I finished a complete draft of the novel I have been crafting on and off since 2016.
Though I met my goal to finish by 2024, the new year marks seven years and counting since I published my second novel, Goddess of the Night, in late 2016.
Fans of Californication could draw parallels between my situation and the lapse between Hank Moody’s third and fourth novels—a lapse humorously compared by Hank’s critics to the decade Guns N’ Roses spent producing Chinese Democracy.
For those who haven’t seen it, the Showtime drama revolves around Hank Moody’s writers block. In his writing, as in his life, he is his own worst enemy. He self-sabotages every break Hollywood gives him, every relationship he forms, every chance he has at forgiveness.
Hank Moody’s process differs from mine and that of many others. In the show, Hank will go months, if not years between writing stints until inspiration bursts violently from his consciousness like rain from cumulonimbus clouds. These drug- and alcohol-infused creative thunderstorms last a couple days and nights, culminating in a polished draft of a literary fiction bestseller.
Lessons from drugged-out literary luminaries
History is filled with rumors of authors similarly pulling substance-aided all-nighters. Using cocaine, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote 60,000 words in six days. Ayn Rand fueled her creative spurts with Benzedrine. Hunter S. Thompson used dextroamphetamine and, later in his career, cocaine.
Missing from these stories of drugged-out literary luminaries is the hard work involved behind the scenes. Take it from an ADHD writer—amphetamines are no substitute for routine.
Perspiration is more important than inspiration
Later in the Californication series, even freethinking, freewheeling Hank Moody tries to teach his daughter that libertine behavior does not make one a writer. He acknowledges the blood, sweat, and tears that stain every manuscript.
He tells her, “The only thing that makes you a writer is gluing your ass in a seat and getting what’s inside your head out on paper. Everything else is a pose.”
Bestselling author Gillian Flynn aptly echoes Hank’s sentiment, “There’s no muse that’s going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write.”
Not even the psychedelic muses of the Beat Generation.
Putting in the time
With his novel stolen and his screenplay residuals spent, Hank takes a job at an all-girls private college. He tells his classroom of ingénues and aspiring authors that being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life.
All novelists would agree.
In On Writing, Stephen King discusses sequestering himself in his office with the door closed. His instructions to himself and to his family are that unless the house is burning down, he is not to be bothered. King also writes every day of the year except Christmas. Then, he admits he is lying. He also writes on Christmas.
Overcoming self-imposed obstacles
To finish my latest novel, I had to invent my own writing routines—only to have them interrupted by life dozens of times. I had to work around day jobs and night jobs; depressive episodes, dermatomyositis, and multimillion-dollar proposal deadlines; dying friends and dying relationships; and worst of all, the pandemic—the antisocial shitstorm that made parasites of the masses and paralyzed my creativity for a year and a half.
After failing to reach my goal two years in a row, I partnered with my therapist to overcome my own specious barriers.
I bought a new (used) laptop and installed nothing on it but a Linux Mint instance and basic writing software. I adjusted my work schedule. I hunkered in my living room at dawn, before the world awoke to interrupt me. I found new coffee shops with better hours and policies that weren’t written by the Chinese Communist Party.
Most importantly, my therapist and I set a goal he held me accountable to—500 words per week.
After enough mornings, afternoons, evenings, and weekends, I finally hit my goal in December 2023. I finished my novel two weeks ahead of schedule.
Working at university has made my vocabulary worse. I now wage my own vendetta against jargon, gobbledygook, and sentence structures that would make my sixth-grade language arts teacher cry.
Sure, I could blame the pedantry of the ivory tower or the
posturing of men and women trying to outdo each other with words
rooted in Greek and Latin. They tie their identity to these flashy
displays of learning: Their words and sentence structures are signals
that after a decade in post-secondary schools, indeed, they belong.
To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of seven billion humans, you alone own the infinitesimal fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself.
In academia, identity is attached to superiority. To be known is
to be better than the rest, to have your papers more cited, more
read. To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of the seven
billion humans on the planet, you and you alone own the infinitesimal
fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself. And what
better way to prove that than to hide your ideas beneath concepts and
language so convoluted, so abstruse that you may be the only human
being who truly understands what you mean?
