What I Learned about Writing from Craig Johnson and Marilynne Robinson

It’s a hard day when a writer encounters two others whose books are so good that he is forced to decide never to write another word. And that day gets harder when one of those wonderful writers creates stories that, in characters, setting, and overall tenor, remind the poor writer of his own. And the second excellent writer? She writes an entirely different kind of novel so well and so intimately that the poor guy has no choice but to give up writing altogether and take ukulele lessons.

Uke Lesson

That poor writer is me, and the two great ones are Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire series (both the books and the Netflix series), and Marilynne Robinson, author of the Gilead trilogy, and most recently, Lila. It was Lila that nudged me over the edge toward the ukulele, and it was Johnson’s Walt Longmire books that first made me mutter, “I’m not writing another word.”

What is it about their writing that so affects me? To put it better, if I’m going to stay in the game and not learn the uke, what can I learn from these two very different masters? Let me start with Death Without CompanyCraig Johnson.

Johnson never departs from the story he is telling: no detours or digressions, no long soliloquies, just story. But in telling the story, he will add a phrase, or sometimes only a word, that captures a character’s enormous but almost hidden emotion, or the breathtaking beauty of a setting he barely takes time to describe. Here’s an example from Death without Company, the second Longmire book.

It’s on page three. It’s winter. Sheriff Walt Longmire has paced a path in the snow along the cemetery fence, impatiently listening to the gravedigger’s chatter. The ground being frozen, the gravedigger launches into a long riff on burial customs around the world. It’s funny, because Jules, the gravedigger, is driving Walt crazy. Underneath, though, there’s a tightening of some unspoken tension: Who died? Why is the sheriff out here pacing in the cold? What happened?

Then we read this, written in Walt’s first person point of view:

You can tell the new graves by the pristine markers and the mounds of earth. From my numerous and one-sided conversations [with Jules], I had learned that there were water lines running a patchwork under the graveyard with faucets that would be used in the spring to help soak the dirt and tamp the new ones flat, but, for now, it was as if the ground had refused to accept Vonnie Hayes. It had been almost a week since her death, and I found myself up here once a week.

When somebody like Vonnie dies you expect the world to stop, and maybe for one brief second the world does take notice. Maybe it’s not the world outside, but the world inside that’s still (pp. 2-3).

After two-and-a-half pages of near comedy tinged with premonition of something not fun, we get that paragraph describing frozen grave mounds waiting to be tamped down when the earth thaws, and then it’s “as if the ground had refused to accept Vonnie Hayes.” And before the almost Homeric power of that can sink in—the earth refusing to accept a dead woman!—Johnson brings us inside Walt Longmire, where his “world inside is still.”

Throughout his books, Johnson does that: After a long focusing on the external action (in the excerpt, the comedic chatter of Jules—remember the two joking gravediggers in Hamlet?—and the setting (the frozen mounds awaiting spring), Johnson in a short sentence or two will give us a glimpse (and often only a glimpse) into Walt Longmire’s emotional response. But not too deeply or long. “Maybe it’s not the world outside, but the world inside that’s still.” By setting things up this way, when the moment comes for Sheriff Longmire to have a profound emotional experience (and in Johnson’s novels, that moment always comes), we’ve had so many fleeting glimpses that we are as deeply moved as Walt Longmire is.

Now let’s turn to Marilynne Robinson’s Lila. Unlike the sheriff of Absaroka County, Lila is a nobody. Abandoned as a toddler and rescued by a woman drifter who taught her the life of itinerant workers, Lila eventually became a prostitute, then a homeless wanderer. Lila CoverDuring her travels, she meets and marries an old preacher in the small Iowa town of Gilead (the title of the first book in this series). They love each other in their own way, but each fears the other will find him or her unsatisfactory. The preacher, John Ames, can tell her, haltingly, of his love and need for her, but she cannot believe it will last, nor can she voice her own fear that he will learn about her past and banish her. She tells him almost nothing about herself. And the context of this agonized reticence for both is the knowledge that the old man will die long before Lila gets old. Then Lila becomes pregnant, delivers a son, and . . . that’s it. In Lilathat’s all the action there is.

All the action on the outside, that is. But inside Lila’s and John’s minds, the characters’ rich, evocative, and poignant musing and rejoicing and fearing and longing are complex—and complete—worlds in themselves. We view scenes of intense external action nearly always through Lila’s remembering and pondering them. Page after page of inner monolog carry us back to Lila’s earliest days, or show us the formative, dreadful experiences she endured, or project us out into the futures she imagines so entirely plausibly that we feel with her the same shiver of fear or despair (or occasionally, hope) that she feels about the life she imagines she will end up living.

Listen: Lila is pregnant, has spent the morning rocking and thinking and trying to understand the Book of Job, since her husband is a preacher and she wishes to understand him. It is 11 o’clock, and she’s waiting for the Reverend, as she calls him, to come home for lunch. We join her thoughts, which she will never share with John Ames, for fear he’d find her shallow:

She felt good, and the baby was moving around more than ever, elbows and knees. The old man would look into her face for sadness or weariness, and she would turn her face away, since there was no telling what he might see in it, her thoughts being what they were. She’d been thinking that folks are their bodies. And bodies can’t be trusted at all. Her own body was so strong with working, for what that was worth. She’d known from her childhood there was no use being scared of pain. She was always telling the old man, women have babies, no reason I can’t do it. But they both knew things can go wrong. That’s how it is pp. 171-172).

It’s in this stream of her consciousness (not stream of consciousness in the technique sense, but in the real-life sense, thoughts weaving together one by one into a skein of meaning) that we come to know Lila. Through her thinking about her husband, we know him too. Remember that sentence about his searching her face for a sign of sadness: Lila’s thoughts show us, more poignantly and fleetingly than any words John might say, his fragile fearful love.

After that, she thinks about dying when the baby comes, and how “here’s my body, dying on me, when I almost promised him I wouldn’t let it happen.” This makes her wonder if perhaps her concern for her husband meant that . . .

. . . she was something besides her body, but what was the good of that when she’d be gone anyway and there’d be nothing in the world that could comfort him. She guessed she really was married to him, the way she hated the thought of him grieving for her (p. 172).

