting director I will call Bebe. after the vaguely Mephistophelian character of the same name on "Frasier." Bebe asked me in a cheery, breezy voice if I'd be interested in appearing as an extra in a documentary shooting at a winery. It paid, but I had to dress up despite the heat. By the time I agreed the gig had changed; it was still a documentary, but closer and not quite so dressy. Even better, I said, but a phone call later the gig had changed a third time. It was now a reality show of some kind, but that didn't matter as I was only "background." It would take the rest of the day, but they'd pay me $50 in cash when I was done, and it would get me an IMDB credit, which was much more valuable than the money. An IMDB credit was tangible, objective, third-party proof that I had "broken through" and was a player, however small, in this strange and fantastic game. I was so enamored of this promise that the fact she couldn't answer any specific questions about the show, seemed in fact almost deliberately vague and evasive, didn't bother me. I wasn't even suspicious when she heard my girlfriend talking in the background and said, rather sharply, "So, you have a girlfriend?"
"Yeah," I said. "Why? Is that a problem somehow?"
"No, no," she replied hastily. "It's just that you may come back very late tonight."
When I assured her this was of no consequence, Bebe gave me a call time and an address in Northridge, and off I went, eager to have my first experience, however tangential, with the sprawling abstraction known as Hollywood. I found the location easily enough, a large home at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a very respectable neighborhood, and amidst the bustle of production assistants and camera crewmen and craft services people, found the director and introduced myself to him.
"Perfect, perfect," he said, looking me up and down. "Just what I needed. I'm not real happy with the quality of the other contestants."
"Contestants?"
His eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. "Well, sure. Why else would you be here?"
"I was hired as background extra."
"Background extra? What the hell would I need with a background extra on a dating show?"
"Dating show? Bebe told me--"
"Bebe. Jesus Christ." He ran a hand through his hair, which looked as if it had received similar treatment a number of times that day already. "I should have known. Well, I can't expect a casting director to be honest when she's on a deadline. Look, Miles, you're not here to be a background extra. You're a contestant on a dating show, and frankly, based on what Bebe's sent me so far, you're already the inside favorite."
"But I can't be a contestant on a dating show," I protested. "I have a girlfriend."
"A girlfriend?" He was utterly incredulous. "You have a GIRLFRIEND?"
It seemed to be the day everyone asked me that question. I wanted to shout, "Is it such a fucking surprise?" but opted instead to inform him that yes, I had a GF and to top it off, I lived with her. What followed was the classic cliche of a Hollywood temper tantrum, short form version. The director cursed Bebe in the slow, inventive, almost intimate way a man curses when he truly hates something or somebody. "Only Bebe would send a man with a girlfriend to be a contestant on a fucking dating show! Well, goddammit, I need four contestants and it's too late to find a replacement, and I can't rig the outcome because that's illegal. So I'm going to have to find a way to discourage this poor girl from choosing you, but it won't be easy."
In spite of everything I was flattered by this remark...until I saw my fellow contestants.
#1, an expensively dressed giant in his late 30s, but trying to look younger, had dyed his thinning black hair so ineptly I could see the stains on his scalp. #2, in his mid-40s, looked like the sort you'd find in the alley aside X-rated video store: his first words to me were an expression of bitterness that he wasn't getting more work on camera. #3, in his early 40s, spoke entirely in soap opera dialogue: 150 lbs of saccharine insincerity. In such company it was not hard to be the front runner. Jason Voorhees would have been the front runner. Without his mask.
Now, the premise of this show was that the woman in question was being set up (literally and figuratively) by her friends with four blind dates who had to compete for an actual, unchaperoned, a-deux date with the lady.
We would dine with her and her friends and family in the backyard of her home, and over the course of the evening would advance toward that goal or be eliminated by virtue of our responses. The poor girl thought we were friends of her friends who had agreed to do this because we'd been shown her picture and thought she was cute; she had no idea we were being paid to be there or that some of the contestants were wannabe actors and viewed this strictly as "work."