Words Without Meaning, Without Truth
As Frederic Nietzsche points out, those who conceal their ideas
behind jargon and gobbledygook often do so deliberately. Ever the
linguistic magicians, they trade truth for illusion. He writes: “The
essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it
wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to
blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”
Nietzsche wrote this in 1878. He was a hundred years ahead of his
time, anticipating critical postmodernism before it became an
academic rage. The postwar generation scribbled pages of
unintelligible, useless prose that earned the ire of intellectuals
ranging from far-Left linguist Noam Chomsky to conservative political
theorists Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss.
Postmodernists deny reality and reject the possibility of
reliable, objective knowledge. For them, there is no answer just as
there is no spoon. Morals are relative. Existence is futile.
Aesthetic standards for art and beauty are impossible. Everything is
viewed with skepticism and irony. Nothing is what it appears—even
language itself. Think Fight Club. Think Matrix.
Darkened ideas of existence, indeed.
Postmodernism explained in three words: There is no spoon.
The Danish sociologist Jürgen Habermas observes the irony behind all this there-is-no-spoon nonsense: Anyone asserting language has no meaning must use language with meaning to defend their position. Habermas calls it a paradox. I call it dishonesty.
Bad Writing: A Simpler Explanation
During my graduate education, postmodernism and Marxism were easy
targets to blame for bad writing. These approaches allowed professors
to justify their hatred for capitalism and Western civilization while
simultaneously collecting paychecks for teaching students to question
all truth but their own.
Managing proposals for astrophysicists and virologists, I’ve had
to re-evaluate my earlier position. As the medieval theologian
William of Ockham reminds me, I need not come up with a complicated
explanation for a phenomenon when a simple one will suffice. In other
words, academics may simply be bad writers.
Researchers learn how to be a great researchers without learning
how to explain their research to both academic and lay audiences.
Quality writing is neither rewarded in peer-reviewed journals nor
considered in the promotions and tenure process. After all, why waste
time cogently articulating results and ideas when you can let your
data and neologisms talk for you?
Those not taught how or encouraged to write well at the last minute string together convoluted passive sentences that recall the words of English novelist George Orwell: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.”
The Curse of Knowledge
Academics spend almost all of their time with their own ideas in
their own disciplinary monocultures. To fit in, they use the same
jargon and awkward sentence structures. They forget the rest of the
world has no clue what their forced acronyms means or that words like
parthenogenesis could easily be rewritten as virgin birth.
Academics simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know.
Much like country clubbers disconnected from the other 95 percent of income earners, academics have an impossible time appreciating and communicating with outsiders. They simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know. They suffer from what Steven Pinker terms “the curse of knowledge.”
Thanks to obscurantism, to postmodernism, to the curse of knowledge, over the past few years, my writing has become less florid, more direct, more plain. I write with clarity. I strive for brevity. To be read is to not to have eyes fixed on your work; to be read is to be understood.
An estimated 16.1 million Americans struggle with depression, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Few of those want to admit it. Fewer still want to talk about it.
Trying to explain the anguish and hopelessness inside you to those who have never battled mental illness is like a woman trying to explain the pain of childbirth to a man.
Sometimes people sense those overwhelming feelings of sadness, especially if you seem gloomy or unusually slow or uninterested in much of anything. But for many, such obvious signs are buried behind much more subtle symptoms. Some overeat. Some don’t eat at all. Many lose sleep. Others are always tired and sleep too much. More recently, psychologists have begun recognizing rage, anger, and irritability as symptoms of depression–especially in men, but also in women.
Trying to explain the anguish and hopelessness inside you to those who have never battled mental illness is like a woman trying to explain the pain of childbirth to a man.
Worse still, many turn to alcohol, drugs, work, and other addictions to bury their depression, anxiety, ADHD, or other mental disorders. When addictions cease to smother the pain, suicide becomes the last resort to make it all go away.
Depression and the American rock and metal scene
Among the most famous is Nirvana legend Kurt Cobain. A chronic drug and alcohol user since age 13, in 1986, he started using heroine. By 1990, recreation became addiction. Unlike softer drugs, repeated heroin use changes the brain’s structure and physiology, creating imbalances that are not easily reversed. Cobain’s brain became dependent on the drug, then developed a tolerance that made it almost impossible to ever deliver enough of the drug into his body to stay happy and alert. Eventually, overcome with mental, physical, and chemical depression, he shot himself.
Chris Cornell’s voice on Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” shows the pain he experienced most of his career that eventually killed him. The song is a favorite of mine and represents the best of grunge and has helped me get through some rough times.
