Everett Maroon's Blog, page 21

Television’s Sidekicks of Color

Author’s note: This post originally appeared on I Fry Mine in Butter in June 2011. 

Feeling somewhat blue in the doldrums of summer reruns and the NFL off season, I gladly tuned in last year to see the then-new show, Royal Pains. It was about an E.R. doctor who gets unjustly fired from his job for helping a sicker but less wealthy patient, and winds up going into extremely private practice for the extremely wealthy in the Hamptons, New York. Catch the irony there? It’s subtle, I know.

It was enjoyable enough, with Mark Feuerstein as the good doctor Hank Lawson (son of being lawful, get it?), Paolo Costanzo as his well intentioned, extremely frustrating brother Evan, and Reshma Shetty as Divya Katdare, a woman of Indian heritage who secretly becomes a physician’s assistant, hiding her vocation from her family. Watching through the season, it was her character who supported the brothers through Evan’s monotony of stupid schemes—how his character didn’t take the grand prize in the Darwin Awards, I have no idea—and Hank’s challenging sense of insecurity to become the backbone of “Hank Med,” Evan’s stupid name for the practice. She reminded me a bit of Stephanie Zimbalist in Remington Steele, although Hank was by most measures not a complete charlatan.

Then the fall rolled around and I took in the premiere of The Good Wife,which I’ve written about on here twice now. And lo and behold, in the midst of the fictional Florrick Sex Scandal of 2009, there’s a cutting-edge investigator at the defense attorney firm: an Indian woman, Kalinda Sharma, played by Archie Panjabi. Wait a minute, my brain fired at me. Is this just coincidence? What’s going on here with the sidekickery?

On the one hand, women of color rarely get leads on television, be they comedies, dramas, or dramadies—a moniker I’m really not fond of, but will use here for purposes of a shortcut, which this em dash break no longer provides—so it’s not surprising to see them in at the second-tier level. But something else was going on, at least in these two instances. It was almost as if someone on the writing staff realized that these women—the characters as well as the actresses—get short shrift on TV.

Divya remarks more than once that she is holding the brothers together, even when say, a restaurant owner is down and Hank is nowhere near the scene, and she has to provide care until more help arrives, all while Evan is melting down emotionally. When it comes out that Divya is supposed to be engaged in the old-fashioned arranged way, she cuts Evan down for dissing her entire heritage, rather than being supportive of her in the midst of her predicament. Meanwhile, over onThe Good Wife, Kalinda corrects Juliana Marguiles’ character, Alicia Florrick, for making presumptions about her Indian family. Florrick responds, “my bad,” which is both nice to see and a bit eye-roll-inducing, since that’s what my 16-year-old niece does when she’s just cussed someone out and gotten caught.

I started thinking about sidekicks more generally. Was it just these two shows? Something in the water that year? Something I’d been missing for a long time? I went and did some legwork. The first thing I learned was that typing “sidekicks of color” into Google returns one with a lot of hits on phones called Sidekicks, and all the colors in which they are produced.

Westerns certainly often go for the Native American sidekick, like Tonto or Little Beaver, Red Ryder’s friend. Little Beaver is not a name they’re going to use in primetime these days, I don’t think. And don’t forget the favorite Latino sidekick of the Western stage: Pancho. But that was 1950, that Cisco Kid show. So also were Roy Rogers and Red Ryder from the 1950s. We were like total ignoramusses on race then. Heck, we even have a Barack Obama in the White House now! We don’t have racism anymore, surely.

Let’s flash forward a few decades. Die Hard. Thanks, black cop who’s afraid to use his gun because he missed so exquisitely badly the last time, for hanging with the white guy on the phone, while he does all of the hard work of walking on broken glass and swinging out of buildings and exploding helicopters with his MacGyver intelligence. Yeah, you get a good shot off at the end. Way to break a sweat there. Nice depiction, writers. You fail on this sidekick creation. Okay, okay, that was a movie, some folks may cry foul. But we also had ER, in which Eriq LaSalle played a distant and unlikeable sidekick to Anthony Edwards’ vulnerable and very appealing Doctor Greene, at the start of the series and honestly, the actors of color in secondary roles only got more numerous as the seasons elapsed.

But I don’t have to point just to the 80s and 90s. This season we had Danny Pudi as Abed Nadir on Community. Then there’s Aziz Ansari as the extremely arrogant and sexist Tom Haverford onParks and Recreation, Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor on The Office, and Maulik Pancholy playing the so-subservient-his-character-doesn’t-even-have-a-last-name Jonathan on 30 Rock.And they’re all on one station, NBC. And none of their characters get taken seriously by the other characters in these shows.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the Indian ethnicity for these characters. Is Indian all the rage? Is there an agent out there really pushing these actors into these roles? Is it too challenging to laugh at African-Americans with the Obaminator in DC? Maybe nobody’s afraid of Bobby Jindal the way they fear looking racist by mocking . . . oh, I can’t even end that sentence properly. Nobody’s afraid of mocking anyone of any color. The President was called a “raghead” just last week. I wonder if South Carolina is trying to secede again, come to think of it.

It’s not progress to move on to a new ethnicity for the sidekick slot, especially if it means that 1.) the newly highlighted ethnicity is mocked or teased in the same way the last one was, and 2.) actors of other ethnicities and races have an even harder time finding work. I appreciate that Royal Pains and The Good Wifehave a bit of self-reflexivity with regard to these characters, but I worry about the overall context here.

