The State of My Writing Career

Once upon a time I wrote a book. I've actually written close to fifteen manuscripts at this point in my life of varying quality and stages of completion, but only one of them ever truly saw the light of day. It was fun for a while, I could go around saying I was a published author, pretend I was famous. People even seem to have enjoyed it. I had originally intended to sell it as a series called The Academy, and it had some robots in it and some James Bond-esque characters running around assassinating bad guys and spying on people. It was fun. I had spent the better part of three years working on my book and its two sequels, and it had come to define me.

Truth be told, my only aspiration as an author was to write good, solid beach novel thrillers with a major sci-fi bent. I grew up on the adventure novels of Clive Cussler and the techno-thrillers of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They satisfied my need both for violence and savagery as well as my desire for the exotic. There's a certain lightness to the writing of a good thriller that keeps you from truly getting emotionally invested in it, thus allowing you to relax and have fun. That was what I really wanted to write about: things people thought were fun. That's a funny thing about well-laid plans: they rarely work out like you intend them to.

As it turns out, I don't write very good adventure stories. I write very emotive and psychological parables that happen to have some science fiction in them. I can point the finger of blame in many directions. There was my former professor at UNH, Alexander Parsons, who spent the second half of my college years teaching me how to be an artist. He invested a considerable amount of time and energy into helping me develop my craft, at times even at his own personal expense. Certainly he helped me to correct a lot of the flaws in my writing. I used to write incredibly shitty characters. I was very embarrassingly and publicly called out on it, and I spent the next two years in the single-minded pursuit of good characterization. There was the chip on my shoulder that I came out of college with about my writing, that led to another round of crafting, a competitive streak I've had to work hard to bleed out of me. There is a certain base level of arrogance to it, too, which I've at times struggled to contain. But all these things just will ultimately get me what I want, which is to publish a successful book, no matter how good my writing is.  More likely they'll just feed back on themselves and magnify the flaws in my writing all the more.

This is really the problem with the The Academy, and where I'm at in my writing career. I have no doubt that my writing is up to snuff. Feedback – professional and otherwise – confirms my confidence. My writing was probably good enough three years ago. I'm not only a quick worker, I'm an efficient one as well. This is not to boast or brag about it: I put a considerable amount of effort into effectively managing my writing time. In the process, I have neglected virtually everything else that a writer needs to do in order to be successful, and in effect, it's killed The Academy.

Yes, The Academy is dead. I've pulled the plug. I had finished a sequel to my published book, which has not yet been edited, and I will look at avenues of getting it out to people who are keen to find out what happens to Rebecca and company after the end of the first book. However, due to a combination of tangled copyrights, mechanical difficulties with the story itself, and the nature of the business, I am unable to pursue this story any further in the market short of self-publishing, something I'm not keen to do. For what it was worth, it was fun, and I am very close to the character of Rebecca. Rebecca helped me through the past two years as much as anyone else. I am very close to my writing, and particularly this story. Too close, as it turns out. As Jim, a friend and mentor who is himself a major award-winning published author said to me “You've gotta break up.” That's just how it goes, unfortunately.

This is not to say that the story is gone. I've got two new universes, in which I am writing novels, short stories, and novellas, one of which was directly inspired by The Academy. I would not be surprised if my audience found some material that made it my Academy books in some of my new stories, though perhaps (or even probably) in some other form. This was not an easy decision to make, but I feel that it's for the best. In keeping with the original concept behind The Academy, I am attempting to tell its successor story entirely in the short form, though hopefully in a much less serialized way than how it originally turned out.

I also do have a new series, and I think it's one with a lot of potential. I'm about two-thirds finished with the first draft of the opening novel, and I have the outlines of several short stories to follow it. These stories may or may not ultimately predate the novel in publication, but that's dependent on a lot of things beyond my control. I won't say too much about it just yet, only that it's written in the first person, the narrator is a teenager, and there are aliens and my usual dark, brooding emotive passages. I can get all excited about it, and I am, and the people that read and like my fiction should as well. But already I can see the problem staring me in the face right back again.