We stay inside Lila’s mind (and heart) like this for long stretches throughout the novel, and I never found a moment of it dry or slow or boring. All the scenes in which action takes place are filtered and formed by her inner perceptions of them. Thought by thought, desire by desire, Lila grew on me, grew into me. All of us have been abandoned, have grown hard and scarred over, have secret escape plans and doubts about the ones who love us most. And like Lila, most of us rise up and through those to a higher place, or at least a glimpse of one. To live with Lila over the span of her life and 260 pages of Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, measured, thoughtful, and simple prose was, for me, to become alive again to all the contradictions that fill my loves and eventually are healed by them.

Read with me the closing lines, remembering that these are the musings of a woman on whom life had scraped the thickest scars and hardened the most tender heart of any deeply wounded character in literature I know.

Lila had borne a child into a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all. Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us. That peace could only be amazement, too.

Well for now there were geraniums in the windows, and an old man at the kitchen table telling his baby some rhyme he’d know forever, probably still wondering if he had managed to bring her along into that next life, if he could ever be certain of it. Almost letting himself imagine grieving for her in heaven, because not to grieve for her would mean that he was dead, after all.

Someday she would tell him what she knew (p. 260-261).

Geraniums

I imagine you can see, now, why after reading Craig Johnson and Marilynne Robinson, I wondered if I should write another word. They tell me, yes.

How I’ve Learned to Value Marketing my Books.

My second novel, Nobody’s Savior, is getting it’s final edit and proofreading, after which I’ll make the necessary last corrections and improvements, and then it will be ready to publish. Those of you who write know what comes next: getting out to sell it! In the past, marketing has been an unpleasant chore for me. Green MonarchsI much prefer sitting at my desk, gazing at the lake and the mountains outside my window and immersing myself in my fictional creations. Solo, quiet, perfect job for a part-time introvert, right? (I’m a “part-time introvert” in the sense that I score right at the mid-point of the scale of introversion-extroversion.)

Yes, but being an introvert-who-doesn’t-sell-his-books isn’t so cool. (Disclaimer: I’m retired, and have a good income, so I don’t really need to live on book sales—but recouping the costs of editing and publishing would be swell!) So over the years since my first novel, Climbing the Coliseum, came out, I’ve been learning about marketing books.

Now, learning is something I’m good at, and I learn best in one of two ways: reading and talking to people. Being a part-time introvert, I usually pick reading first. So, I’ve pored over maybe twenty-five fine volumes of book-marketing advice and theory. Those books taught me a lot, and I’m still lerning, and not just about marketing—I have come to know better the discomforts I feel about self-promotion; more on that in a moment.

Another smart step was to hire a creative marketing team in Sandpoint, ID, Keokee Creative,Keokee Creative [INSERT logo] who helped me overcome my reluctance to get involved with social media. I had a web site, and they improved it. Thanks to Chris and his team, my author platform took it up a couple of notches.

I made a huge mistake when Climbing the Coliseum first came out: failing to set up any expectations for it—no one but my wife knew the book was coming! Release day on Amazon, B&N, and other places, was like the proverbial tree falling in the empty forest—not a sound! Not a soul knew it was out! Well, I won’t make that mistake again. If you’ve liked my Facebook author page (or if you haven’t, please visit and Like it!), or my LinkedIn page (and if you haven’t been there, perhaps you’d be kind enough to go and connect with me), you’ll get notices now and then about the progress of Nobody’s Savior.

Why did I fail to build “book buzz” when I was starting out? Sheer, outright discomfort with talking about myself. When I would go into a bookstore or get in a conversation with someone, before making my pitch I’d invariably make an uncomfortable joke about “shameless self-promotion.” Though I framed it as humor, I actually did feel embarrassed to ask people to buy my book; sometimes I even hemmed and hawed rather than simply telling them it was available. AuntiesBooks logoThen, at a reading in Spokane at Auntie’s Bookstore, I had a revelation: I really liked sharing my book, my words, and my writing experience with those people. Standing in front of the little audience (five people came, including my wife Michele, two friends, and the book store events manager. In other words, I had one new fan!), I realized I was having a good time. Talking about myself! From that point on, I’ve been learning to think differently about “marketing.” Let me share how that is.

Actually, that’s the word: “Share.” I love my novels, I enjoy writing them, revising them, editing them, packaging them, and reading from them. Heck, I like looking at them on bookstore shelves and in their tidy piles beside my dresser. The truth is, I think they offer people something valuable. Less and less do I think of the transaction as a commercial one, and more and more as sharing with people something of value.

And what is that value? My novels—like those of so many authors—tell stories of psychological and investigative work among empathetic and engaging people, who grow and change through their experiences doing their work and solving their problems. From forty years as a psychologist and family therapist, I have lots of stories to build on, and I’ve learned that the work of good psychotherapy can sometimes be a lot like detective work. When I write, I keep two values in the foreground: creating sound psychological stories that are also intriguing and entertaining; and complicating them with investigation into hard-to-understand, but ultimately human, mysteries, often crimes. To support that dual structure, one main character, Ed Northrup, is a psychologist; to support the second part, sheriff’s deputy Andi Pelton (also Ed’s love) is the other main character. And I write secondary characters designed to engage readers’ empathy and emotion (both positive and negative), and sometimes to make them laugh.

So what’s the value I offer in my books? You like to see how other human beings deal with their problems, right? I think we all enjoy learning what baggage others bring to their challenges, what baser motives and what nobler instincts, what courage and what fear, what intelligence and what blindness. We like to read about what others are up against and how they deal with it, because such stories enrich us, gives us at least the pleasure of a good read and, at most, a deepened sense of our common humanity.

Reading novels like mine opens another corner of the human world to our gaze and our understanding, and I think that’s valuable in a day and age when demonizing others rather than struggling to understand them—and yes, to have sympathy with them—is too common in the public arena. So I have come to think that “marketing” activities are the activities I can engage in to share what I offer to my readers.

I hope you’ll join with me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or follow this blog and visit my web site at www.billpercybooks.com—I believe you’ll be glad you did.

See? Shameless self-promotion!