That said, I’ll give it another season to see if I’m being too heavy-handed. But my suspicions won’t go away in the meantime.

Why God Hates Us

This was originally a post on I Fry Mine in Butter from 2010.

In the beginning, there were good preachers and there were scary preachers. The good preachers seemed kindly, they talked about love, they talked about forgiveness, they talked about acting as Jesus did, minus all the getting betrayed and walking up a huge hill with a board, and getting crucified. And that was good. And they have remained basically the same, still talking about love and forgiveness and modeling.

There were also the scary preachers. They ranted about hell fire and damnation, and sin. Lots of sin. Everyone a sinner, with the implication, never acknowledged, that they must be sinners too. And while scary preachers could raise a ruckus, most people preferred the other kind of preacher, especially when the scary preacher got embroiled in personal scandal, showing that despite their invective, they were not better than the rest of us.

So scary preachers evolved, which is to say, they changed. They started selling snake oil. Actually, they’d already been selling snake oil, they just codified the arrangement. They became carpetbaggers, hucksters, oil men, fake journalists hawking gold, Wall Street barons, politicians, and some even kept the preacher mantle. But their message is still the same as it was at the dawn of time. Hate, fear, judgment, death, pain, sacrilege. More drama spews out of their mouths in 44 edited minutes of air time than in 20 years on an average soap opera. The message is loud and clear: we cannot possibly be as righteous as they are. So we better look out for the moment when God Will Strike Us Down.

September 11, 2001, according to Jerry Falwell: “the ACLU has to take a lot of blame for this” in addition to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians.” Do note that transsexuals were not mentioned. Transsexuals had nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda bombing the US. But when Falwell said it, Pat Robertson heartily agreed. It wouldn’t be the last time Robertson said tragedy had befallen a nation because of The Big Mean Left.

When Haiti came crashing down in a tremendous earthquake, scary preacher man was here again, not to reassure us, not to tell us that we were just too small to understand God’s will, but because the Haitians had “made a pact with the Devil.” Watch as Kristi Watts nods at whatever she can (Haiti is on the island of Hispanola, okay, I can nod to that) and looks a bit like Michael Myers when Kanye announced “George Bush hates black people.” Why doesn’t she slap this guy?

Iceland’s Eyjafjoll volcano started spewing lava and ash last week, twice in as many months, and shut down most of Europe’s airports, for the particulate matter in the air eats jet engines. And Rush Limbaugh was there to explain basic plate tectonics to the masses, saying “You know, a couple of days after the health care bill had been signed into law Obama ran around all over the country saying, ‘Hey, you know, I’m looking around. The earth hadn’t opened up. There’s no Armageddon out there. The birds are still chirping.’ I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied.”

White people are here to tell us why people of color die. Thanks, white people!

Sure, because God don’t know the difference between the United States of America and Iceland. It’s all the same planet, after all. We have the scary preachers to guide us.  We have them to shoot abortion providers, or create such restrictive laws that those doctors are shut down. We have them to tell us that our service people who have died in action were really killed by an all-powerful and crazy ass manipulative God who is pissed that this country lets gay people exist. Because of course any of that crap makes sense. (Incidentally, Fred Phelps’ son is coming out with a pretty pissed-off-at-Dad memoir. It’s on my reading list for sure.)

Once upon a time the good preachers and the scary preachers had to travel to spread their messages of hope and complete destruction. But humans progressed and well, now they only need a microphone.

Out of Order

Author’s note: This is reblogged from I Fry Mine in Butter, from June 2011 when I originally wrote it.

I was still a teenager when Law & Order started on NBC, and while I liked it just fine, I don’t remember being immediately taken with it. Actually, it seemed a bit like one of my boyfriends, the first of three Scotts I dated in high school and college—fairly likable, but I wondered about how long it would last. Law & Order, on the other hand, grew on me over time; I may not have caught each and every episode as they aired that first season, but I would read the tiny printed previews in my parents’ TVGuide and remember to watch. Hey, it was 1990, after all, and the newspaper’s television guide was often wrong. Oh, life was so hard.

I wanted to know what was up with Ben Stone, the ADA who seemed a little, well, crazy. Robinette was the cool and collected one, often mediating between Stone and Adam Schiff, the District Attorney. Every episode the cops were nearly precognitive, until the attorney’s office took over and had to deal with the technicalities that threatened to have the case for the people thrown out. It was as if Giuliani’s New York weren’t even possible because these criminals knew it was a cakewalk. Still, with a little bit of magic and finesse, and a hell of a lot of drinks over what I can only presume were extremely old bottles of scotch, Schiff got his convictions. Or at least very intimidating plea bargains.

Then McCoy showed up and it was a new style of ADAing, if I can gerundize the noun like that. When criticism came back early on that there weren’t enough women on the show—scratch that, there weren’t any women on the show, other than the occasional appearance by Dr. Olivette—they changed the cast around. Mostly they just got rid of Robinette, the only character of color. But hey, it wasn’t long before Detective Rey Curtis came on after that, and he spoke Spanish. Strangely enough, along with more women on the show came more opportunities to show sexism, namely on the order of McCoy having affairs with various ADAs, and this happened mostly off-camera. Writers, you’re supposed to show, not tell. Sheesh.