Cobain is hardly alone among rockers and metalheads. Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman Chris Cornell struggled with depression most of his life until hanging himself in a Detroit hotel room at age 52.
Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington hung himself only months after Cornell, on what would have been Cornell’s 53rd birthday. Stone Temple Pilot’s Scott Weiland battled substance abuse for much of his career and a year and a half before Cornell died after overdosing on cocaine, ethanol, and methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA).
At the core of these singers’ struggles, as a psychologist once taught me, are feelings of hopelessness. Little brings you happiness. Nothing seems to change. You feel trapped, perhaps useless, unwanted, unloved–even if you are adored by millions.
What causes us to feel hopeless?
Exactly what causes those feelings depends on the individual, but for many, myself included, we feel as though we are running from our pasts, from memories we long ago repressed, from demons we thought we exorcised on a therapist’s couch.
Some, like Cobain, have a family history of depression, suicide, and substance abuse, likely indicating an underlying physiological problem with the brain. For others, like Weiland, are simply unable to cope with terrible traumas and unprocessed memories of rape or abuse. Others still suffer from both.
Many have no idea most depressed people are in so much pain– even singers, musicians, writers, and artists whose lyrics, music, themes, and styles can be dramatic, morose, and hint at, if not signal mental anguish. Often, nobody knows until it’s too late. Our culture needs to change that.
Finding inspiration in those who have struggled
The past several months, I was inspired, though not surprised, to find these themes not just pop up, but humbly honored at rock and metal concerts. Dexter Holland of Offspring paid tribute to friends he lost. From Ashes to New dedicated multiple songs to Chester Bennington, citing him as a major influence and calling him a friend. Breaking Benjamin similarly called out struggles with suicide and depression. Five Finger Death Punch discussed substance abuse. Their lead vocalist, Ivan Moody, shared his own struggles and recent decision to stay sober.
Disturbed truly went out of their way, airing the numbers for mental health hotlines as they paid tribute to all that rock and metal have lost over the past few years to suicide or substance abuse as they played their ballad “A Reason to Fight.” While some have been critical of the track, calling it too much of a departure from Disturbed’s iconic twenty-first-century metal sound, I love the song. Hearing it live with candles and a supportive audience that clearly had many battling their own beasts inside.
Depression: You should talk about it. With the help of friends, family, therapy, medications, support groups, and hotlines, you can win the battle. I am proof of that.
In Disturbed’s words:
Don't let it take your soul, Look at me, take control We're going to fight this war This is nothing worth dying for
Are you ready to begin This is a battle that we are gonna win
In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev pulls back the curtain on twenty-first-century Russia, revealing the world’s biggest country may also be its most deluded and its most corrupt.
He shows readers a Russia that has “seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich,” and left its inhabitants with “the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.”
Peter Pomerantsev in Nothing Is Real and Everything Is Possible beautifully describes for readers Russia’s transformation from a post-Soviet republic searching for an identity to a postmodern mafia state.
Airing Russia’s Dirty Laundry
Pomerantsev is a former Russian television producer for TNT. There, he helped kickoff shows ranging from Russian remakes of Married with Children to a never-aired miniseries on a mafia-run Siberian town written and directed by a gangster. The latter mocked Russia’s mafia politics, where leaders are made to look like gangsters, unlike Western politicians, who “act like upstanding citizens,” and Hollywood “is obsessed with the underworld.”
His exploration of Russia’s underworld begins with stories of strippers and gold diggers. They come to Moscow from Siberian mining villages and St. Petersburg slums to compete with Russia’s endless supply of world-renowned beauties for a chance at a better life, one sponsored by Moscow’s newly minted sugar daddies. These “Forbeses”—so called because of their place on the Forbes list—refer to the girls as tiolki, or cattle.
The fatherless tiolki start at eighteen and hone their craft at a Gold Diggers Academy run by a 40-year-old woman with an MBA. After securing a sponsor, in exchange for exclusive sexual rights with a mega-rich man, they get an apartment, a car, a $4,000 month allowance, and twice yearly vacations in Turkey or Egypt. Once their sugar daddies grow bored, the girls land on the streets without a penny to their name. By the time the girls turn twenty-two, most Forbeses no longer want them.
Then, there’s Dinara, a young Muslim woman who fled Dagestan—a republic in the North Caucasus, near Chechnya—to study in Moscow. She wanted to escape the influence of the Wahhabi preachers from Saudi Arabia. They took over her hometown and convinced local girls to become suicide bombers. Unable to find a good job after failing her university entrance exams, Dinara turned to prostitution. She had not touched her Koran since she entered the world’s oldest profession, afraid Allah would never forgive her.
