I was thinking the other day about the stories I wrote that I managed to get published. They are:
1) A story about an Ethiopian refugee who became an Olympic long-distance runner.
2) A story about two refugees from Eritrea who were kidnapped in the desert while trying to escape.
3) A story about a second-generation Eritrean-American trying to help his family pay to bring a refugee family member out of Africa.
4) A story about a poor kid in Baltimore and his role in the 2015 riots.
and:
5) A story about a working-class white guy who accidentally kills someone on his first day on the job as a truck driver.
1-3 are all about Eritrean or Ethiopian immigrants/refugees. #4 is still about the marginalized, and its main character is still black. Only #5 has a white person who is, if not rich, at least scraping to reach the middle class.
Politics, or something else?
Absent other information, if I had to guess, I'd assume the editorial boards of most literary journals are left-leaning politically. That would mean, among other things, a preference for diversity, for wanting its content to be about more than the realities of white, male American life.
My own success rates seem to bear this out. I've written about 30 short stories in the last four years. Only six have been about people who weren't white. Four of those got published. Only one of the other twenty-five has been published.
Some white writers complain about it being harder to get published as a non-minority. I don't think that's exactly true, and I don't think it's as closely linked to political beliefs of editors as one might think. Every journal gets hundreds of stories and can only choose a few. Many of them are of similar quality, and it's very hard to pick winners from similar products. It's not always a political decision to pick writing either by a minority or about a minority. You're just trying to put together a good collection, and that means you don't want all the material to seem the same. The diversity isn't ideological, it's pragmatic. The magazine just seems better that way.
Not that it's never ideological. It used to bother us on the Baltimore Review that our journal was named for a majority black city but our contributor page was always so lily-white. I was always on the lookout for writing from black writers or about black, urban issues that reflected the city. We seldom got it. That meant that if you were black and sending us a story, your chances improved. The other editors once picked a story I didn't think was very good, but had been written by a politically active trans-gendered woman. It was about the evils of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Or something. I really thought the other editors picked it because it said what they thought enlightened literary journals ought to be saying.
This isn't new advice, but make it new
It may sound like I'm writing one of those oh-so-precious "It's-hard-for-a-white-man-to-make-it-in-the-world" pieces, but that's not my point. If there is a bias in favor of minority writers, my point is that this is natural. Every writer has to struggle with the difficulty of writing something that seems fresh and new. Minority writers maybe have just a small advantage at making it sound new, because what they're writing about may seem new to editors and their readers. And I have no problem with that.
The lesson for everyone else is nothing novel. You have to write something people haven't already seen a thousand times. That show "This is Us" that literally even woman I know is crazy about is an interesting example. It's really about the realities of white, middle-class America. One character defends his family to a snobby theater-type, " So what if we're normal?" Except that they're not normal. They're triplets. Well, twins who lost their triplet in birth, so their parents decided to adopt a black child who'd been left at the hospital on the same day as their twins. One of the twins is a well-known actor; the other is a 300-pound woman. So, not normal.
You might be even whiter than I am, if that's possible. You might not know a couple of languages and have worked inside communities that give you access to good stories most people haven't heard before. But nobody's normal. Everyone has something weird, different, and new to talk about. Find that and write about it.
Because as much as people want a story that's strange, they also like to see themselves in stories. Finding what's abnormal in your normal life allows you to combine the shock of the new with the shock of the familiar.
President Trump tweeted on Saturday night that we had offered a "wonderful" deal on DACA for two reasons: 1) to fix a long-term problem that needed fixed, and 2) "To show that Democrats do not want to solve DACA, only use it!"
In other words, Trump doesn't think the Democrats will take a good deal if it's offered to them. It's a bluff.
It's possible that this is actually a diabolical double-agent, deep under-cover type of a move. He actually wanted to offer a good deal on DACA, but has to put a certain face on it to his immigration hardline supporters, so he's making it look like the offer was all a bluff. But I tend to think that President Trump's pronouncements tend to have a more direct relationship to what's really on his mind than that. I think he really put this deal out there partly because he was pretty confident Democrats would not take it.
I realize not all Democrats think it's really a "wonderful" deal. It's asking for some significant concessions. I don't think the price of the wall is really the obstacle it's being made out to be. Even Luis Gutierrez was willing to fund the wall in exchange for DACA protections, since the wall will take forever to build and won't really make much difference anyway. But changes to family-based immigration would be a watershed in how immigration has been done. These changes will reduce the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. legally every year.
I think Democrats could mitigate some of this in two ways. One is to ask for some language seeking exemptions for some humanitarian cases. If legal immigrants have aged parents they care for, perhaps they could come, for example. Secondly, Democrats could seek to work with Trump on a plan to expand legal immigration for critical needs. I think the point of Trump's disastrous "shit holes" comment was meant to be an argument for using immigration strategically for the sake of the American economy. (I realize that by trying to make an incoherent Trump statement coherent, I'm doing what his staff does every day, but I really do think that's the semi-cogent thread somewhere at the back of what he said.)
Democrats could try to build some sort of plan that was forward-thinking both economically and geo-politically. Much of the Arab Spring of 2010-2012 was fueled by the high level of education and low levels of economic opportunity for young people in the Middle East. Egyptian doctors went on strike in 2011, for example, because they were earning so little.
This could be the seed of a program to bring doctors and other highly-skilled workers to the US. They could be offered much better wages than they currently earn but still good-deal wages by American standards in exchange for working in areas with low access to medical care. It could be good for the economy, help build diversity into the immigration program by opening it up to countries currently under-served, and be a useful form of soft diplomacy.
But Democrats have to swallow a pill to be able to do any of this
Democrats will not be able to influence the deal on the table unless they enthusiastically respond to Trump's move. Trump thinks they won't. He believes, and maybe not totally without reason, that Democrats are so wedded to their #resistance mindset that they would not accept a deal that was exactly what they wanted. The media doesn't help with its constant analysis of who "wins" and "loses" budget battles, instead of leaving open the possibility that America could be the winner.
But Dems are pretty set on fighting wars of perception on their own. Here's a thought, though. Rather than determining to set the perception of always fighting against Trump, couldn't Democrats embrace this deal with enthusiasm? They could say thanks to Trump for offering exactly what they wanted. They could throw classic champagne-filled liberal parties that Democrats are known for, complete with celebrities. Democrats could just act like this is a win.
During the State of the Union speech, Dems could giving a rousing standing ovation when Trump mentions DACA. They could refuse to sit down and let him continue before Republicans do. They could praise him in the press.
To add a wrinkle to it, they could talk about how nice it can be to work with a non-establishment Republican, someone who isn't so wedded to the company line he can't think about what's good for America. They could talk about how they look forward to working with Trump on other issues in common.
They let Trump have his win, but in doing so, they put the embrace of death around him. Immigration hardliners are already burning MAGA hats over Trump's generous offer. (Not the first time they've done this.) By embracing Trump even a little bit, Democrats could drive a wedge through support from the right.
But this would take thinking more than one step ahead, something politicians seem unwilling to do in an age when everyone is obsessed with winning today's headlines.
