Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 4

The Mariner's Obituary: An Analysis of Three Act Structure in Baseball

I've been holding off on writing the Mariner's obituary since the first week of the season when they not only went 1-6 but lost two season defining games. I believe very much in art and really there are games in a baseball season that are pivotal and mean more than others even if they go in the win or loss column looking the same, but the season is so long that only fools can proclaim the destiny of a team after a couple of weeks in April. This gets easier though if you do look at baseball in terms of three act structure, an idea I've written about before. The first act (conceit) is April and May, the second act (conflict) June, July, August, and the third act (resolution) September and October. We're nearing the end of the 1st act now and like a movie you can pretty much tell if a season is going to be a shitter by the end of the 1st act with few movies or teams fully recovering to redeem this, and the M's are the worst kind of movie.

There really isn't much to hang onto with this club except that they have some young talent that looks like it can really go somewhere. I can't think of a movie title right this second to define this team but they are like one of those flicks that has lots of future stars in their first role, but the movie itself is a disaster and no one but film buffs will ever remember it. So, who are the promising talents on the 2017 M's that the fans have held onto with baited breath: Mitch Haniger comes first to mind, but he's on the DL right now, and then Tyler Motter, Ben Gamel, Guillermo Herredia, and a couple of others that are eluding me. The dream for this team if it wasn't beset by injuries was that the young talent would be upheld by the veteran stars (Cano, Cruz, Seager), and the two would blend like colors in a painting to create a memorable team. The problem is the veterans aren't having a very good season, though the stats may belie this a bit, but they have no feeling out there, and just seem lost in a shitter, wondering where their careers are going and when retirement is coming, as they look down the barrel of another season not being in the playoffs.

The injuries are a big part of this season and to stretch out the movie metaphor some I'd say that this is akin to the mood on the set and how well the production goes in general. Of course, some great movies are famous for horrible productions, and vice versa, but in general this isn't how it works. I know the pundits will make excuses for the 2017 M's going under because of injuries to four out of five of the starting pitchers (Iwakuma, King Felix, James Paxton, Drew Smyley (?)), and that this will satisfy the naysayers, but that is not an accurate picture to me. Kuma is truly at the end of his career and I thought he was done last year so that him going to down to injuries isn't so unexpected. King Felix is clearly in the decline of his greatness but like the veterans in the starting line up the hope was that he was good enough still to bolster an up and coming staff, but this might be wishful thinking. They've been touting Paxton for the last three or four years and while he has talent he's been injured every year and it's looking like he is going to be one of those players who fortune didn't shine on. And this isn't even addressing the bullpen that was never there to start with and relying almost wholly on a closer named Edwin Diaz who had a few promising moments at the end of last season but was never fully tested, and is predictably now in the minor leagues.

Structurally, the baseball season is entering the end of the first act (conceit), and the beginning of the second (conflict). I don't go to movies anymore (does anyone?), but I used to have no problem walking out on them and this season is turning into one of those where the fans will leave the park long before the show is over. It's relatively safe to say that a team as bad as the Mariners can't recover at this point and even the cover of the 162 game season is not enough to let the critics sigh and say, "it's baseball... anything can happen." That's true to a point but the season has a structure, and once the Mariners enter the second act in a week or two, there will be no denying that there is no bounce for this club, and no conflict to meet. There is an argument to made for a team playing .500 ball in the first act, kicking it into gear for the second and third act and making the playoffs, just like a movie or book can start slow and turn into something, but that assumes it's alive. This team is dead.

Creative Non-Fiction vs. Pop Sociology: An Analysis of Cardboard Gods and Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Cardboard Gods, by Josh Wilker, and Big Hair and Plastic Grass, by Dan Epstein, are both books about baseball in the '70's from a similar alternative point of view making them a good comparison of a literary theme. Wilker's book takes baseball cards from the '70's, and then lets his mind fly at the memories they evoke, mostly starting from a sociological nectar, and then flying into the personal, like much of creative non-fiction. Epstein's book also focuses on single players like Wilker, but not on their baseball cards and the personal feelings they evoke for him. Instead, he uses his personal feelings much like an author writing in the third person, so that we know that he loves the players he's choosing, or at least they evoke something in him, but he keeps much more detachment than Wilker. He never flies into an account of what the player meant to him, but tries to let that come through through his research. More importantly to this essay, he doesn't turn the memory of a player into a personal reminiscence of how he grew up.

You could say that Epstein's book is pop sociology in the truest sense. It has been thoroughly researched and there is definitely a side of him that is trying to use baseball to explain what the '70's felt like to him. Granted, the author probably went through grade school up until high school in the '70's, but like many Gen X'ers has a fondness for his childhood and clearly can't believe how the '80's and the Reagan years changed the "funky" (Epstein's word) track the Country was on. It's sociology not exactly with a moral imperative like someone remembering the holocaust, or the civil rights movement, but definitely a nostalgic one with the underlying conceit that the '70's were a great time for baseball and the country, even if they weren't seen that way by most historians, sociologists, political scientists, etc. His moral mission isn't so much a political cause, but a bit of baseball revisionism, in the hopes of elevating an era to its proper place in American culture. It should also be said the book is fun to read so that both the literary style and the mission fall into the pop camp.

Cardboard Gods is really nothing like Big Hair and Plastic Grass, although they'll be lumped together, and the authors do interviews together, nor would it be hard to imagine them talking baseball since they have essentially the same point of view. I'm no expert but Cardboard Gods strikes me as a quintessential example of creative non-ficiton, a genre that Big Hair could never be mistaken for. Wilker takes pop sociology and personalizes it without the pressure of having to really create characters, plot, etc., save a fleshing out of the main character (Wilker) and/or a sociologist's point of view. Don't get me wrong, there are many lyrical passages in Cardboard Gods with poetry to burn, but my frustration with the book (if there was one) was that he really didn't create a story from his memories of baseball cards, and yet with each succeeding card and/or chapter he chronologically moved the '70's forward and by so doing his life growing up as a kid in Vermont. So, in some ways there was the conceit of a story and/or what they used to call autobiographical fiction, but it wasn't the same thing, and I wanted the same thing. I didn't know what creative non-fiction meant but now that I'm pounding away at the idea and getting a better feeling for it I'd say that Cardoboard Gods delivered on the promise of its genre, and that's really all any book can do.