And what work it was. After the painfully awkward "surprise" moment -- which we shot three times, if I remember correctly -- we sat down to an enormous, lukewarm dinner of Thai food in the sweltering, bug-infested backyard. The director had placed me as far as was humanly possible from the victim, who I will call Keliani, probably in hopes she couldn't see me through the glare of faux-romantic candle-light, so I busied myself with the food and polished off an ungodly amount of white wine, which a production assistant poured liberally whenever anyone's glass got to the panic level. By the time Kelani had questioned the first three dates I was drunk off my ass. My answers were moronic, but so was the situation: what I mainly carry away from that part of the evening was the sudden compulsion I had developed to look at the camera. I literally became fixated on it. Whenever it wasn't pointed directly at me -- and sometimes when it was -- I stared at the fucking thing as if it were on fire, giving the director fresh reasons to regret Bebe had cast me for this "documentary."
After dinner Kelani was to ritually slaughter the nonexistent hopes of one of the suitors by making the first cut. While deliberations were in progress, I sneaked inside the house and watched an MMA fight on cable (I remember it was Urijah "the California Kid" Faber against Jens "Li'l Evil" Pulver. Unfortunately I'd consumed so much white wine I fell asleep. When I awoke the director was standing over me, sucking a cigarette down to its filter and raking his fingers through his now-destroyed salon haircut. "Okay," he said, in a tense, strained voice. "I think I did it. I think I managed to discourage her from choosing you."
"How?" I said, yawning.
"I kind of let her overhear me telling my assistant that you weren't uh, you know..."
"Straight?"
"Stable. I said you'd had a wicked breakup and were rebounding hard and just kind of, you know, a big hot motherfucking mess. I'm pretty sure she heard me."
She heard him. I was the first suitor to get the axe, which afforded me a chance to rinse the foul taste of cheap white wine from my palate with, you guessed it, more white wine. But when I tried to leave the set I was told I had to stay until shooting was over. "We need to get reaction shots from the losers!" the director explained.
More wine. A couple of Thai egg rolls. The fight card ended. Evening had become night. The other losers, #2 and then #3, came in and sat with me, comforted that at least I had been the first to go. At last, while #1 and his badly dyed hair were having a romantic, victorious dessert with Kelani, I was summoned outside, to the front yard. It was pitch black and for some reason the only light on the whole block was from the camera jammed in my face. I couldn't see a goddamned thing except this huge, glaring light, like the light an interrogator would use in a 40s gangster movie when he gives the crook the third degree. Considering the truly heroic intake of grape pumping through my veins, it was all I could do not to reel backwards into the graveled driveway as the director, unseen, told me to record my feelings about having lost my chance with Kelani. I was naive enough to relate my actual feelings, whereupon, with an exasperated cry of "CUT!" he said:
"Can you try to sound sad?"
We worked on "sad" for a few takes, but it was hopeless: wine is like truth serum to a beer-drinker. Eventually the director told me he'd settled for "disappointed," but in addition to making me tell the truth, wine also makes me assertive. I didn't want to settle: I had been paid this crisp $50 bill to play a role, and the role called for sad, so I insisted on more takes. I'm not sure if I ever hit the right note of sadness or whether the director just lied to get my drunken ass off the property, but either way, in a few minutes I was wobbling toward my car, convinced that my first foray into Tinseltown had been a huge success -- a feeling that dissipated well before the following day's hangover.
That was eight years ago, and I now have 47 IMDB credits to my name, which is no mean feat considering my true trade is writing and my work in "the business," far from being my life's dream, has never been anything but a means to make money. But I never see that first credit without thinking of how disappointed my girlfriend had been that the show got cancelled before my episode went to air. Far from being annoyed at the discovery her boyfriend was a contestant on a dating show, she'd been eagerly looking forward to seeing me make a fool of myself.
As for Bebe, I have to laugh whenever I see her name roll past me on the credits for a television show: for every actor cast upon it, I know, there might be a helluva story.