President Trump has apparently reversed his reversed reversal of a reverse, and is now saying he'll support a path to citizenship for nearly two million dreamers in exchange for some kind of enhanced security that might include parts of a wall and restricting family-based visas to spouses and minor children. Democrats are likely to fight the stipulations, but it's a pretty sweet plum they'd be turning down. Doing right by that many people, getting that many hard workers out of the informal economy and into jobs with protections and obligations to pay taxes--this is no insulting offer on the table (if that's really what's on the table, and of course, with Trump, it's hard to know if what he says today is what he'll stick to tomorrow).
I never liked Trump. I've disliked him for at least 25 years, long before I dreamed he'd be stupid enough to think he could be president. I thought he was a braggart, a bad businessman who covered over his lack of acumen with showmanship, a blowhard, uninformed, and all the worst parts of New York. I haven't really changed my opinion. I saw his picture on a wall today in a government building, and it still made me sick over a year after his inauguration. I get the visceral rejection from liberals (and many conservatives) of Trump and all that he is.
But if liberals do not embrace this offer--and, moreover, embrace and praise Trump for making it--who will? Trump was brought into office by a far right who thought he'd give them something they hadn't dreamed a politician would offer. That isn't to say most of Trump's support was from the far right, but they did swing the vote for him, and it'd be hard for him to govern without the shadow they cast. But earlier in January, these members of Trump's base threw a fit when it seemed Trump was going to be reasonable about immigration. In fact, immigration hardliners have been riding him hard for a while, making their support conditionally available if and only if Trump fulfills their rather impractical and inhumane dreams on immigration.
What this means is that if Trump really follows through--if he puts a reasonable deal on the table of a path to citizenship for that many people in exchange for reasonable demands on immigration enforcement--then liberals have to come out with enthusiastic and unequivocal support. Yes, that means we will have to show President Trump some love. If we don't, then supporting the dreamers becomes a politically suicidal move for him. He's not going to be able to lose support in one place if he doesn't pick it up in another.
A path to citizenship for 1.8 million by law and not executive order really would be great for America
That doesn't mean we've got to promise to vote for the guy, but it does mean we've got to recognize that this would be a politically courageous move on his part. He'd be risking irritating his base in order to do the right thing.
Long before 2016, I had dreamed of an outsider coming to the White House. So much of Washington does need remade. We really did need a straight-talking iconoclast. Much like the women who said they wanted a woman president but just not Clinton, though, Trump wasn't the iconoclast I was looking for.
But here's where an iconoclast can work in ways nobody expected. Trump is unstable, but if in this one case he's unstable like a fox enough to irritate his own base, should we balk at embracing this particular mood of his? Should we begrudge saying that an actual law passed by Congress and signed by the President protecting the dreamers--an accomplishment rivaling anything in the Obama era--was a great achievement? It's what we want. Why bite the hand willing to give it to us just because it's attached to an insufferable egoist?
Democrats can squabble over the particulars of what the Republicans want in return--how much to pledge to the wall, whether special cases can't be made for humanitarian reasons, etc. But what's out there now already seems close to a good deal. It's possible that legal challenges to the wall will keep most of it from ever getting built, so why fight too much over saying yes to it?
If this deal goes forward, Trump will need support. He'll have it from me. If a deal passes in which 1.8 DACA dreamers are made permanently safe by Congress, I will post a picture of me wearing one of those stupid MAGA hats on this blog. It'll be like when Ohio State and Michigan fans make bets that the loser of the game has to wear the other team's colors and post it on Facebook. Only unlike Michigan fans, I won't be disappointed. I'll gladly wear a hat with the stupidest political slogan of all time if the author of that slogan does the right thing by so many people.
There is a South Park episode where Randy Marsh gets obsessed with cooking shows and decides to dedicate his life to becoming a great chef. He quits his job and dedicates himself to the task. This drives his wife crazy, but she is unable to change his attitude until finally, to make a long story short, she gives him an "old fashioned" (hand job), and he concludes that "cooking is dumb" and goes back to life as before.
That's how I feel right now about writing literary fiction. I've given most of the last four years to it, not to mention all that time in grad school, and now, I just don't see what I saw in it. I've read every short story in the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories Anthologies for the last five years. I've read the Pulitzer-winning novels from that time, too. None of them has really changed my life the way I thought great literature should. Meanwhile, I continue to write stories that I think are getting better, but I'm having more trouble getting them published than I did a few years ago. Clearly, my ideas about what makes something worth reading do not match what the industry thinks makes something worth reading.
I was going to try to keep going for a full five years, but that just seems like a decision based entirely on the number of fingers on the human hand. I already know this isn't for me. I've done well enough I don't have to feel like I'm quitting because I just suck. But I also know I don't want to keep going forward. It's a good time to quit.
So what's next for me? I'm going to focus more on my day job as a translator. I'm going to try some different kinds of literature, probably science fiction to start with. I'm also going to read more non-fiction. I may take some courses in topics I feel stupid in, mostly information technology stuff. I don't know how to code in a single computer language. I've never taken calculus. These seem like things I ought to remedy.
I'll never stop writing. It's too much a part of how I figure things out for myself. But I think I'd like to write more about politics, religion, and other big-idea type stuff than just about writing. That's why I was interested in fiction in the first place. I don't know if I ought to start another blog, since the new one wouldn't be about writing, or just keep going on here and change the focus. Or maybe not write a blog at all, since blogs are so ten years ago that hardly anyone reads them.
I have found that blogging has been useful to me, personally, even if it's been of no use to anyone else. I see now why people used to keep journals. Writing this journal in public has been good enough for me that I will probably keep doing it in one form or another.
The first I heard of the sexual assault allegations against Aziz Ansari, whose show I flat-out love, wasn't the original story in Babe. It was Caitlan Flannagan's disapproving write-up of the story in The Atlantic. I have to admit, when I saw this article, I felt sickness and then relief within about two seconds. Here, at last, was the story I'd dreaded about someone I really admired being accused of sexual assault. Louis C.K. had been unsettling, but he was someone I merely considered wise and funny. Aziz Ansari's show had so much heart, it actually made me feel somewhat optimistic about life.
But wait! Flannagan's article wasn't saying he was a bad guy. It was saying that the whole accusation against him was a smear job! It was saying young women today, for all their grit to become CEOs, have become enfeebled when it comes to believing they have the ability to say no. It was saying that Ansari wasn't to blame for what happened on that date, that the woman's tale amounted to nothing more than miscommunication and questionable choices on both sides. Flannagan wondered how the woman got into consensual oral sex--both her to him and him to her-- at his apartment on a first date and then was surprised that Ansari wanted more.
It was so reassuring. Not only did it rescue me from having to think bad thoughts about Ansari almost before I even knew there was a story about him, it seemed to be that moment I've secretly been hoping for: the comeuppance of an overstepping social movement. The subtitle to Flannagan's article was: "Allegations against the comedian are proof that women are angry, temporarily powerful—and very, very dangerous." That hit the spot. I'm a sucker for this kind of writing. It's written by a liberal, but one who kind of shakes her head at the foibles of liberals, exhibiting a moderate conservative's sense of proportion. It lets me have it both ways, thinking I'm smarter than both liberals and conservatives. I posted a link to the article on my Facebook page and added a note to it that was triumphant, gleeful and condescending as fuck. I wrote, "As this movement goes forward, it's important to separate behavior we cannot allow from behavior we just don't like."
One thing I forgot to do was go back and read the original article from Babe.