The trouble is creative non-fiction is such a new genre that I'm afraid most people (myself included) don't really know what it means, and that would include a lot of people who write it. I think it gets mistaken for first person fiction of the kind that Kerouac popularized, and that the new journalists bent into shape, but it's really neither of these genres. Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, etc., used their lives as example for art not sociology, but Cardboard Gods inverted the equation and used art for sociology, like I think most creative non-fiction probably does. This is a very new genre and one that I could imagine catching on except for two inherent flaws: 1) people like a story that ties characters together, and 2) the new journalists that inspired creative non-fiction were actually working on a story that a magazine had assigned them to, and did actual research. In this way, Epstein's book is more like new journalism except that he doesn't throw himself into the fray like Hunter S. Thompson, nor does he stand against the wall observing like Joan Didion. He detaches more like Tom Wolfe in Electric Kool Aid Test, but he's also different because Wolfe tried to tell a story and cop an actual voice different than a journalist, and more akin to experimental fiction.

I don't think "If So Carried by the Wind" is creative non-fiction so I'm sorry for giving that impression. I liked the way the words sounded together and thought the genre alone made the book cutting edge, but like all genres it has its own form. It's much more linked to the essay than any of my books, that really try to take personal experience and then form them into an artistic statement through realism, my favorite subject matter. All of this genre labeling would be much easier for someone who wrote YA, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, etc., for then the terms are relatively clear and the fiction is obvious. It would also be easier if one were writing literary fiction that assumes composite characters a la Raymond Carver, who clearly wrote from his life, but was creative enough to hide his character in characters. I'm still not sure what my genre is but I'm most comfortable with contemporary fiction even though that won't sell a book. Why this genre? Well, I think it's contemporary to write about yourself and channel all experience through your particular vision, but unlike the creative non-fictionalist I'm trying to write a first person story, not a sociological treatise. As far as I can tell the word "fiction" does imply a story whether it be realism or fantasy, and while the more supernatural genres have usurped the word I'm not sure how good an idea this is.

Creative non-fiction is the outgrowth of the think piece that was freed by the '60's to illuminate experience and ideas through multiple avenues, without any scholarship save one's life experience, the ultimate scholarship, or so the think piece goes. Cardboard Gods is very much a book trying to understand the '70's through personal experience, but instead of creating actual characters Wilker uses his family as a mere example of what he saw society going through retrospectively. To me, this was my inherent frustration with the book, and maybe my frustration with creative non-fiction. It doesn't require scholarship like Big Hair and Plastic Grass, so that it teases with a story that never materializes.

creative non-fiction

I figured out what creative non fiction meant today for a nanosecond, but now it's gone. It had to do with a piece I read in "1970" called "The Making of a (tennis) player." I'm working on a book with the tagline, "Two perspectives, one story of growing up in Hollywood in the '70's," so a book about the 1970's is of inherent interest to me. Anyway, this creative non-fiction piece had to do with tennis in the '70's when the scribe was in high school. He was remembering what tennis felt like in the '70's, a feeling near to me, since I was forced into this solitary sport because of its glamour, and my mother's love with what was trendy. Don't get me wrong, tennis was a great sport, but not for me.

My critical take on the essay is pretty much irrelevant except that like many pieces in the book (not all) I was excited at first but after a few pages lost interest. I'm also willing to admit I could change that opinion, since I liked a lot of what the piece was about, but I realize that by calling it a piece I'm turning it into a work of contemporary art that could be put in a museum, and that is new. (is creative non-fiction the literary equivalent of a piece? I think so!). Anyway, this piece started as a story. He was talking about how this gorgeous saleswoman in a tennis store off La Cienega was selling him on the sensual quality of a satin warm-up suit. I liked this part a lot. Then, it drifted from being about the saleswoman or sex and turned into a nostalgia for Jimmy Connors, and the tennis vibe of his youth. There was a great paragraph about how Connors taught him you had to be an asshole to succeed in the world, and why I have to reread this piece, especially because I was bleary eyed when I read it.

Withholding all the useless artistic guilt, I thought that "The Making of a (Tennis) Player," wasn't so much of a story as I've come to know stories, but maybe the essence of creative non fiction. It was definitely non fiction since the author was directly talking about his relationship to tennis in the '70's, and at the same time wasn't really writing a story. He was writing something that seemed like a story, but it was really more a piece of loosely self referential sociology. To give him credit, he wanted to make the piece entertaining and why he started it in the guise of a story, but it was clear it was more an attempt at sociology. I'm starting to think that creative non fiction is more of an attempt at sociology than art, though the art can highlight the sociology, so much so you think it's art, but it's not. Ultimately, "The Making of a (Tennis) Player," is more sociology than art, since there is no story at all. No characters, no arc, or anything else.

Maybe this is the essence of creative non-fiction, it is the new sociology. It uses art to serve sociology, rather than art using sociology to serve it (how I was taught). I'm more interested in three act structure and making characters, but I think these things are a tool for the creative non-fictionalist to express their disdain for contemporary culture. I'm trying to find beauty through these tools.

The Inherent Worth of a Story

I'm both writer and reader, so I understand that what's interesting to a writer isn't necessarily so to a reader. Many writers, myself included, create exercises for themselves that sometimes turn into novels, but these aren't the ones that will be remembered, or if that's too big a word, enjoyed. The best work any writer does is what naturally comes out of him and a reader can sense that immediately. But that said it is possible for a writer to have a story that is so abstract, obscure, oblique, or out of the mainstream, that it won't appeal to that many readers no matter how well written it is.

I was walking around tonight and simply realized that the reason love stories are so popular is that it's something inherently of interest to people, that they must not be able to talk about enough to get out of their system, given the private nature of love, but we all want to read love stories. In fact, I'm sure there's a story out there with more inherent worth than a love story and why most books, movies, etc., try to throw one in at some point, even if that is not what the book is ostensibly about. I'm not sure what the number two story would be but it would probably be about work, parenting, a trip, a war story, or something else that people want to read. Maybe one about baseball.

The thing is we've told each other so many love stories at this point that there really aren't that many more to write. There is room in the world for other kinds of stories, but one would have to question the inherent worth right off the bat, and by that I don't mean artistic worth, but how well it would relate to the public. You could write a great book about socioeconomic problems in 1970 St. Louis and if you didn't concentrate on character it might not be of inherent worth to anyone outside of someone familiar with St. Louis in the '70's. I guess that's why so many creative writing teachers were paid far too much money to tell aspiring student/writers to focus on character, and that they drive a story more than plot or setting. Of course, this is a little odd to say, because plot and setting challenge a character, but they are not the character, and serve him/her, rather than the other way around.

I'm not sure how much we focus on character as a society anymore, and that's to the detriment of storytelling. I saw a Mike Bribiglia movie last night called, "Don't Think Twice," and he's a good artist. The movie was about an improv(e) comedy troupe and fun to watch but there were almost no memorable characters. There were sketches at character, hints at conflict, lines that were so good they defined the idea of a person, but there were no living breathing flesh eating characters in the movie, and it will therefore be forgotten. I'm not sure if contemporary fiction suffers from this same problem, but I could imagine it does if only because we're living the age of the critic where the essay rules the day.