I paid more attention to McCoy’s willingness to get all Uri Geller with the law, bending it just to keep people he knew to be criminals behind bars. Keep that up enough and you’ll be the DA someday, McCoy.

Somewhere along the way, having passed well over the line into “like,” I began taking some glee from the show. They had started the whole “ripped from the headlines” schtick. While Dick Wolf had taken from real events in its first season—mirroring the Bernhard Goertz case, for example, the idea took on a life of its own. Tom Cruise tells people they don’t need anti-depressants? There’s a show for that. Mel Gibson waxes philosophic about how the Jews have taken over? There’s a show for that. Snobby kids driving vulnerable kids to suicide via MySpace? There’s a show for that, too. The guest appearances were amazing:

Samuel L. Jackson, Martin Short, Kathy Griffin, Betty Buckley, Lynda Carter, Angela Lansbury, Heather Locklear, Luke Perry, Edie Falco, Chevy Chase, everywhere from A-list actors to Griffin, they gave rise to regular viewers’ anticipation that The Guest Star Is The Killer. There were so many “watch until the very last second” twists and reveals it seemed positively pedestrian when a straightforward plot popped up. I was more than hooked, I craved my Law and Order. Once the magic of syndication hit, I was enthralled, even if it did make study time in college a little less focused.

Less than two weeks ago NBC announced it would be the end of L&O, and while a few people held their breath to see if another station would pick it up—say, over keeping onCSI: Miami—but none were forthcoming. And so . . . that’s it. This week was the very extremely there-will-be-no-more episode. It’s been 20 years, a long enough time in my life, but an eternity on television. With such short notice, would there be a send off? There couldn’t be, right?

There sure wasn’t.

SPOILER—LOOK OUT BELOW.

I’m glad to know that Lt. Van Buren’s cancer is in remission, and it was heart-warming to see her be cared for by her boyfriend-turned-fiance. I also loved seeing McCoy light into yet another overprotective legal advocate, I mean I really cheered him on. Jeez, do not get on this man’s bad side!

They got the bad guy. Wolf’s vision of a “positive” drama about the criminal justice system finished out on an up note, and then, without the literal snap-to-black we got at the end of The Sopranos, it was over. Simply over.

That sucked.

The end.

It’s Not the Same Press Anymore

This article originally ran at I Fry Mine in Butter.

Once upon a time, newspapers like the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, and so on all had reporters posted in far away places from Moscow to Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro to London. These folks were part of a press corps that wrote daily or near-daily stories and sent them back to their editors in the paper’s home town. Each paper published different articles on similar topics, because the ideas around what was “newsworthy” were generally the same, although it was common for one paper to run a story and another not to, if the first paper had confirmation of all of the details but the second one couldn’t muster them together. This is how we all came to know the concept of “getting the scoop” on the competition. Political reporters tried to form relationships with people in the political arena, so that they could get first dibs on juicy quotes or source material. I presume that a lot of backroom dealmaking popped up in this kind of relationship. Agreeing not to mention President Roosevelt’s wheelchair meant that one got to continue to sit in the White House press corps, for example. Agreeing not to mention JFK’s many affairs got them something I don’t know. But something.

In addition to this reporting by individual news agencies, there were three competing news services that had their own reporting staff. Well, there were more than three, several more, but there were three most notables: The Associated Press, Reuters News Agency, and United Press International. UPI was kicked around like the stepchild of the bunch, but a certain Helen Thomas (I will submit here that we are distant cousins) was well known for being a quality journalist associated with UPI. These news agencies would have reporters in cities all over the globe, just as the newspapers did, and would sell the stories they wrote to newspapers, to fill in content, provide stories for places where they couldn’t have their own reporter, and so forth. They represented a small but significant quantity of the stories in any given city’s paper, but the main stories, the “real catches” were done by the newspaper’s own staff.

That the reporting corps of newspapers and of the news agencies were markedly white, straight, and male meant that the ideas of what made “real” news came through that lens, a rather narrow lens. But this is how the news media functioned for decade after decade, and it brought this lens to the new 20th Century technologies as they came into being: radio, television, the Internet.

There’s my cousin, back in the front row, but now writing for AP.

Today it is a different world. Newspapers, cautioned for 30 years now that they are a dying news medium, no longer have the broad bureau staff they once employed. While the New York Times maintains 26 bureaus internationally, they’re now an outlier in the field, the gasping far end of the normal distribution that has, like an exhaling balloon, been whizzing away toward the smaller side of the graph, toward newspapers that have only a few bureaus worldwide. In the void left behind by newspaper organizations, the news agencies have all but taken over, and now many, many of the stories we read in the paper (or more often now, online) are from those agencies. Whether I look at the Inquirer, the Post, the LA Times, I can find the exact same article. Just look under the headline to see the attribution. If it doesn’t say “staff writer” or “contributing writer,” but AP, it’s a pre-packaged article.

ABC News took a new step in the process of redefining foreign correspondence in 2007, when it sent seven television journalists with laptops and handheld video cameras to one-person bureaus around the world. Dana Hughes, an ABC correspondent based in Nairobi, told  the American Journalism Review, “We are fixers, shooters, reporters, producers, and bureau chiefs.” Five jobs, one person. (The Yale Globalist)

But what’s the problem? Why even care? Aren’t we supposed to congratulate efficiency?