How to Write a Novel

Edited page.1

No doubt, the title is a bit grand, isn’t it? I’m not really going to tell you how to write a novel. Instead, I’m going to share with you a “progress note” about my second book, Nobody’s Savior. Those of you who’ve read the first novel, Climbing the Coliseum, will recognize the characters–Ed Northrup (the psychologist), Andi Pelton (the deputy sheriff and now Ed’s lover), Grace (Ed’s sixteen-year-old adopted daughter), Sheriff Ben Stewart, gay bartender Ted Coldry, rancher Magnus Anderssen, and assorted others. And you’ll recognize the setting, the (fictional) town of Jefferson, set in the (equally fictional) Monastery Valley in southwest Montana.

Nobody’s Savior started life, actually, as part of Climbing the Coliseum. It was a subplot about Magnus Anderssen’s mysterious psychological breakdown and Ed’s efforts to help him figure out the cause. But my editor, Lorna Lynch, pointed out what should have been obvious to me, even as a rookie: That book was too long. Way too long. Most editors and agents say a first novel should be around 80- to 90-thousand words; that first version of Climbing clocked in at 180,000! So Magnus’s story had to go: Now, it’s the backbone of Nobody’s Savior.

Unfortunately, the Magnus material, taken out of Climbing, was only 48,000 words, not really enough for a full novel. Besides, I’d fallen in love with Grace and there was nothing for Grace to do in Magnus’s story! Nor was there anything for Andi Pelton, who at the end of Climbing had taken up a more intimate relationship with Ed. As a psychologist, Ed couldn’t violate Magnus’s privacy by discussing the case with Andi, so what was she going to do?

waseca3n-3-web

Back in 2014, I read about a 17-year-old high school junior who’d been arrested in Waseca, Minnesota for amassing an arsenal of guns and bombs, with which he planned to kill as many of his fellow students as he could. Bingo! I had a job for Andi Pelton and the Sheriff’s Department! That story–of Jared Hansen (not the real plotter’s name), the good boy who turned terrorist without explanation–became the backbone of Andi’s role in the novel, and naturally, since Jared appeared to have become paranoid (again, without any obvious explanation), Ed could work with her and the other deputies to solve the case. And given Jared’s popularity at school, Grace too could weigh in, because she knew and liked Jared. Whew! The old gang rides again.

Of course, having a story to tell doesn’t amount to having a novel to sell! So since mixing the Jared story into the Magnus story, I’ve written five drafts, gotten a developmental edit, revised yet another draft, and sent the manuscript off for the final copy edit and proofreading. One more revision when it comes back, and Nobody’s Savior should be ready for me to launch and for you to read. Stay tuned, and watch this space!

 

 

Fiction Is a Lie That Tells the Truth

Once upon a time

I write fiction. What Albert Camus said about fiction—that it is “a lie through which we tell the truth”—has become almost a cliché. A quick search of Google images for that quote reveals that, either word-for-word or in slight variants, it has been said also by Dorothy Allison, Tim O’Brien, Laura Groff, Khalid Hosseini, Neil Gaimon, and Stephen King. And many others not so well known.

Maria Popova, in her blog “Brain Pickings,” has a delicious compilation of iconic writers riffing on this theme. Such luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mark Twain weigh in. Others quoted by Popova include Tom Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Wallace Stevens, and Eudora Welty.

Mark Twain’s variation on the theme is interesting: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

Mark Twain

This is an absolutely vital point for writers and readers of fiction. In my novels, because they are set in my version of the real American intermountain west and not in an alternate universe, if what I write is impossible, I have failed. The things that happen, my characters actions and reactions, must be possible in the setting I have created. Otherwise, readers will put the book down, probably forever.

At first reading, I found the second part of Twain’s idea—that truth is not obliged to stick to possibilities—hard to swallow. Can an impossible thing be, at the same time, true? I immediately thought of what the Queen says in Lewis Carroll’s marvelous novel, Through the Looking-glass:

“I can’t believe that?” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

“There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Are Mark Twain and the Queen right? Is the truth unhedged by possibilities? Dare we take as true impossible things?

In at least one sense, the answer is definitely yes. At one time, human flight was factually impossible. Yet, with time and the development of a sufficient science, human flight came true. What is impossible today may still be true at another time. Plato, you’ll recall, taught that a real thing is less real and less true that the “Idea” of that thing. To know the truth would be to know the Idea, not the real thing. An impossible thing in reality may indeed be possible in the world of Ideas.

Turning the issue on its head, what about lies? Are they, like fiction, constrained by possibilities? I would answer no. For an example, let me take a famous lie reported by Bill Moyers. On May 29, 2003, two months after invading Iraq “to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” (another lie), President George W. Bush, in an interview with Polish Television (TVP), said, “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.”

At first blush, this lie would seem to be possible—although no weapons or labs had actually been found as of May 29, 2003, perhaps in the future they would be discovered. However, in fact, there were none, anywhere in Iraq. The CIA closed its investigation into WMD in Iraq in April, 2005, finding nothing. So at the time the President spoke his lie, it was literally impossible: WMDs did not exist in Iraq.

Thus, it would seem that the lie, like the truth, is not constrained by possibility.

Lying is claiming the truth for something untrue. Strangely, that fact might lead us to condemn fiction as “lying.” Indeed, the cliché says exactly that, without censure: Fiction is a lie that tells the truth. The facts of fiction, untrue in themselves, nevertheless must be possible, and consequently, the lie that is fiction reveals a deeper truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” Or as Bruno Bettleheim wrote, discussing the psychological importance of fairy tales, “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.

If a thing is impossible, it may be true in some way or at some time, or it may be a lie. If it is possible, then it may be true, false, or fiction. And if it is fiction, the words of Tim O’Brien (interviewed by the BookReporter in 1998) apply:

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand upon those mysteries.

Before he died, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) said this about fiction:

D.F.WallaceFiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

For “loneliness,” substitute in Wallace’s saying any of the human emotions and core experiences, and you can see the deeper truth that is fiction.

Winter Holiday Lessons for a Troubled World

Scrooge

The holiday season is tormented this year. Terrorism here and abroad piles anxiety upon anxiety for many people. Racist and fear-mongering politicians capitalize on those anxieties to promote themselves. The Christmas decorations in stores and restaurants, the drone of holiday carols and songs over MUZAK systems—all seem strained, as if we were trying to deal with an ugly stain on the wall by splashing it with new paint.