I think TV gets this problem much better than the movies nowadays. The second golden age of TV has figured out what people want to watch, and that's not easy to do. We all can only write from our experience, but if our experience is rich enough it should be able to encompass a whole host of experiences that can be turned into art. This would be fiction at its truest representation and why the writers of old argued for composite characters, seeing it as an art to make a a story inherently interesting by basing it on your experience, but not necessarily it being your experience. I was never very good at composite characters, so my hats off to anyone who can make them real. I want to say that we've reached a point in society where we've lost the use for a composite character, and no changing the name of the character does not make him/her a composite. It makes them a thinly veiled version of someone real and pisses off the audience.

So, what is the inherent worth of "If So Carried by the Wind"? It's not really a love story but a story of a young student with mentors and in this way is universal. How well I told that story is another question, but without dwelling on that this is the inherent worth of the story. The secondary worth is that the mentor's involved happened to be important underground figures of their era. Why is this important? Well, it changes their character because the reader sees the worth of the mentor's life, adding to the inherent worth of the story. It does matter what people have done or not with their life and while this might not be the inner depth of their character it is what they are made of, inside and outside. The tawdry part of this secondary meaning is that people love to name drop, but this is not storytelling.

The inherent worth of "Toy Land" my yet to be published novel with a collaborator to be named later is that it's about my mother, or at least the first half is. The second half is about my friends. I definitely see the inherent worth of writing about one's mother, since we all have a very deep relationship with ours, and it's something everyone relates to. As for childhood friends, that may or may not be a better subject matter for a story. It does have inherent worth, but the friends better be very interesting to make it matter, but I could also say that about the mother. The thing is not everyone has great childhood friends, but to repeat myself everyone has a mother.

Understanding Literature

I've only lived through the first big wave of postmodernism but have seen literature and politics blend so that it's hard to name things anymore, and maybe that is the essence of postmodernism. Everything had been named, and so we had to rename it, brand it, present it as new, even if it was merely a collection of things we'd already seen. There are so many sub genres for the types of literature I write that I have no idea which to choose from, and can only see it as marketing. My first take on what I wanted to write was that it was fiction and shelved in the literature section at bookstores. There were other kinds of fictions too, and the first that comes to mind is "Science Fiction," so that there were at least two distinct kinds of fiction within the big tent. I'd want to put romance into that tent but I don't think the word fiction was used to designate it. There were probably was also a teenage literature section that was technically a kind of fiction, but I think high brow culture gave it so little significance that books of fiction mixed with diaries could got shelved in there under the age bracket, teenage. The biggest difference between science fiction and literary fiction was that one imagined impossible events in outer space, while the other was more steeped in realism, even if the stories were made up as reflections on real life. There was also an unspoken assertion that fiction/literature was far better written than science fiction, that was usually pulp. Over course, there were science fiction novels that were regarded highly by people who liked the classics, but by in large science fiction was trash writing, like mystery while literature implied a real emphasis on words.

In the '90's, this loosely assembled shelving started to break down. I grew up wanting to write like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, with the literary ramblings of Kerouac thrown in there, not to mention the new journalists from the '60's. This form of writing was called "literary fiction," and I hated those words together (still do). I got it at the time but had never heard it before and squirmed at the implications of those words together: "literary fiction." What did that mean? I really don't know, but it must've been an attempt to say that anything with literary ambition (not pulp) was literary fiction, whether it was autobiographical or not. It's my guess that literary scholars were burnt out by the argument of whether or not you could write a pice of fiction (i.e. a made up story) if the story were factually true. In the early days, writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald railed against Thomas Wolfe for writing factually true stories without the art of composite characters. I think (?) the composite character argument defined their rationale, because from a stylistic point of view Wolfe was definitely writing literature with a capital L. The Beats sharpened this argument by asserting that it was difficult to know whether a story was made up or real since life was like a dream and it was the storytelling ability that made something literature. This idea was bolstered by the new journalists who wrote in a very idiosyncratic/literary manner and told their own stories cloaked as essay's.

I mostly write autobiographical fiction and mostly think those two words together say it all. The word autobiography is one writing about themselves, but fiction implies its not a straight ahead autobiography. So what is a straight ahead autobiography? It's a lot like a biography, an account of someone's life for posterity, but not structured like a story. Again, the best of any genre breaks genre, but autobiographies and biographies want to present a person to the public, almost like a resume, and usually function best in the hands of famous people, or at least ones with renown. The autobiographical fictionalist would say that he was using his life for artistic ends, and simply finding archetypal examples of love, loss, death, sex, etc., and doing it through the filter of characters chosen to express these ideas, so the life is really existing for the art. In biographies or autobiographies, the art is secondary to the life. Maybe better words would be "autobiographical literary fiction."

Circa 2017, I don't think anyone thinks of literature as fiction anymore. I'll admit it's a fair thing to ask an author if he writes composite characters or not, but it seems like most literature is now autobiographical, and the art of making up characters and/or events is over. I think (?) when you use the word fiction now you are almost certainly referencing fantasy, and doing it rather awkwardly since the words "science fiction" don't really exist anymore, either, because I'm not sure fantasy is science fiction. Science Fiction often dealt with alien worlds or the effects of radiation and had a lot to do with the post WW II world, and linked to science. Fantasy might not take science into account at all, but it is most certainly fiction. YA is also fiction, I think, and usually written by middle aged authors trying to make a dime, and some lighthearted teenage romance. I guess Judy Blume was the great YA author of my youth and that was definitely fiction.

Literature has been overtaken by first person "I" poetry. There are now so many first person books (mine included) that the genre is floating. The two labels (brands?) I liked the most were creative non-fiction and memoir: I started calling "If So Carried by the Wind" creative non-fiction, but changed it to memoir. I initially called it a memoir when I typed it up in 2001, with my cats circling me, and mostly think that describes it best, but there is a problem with what the word "memoir" connotes to me. I suppose the french sound of it lends some poetry to it so that it's more of an account or literally a memory of something that happened to someone, but without the weight of trying to present a life like a biography or an autobiography. For example, I wrote a memoir about my two months in Paso Robles for an unforgettable summer, or a soldier could write about his life in polynesia. The hang up with the word memoir is that it has taken on many of the attributes of an autobiography and seem to imply that the person writing the memoir is of some significance. In "If So Carried by the Wind" I was writing about people of significance, but not me. In the self help era (the '90's) it was common for people to write memoirs about rehab, diet camp, etc., and this also has tarnished the genre.