The problem is, we’re not getting the best news anymore. The fewer the number of people involved in bringing us our news, the fewer the opportunities to think about how to broaden our news, tell more stories, talk to more sources when writing and delivering an article to us. And while I’m not surprised, I’m sad to say that the downsizing of reporting staff has hit minority and female reporters hardest. Forty-four percent of American newspapers have no minorities on staff at all (American Society of Newspaper Editors). While there were inroads made from the 60s through the turn of the millennium, it now appears that we’re returning to white boy journalism. So with fewer diverse perspectives bringing us news, decreasing numbers of reporters in the field, and fewer media outlets, what kinds of content are we receiving? All while we herald first amendment rights to free speech.

I would like to remind everyone that the full text of the first amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (emphasis mine)

What does it mean if the private sector gives up on reporting? It’s not Congress, after all, it’s the private sector.

What does it mean if cost-cutting winds up costing us quality reporting? If all we see are shots of Paris Hilton crying on her way to jail, reports about some celebrity’s rehab attempt, the fear-mongering that Mexican citizens are infiltrating our country? If swine flu, volcanic ash, doomsday earthquakes, political scandals, global warming, health care socialism, and rogue uranium crowd out the airwaves and news Web sites? What are we not hearing?

We are not hearing about triumph over struggle. We are not hearing about progress. We are not hearing about needing to come together to solve problems. And any myriad of other news that isn’t polarizing, hate-instilling, us versus them crap.

I want my content back.

The Coen Brothers Know How to Murder

Author’s note: This is reblogged from I Fry Mine in Butter, published in May 2011.

Please note, this post contains and focuses on images of fictional violence.

I was a fan of the Coen Brothers before Fargo came out, and then it was all over, I was nuts about Coen Brothers movies. I still think there’s never been a better movie opening than the one in Raising Arizona. There are a lot of things I could write about with regard to their work, but fortunately for me, it’s mostly been covered by the blogosphere. What I haven’t seen, however, is this, and coincidentally enough, it’s one of my most favorite aspects of their work—it is freaking hard to kill someone. On a larger level, it is inordinately hard to be a criminal. Shit just doesn’t work out very well.

In two films, the aforementioned Fargo and Burn After Reading, people who are otherwise desperate or ignorant try to deal with their circumstances by identifying get rich quick schemes. They even had the best intentions to start out, but faced with two juggernauts as adversaries—well established, smart and greedy businessmen, and oh, the Russian embassy, respectively—they fold like a house of cards in a day care center.

Jerry Lundegaard (played by Mr. Method, William H. Macy) has no idea how his life has gone so far off the rails, and he never figures it out. So frustrated from being overlooked by his insensitive buffoon of a father-in-law, he finally comes up with a money-making deal, only to have Dad and Company offer him a pittance for bringing the idea to him. When he says he wants more money than that, they tell him okay, no deal, but we’ll go ahead with this plan on our own, and Jerry, not being one from the Direct Communication school of confrontation, opts instead to find two criminals to kidnap his wife and hold her for ransom.

In its foreign release, Fargo’s premise is given away by its subtitle, A Comedy of Errors.This is a loose definition of the word comedy. Where Raising Arizona went for the guffaw, Fargo launches straight for the jugular so it can get as bloody as possible. The kidnapping goes badly, and here is the first of several instances in which violent moments don’t play out as expected.

Just the image of the masked Carl Showalter (Steve Buschemi) peering through the living room windows, trying to figure out where his intended victim is goes to the heart of demystifying violence. In so many television shows and movies, it’s a fight between brilliant serial killers and the genius forensics staff and investigators who hunt them down, the line of scrimmage as small as a double helix strand of DNA. But for anyone who’s come into contact with the actual criminal justice system, life almost never works out that way. You go to kidnap a woman on behalf of her husband and it’s actually such a logistical nightmare—find the address, get in unnoticed, get out with lady unnoticed, get to hideout, deliver ransom notice untraceably, and so on—and Fargo exposes this at every turn.

Getting stopped by a North Dakota state trooper for not having proper tags on their car (hey, it’s how they caught Ted Bundy, right?) was not what they had in mind on the way to their safe house. That Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), Showalter’s accomplice shoots the trooper isn’t novel, but Showalter’s reponse to having the cop’s blood splattered on his face is.

The relationship between the accomplices breaks down quickly and violently, with Showalter showing up, finally, with the ransom, but also with a gunshot wound to his jaw, because even the ransom didn’t happen the way he’d wanted. These are mismatched criminals, with Showalter the loser who turned to crime, and Grimsrud the psychopath who is notable for his near-complete lack of affect the entire film. This is a lot more interesting to me than formulaic, lock-step gang members or blue codes of silence, and so on. They’re not masterminds.

The woman on the hunt, however, is quick-witted. Marge Gunderson (played by Frances McDormand, who won the Oscar for this role) is the sheriff in town, the very pregnant sheriff, which is also a sliver of against type that the Coen brothers work into their films. While at first she is looking into what appears to be a simpler crime, a whole lot of bodies pile up before she catches up to Grimsrud in the infamous “wood chipper” scene. It’s not even easy to dispose of an accomplice in a wood chipper, apparently. And where everyone else has failed to win in any battle against Grimsrud, she prevails. Part good detective work, part nothing fancy.

In Burn After Reading, the setting is wildly different, in the urbanity of Washington, DC. As an aside I’ll say here that I love movies about DC; having lived there for more than a decade, I enjoy ascertaining which shots were on location and which were probably shot in some far away place like Vancouver.