I took my first trip to Los Angeles in 1999 and at some point very shortly thereafter I decided I wanted to live here. Life being what it is, and me being what I am, it took me about eight years to execute this ambition, but all during that while, no matter how much fun I was having or how satisfied with life I might have been, the idea of moving to L.A. always haunted me. I'd watch "L.A. Confidential" or an episode of "Angel" or any other damn thing set there and I'd feel the sort of helpless, hopeless longing you experience when looking at a photograph of an ex-lover you can't exorcise from beneath your skin. I didn't know precisely why I felt this: I was born just outside Chicago and raised just outside D.C., and I knew nothing of the West, of SoCal or even L.A. itself beyond what I'd seen on a few visits to my brother over the years. Nevertheless, I knew my ultimate destiny lay here. So when I arrived, following a four day-journey across virtually the entirety of the United States, I had already fulfilled my principal ambition. Some folks wanted to be screenwriters or stunt men or make-up effects artists or musicians. I wanted to live here. Now I did. And as I stood on my balcony that first night, gazing past the line of wind-rustled palms to the full moon that bathed the city in appropriately dramatic light, I asked myself a question:
"Now what the hell am I going to do?"
Though it hadn't been my actual objective in coming here, it seemed to me that since I was in Tinseltown, a.k.a. La La Land, a.k.a. (ironically) the City of Angels anyway, it would be foolish not to try to work "in the movie business" in whatever capacity they'd have me. I'm a creative person by nature, so it seemed natural to try my hand at that game.
Now, everyone who comes to L.A. trying to break into the entertainment industry will a tale unfold about the degrading, ill-paying, stress-crammed jobs they have worked to pay the rent while they tried to put dream into action. Your humble correspondent was no different. I worked security in Malibu and private investigation in Fresno. I've done light industrial work in Northridge and been an office temp (soooo many times) in Woodland Hills. I slaved in a soul-shatteringly boring insurance cubicle in Van Nuys and once -- I express no shame in admitting this -- was once reduced to the fetal position the prospect of another day at a "legal solutions" business somewhere in the depths of the Valley. The first twenty months I lived here were a brutal, pride-swallowing, ne'er-ceasing struggle against anxiety, depression and the side-effects of drudgery and poverty. Even now, I'm amazed that I endured it. But there are good memories, too, or at very least ridiculous ones, which leaven the gloom of the past. Among these was my first "break."
In the summer of 2008 I got a call from the sleazy talent agency I'd joined in the hitherto futile hopes of landing a part, no matter how small, on a show, no matter how stupid. I was put through to a casting director I will call Bebe. after the vaguely Mephistophelian character of the same name on "Frasier." Bebe asked me in a cheery, breezy voice if I'd be interested in appearing as an extra in a documentary shooting at a winery. It paid, but I had to dress up despite the heat. By the time I agreed the gig had changed; it was still a documentary, but closer and not quite so dressy. Even better, I said, but a phone call later the gig had changed a third time. It was now a reality show of some kind, but that didn't matter as I was only "background." It would take the rest of the day, but they'd pay me $50 in cash when I was done, and it would get me an IMDB credit, which was much more valuable than the money. An IMDB credit was tangible, objective, third-party proof that I had "broken through" and was a player, however small, in this strange and fantastic game. I was so enamored of this promise that the fact she couldn't answer any specific questions about the show, seemed in fact almost deliberately vague and evasive, didn't bother me. I wasn't even suspicious when she heard my girlfriend talking in the background and said, rather sharply, "So, you have a girlfriend?"
"Yeah," I said. "Why? Is that a problem somehow?"
"No, no," she replied hastily. "It's just that you may come back very late tonight."
When I assured her this was of no consequence, Bebe gave me a call time and an address in Northridge, and off I went, eager to have my first experience, however tangential, with the sprawling abstraction known as Hollywood. I found the location easily enough, a large home at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a very respectable neighborhood, and amidst the bustle of production assistants and camera crewmen and craft services people, found the director and introduced myself to him.
"Perfect, perfect," he said, looking me up and down. "Just what I needed. I'm not real happy with the quality of the other contestants."
"Contestants?"
His eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. "Well, sure. Why else would you be here?"
"I was hired as background extra."
"Background extra? What the hell would I need with a background extra on a dating show?"
"Dating show? Bebe told me--"
"Bebe. Jesus Christ." He ran a hand through his hair, which looked as if it had received similar treatment a number of times that day already. "I should have known. Well, I can't expect a casting director to be honest when she's on a deadline. Look, Miles, you're not here to be a background extra. You're a contestant on a dating show, and frankly, based on what Bebe's sent me so far, you're already the inside favorite."