Through his research and his front-row seat to the manufacture and consumption of Russian entertainment, Pomerantsev realizes the game the Kremlin is playing. More totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union closely controlled their propaganda, forbade criticism, and failed to laugh at humor. Putin’s New Russia has transformed Juvenal’s bread and circuses from a lament into an art form. “The new Kremlin actively encourages people to have a laugh at its expense.”
Deconstructing the Kremlin Matrix
Pomerantsev also produced the story of thirty-something executive Yana Yakovleva. She was arrested by Russia’s drug enforcement agency (FDCS) for selling the chemical cleaning agent diethyl ether. Despite having a license for its importation and sale, FDCS officials charged her with distributing illegal narcotics.
“Black is white and white is black. There is no reality. Whatever they say is reality,” Pomerantsev writes.
Yakovleva then spent seven months in jail, awaiting trial, trying to understand why she was arrested for selling something she had been legally selling for years.
As Pomerantsev explains, Yakovleva was caught in a Machiavellian political trap set by former KGB officer and now head of the FDCS, Viktor Cherkesov, to break the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. He was upset Putin did not make him head of the FSB and wanted to prove his rival, FSB head Nikolai Patrushev, was a weak link.
Yakovleva ignored multiple attorneys’ advice to pay a million-dollar bribe, refusing to believe she had done anything wrong. She eventually won her trial and now leads campaigns against corruption and bribery.
In Russia, black is white and white is black. Reality is whatever those in power say is reality.
Pomerantsev admires her strength and perseverance but fears she is the exception, not the rule. After all, 99 percent of defendants are found guilty at Russian trials. And when he airs the story on Ostankino, Pomerantsev is forced to cut “the high-level political stuff,” including Putin, Cherkesov, and Patrushev, basically shielding the truth from Russian eyes.
Delirium: Any Means to Escape
Kazakh-Russian supermodel Ruslana Korshunova made world headlines when she died in June 2008 after falling from the ninth-floor balcony of her Manhattan apartment. Authorities called it a suicide, but her mother refused to believe as much. Pomerantsev theorizes her death was related to her involvement in the Rose of the World.
Supermodel Ruslana Korshunova was nicknamed the Russian Rapunzel for her flowing blonde hair and spellbinding eyes. Pomerantsev describes them as “large and wolf blue, the light of her Siberian ancestry.” She made world headlines when she died in June 2008 after falling from the ninth-floor balcony of her Manhattan apartment.
Modeled after Lifespring—whose methods caused mental damage in their participants and in 1980 went bankrupt after being sued—Rose of the World has been denounced as a cult and encourages participants to share their worst experiences and recall repressed memories. After three months of training sessions, Korshunova left Rose of the World. A few months later, she was found dead.
Ukrainian model Anastasia Drozdova also attended the training sessions with Korshunova. She killed herself under similar circumstances in 2009.
Pomerantsev himself investigated Korshunova’s death. He includes it—along with the other tragedies about strippers, gold diggers, and prostitution—in his book to illustrate how desperate Russians are to escape, to find life and meaning in a nation without either.
“Look at these girl, they’re all lost,” he quotes former model and psychologist Elena Obukhova.
Meet the Russians
Pomerantsev closes with the story of a $5.8 billion lawsuit over ownership of an oil company between Russian oligarchs Boris “Godfather of the Kremlin” Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.
The suit was less about money and more about power. After all, Berezovsky took credit on his own Facebook page “for bringing the president to power…for destroying freedom and speech and democratic values.” He understood how television could bring men to power. He created the “fabricated documentary.” He invented barely credible scandals to topple Vladimir Putin’s opponents. He “invented the fake political parties, television puppet constructs, shells without any policy whose point was to prop up the president.”
He became a victim of the very people he elevated, the very entities he created. His own channel, Ostankino, “cast him as an eternal bogeyman…blaming him for everything from sponsoring terrorism to political assassinations.” He created the Russian system and molded [Putin] before being exiled by his own creation.”
Berezovsky’s confession was lost on the English judge presiding over the suit, who found the progenitor of modern Russia “an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness,” who, like so many Russians, regards “truth as a transitory, flexible concept…to be molded to suit his current purposes.”
