The Illusion of Strength

In the spring of 1918 Germany, dominant nation of the Central Powers launched a massive assault on the Western Front, smashing through defensive trench lines and advancing miles. From one perspective this looked as though it may change the course of the war and could possibly force the Entente Powers to agree to a peace on terms favorable to Germany and the Central Powers. However this display of strength was an illusion. German’s offensive soon lost momentum, stalled, and then was reversed by the Entente and in November of that same year the Central Powers, wracked by shortages, mutinies, and revolution, capitulated. On the surface during that offensive Germany had appeared powerful but this masked critical shortages of food, fuel, minerals, and men. Senior official in the Kaiser’s government had warned in 1917 that Germany could no longer win the war with a military strategy but these warning has been ignored for a futile show of strength.

I’ve been thinking about illusionary strength and how that may apply to the current state of the Republican Party and Conservatism in general for American politics. The most recent election gave the House of Representative to the Democratic Party and what looks to be a two seat addition for the Republicans and there is a tendency to read this as a slit decision but like the German military in early 1918 I think behind the stern facade the Republicans are starving for resources.

In every demographic category save one, white males without a college degree, the Republican Party is bleeding support. The suburbs, once an unassailable Republican redoubt and even Orange County home to Reagan and Nixon, has moved to supporting the Democratic party, and this has happened during a period of relative peace and with unemployment under four percent.

There is a tendency to blame Trump for this dismal showing in the midterms, and his unpopularity is a critical factor but the party tiled the soil to make Trump not only possible but also inevitable. In 2020 it is very unlikely that Trump will be substantially more popular and should there be an economic reversal or some other calamity he could be an even greater drag on the Conservatives as they head into an election to will determine the districts for a decade.

But beyond Trump what do they have to offer? I can think of no policy position that popular with the general electorate. I do not know if it is too late for the Republicans to change course, electoral politics tends to move slowly and change over generations, but I do believe that they must try and or they will end up on the shoals.

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The Twitching Time

Over at the forums for the Writers of the Future contest people referring to get antsy as they await results for a quarter’s judging as ‘twitching.’ The Contest runs on a 90 day cycle meaning that in general you have a vague idea when result will filter out, starting with the dreaded ‘Did not Place’, moving up through the ‘Honorable Mentions’, Semi-Finalist, and onto the ‘Finalist,’ those eight stories out of thousands that get passed by the coordinating judge to the panel that determines the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. Sometimes a finalist who did not win one of the coveted top three spots is afforded the honor of becoming a published Finalist and appears in anthology along with the winners earning that author not only a professional credit but also a spot in the workshop held for the winners.

Even though results have been released and my 4th quarter entry did not place, that was expected as I really did not think a 1000 word pun story was their style, I am continuing to twitch.

In the 2nd Quarter my story made finalist but did not win but the contest administrator asked if they could hold it as a potential published Finalist and now that the year has closed, the quarters for the contest start with October and do not follow the calendar year, I am waiting to find out if I will be going to workshop, which is taught by one of my favorite writers, Tim Powers.

Amplifying my current state of twitching is that fact that I am waiting on two book publishers to get back to me. Both editors have given rough guidelines for when they may make their decisions, though as harried, underpaid, and over-worked professionals I know that these estimates could end up on the optimistic side, and the window for their replies are beginning to open.

How do I deal with this stress of waiting on others to decided my fate?

I write more. I am finishing up a story that has gotten really nice comments from fellow writers as I seek their feedback, a novel is starti8ng to come together in my noodle, and a strangely sweet and kind short story is also firming up.

As they said on a recent episode of Doctor Who, hope is not passive, it is active; we must chose to hope.

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Thoughts on Doctor Who Series 11

We are now six episodes into Jodie Whittaker’s premier run as our iconic Gallifreyian and also Chris Chibnall’s reign as show runner giving us enough material I think to come to some early opinions about the show’s new direction.

In a sentence: I like it.

Chibnall has spilt the series’ episodes between space-based adventures and Earth bound ones. While the previous show runner, Steven Moffat, like to produce grand scale adventures with the entire universe hanging in the balance, Chibnall seems more in tune with small stories that turn on deeper levels of characterization. Of the two approaches I thin, Chibnall’s works better.

I suffered from fatigue over the scale of danger repeatedly thrown at the audience by Moffat’s grand plots. After the first couple of doomsdays it gets rather difficult to invest any emotional weight into the story.  This is very much like the trap the James Bond franchise got it self into, if your stories are more about plot than character, which is often the case in any continuing series, then the stakes in those plots tend to become ‘save the world’ and it is very hard to raise them after you have saved the world a few times.

