Solution: a single law. Henceforth, no one may sell any stock that he or she has not owned for at least one year. You want to buy a piece of control of a business, you gotta commit to stick with it for awhile. People’s livelihoods are not game pieces. When the screaming finally begins to die down from that one, hike it up to two years…and keep hiking it. Presently the outraged stockholders will start to notice that they’re making more money. And that it’s sounder money, since it exists in a healthier economy. And that fewer people want to mug them for it. Even the rich can be made rational, with patience and a big stick.
—CDEW. This one is, admittedly, a pet cause of mine: Canonize Donald E. Westlake. As the Washington Post’s cover blurb for his newest novel The Ax wisely says, “If there were a different set of values at work in our glum society, Westlake would have won National Book Awards and Pulitzers…there would be statues of him in every municipal park.” I suggest only that this does not go far enough. If elected I would arrange, as a gesture of American/Canadian amity, to give Mr. Westlake a perpetual lifetime blank cheque on our treasury, to draw from as he sees fit for any purpose that pleases him—and I would require all Canadians to possess at least one copy of every book he has published (except Two Much, an inexplicable failure), and two copies of every novel involving John Dortmunder. Regrettably, I do not believe I could expand this program to include pseudonymous Westlake works, the “Stark”s and “Holt”s and so on; I’d like to, but even British Columbia does not have that many trees. This single plank could make Canada—indeed, the world—a noticeably better place.
—CGC. Canonize George Carlin. This one speaks for itself.
This is not meant to be a complete list of goals, by any means, but rather a first effort toward a position paper. And I think it gives you the general tenor of the party I hope to create. If enough of you rally behind me, I promise I’ll follow this through all the way. As long as I don’t have to know what the hell a “husting” is or wear a tie.
Present Imperative,
or Social Mahooha
Burning the Sambuca
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 1997
DONALD WESTLAKE WRITES hilarious novels about a thief named Dortmunder and his criminal associates. None of them is a mental giant; each is sophisticated only in the minutiae of his own professional specialty. But they all have a basic common sense that serves them far better than intelligence or education seem to serve the rest of us. In Nobody’s Perfect, for instance, Andy Kelp is bribing a cop by buying him dinner. The cop, to demonstrate how suave he is, orders a Sambuca liqueur and does the hip ritual of lighting it to roast the floating coffee bean. He glances at Kelp for his reaction. “What’s that burning?” Kelp asks. Puzzled, the cop says, “The alcohol.” Kelp looks at him. “Then why do it?” he asks. The cop blinks…and hastily blows out the Sambuca.
For me, this resonates. One of the funniest things humans can do is voluntarily cooperate in their own mugging—and lately we seem to be doing so in epidemic proportions. Conventional wisdom says the world has steadily grown more cynical and suspicious in the last half century…but the evidence I see does not support the claim. I think the more sophisticated we think we’ve become, the easier we are to fool.
I first noticed this in the seventies. At that time the most popular recreational drug had four pluses and one big minus. It was non-addictive, dirt cheap, made its users pleasant company and had zero undesirable side effects. Unfortunately, it also smelled nice—which made it too easy to bust. The drug dealers’ solution startled me. “We have a new product we think you’re going to like even better.” Tell us about it. “It’s almost as addictive as tobacco, it makes you so obnoxious even other users can’t stand you, it’s easy to counterfeit, the high lasts less than half an hour, there’s a fair chance it could kill you with normal use and it’s guaranteed to leave you uptight, impotent, constipated and bleeding from the nose.” Gee, that does sound pretty good…but I don’t know, I’m kind of attached to my stash…“Wait, you haven’t heard the best part: it costs a fortune.” Whoa, cried a generation, why didn’t you say so?
It worked, for over a decade, because no one heard Andy Kelp asking, “Then why do it?”
Soon it happened again. A man came before the nation and said, “I have an unbelievable deal. Just because you’re a special person and I like your face, you know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to let you wear my name on your ass. In big letters. Isn’t that great?” Confused, but unwilling to appear unhip, the nation said, uh, what is your name again? “What’s the difference? It’s the name of a Michael J. Fox character in a trilogy they’ll be making in a few years—who cares? The point is, I’m willing to let you be a walking sandwich sign for me—I’m going to let you make me a star!” But, uh, what’s in it for us? “Not a damn thing—plus, you get to pay twice as much for the pants! It’s called a ‘lifestyle statement.’”
Kelpless, we reached for our plastic. In a few years, we were paying heavily for the right to wear alligators on our tits, for no reason anyone has ever explained. Now all the young men seem to wear the same clown suit—excuse me, clone suit—and it’s impossible to find a private-eye novel which doesn’t compulsively list the brand names of every item of the hero’s wardrobe, and there are no cheap clothes.