The trial cost Berezovksy everything. Legal fees alone totaled $100 million. Six months later and rumored to be destitute, he sold an Andy Warhol silk-screen print of Red Lenin for $202,000. Three days after that, following what has become a common theme in the country with the world’s third-highest suicide rate (former Soviet states Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Latvia also top the list), Berezovsky hung himself in the bathroom of his ex-wife’s Ascot mansion.
Though the master is dead, his teachings live on. “Make, steal, siphon your money off in Russia. Stash it in New York, Paris, Geneva, and especially London.” Berezovsky’s apprentices took his lessons to heart.
Abramovich is Russia’s eleventh richest person, Israel’s first, and between 2000 and 2008 served as governor of Chukotka, the Russian province opposite Alaska on the Bering Sea.
Vladimir Putin rose from obscurity to the presidency in a few short months. He then became prime minister, then president again. As the head of state, he has replaced Berezovksy as Russia’s godfather.
Godfather of Russia
Putin purged Russia of its Boris Yeltsin-era oligarchs, those men who got rich helping Russia transition from a command to a market economy. Those remaining had brokered deals with Putin and his inner circle, trading political allegiance for economic favors.
At the same time, the mafia dons running protection rackets in towns and cities across Russia have been replaced by equally violent, immoral friends of Putin.
Russian defector and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko accused the FSB of staging apartment bombings and other terrorist attacks to bring Putin to power. He accused Putin himself of ordering the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Within a month of the accusations, Litvinenko was hospitalized and died from poisoning by radioactive polonium. Investigators found he was murdered by the FSB. His death was likely approved, if not ordered by Putin.
Under Putin, Russia backed a rights-violating government in Syria and invaded Ukraine. His regime granted asylum to American political dissident qua traitor Edward Snowden. Many say Putin’s cronies meddled in the 2016 election, placing a pro-Putin president in the White House.
In effect, Putin is the master of Russia’s own puppet show, giving its citizens just enough cord to let them think, act, and speak as they want without ever questioning what’s going on behind the curtain. He lets the press mock his government, his tough-guy public image, his nation and its culture, provided they only tell half the truth. Like some Orwellian propagandist, Putin and his Kremlin allies “switch messages at will,” allying themselves with European right-wing nationalists to ridicule the EU, with the far left to condemn US hegemony. He is whoever Russia needs him to be.
Russia Has Become a Mafia State
Anarchists
often compare
the state to a mafia, a crime syndicate that demands your money in
exchange for your protection and your life. For
this, we are laughed at; our observations are dismissed as the jaded
perspectives of puerile,
tinfoil-wearing psychopaths struggling with modernity.
Yet twenty-first-century Russia, Litvinenko observed, is a mafia state. Pomerantsev agrees, painting a surreal image of a land where oligarchs and dons have filled the post-Soviet political void, where postmodernism has become the unofficial state religion: Truth is transitory and mutable; it is whatever those in power say it is. Like those woken from the Matrix, nothing is true and everything is possible.
Editor’s Note: This is my first review for the new Anarchist’s Bookshelf series. I read author’s against authority you don’t have to (but you can if you want).
Even though 2019 will seem just as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will not just survive; we will be better off by its end.
Many people, myself
included, wished good riddance on 2018.
Yet, with 2019 still emerging from the neonatal intensive care unit, pundits and economists are already predicting doom and gloom. Trump’s trade war is expected to slow the U.S. gross domestic product through 2021. Inflation is expected to rise.
Of course, all
economists are notoriously bad at forecasting recessions—and they
have been for centuries.
Intellectuals have mostly been wrong about the future
English cleric turned soothsayer Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 we would never produce enough food to feed a geometrically growing population. Limited food supplies would lead to society’s ruin. Today, Earth is home to more than 7 billion human beings. Farms worldwide produce over a quadrillion kilocalories—enough food to feed 10 billion people.
Looking at what he
considered the capitalist exploitation of labor, Karl Marx prophesied
the proletarian revolution and the coming of a communist utopia.
Though his fervent disciples continue to insist on his accuracy—and
continue to wait for a non-totalitarian version of their utopia—most
intellectuals agree he was dead wrong.
His theory of exploitation was disproven in theory in the nineteenth
century by Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk and
in reality in the twentieth century by the survival of capitalist
institutions. Regimes based on his ideas fell as fast as they rose
and killed 100 million people.