Herein is one of the central conundrums of my writing career: I can't not care. My writing only works when I'm very close to my characters, feeling what they feel and letting them take the lead in the story. It's a fine place to be when you're writing fiction, but a very difficult and awkward place to be when you're publishing. I didn't want to put myself through the emotional wringer in the state I was in when I finished The Academy. I played it too safe, and accepted something I probably shouldn't have. Which is not to say that I'm totally to blame here, either. My publisher completely botched the PR for my book, and at the time I was in no state to do the legwork required to get the word out. Quite frankly, I'm amazed as many people found it as they did.

That's really all right, though. I learned a lot from the experience, and I can take that and put it into my next experience. So yes, The Academy is dead. Long live The Academy. It was a good story, but it was ultimately doomed. In addition to my own errors in marketing it, there were substantial mechanical flaws.  I've learned from my mistakes. It will be reborn in some other form in the near future, the flaws corrected, though not necessarily with the same cast of characters, and given a proper chance to be marketed. In the meantime, I can't wait to tell you more about my other story, but perhaps I've said too much already. I'm in that classic fluid first draft period where details are up in the air, and I don't want to state something for the record that gets changed. But rest assured, my writing career is not dead. I needed some perspective, and I needed a break from what I'd been working on. I've gotten both now, and now I want to get back to doing what I love: writing really good fiction.

Clara the Windup Doll

Note: I'm going to be doing a series of posts about my life and my struggles with mental illness over the next few months.  Though the people I talk about are real and everything I recount in these posts actually happened, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of everyone who I write about out to protect their privacy.

Clara was a fairytale character transposed into real life: blond, sprite-like, with the body of a broken down music box dancer.  I met her on an online fetish forum in 2008, and for a few months last year, she lived with me.  Clara kept a necklace of several interlocking gears that was made for her by her ex-girlfriend in San Francisco: an affectionate reminder of what she believed she was: a windup toy.  Like with many of my friendships and relationships, this one began when she read my fiction, in this case a short story I had posted to the site.  She said she'd been a member of the forums since she was thirteen: for five years, then, as she claimed she was eighteen.  She was both astonishingly earnest about her troubled past and equally naive.  I liked her because we had so many diagnoses in common, and it made me feel like she could relate to me.  The time we knew each other consisted of the better part of a quasi-psychotic and emotionally dissociative phase in my life that corresponds to some of the sickest and most disabled I've ever been.  It was, actually, Clara herself (among others) who had suggested I apply for Disability in the first place.

I've told this story many times before, but never in writing.  Clara was, literally, a delusional drug addict who wound up costing me a lot of money.  Money, that universal solvent of human ties, was in fact what ultimately ended our friendship.  I have been quite harsh and critical of her behind closed doors in the company of close friends, perhaps unduly so, but that's not what I want to write about here.  Rather, I've come to realize, Clara's struggles are a reflection of my own.  It's those struggles that I want to talk about tonight, and I can think of no better way to view them.

People with a severe diagnosed mental illness generally fall into one of two categories, but in reality they're one in the same.  There are those who are ashamed of it and try to hide it, and those who do the opposite and celebrate it.  To the extent that she was aware of her own illness, Clara was the latter, while I was the former.  As I've come to learn, both methods are little more than a severe form of denial.  We were, at the time we knew each other, both fractured people: openly dissociating, psychotic, at times psychotically babbling incoherently.  The popular image of the mentally ill is the lunatic schizophrenic, but the reality is often more subtle.  Clara wasn't incoherent.  Her system may not have been on the level with everyone else's, but it made sense to her, and to those who were willing to learn it.  I too had a system of my own.  Like Clara, I had devised an ingenious method of escape: a fully-fledged virtual fantasy world of my own design.  I suspect that a lot of people do this, ill or not.  It's just that few of us are ever allowed to take it as far as Clara and I did. These places, and the thoughts, feelings, and people that inhabit them can lay undisturbed for years, even decades.  It is, in principle, a highly effective substitute for reality.  The catch is of course that sooner or later these sanctuaries, however elaborate or simple, do eventually collide with reality.  If and when that happens, it can be truly terrifying for everyone involved.