Another drawback to grand plots is that they also flattened people into faceless masses. In some of my posts about writing I have discussed the difference between hypothetical people and on-screen characters.  Your heroes might be out to save an entire planet but that population is just a number and we are not wired to become emotionally invested in arithmetic. We care about individuals, about characters with lives that connect to our own. The show’s most recent episode ‘Demons of the Punjab‘ displayed perfectly how to handle large-scale stories by drawing us into the troubles of just a few characters. The partition of India was traumatic for millions but giving us one family and the trauma they suffered dramatizes the reality far better than any plot to save the millions. (I also love that title, it’s a misdirect as much as the aliens running around in the story. The ‘demons’ aren’t the aliens but rather the humans there and the ones created the tragic situation.)

Jodie Whittaker is doing a great job as The Doctor. She plays the role with equal parts empathy and manic energy. I am suffering a bit of whiplash as I watch the show because my sweetie-wife and I are also currently watching Broadchurch, a drama about a child’s murder and its reverberations through a small English coastal town, where Jodie plays a very different character.

All in all I am quite pleased with the new direction and the new cast and I look forward to the rest of the series.

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This Haunts Me

All mass murders are terrible to contemplate. The fact that they are so terrible and seemingly without reason leads many to decry mental illness for no sane person could desire to perpetrate such an act but that significantly misrepresents what mental illness is and distances us from the reality of not only the events themselves but also the truth about our own human nature. Blessed and cursed with an active and detailed imagination when these dreadful murders occur I often find myself thinking deeply about what it must have been like, what the events themselves must have felt like to the people trapped in those living nightmares.

The recent, and it’s a sad commentary on our culture and our times that I refer to it as the recent rather than as a singular event, mass murder at the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks California dogs my thoughts more than other recent acts of horrendous evil and it comes down to a single fact, a single person; Telemachus Orfanos.

Telemachus, who was not even thirty years old and who had also served when his country called by enlisted in the United States Navy died along with dozen people when a gunman opened fired at the Borderline Bar but more than the senseless slaughter I am haunted by the fact that Telemachus had survived the Las Vegas a year earlier when scores of people were murdered.

He was not the only person at the Borderline that had also been at the Las Vegas concert. Both events were centered on Country Western music, thousands had attended the massive concert, and the locations were not that terribly distant but the sheer concept that people who had survived one mass slaughter were a year later subjected to another is truly horrifying and for Telemachus to die at the Borderline would seem to underline that horror with a specificity that refuses to release me. At odd times of the day, when mind may wander, I find myself thinking about that night. How must it have felt when those shots first began ringing out, what terrible flashbacks did that prompt, what thoughts if any passed though his mind before he died?

It would hardly be surprising if someone established a foundation in Telemachus’ name. I have written before on the power of individual identity versus an amorphous and intangible number. This undoubtedly is the reason this person’s story refuses to depart from my mind. Eleven other people died that night, each one had a full life with twists, turns, highs and lows, but Telemachus’ story, easily grasped and powerful transcends being woeful statistic and real tragedy is that it shouldn’t be that way. We can’t hold a dozen points of view, a dozen stories, a dozen lives in our heads but we can picture one smiling man, a veteran, and only time will tell if he becomes a symbol.

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The Man Passes, the Ideas Persist

Yesterday Stan Lee one of the principle architects of Marvel Comics, which left a massive impression on our culture, passed away at age 95. Normally I am not one to write eulogies to passing celebrities. My own relationship to death is complex and idiosyncratic but for Mr. Lee I want to talk about the ideas the man pushed from the very start of his career right up to his final days. He was an entertainer, crafting or assisting in the crafting of dramatic stories filled with action, excitement, and stunning visuals but when the plots have faded away, when the reveals transform into clichés, and the characters melt into history the moral philosophy of his work will endure.

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.”

That bit of knowledge from Spider-Man is perhaps the best known of Mr. Lee’s philosophy but there is more compacted into that simple sentence than the call for heroic action from those capable of heroic deeds. If great power compels great responsibility then any amount power also requires an amount of responsibility and while it is never directly expressed, over and over again throughout the long and continuing run of the Marvel Universe we see the responsibility wielded by those with only a little power. We all have the power to hurt, with cruel words, with casual bigotry, with careless indifference, we have the power to make the world a worse place and therefore we have the responsibility to make it a better one. It in on us to utter kind words, to reject all forms of bigotry, to care about our fellow people both as individuals and collectively. The heroism Stan tried to teach us was not fantastical powers but rather in the ability to care and act. In that way he called on all of us to be the heroes we could be.