"But I can't be a contestant on a dating show," I protested. "I have a girlfriend."
"A girlfriend?" He was utterly incredulous. "You have a GIRLFRIEND?"
It seemed to be the day everyone asked me that question. I wanted to shout, "Is it such a fucking surprise?" but opted instead to inform him that yes, I had a GF and to top it off, I lived with her. What followed was the classic cliche of a Hollywood temper tantrum, short form version. The director cursed Bebe in the slow, inventive, almost intimate way a man curses when he truly hates something or somebody. "Only Bebe would send a man with a girlfriend to be a contestant on a fucking dating show! Well, goddammit, I need four contestants and it's too late to find a replacement, and I can't rig the outcome because that's illegal. So I'm going to have to find a way to discourage this poor girl from choosing you, but it won't be easy."
In spite of everything I was flattered by this remark...until I saw my fellow contestants.
#1, an expensively dressed giant in his late 30s, but trying to look younger, had dyed his thinning black hair so ineptly I could see the stains on his scalp. #2, in his mid-40s, looked like the sort you'd find in the alley aside X-rated video store: his first words to me were an expression of bitterness that he wasn't getting more work on camera. #3, in his early 40s, spoke entirely in soap opera dialogue: 150 lbs of saccharine insincerity. In such company it was not hard to be the front runner. Jason Voorhees would have been the front runner. Without his mask.
Now, the premise of this show was that the woman in question was being set up (literally and figuratively) by her friends with four blind dates who had to compete for an actual, unchaperoned, a-deux date with the lady.
We would dine with her and her friends and family in the backyard of her home, and over the course of the evening would advance toward that goal or be eliminated by virtue of our responses. The poor girl thought we were friends of her friends who had agreed to do this because we'd been shown her picture and thought she was cute; she had no idea we were being paid to be there or that some of the contestants were wannabe actors and viewed this strictly as "work."
And what work it was. After the painfully awkward "surprise" moment -- which we shot three times, if I remember correctly -- we sat down to an enormous, lukewarm dinner of Thai food in the sweltering, bug-infested backyard. The director had placed me as far as was humanly possible from the victim, who I will call Keliani, probably in hopes she couldn't see me through the glare of faux-romantic candle-light, so I busied myself with the food and polished off an ungodly amount of white wine, which a production assistant poured liberally whenever anyone's glass got to the panic level. By the time Kelani had questioned the first three dates I was drunk off my ass. My answers were moronic, but so was the situation: what I mainly carry away from that part of the evening was the sudden compulsion I had developed to look at the camera. I literally became fixated on it. Whenever it wasn't pointed directly at me -- and sometimes when it was -- I stared at the fucking thing as if it were on fire, giving the director fresh reasons to regret Bebe had cast me for this "documentary."
After dinner Kelani was to ritually slaughter the nonexistent hopes of one of the suitors by making the first cut. While deliberations were in progress, I sneaked inside the house and watched an MMA fight on cable (I remember it was Urijah "the California Kid" Faber against Jens "Li'l Evil" Pulver. Unfortunately I'd consumed so much white wine I fell asleep. When I awoke the director was standing over me, sucking a cigarette down to its filter and raking his fingers through his now-destroyed salon haircut. "Okay," he said, in a tense, strained voice. "I think I did it. I think I managed to discourage her from choosing you."
"How?" I said, yawning.
"I kind of let her overhear me telling my assistant that you weren't uh, you know..."
"Straight?"
"Stable. I said you'd had a wicked breakup and were rebounding hard and just kind of, you know, a big hot motherfucking mess. I'm pretty sure she heard me."
She heard him. I was the first suitor to get the axe, which afforded me a chance to rinse the foul taste of cheap white wine from my palate with, you guessed it, more white wine. But when I tried to leave the set I was told I had to stay until shooting was over. "We need to get reaction shots from the losers!" the director explained.