Oh, man, that sucked when I went back and finally read that the original article. It took someone posting on my Facebook that the Atlantic article was taking Ansari's side before I went and read the woman's side of it. (I really, really assumed I could just take The Atlantic at its word. That journal is so often my voice as a center-left know-it-all I really don't critique it as much as I should.)
Her side is a lot more damning. I don't think it shows that Ansari committed sexual assault in a legal sense. Apparently, Netflix wasn't too bothered by the story, because 24 hours after it broke, they still had a congratulatory message to Ansari on their home page. But the woman's story is believable, and it really doesn't make Ansari sound too great. My take is that he met a woman who was star struck by him, thought she'd be easy sex, and took it for granted. Meanwhile, she thought it was a real date and was surprised he just wanted to hurry up and get to the sex. She was not as forceful or as clear as she could have been in saying no. That's not to blame the victim, it's just my take on how I think it went down. However, it's clear she tried several times to give him signs that things were going to fast. She apparently used both gentle verbal as well as non-verbal clues. I think she was still hoping this might turn out to be a real date/relationship, and didn't want to jump straight to "Get the fuck off of me." She was trying to be nice about it.
By the end, she finally made it clear she wasn't interested and Ansari relented. She left in an Uber. But it took her many more rounds of saying no in various ways than it should have. The anecdote doesn't give me a great feeling that if the woman had been drunker, Ansari wouldn't have just had sex with her.
People are taking sides, and that's both understandable and dangerous
Flannagan invoked "Cat Person," the unexpectedly viral short story from The New Yorker last month, and the allusion couldn't be more appropriate. The public interpretation of the Ansari allegations seems to be splitting along much the same lines as the public perceptions of that story, in which a younger woman talks herself into an unwanted sexual encounter with an older man she hardly knows. I had my own take on it last month. I found the man in that story more guilty of a lack of awareness born of loneliness and hope than malicious. Some found a predator hiding in fat clothing. Again, I'd wager interpretations were strongly split along gender lines. The main similarity between Cat Person and the woman's account in Babe was that in both cases, there was a woman trying to be polite and ending up with sex she didn't want as a result.
My own rush to pass judgment on the story is proof about how precarious it is when women feel they have no other recourse than to appeal to the court of public opinion. She evidently felt Ansari's behavior was bad enough to deserve public scorn, but not bad enough to press charges. A lot of women face this kind of thing where the actions in question are in a maddening gray area of being bad enough to cause emotional harm, but not bad enough to be criminal. But in taking it to the court of public opinion, in this case, the woman found she had some uphill climbing to do. I think this passage from Flannagan helps explain why people like me were so instinctively opposed to the story:
Twenty-four hours ago—this is the speed at which we are now operating—Aziz Ansari was a man whom many people admired and whose work, although very well paid, also performed a social good. He was the first exposure many young Americans had to a Muslim man who was aspirational, funny, immersed in the same culture that they are. Now he has been—in a professional sense—assassinated, on the basis of one woman’s anonymous account. Many of the college-educated white women who so vocally support this movement are entirely on her side. The feminist writer and speaker Jessica Valenti tweeted, “A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction. But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.”
I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months. But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.
There's a lot to unpack there, but the short of it is that Ansari represents a great hope. People like me have a lot invested in his success. And skeptics of the #metoo movement have been able, up to now, to dismiss it for its whiteness. So a couple of dearly held safe places are challenged by this story.
I'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. It's dangerous to entrust people like me to adjudicate accusations correctly. When a woman feels the court of public opinion is her only recourse, I've got to do my best to be a responsible juror. But man, it is hard when I really, really, don't want to believe the damn story. It's hard when I feel that society needs to actually express the new sexual social compact before we can adjudicate cases correctly.
A good effort toward that new sexual social compact
I tried a few weeks ago to express my reservations about what #metoo means for the rules that have been in place since the sexual revolution. #Metoo felt to me like something of a counter-revolution, like it wasn't merely trying to stop sexual violence, but also trying to sneak in a rearguard assault of sexually free behavior. It felt like someone was trying to slip in conservative sexual mores in a liberal skin.
Elizabeth Bruenig's commentary in the Washington Post is the wisest article I've yet read on this whole mess, and it brings the Ansari debacle into the context of the larger social discussion to argue that what is needed now is a second sexual revolution. Bruenig states that in most social situations, it is rightly considered rude to outright call out the bad behavior of others. We don't tell our office mate we're bored by his story and need to get back to work, we look at our watches and shift nervously and hope he gets the point. Because the sexual revolution taught us that sex is no big deal, just another social transaction, we have applied this same level of politeness to it. We don't tell our date we're not interested, we say we've got to get up early or something like that. Bruenig argues, though, that:
The trouble is that sex is clearly different, as the lasting unhappiness of so many women attests. If acknowledging that endangers one of the achievements of the sexual revolution, so be it: What is the alternative? Telling women over and over that, when it comes to sex, they must abandon all of the normal rules of interacting with others in society hasn’t helped and seems transparently ridiculous. In every other domain of life, being patient and generous with outhers makes a person praiseworthy and well-liked; those mores are deeply instilled and hard to shake, especially for women. It doesn’t make any sense to keep insisting otherwise, and trying to destroy those norms — which are good for society in general — seems like a ruinous project.
Instead, we ought to appreciate that sex is a domain so intimate and personal that more harm can be done than in most social situations, and that given that heightened capacity for harm, we should expect people to operate with greater conscientiousness, concern and care in that domain than in others....
Demanding an expansion of empathy and responsibility when it comes to sex isn’t regressive; it’s a sexual revolution in its own right. It is silly to think we could have needed only one.
So how to rule in the public case against Ansari?
Here in the present, when we are still trying to establish this second revolution, how much do I blame Ansari for not demonstrating this greater conscientiousness, concern and care? It seems wrong to me that he could face the same fate as Harvey Weinstein, when the scale of wrong is so different. If Ansari worked at Roto-Rooter, he wouldn't lose his job.
But how can I watch Season Three of Master of None with the same joy now? The show relies on its sweetness, and that sweetness is now ruined. I suppose I could say that Ansari's character on the show, which is very much modeled on him personally, is not a perfect person. Real-life Ansari can make mistakes and learn from them as much as Dev, Ansari's on-screen alter ego. But I don't know. I guess I'll know if and when Netflix puts out the next season.
Ansari did what most men have done. He kept pushing for sex without concern for what his partner wanted. This is common now; it has to stop being common. But what to do in the present, while the second revolution is still in process? Do we destroy the men who haven't adapted to the new rules yet? I think that's dangerous. Not every member of Men Going Their Own Way is a loser finding a fig leaf for the rejection that was going to happen anyway.
You won't get your second sexual revolution until men can be honest about how they act now. You won't get men to be honest about how they act if honesty gets you self-destruction. You'll continue to get "I thought she was into it. She didn't say no."
Ansari might live through this. The public will for him to live through this is awfully strong. I'm not the only person who will have a prejudice against admitting he did something wrong. But he did do something wrong, it seems. The only question is how wrong it was.
The questions we should all ask ourselves
I hate how polarized this discussion is along gender lines. Men accuse women of being shrill, witch-hunting zealots, while women accuse men of cheering on rape culture. This is stupid discourse. This isn't easy, and the answers aren't easy. I've never yet heard an answer to the question of whether it's worse to be falsely convicted of rape or to be raped and not be believed. The answer to that question is that there is no good answer. It's a terrible question for a terrible problem. Society's endless tastes-great-less-filling shouting match over which is worse is keeping us from making both less common.