Creative non-fiction is a bold attempt at redefining contemporary literature and this makes me want to take it on more fully than I have and not hedge. Broken down literally it means creative non-fiction, or the mirror image of autobiographical fiction. The non-fiction to me is an homage to journalism that was shelved squarely in non-fiction, along with biography and autobiography. The word creative to me say's that it's creative journalism, and a nod to the new journalists that have largely spearheaded contemporary literature (Didion, Wolfe, Thompson, etc.), but without the word journalism in there so there is no pretense of an essay. The word creative also ties into the creative writing programs that many of our young writers have gone to, including yours truly, though I got out as an undergraduate. So, what don't I like about the brand creative non-fiction? It feels gimmicky. I may be influenced by Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, but I'm not writing an essay. I realize with these writers the essay was secondary to creative self expression, and in that way they changed journalism forever, but I'm not cloaking my art as an essay. "If So Carried by the Wind" is presented as a story, and if anything I was trying to write like S.E. Hinton who probably wrote YA Literary Fiction full of composite characters, but in the '60 was considered a smart author for teenagers. If there were a brand, that said "I write from my life but with an artistic intent," I'd wear that proudly, and maybe why memoir is the best word. It does imply that you are living your life for a memory, and within that memory is a story.

I don't think everyone has an autobiography within them and that would include me and maybe why the label autobiographical fiction didn't hold up. For a biography or an autobiography the art is secondary to a larger than life life that must be told, but I'm not sure a memoir suggests this. It may suggest larger than life people trapped in a memory, and in that way is like "If So Carried by the Wind." But I just wrote a book about growing up in the '70's and it's neither autobiography or memoir.... it's too confined and character driven for autobiography, and too sprawling for a memoir, so maybe it's creative non-fiction. But creative non fiction = fiction. The difference is it implies playing with a true account of events, while fiction implies made up events. Maybe fiction shouldn't imply this anymore, like when I was growing up. The label science fiction is nearly dead, and while fantasy, erotica, and YA, all imply fiction, the word has been left out of describing them.

I'm going to sleep soon. This is just too confusing.

Drafts, Rewrites, etc.

For every book there is always a first draft, or a birth. The first draft is the vision (thesis), the voice (style), and the structure (narrative). I think most of the writing is done in the first draft, but not all. There is also a necessary second draft to correct grammatical mistakes, add a detail or two, or maybe even a paragraph, but not much more than this. It has always been my dream that I'd write a first draft so good that all it would need was a little professional cleaning up and my job as a writer would be done, but it hasn't been that easy for me, or any writer. The word "rewrite" has to be one of the most horrifying for any writer because it implies the first draft wasn't good enough and to make it better the book needs to be written again. But why would someone rewrite something that was already done? It's a good question.

If you break down the idea that a first draft is the vision, voice, and structure of the book then it is possible that it can have one or two of these ingredients but utterly be missing the third. I can imagine stories that have such a good thesis or idea a reader licks his lips, but the style is so bad that the idea needs to be fleshed out. But it would be hard to imagine a book with no thesis or structure wooing someone enough with style to require a rewrite. In this case, I think it would be good advice for the writer to write something new with a thesis and structure because their style is intact. But in general I'd imagine any book requiring a rewrite would have enough vision, style, and structure, to elicit such a thankless job, and yes I said thankless.

I am one of those writers who loathes rewrites and the very idea makes my skin crawl. My basic bitch against them is that a rewrite mostly has to do with style and the voice of a piece is hard to duplicate, if not impossible. I didn't write any rewrites for the unreadable books of my twenties. I'd usually do a second draft and correct whatever grammatical mistakes I could given my poor skills as a grammarian, but after that I was done. My idea was that the book had already lived through me and passed onto another dimension free of me, so any tinkering with it was absurd. Another problem was that the books may not have had a compelling enough thesis (vision) to even warrant a rewrite, though a friend of mine once wanted to turn one of them into a screenplay on the thesis alone, but we never did it.

So, what is a rewrite? The best way I can put it is that the reader reads what's on the page and he/she isn't thinking of whether what they are reading is rewritten or not. They are really only existing on the page along with the writer and it's not their job to think of all the work that went into the book, so they shouldn't be able to tell what is rewritten or not, so the rewrite has to cop the original style to a degree and this is hard for a writer. It can only happen through immersion and speaking from experience when I've finished birthing a book the last thing I want to do is think about it for the next year or two, so in many ways the whole task is for the reader and publication, or so it would seem. I really can't imagine rewriting a book only for myself.

The first book I really did an edit on was "If So Carried by the Wind," but it didn't go well. I'd never done anything more than a cursory second draft mostly based on grammar, but soon learned that there was even more to a second draft: it also required shuffling sentences, paragraphs, and a general reworking of narrative structure, however lightly done. But not even this was a rewrite, so when I was asked to do one, I thought the goal was to literally rewrite an already existing novella into creation and to rebirth it, but this was never the goal. A rewrite ALWAYS serves the first draft otherwise there would be no point to doing one, but I missed this lesson. I thought the style (voice) had to be rewritten along with everything else, when really I may have needed nothing more than a slightly hyped up second draft. I'm not sure if I would've learned this as a graduate student in an M.F.A. program because I was a creative writing major and never got this kind of lesson, but it wasn't a very good program.

As far as I can tell, a rewrite adds depth to an already birthed manuscript or else it's just polishing a turd. I can imagine that every writer has a different process for doing a rewrite but at its simplest it's realizing that you left something out of your narrative that you'd like to tell, or that you told something but weren't happy with how you told it, and it ends there. I really don't think a rewrite is more than this. It's not reshaping the entire structure of the story because that probably comes in the first draft, or the second, and it's not finding a voice because that also happens in the first draft, and if it doesn't then you are really not rewriting a piece but starting from scratch, a new birth.

I did a rewrite this fall but fell into a common trap for me of thinking I'd literally rewritten the whole novel to better effect, but I was wrong. I really was only rewriting, or filling in the canvas. Much of my rewrite wasn't very good, but some of it was, and I hope (fingers crossed) that I made some poorly written paragraphs better, and added some details to make the story richer, but not much else. A rewrite is never the birth of a novel, but rather the reflection of the birth through an imaginary reader begging for more. I did have to immerse in the original to get to the point to be able to do this but once done it was a fun process, not unlike writing a novel for the first time, so I must've mistaken the feeling of good writing for vision and structure, but those two components already existed. True to me, I had to test the waters and make sure they already existed by arranging a month long rewrite into a presumably new novel, but it was so inferior to the original it wouldn't be worth describing. I really thought a month of writing was worthless, but I now see that I was intuitively coloring in the manuscript for posterity, publishers, readers, and friends.

I don't know how long a first and second draft have to sit before a writer can go in on a rewrite, but I'd imagine at least six months to a year to get over the birth, but in my case it was longer. I mostly believe in the idea that a piece of writing is done after a second draft that can include some rewriting, but not a lot, or as much as I just did. A good editor could probably help with this by reading a first draft and having the writer walk with them through the minor changes and additions a manuscript needs, and then you're done, but this might be hopeful.