Contemporary cynics operate largely on Malthusian and Marxist ideas.
As Todd Buccholz explains in New Ideas from Dead Economists, alt-right talkingheads stomping their feet for border walls and trade tariffs are the intellectual descendants of Malthus. So too are environmentalists who year after year change their predictions of when humankind will eventually destroy ourselves and our Earth.
Today’s progressive clamoring about an unjust world run by greedy white, male sexual deviants is yesterday’s Bolshevik bitching about a bourgeois society ripe for revolution. Trump supporters combating cultural Marxism with their own brand of identity politics are merely buying into the Marxist narrative that capitalism is a zero-sum game.
Todd G. Buccholz makes the history of economic thought accessible, useful, and fun. He reminds us ideas, even bad ones, rarely die; they adapt. No doubt intellectuals will try to ruin your 2019 by resurrecting Malthus and Marx’s thoughts.
Lessons from trying to predict the future
The lessons from Malthus, from Marx, and from your resident Facebook doomsayers are:
Predicting the
future is fraught with peril. Controlling the future is impossible.
Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.
Utopias cannot be planned and rushed. Let progress unfold in its own time.
The world is never as bad as those in power would have you believe. Violence, as Steven Pinker demonstrates, is the lowest its ever been. Europe has not seen war since 1945. Per capita income between 1960 and 2016 rose 183 percent throughout the world. Less than 10.7 percent now live in poverty, down from 42.2 percent in 1981. Never in our history have humans expected to live so long.
Don’t blame your current misfortune on the sitting president, on Congress, on the system, on the economy.
The president is a power-obsessed egomaniac stuck in Freud’s phallic stage who prides himself on his encounters with models and porn stars. He will be gone in a few years.
Congress is so out of touch with twenty-first-century reality they don’t understand how Facebook works. Humor columnist Dave Barry called the senators investigating Facebook’s role in their re-elections the “Senate Committee of Aging Senators Who Cannot Operate Their Own Cell Phones Without the Assistance of Minions.”
Economics are the study of human choice. Until Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, or some senate committee has you starving in a locked cell, you control most of your choices, however constrained. You are the author of your own story. You own yourself.
Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. Don’t be these people. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.
Humans have steered our course upward for centuries. Even though 2019 will seem as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will survive; we will be better off by its end. The story of humankind has a happy ending. So too will 2019.
Wine is one of the most peculiar, particular substances ever invented by humans. Try as winemakers do to control and perfect it, so much of its production is beyond their control: Grapes are as finicky as plants come. Weather is unpredictable. Soil and geography exist independently of humans and where we choose to work and live.
And yet, by growing simple grapes in some of the most inhospitable soils in some of the most unforgiving places on Earth, we create the most complex, most beautiful beverages.
Priorat is made from the otherwise unimpressive garnacha grapes. But when grown in windy, semi-arid conditions in shallow, nutrient-poor soils in the Catalonian foothills, garnacha must develop deep roots to find water and nutrients. The result is invigorating wines with rich cocoa, raspberry, and tobacco aromas that rival the best in the world.
Similarly, as humans, we stress. We toil. We often work against ourselves and against each other. We must resolve issues given to us by families we never chose. We must yield to authority we often do not agree with or choose. We must invent tools and means to overcome nature. We often lose.
Like wine, the best humanity has to offer is often born of and must learn to overcome chaos.
Yet, like wine, sometimes the greatest among us survive the worst conditions. These men and woman beat the odds so often stacked against them. They write the works of literature that last the ages. They compose the symphonies and sonatas humankind will listen to centuries in the future. They invent the most indispensable tools. They change how we live. They enrich our lives. Like the world’s finest wines, we revere them. We remember them. The best humanity has to create and to offer is often born of chaos.
Tonight, my girlfriend and I watched Julie & Julia. The movie is based on Julie Powell’s year blogging and cooking her way through Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. At the beginning of the film, Powell’s blog is slow. Her mother is her only commentator and reader. Worse, her mother discourages her.
I reflect on my own blog: seventeen weeks, twenty posts, 339 views, two comments from friends. Unlike Powell, my parents have encouraged. (My mom actually recommended I watch the film and got me Julia Child’s autobiography for Christmas last year.) Like Powell, so too has my girlfriend and my good friends.
All the same, running a blog is tough. Updating it is tedious and time consuming—especially when I, like Powell, have a day job. Readers are scarce. Rewards are few.
Is there anybody out there?