For now, my lesson from this is nothing Earth-shattering. I have biases. Those biases affect my judgment. People you think highly of can act badly. Ansari acted badly. How badly, and what the result should be, I don't know. And it's okay not to know some things.
The show Black Mirror is a little bit hit-or-miss to me, but when it hits, sometimes it just crushes it. The premises of some shows are so compelling, I had my first long conversation about one of the episodes before I'd even seen it. Just the description of it was enough to draw me in.
Jump off here if you've never seen the show
Anyone who's seen the pilot episode will probably remember it forever. In it, the British Prime Minister is awakened to hear some shocking news: someone has kidnapped a popular young princess, and is threatening to kill her unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig that same day and broadcasts the act live on television for the world to see. There are technical provisions in place that prevent faking the act.
There is a provision that makes it less preposterous: The Prime Minister can wear a condom.
A friend of mine told me this premise in a bar one night to entice me to watch the show (it worked), and we spent the next two hours dissecting this thought experiment. We added wrinkles to it: what if, instead of a princess, she's a poor woman with kids? What if it's ten people whose lives are at stake instead of one? Fifty? A hundred? A million? What if it's a school full of kids?
My friend tended toward the "no negotiations with people who make me fuck pigs" end of the spectrum. I had to add a lot of people with lives hanging in the balance before he would consider carnal knowledge of a pig. (I might claim some hypocrisy here. He loves bacon.)
The show itself isn't really about the morality of what the right decision is. It's more about the media and how media-driven public perceptions can change in an instant and determine what politicians do. At the beginning of the day, the public supports the Prime Minister's decision not to pork the pork, but after an effort to trick the kidnapper fails and the princess pays the price, the same public begins to demand he do it. The Prime Minister ultimately bows to public pressure and does the deed, but he does it so save his political career, not to save the woman. But I didn't know all this when talking about it in the bar with my friend, so we treated it like it was more or less an ethics problem: given the situation--hostage, demand, pig--what is the right course of action for the Prime Minister? I've been thinking this over for almost a year, now, and I'm still not sure what the right answer is.
Turns out, The University of Alabama has been running an advanced program in theoretical ethics for decades.
The no argument
My friend had some good reasons to say "no" other than just not wanting to do it. First, how do you know that anyone sick enough to come up with this plan would actually release the princess? But more to the point, let's say you do what the pig perverts ask and they do release the girl. You've saved her life, but what if there are other people who then try the same thing? Now, ransoming humiliation out of politicians can become an easy way to get any politician with an agenda you dislike out of politics. You've opened the floodgates to all kinds of evil.
The yes argument
I wanted to agree and vote no on this, but there was something that didn't sit right with me. Try changing a few parts of the situation, and you might come up with a different conclusion:
-What if, instead of schtooping a swine, the kidnappers say you must give up your life in her place? You must drink poison on national television or the woman will die with suffering. Wouldn't most people say that yes, one ought to sacrifice oneself for another? Or at least that doing so would be noble? So why is it noble to give your life to save another, but not to just be humiliated to save someone? Does pride mean more than life?
-What if it's not the Prime Minister being asked? What if it's just some random schmo, and the kidnappers have picked him as the patsy at random from a phone book? They just want to humiliate a random person. What should he do?
-What if there were no public shame element to it? Let's pretend a woman has a rare form of cancer, and scientists have discovered that pigs produce a chemical that defeats the cancer. However, they only produce it when a human male has sex with them, and so far, the hospital hasn't found any volunteers. So there are no cameras and no agendas--just the need to have intercourse with a pig to save a life.
-Even my friend had to admit that the argument for sexing Sooey became stronger when you started adding victims, especially if the victims were children. This, of course, brings about the difficult question of how many people become enough to fuck a pig and how many is few enough to not do it.
I couldn't help feeling there was a good moral argument that at least the first time this happens, the morally correct action is to take whatever drugs you need to take so you aren't in your mind and your equipment works, and to fuck the pig.
Okay, I might have been encouraged to take this position because every time I said, "I think you've got to fuck the pig" in that bar, I enjoyed watching the bartender who was eavesdropping on us shake his head. But I don't think I was only ready to say there was a good argument for banging the bacon because it got a rise out of the bartender; I think that it might actually be the right thing to do. Snort coke, take an entire bottle of Viagra, hire porn stars to whisper in your ear, and do the deed. After that, resign your post in politics and retire to a monastery somewhere to live our the rest of your life.
Two caveats: 1) Only the first person this happens to should comply. Once is noble sacrifice. Twice is inviting an outbreak of copycat crimes. (And actually, now that Black Mirror has done this idea, I don't think anyone in the real world ought to go along with it. It could very easily become a popular form of criminal mischief, like an extreme form of SWATing.) 2) Nobody can blame you if you say no. If the kidnapper's requirement was to stab yourself in the eyeball, I don't think I could make myself do that, either. How do you overcome the body's instinct not to do some things? I don't know if all the drugs in the world could get me to do it. Even if I could bring myself to try, I'd probably fail.
More important than the yes or no
The bigger deal to me as a writer is that I can't remember having had that animated and engaged a conversation about a "literary" story in a long time. Literary fiction seems to feel that setting up a moral choice that a character must make where there are competing moral claims is beneath it somehow. That's for science fiction. It's too plot-based. Yet people love reading for these reasons. Moreover, it's clear to me what the social value is of a story meant to engender a debate over the right or wrong path in a certain situation. I'm not always sure what the social value of literary fiction is. Lit fic seems to produce a million versions of the same story, where we open a window into the psyche of a character faced with a private form of crisis, and we try to convincingly render the psychological process in the character that leads to some kind of internal change. It sometimes feels like literary fiction is the same story over and over, just with a never-ending quest to find an overlooked type of character to tell it about and a new form to fit the story into.
I've never really read sci-fi, unless you count Vonnegut. I took a course in high school on sci-fi and fantasy, where I read a lot of the best-known sci-fi short stories from a hundred years ago when I was a teenager. Since then, I've never really examined the genre. I'm rethinking this. I've written before that I'm not totally sure literary fiction is the right genre for me. All the stories I've written in the last five years have been lit fic, but maybe it's time to change that. Maybe this is the year where I take a break from the road I've been on, read some new stuff and re-think what I want to do with writing. It makes sense that I would try to write the kinds of stories I myself find compelling.
I resisted watching A Handmaid's Tale for a long time, even though everyone was talking about it and it seemed to be the darling show of the moment. Much like "Cat Person" was the right short story at the right time politically and culturally, Hulu's remake of Margaret Atwood's novel has benefited from coming to be at a time when significant segments of America feel the gains of women of the last two generations are under a counter-revolutionary attack from a conservative right. Donald Trump is seen as a marker of this counter-revolution. Handmaid has become a focal point, an easy-to-identify signifier in a cultural war. Women are dressing up in Handsmaid's garb to make a point about the lack of female voice in a misogynistic culture.