It's not a great metaphor, but rewriting is a little bit like being an ace relief pitcher coming into face one batter in a game that has its own momentum. They didn't create the momentum, and the draft of the game has already been written, so in some ways it's unfair to expect so much of them, but we do. We expect them to come in and write one great paragraph or sentence to fill in what we've seen for nine innings, and they have to do this with absolutely no get up and go. All of the other players on the team have a chance to prove themselves throughout the game but not the pinch hitter, or relief pitcher, so it's a special kind of job. In some ways, it's no different than writing a first draft because every pitcher or writer has their good days, but they are not radically changing the structure of the game (the narrative).

I never thought of it this way before but to play out the baseball metaphor a first draft is like a pitcher going nine innings, or maybe eight, and then a reliever coming in to do some second draft work. A rewrite would be more like a pitcher leaving the game earlier and then expecting a lot of pitchers to fill in a paragraph or two, so at least in baseball we live in the age of the rewrite.

Comey, the Apprentice, is fired

I suppose the backbone to any good governance is to have ethical men stepping into the political arena to call foul without any political partisanship. This is an ideal, of course, and one that I'm afraid has largely left us as a nation. I think of the rise of memoir in literature, or creative non fiction, and see how far we've come as a society that strives for objective truth, admitting the objective is subjective. The new journalists started this in the '60's, and I'm pretty sure Hunter S. Thompson wrote a great piece in "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," about how objectivity in journalism was a lie. He may have been right, but the human race goes on because some men strive to rise above partisan rancor and search for the objective truth. I'm sure philosophy, theology, law, and language, all attempt to do the Herculean task of rising above our own likes and dislikes, but driving by the Facebook building every night with a flag beneath the American flag giving a big thumbs up is disheartening.

The public imagination and reality have a strange way of playing with each other, but in the public imagination we first strive to ascertain reality, and so it does matter how people are thought of, even if their actions, or some of them, contradict the illusion. James Comey, Robert F. Kennedy, Patrick Fitzgerald, and a few others came to symbolize our love for the objective passionless governmental truth seeker, working within the confines of the law. I don't have it in me to go into a long analysis of James Comey's legendary F.B.I. biography, but I first heard about him going to John Ashcroft's hospital bed to get him to sign an order in defiance of the Bush Administration's wiretapping policies, or something like this. The partisan in me has been both angry and happy with Comey over the years, but this is secondary to his reputation in the public imagination as a truth seeker free of the Dem/Repub war. (I'm pretty sure Comey was a Republican at one time, but may have become Independent).

I can't get over the optics of Trump firing him because I watched the Apprentice a lot in season one, it's only good season. The drama of the show was that Trump would fire someone every week, and do it in a cold blooded way after watching a show of how well each contestant performed in his capitalistic endeavor. The best part of the show was that you really got the feeling that Trump admired good ol' American hucksterism and could get lost in watching some people try to open a lemonade stand, and critique them. The firing was part of the modern era where we all fear for our jobs in a society with less and less of a social safety net. It was also a TV show so the firings didn't feel that significant except within the drama of the show and how much we (the audience) related to the contestants. It's safe to say that in optics I haven't seen a President get this off on firing people, and making a public spectacle of it. The difference is Trump isn't judging young wannabe capitalists, but government workers who take their service to their Country seriously. It's not really a dollars and cents issue.

The thing in life is that anyone can argue any action, and why debate is never ending. Trump and his acolytes are claiming that Comey broke the public's trust with him when he revealed that Hillary Clinton had all but broken the espionage act in her email scandal but wouldn't be tried. I think Comey stepped in some political shit here, and like a referee trying to make up for a bad call, threw the election towards Trump in the week before Election Day. This doesn't make what he did right, but once the ethical mistake was made not to prosecute Clinton, there was nothing else he could do. Why he chose to explain the scandal in such depth, an unprecedented act for the F.B.I., spoke of an inner turmoil in Comey that few could understand. Did he feel guilty for letting her off, and wanted everyone to know that she was a criminal? It was hard to tell what he was doing, like a man hedging a bet on a bad ethical decision. Let's face it, Dems, Hillary Clinton was under too much of a cloud of suspicion before she ever threw her hat in the ring to run, and this should've disqualified from any major political party.

The idea that Comey's firing wasn't about Russia defies credulity, like how the Iraq War wasn't about oil.

Just Say No to Gorsuch!

I've studied a lot of politics in my life, but am not so much these days. I drive pizzas for a living and on NPR tonight they preempted "Fresh Air" (not my favorite show, but occasionally listenable) for a special report on the Gorsuch judiciary committee testimony. It excited me to listen to this if only because it was something they don't usually do, and I wanted to know more about the political strategy behind Trump's first Supreme Court nominee. So, here's where we're at.

1. It's vital to remember that the Gorsuch nomination was forced on us by the Republicans late in the second term of the Obama Presidency, known as the Party of "No." Antonin Scalia died of a heart attack in the heat of a Presidential campaign, and the Republicans argued that given the political climate they thought it would be wise to wait until the general election to make such a defining decision as a Supreme Court Justice. In some ways, their argument made sense, but there was no precedent and it was in line with their "Party of No" reputation. It really was a flagrant foul in any card carrying Democrat's book, mine included. I actually remember Trump saying at a Republican debate in South Carolina that he thought the Seanate should decide the justice rather than holding the Country hostage. I think the Republicans implicitly argued that if Hillary won they may have been fine with an 8 Justice bench that threw every tie into the highest appellate court's ruling, and this is a way of deciding the Nation's laws. I'd guess that this would sometimes work in the favor of the Democrats, and at other times in the favor of the Republicans.

2. It should be said that the political climate is absolutely toxic this week: Paul Ryan's disgusting tweak on Obamacare, mixed with James Comey testifying that the F.B.I. was investigating Trump's Russian connections, has really diminished the newsworthiness of Gorsuch, and yet any Supreme Court Justice appointment is critical to the Nation far beyond the terms of a President, since it's a lifetime appointment. Gorsuch is basically flying (lying) beneath the radar in the mainstream 24 hour news cycle.

3. Obama did nominate two Justices to the bench but neither of them tilted the liberal/conservative dichotomy of the Court, with one of them replacing John Paul Stevens, who held out for the good of the Country during the W. years, but was ancient. The other was Stephen Bryer (like the ice cream?), who I think leaned traditionally left on social and labor issues. Obama's first replacement was Sonia Sotamayor, or who Jeff Boregrads Sessions once referred to as a "Wise Latina." I think in retrospect her nomination will go down as one of Obama's great moments, at least to me. His other pick was a much more mainstream woman named Elena Kegan, who I don't like nearly as much, but I'm sure when the whip comes down she sides with the popular Democratic Party position of the day, even if it's an attack on labor. I don't think Sonia Sotamayor would do this.