More wine. A couple of Thai egg rolls. The fight card ended. Evening had become night. The other losers, #2 and then #3, came in and sat with me, comforted that at least I had been the first to go. At last, while #1 and his badly dyed hair were having a romantic, victorious dessert with Kelani, I was summoned outside, to the front yard. It was pitch black and for some reason the only light on the whole block was from the camera jammed in my face. I couldn't see a goddamned thing except this huge, glaring light, like the light an interrogator would use in a 40s gangster movie when he gives the crook the third degree. Considering the truly heroic intake of grape pumping through my veins, it was all I could do not to reel backwards into the graveled driveway as the director, unseen, told me to record my feelings about having lost my chance with Kelani. I was naive enough to relate my actual feelings, whereupon, with an exasperated cry of "CUT!" he said:
"Can you try to sound sad?"
We worked on "sad" for a few takes, but it was hopeless: wine is like truth serum to a beer-drinker. Eventually the director told me he'd settled for "disappointed," but in addition to making me tell the truth, wine also makes me assertive. I didn't want to settle: I had been paid this crisp $50 bill to play a role, and the role called for sad, so I insisted on more takes. I'm not sure if I ever hit the right note of sadness or whether the director just lied to get my drunken ass off the property, but either way, in a few minutes I was wobbling toward my car, convinced that my first foray into Tinseltown had been a huge success -- a feeling that dissipated well before the following day's hangover.
That was eight years ago, and I now have 47 IMDB credits to my name, which is no mean feat considering my true trade is writing and my work in "the business," far from being my life's dream, has never been anything but a means to make money. But I never see that first credit without thinking of how disappointed my girlfriend had been that the show got cancelled before my episode went to air. Far from being annoyed at the discovery her boyfriend was a contestant on a dating show, she'd been eagerly looking forward to seeing me make a fool of myself.
As for Bebe, I have to laugh whenever I see her name roll past me on the credits for a television show: for every actor cast upon it, I know, there might be a helluva story.
April 7, 2016
Is Hollywood Out of Ideas -- or Just Guts?
The idea that Hollywood is "out of ideas" has been gaining currency for many years. I myself subscribed to this theory, and had some excellent evidence to back it up. That evidence continues to pile up at the box office, year in and year out, lending a sense of certainty to the belief. The fact remains it is not true. There are plenty of new ideas in Hollywood: it's just damned hard for them to get a hearing -- on the silver screen, anyway.
Near the end of 2007 I moved from a small town in Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in the hopes of belatedly chasing my secondary dream of working in the entertainment industry. By the summer of 2008 I had my first industry gig, a five-week writing job, and this led, almost precisely a year later, to a "permanent" job at a make-up effects studio. I put the word in quotations because there are really no permanent jobs in "the industry" and absolutely no permanent jobs in make-up effects. The very nature of MUFX work is temporary. You work on a movie for six months; the movie wraps and you get the hook. Or, you work on a TV show; it gets canceled after the second season, and out you go. My job, it's true, was not rooted to any one project, and so I fancied I had more permanence, or less impermanence, than most. I was the "office coordinator," a nebulous term meaning that I did whatever needed to be done, from the august (budget estimates, script breakdowns) to the menial ("Can I get you some coffee, Lady Gaga?") and even the super-menial ("The wet sand we bought for the dummy is too lumpy; take this shovel and beat it flat."). There was no project too intimidating or ridiculous ("Help me put this temporary tattoo on that actresses' butt, but for God's sake don't look like you're enjoying yourself!"), no location to remote or uninviting ("I know it's quarter past four, and I know it's 35 miles away through stop-and-stop traffic, but you need to get these fangs to the location in Malibu by five.") for me to tackle. One of the most informative, if also the most boring, was called "tracking development leads." Simply put, development leads are little blurbs of information which tell you the status of just about every project which is trying to get off the ground in film or on television -- movies, television shows, mini-series, you name it. I had to sift through hundreds of these each week in hopes of finding one that might be persuaded to hire us to do its effects work.
Over the course of my year with the studio I must have seen somewhere in the vicinity of about ten thousand development leads, and after a few months I began to notice a specific pattern. About one-third of the ideas being pitched were what I would call "original," meaning that they had no direct link with any existing or previously existing movie, series, or franchise. The remaining two thirds were remakes, reboots, spin-offs, prequels, sequels, or adaptations. This is of course a very rough estimate. In any given week the figures might be radically different either way, but the overall trend was always for rehashing "old" concepts and against producing "new" or "original" ones.