My resistance to watching it, in spite of how much everyone was talking about it, was similar to why I waited so long to watch the Christmas comedy Elf. It seemed like a story that kind of wrote itself, and I found it hard to believe it could hold enough surprises to be interesting for long. I knew the basic idea of the book: the American government is replaced by a radical theocracy. A core concept of that theocracy is the total disenfranchisement of women. The increasingly shrinking number of fertile women are used as breeding stock by the ruling class. I didn't see how there would be much I wouldn't expect.
But much like Will Ferrell can make me laugh at a joke even when I know it's coming by being utterly committed to the character, Handmaid drew me into a story I mostly knew was coming through its wonderful attention to detail and the ability of the actors to painfully incarnate the emotions of people in hopeless situations. For the women of Gilead, the Puritanical government that has replaced the United States, the time to fight back openly has passed. The women must live with the bitter knowledge that they have missed their chance to either fight or run away to Canada. (Side note: Did the Canadian government sponsor this series? Because they come off looking REALLY good in it.) Scene after scene delivers believable emotional pay-off. "The ceremony" is truly creepy time after time. It's rape, but done slowly and with community approval.
You can know it's coming and still be haunted by it
What makes the show compelling is watching how women who have been stripped of all rights and all agency struggle to find ways to fight back, to form meaningful emotional bonds, and to keep hope. I couldn't help but be reminded of the novel The Underground Railroad, which I've alluded to a few times on this blog. Both Cora the runaway slave and Offred the human baby incubator are in a political environment with so little room to maneuver, the best choice by far is to attempt to run north.
Offred has, perhaps, a little more leverage than Cora. Modern day "slavery wasn't that bad" advocates like to contend that slave owners were motivated by profit not to harm their property too severely. But white slave owning fear of rebellion was often a stronger impulse than fear of lost capital. A slave owner would sacrifice a few slaves to prevent the lot from turning. In Handmaid, no amount of rebellion seems to be enough to condemn a handmaid to death, at least not while she is still fertile. The need for babies is too strong to waste one of the few working uteri still in existence. When Ofglen is discovered to have committed "gender treason" (being gay), her partner is summarily executed, but Ofglen is sent back (after having her clitoris removed to prevent temptation) to breed more children. Offred continually finds ways to obtain leverage, whether it's playing on Serena Joy's desperate hope for a baby or Commander Waterford's need for companionship and sexual titillation. There are limits to what leverage can get her, and the season ends with us about to find out what those limits are. But she's got something to work with.
Missed opportunities
Still, the show so far leaves me wanting. We know that the environment is under duress from pollution. This is what has caused infertility among most women, and it has also apparently had an impact on the food supply. In an early episode, Offred is warned about getting certain kinds of fish that might be high in toxins. When visiting foreign dignitaries inquire about Gilead, it is a point of pride that Gilead has made strides growing oranges.
We aren't actually told this in so many words, but it's a good bet the the stress on the environment and resources had a lot to do with Gilead getting a chance to come to power in the first place. How could any militia group overthrow the world's most powerful military? Not without a lot of concern from the people that the way things are going isn't getting it done.
And herein is the first thing I haven't quite found satisfying in Handmaid. There are some really intriguing flashback moments of how it all went down, none more satisfying than the realization that Mrs. Waterford herself, although a highly intelligent and successful writer, was actually an architect of the rules meant to subjugate women and make it illegal for them to read. She was never able to publish a book on the subject, but she was the one who conceived of treating fertility as a national resource. But so far, I haven't yet found the explanation of how the revolution put Gilead in place to be understandable. I feel like the show sort of yadda-yadda-yaddas its way through parts of it by having Offred trot out the old saw about being in a bath where the water gets turned up bit by bit until you're boiled alive.
That's unsatisfying, because it's an argument used by those who fear progress as much as those who fear backsliding. What about this particular crisis made it possible for people to accept this grim society? What made it possible to erase respect for human rights to the point the handmaids lost their right to choose sexual partners?
I don't feel like the writers quite have a handle yet on their own cosmos. In adapting the book to the screen, a certain looseness has crept in. If this were a movie, and the writers made the choice to focus on the lives of the handmaids and leave the nature of the origins of calamity something of a black box, that would be fine, but in a series that aims to go on and on, the audience is going to need to feel that this world is realer. Why has this society failed to find technological solutions to its problems? Why does there seem to be no fertility treatment? Why, if it has the discipline to treat female fertility as a national resource in order to save itself, is it so carefree about male fertility? (We learn that many midwives are assigned to infertile male commanders, meaning they go through month after month of wasted ceremonies. Does nobody check the men?)
Moral certainty is a little too certain
When Offred manages to tell the visiting Mexican ambassador the truth about the lives of midwives, that they are beaten and raped and monitored, the ambassador says she's sorry. "Don't be sorry. Do something," Offred says. The ambassador responds that she can't do anything, because her country is dying. In her large hometown, a live human hasn't been born in six years. Mexico needs to trade with Gilead to obtain handmaids of its own or it will die. Offred replies, "My country is already dead." We, the audience, are meant to side with her moral indignation and believe that Offred's view is the right one. What good is it to save humanity if, in the process, we lose what makes us human?
Contrast this with the moral upside-downness of possibly my favorite dystopian story, the musical Urinetown. In the world of the musical, years of drought have made water extremely scarce. It is illegal to urinate anywhere but in a public restroom, and there is a charge to go there. Anyone who is caught going outside the public facility is sent to Urinetown, which, in the interests of not ruining the musical if you haven't seen it, let's just say is sort of like jail.
There is a revolution against this system. Heroes rise up in the cliched way that heroes do, and the people replace the heavy-handed government with a leader who promises to share the water with the people.
The audience is meant to side with this peasant's revolt, but we're being played. The peasants' motto, "Don't give us tomorrow, just give us today" should have tipped us off. The leader who takes over after the revolt is too kind-hearted. She gives the limited water away too freely, and within a short period of time, society is on the brink of collapse because its water reserves are gone. The leader who toppled the government is now killed and replaced herself.
Is Urinetown defending dictators? I don't think so. But it is questioning the unproblematic easiness of the story where right topples might. There is a cost to an easy morality. If you apply absolutely a moral principle, even a seemingly obvious one like "people should be able to pee freely," there are costs to your absoluteness. Offred might be correct to say that her country is dead if it has lost its sense of human rights, but if the shadow group Mayday leads a revolt to topple Gilead, how will it prevent the literal death of humanity that is under duress?
This is an uncomfortable line of questioning. I'm uncomfortable writing it. Of course Gilead is wrong. That's the success of the show's close rendering of the lives of the midwives. Our empathy is activated, rightly, to feel that no matter what issues society is facing, this can't be the answer. But the show is also cheating a bit by not really putting us face to face with the issues society is facing. We only see the privileged world of the well-to-do, those who are given a handmaid. What's life like for the rest of the world? If you saw the blight there, would you feel more of a sense of understanding for how Gilead made the choices it did?