The nomination of Gorsuch is to replace Scalia, one of the most influential Justices in the history of the court, or at least one who will go down in history. He was famous for being a strictly conservative interpreter of the Constituion, looking to the original intent of the Constitution, while the liberal Justices saw it as a living breathing document to be contextualized for its historical era. Gorsuch admits to being an originalist too, and since he's replacing Scalia, the logic goes that he has the right to be the same as Scalia, like an understudy assuming a grand master's role. And being the same he is not inherently a lightning bolt decision like Trump's next pick will be if Ginsberg dies of cancer, or Kennedy decides to call it quits, the swing vote. Gorsuch has the same political cover that Obama's two picks had and who the Senate Republicans passed, the Party of No.

I'll admit this is the part of the essay where I get hazy because I'm confused as to the rules of the Senate vote. I think Gorsuch needs 60 votes to be nominated, and the Republicans have 52, leaving 8 votes. There are some Red State Democrats they can pick off, but they might not be able to make it there, and if they do there is still the filibuster, which must be what McConnell employed against Obama's pick, the mild mannered Merrick Garland. Maybe it's Merrick's fault, or the media's, or Obama's, or the Democratic Party, that doesn't exist, but they failed at painting a narrative showing how insane the Republican obstructionism was, and how flimsy their argument. Merrick Garland would have tipped the favor of the Court to the Democratic Party's side, and I remember thinking it was an act of providence that Scalia had died while Obama was still President. I remember watching Merrick accept the nomination in the Rose Garden, and he was so honored he broke down in tears.

My analysis:

The Democrats should block Gorsuch and come to the conclusion that the Country could function better with eight justices than Gorsuch on the bench. I wouldn't have said that until listening to the NPR show and being utterly disgusted by him in a way that was hard to explain. Gorsuch sounded terrible to me, just the biggest liar you could imagine, a guy willing to lie even when he didn't have to, just to prove his obedience. I've really detached from the knee jerk anti Trump stance on everything, but the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice might the be the most important thing a President does, and this guy isn't just conservative.

So, where does that leave the Democrats? This is the $50,000 question, and since I blame the Democrats for everything, let me say that I have no faith in their ability to politically master this moment, just none. The basic dichotomy in the Party now is that they have been liberal elite corporatists for so long now they have lost touch with their base and can't replenish it solely with millionaires on the coasts. The Party wants to move left but the establishment won't let them and I feel the bitterness over Merrick Garland, rightly deserved, has made this issue a do or die for the new Left emerging in the party, and the party isn't up for it. Politically, I think the Democrats should show some balls and filibuster the goon, the future be damned. If America really got a chance to hear this guy talk without all the hullabaloo of Trump I really don't think he'd past the muster. I know the Democrats are in some wine bar in Silicon Valley rationalizing how Obama had his two picks, and this was similar. The real battle would be when Trump got his next pick and could tilt the Court, so let's save our ammo. Yeah, like I could really see these wine and cheese snobs getting out their ammo? If the Democrats don't act now they never will.

I really don't think the base is going to respect a Party that only chooses the easiest issues to defend with the highest social justice cause leading it that is impossible to argue against without sounding like an asshole, like an open borders policy, but..... that's easy. Hell, I could go on TV every night and talk about how I believe every vote should be counted and show how much disenfranchisement there is with a cool objective head and those on the left and the right would agree with me, since it's Un-American to not believe in Democracy across the political spectrum. But the Gorsuch nomination presents a much greater problem to this bloated Party of One, and he just left town to the Caribbean.

Let me say, that I have no faith the Schumer lead Democrats can do this, nor do I think his niece Amy Schumer is very funny. The Schumers will not pull off a filibuster because they won't want to become what they hate, the Republicans, the Repuglicans, and/or the Party of No. I think what makes the vote so hard is that it would have to bond the Democratic Party together in a way neither Trumpcare or the Russian espionage/shady business dealing inquiries will do. The Republicans themselves may implode over the health care debacle, that will leave their Senators (not congressmen) in a perilous position if they vote for it, and the Russia allegations? I don't know what to think about this except the Democrats are just about as corrupt as the Republicans, and they may be indicting themselves. It's the Gorsuch vote that matters, the one no one is paying attention to, except me and a few other pizza men and liquor store clerks listening to the radio.

Valentine's Gift

I'm feeling edgy today like the world doesn't exist, or not as I knew it, and really it's much easier to disappear and not exist. That's what I've tried doing for most of my life to no avail. The dreams of my youth are now gone, and I'm coming back to a self that barely recognizes anything I once was, and yet I have a book up in Left Bank Books in Seattle, my masterpiece called "If So Carried by the Wind." A group called the editorial research bureau got it together to publish it for me, since that step of the writing process was always overwhelming, and I'm thankful for them taking an interest. I used to dream it would be possible to survive as an artist, but it's becoming less so with every year I get closer to death, and yet this book exists and with any luck will outlive me.

I read it on Valentine's Day in Left Bank Books, and I used to spend a lot of my time reading in book stores, so this was special. They have it up in the Beat section of the bookstore, and ever since late July I've been meaning to read it, but haven't got around to it, although one never really gets around to these things, but rather they come to one, and what differentiates art from taking out the trash. I only read a few spare pages looking for errors because that's all I can do with my work, look for imperfections, but I didn't find any that were too glaring, and was able to lose myself in the prose for a moment. I was taken by what I had written, as if I was another person reading myself, and this was both a beautiful and odd experience, at once detaching me from reality and at the same time making me closer to it than I'd ever been before. I always hoped I'd be remembered through my words, and for a brief solitaire glance at a few paragraphs space out through "If So Carried" the dream had materialized. I was no longer what I dreamt of becoming, but had gone past this to an unreal point of non existence, even as I'm striving to exist. I really don't know how great artists go on living after their art since it all but subjugates them to the after life right off the bat, like a man looking at the Sun for a brilliant beautiful moment only to turn his head from the overwhelming glare.

There was pride in what I had written as if I was reading someone else, and that my book is sandwiched between one by Kerouac, and another anthology on the Beats didn't hurt the feeling. Sure, the editorial research bureau chose a cheesy cover and maybe I can fix that in my real life, but that was the least of my experience, and so small compared to the feeling of an ephemeral immortality, or a recoiling away from oneself into an encapsulated being known as a writer. I really was amazed at what I had achieved and for a solitary moment or so the world bowed to me, and some women at a booth wished me a happy valentine's day and gave me a pin of the pike place market pig, that I now wear proudly. My life will go on in little pieces here and there, but I doubt any will be as significant as realizing for a brief moment the lasting quality of an aesthetic experience.