Computer nerds, monitoring reports from the plague zone, realized their hour had finally come. They tested the waters with the PC: it did the jobs of typewriter and a calculator very well, and almost nothing else; required a learning curve that compared unfavorably with reactor maintenance, and typically cost, when all necessary peripherals were in hand, at least $5,000. (An early prototype, the Macintosh, failed—despite a completely unnecessary twenty percent price hike—because it did many things very well and could be mastered by a child.) UnKelped North America fell in love. Naturally most of the people who bought one rarely used either typewriter or calculator. Along came stunted parodies of 25¢ arcade games for hundreds of dollars—up front. Another bonanza. So they decided maybe we were dumb enough for the Big One…
…and trotted out the Internet.
Consider the selling points. You’ll need twice as much gear, it’ll be even harder to hook up, and no matter how diligently you study it, you’ll never get it to work consistently—it’s fundamentally buggy. You’ll need to pay a service provider more than you probably do for cable TV, and service won’t be half as reliable. Best of all, you’ll give up the last shreds of privacy you have left, deliberately laying open your most intimate secrets and your credit to anyone on earth. And what do you get for that effort, expense and risk?
An infinite heap of suspect data in total disorder.
That’s right: it’s been deliberately set up as an anarchy. You know, that system of organization that’s failed catastrophically and tragically every time it’s ever been tried? They used to say an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, and we’re determined to disprove that. We’re going to build the biggest graffiti wall the world has ever seen, and irretrievably commit all the painfully acquired wisdom of our culture to it.
And wait’ll you see how tedious it is. Turning every single page takes at least a minute—because they all contain superfluous graphics—so you can spend an hour at the simplest tasks. At three dollars an hour. (They can fix that. You can access the suspect data almost instantly—just lay out a few thousand bucks for a new computer and pay another small fortune for a direct Internet connection. To any complaint, there’s always an answer, and the answer is always, “Give me more money.”)
The scam was so successful, it blew the secret: now everybody’s doing it. A man in Seattle has convinced millions a cup of coffee so incompetently roasted it isn’t worth a quarter can, with a dime’s worth of other ingredients and the labor of a sullen teenager, become five cups of something with a foreign name (that you can’t even light) worth $3.50 a crack. People who know their lives are stunted and impoveri
shed by the telephone now pay for the right to be pestered anywhere, anytime, in high-speed traffic or at the beach. They’re lining up to buy DVD players, since the word is out that they cost a bundle, they don’t record, the special features don’t really work, movies cost twice as much and a single scratch can ruin one forever.
Perhaps it all began when, somehow, a whole generation agreed to think of their houses—their actual houses—not as homes, but as disposable poker chips in a high-stakes game…and kept on doing it, even after they realized no sum will ever compensate them for being permanently rootless gypsies, miles from everyone they love. When it seems sensible to set fire to perfectly good alcohol, you know you’re living in the Crazy Years.
The Fall-Guy Shortage
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 1997
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER civilians have begun to consciously notice the problem yet—but I can tell you that we writers are in a state approaching panic. It is our function to be the canaries in society’s coal mine, identifying problems before they affect anyone important—and what we are beginning to sense in the air is not just the end of civilization, or even the end of fiction, but the potential end of the only thing that could possibly compensate us for either: humor itself.
See if you can work it out for yourself. It’s right under your nose, really. What do civilization, fiction and humor all require to exist?
That’s right: a fall-guy.
There can be no civilization without scapegoats. Unspeakable things must be done to make a civilization flourish, unforgivable things—and somebody has to carry the can. In fiction the need is even more pressing: no matter how endearing you make your characters or settings, in every single story someone must be punished—the protagonist, if it’s Serious Literature, or the villain, if it’s Trash. And as for humor—well, it is not exaggeration to say that humor is the fall-guy, and vice-versa.
Picture that most enduring evergreen of the field: a man slipping on a banana peel. Funny? Eternally so. But now imagine the slippee is your favorite grandmother. Still funny, to be sure—but noticeably less so. Imagine it’s you. Hmmm—not very funny at all, is it? Now imagine the victim is your boss. See what I mean? Now it’s twice as funny. The more deserving the fall-guy, the riper the joke.
For us to endure as a society, we desperately need people that we all agree it is alright to hate. And these days the cupboard is damn near bare.
In a vain and reckless attempt to make ourselves more likeable, we no longer permit ourselves to hate people who speak a different tongue—or those with a different complexion, or politics, or superstitions, or habits, or any of the old stand-bys. Hell, half of us have even stopped insulting the other gender (in public)! The only large groups still fair game are fat people and white males. (Oh, bosses are still good, and politicians—but both of those tend to come under the heading of “white males,” don’t they? Besides, it’s not so much fun laughing at someone you know is probably going to have the last laugh.)
Society requires fall-guys—untouchables, on whom we can all unload our own random rage and contempt. These days witches and Jews and cripples and Gypsies and native people and people of color all have apologists—and good attorneys. We need whores (how dare they sell what is most desperately sought, at a fair price?) and queers (how dare they offer to give it away?) and welfare mothers (how dare they get stiffed for it?) and junkies (how dare they avoid the problem?) and the homeless (how dare they not die when their credit fell to zero?). This civil rights nonsense has to end somewhere.