No One is Perfect, Heroes Least of all

One of the defining divisions between early Marvel and the competitors is that the characters were flawed. They suffered from doubts, they suffered from egotism, and even as they saved other they needed saving themselves. Without the burden of perfection the lesson is clear, we are all heroes. Heroes make mistakes but they learn and correct, guided by the clear morality of what is right and what is wrong.

In the world of comic books villains wear colorful costumes and make clear and grandiose statement of their intent but Stan helped us recognize the villains among us, even as they hid in disguises, masquerading as concerned leaders while steering us away from our better natures and he taught his that our voices are our power and our responsibility. If we just ‘shut up and sing’ as are standing aside as clearly as Peter Parker did when the robber escaped before killing Uncle Ben. You want honor the man who gave you so much, stand up, speak up, and use that voice as he wanted you to.

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I’m So White

A few months ago I took one of those DNA tests that helps determine your ancestry and genetic traits. While the results are not particularly surprising it is interesting to see jus how shockingly white I am. Of course anyone who has seen me burn in the sun would intuitively understand my ancestry is European. By the numbers my genes would indicate that I am 98.3 percent European, with a full 64.5 percent from Britain and its islands. Another nearly 14 percent is designated to French and German ancestry which means I am perpetually at war with myself, followed 4 percent Scandinavian, 2 percent Iberian, 1.5 percent comes from Sub-Saharan Africa almost a third of a percent of me is Finnish.

This was all very cool and fun seeing where my material came from before it reached this particular evolutionary dead end. (I have no kids.)

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Everyone’s P.C.

P.C. of course is short for Political Correctness and the term is often tossed about in a derisive manner. It as many meanings, sometimes it is about the things you are not allowed to questions, sometimes it is about simply recognizing that human being come in a bewildering assortment of flavors and that there is no one correct way of being a person. In one of it’s most common manifestations the concept is expressed in the re-naming of things, positions, or ideas. What was once perfectly acceptable falls out of fashion and is replaced with a new term usually meant to carry greater consideration and less negative connotation, such as Trash Collector transforming into Sanitation Engineer even though no advanced degrees are involved.

What I find fascinating is that every stripe of political division has their natural P.C. and like rebellion it is only wrong in the third person. When others employ it the technique in never called being politically correct but the intent is the same. Consider the difference between the terms ‘mercenary’ versus Private Military Contractor. That may be a little obscure consider instead Pro-Life vs. Anti-Abortion, Rich vs. Job Creators, Torture vs. Enhanced Interrogation, examples are nearly endless.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum you employ various shades and colors of your own P.C. and bristle when others fail to utilize the terms you prefer.

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Thoughts on Diegetic Elements in Fiction

Last night I watched a video critiquing what the author thought were overly simplistic interpretations of the film Annihilation (2018.) He was specific in considering that for this movie theme and metaphor were not subtext but textual and any attempt, in his opinion, to understand the narrative without grappling with the thematic thrusts was doomed to misunderstanding the film, its point, and critically, it ambiguous ending. His analysis got me thinking about diegetic and non-diegetic elements in fiction.

Roughly speaking a diegetic element is one that exists within the fiction construction and can be experience by the characters of the narrative. The best example of this is the use of music in film. A diegetic song is one that the characters of the movie can hear and react to, such as the music playing on a radio that the character silences by switching it off. Non-diegetic music is the film’s score used to cue the audience about the scene but is unknown to the characters, such as the classic shark’s theme in Jaw (1975), which precedes the attacks but doesn’t exist in the world of the film.

All narratives have diegetic and non-diegetic elements, a novel’s narrative is usually told in a voice that is not detectable by the character’s of the story, particularly when it is a third person or omniscient narrator, and even elements such as typeface which impact the reader are examples of prose non-diegetic elements. Whenever an author chooses to ‘tell’ instead of show, and there are plenty of times when that is the correct choice, they are engaging a non-diegetic element. They are breaking away from the ‘reality’ of the world to explain a concept to the intended audience.