I drew Jenny, the love of my life, a drawing the night before for the special day even though she had to go to work so maybe my mind was open to the world bending before me in splendiferous rays of light awakening a dreaming giant, and that's all I ever hoped an artistic act would give me. Fame, money, glory, were always secondary to a feeling of real illumination with the after life that I expected of art, but then the body must come down to meet the soul and try to negotiate another day of mere survival in a world that seems less and less accepting of the soul. I mean how could Joni Mitchell or Van Gogh go shopping after immersing in a melancholy so profound that they managed to supersede it while still maintaining an identity, a gender, a name, a family, and a home. I became the heroes I feared most for a brief moment in the bookstore, unable to understand how I survived aside from pure aesthetic joy, which came so rarely embroiled in this mortal coil. It took me over six month to accept that I had transcended everyday reality, but that would be six months worth waiting for, because few ever know this feeling. Will everyone like this book? No, and I try not to like it as much as I can, since doing so relegates me to further obscurity as a living person but that's the danger of art and why artists commit suicide so often, as a way of escaping the body for the soul.

I'm currently working on a book with an old friend, a man I've temporarily brought to life through my prose about our childhood, and this is a rare gift. In the abstract, it has made me feel alive, but publication will only further enlarge my non- existence whether or not it's a smash hit in the literary world, if there even are those anymore, but the public is always a step or two behind the artist, with one waiting on the other.

A Citizen's Dissent

A couple of months ago, before labor day, when the Presidential contest unofficially begins, and before the conventions in late July, that were rather lackluster compared to the open conventions the media was preparing us for, I really thought Trump would win by a landslide. He wouldn't win upwards of 45 States like Nixon in '72, or Reagan in '84, because that wasn't possible in the red state/blue state polarized divide in the U.S., but enough for a clear victory like Obama in '08, a campaign now famous for the term "the Obama Coalition," but not a 50 State winner. Why did I think this? I thought Trump was the change candidate and Hillary the status quo candidate, and in a change election the status quo doesn't usually fare well. I also thought (naively), that Trump had already said all the crazy things he could, and sunk himself as far as he could go in the Republican Primary, and was made of something even stronger than Bill Clinton's "teflon," but on this I was terribly wrong, and so it looks like he's going to lose two weeks from tomorrow.

Hillary Clinton may be the most status quo candidate of my lifetime, and that's saying something when you compare her to Pappy Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore (Bore), or Obama or Romney from 2012. Love her or hate her, (though it's hard to do both like with Trump, making him much more fascinating) there is absolutely no central thesis to her campaign and even the above candidates, who all lost an election, had the ability to craft a thesis: Pappy was patriotic and outraged on flag issues; Bob Dole was a return to yesteryear, the last WW II era candidate; Al Gore was a pre Bernie populist, but that didn't stick so well; and Obama and Romney were weird mirror images, but Hillary is non existent. To say she doesn't hold press conferences, or answer questions from reporters, doesn't even begin to describe the strange non existence to a Presidential run from the first woman President. Now I know the political experts would tell me that this "non existence" was by design because it's politics 101 to stand back and just let your enemy implode, which Trump does at devastating speed, but it's more than this and those same said experts know it.

Part of the reason I thought Trump would win in what we moderns call a landslide, is that I didn't think it was possible to win the Presidency without one, not that a candidate had to have the best thesis, or the most dynamic campaign, but that one was required, but not in 2016. I'm inclined to think part of the reason for this is that the American electorate doesn't really require a thesis anymore, since we're essentially an illiterate society and this rings true. But whether I'm right or wrong, I've never seen a campaign where a candidate is on the precipice of what the statisticians are telling me is going to be a blow out, without even the hint of a campaign, not even a whisper of one. Clinton has had no memorable moments of glory yet, like she did in 2008 in the Democratic Primary against Obama, and more so has had tons of terrible news. She got dubiously cleared of ethics violations on July 5th by the F.B.I. (Comey should've announced on the 4th of July, to make a patriotic point), but the issue hasn't stopped hounding her. It's come to light that not only was Clinton ethically challenged by setting up a private server, but that the whole Clinton Foundation had questionable relations with donors while Hillary was the Secretary of State. I realize to the seasoned political observer this is all par for the course and legal, but as I heard one bleary night on the radio, "that might be true but what we're witnessing with the Clinton Foundation is the dumbing down of corruption." The dumbing down, indeed.

The political observer in me really didn't think it was possible to win a general election while being the second most unliked candidate ever, with corruption scandals swirling around her, and no real campaign thesis, or reason for her candidacy. I really didn't think this kind of mediocrity could win the day, but like a football game than neither team deserves to win, neither candidate seems deserving of the Presidency, and this is becoming a troubling trend in America, that Obama bucked in 2008, but that W. all but defined from 2000 to 2008, blundering his way to a 20% approval rating by the end of his administration, and becoming a national joke. Now obviously no one knows how Hillary or Trump would (will) run the Country since they haven't been tested yet, but it's relatively safe to say that a victory for either of them will be bucking the trends of all conventional wisdom. I've never really thought of myself as a conventional person per se, but the prognosticator in me must take off his political wizard hat and really contemplate what happened here in my great Country in the year 2016, in an election that defies all reason?

The first place to start is the change election vs. status quo election idea that I delineated in a blog a couple of months ago, when the campaign was seemingly innocent compared to now, and that's remarkable, considering the Donald had spent the primary season talking about how "big his hands were!" It's safe to say that the popular uprising of Trump and Bernie was (is) indicative of a major frustration and rift in the people that this national campaign is hiding from all of us for a bloody month or two, but one of these candidates will win, and then we'll be left with the same mood. If Hillary wins she'll be the wrong candidate for the times, and if Trump wins he'll be the right candidate for the times, but the wrong man, making for a shaky national mood. I've heard commentator after commetator basically declare this election is the end of America as we know it, but then they'll put their conventional wisdom hats back on and try to chatter away about the week's news, as if everything was status quo.

I don't necessarily blame the political class for being out of their depth right now since we all are as Americans, and yet it's hard to know what the different factions of the Country are rebelling against. The media has painted the race very clearly in the Sexist vs. the Woman, and if the media is behind Hillary, which it certainly seems to be then this was probably the best and only political tract for her to victory, since she has nothing else to run on and is not a candidate of the times. From this perspective, the media wants Hillary to beat Trump because it is owned by 5 major corporations, which in turn live and die on Wall St. everyday, and they see Clinton as a much friendlier candidate to their interests than Trump. I do think Bernie surprised them and wounded Hillary enough that the only candidate she could ever possibly beat would be Donald Trump, because as much as I would've argued otherwise in the Summer of Trump, she's far too damaged a candidate to legitimately win an election, let alone ascend to the Presidency, and isn't defying the odds because of a magical grace and connection to the people, since she's been in hiding for months.