In this film, Osbourne Cox (the amazing John Malcovich) is a CIA analyst fired from his job for drinking, and the movie watches his progression from condescending jackass to full-on murderer, complete with consequences on the order of mortal coil intensity. Along the way, his wife decides to divorce him and upon advice from her attorney, makes copies of his hard drive, complete with what one presumes are the most rambling and uninteresting memoirs about life in the CIA ever put to a keyboard. Losing the CD at her local gym, it is discovered by the staff, notably Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand again), who decide to blackmail the owner for what they believe is classified government information. Hey, after all the laptops and hard drives that went missing during all the years of the Bush administration, it can’t really be all that upsetting for one little CD to get out, right? But Litzke really, really wants 16 cosmetic surgery procedures, and $50,000 or so would really help her out. Feldheimer, being a body-focused, helpful team player, wants to support her in her endeavor to get the body not achievable through their own vocation. They decide to blackmail Cox.

By this point, everyone knows it’s not going to proceed smoothly. He can’t even blackmail Cox properly, and winds up not getting the money at their meeting.

Feldheimer, looking for dirt on Cox to up the extortion ante, breaks into Cox’s house and runs into Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), Cox’s wife’s man-mistress. Pfarrer, who has been increasingly paranoid about a dark car following him around town, shoots Feldman in the face, killing him, and it is here where again the Coen brothers go to excruciating detail to show us how darn hard it is to clean up after shooting someone in the face.

The plot lines devolve into more violence, increasingly interwoven, until Cox takes after the gym manager Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins), who has nothing to do with anything, with a hatchet. It’s a last scene of bloody gore that reveals the amount of energy to swing an axe into and out of a body, and you can see on Cox’s face that he wants to rethink the moment after the first couple of strikes. I find that watching this scene I have a level of distaste I just don’t experience watching a shootout on television, because that violence is mystified as plot development. This violence is senseless, awful, shameful. And the brothers Coen are quick to follow up on its heels with a long satirical scene:

So the lesson here kiddies is, don’t go being a criminal. It’s not going to get you anything good.

Writing without a Map

Not only are jokes on the skids as humor goes–apparently there are more 21st Century ways to make humor than old stand-up one-liners–but coupled with the rise of GPS systems, and jokes about how men never ask for directions sound positively archaic. With a smart phone or in-car positioning system, one never need be mapless again. If our sense of direction is sub-par, no worries. In a new neighborhood or city, instructions for orienteering are just a few clicks away.

I admit it; I am a fan of plans and outlines and the writer’s equivalent of a blueprint for works in progress. But sometimes my standard process doesn’t unfold, and I find myself writing into blackness. If I prefer having character descriptions in front of me, a knowledge of the major plot points and an intermediate grip on the themes as I sit down to write, then I have to manage my disappointment when identifying the tale to be told is a murkier process. This new novel will only reveal itself to me in word-sized chunks–no matter how I try to stir up bigger portions of the narrative, I can only clutch at one scene at a time, like trying to get at the most excellent plushy animal at the bottom of a seaside toy grabbing crane. I will take what I can get, succumbing to this impromptu apprenticeship in authorly creativity and patience.

For the writer who likes to know the universe before typing, here are a few suggestions when that unruly project comes along:

1. Note as you go–At the end of your writing session, leave a few minutes to diagram what scenes you added, if you wrote in any new characters, and describe the major plot points that are now in the narrative. I like to reflect on the just-laid scenes before I sit down again, so having an ongoing journal for each project helps get into the right mindset more quickly, and then my writing time is more productive.

2. Use the lack of structure to your advantage–If you’re not going to be beholden to an earlier idea about who does what, then relax and let your characters do their thing in the story. They may surprise you with their activity once you free up your expectations for your writing process. Remember, the bulk of the work is in the revisions, so there will be plenty of time later to shift, tweak, and undo (if need be).

3. Feel free to use placeholders–I sometimes put in a <> marker in my first drafts if the needed scene isn’t coming to me or I feel more capable of writing some other aspect of the novel. Without a drawn-out architecture plan, there’s even less reason to struggle with some impertinent character or plot point. You aren’t wedded to any sequence of events, so if you’re obsessed with the antagonist, go ahead and tell their story from beginning to end. You can and will work everything else into their story until all of the components are present and accounted for in the manuscript.

4. Remember that good writers are flexible writers–Of course there are stories about the superstitions writers attach to in the course of finding a process that works for them. If only life were static and nothing ever changed, then a single way of writing a novel that worked perfectly could be used time and again. Thank goodness life moves and is fluid (talk about running out of things to write about–it’s a good thing the universe keeps growing). So if say, having a 1-year-old and a brand-new work schedule mean that not enough brain capacity exists to do things like, uh, outline the novel in progress, then it will only make me–I mean, one, it will make one–a better artist in the end. The point remains to tell the story that is dying to be told. How we get there is not only part of the project, it is a big chunk of the joy.

Good luck, folks, and may your best words find you.