In fiction, the problem is even worse—since so many of us writers have at one time or another been whores, queers, supported by the Canada Council, junkies or homeless. Screenwriters, teleplay writers, novelists, dramatists, political speech-writers—all of us are crying out for acceptable villains. It’s worst in the adventure field, where they need someone so universally agreed to be vile that any conceivable brutality inflicted on him by the hero will elicit applause—people we want to see now-Governor Arnold blow into chopped meat. And the supply is dwindling. Gooks won’t do anymore.
It began back in the fifties, when the TV show The Untouchables was forced to stop giving its mafiosi Italian names—and that opened the floodgates. We’re almost down to terrorists, serial killers and drug dealers, these days. And sadly, they’re all beginning to wear a little thin as literary devices. Despite our best efforts at publicizing them, there just aren’t many actual terrorists or serial killers—since both gigs require so much effort and risk, and pay so poorly. And drug dealers tend to turn up on many writers’ own Rolodexes, so it has to be crack or heroin.
But society, as always, has shown us artists the way and brought us the ideal villains just as we needed them most:
Thank God for child molesters.
Seduction of the Innocent
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 1997
PAUL SIMON ONCE SAID, “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.” I have myself seen the future writ large upon my own sidewalk.
A few years ago, that sidewalk became so damaged as to require repair. The freshly poured concrete naturally attracted graffitisti with popsicle sticks, determined to immortalize themselves. How few opportunities there are these days for a writer to have his or her work literally graven in stone! Inevitably, one of these was a young swain who wished to proclaim his undying love to the ages. His chilling masterpiece of…er…concrete poetry is located right at the foot of my walkway, where I must look at it every time I leave my home. It reads:
Now, I don’t know about you, but I decline to believe that even in this day and age, any set of parents elected to name their son “Tood.” I am forced to conclude that young Todd is unable to spell his own flippin’ name…despite having reached an age sufficiently advanced for him to find Janey intriguing. (Assuming her name is not, in fact, Jeannie or Joanie.) As I make my living from literacy, I find this sign of the times demoralizing.
I was going to argue the case that illiteracy is on the increase—but on reflection, I don’t think that’s necessary. I don’t suppose there’s a literate human alive who doubts it. Let’s move on to the more pressing questions: why is this happening, and what, if anything, can be done about it?
The late great John D. MacDonald, in an essay he wrote for the Library of Congress, put his finger on the problem: the complex code-system we call literacy—indeed, the very neural wiring that allows it—has existed for only the latest few heartbeats in the long history of human evolution. Literacy is a very hard skill to acquire, and once acquired it brings endless heartache—for the more one reads, the more one learns of life’s intimidating complexity and confusion. But anyone who can learn to grunt is bright enough to watch TV…which teaches that life is simple, and happy endings come, at thirty- and sixty-minute intervals to those whose hearts are in the right place.
Literacy made its greatest inroads when it was the best escape possible from a world defined by the narrow parameters of a family farm or a small village, the only opening onto a larger and more interesting world. But the “mind’s eye” has only been evolving for thousands of years, whereas the body’s eye has been perfected for millions of them. The mind’s eye can show you things that no Hollywood special effects department can simulate—but only at the cost of years of effort spent learning to decode ink-stains on paper. Writing still remains the unchallenged best way—indeed, nearly the only way except for mathematics—to express a complicated thought…and it seems clear that this is precisely one of its disadvantages from the consumers’ point of view. Modern humans have begun to declare, voting with their eyes, that literacy is not worth the bother.
It is tempting to blame the whole thing on the educational system. But that answer is too easy, and the only solution it suggests—shoot all the English teachers—is perhaps hasty. By and large they are probably doing the best they can with the budgets we give them.
Nor can we look to government for help. Even if a more literate elector
ate were something politicians wanted, they are simply not up to the job. I’ve given up trying to get anyone to believe this, but I swear I once saw a U.S. government subway ad that read, “Illiterate? Write for help…” and gave a box number.
Those of us who are parents, however, can do some useful work. We can con our children into reading.
I offer two stratagems.
My mother’s was, I think, artistically superior in that it required diabolical cleverness and fundamental dishonesty; it was however time- and labor-intensive. She would begin reading me a comic book—then, just as the Lone Ranger was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff, endangered-species stampede approaching, angry native peoples below…Mom would suddenly remember that she had to go sew the dishes or vacuum the cat.
By the age of six, I had taught myself to read out of pure frustration. So Mom sent me to the library with instructions to bring home a book. The librarian, God bless her, gave me a copy of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel for children, Rocket Ship Galileo…and from that day on there was never any serious danger that I would be forced to work for a living. Mr. Heinlein wrote stories so intrinsically interesting that it was worth the trouble to stop and look up the odd word I didn’t know. By age seven, I was tested as reading at the level of a college junior.
The only problem is, you cannot simply hand the child the comic book: you must read eighty percent of it to her, and then stop reading with pinpoint timing. With the best of intentions, you may not have that much time or energy to devote to the task of seducing your child.
The Crazy Years Page 11