Despite the fact that you and I are roughly sixteen times more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack (check it out at “Ask the Odds.com”), some people are falling all over themselves to rush us to war in the (false) name of “national security.” The politicians’ rhetoric of fear, war, bigotry, and retaliation ramps up the anxiety in the air. So much for “peace on earth, good will toward men.”

Do the legends surrounding this season, the Hanukkah story of the eight days of light and the Christmas story of the stable and the angels and shepherds, offer us any real comfort in these times? I think they might, though not the sort of comfort we usually associate with the season. It’s not a year for sentimentality. But perhaps it’s a year for some understanding, even compassion.

Forget Hanukkah’s miraculous, never-ending lamp oil. Ask instead, what were the circumstances during which that miracle took place? It was an insurrection, a revolt against the Seleucid rulers of Judea, triggered by the Seleucid decree that the Jews worship the Greek gods in their Temple in Jerusalem. MaccabeesThe rebellion was led by a farm family, Mattathias and his five sons, later called the Maccabees (after the oldest son, Judah, whose nickname was “the hammer,” which in Greek was “Maccabeus”). The rebels formed a guerilla militia of about 22,000 men. They took on a larger army and after many years of struggle, eventually won independence for Judea (which lasted around one-hundred years, until the Romans came to town).

Hanukkah celebrates that victory and the purification of the Temple in Jerusalem. But it is a story curiously similar to what is going on in our world: One group imposing their religious beliefs on another, and the other resisting violently. Looking back, we call the Maccabees “freedom fighters.” The Seleucids called them terrorists.

One lesson of Hanukkah, then, may be that naming a group or a person “terrorist” depends entirely on one’s point of view. If you are fighting the dominant power because you believe it has polluted your religion and is destroying your culture, you call yourself a freedom fighter, a maccabbee, a hammer of your enemy. On the other hand, if you belong to the dominant power and feel threatened or afraid of these maccabees, you call them terrorists.

Either name arouses enormous passion, and it’s that passion that leads to the ruthless commitment of the rebels to tear down the dominant power and the dominant power’s obsession with destroying the terrorists. The last thing either side intends is dialog. The last emotion either side feels is compassion. Is there any hope in this scenario?

Perhaps. Think about the Christmas story’s circumstances, as they are portrayed in Luke’s Gospel, the gospel most people consider somewhat historical. I’ll ignore the fact that the property tax census that forced Joseph and Mary to travel three days to Bethlehem did not happen in the years when Jesus was likely born. I’ll ignore too the fact that the Romans conducted their censuses and collected taxes at people’s homes, not at their ancestors’ birthplaces JesusMangerShepherds(the property on which the tax was assessed existed at their homes, not at their ancestors’ birthplaces). Finally, I’ll ignore the fact that to require everyone to travel to their ancestors’ birthplaces would have created chaos across the Empire. The Romans were ruthless, but they weren’t stupid. (If you want to read more about these facts, go here.)

In any case, whether in Bethlehem or Nazareth, Joseph was an artisan, probably a carpenter. At that time, as John Dominic Crossan has shown, using the work of Gerhard Lenski, artisans were probably the second-poorest groups in Judean agrarian society, one step away from homelessness. Ironically, by the time of his public preaching, Jesus had indeed become effectively homeless, an itinerant teacher.

Dean Snyder makes the point that, whereas the Magi are the stars of Matthew’s nativity story, it’s shepherds who come to see the baby. He notes (also following Lenski) that shepherds belong to the lowest class in the Roman world, the “expendable class,” too poor to even afford a home of their own. These shepherds were hired hands, living in the fields with their flocks (which belonged to wealthier farm owners).

Shepherd

In short, Jesus was born into poverty, beautifully symbolized by the story of the stable and the manger, surrounded by shepherds. But poverty and oppression by an occupying empire are two of the conditions that frequently “radicalize” young men. Keep in mind that throughout his life, Jesus was quite familiar—everyone in Judea was—with terrorist groups such as the Zealots and the Sicarii (“dagger-men”), who kept up a guerilla war against Rome for more than 70 years, using violence and assassination. There had been a revolt against Rome in Joseph and Mary’s province, Galilee, in 4 B.C.E., when Jesus most likely was a little boy. Terrorism (if you were Roman) or freedom fighters (if you were Jewish) would have been a fact of life for Jesus. However, he chose, and later preached, neither. He did not fall into the trap of name-calling (“I’m a freedom fighter,” “No, you’re a terrorist”). Instead, do you remember what he said?

You have heard it said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:43-44).

Perhaps there’s a message there for this tormented time, torn apart by fear and grief and their inevitable followers, rage and hatred. Of course, some will remind me, that’s naïve. After all, Jesus was crucified.

On Political Words

In her November 5, 2015 review of two stage adaptations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Ingrid Rowland remarks on a fascinating bit of history. She writes, “On the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy found the right words to break the news of his death to a poor, largely black audience in Indianapolis by harking back to ‘my favorite poet…Aeschylus.’”

Aeschylus

She then quotes the words of the Greek poet that Kennedy used to console his audience:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Rowland notes that “Kennedy’s words diverge slightly but tellingly from Edith Hamilton’s translation, his evident source (her third line reads ‘and in our own despite’).”

Reflecting on that, she thinks that the word-change suggests that Kennedy had long lived with those words, using them as he grappled with the sufferings and tragedies striking the Kennedy family.RFK We all know how a beloved poem or song, memorized long ago, and lovingly repeated to ourselves over the intervening years, can undergo small changes as we internalize them, making the lines our own.

But Rowland goes on to make another point. She says that it’s “unexpected, too, that a political figure would feel free to address an audience of ordinary people in the lofty language of Greek poetry rather than talking down to them with mock folksiness.” And Kennedy was in a heated presidential campaign contest with Eugene McCarthy at that moment, the campaign in which he too would soon be assassinated.

I’m fully aware that Winston Churchill reminded us that “comparisons are odious” (or as Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing says, “comparisons are odorous”), but let me take the chance and give a couple of examples of another kind of political speech.

Shakespeare's "Dogberry"
Shakespeare’s “Dogberry”

I’ll start with the woes of the health care system in the United States, which are many and serious, not least of which is the dire plight of the uninsured. There is much to be fixed in the Affordable Care Act, and honest people can disagree with its provisions. A fruitful and welcome dialog could take place between the candidates and the parties about the important issues with reforming health care. Instead, Dr. Ben Carson, speaking on the stump, offers us this:

And [Obamacare] is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.