Support De Spite

I’ve seen it at least half a dozen times on my Facebook wall–people who will write a status asking anyone who has clicked like on things like Romney, Paul Ryan, or the GOP, to just go ahead and defriend them now. Then they’ll list the reasons why a mouse click for the political right is so offensive. I don’t disagree that a vote for Republicans, generally speaking, is a vote against reproductive rights, LGBT civil rights, and the like, because yes, the GOP’s political platform reads that they’re opposed to those rights and communities. And even if Mitt Romney himself is in favor of a “rape exception” for abortion–even if there are no health practitioners in a given area to perform an abortion because overall the climate has dampened training in those procedures–his colleagues have been arguing quite forcefully that they will continue to push legislation that outlaws all abortions no matter the mitigating circumstances. So I understand that the nuances at play in our political parties are not enough reason to absolve members of a given party from the consequences they wreak on our fellow Americans.

But I’m not jumping on the defriend bandwagon. I read the primary narrative of FoxNews as divisive, pitching conservative keyword after keyword to their faithful audience, and attempt after attempt at alienating the rest of us from watching. It’s a process wherein less and less motivation falls on FoxNews to double-check their facts and sources, until disinformation is all they telecast, reality be damned. What does it mean to live in a country where a vocal minority attempts to steep an entire political party in hate and anger, and people at the other end of the spectrum point fingers and laugh derisively or shout back in frustration? When we dismiss each other as lost causes, what are we left with?

Well, I don’t need to hypothesize. We’re there already. We’ve got millions of folks in this country who have given up on the political process, the idea of government–the government that paved our highways, set up our telecommunications infrastructure, founded our public education system, and decided our children should breathe clean air, our elders should not live in poverty, and our indigent should have a support structure–but most importantly, we have given up on each other. We’ve let extremists on the right take over Christianity until it’s become a warped, decidedly un-Jesus-like institution that blames the poor for their poverty, blames the sinners (ahem, isn’t that all of us) for every ill and weather calamity that befalls the country, and blames civil rights for the end of society. Those same extremists have moved the Republican Party from talk about freedom and the merits of small government to a series of economic hoodlumism that is unsustainable by nearly every economic theory and standard out there, and that requires unacceptable rollbacks in things like workers rights, a reasonable tax structure, and regulations that protect against greed by Wall Street fat cats.

I know that’s not what Christianity stands for. Yes, I believe in God (with a good dose of universe-froo frooness thrown in), and I think Jesus Christ was awesome, if you look at what’s been ascribed to him in word and deed. No, I’m a registered Democrat, having voted for that party in every election except my first one; I voted for George Bush the elder, when he won against Mondale. I pressure fellow Christians about being more open to ignoring old Leviticus scripture–since chances are they’re already out of “compliance” with most of it–but I can’t push the GOP from within if I’m not one of them.

This impatience to support each other as complex human beings goes beyond political parties, of course. Take the rift between adults who have children and those who don’t. To the adult without kids, I look like I’ve given up my life for the sake of having a permanent subordinate around, pulling at my pant legs. To the adults with kids, those without are often called selfish and strange because they’ve attached to hobbies or objects instead of helping to raise children. And of course we can point to examples–there’s always a damn example–where these moments have struck like lightning bolts, but to color whole groups of people as our least functional instances is the heart of stereotyping.

I know people who are card-carrying GOP members, and they love me and want me to have a full, happy life. It is my hope that they also encourage their fellow Republicans to leave behind the divisive policies about abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, and health care reform. I support Maureen Walsh in her reelection campaign, because the GOP needs many more Maureen Walshes. I will not defriend people online because they click “like” for Mitt Romney, but I can’t promise I won’t make a lemon face when I see it, because I think he’s a terrible representative of his party and a mean person to boot. But let’s remember that is was the Republicans who pushed many southern Democrats away from their stubborn support of segregation. Democrats do not have the market on moral righteousness. Moreover, Planned Parenthood may be the contemporary vanguard for affordable health care for women and the largest group advocating for reproductive rights, but it started out as a eugenics experiment. Those extreme views needed to get pushed out of those organizations, for obvious reasons.

Middle-of-the-road is a hard spot to occupy, and it comes with some built-in problems, but right now, we need to hear from the folks in the middle. Yes, we need a left swing because if we were to grant all of the requests by the right-most standing advocates, we would no longer be living under “American values,” and that’s not something we should abide. We can’t throw our friends, family, and neighbors under the bus because we hate the group they’re in. We need them now more than ever, so that we can all get on a more loving, support road to our future.

Entropy and the Asshole

Trigger warning: This blog post is about sexual assault.

I’m a believer in entropy. Well, not “in” it exactly, in that I don’t worship at the altar of things coming undone or descending into chaos, but I believe it exists as a force. Clean up a room and slowly things get out of place. Watch the waves come into shore and eventually you’ll notice the beach is growing…or greatly receding. If the universe is replete with patterns, it is also chock full of disorder. Stars collapse, DNA mutates, and here on earth human beings invent new ways of injuring each other.

So it is that in the sea of sound bites that defines the Sunday morning politics shows on American television, Representative Akin (R-Mo), running for the Senate, said that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because the female body releases a chemical that prevents insemination. This representation of pseudo-science, which stems from an evaluation of how some waterfowl resist pregnancy, is at once a misunderstanding of science, how the human body works, and the range of circumstances that lead to sexual assault in this country. And these are not to mention that it is millions of women, not “thousands” as described by Akin in his amendment to his statement after the Internet cried foul upon his original remarks.