Last summer (the summer of 2010), I was out of my goddamn mind.  I'd walk to Prescott Park in downtown Portsmouth having visible animated coversations out loud with my alter egos.  Though no one ever seemed to notice, I spent a good many nights after the play let out in the outdoor theater bawling my eyes out as I hung over the railing that sat atop the seawall on the Piscataqua River.  Each night my dream world broke a little bit more, and each night I was dragged kicking and screaming one step closer into the real world.  I'm quite impressed I was never arrested.

I live about a mile and a half from the park.  I'd taken to going on long walks just to try and sort everything out.  It was as good a coping strategy as any.  From April to December of 2010 I spent literally half my waking hours either in the park, on the attached recreation areas of Peirce or Four Tree Island, or in transit to any of those places.  My fiancée hardly saw me, and she lived with me the whole time, too.  In contrast, Clara's strategy of choice seemed to be prescription painkillers and benzodiazepines.  As a result, she spent a lot of time sleeping.  Both our efforts were equally time-consuming.  But, in our own way, in the waking moments we had together, Clara and I were supportive of one another in a way that few others could be.  I trusted her to understand what I was going through in a way that I didn't really trust anyone else.  Most people have no idea what to do when someone else disagrees with their reality on such a profound level.  In the case of politics and religion, they become obsessed with correcting the other person, and with everything else the stimulus simply never makes it much past the input channel.  Which is why I can't truly fault Clara for her flaws -- they were my flaws too.  My only advantage over her was that I was aware my delusions weren't real.

Slowly, things seemed piece themselves back together over the summer, and this brings me to the lesson Clara taught me.  The truth of the matter is, which I learned over the course of that summer, is that there is no escape from reality, not even through death.  We exist or we don't.  I pick up a magazine or see a self-help book, and I see this all around me.  My life is equally painful and scary now as it was last year.  The only difference is that I've slowly come to accept it.

At the time, I called my massive walking/running/meditating/generally-acting-like-a-crazy-person routine self-improvement.  And maybe I learned some skills.  But the pursuit of self-improvement is ultimately no different than Clara's and my delusions, or her drug use.  I never started to get better until I accepted my weaknesses.  It's a life-long struggle that never ends.

But the reward for all the effort is a chance at real peace, something I really don't think Clara ever knew.  what else are muscle cars, gym memberships, and expensive jewelry?  Clara would make me drive her to the drug store on a nearly daily basis so she could buy new brands of blond hair dye.  Hers is only an extreme case.  Our desire for escape is only the reflection of our deep dissatisfaction with the way things are.

I try very hard day by day to accept this.  It's neither easy nor glamorous.  But, it ended my dissociations and
ended my dependence on fantasy, and let me focus on what was in front of me: a woman who deeply loves me and for whom I feel an equally deep love, the thrill of watching the sun set over Portsmouth and the Piscataqua, and even just the freedom that comes with being unburdened with keeping track of it all in my head.  In the end I discovered that that's all I need.  We have the world, and each other, as fucked up as it is.  Why would we want anything else?

Freak Out Nation

What feels like an eternity ago, I wrote a short piece on Facebook called Freak Out Nation, back when my whole blog was confined to just a few dozen of my friends who happened to comment on it.  I don't know who reads this blog now, but I feel like a lot of things happened since then, and I want to revisit it.

I think it goes without saying that I'm not terribly pleased with the state of things in both my home country of the United States and the world at large, but especially here in the U.S.  I've had a difficult life that hasn't terribly pleased me either, but eventually I came to terms with it by coming to understand it -- and myself -- and the situation is no different with society at large.  Needless to say, there are some pretty huge parts of our society that are highly dysfunctional right now, and I want to help.  Maybe this is all an exercise in futility.  It probably is.  But I can't change how I feel, and so I'm stuck.  I never really started out in life wanting to be political, but that's how it happened.  So, with that in mind, let me get straight to the point.

An hysterical woman, presumably liberal based on the haircut.

America, we need to talk about our feelings.