I often feel like Powell, asking myself, is it worth it? Will I ever catch a break, develop a regular enough readership? My words enter the digital black hole we call cyberspace, where little is truly seen but every thought, every letter, every phrase, every photo, for better or worse, becomes immortal. I, like Roger Waters, ask, “Is There Anybody Out There?”
I remind myself why I write this: Blogging, for me, is as much about expressing my ideas and promoting my novels as it is a series of therapeutic exercises for accepting my life as an autoimmune patient and a political iconoclast.
Blogging in the Age of Information Overload
Today marks exactly four months since I started this blog. I’m nowhere near ready to give up.
But times have changed since Powell blogged in 2002. People have never been so connected and consumed so much information. Americans alone digest 33 gigabytes of media every day. One cannot be just another Information Age culinary dropout or just another Web 2.0 desk-chair pundit.
What, then, must a man to do stand out in an age of narcissism? What can he do to bring order when so much of the world and so many people’s lives (including his own) seem to be chaos?
This weekend, I had the privilege of watching Five Finger Death Punch cover The Offspring’s “Gone Away” here in Phoenix. Three months ago, I watched Dexter Holland play the piano version of his own song from almost the same spot in the same venue.
Both singers paid tribute to friends they lost years ago. Before his version, Five Finger frontman Ivan Moody discussed his struggle with alcoholism and recent sobriety. He then asked the audience if they knew how much time they had left in life.
I turned to my friend and told him I did not want to think about that. The honest answer—for most of us, but especially me—is I don’t know.
As a writer and guitarist struggling with dermatomyositis, songs like “Gone Away” almost make me cry these days. They remind me, as Moody reminded us, of life’s transience and fragility.
Under the auspices of truth, harmony, and justice, in my novel, When Love Speaks, the government threatens to shut down any publisher or broadcaster who will not censor their own for printing or airing anti-establishment rhetoric. If this sounds familiar, it’s because, as Glen Greenwald tells us, that’s exactly what the Israeli and US governments are doing to Facebook.
US senators call for laws that would ruin the internet
Irish journalist Danielle Ryan also reports US Senator Chris Murphy tweeted that hate-speech instigators like Alex Jones use sites like Facebook to “tear our nation apart.” He called on tech companies to “do more” than take down controversial websites, adding that democracy’s very survival depends on privately led censorship.
Ryan warns us Alex Jones may be among the first, but he won’t be the last. His ban is about normalizing internet censorship and controlling truth.
A leaked memo drafted by US Senator Mark Warner, Ryan adds, proposes regulating social media. Warner wants to protect consumers by forcing Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and others to verify identities and locations of accounts, to do more to determine which accounts are “inauthentic,” and to “label” bot accounts.
Worse, in a proposal only a nonpracticing Harvard lawyer could devise, he wants to make social media platforms liable for state-law torts (defamation, false light, public disclosure of private facts). Under Warner’s proposed law, if Alex Jones libels Hillary Clinton in a YouTube video, then Clinton could sue YouTube and its parent company, Alphabet, for damages.
Such a law would ruin the internet. It would make platforms and content providers legally and financially responsible for anything anyone says or does using their services. Courts would be clogged with disgruntled corporations suing YouTube for negative product reviews. Pissed-off parents would sue Facebook for high-school rumors. Politicians would sue Apple for dishonest podcasts. Every dollar these companies make would be spent litigating. Even if they won every case, those kinds of operating costs would finish YouTube and Facebook. Competing platforms would never stand a chance.
Using Facebook to Censor controversial content
Facebook and YouTube do not have to provide contemptible trolls like Alex Jones a platform. Tolerating free speech is not the same as the right to a microphone.
But one cannot help but wonder if the government is forcing Facebook to do its dirty work. How else does one explain Mark Zuckerberg’s change of heart?
On July 18, 2018, Facebook’s CEO defended allowing InfoWars and Holocaust deniers on his platform. He said remained committed to keeping Facebook an open platform.
“As abhorrent as some of this content can be,” Zuckerberg said in his July interview, “I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.”
Barely a week later, Facebook banned InfoWars and Alex Jones. A company spokesperson told journalists that Jones and InfoWars violated their terms and conditions. In other words, Facebook banned both for hate speech—a term so baffling, convoluted, and presumptive that neither Zuckerberg nor the US Supreme Court can agree on its definition.