I wish people who wrote about Christians knew a few
As a side note, I was disappointed in the realization that there is a secret hotel used by the politically powerful where all of the sins of the flesh Gilead keeps under wraps are permitted. There is booze, music and dancing, and sex slaves. By making such a world, the show is demonstrating an essential contempt for the villains. This contempt doesn't make the villain more odious, it makes the villain pathetic and less frightening. Gilead would be a more formidable--and interesting-- foe if moral hypocrisy wasn't so predictably rampant. The presence of this hotel is a sign of the prejudice of the liberal mindset against religion and people who take their religion seriously. Of course there are hypocrites, but there are also Christians in America jumping in right now to fill the breach by fostering the children of families torn apart by the heroin epidemic. There are Christians who feed the poor and take medical care to other countries. The same Christians we revile for voting for Trump may have also brought medical care to Haiti, the place Trump called a "shithole." I'm not saying religion is the answer. I am no longer a Christian myself. I'm saying that it's less clearly the problem than some liberals like to pretend it is.
The intellectual argument...
I can construct an argument about why it is wrong, even if the human race depends upon it, to force the handmaids into childbearing against their will. One way to make the case is through the trolley problem, a thought experiment in ethics. In one scenario, there is a trolley car coming down the track, and there are five people on the track tied up who will be killed by the trolley. You are standing by a switch that can change the trolley to another track. But there is one person on that track tied up who will be killed. Do you pull the switch?
Almost everyone agrees the answer is yes, but critics of pure utilitarianism will add that the reason isn't simply because it's a question of saving five people versus saving one. You cannot treat people as tools, even if they are tools to accomplish something good. People are ends, not means. Flipping the switch to save five people was morally sound, and you cannot be held responsible for the unintended consequence of it killing someone else.
A variation of the scenario makes the concept of humans as ends not means clearer. A trolley is headed toward five people tied up on the track. You are standing next to a fat man on the platform. If you shove him onto the track, you are certain (I guess you're an engineer of trolleys or something) that the fat man's weight will slow down the trolley enough to stop it from killing the other five. Do you throw the fat man onto the track?
The answer is no. It's one thing for Spock, in Star Trek II, to decide that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" and sacrifice himself. It's entirely different to sacrifice someone else without consent based on that philosophy.
You might argue, based on a purely utilitarian position, that my refusal to throw the fat man on the track amounts to superstition. Sacrificing one to save five is just good math. I should do it and not hesitate. But think of what that leads you to. Do you take a healthy man and harvest his organs to save five others?
The extreme example of the problems with strict utilitarian thinking is in the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." In Ursula K. Leguin's imagining, an entire society lives in paradise, but their paradise is all predicated on one condition: the never-ending torture of a child.
...and the argument of the belly
I can make these arguments and we can see the strength of them in a society where we are all generally well-fed. Offred can make her appeal to empathy, and it will resonate with an audience in which perhaps more people are dying of diseases caused by over-eating than they are dying of being malnourished. But do these arguments ring hollow to people who are dying? If you were hungry, and the world looked like it was dying, would Gilead make more sense to you?
I hope the answer is no. I hope society would not try to build the paradise of the many on the suffering of the few. But it's foolish to try to pretend the rationale to do so isn't strong. There are five people on the track screaming, and you can save them if you just ignore that one person.
Great ethical leadership
The other day, I was discussing these very ideas with a friend of mine who is an officer in the Marine Corps. He is also a Harvard graduate, a voracious reader, and a Christian. I was keenly interested in what the Marine Corps had taught him and what he thought about making decisions in a combat scenario. If his platoon was outnumbered, and he couldn't extract them without leaving some Marines, should he sacrifice some to save most of the platoon? Given that the military believes in not leaving anyone behind, to what extent do you follow that commitment? What if you are being pursued, and there is one slow guy who, if you wait for him, will get you all killed?
He gave great answers, and he admitted that sometimes, you might be essentially throwing the fat guy off the platform, and your justification will come down to semantics. You might have to ask one group to sacrifice itself in a delaying action to save the rest of the unit. The important point to him, though, was that you don't call it a suicide mission. You call it a delaying action. You tell them to fight to the last man, to try to come out of it alive. Importantly, he felt that everyone, by signing onto the Marine Corps, had essentially given consent to be sacrificed, so it was different to him than throwing a fat man off a platform without him knowing.
On the other hand, he realized that war itself is sort of like throwing a fat man off a platform: we are killing some people against their will in the hope that it will make the world better for everyone else. In the end, he recognized that making decisions is context-dependent. There is a principle that "we leave no Marine behind." Without it, the entire band-of-brothers bond that the Corps depends on would be broken. But this is not an absolute principle. You don't kill unlimited numbers of Marines in a hopeless effort to save one person.
Preserving human rights in an resource-constrained environment requires a great ethical leader. You cannot have the pure utilitarian who cynically shakes down the poor, like in Urinetown. But that cynical utilitarian cannot be replaced with a doe-eyed idealist, either.
The best leader, in the fat man scenario, will convince the fat man to jump in front of the trolley to save others. The best leader will build a monument to the fat man and get people to call him Steve instead of just "the fat man," because damnit, the man had a name. The best leader will also fix the trolley so it doesn't run over people tied up on the tracks, so nobody else ever has to jump in front of it to stop it. That's a lot of ask of a leader, but that's the only way to avoid the extremes of a prosperous Gilead or an impoverished Mexico.
We have precious little of that kind of leadership in the real world. I'd like to see it emerge in Handsmaid's Tale, rather than a simple tale of good triumphing over evil.
This is my first published story of the year and also my first published story since the book came out last year. It's on Drunk Monkeys, which is a fun e-zine. I particularly like their 100-word movie reviews.
This is the story that came to me as I was driving to a friend's on a Friday night. I got up early on Saturday morning and wrote it. I edited it on Sunday and submitted it. On Tuesday, Drunk Monkeys told me they wanted to publish it. Meanwhile, I've got stories that took me months to write that I've been trying to publish for over a year. Writing is a funny business.
In the spirit of the site's 100-word movie reviews, I hereby offer my own:
Thor: Ragnarok--a touching allegory about dealing with erectile dysfunction
Ragnarok begins with Thor crushing stuff like an awesome bro, but then this ball-busting woman comes along and breaks his hammer. He can't nail stuff anymore. He ends up in an abusive relationship with a woman who controls him. By luck, though, he reconnects with an old bro, and they smash stuff together and that helps Thor find his old masculine mojo again. He shaves his head and gets ripped. In the end, he finds out it wasn't his hammer that made him a man, and he bangs everyone with thunder while he rocks out to Zeppelin.
As I said yesterday, we've been watching a lot of streaming video the last few days to wait out the cold. Yesterday, we finally got sick enough of The Mindy Project in season four that we found something else to watch. The first thing we tried was the latest Dave Chapelle special. I don't know if he's the funniest comedian I've ever heard, but he's damn sure one of the most perceptive.
One of his bits was him recalling the words he'd said in the 72 hours after Trump was elected, and how those words were perceived and reported on by the media. He repeated a few jokes that he'd done in New York the day Trump was elected, then talked about how a reporter had interpreted what he'd said to mean he supported Trump. He then talked about his appearance on Saturday Night Live right after the election and how he'd come up with something rather spur of the moment, something like "we'll give him a chance if he gives us a chance." Chapelle said he wished he hadn't said that. He credited his comments to the elephant effect, the way it's difficult to talk accurately about something until you've had enough distance from it.