Like many people, I took this to mean that Hollywood had run out of ideas, that after a century of moviemaking and sixty-odd years of television, the well had finally run dry, or was in the last stages of doing so. In fact, in writing a review of Rob Zombie's "Halloween" remake, I said: "Since Hollywood isn't interested in new ideas, and Zombie has apparently run out of such ideas as he has, I guess [remaking "Halloween"] was inevitable." It was only much later I heard Zombie say, in an interview, that after doing the "Halloween" remakes, he approached the studio with an original idea, only to be told he could direct another remake, this time of "The Blob," or hit the road. It wasn't that he didn't want to shoot his own stuff, it was that he wasn't being allowed to. And this led me to ask: Why?
The truth, I discovered after some digging, was that the "mid-budget" film was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Inflation makes using numbers tricky, but speaking in broad terms, "mid-budget" films are those which cost between $5 - 60 million dollars, and which are generally geared toward adult audiences. To quote Jason Bailey's article on Flavorwire: "Slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted. Studios began to make fewer films, betting big on would-be blockbusters, operating under the assumption that large investments equal large returns. Movies that don’t fit into that box (thoughtful dramas, dark comedies, oddball thrillers, experimental efforts) were relegated to the indies, where freedom is greater, but resources are far more limited." As it happens, "would-be blockbusters" are generally action-adventure or science-fiction/fantasy films, pitched to younger audiences and toward the youthful nostalgia of older theatergoers.
Now, what is immediately noticeable about most of the tentpole films being produced is that they are not merely films but franchises -- "revenue streams" in the vulgar verbiage of Hollywood bean-counters. Even when the original film in question was not derived from an already existing novel, comic book, theme-park ride, cartoon, etc., it immediately spawned a series of sequels, to the point that, using just these examples, Hollywood has, in the last decade and a half or so, turned out eight "Potter," five "Pirates," seven "Furious," five "Transformers," three or four "Star Wars" and more comic-book/graphic novel movies than I can actually count. At the same time it virtually stopped making adult-themed mid-budget films which were often notable for the originality of their storylines. Movies as diverse in theme as "The Godfather," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and "When Harry Met Sally" simply were not being produced anymore. These movies cost money, took chances, and it was anybody's guess whether they'd recoup it at the box office: another "Fast & Furious" movie, on the other hand, is viewed as a safe investment. So too were the reboots and "re-imaginings" of every iconic horror film you care to name, along with the cream of 80s and 90s television shows. Even old radio programs from the 30s and 40s were disinterred, dusted off and sent staggering like mummies into the marketplace. No idea was too long in the tooth to get a $150 million budget, not even Edgar Rice Burroughs "Martian" series, whose first installment was penned in 1912.
At the same time, while this frenzy of remaking was in progress, original screenplays and concepts for television shows began to form an immense backlog at the studios. Young screenwriters and aspiring directors found themselves unable to get a hearing. It got to the point where some writers, simply to bilk the system, paid artists to transform their scripts into graphic novels, published the novels on their own dime, and then went to the studios saying, "I've got the rights to this comic book...." whereupon the doors immediately swung open. In the sphere of television, of course, this dam eventually burst: first at the cable networks like HBO and Showtime, and later, via the streaming services like Netflix, which began to produce their own, often superlative, original content. Thus the grotesque situation has arisen: whereupon studios steadfastly refuse to make anything original, whereas cable networks and services like Netflix are consistently pumping out daring new shows.
It seemed to me that this schizoid situation could not stand for long. After all, many "tent-pole" films bomb, saddling studios with huge losses -- "John Carter of Mars," "Battleship," "The Lone Ranger" and "Fantastic Four" all come to mind. Soon the suits would ease back on these all-in, bet-the-house rolls of the dice and go back to letting the Rob Reiners, Francis Ford Coppolas and Steven Soderberghs of Hollywood resume their work at the mid-budget level. Soon they would open the sluice-gates and let a flood of daring new original material pour into development, allowing adults alternatives to the sight of Vin Diesel chewing his dialogue like marbles, or the sound of another J.J. Abrams or Michael Bay film, each audible from 20 blocks away. Even Joss Whedon, who became one of Hollywood's hottest directors after the success of "The Avengers," admitted afterward, "What we need are new narratives."
