What’s My Line?
Thanks for asking. When anyone does — and it isn’t often — I tell them I’m a writer. If this interests them, they almost always want to know what sort of stuff I write. Had I told them I was a garbageman, they would ask what sort of stuff I collect. But since I write about all manner of things in various modes at several venues almost every few days, I find this question hard to answer and a bit embarrassing. At least garbage men get paid.
The short answer is I’m a reality-based author of fiction and nonfiction. Not a fantasist or fabulist. Sci-fi and magical realism aren’t my thing. YA & MG neither; I have enough trouble getting into the head of my own teenager. Mostly I report what goes on in the wider world that orbits beyond my psyche, imagination, family, friends, and community. I tend to write about people I never met and will never meet except perhaps on YouTube. Real people, filtering into my fiction and populating my essays. Real events, mostly from the recent past, that when closely examined reveal unexpected connections and seamy subtexts, and I just have to tell someone. So I gather facts, interpret them, assemble an attitude, and dump pieces of my mind into one dungeon of discourse or another.
In truth, the more I dig into what powerful institutions do in our names and supposedly in our behalf, the less of it I can abide. In one way or another, all news is fake. Events are rarely as made to appear. The news we are fed often omits secret ingredients, leaving a bad taste in my mouth and cramps in my gut when I partake. It makes me want to know where what I just ate came from.
I suppose I could write about more innocuous things, like those three squirrels out back who poach on my bird-feeding station that scamper and leap 15 feet down when I catch them in the act. “Don’t hurt yourself,” I tell the rodents as they plummet. But then I think why take time to spin this slice-o-life into a clever parable when there are so many inscrutable miscreants and misdeeds out there to lay bare? So I go back to examining the residues in the media filter.
There are, you might say, many good people out there too, doing good works, expecting no recognition or recompense for their manifold ameliorations. Why not write about them? Wouldn’t it help to demonstrate that hope is possible?
Of course it could. The mighty fine Yes Magazine operates on that principle. Its stories of self-reliant grassroots folk growing their own gardens and enterprises are welcome uplifting news. I thought about writing for them. I tried to think of positive forces in my community or elsewhere whose stories I could tell. But what soon came to obsess me were the practices of NGOs, those worthy human rights outfits who aid refugees and respond to disasters and public health crises. Wondering why they somehow never quite manage to boost people out of poverty and strengthen “civil society,” I checked this, that, and other sources. Many international aid groups, it seems, are tasked with opening markets for donor countries in developing ones, depressing local economies. Some, I find elsewhere, have been infiltrated by agents of the secret state who help their leaderships think correctly and use them to cover special operations to project power while burnishing America’s image and the do-gooders’ bona fides. After sniffing around, all that seemed uplifting were my hands floating over the keyboard, paralyzed. It turns out that the aid racket is the bigger story and decided that’s what I should be telling.
I haven’t written that up, but I might. I brought it up to dramatize how my literary lodestone is constantly tugged at by the dark side. It draws me to expose nefarious machinations because, in a way, all happy stories are the same. At their core, they are all about love, and love is, well, one rapturous thing with the power to unite all living beings. While I wish there were more stories relating positive acts that build strong communities, I’m much more interested in why efforts to do good fail and, when done for wrong reasons, can even make things worse. Yes, we can overcome, but first we need to draw a bead on the forces that make it so hard for ordinary folk to prevail.
The long-running 20th-century pulp fiction and radio serial called The Shadow featured a courageous private dick, sort of a hardboiled Harry Potter who could cloak himself in invisibility. He used his power to cloud men’s minds to unmask evildoers, but never seemed tempted to use it to pull off immoral acts incognito (unlike the ethos of the invisible apparatchiks who shadow us now). Ferreting out “what evil lurks in the hearts of men” [sic] puts burdens on storytellers that rapporteurs of good news don’t face. But maybe they should try taking account of motivations and side effects, or at least report back later on how happy their story’s ending turned out to be for all involved.
There’s plenty of evil to go around. Unfortunately, it doesn’t want anyone to investigate and expose it. It’s a dirty job I’ve volunteered for, but when shit happens someone has to collect the garbage.
So I sift through events to tease out the good, the bad, and the ugly and try to tell it like it is. Mostly not here, because I sense that these pages aren’t the best setting for my brand of socialist realism. Those sorts of stories end up at CounterPunch and my blog. Here, like most of us, I’m softer-edged, more self-referential and less political. That’s my line and I’m sticking to it.