I'm familiar with saying the wrong thing
We've all experienced this, of course. Anyone with the capacity to be the least bit honest and introspective will occasionally look back on the things he's said and feel sheepish about them. In 2017, I wrote a fair bit about race. That's because I feel like that urban blight, which affects black Americans disproportionately, is the most pressing issue America has to face. It's also because I feel that as much as conservatives miss the boat by promoting a bootstraps philosophy too much, at the same time, a lot of liberal rhetoric on race is also inaccurate and not helpful. And the whole conversation we're having about race isn't leading to improvement; being properly woke isn't going to fix the heat in Baltimore City Schools. That requires boring, long-term work to improve a system of acquisitions and accounting. The way we are talking about race now in America lacks the seriousness necessary to accomplish goals like these.
I still believe that, and I think it's necessary for thoughtful people to be bold in shattering the icons held dear by those who seem to be dominating a lot of the conversation. But that doesn't mean I feel like I got everything right that I've said.
What I messed up last year
I now wish I'd either not posted this piece on football players not standing for the National Anthem or written it differently. At the time I was thinking something like this: Although I agree that it's shameful how not everyone is able to share in the full bounty of America's wealth, I am also worried that we are fracturing enough as a country that if we aren't careful, we will soon have a lot less wealth to figure out how to distribute. Democracies can be fragile, and if we lose all signifiers that bind us together, the whole thing can fall apart.
However, looking back on it, even a moderate call to suggest players might want to rethink kneeling overlooked something far more important. Colin Kaepernick is not a perfect person. It was stupid of him to wear those pig socks. But he's a brave person and I admire him. The easy, cowardly, approach would have been to just stand for the anthem without meaning it. He gave up a ton of money to take a stand for something he believed in.
The fact that enough people--mostly white--were incensed enough by his very mild kneeling protests that they terrified NFL owners into not hiring a capable quarterback says an awful lot about America. Mostly, it says Kaepernick was not wrong to call out systemic racism.
It is really difficult to stand on a stage--or in front of a computer--and say something that is creative, audacious, and also true. But that's what any artist or thinker has to do. To do that, you have to be fearless. Chapelle noted in his special that he doesn't ever feel bad for anything he says on stage. I'm not by nature the kind of person who can really say I don't give a damn what others think and mean it, but I am resolved to try to become more of that kind of person. The best way to become more fearless is to keep trying to speak the truth as I see it. As I do that, I'll make mistakes. I will try to learn from them and do better, but I'm really going to try not to feel bad about them.
You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself (if only you weren't an asshole who's never satisfied)
Even if you do say everything right, someone can always take it the wrong way. Truth shares a property line with falsehood, and the minute you start trying to talk about the part of truth's domain that isn't dead in the center, others will start telling you that you're headed over the line. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from a perspective of wanting young black people to not feel that the deplorable condition of many of their peers is their own fault, so he writes about systemic injustice, both historic and present. Some of his critics immediately counter that this narrative removes agency from young black people, that by focusing on the obstacles before them, Coates makes it impossible for them to overcome those obstacles. Because Coates is trying to put up a gazeebo on the part of the lawn where few people go, some are saying he must have gone over the property line. But he hasn't, for the most part. He wants to use the full value of truth's property, which means going up to the edge. That doesn't mean he's a bad neighbor.
And just because I am willing to criticize liberal racial rhetoric doesn't mean I am siding with bootstraps-type conservatives. The Dudley Randall poem we all learned in school, the one pitting Booker T.'s pragmatism against W.E.B. Dubois's idealism, is sort of a false dichotomy. We need both. We need the academy and the trade school. We need political activism and economic activism. That's the point I am usually trying to make when I write about race.
I am resolving to continue to be as bold as I can be as a writer. But I also have to continue to look at the elephant, to see if anything has changed as I've (hopefully) gained perspective in life. For me, I think I'll always face a temptation to try for the overly clever interpretation. It's a pitfall for a lot of academics, artists, and public intellectuals. That's what I'll resolve to try to guard in myself.
But I'm not sorry for what I've said. I'm just going to keep trying to do better.
With it being as cold here as it is everywhere right now, and since I am too weakly constituted to deal with the cold, we've been doing a lot of what everyone else is doing: streaming shows all day long. Mrs. Heretic and I are currently watching the entirety of The Mindy Project, which neither of us is crazy about, but since we're too lazy to figure out an alternative, we'll probably watch to the end.
In the mornings, I write short stories where I try to bring about a convincing and satisfying resolution in five thousand words or less. In the evenings, I watch shows where the goal is to keep the story going for as long as it is profitable to keep it going. There are, of course, little climaxes and little denouements within the episodes and seasons of a TV series, but the big resolution is withheld indefinitely, until the stars want to do something else or the sponsor decides to cut bait.
Interrupting ancient tradition
The basic plot structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution or denouement has been more or less the cultural expectation in the West for over 2,000 years. Aristotle described plot in a way that people growing up in my era could find very easy to recognize. It can be a little difficult to find the structure in some ancient stories, partly because we have only fragments of some of them, but it's there. All the literature we read in school follows this outline, whether it's Shakespeare's plays, Homer's epics, 19th-century Romanticism or 20th-century realism. The only exceptions are stories that are intentionally trying, through some avant garde sensibility, to subvert classical plot structure. For the most part, though, it's been something that's been constant whether we're watching Star Wars or reading Faulkner.
When television became ubiquitous, plot structure changed only slightly. Instead of being treated to a story where a character faced challenges, adapted, and either overcame or was overcome followed by a hard ending where we were forced to imagine what would happen afterwards, viewers got miniature versions of the plot cycle repeated over and over. Every week, the stage was re-set and the play took place again, with variations from the last episode, but still very similar. Beaver Cleaver learned life lessons, then would forget them the next week and have to learn all over again.
This wasn't totally without precedent in Western culture. There had been serial narrative. Dickens, of course, is the first example that comes to mind. But a Dickens story, even broken up into dozens of magazine installments, still is headed towards an end the whole time. It's a traditional plot structure that just takes a while. A better early analogue for 20th-Century TV would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with narratives progressing toward an ending, but then re-set to do something similar again. The earliest analogue in American literature would be James Fennimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo stories.
In talking about 20th-century television, I'm talking mainly about the sit-com, or dramas like The Fugitive or Kung Fu, where the overall meta-plot of the story didn't really advance much from episode to episode. This was the dominant model, but there were others. The daytime drama or soap opera had plot cycles or "story lines" within a larger story that, if the network executives were lucky, would never end. The daytime soap was held in low esteem, thought to be trash for shallow housewives, but there were night-time versions with a slightly better reputation.
Around the turn of the century, shows like Ally McBeal started to give audiences something different. This was a comedy where things that happened in one episode carried over into the next one, allowing writers to do things they hadn't been able to do before. As the Internet and fan forums started to exert influence in how people watched TV, fans loved being able to speculate on what would happen with a story from season to season.
As a result, plot cycles started to operate on many levels. There was still the plot cycle of each individual episode, but there was also an emerging plot cycle of a season. As CD sets got sold by season, we started to think of the season as the fundamental unit of a TV show, not the episode. This has accelerated with shows that are now made for streaming services that get released as an entire season and watched, often, in one binge session.
Like having sex for five years
In general, opening up TV narrative past the episode and into the seasonal aspect has made it better. In the old days, shows required us to forget what we'd seen in past episodes, a characteristic The Simpsons has had endless fun making mocking. The application of consequences to TV shows has made it easier for audiences to suspend disbelief and get into the shows.