I'll be the first to admit, I've been part of the problem.  Passion is an all-too-human emotion.  One could even argue that it strikes right at the core of who we are as a species.  A lot of what I see around me makes me very angry.  What's to be angry about?  Lots.  According to pretty much everybody it seems to be the end of America as we know it, though the operational definitions of what exactly that means vary depending on who you ask.  Government is dysfunctional.  The media has abdicated any and all responsibility to service the public good.  The apocalypse is nigh.  Perhaps the question should rather be "What's not to be angry about?"  But if one thing has been made abundantly clear to me in the past year, it's that anger is part of the problem, not the solution.

I've arrived at the point as a blogger and an observer of human behavior where labels are starting to mean less and less to me.  The fact of the matter is, so-called liberals and conservatives are behaving in exactly the same way right now, from Glenn Beck and the Tea Party to Jon Stewart and progressives.  We're all stark-raving mad with hysteria.  For a while, because of the social dynamics, it seemed to me like this was much more of a conservative thing than a liberal one.  I was wrong.  At this point, I feel like it almost doesn't even matter who gets elected anymore.  It doesn't matter how good Democratic legislation is if they can't articulate it.  It doesn't matter how well Republicans articulate their policy as long as it's dysfunctional.

A hysterical man, who I presume is conservative because
he's wearing a tie.

There is a bizarre belief that has come to permeate American society, particularly endemic to my parent's generation, however by no means limited or exclusive to it.  It is the belief that unless one gets everything one wants exactly as one wants it, one might as well not have anything at all.  Put another way, it's all or nothing.  One side or the other will be very quick to accuse the other of this, but I have yet to find a partisan of any stripe who's willing to recognize it in themselves.  Frankly, I'm flabbergasted that it's even come to this.  For one thing, an all or nothing attitude in life is at best unrealistic, and at worst incredibly damaging and potentially even lethal.  All or nothing is an attitude of entitlement, of dashed hopes and broken expectations that guarantees disappointment.

Conservatives wanted to undo the 1960s.  They didn't get it.  Now they're freaking out.  Liberals wanted essentially a revival of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.  They didn't get that either.  Both might as well be logical fairy tales, but that hardly seems to matter.  There is still the expectation that they'll get exactly what they want.  Surprise, surprise, the politicians they elect, who come from the same pool of imperfect, flawed human beings that they do, fail to deliver upon their superhuman expectations.  Starting to sound familiar?

There is this idea in our society that our public figures, by they religious, political, or social leaders/celebrities are somehow superhuman and therefore flawless.  We elect and support ideals, represented by people.  Yet we're always both shocked and dismayed when those same leaders fail to perfectly embody the ideal.  A lot of people like to argue that it's always been this way, but I'm not so sure.  Even if it were literally true, the context in which it happens -- under the glare of the self-empowering and self-validating internet and a self-absorbed and irresponsible, dysfunctional media -- changes its meaning, and thus the results.  A society which has historically relied on its emotions in public decision-making has now been deluged by an avalanche of opinions and facts to support whatever position they desire.

That to me would seem to indicate a realignment in our we view ourselves, and thus our leaders is in store, but instead we've collectively chosen the path of short-term least resistance, which is to remain in denial and grasp at whatever we can find to support our now-challenged beliefs.  Which is not to assign blame or pass judgment -- I certainly can't say I would do any better in that position.  I only come at this from the position the lesson learned as a matter of survival.  Without motivation like that, confronting that kind of emotional vulnerability is next to impossible even in the best of circumstances.  Yet soon, millions of die-hards of all walks of life are going to have to for the reason I did: to not will be kinetic death, if not literally than figuratively.  When that finally does occur, who knows what could happen?

As this drama unfolds, I've watched something truly remarkable: the actual message of both sides has degenerated to the point of nonsense.  This happened first with the Democrats in 2009 and early last year, and it's happening now with Republicans.  The only difference is that the Republican true believers  currently have the megaphone of Fox News to create the illusion of coherence, and thus effectiveness.  Jon Stewart wonders why Democrats can't articulate the role of government anymore, it's because the message has broken down, and they haven't done themselves the courtesy of self-righteous delusion like the Republicans have.  As for the Republicans, both their policies and their message has become little more than a string of cobbled-together ideological buzzwords and concepts with little meaning  beyond the surface.  What has the progressive response been?  Panic, defensiveness, and a particularly sick strain of nihilism.  Which, by the way, was exactly what was playing out among the Republican base two years ago.

