I believe

"How could any bug with such powerful convictions as I possibly be wrong?" the grasshopper asked, hopping into traffic.

Imagine Joe...

It’s midnight here in California and I can’t sleep. I’m having bad visions and scary dreams after the Vice Presidential debate. They say you can tell a man by the friends he keeps and the people he hires. I keep seeing Vice President Joe Biden’s super-white teeth, grinning in the darkness like some mad Cheshire cat. I know what’s bothering me; I’m worried this guy might stumble into the presidency and I don’t think he’s got a clue.

Let’s say President Obama ate one too many greasy hamburgers behind Michelle's back and snuck a few too many puffs on the hookah after a strenuous game of hoop ball with a few pros on their down time and the cumulative effect caused the boss man to keel over and speak in tongues or exist in such a vegetative state that even the New York Times would have to admit he was no longer the man for the job. Hey, it could happen; they still have one or two serious reporters at the Times.

Now imagine that after ascending to the throne, President Joe Biden has a meeting with Putin where they discuss Russia backing off from their involvement in Syria. Try to visualize the guy you saw smirking and mugging while his debate rival was talking national security, health care and the economy. Imagine that Joe trying to persuade Iran’s mad neo-Hitler to give up his plans to annihilate Israel. See his brow furrow as he tries to grasp the dangers of Muslim terrorism, struggles to convince the Chinese to play fair, looks for ways to confront the economic stagnation, reduce bloated budgets, cure the cancerous national debt, solve the Mexican Border dilemma, repair the failed strategy in Afghanistan, reverse the lunatic plunge away from our natural energy resources. Is that the man for you?

This isn't some made-up scenario; the difficulties that would face a President Joe Biden are the current President's problems, and, even with his legendary arrogance and powerful biblical oratory, he hasn't solved anything in four years. The realization comes over me like a flaccid stroke of lightning: Barack and Joe, when it comes to style, are as different as night and day. But when it comes to problem solving, they’re two ineffectual little peas in the same pod. I don’t know about you, but in these times I don’t need sleep to give me nightmares.

 

The Cost of Common Sense

I couldn’t record my weekly radio podcast, the one hour Dark Landing. I have a home recording studio with limited ability to muffle loud bird chirps, overhead airplanes and local dogs, and here somebody was hammering like a crazy man right next door. I went out there and it was some guy beating on the cement sidewalk with a big mallet. Something worse, if you can imagine, I’d met him before. It was my neighbor’s father-in-law, and since he was wrecking my day, I thought I’d at least be bothersome in a minor key way.  I’d have done more if I’d been able to think of something, but I’m never quick enough at social mischief when it’s me on the bubble..

            “It’s really hot out here.”

            He squinted up at me with a look of dusty, sweaty annoyance. “That’s why I waited to start until later in the afternoon.”

            “What do you do in real life?”

            `"Financial services." He gave me a spectacularly annoyed look. How could I blame him? Here I was, wrecking his day.

            “Oh.”

            He reached for his chisel, but I was too fast for him. “Well, as long as you’re here, give me an off-the-top-of-your-head number.”

            “What number?” he frowned, my conversation clearly having the desired effect.

            “Rate of inflation. What’s our current rate of inflation?”

            That stopped him. He set down the mallet and wiped the sweat stinging his eyes. “The rate of inflation is very, very low,” he growled, giving me a look like I should know better. “It has been historically low for several years.”

            “Ohh…Then why is Peter Pan peanut butter selling at five dollars a jar at Albertsons? Last year it was three dollars, and the year before that a dollar ninety nine. Meat, cookies, gas for the car, everything is doubling and tripling.”

            “Christ,” he snarled. “You’re talking about the cost of living.”

            “Oh. That’s different?”

            “Of course it is,” he said, shutting off my nonsense by going back to his hammering.

I’m not going to watch pro football any more.

 

Those of you who know me are thinking that’s as unbelievable as some confused 240 pound linebacker showing up for the after game interviews in high heels and a flouncy skirt.  After all, I wrote HEADSLAP, the highly acclaimed bio of the great Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, and FOUL, my novel about that old NFL scandal everybody has been trying to bury for decades.  Football is one of those blood sports like hockey, bullfighting, boxing and war.  Graceful young creatures get battered about, maimed, and sometimes die.  To enjoy conflict you don’t need truth, justice and freedom on your side, you only have to believe the sport, no matter how bloody, is played by the rules.  It’s called the integrity of the game.  If you gut-shoot a buck, that’s on you, and you have to stalk him down until you can take a kill shot.  That’s one of the rules in hunting.  In mortal combat, poison gas, nerve gas, and chemical warfare are outlawed, just like chop blocks and piling on the quarterback.  Those are the rules.  But there is no rule in the game of football that says because 200 million dollars in gambling money is on the line a bad call should stand.  It’s only money, stupid.  I believe in all the players who have played hurt over the years.  I believe in all those brave footballers who die too young of their wounds.  But after this how can anyone believe in the integrity of the game of professional football?