Obamacare is “slavery in a way.” Slavery. A law that attempts to help some of the poorest and sickest members of our society is likened to slavery. What an offensive comparison, both to the Affordable Care Act and to the millions of slaves and their descendants (which include Dr. Carson) who endured that national ignominy. Does Dr. Carson realize whom he is insulting?

Unlike the depth and compassion in Kennedy’s speech—remember, he was quoting Aeschylus to a largely Black audience on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated—other candidates use attacks on minority people to advance their campaigns, especially people whose lives are perhaps the most precarious in our nation: the undocumented immigrants. Take this from Donald Trump on July 5, 2015:

What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.

Instead of speaking to immigrants from his heart (which is where Trump says his speeches come straight from), he vilifies 11 million people for a round of right-wing applause. It is as if Kennedy had, instead of quoting Aeschylus, told his Black audience not that their suffering and grief may transform to wisdom, but that Dr. King’s death proved the futility of their struggle for political, civil, and economic rights.

Perhaps I am being unfair to contrast today’s political speech with that of Robert Kennedy. But really, the level of rhetorical nonsense coming from the right has overflowed the bounds of comedy and is becoming a national tragedy, an embarrassment. Perhaps we need an Aeschylus to give voice to that.

Here’s a line that the Greek might use to do so:

It is an easy thing for one

whose foot is on the outside of calamity

to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.

– Aeschylus, Prometheus Unbound

October Light in Idaho

Photo by Marianne Love
Photo by Marianne Love

 

Here in north Idaho, the October light has been stunning, golden, filtered as if through the dusts of heaven. At times pale and soft, the light spreads a patina over the gardens and the forest. This October, the light almost appears to emerge from within the trees and the rocks and the mountains themselves rather than from the sun; it’s as if the hot, dry, fiery summer heat soaked into the material of this land and now glows softly.

 

October light

 

This morning, watching the October light, I remembered that John Gardner published a novel with that title in 1976. It tells the story of James Page, a septuagenarian living in a small town in Vermont, and his widowed sister, Sally Page Abbott, who has come to live with him. The book opens with James Page enraged at Sally’s television, so angry he fires his shotgun into the machine, nearly killing his sister of fright.

James Page, we learn, is very conservative, so conservative that he considers TV and technology demonic. He hates it. And he browbeats and torments his sister with his demands to the point that . . . well, I’ll let you read the book. I remember it as a dark book in many ways, but I also recall finding the title strangely apt. This October’s radiant light in the northern part of Idaho (and who knows, everywhere else perhaps) reminds me of Gardner’s story.

Photo by Marianne Love
Photo by Marianne Love

Gardner’s October Light is deeper than a story about a curmudgeon and his tormented sister who finally rebels. Published in 1976, it was Gardner’s bicentennial take on the American revolution—an oppressive “king”—James—and his “subject” (Sally), who first struggles to remain loyal, but in the end rebels. However, if Gardner had stopped with that, the book would merely be a modern allegory. He’s up to something more profound, and the title captures that depth just as our north Idaho October light captures something of “the dusts of heaven.” But what?

The web site “enotes.com” says this about October Light:

[T]he novel focuses on . . . the power of nature to act as a moral force and become the positive center for human life, strengthening that which is best and serving as a guide. Nature cannot accomplish this alone but needs to be mediated by art, and that art, as October Light makes explicit, must be moral art—moral fiction.

This morning, when I was absorbing the light radiating from the trees, the grasses, the rocks, from the lake stretching out in front of our house, LakePendOreille1 I could feel that power of nature in the light that welled up from within the natural world like water from a deep spring. It occurred to me that the task of moral fiction, among other things, is not to let such beauty as this morning’s light go unsung. (By the way, for a different take on “moral fiction,” read Mary Gordon’s piece in the Atlantic.) This light is as true and, brought into fiction, can be as much a source of energy as the cruelties and hidden motives and conflicts that are so important in my fiction, in any fiction. There is darkness. But there is also light.

In all the spiritual traditions I am aware of, light is everything. Think of all the hymns you’ve sung or prayers you’ve recited, sutras you’ve chanted—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, whatever—hasn’t the word “light” infused many of them? Zen master Foyan said, “[The mind’s] light penetrates everywhere and engulfs everything, so why does it not know itself?”

So what should be my song about this October light? I can’t sing as well as Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet,

But there is much beauty here,

Because there is much beauty everywhere.

That’s what the traditions are telling us: There is much beauty here in north Idaho’s October light–or wherever you are–because there is much beauty everywhere.

Remember this next time the politicians cast their dark spell over the land. Remember the October light.

 

 

Attention without feeling is only a report.

Attention without feeling?

Paying attention to the world is the bedrock of storytelling. When Elmore Leonard was asked how he could write such pitch-perfect dialog, he said, “I listen.” Fiction is not reality, but if it isn’t real, it’s wrong. Remember what Chekov said about a rifle above the mantle in chapter 1 (that it must be fired before the book ends)?

Chekov.Rifle on Mantle

If readers can’t feel the heft or see the light glinting off the barrel’s blue steel, the gun is a mere prop. Unless the characters in a story touch off some fuse of feeling in readers, creating the intimate music of empathy or fear or attraction or repulsion, the work will fail. To do that, a writer must pay attention to the sensory and emotional details of whatever in the scene is meant to light that fuse.

The poet Mary Oliver was the life partner of Molly Malone Cook, a photographer, and when Cook died (after forty years together), Mary wrote a book, Our World, MaryOliversurrounding many of Cook’s unpublished photos with her own poetic reflections on the life and love they shared. She wrote about learning to attend to the world by observing Cook’s method of taking photos, brimming with keen attention to and care for what she saw. She wrote this: “Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.”