The First Amendment keeps the American government from censoring its citizens. But if Facebook won’t stand up for its own rights, how can we expect them to support ours? Has Zuckerberg become the establishment’s stooge?
A single week of news could do more to sell my books than a decade of marketing to family, friends, and anyone who will listen.
Click here to buy the Kindle version of When Loves Speaks. Click here to buy the printed version.
This week, a pair of Bostonian architects have come to the defense of brutalism while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been censored by Facebook, YouTube, and Apple on the grounds that he incites violence and hate. My first novel’s themes have come to life.
Alessandra Burley and the politics of architecture
When Love Speaks is a romance between an architect and an opinion columnist. The female protagonist, named Alessandra Burley, works to restore and rebuild century-old homes along Colorado’s Front Range. She loves architecture that glorifies the best of humanity and dislikes the abstract, inhuman appearance of modernism. She would agree with Donald Trump on one thing: Brutalist architecture is ugly.
The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC, embodies the underlying ideological message behind brutalism: Your no longer belong to yourself. You are no more your own man (or woman).
Brutalism evolved in post-World War II Europe from forms created by the Swiss modernist Le Corbusier. Steel wasn’t widely available following Europe’s costliest war, so architects and engineers built structures from concrete. The movement, explains Mark Pasnik, is about an ethic rather than an aesthetic: Be honest about your materials, show them for what they are.
The movement caught on in the 1960s and 1970s and represents what Alessandra Burley sees as the architectural antithesis of human decency and liberty: Function over form, matter over mind; the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Brutalism’s proponents hardly disagree. Pasnik and Chris Grimely state the movement “became synonymous with the modern international bureaucratic order” (it’s all over Washington, DC). They write:
“Concrete buildings recall a time when our country invested in the civic realm [that is, when government elites invested in themselves], when government could be a positive caretaker of its most vulnerable people [when communism was most popular], when the nation could sincerely express collective aspirations and openness through monumental structures [when people were easier to control by giving them bread and circuses].”
For men like Pasnik and Grimely—men who worship the state as though it were God and praise the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building as though it were Rome’s colosseum or Chartres’s cathedral—these are good things. To them, the individual matters not in an age where her body, mind, and soul can be crushed by a single concrete block.
As another of my characters, Argentine architect Miguel Estrada Ramírez, tells Alessandra Burley, “All architecture is a reflection of politics. All buildings demonstrate ideological goals.”
Brutalism exists to convince you your soul is dead and remind you your opinion no longer matters. Its message is clear: Get in line for your bread and embrace your government-controlled future. (But first please fill out forms GSB-1071 and GSB-1074E.)
John Cartwright and the politics of free speech
John Cartwright, the columnist in my novel, is willing to die to defend the freedoms he holds dear. He finds himself in trouble after the government passes the Brandenburg Act, a law named for the US Supreme Court case which limits speech that incites imminent violence.
But unlike Alex Jones, John Cartwright is a moral man. He would never harass Sandy Hook families. He would never spread rumors about Hillary Clinton and a pizzeria-based child sex ring. He would never interview much less vote for Donald Trump. He harbors hate only toward those who would keep men and women from living and thinking as they choose—whether they call themselves Christian democrats, communitarian republicans, libertarian paternalists, progressive liberals, constitutional monarchists, neoconservatives, or communist revolutionaries. To Cartwright, these roses by any other name still reek of power and control.
In response to Jones, free-speechers on both the right and left have canceled their gold-card memberships. Neil Macdonald of CBC News calls “the doctrine of free speech flawed” and brands Jones as a bigoted liar who “deals in viscous stupidity.” His penultimate line reads: “Alex Jones’s horrifying incitement goes too far.” Anoa Changa at the Huffington Post absurdly and inaccurately claims free speech laws and media corporations protect only white, conservative speakers. She writes: “Jones is not the hill any free speech advocate should want to die on.”
If we do not defend the rights of society’s most deplorable to speak, then soon, none of us will be able to speak.
Alex Jones is a rotten piece of anti-intellectual neofascist filth. He no more loves liberty than Cartwright does control. But if we do not defend the rights of society’s most deplorable to speak out, then soon, none of us will be able to speak out.
Toward the end of my novel, one of Alessandra Burley’s friends asks her, “But you don’t think he [John Cartwright] goes too far?”
Jones’ ban from major social media platforms again raises that question. Do you believe in freedom for the thoughts you hate? Would you place society’s vilest men on the gallows for mere words?