So what do we do?  For one thing, we need to calm down.  Then we need some new ideas.  So long as the Baby Boomers maintain a stranglehold on the jobs market and politics, that's not going to happen.  Which will only make my generation all the more irresponsible when it finally does take power.  The problem is not one of policy, or even really articulation.  It's purely timing.  You can have the best ideas in the world, but it matters jack shit if no one's willing to listen.  In the meantime, the truly bad people out there in this world can hijack the system almost at will, and they're doing their damnedest to do just that.

I'm not an idiot, so I know that this is, as I said in the beginning, mostly an exercise in futility.  Things will sort themselves out, eventually.  The policies we need are logical inevitabilities -- it's just a matter of when.  But I can at least take responsibility for my own part in all this.  I'm done trying to bring people down.  We have enough of that.  Let's lift each other up, again.  We can do this.  I'm not going to pretend like I can do this on my own, but at least I'll have tried.  We're all responsible for this mess, and it falls to each of us individually to do our part to clean it up.  So enough histrionics.  Enough nihilism.  Life is what you make it.  Stop worrying and go out and live.

It's all any of us can really do.

Arab Spring and the American Perception (Part 2)

Libyan rebels.  They look pretty scary, huh?

America has a problem with reactions.  It's natural: aside from a couple of Aleutian islands, our territory hasn't been conquered in living memory, and our position astride the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the preeminent global naval power means we're virtually secure from any land-based invasions for the indefinite future.  Think about it.  We were the only major participant in World War II that didn't have to rebuild.  Our cities were never bombed, and we're effectively an impenetrable island here in the North American continent.  So when American society (and thus its media and politicians) shit a collective brick over an attack on the homeland (9/11), I'm willing to be understanding.  As George Friedman at STRATFOR likes to say, Americans have a long history of underestimating, and then overestimating the power of their enemies.  It makes perfect sense.  But how much collective social and media hysteria is too much?  I don't think anyone could make a case that it's helping right now.  And the fact of the matter is, I can't get decent domestic coverage of Arab Spring from any American news outlet.  I'd like to offer my theory as to why.

Since the advent of cable television and the internet, the celebration of controversy has become a fetish of the American media.  I'm not going to sit here and pretend that sensationalism, hyperbole, and magical thinking haven't always been a part of human discourse, but as we both individually and as a society become more and more exposed (saturated, even) with information during our waking hours, their effects multiply, and our ability to make sense of it all hasn't caught up yet.  So while a literalist would argue that these forces have always existed in the same quantity to some degree or another -- and I would agree with that sentiment -- their power has increased dramatically in the past thirty years, and that in and of itself is unprecedented in the modern era.  This is both a windfall for free thought and a tremendous danger.  It's a windfall because our ability to project our ideas has increased tremendously, and that is empowering.  It's dangerous for exactly the same reason: with no ability to reason and filter the cacophony of opinions and thought, sound ideas have the same weight as really, really bad ones.  If you think I'm wrong, read any three conservative blogs Google Blog Search pulls up and tell me what you see.  (If you want to see a left-wing version, look up 'natural diets' or 'natural health'; 'natural' anything for that matter.)

Enter the 24 hour, round-the-clock television media, which for all intents and purposes has always somewhat dissonantly prided itself on thinking for the American public.  As journalists such as Robert D Kaplan and Joel Garreau have noted, journalistic objectivity is a myth; wishful thinking; a fantasy.  As I've also discovered through my own exposure to the media that the heavier a news outlet, reporter, or pundit rests on this label, the less self-aware and objective they ultimately turn out to be.  All a system like that needs is one competent and disingenuous ideologue to start lying and bending the truth in accordance with his or her beliefs, and the whole damn thing becomes fouled in a giant cascading chain reaction.  See this article, in which Fox News is so focused on opposing President Obama that they inadvertently contradict their own ideology as proof.  Want a liberal counterexample?  How about this nugget from the Huffington Post about veganism as a cure for diabetes.