In his book on creativity and Zen, Abbot John Daido Loori relates an experience he had while learning photography from the great photographer Minor White. DaidoLoori On pages 16 and 17, Abbot Loori describes precisely this attention-with-feeling that Mary Oliver is talking about. He is reporting Minor White’s instructions about how to photograph with utter attention and openness:

Venture into the landscape without expectations. Let your subject find you. When you approach it, you will feel resonance, a sense of recognition. If when you move away, the resonance fades, or it gets stronger when you approach, you’ll know you have found your subject. Sit with your subject and wait for your presence to be acknowledged. Don’t try to make a photograph, but let your intuition indicate the right moment to release the shutter. If, after you’ve made an exposure, you feel a sense of completion, bow and let go of the subject and your connection to it. Otherwise, continue photographing until you feel the process is complete.

         “Until you feel a sense of completion . . . until you feel the process is complete.” This sort of feeling attends both to the subject of the photograph—bow to it, honor it—but equally to oneself—feel your connection to the subject, that is, your awareness in the present moment that you have in fact formed some kind of link with your subject.

Attention and feeling for what?

What is this attention in a writer? I experience it—although I don’t consciously conjure it—when I am as alive as I can be to the inner thoughts and feelings of a character who is engaged in his or her own scene. At the same time, I find myself–again, without consciously intending it–tuned into my own emotion about the scene, and about my life. In that engagement without self-consciousness, Mary Oliver’s attention-with-feeling makes the writing shine, a wonderful moment, fading quickly. Later, I may need to rewrite or even to abandon what I wrote (“kill your darlings”). It doesn’t matter. Those moments of attention-with-feeling are their own reward. Beyond that, occasionally, they yield writing that works, no, soars; work that can be kept.

You might like an example. In an important scene in my first novel, Climbing the Coliseum, Ed Northrup (the psychologist main character) ClimbCover-252pxhas to decide whether to let fourteen-year-old Grace, abandoned by her mother, be put into the child protection system, or to care for her himself. I’d been immersed in this scene for more than an hour, struggling to figure out how Ed, wrestling with his own depression, would respond. I wrote these lines of dialog (the first speaker is the attorney who will carry out Ed’s decision, whatever it is); I’ll interpolate my own emotional response where it illustrates the point of attention-with-feeling:

The attorney poured himself a second Scotch. “We need your decision, Ed.”

“I can’t decide something this big so damn fast.”

“We’ve been talking for an hour. Grace’s mother is dying.”

“That’s not my goddamn problem, Jerry.”

[I felt a twinge of guilt at that line.]

          The attorney sipped his Scotch; over the edge of the glass, he peered at Ed. “No?” he said, then shrugged. “No, you’re right. It’s not your problem, it’s little Grace’s. She’s the one facing life in the Children’s Home.”

Ed grimaced. “Screw you, Jerry. I’m sick of—”

[Another twinge. I had the odd sensation that I was recoiling from something—something I hadn’t planned for the novel—and doing it through Ed.]

       “You’re sick of other people’s problems landing on your doorstep.” Jerry turned and gazed out the big windows at the darkening mountains. “I get that. I’m the all-purpose lawyer that everybody thinks can solve any goddamn problem they bring in the door.” He turned back to Ed. “I can’t, and I hate it.”

Ed shook his head. “Don’t try empathy bullshit on me, Jerry.”

Wham! The twinge morphed into a punch in the gut. I knew what I recoiling from: Years before, in my work as a psychologist, I’d reached a certain point where I felt overwhelmed by the needs of my clients. I’d wanted to push it all away, find some place of quiet, of no-demand. Perhaps I’d secretly wished to be belligerently selfish. But my character Ed wouldn’t be belligerent. He was conflicted, sure, just as I had been, but he was a decent man, trying his best to figure out the right thing for Grace. In other words, Ed was not me and would not express what might have been my unconscious anger. My writing was twisting him into something he wasn’t. I erased the whole scene and began it again.

Attention with feeling for the scene, but also for oneself . . .

Attention

Attention with feeling. If I’d kept writing without attention to my own emotional reaction, not only to Ed’s and Jerry’s conversation, the scene would have betrayed Ed’s character, his truest instincts. Given the larger plot, I would have derailed the story, perhaps beyond salvage.

Does this matter in our busy world?

Fictional characters are fictional, but they must be true to themselves, no less than you and I must. So go: Spend five minutes talking and listening with your beloved, with full attention with feeling, then answer whether it matters for fictional characters—and whether the people in fiction might teach us how to attend fully. Take a favorite poem and read it aloud. Gaze at a beloved painting, or behold a landscape that delights you. Do these things with your full attention and openness to the feelings they provoke in you.

Then answer whether it matters.

Political Rhetoric in an Era of Division: Republicans Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

Political Rhetoric is a Literary Form

MLK.Speaking

In this blog, I reflect on many things gathered under the rubrics of “Psyche, Story, Spirit” – the wide range of psychological, literary, and spiritual issues that concern me. To me, the rhetoric of the emerging presidential campaign, especially on the Republican side, presents quite a story, its field littered with psychological intrigue – and maybe pathological intrigue. From my conversations with people, many Americans feel disspirited when we hear or read the debate. Since my chief interest in this blog is about writing, a form of rhetoric, I’ve been reflecting on what the campaign is doing to the language of our public conversation. This in turn brings me to two exemplars of political rhetoric in eras of deep division: Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

 

Trump                                           Lincoln

The Contexts Facing Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln

First, let’s consider the fact that Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Lincoln’s approaches to political speech emerged in two politically very similar epochs. The first was the period 1846 -1865. 1846 was the year Dred Scott first sued for his freedom, and 1865 was the year of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. At that point, the bloodied nation was concluding the Civil War. Even more consequentially, the soon-to-be-reunited states needed to reconcile after three generations’ conflict over states’ rights and slavery. In March 1865, although the Confederacy was losing the war and the issue of slavery was settled, the Reconstruction loomed contentious. People both honest and cynical, on both sides of the issues, fully and loudly voiced opinions about the role of government, states’ rights, and the status of the newly freed African Americans. There was great tension in the air.

Ours, the second period, I somewhat arbitrarily date from 1980, when the “Reagan revolution” began, through the present. Now, we can observe its second generation, the Tea Party TeaPubicanParty and it’s heroes Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and the rest, promoting the politically divisive and racially controversial attitudes reminiscent of the pre- and post-Civil War era. I say the dating is arbitrary because although the Reagan revolution, bent on overturning the New Deal, achieved power in 1980, it had been brewing since the 1930s. Even in 1980, however, the debate was a conversation about ideas, not persons; it was sometimes calm, occasionally contentious, but usually civil. Reagan, for all his rhetoric (“guv’ment is the problem”), grew the government, and he collaborated with his opponents, led by Tip O’Neill, Democrat Speaker of the House.