However, there is a built-in problem with TV's season-by-season approach to building narrative. The climax in plot has the same name as the high point of sex for a reason. Plot is supposed to delight, to build expectation, and then eventually to deliver on that expectation and resolve the tension. Odysseus is supposed to eventually make it home. With a TV show, however, as long as there is a promise of one more season, then we cannot ever really get to the big orgasm. It might sound great to have sex forever, but at some point, delayed gratification starts to pass a point of diminishing returns. (Mrs. Heretic might opine at this point that this would explain why I'm fond of short stories. At least I don't write a lot of micro-fiction.)
There are three plot cycles in a TV series: the episodic, the seasonal, and the overall series cycle. As long as the series cycle is not resolved, Odysseus will never get home again. The audience never gets its big orgasm. In a great series, you can have moments that certainly feel orgasmic, like when Sansa Stark releases the hounds on Ramsey Bolton's ass. But for most shows, we just get points in the narrative that feel better than others--like season openers or finales. (One strength of Game of Thrones is that the series always had an end point in mind. It is just a very long plot instead of an indefinite one.)
Finally, at some point, the audience gets rubbed raw by all this foreplay. The show starts to jump the shark, and the executives, if they're smart, plan for a final season that finally resolves the show's big narrative issues. So we do finally get resolution. But there is a strange effect on the evolution of a show.
House, Nurse Jackie, and essential character armor
We all know about plot armor: the certainty an audience has that the show's main character cannot die until the end. The modern TV series introduces another kind of armor, one that makes the main character invulnerable from fully maturing past his or her shortcomings until the end.
I commented before about the movie Train Wreck, how it's satisfying once Amy Schumer's character finally overcomes her self-destructiveness. But it's also clearly the end, because now we, the audience, have nothing left to laugh at. With shows like House or Nurse Jackie, the main character is not going to fully overcome (or be overcome by) their shortcomings until the end, and the end is not now until we have the announcement that we are in the show's last year. Until then, we can have false climaxes--both House andNurse Jackie had a season where the main character kicked their addictions and tried to live right. But that made it hard to keep the momentum of the show going. For viewers, it was an interesting contrast from seasons past, but we all knew that the writers would pull the plug out of the tub of that transitional season.
In a movie like Train Wreck, the main character's personal development is linear. Events change her little by little until she makes a big change. In a TV show, the character is resistant to hundreds of events before it starts to change the character. The development isn't linear; it's a circular holding pattern. The character gets close to getting it right over and over, but always falls away until the show finally gets clearance to land.
The TV series does not have to answer one of the big questions in traditional narrative--Why now? Why are we being allowed into this person's life at this point in it? Usually, it's because that's the point we need to start at in order to witness the change. In TV, though, we come in at the point where the change is furthest away.
The result on modern viewers
It's hard to say what the actual psychological effect of stories are on readers and viewers. Hopefully, they help to produce empathy. But does reading about or watching a character overcome personal flaws (or fall to them) help the reader to do (or avoid) the same? I'm not sure, although I operate on faith that it does. I feel like it has in my own life, so I write in the belief it might do the same for others.
But I feel like there is an entirely different psychological effect of a television show that goes on indefinitely and only decides to end when external factors make it end versus a story that ends organically on its own terms. Not to sound like one of those annoying people who make a big show of how international and cosmopolite they are, but I prefer watching a Korean drama, where there is an end built-in from the beginning, and we are working toward it through all 20 episodes. The season is also the series. It has an entirely different narrative impulse.
I suppose a show where the main character limps on for seven years with the same basic issues is more like real life than a show where the main character overcomes a flaw within the space (to the audience) of a few hours. We do tend to face the same life issues year after year and decade after decade. So maybe the modern, streaming show is a truer model of how to deal with our weaknesses. Maybe Bojack Horseman can't stop doing drugs and drinking and wallowing in self-pity, but he can try to find ways to deal with his horrible flaws so he can face his day-to-day issues. He wins some, even if he usually loses, and the losses have much direr consequences. But maybe that's really all most of us can really do--try to minimize the downside of ourselves rather than overcome it and conquer mightily.
But this feels like a loss, somehow. The greatest fiction in fiction might be the illusion that we have control over our lives, but as Lander said in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, "Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth." I think readers and viewers lose some sense of agency when they follow narrative arcs that last from the time our kids start kindergarten to the time they're asking out prom dates, especially if we all know the show only ended because two of the characters left to go be on a different show.
Speaking of The Underground Railroad, I hear it's going to become a series on Amazon Prime. I look forward to watching it. It will deal with a question the writers of Handsmaid's Tale are dealing with now: how do you take a single novel and turn it into several seasons of stories? If there is a novel that's not itself a series but that might work for a TV show, it's this one. Like the underground railroad in the story, the narrative of the book has a lot of hidden passages that might lead to places nobody even knows about. Since the book is as much about the journey of African Americans as it is about the main character, it ends with more questions than answers.
The age of streaming video, which most are viewing as a golden age of television, has given us some brilliant moments and some stuff that's just better than being outside when it's freezing. I hope The Underground Railroad will become some of the best we've yet seen.
I got another one of those emails today. Dear Jake, although we're not going to publish you, we liked your writing enough that we were able to distinguish it somewhat from the mountain of rubbish in the slush pile. If you sent something to us again, we might be interested in reading it.
Every writer who isn't George Saunders knows the struggle of submitting short stories to literary magazines. There's rejection--the majority of what you face--and there's an occasional acceptance to keep you going. But then there are also those in-betweeners, the "encouraging rejections."
I've gone back and forth on how "encouraging" an encouraging rejection is. On the one hand, of course it's nice to know someone noticed it. And it does mean something. With ratios ranging from 50 stories to one you can accept to thousands to one, every editor has to let go of stories she likes. So it's nice to hear that even if you weren't the one in a hundred, you were still in a select group. It's some validation.
On the other hand, it can be a little maddening to know you were close but not quite there.
These conflicting feelings get stronger when the journal giving you the nice no is one of the big ones. In the last four months, I've had four of these from four different journals that are generally considered "top 50." I know that these aren't just form letters, because I've sent stories to them before and not gotten this secondary type of rejection. Earlier, all I got was "it's not for us."
I guess I could take it as a sign that I'm growing as a writer, and if I keep at it, I might get a big breakthrough sooner or later.
On the other hand, I'm so exhausted from the effort I've made up to now, and feeling so much like I ought to quit writing and do more responsible things with my life, that it feels like this was the final close-but-no-cigar. Right now, my son is upstairs not doing his homework, because I'm downstairs writing and not making him do it. I should do something more adult with my time, shouldn't I?
I imagine reactions to rejections are sort of Rorschach tests for writers. True believers will not be deterred by any amount of rejection, even if the local high school turns you down for a journal that all citizens are invited to with the note "Please never write again." Pessimists will always see a down side. Even if the New Yorker picks their piece, you can then whine that it didn't go as viral as "Cat Story" or didn't get picked for Best American Short Stories. Me, I'm an agnostic, and that means I see mixed results in everything.
One way or another, I feel like 2018 is a year where something is going to happen. It might be the year I make some key breakthrough, or it might be the year I hang it up. These last four years of making an honest effort to write successfully have so far felt like I've come to an inconclusive draw. I can't help but interpret these notes as a sign that I'm either boutta knock this writing thing out or get knocked out.