Over my lifetime, I've watched the media become more and more self-absorbed and more and more self-aggrandizing about this license.  What was once a novelty has evolved into a celebration of baseless claims, overanalysis, and gladiatorial cheerleading.  Which is fine, if you want to talk about fiction or sports.  When it comes to foreign affairs and politics, this is a very big problem.  When reporting becomes about winning, you lose all perspective.  When you lose all perspective, the truth is almost irrelevant: the only way you're going to know is when the truth violently intervenes, and even then there's always denial.

So long as speculation and opinion are being packaged and sold as truth, and so long as a majority of opinion holders remain incapable of telling the difference, the American media and the public at large will be unable to perceive anything resembling a rational, reasonable reality.  Denialism will reign supreme.  This herein is my point: the United States overreacted to 9/11, and it continues to overreact to foreign affairs today.  It overreacts to politics, it overreacts to sports, celebrities, crime, and social change.  So long as we maintain this shroud that effectively prevents us from being self-aware producers and consumers of news, we will continue to be hysterical and overwrought.  That is neither a judgment nor a condemnation: it's a simple cause and effect.  Will we straighten it out?  Of course.  We're living through a completely natural transition in global history, and since American society is on the leading edge of it, we take the brunt of its full effects.  What do you think al-Qaeda is about?  At its core, it's about the same thing as the Christian Right.  Conservatism by its nature opposes change.  Contextualize that in whatever culture you want.  The greater and faster the change, the more extreme the response.

Arab spring will probably usher in a temporary, chaotic transition phase in the Middle East, until whatever new order that will arise will set in.  I don't think it will necessarily be an Islamist one when all is said and done.  I think it will return Turkey to its role as a preeminent regional and world power, and that it will probably ultimately limit Iran's power and influence on regional and world affairs.  Whether that takes place under an authoritarian Middle East, a democratic one, or some hybrid of the two remains to be seen.  That's as much as I'm willing to predict, and as much as any layperson should be willing to predict.  We'll have to see.  But one thing we don't have to do is be hysterical about it.  Whether we ultimately will or not is in our own hands.

Arab Spring and the Consequences of Democracy

This will be the first of two related posts.

Rebels in Libya are on the outskirts of Sirte, in what could be a pivotal moment in their campaign to dethrone Muammar Gaddafi.  In the meantime, popular uprisings and pro-democracy protests in the Middle East have spread even to Syria, one of the most tightly-controlled and repressive Arab states.  Other protests are ongoing in Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia.  Governments in Eygpt and Tunisia have already fallen.  Some in the media are calling this Arab Spring.  But what does that mean and what are the consequences?  And perhaps even more importantly, how are we perceiving it here in America?  I want to find out.

To start, the Mideast is undoubtedly experiencing one of its greatest upheavals since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.  Ironically, one of the results of the protest movement may be to ultimately strengthen Turkey's military and diplomatic clout in the region, as we're already seeing in Libya (see the first link in the post).   I'm not going to pretend I know what the consequences of a democratic Egypt, or Syria, or Yemen or Libya specifically are.  However, there are some general patterns to the unrest and to young democracies in general that we can use to make some rudimentary forecasts.

I see two major patterns in these uprisings.  The first has to do with where the uprisings are taking place and where they are not, and the second has to do with the consequences of the uprisings that have taken place.  First, and most importantly, it's important to remember where these protests are not taking place on a wide scale.  These countries include Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait.  As you can see on a table of the UN Human Development Index, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar rank very high on that list.  Oman and Kuwait are also relatively wealthy and stable countries. You'll note that Bahrain is also on that list, however Bahrain also contains a Shi'ite Muslim majority (whereas the ruling party is Sunni), and we've all seen the power of sectarian strife in the Muslim world in Iraq.  The pro-democracy protests in Bahrain may be a natural result of Bahrain's wealth, but the Shi'ite-Sunni factor is enough to allow me to set it aside for the sake of this particular argument.  I'll write more on it later.

Countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar however, have, over the past several decades, wisely invested oil revenue in infrastructure and education, and can now be considered "developed" countries with a very high standard of living relative to the rest of the Middle East.  While it's true that Libya has significant oil wealth, its oil revenue has largely gone to enriching Muammar Gaddhafi, his inner circle, and favored tribes, rather than in infrastructure or education.  Egypt and Tunisia are not significant oil producers.  We can also add to this list Yemen, whose oil reserves are largely depleted, and for which little to no investment in infrastructure has taken place over the past several decades.

Clearly, infrastructure and education are two major reasons for stability.  All of the countries currently facing uprisings are both economically stagnant and suffer from major unemployment problems.  Indeed, it was unemployment and the rising cost of food and other basic necessities that initially sparked the protests in Tunisia.  People want a better standard of living, and their governments have been unable to provide for them.  Geography and sectarianism may at times and in places exacerbate these sentiments as well, as it did in Libya and it seems to be doing in Syria and Bahrain.  A population without jobs, food, or shelter is always going to be a restive population.  We're seeing the natural consequence of it now.

My second point on democracy regards its consequences.  Because American democracy has facilitated a system in which a lot of wealth has been produced over a long period of time, I think there is the tendency in the American media and government to believe that democracy can "cure" the conditions that generate repressive authoritarian governments and/or anarchy.  Certainly that's a lesson that the Bush Administration learned rather harshly in Iraq.  In truth, imposing democracy has had at best mixed results worldwide.  In places like Chile and South Korea, where democracy has evolved from fiscally-minded and at times brutally repressive dictatorships, it has been rather successful.  It has also been largely successful in former communist central and eastern Europe, though at times chaotic.  It has also been successful in Turkey as well, albeit with the influence of a politically powerful armed forces.  Democracy as a system is not inherently "better" or "worse" than any other system; it all depends on the circumstances.  A nation with an educated populace poised to take advantage of a strong and robust internal infrastructure is a good place for democracy to succeed.  One thing democracy does very well is ruthlessly and mercilessly expose the health of the society that participates in it.  Indeed, a place like Egypt will need a powerful army willing and able to intervene on democracy's behalf to prevent creeping Islamism, corruption, and neo-authoritarianism.  Whether or not that's actually the case and democracy will succeed remains to be seen.  Doubly so in Libya, should the rebels eventually succeed.

It may ultimately be the case in Bahrain that the ruling party is a victim of its own success.  That remains to be seen as well, however, due to the sectarian makeup of the country.  I don't know.  It's possible we could see the Emirs of the UAE peacefully overthrown and replaced with democracies in the next few decades.  As I stated above, such an occurrence is not unprecedented, as examples in South Korea and Chile illustrate.  But it may also be that in ethnically and religiously divided countries, democracy ultimately weakens society rather than strengthening it.  Case in point, Syria and Iraq.

As unpleasant as figures like Hafez al-Assad (and his son, Bashar al-Assad) and Saddam Hussein were, we saw the effectiveness of their admittedly brutal regimes at holding their respective countries together.  A democratic Syria, like a democratic Iraq, means chaos and civil war.  Their borders were drawn artificially by the European powers following World War I with little to no regard for demographics, and the entire Mesopotamian and Syrian region is a sectarian powder keg.  As for Yemen, there are four times as many guns as people, and much of the country is ungovernable even for an authoritarian dictator like Ali Abdullah Saleh.  Democracy will only exacerbate this problem.

Hopefully this illustrates some of the nuances and complexities surrounding Arab democracy and Arab Spring.  I'm not saying it will fail or succeed -- I'm only attempting to illustrate both the circumstances that allow for it and some of its consequences.  Undoubtedly in the short term, a democratic Middle East will be a less stable one, but that instability was probably inevitable given the economic stagnation and underdeveloped infrastructure.  Ultimately, there may be little that President Obama, or David Cameron or Nicholas Sarkozy can do to influence the course of events, despite their intervention in Libya.  When I talk next about the media and our perception of these unfolding events, that will be of major consequence.  For now, though, I'll leave with what I've already written and come back tomorrow with the follow up.