As if women don’t already question whether they’ve experienced a “real” rape or not, now they have to worry about a new facet of their experience. The anti-logic and nonsense bound up in this concept is almost amazing in its multifacetedness. Here are all the angles of “wrong” in Akin’s assertion, but let’s begin with his quote first:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Problem #1: Human bodies don’t actually work that way. Hey, you can find someone with an M.D. to say most anything. Maybe that doctor isn’t board certified in anything, or practicing. But the Journal of American Obstetrics and Gynecology estimates that something on the order of 30,000 pregnancies result from sexual assault each year, and a recent study at the University of South Carolina showed that 6.4 percent of rapes result in pregnancy. Ducks, on the other hand, do secrete a chemical that prevents conception if the female doesn’t want to mate. And let me harken back to grade school biology class: People are not ducks.

Problem #2: The concept of “legitimate rape” is more than a little sickening. It’s not new to hear that some men talk about rape in terms of “real” rape and “falsely reported” rape, and thanks to that discourse, millions of women feel like total crap for decades on end. But to call it “legitimate” is a misuse of the word, in that it is marking some rape strangely as aboveboard, when 100 percent of rape is a terrible, awful blight on society and the people it leaves in its wake (pregnant or not) is especially appalling. Also, to have “illegitimate” children come from “legitimate” rape tears at the very fabric of meaning. Of course, these are the folks who want to redefine personhood. (Can’t redefine marriage, oh no, but PERSONHOOD is fair game.)

Problem #3: Statutory rape flies in the face of this stupid freaking concept. Is Todd Akin really ready to argue that a 12-year-old girl, pregnant from a rape or incest, wanted her encounter and that’s why she’s pregnant? So the woman who was kidnapped as a teenager by her father in Austria and forced to bear 7 of his children was okay with her relationship with him? This, Congressman, is why people see red when you blather out your ill-informed, offensive bullshit. Because you just erased any validation that millions of women had in coming to terms with the trauma they survived.

Problem #4: The lack of pharmaceutical research on these contraceptive “secretions.” Let’s get real here—if women were capable of producing their own contraceptive chemical, global pharma would be all over it in order to create a contraceptive. And right-wing preachers (and the politicians they support) would swarm the arrival of this product on the market as the newest doomsday for human reproduction and morality. Not seeing that happening? That’s because this chemical does not exist. Also, while Akin asserts there is some kind of affirmative chemical that women can secrete, other extreme conservatives have said pregnancy is prevented during forcible rape because “the juices don’t flow.” So which is it, guys? Are there sperm killing juices or life-giving juices at play here? My sense is that they don’t really know, because they probably don’t have much contact with either in their personal lives.

Okay, that was a low blow. My apologies. Let’s get back to it.

Problem #5: Akin didn’t really apologize. In his “apology” a few hours after his original remarks, his Web page read (full statement here):

As a member of Congress, I believe that working to protect the most vulnerable in our society is one of my most important responsibilities, and that includes protecting both the unborn and victims of sexual assault.  In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year.  Those who perpetrate these crimes are the lowest of the low in our society and their victims will have no stronger advocate in the Senate to help ensure they have the justice they deserve.

He’s also misusing the word empathy here for “sympathy,” which would be more appropriate, but I’m splitting hairs. The issue here is where is his apology? He just offended millions of people and suggested that any woman who was faced with the horrendous situation of getting pregnant after being raped wasn’t really raped, and he can’t even apologize to them? He thinks it’s clear he “misspoke?” It’s clear, sir, that you’re an asshole, that’s what’s clear. That in looking to shore up conservative votes in the GOP base in Missouri—a state in which you were already polling well—you used rape survivors to get votes. And that would mean, in my book, that you should apologize to the good voters of Missouri, because that’s an insult to them, too.

So we didn’t get an apology from a politician who asserted something that wasn’t true, using science that doesn’t exist. Still following along? The descent from what we’ve believed is an orderly universe is troubling when we see the entropy in culture, isn’t it?

It was only a few hundred years ago that women who were burned at the stake in Massachusetts faced their own misogynistic mash-up of pseudo-science and skewed morality:

They said if she wasn’t really a witch, she wouldn’t burn.

Also read my article on the poverty of consent.

Baby-Induced Super Powers

We know the story because it is so very cliche and common: two people have a baby and plummet into a world of sleep deprivation, regurgitation, dirty diapers, and near-constant wailing. Oh, those poor, poor new parents. We’re sure they need to know more about the level of hell they’re about to inhabit, so we pet them gently on the shoulder and whisper, “Your life will never be the same.” We should take care, in the immediate aftermath of granting such unsolicited advice, to avoid the daggers they shoot out from their eye sockets, because I hear they are heat seeking and almost never miss.

What we don’t pay attention to, not nearly as much, are the tiny skills that caring for a new human bestow upon these exhausted parents. I have noted, in no apparent order, the following gifts that have careened into my lap since Emile’s birth nearly a year ago:

1. Inside sneak capability–I can creep away silently with the best of them now, which for a 5-foot 9-inch 300-pound guy is its own kind of amazing. Our baby is a very light sleeper for the first 90 minutes after bedtime, but I have mastered tiptoeing and silent movement despite the fact that our floorboards are more than 70 years old and have never been hammered down. Small beetles make the hardwood boards creak, but not moi. Whew.

2. Ability to hold complicated conversations while sleeping–Perhaps this one is a double-edged sword because people may think I’ve actually agreed to something or held a discussion with them when I have no conscious input or memory of my time spent yammering with them. But I have confidence at this point that I’d be able to talk my way out of certain death while still asleep, if I had to. What can I say, I’m a creative thinker.