One must think of why the media gave Trump so much attention in the first place, because they all but created his candidacy in what they labeled "The Summer of Trump." The obvious answer is that the cable news networks received great ratings through Trump and this was admitted by the heads of some major news departments, so no one need put on a tinfoil hat to think about it. There is no doubt that Trump and his ascendancy among a dreary Republican cast was more exciting than watching Jeb Bush blather on and on, and yet.... Jeb was most likely part of the same Bush/Clinton/Bush/(Obama)/Clinton (?) cabal that has lead America for the last 25 years, so whey weren't they for him?

This leads to the stalking horse theory, that I learned about on FB during the primaries but have fleshed out. Clinton was a preferrable candidate to the elite than Jeb!, and though I haven't given this much thought I'd say it's because Hillary was actually a more appealing candidate than Jeb, or a more compliant one, or a combination of the two. For starters, Jeb was hampered from the beginning by the last name Bush, since in the Bush/Clinton cabal, the last name Bush became vilified through W., while Clinton didn't exactly have a squeaky clean image, but Bill was a very popular President, and you want a good name to make a sale, or as Hillary used to say in 2008, "It takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush (referring to her failed candidacy, and to Bill beating Pappy in '92). It's easy to to see the great Producers of the 2016 election in a back room somewhere deciding whether to cast Jeb or Hillary, since both were status quo candidates, but given the "change" mood of the Country, and that Hillary was a woman, ultimately went with her.... it makes sense. So, the media chose Hillary, pumped up Trump, and by doing so all but tore down the weak and ineffectual Bush Brothers.

I didn't believe the stalking horse theory at first but after Trump went after a dead Muslim U.S. soldier for being unpatriotic and all but brought his campaign down right after the Republican convention, I really had to wonder. Remember, this news came out right at the start of the Democratic Party Convention and Hillary's coronation, that got off to a horrible start when Wiki Leaks proved the Democratic Primary had favored Hillary over Bernie in the primaries, and forced Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the head of the DNC to resign on the eve of the convention! I mean that would be scandalous and perhaps a damning pivot in any other general election of my lifetime, and yet the Clinton camp blamed the Russians, starting a new cold war, and the media jumped on this assertion as if it was a far greater truth than the revelation that the Democratic Party was terribly corrupt and that all the Bernieacs were right.

So, here are the Trumpian variables: 1) he is a stalking horse doing his best to lose, 2) he is a stalking horse who fell in love with winning, and is reneging on his deal with the Clinton campaign, 3) he is not a stalking horse and just a phantasmagorical media creation that has been bubbling under America's collective skin, and has come to fruition. The rationalists like President Obama have done a decent job to describe to an illiterate electorate that Trump didn't come out of nowhere and his roots could be traced to the crazy conspiratorial thinking of Rush Limbaugh inspired right wing radio from which Fox news blossomed in the W. years. In an aside, I recently learned that Fox news was the most popular cable show on TV, not just news show, so there is definitely more than a grain of truth in the historical argument for Trump's rise through the Republican ranks, but it's hard to talk about for any popular politician since it's a radical indictment of the Republican Party, which makes up a huge chunk of the Countrty's electorate. It's also possible to hold this pragmatic historical view while still painting Trump as a stalking horse.

In this media dissection of the election, everyone got behind Hillary from the very start and that could be seen in the lack of TV coverage for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I mean he was mounting a major candidacy against Clinton and I had to listen to the TV and radio commentators talk about Republican also rans like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and a host of others, more or as much then I ever heard about Bernie even though he was igniting a movement. I know that the reasons for this are obvious since Bernie is an avowed populist candidate who believes in taxing the wealthy, seriously regulating Wall St., and changing the economic foundation of the Country, which none of the media conglomerates want, but would they have covered other competitors if they had existed in a non incumbent general election? I don't think so since the Country has never been more ripe for a third party and they don't cover Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in the least.

The word "rigging" has become the new nomenclature for this election and has come to mean so many things at once it's starting to lose meaning. The word "rig" can now mean anything from the actually stealing of votes, to the whole economic structure of the Country, to a debate schedule, but at heart I really think it has to do with what the media chooses to show us, or not. The rigging is no different than it has been for the American political process for my lifetime, and if there is any truth to be gained from these two miserable candidates that both deserve to lose it's that the media is completely tilting an election. Sure, they initially created Trump by giving him millions of dollars of free air time, since he was the boss on "The Apprentice," but now they are taking him down, and it's safe to say this whole election has been about Trump, and Bernie.... not Hillary, who has largely been in hiding, and out of touch with the mood of the times. But it has been more about Trump, since Bernie never manned a popular reality TV show on ABC, and was never a stalking horse, or so we think! (lol!)

I'm not sure where to start this next thread since it's too big for word, but the media in the general has unapologetically turned into one big opinion piece against Trump. Now it's fine to do this in an opinion piece, but it's a journalist's job to search for the objective truth wherever it might lead him/her, and that is just not happening from any media source. You could argue that the media is horrified of the monster (stalking horse!) it created and now has the obligation to tear him down, and indeed this is how it's being presented sans the part that they created Trump. If anything, the journalists are taking a more righteous stand that they are doing something popular by not so transparently aiding and abetting Hillary's victory since in her words she is the last thing standing between "America and the apocalypse." The reasoning almost mimics the great theoretical question that if one could go back in time and murder Hitler in the '30's before the start of WW II, before the Concentration Camps, but after banning Jewish businesses, would they have done it? It's almost like all those Woody Allen movies where he asks if the Rembrandt was burning would you save it or yourself, but this seems to be missing the point.

So, you might ask if you are still reading, if the media is so concerned about a Trump victory why did they create him in the first place? The easy answer is they wanted ratings and only think of short term profits to show their shareholders, and thought Trump would die on his own sword, a line of argument his Republican Party opponents are also taking when they are questioned why they didn't attack the Donald's credibility more in The Summer of Trump. To me, the Hitler reasoning doesn't really cut it, because if they were so scared of Trump they wouldn't have created him in the first place, and the only argument for them in this scenario is that they too are lost in the reality TV game. The journalists have no high horse to stand on here, and by trying to correct their mistake may be destroying even the illusion that there is a free objective press in America educating the electorate to make the best decisions in their interest, since the foundation of the Country is based on this trust between the 4th estate, the press, and the government. Whether by design or just attrition the media has never seemed less real, and everyone feels it, but can't exactly describe it except through the word "rigged."