Key Rhetorical Approaches from the Two Eras: Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Lincoln’s Speeches

Mr. Trump’s Political Rhetoric

Against this background, it is instructive to look at key rhetorical approaches from these two eras. For that comparison, I offer the rhetorical styles of Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln on the salient issues of their day. Let’s consider first a quote from Donald Trump’s website, concerning Latino immigrants to the United States:

In recent weeks, the headlines have been covered with cases of criminals who crossed our border illegally only to go on to commit horrific crimes against Americans. Most recently, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, with a long arrest record, is charged with breaking into a 64 year-old women’s home, crushing her skull and eye sockets with a hammer, raping her, and murdering her. The Police Chief in Santa Maria says the “blood trail” leads straight to Washington.

(Note: If you follow the link to the phrase “blood trail” in Mr. Trump’s statement reveals quite a different, and more complicated, story than his statement implies. I don’t have space here to go into the rhetorical sloppiness – or dishonesty – of his implication, but I will suggest that his use of the police chief’s opinions adds no rigor, but does cheapen, his arguments.)

Or consider this, from Mr. Trump’s stump speech against the Iran nuclear agreement:

“We are led by very, very stupid people.”

On his website, Mr. Trump continues, “It was amateur hour for those charged with striking this deal with Iran, demonstrating to the world, yet again, the total incompetence of our president and politicians.”

You’ll notice in all these quotes, which I think fairly represent the overall rhetorical tactics of Mr. Trump’s campaign, the approach is to attack the persons, not to discuss the issues. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, the issue for discussion is the terms, not the intellectual adequacy of the diplomats from the six major Western powers. The old-fashioned word for this is the ad hominem argument – if you cannot win debate on the issues, attack the character of your opponent.

The other Republicans offer nothing else than rehashes of Mr. Trump’s talking points, Repub.Debate which raises an interesting side question about his rhetoric: Did Mr. Trump create the talking points himself, or did he borrow someone else’s? Is he as independent as he likes to claim? Moreover, aside from personal attacks, do the Republican candidates have any ideas to offer?

In short, Mr. Trump’s (or his colleagues’) rhetoric seems designed to promote anger, division, and contempt for those who disagree with him – a tactic borrowed by Tea Partiers from many strains of radical politics before them. On other issues such as immigration and women’s health, his talking points, and those of the other candidates on the right, follow the same plan.

Mr. Lincoln’s Political Rhetoric

In contrast, let’s turn to the speech of a politician who suffered personally for opposing the very sentiments espoused by the proto-Tea Partiers of the 1850s and 1860s, a politician who exactly one month after his speech would be assassinated for it, the ultimate ad hominem argument. Abraham Lincoln, who had every reason to feel profound anger with his opponents in both the Confederacy and in his own Congress, refused to speak harshly about them in his Second Inaugural Address. Instead, he sought the common ground.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. …

Then Lincoln ended his address thus:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

“With malice toward none; with charity for all . . .”: No ad hominem appeals, no calling forth the baser emotions of anger and hatred, and indeed, a firm rejection of them as a national ideal.

Would that the Republican politicians of 2015, 150 years after their party’s first great hero, could adopt his rhetorical style. That is, would that they could accept the burden of healing our divided nation, bringing mutually wounded opponents to the table of reconciliation. Our political psyche, our national story, and our community spirit would be profoundly changed, and richly nourished.

But if they cannot manage this, can you and I?

Writers as Heroes in Dark Times

On Maria Popova’s blog, you can find an interesting story about Pablo Picasso. It describes how he stayed in Paris during the Nazi occupation, despite being urged worldwide to leave and protect himself. Ms. Popova’ writes,

Despite frequent harassment by the Gestapo, Picasso refused to leave Nazi-occupied Paris. He was forbidden from exhibiting or publishing, all of his books were banned, and even the reproduction of his work was prohibited — but he continued to make art. When the Germans outlawed bronze casting, he went on making sculptures with bronze smuggled by the French Resistance — a symbolic act which the deflated creative community saw as an emboldening beam of hope.

picasso1

During World War II, it wasn’t just Picasso who acted heroically, though apparently he was an inspiration to artists in France. There were also Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway, although Hemingway’s exploits (assembling his own private army to “liberate” the Hotel Ritz in 1944) are perhaps more comical – or pathological – than heroic. Not to forget Irène Némirovsky, who died in Auschwitz, but left us an extraordinary novel of life under the Nazi regime. And there were artists and writers and musicians throughout Europe who, if we knew their stories, would inspire us with their heroism

Nor were there heroes only during the world war. Consider also Vaclav Havel during the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the middle years of the Soviet empire, and Yegeny Semyatin under Stalin. The list of artistic heroes is just as long as the list of oppressive societies or dictators. Whether during war or during periods of ongoing oppression, artists emerge as heroes, using their art to expose the horrors and corruption of the times. Sometimes, they themselves suffer retribution. Picasso was suppressed and in constant fear of arrest. Likewise, Camus, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, and Semyatin were imprisoned by the regimes they resisted. Irène Némirovsky, and no doubt many other artists, died in Auschwitz.

What, then, about artists in our time and in our country, where such blatant oppressions and imprisonments are said not to occur? (But ask African Americans or, increasingly, Hispanics and Latinos, or even women seeking low-cost health care, about that.) Do these times call for heroism from those us who are writers? And if so, against what is that heroism to stand?

I don’t know if my own answer works for everyone, but I think we do need heroism, and that we should stand against the perversions of truth.

We in the developed countries don’t face an obvious enemy such as Nazi or Soviet occupation. But we face something for which George Orwell coined the perfect name and against which he warned us in 1984: doublespeak. For Orwell, doublespeak signified the use of language to obscure and euphemize political evil.

Doublespeak

When the military uses the phrase “collateral damage,” they distort language to obscure an evil fact: the deaths of non-combatant civilians during an operation. Although in our everyday discourse, doublespeak rescues us from crudity or unpleasantness (we say “passed on” instead of “died,” “workforce reduction” instead of “firing workers,” or “new and improved” instead of “higher-priced”), doublespeak can be and is put to more sinister uses.