As it happens there is no evidence of any of this occurring. On the contrary, studios like Disney have doubled down on their position, refusing to produce anything they can't turn into a theme park attraction, while networks and services like HBO, Showtime, AMC, Starz, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are sailing full steam ahead into the uncharted but exciting creative waters that gave us shows like "Breaking Bad," "House of Cards," "The Americans" and "Orange is the New Black," among many others. Increasingly, this is where writers and producers who would rather fail with with their own ideas than succeed with someone else's, end up.
When I was a kid, with a few notable exceptions, television was considered the lower end of the entertainment food chain -- Stephen King referred to it quaintly as "a bottomless pit of shit" -- while the silver screen was considered its zenith. Things have changed: the paradigm has capsized. Daring films penned by iconoclastic writers and helmed by gutsy, visionary directors are increasingly rare in commodity, while television, once rightly reviled, is now the home of creativity and daring. I don't honestly know if this situation is good, bad, or sacrilegious, but I do know that the expression "idiot box" now applies more to your local cineplex than it does your television.
Near the end of 2007 I moved from a small town in Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in the hopes of belatedly chasing my secondary dream of working in the entertainment industry. By the summer of 2008 I had my first industry gig, a five-week writing job, and this led, almost precisely a year later, to a "permanent" job at a make-up effects studio. I put the word in quotations because there are really no permanent jobs in "the industry" and absolutely no permanent jobs in make-up effects. The very nature of MUFX work is temporary. You work on a movie for six months; the movie wraps and you get the hook. Or, you work on a TV show; it gets canceled after the second season, and out you go. My job, it's true, was not rooted to any one project, and so I fancied I had more permanence, or less impermanence, than most. I was the "office coordinator," a nebulous term meaning that I did whatever needed to be done, from the august (budget estimates, script breakdowns) to the menial ("Can I get you some coffee, Lady Gaga?") and even the super-menial ("The wet sand we bought for the dummy is too lumpy; take this shovel and beat it flat."). There was no project too intimidating or ridiculous ("Help me put this temporary tattoo on that actresses' butt, but for God's sake don't look like you're enjoying yourself!"), no location to remote or uninviting ("I know it's quarter past four, and I know it's 35 miles away through stop-and-stop traffic, but you need to get these fangs to the location in Malibu by five.") for me to tackle. One of the most informative, if also the most boring, was called "tracking development leads." Simply put, development leads are little blurbs of information which tell you the status of just about every project which is trying to get off the ground in film or on television -- movies, television shows, mini-series, you name it. I had to sift through hundreds of these each week in hopes of finding one that might be persuaded to hire us to do its effects work.
Over the course of my year with the studio I must have seen somewhere in the vicinity of about ten thousand development leads, and after a few months I began to notice a specific pattern. About one-third of the ideas being pitched were what I would call "original," meaning that they had no direct link with any existing or previously existing movie, series, or franchise. The remaining two thirds were remakes, reboots, spin-offs, prequels, sequels, or adaptations. This is of course a very rough estimate. In any given week the figures might be radically different either way, but the overall trend was always for rehashing "old" concepts and against producing "new" or "original" ones.
Like many people, I took this to mean that Hollywood had run out of ideas, that after a century of moviemaking and sixty-odd years of television, the well had finally run dry, or was in the last stages of doing so. In fact, in writing a review of Rob Zombie's "Halloween" remake, I said: "Since Hollywood isn't interested in new ideas, and Zombie has apparently run out of such ideas as he has, I guess [remaking "Halloween"] was inevitable." It was only much later I heard Zombie say, in an interview, that after doing the "Halloween" remakes, he approached the studio with an original idea, only to be told he could direct another remake, this time of "The Blob," or hit the road. It wasn't that he didn't want to shoot his own stuff, it was that he wasn't being allowed to. And this led me to ask: Why?
The truth, I discovered after some digging, was that the "mid-budget" film was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Inflation makes using numbers tricky, but speaking in broad terms, "mid-budget" films are those which cost between $5 - 60 million dollars, and which are generally geared toward adult audiences. To quote Jason Bailey's article on Flavorwire: "Slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted. Studios began to make fewer films, betting big on would-be blockbusters, operating under the assumption that large investments equal large returns. Movies that don’t fit into that box (thoughtful dramas, dark comedies, oddball thrillers, experimental efforts) were relegated to the indies, where freedom is greater, but resources are far more limited." As it happens, "would-be blockbusters" are generally action-adventure or science-fiction/fantasy films, pitched to younger audiences and toward the youthful nostalgia of older theatergoers.