3. Ambidexterity–Clingy babies still want lunch, and lunch requires a series of actions for the caretaker to execute, like putting pureed food into tiny bowls and then spooning the food with tiny utensils into a moving target. To slow down the moving target and succeed at placing the puree into the infinitesimally small aperture, which opens and closes at random frequency, one hand generally needs to come into play, so the other one must hold onto the tiny bowl and deliver the goods all on its own. Or the parent may need to run interference so the baby doesn’t manage to grab onto the food dish and fling food everywhere except into their alimentary canal. Learning to work both arms and hands equally well is a super power that is sure to be reinforced for at least the next 10 years.

4. Creative organization–If once upon a time the objects within the home were arranged only for the convenience of the adults living there, that era has now passed. There may be no creative thinking associated with inserting outlet covers around the home, but when it comes to cramming 100 percent of the objects into 25 percent of the cubic space of the house, yeah, thinking outside the box comes in handy. And if the exhausted parents have say, forgotten to baby proof ahead of a new burst in the baby’s mobility–hey, it happens–expect that the creative side of the brain will go into overdrive. And without prior notice, it will become perfectly feasible to affix particleboard bookshelves from IKEA to the wall with a combination of duct tape, craft glue (you’re not keeping up with that baby’s first year book anyway), picture hangers, and FunTak. Go you, creative genius.

5. On the go music encyclopedic knowledge and retrieval–Need a lullaby right this second? The one your mother sang to you will leap forward and reproduce itself even if quizzed moments earlier you’d sworn nobody ever sang a song to you in your childhood. And look out, because once the parental unit begins tapping into music from their first five years of life, most of it will occupy considerable memory space, displacing things like multiplication tables (my apologies to my lunchtime waiter last week), their partner’s first name, and what year it is. But need a snappy rendition from The Muppet Movie? It is right. There.

So let’s not pity new parents. They’ve got a few legs up on the rest of us. When you see a parent out in public with a child under 2, just give them a thumbs up. And feel free to ask for a quick performance of the theme song to The Great Space Coaster. I’m sure they’ll be happy to comply.

Ode to Libraries

I often insist to people who ask about my early education that Catholic school was just fine for preparing me in the ways of the three R’s, even if I did believe, upon high school graduation, that the world consisted of Catholics, Jews, and protesters. I could diagram my sentences, perform passable algebraic calculations, type 85 words per minute, and name every state capitol city (Trenton! Montpelier! Madison!). But more importantly I had a curiosity for learning and wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. For while parochial school had some fine qualities for me the student, it certainly lacked in other areas, like its library.

I read through most of the sections by 5th grade, and I only started at that school as a third-grader. Soon enough I was pestering my mother to get a Princeton Public Library card, and devouring books on maritime history, the American Civil War, young adult fiction, and anything by Stephen King. Now there were too many books for me to read, but I took that as a challenge instead of demotivation. Nothing suited a precocious child more than the idea that the world’s knowledge is just at their fingertips.

Libraries today face an almost dystopian future—local funding cuts across the country have left their budgets at little more than nominal levels, many libraries have severely reduced hours of service, or no full-time employees, or very little money to get new books. In communities across the country, strapped counties and cities have pulled money out of libraries so they can continue other services like law enforcement and waste disposal. But what are we losing as a nation without a strong free library system?

Here are just a few of the benefits of libraries and what they do for their local communities:

They offer free Internet access
They have the latest in fiction and popular nonfiction
They often have a notary public on site
They house local history and often, special collections about the area
They host reading hours and events for children
They help instill a love of reading and learning for the next generation
They often assist job seekers
They have a wide range of periodicals
They often have agreements with other library systems so small town users have access to larger collections from other places
They have DVDs and music CDs
They may have reference librarians who can help with research or deeper information needs
They have good spaces for reading and writing
They often have meeting rooms that the public can schedule
Did I mention the free books?

There has been no time in my life when I didn’t have a library card in my wallet, except when I was a college student, and then I had access to more books than ever, what with Syracuse University’s million-plus collection at Bird Library (not to mention the other five libraries on its campus at the time). While we moan about what government doesn’t do for us and how all of the politicians seem to hate actual people, let’s remember libraries and real open access. Nothing can make the playing field of economic privilege level, but libraries can flatten it out a bit.

Here in Walla Walla there’s a storm brewing because the city and county libraries, which decades ago agreed to support each other when they could—this included sharing some budget windfalls—are now arguing over a $3 million surplus held by the county when the city could use some of that money to support its library services. Instead the county wants to build a new library building with the money. County commissioners, who are not in direct control of the rural district library board, asked the board to put the project on hold, in light of so much public outrage at the plan. Complicating this discussion is the belief that the county library board kept these funds secret from the entire community while it brewed its project for the new facility, and when the city library sorely needed sustaining funds. Surely this impasse is not helpful for the readers of the region, and even though it abets discussions around funding and budgets, it distracts from a fuller conversation that we need to have regarding library services.

For me, I want my kid to have the same excitement about reading and experiencing new worlds via books that I had in my youth. I hope the country can find a way to keep libraries going and not politicize this issue, like so many others. I love you, library. Here is a more proper ode to you. Thank you, library, for making me smart(er).