I would argue that doublespeak, when used to conceal evil intentions or actions, is itself evil. And I believe that writers who take a stand against such doublespeak are heroes, even in the absence of war and occupation. By “taking a stand,” I mean two things. Writers can directly and openly unmask the doublespeak, or they can write the truth about a thing without using the doublespeak.

Political sloganeering is an insidious and invisible kind of doublespeak that writers can (and I’d say, should) stand against. The standard American political reactions to an episode of gun violence provide good examples. From the left, we always hear, “We need common-sense gun control.” From the right: “We must protect Americans’ 2nd Amendment rights.” What’s insidious about both slogans is that they cover up two ugly realities.

Common-sense Gun Control?

First, there is nothing “common-sensical” about doing background checks to prohibit the mentally ill from owning guns. The evidence is that the mentally ill as a group are no more prone to be violent than anyone else. In fact, drug and alcohol abusers are much more likely to commit gun violence than depressed or anxious people, even more than paranoid schizophrenics during actively psychotic periods. The MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study reported that non-substance abusing mentally ill people – no matter their diagnosis – were no more likely to commit violence than their non-substance abusing neighbors. In earlier (1970s) studies, psychologists thought that one category of psychotic thinking, called threat/override-control symptoms, characterized one group that is prone to violent acts. (Threat/control-override symptoms are false beliefs that someone threatens one or that someone is actively controlling one’s thoughts. These symptoms are found almost solely in paranoid schizophrenics.) But later research suggests that this may not be true, except in the presence of active substance abuse. In other words, paranoid individuals who are not abusing drugs or alcohol are no more likely to become violent than their “normal” neighbors who don’t abuse drugs or alcohol. (Remember, this is about statistical groups, not about individuals like Vester Lee Flanagan in Roanoke.)

So it would be far more meaningful to screen for active substance abuse, which is correlated with episodes of violence, than to screen for mental illness. But can you imagine having the alcohol industry team up with the NRA and the gun industry against that solution? So we hear calls for “common-sense gun control,” which is neither common-sensical nor likely to control guns. The ugly fact that the slogan conceals is that the problem is guns themselves in the hands of angry substance-abusing people, not those who are mentally ill. Another ugly fact is that the one group of mentally ill persons who commit significant gun violence are those who commit suicide. But no one issues a call for “common-sense gun control” when a person commits suicide-by-gun. We never hear about him (it’s usually him).

Our 2nd Amendment Rights?

In the second example of doublespeak, appeals to the 2nd Amendment are used to obscure the corporate interests of gun manufacturers. Worse, the phrase in the Amendment about the militias’ being “well-regulated” is invariably ignored, often by slyly referring to the clause in which it appears as a mere “preface.”

2ndAmendment

The Second Amendment was adopted in December 1791, fifteen years later than our founders’ Declaration, in July 1776, that all persons have “an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Clearly, in the founders’ politics, the lives of the citizenry, their liberty from tyranny, and their ability to pursue happiness are prior to the right to bear arms. Now, I have no doubt that many gun hobbyists derive real pleasure from the liberty to enjoy their collections. But if someone derives happiness – as distinct from feelings of safety or control – from owning an arsenal of assault rifles on the grounds that it will protect themselves and their families from a government takeover of their back yards, I would argue that such delusions of “happiness” may signal mental illness. When guns deprive citizens of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is sophistry to invoke the 2nd Amendment to trump that ugly fact.

More importantly, only five conservative Justices of the Supreme Court believed, in District of Washington vs Heller, that the 2nd Amendment intended that private individuals had the right to keep and bear arms. (And when it comes to cries that the 2nd Amendment is sacred, let’s note that, for some radical conservatives, the Constitutional amendments stop being so sacred when they accomplish political goals that the radical right-wing disdain, such as ensuring the right of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment).

And note this too: That 2008 decision, Heller, was far more limited than NRA and the 2nd Amendment zealots admit. Here is a summary of the actual decision:

[T]he Court ultimately concluded that the second amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” (id. at 592); that “central to” this right is “the inherent right of self-defense”(id. at 628); that “the home” is “where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” (id. at 628); and that, “above all other interests,” the second amendment elevates “the right of law abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home” (id. at 635). Based on this understanding, the Court held that a District of Columbia law banning handgun possession in the home violated the second amendment. Id. at 635.

Note that small phrase, “hearth and home.” What was decided in 2008, then, was that possession of handguns in the home for self-defense is allowed. Nothing in the decision applies to or implies the onslaught of state laws allowing for public and concealed carry, ownership and brandishing of semi-automatic weapons, and the like.

So what has this example got to do with the heroism required of writers?

EditedPage.1

Writers don’t hesitate to do hours of research to make sure we get even a single fact right. (I’ve spent at least four hours just researching this blog post.) I’d argue that writers, including writers of fiction, know how to search out an issue’s niggling finer points, as I’ve tried to do by way of example with two common political slogans. In this charged and volatile political environment, where politicians demonize entire groups of people, I think writers have a responsibility to search deeply into the truths or facts being obscured or concealed by political doublespeak.

Finally, let me nominate a writer who has shown heroism recently in fighting lies coming from politicians. In March of this year, Governor Paul LePage of Maine used Steven King as a whipping boy to flog his plan for eliminating the state income tax in order to lure rich retirees to Maine. He claimed that the Steven King had moved to Florida to escape the Maine income tax, implying that King did not pay income taxes in Maine. Both statements were lies, covering up an ugly agenda: Taxing the poor (through hiking the sales tax) to reward the rich (by ending the income tax).

Steven King struck back the next day. He released this Tweet:

Governor LePage is full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green. Tabby (King’s wife, Tabitha) and I pay every cent of our Maine state income taxes, and are glad to do it. We feel, as Governor LePage apparently does not, that much is owed from those to whom much has been given. We see our taxes as a way of paying back the state that has given us so much. State taxes pay for state services. There’s just no way around it. Governor LePage needs to remember there ain’t no free lunch.

         In his response, King revealed how much he’d paid in taxes in 2013 – 1.4 million dollars. He stood for truth against political doublespeak by exposing himself. I salute him.

Let’s do our part.