I SAW A MAN FROM THE 7th CENTURY YESTERDAY

I SAW A MAN FROM THE 7^TH CENTURY YESTERDAY

So time travel is possible after all.  He was on the Drudge site on the internet, white teeth flashing, fist in the air, hoping to rip my throat out and see blood fly.  I don’t think we realize what we’ve done.  Say you want to experience unspeakable cruelties – eye gougings, torn limbs, lingering tortures and so on – well, history books had to suffice until the motion picture industry gave us Technicolor, Surround Sound and 3-D.  But even with the extravagances of the modern cinema houses, you still knew it wasn’t real.  You could have Spanish inquisitors pulling out tongues and frying skulls with branding irons, and depraved Kings could rape little girls, but it was just a story.  Historical drama, they call it at the awards ceremonies. 

This serf from the 7^th century was only on a website, but he was real in a way no movie could ever depict him.  He wanted me and my kind dead because I would not, could not, did not bow to his prophet, dead since 632 but eternally alive in the memories of the faithful.  And my time traveler from the early Middle Ages wasn’t alone.  Large populations of his fellows swarm our world these days.  I see them nightly on the news, burning flags, dragging our diplomats naked through the streets of their towns. 

I was warned of this some three decades ago by my learned and urbane Iranian brother-in-law, himself a ‘modern’ Muslim.  “The Shaw must move slowly,” he told me.  “He has no other choice.  If he moves too swiftly, he will anger the people.  And yet, your government officials are very impatient.”  He tried to explain to me how nearly impossible it was to view a 7^th century person in terms of modern perception, trying to make real for me the many blunt and unyielding obstacles that stand in the way of simply showing older-culture people the light of modern ways.  I didn’t give as much weight to his ideas as I should have, and that is unforgivable, considering I had the lessons of Vietnam at my personal beck and call.  But then, our U.S. Presidents from JFK and LBJ through Carter, Clinton, the Bush bunch and Obama – well meaning individuals, all – didn’t really get it either.  You can move the man from the 7^th century, but you can’t move the 7^th century from the man. 

Writing Like A Lady

A month ago I asked a lady romance writer (you know her) who often reviews genre fare if she would have a go at my new novel, The Freight Train of Love.  It is more a classic war romance novel than genre romance, but I liked her writing so I figured Nothing ventured nothing gained…She asked to see a few pages, but then, a few days later, declined to do the review.  I wasn’t surprised at her decision, but disappointed with her reasoning.  She said she found the person of my heroine Clair to be "crude and unladylike".

 I respect her decision, and in a way I was glad I’d contacted her, because her reasoning started me thinking about how important it is, the way we position ourselves as authors.  Hemingway.  Isabella Lady Bird.   Robert B. Parker, Louis L’Amour, Dick Francis.  Danielle Steele, Marsha Muller, Nora Roberts.

 Beyond this, I was moved to a somewhat controversial judgment.  It has been my experience that some of the women romance writers I have met love gutsy women when they are written about by other women.  But when a man writes about them, the same girls feel a bit undressed.  When a man is writing, they want to see the male idealistic image of a woman, rather than a real person. They are, I believe, vastly uneasy with the idea of a man knowing a woman's character well enough to write in the heroine POV. 

 This started me thinking, not so much about the inner feelings of a man writing the part of a woman character, but of the problems both men and women have faced since novel writing began. Early woman novelists had to use names like George and Tom. Today both men and women use pen names or first name initials to hide their true identies, and they do it, I think, for just these sorts of reasons. While I don't think it should matter one bit to a writer whether writing in the personna of a man or a women (any more than it shouldn't matter if a writer puts himself in the shoes of a demented mass murderer to tell a story) I think it does matter to many readers, and, as we see, even to professionals in the literature biz.  So if you’re going to write thrillers, maybe better you should be Wild Bill or Gutsy George.  And maybe my next heroine driven novel will be penned by Tinkera La Bella. 

Break Out Of Your Box

Don’t you resent being labeled by either the Republicans or the Democrats as to how you are going to vote?  The truth is, you are not Hispanic.  You are not a Black Afro-American.  You are not a White or a Jew.  You are an individual, you are an American citizen, and you have the freedom to make up your own mind and vote as you choose.

I’ll let you in on a little secret.  My people are from Europe, from Prussia (which no longer exists) and Slovinia (which again exists after being Yugoslavia for a time)  So the pollsters would dump me in the White box with the English, the Germans, the Russians, the Spanish, the French, the Italians, and so on.  But here’s the bigger secret:  Nobody belongs in the White box.  Or in the Black, the Red, the Brown, the Yellow, or any other boxes.  They are illusionary boundaries set out to hem in the herds for this or that reason. 

Now I would be the last to deny cultural differences, linguistic difficulties, or human impatience, greed and ignorance.  But there are no boxes, no rigid walls that separate us, no quick and easy ways to define who and what we are. 

And here is the biggest secret of them all:  those simple DNA tests that you can get will prove the fakery of the Box System of dividing people into alien groups.  I’ll give you a good example.  If you go back a few generations, my wife is a mix of English, Irish, German and Norwegian.  But her DNA reveals that she is descended in historic times to French people, and in pre-historic times through Spain to Africa.  So does that put her in some sort of White-Brown-Black box?  Or does it cause you to suspect the rigid walls of the box may not represent the way things really are?