Now, what is immediately noticeable about most of the tentpole films being produced is that they are not merely films but franchises -- "revenue streams" in the vulgar verbiage of Hollywood bean-counters. Even when the original film in question was not derived from an already existing novel, comic book, theme-park ride, cartoon, etc., it immediately spawned a series of sequels, to the point that, using just these examples, Hollywood has, in the last decade and a half or so, turned out eight "Potter," five "Pirates," seven "Furious," five "Transformers," three or four "Star Wars" and more comic-book/graphic novel movies than I can actually count. At the same time it virtually stopped making adult-themed mid-budget films which were often notable for the originality of their storylines. Movies as diverse in theme as "The Godfather," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and "When Harry Met Sally" simply were not being produced anymore. These movies cost money, took chances, and it was anybody's guess whether they'd recoup it at the box office: another "Fast & Furious" movie, on the other hand, is viewed as a safe investment. So too were the reboots and "re-imaginings" of every iconic horror film you care to name, along with the cream of 80s and 90s television shows. Even old radio programs from the 30s and 40s were disinterred, dusted off and sent staggering like mummies into the marketplace. No idea was too long in the tooth to get a $150 million budget, not even Edgar Rice Burroughs "Martian" series, whose first installment was penned in 1912.
At the same time, while this frenzy of remaking was in progress, original screenplays and concepts for television shows began to form an immense backlog at the studios. Young screenwriters and aspiring directors found themselves unable to get a hearing. It got to the point where some writers, simply to bilk the system, paid artists to transform their scripts into graphic novels, published the novels on their own dime, and then went to the studios saying, "I've got the rights to this comic book...." whereupon the doors immediately swung open. In the sphere of television, of course, this dam eventually burst: first at the cable networks like HBO and Showtime, and later, via the streaming services like Netflix, which began to produce their own, often superlative, original content. Thus the grotesque situation has arisen: whereupon studios steadfastly refuse to make anything original, whereas cable networks and services like Netflix are consistently pumping out daring new shows.
It seemed to me that this schizoid situation could not stand for long. After all, many "tent-pole" films bomb, saddling studios with huge losses -- "John Carter of Mars," "Battleship," "The Lone Ranger" and "Fantastic Four" all come to mind. Soon the suits would ease back on these all-in, bet-the-house rolls of the dice and go back to letting the Rob Reiners, Francis Ford Coppolas and Steven Soderberghs of Hollywood resume their work at the mid-budget level. Soon they would open the sluice-gates and let a flood of daring new original material pour into development, allowing adults alternatives to the sight of Vin Diesel chewing his dialogue like marbles, or the sound of another J.J. Abrams or Michael Bay film, each audible from 20 blocks away. Even Joss Whedon, who became one of Hollywood's hottest directors after the success of "The Avengers," admitted afterward, "What we need are new narratives."
As it happens there is no evidence of any of this occurring. On the contrary, studios like Disney have doubled down on their position, refusing to produce anything they can't turn into a theme park attraction, while networks and services like HBO, Showtime, AMC, Starz, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are sailing full steam ahead into the uncharted but exciting creative waters that gave us shows like "Breaking Bad," "House of Cards," "The Americans" and "Orange is the New Black," among many others. Increasingly, this is where writers and producers who would rather fail with with their own ideas than succeed with someone else's, end up.
When I was a kid, with a few notable exceptions, television was considered the lower end of the entertainment food chain -- Stephen King referred to it quaintly as "a bottomless pit of shit" -- while the silver screen was considered its zenith. Things have changed: the paradigm has capsized. Daring films penned by iconoclastic writers and helmed by gutsy, visionary directors are increasingly rare in commodity, while television, once rightly reviled, is now the home of creativity and daring. I don't honestly know if this situation is good, bad, or sacrilegious, but I do know that the expression "idiot box" now applies more to your local cineplex than it does your television.
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