Another non-diegetic element, and one beyond the control of the author, is the ideas and worldviews that the audience brings to a narrative. What I bring to a story as I read it influence how that story and its themes are received. The author may have very clear intent on their part as to what their themes and sub-textual messages are but once the tale is told that have zero control over the messages that others may take from their works. John Carpenter with his film They Live (1988) intended it as a commentary on conservatism and specifically Reaganism however neo-NAZIs bring their racist worldview see the film as commenting on a idiotic concept of a global Jewish conspiracy. They take a non-diegetic theme that Carpenter never intended.

Bringing all this together when we artists are creating our works I think it is important to keep one mind on the diegetic and non-diegetic elements of the work. Select them carefully, deploy them for intended effect, and always be humble enough to understand that even a piece of flash fiction carries alternative meaning for different people.

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Trump’s Poisoned Well

Last night I won a bet for a donut. A conservative friend had a few months ago wagered that Senator Cruz of Texas was going to win his re-election by 10-20 points. Under normal and recent political conditions he would have been on safe ground with that stand, Texas is very Republican, by 538’s standard it is 16 point more Republican than the average US state, and Cruz’s opponent was not running as a conservative Democratic choice but rather as an openly liberal politician. In recent history those two factors would have combined for a GOP blowout but that’s not the environment we are in and why I bet that Cruz would not win by such margins. (I never bet that Cruz would lose, the odds were always against that outcome.) Last night Cruz won by 3 points, in Texas, against liberal Democrat, in the context of an economy with unemployment under 4%. And on the same night the GOP lost control of the House. To me only one thing truly explains these atypical results – Trump.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Trump. Those who do not stand with Trump have been chased out of the party and more and more candidates no only embrace Trump personally but emulate him to court his supporters. In order to win the primaries a Republican needs to be like Trump. But as we witnessed last night there are great swaths of the general electorate that are repelled by Trump and his brand. To be clear that is not universally true, the GOP has expanded their senate holdings, though the battleground favored them in that respect, and they look to gain some Governorships in George and Florida while losing Wisconsin and Kansas.

Mid-Term election typically drew fewer and more committed voters and while I have not yet seen final number this mid-term looked to buck that trend bring a larger and more diverse set of voters to the polls. If, and this is a big if, these voters have become more engaged and are not a fluke of the times, then that does not portend well for the Republican’s in 2020. Though of course nothing that far off is even close to becoming set in stone, between now and then there will be investigations, crises, unexpected events, and an unknown economy, but this year should have been a very good year for the party in power had it not been poisoned with Trump corrosive, insulting, and repellent nature.

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Election Day Is Here

As millions go to the polls here are a few thoughts about the current state affairs in our nation.

I wonder where is this populism’s popularity? Trump and his take over of the GOP is often branded as populist and yet not only is Trump himself unpopular but I struggle to think of any policy that he or his administration has chased or achieved that is popular with the general population. Not his tax policies, not his immigration policies, not his health care policies, not his foreign policies, none of these are generally approved, so what exactly is his populism?

It is with sad amusement that I watch in some friends the death of political cynicism. It is good that the cynicism has died but it is sad that it took an event as extreme as the election of a racist con man to the presidency to bring it about. A few years ago I stood on the stoop of a store after hours discussing politics with a group of writers and one voiced the cynicism masquerading as wisdom that it didn’t matter who you voted for because all politicians were the same. I was rebuffed when I countered that it always mattered and now that person is a fervent member of the resistance. This particular bit of cynicism is often found in the young and is used by them to justify their non-participation, hopefully along with my friend this has been burned out of millions. Voting always matters.

Speaking of youth that brings to mind the saying, often attributed to Churchill that if one is not a liberal by 18 then you have no heart and if you are not a conservative by 30 you have no brain. Not only is this misattributed and terribly simplistic studies by political scientist have shown that it is wrong. In general the political beliefs that people form as young adult tend to remain their core value throughout their lives. Additionally what forms their core political beliefs as young adults is not careful consideration of competing philosophies but the major political events, moods, and crises of their times. If the Vietnam War drove you left you tended to stay left the rest of your life, the same for Reagan pulling you right, and that makes me wonder what will be the generational impact on our politics by Trump?

Nate Silver has said that his model’s predictions, 85% of a Democratic House and about the same for a Republican Senate has a 40% chance of being wrong in one of those contests. A 40% chance that either the GOP retains total control of the legislature or that they lose it all. If that were to happen, in either direction, the political earthquake will be felt and its aftershocks, for years. I think our current period, the last two years, would appear as the calm before the storm.

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