Book Review (via Goodreads): George Friedman -- The Next 100 Years

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


George Friedman is a respected futurist and forecaster. I think any attempt to make any kind of concrete speculation on the scale that he does is undoubtedly going to be rife with errors, but he does a good job of contextualizing his claims, and they're not implausible. While I disagree with some of the fundamental bases of his predictions, it is nonetheless an excellent compliment to other authos on geopolitics and foreign affairs such as Robert D Kaplan. For a good companion piece, try Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau, which focuses exclusively on the technology.



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The Bad Journalism Shuffle

A journalist.  I think.

NPR is in the news again for controversial comments and behavior on the part of its staff.  A longtime public radio and television supporter, I've largely kept my comments to myself as this has unfolded.  The media in this country makes me angry, and anger usually prevents any attempt at rational discourse.  This blog is in part about peoples' perceptions of things, and in an era of mass communications and the internet, the media plays an even greater role in public discourse and opinion than it did before.  So as I ponder the arrival of fascism in the heartland (yes, I went there), I feel the time has arrived when I can no longer be silent on the sorry state of America's news media.

First off: James O'Keefe is a sociopathic slime ball who contributes nothing to society and in fact takes so much away.  Regardless of his methods, Ron Schiller's comments should really have come as no surprise.  But the issue here is larger than just public radio.  This is a matter of whether or not we want to have an objective, independent media in this country, or whether we'd all just rather have our beliefs confirmed regardless of what's really going on.  To that end, let me posit a question: why is Gawker, which is owned by Playboy, the only reliable source of American investigative journalism left, and why is a Comedian, Jon Stewart, the only reliable news man left on television?

The way I see it, the media in this country has a real problem, and the problem is money.  Let's leave Fox News and their bizarro alternate universe alone for the time being.  Their flaws are obvious, and trying to debate the obvious with somebody who does not see the obvious is like debating a brick wall -- it's a waste of everyone's time.  Everybody knows how newspapers are getting squeezed by the internet. Cable TV is largely obsolete, and on its way out.  Whatever the reason, the media is in an outright panic, and engaged in a pretty devastating Darwinian competition for its very survival.  The public attention span is about thirty seconds.  90 million American adults are functionally illiterate.  As much as we may not want it to be, circumstances have turned the industry into a zero-sum game.  And most major outlets have figured out that opinion journalism brings in advertising revenue, so that's what they run with.

So what's an inquisitive and earnest person to do in this sprawling, sticky morass of journalistic bilge?  You'd better be damn sure you know your source and what motivates them.  When Roger Ailes says in an interview "These people we're [fighting] are basically Nazis," and not apparently intended ironically, that's when you change the channel.  Even the AP, that stalwart of independent journalism, has succumbed to the crippling need for political expediency.

Generally speaking, I find that news outlets that react to a narrative, as opposed to actively cultivating a news narrative, to be more reliable than those seeking to contextualize a story themselves.  Whenever news occurs, it occurs in a specific context.  Part of the journalistic process is finding that context and presenting it to the public.  What we have now is an industry machine that manufactures its own contexts to suit its own particular point of view (something virtually no news media save for the critics and satirists themselves has escaped).  Even worse is to present said news in no context, which leaves the individual consumer to decide it for themselves -- a feedback process that has produced some of the worst excesses of rumor, speculation, and baseless claims.  We Americans have collectively lost the ability to keep up with the amount of contextualization, analysis, and synthesis required to function in today's global society.  And until I see some proof that that's changed, I simply don't trust the news consumer themselves to hold informed opinions anymore.  Go ahead and call me an elitist, but at least I'm honest.  I hold myself to these same standards as well.  The political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon calls this an ingenuity gap (and his book of the same title is an excellent read, if slightly dated).

What are we going to do about this?  I don't know.  A good place to start would be in our school systems and universities, which need to return to the curriculum of civics and mandate coursework in basic media literacy (this current emphasis on testing is fundamentally flawed, though that's for another entry).  Second, we -- all of us, liberal, conservative, young or old (but especially old) -- need to collectively chill out.  Our country and the world are changing very quickly, and I understand that scares a lot of people.  The problems I see in our society today are as psychological as they are ideological.  And of the two potential solutions, that's going to be the far tougher nut to crack.  Absent a charismatic leader or leaders who can bring us together (which of course many hoped Obama would be, but rather he turned out to be the face of this massive change), but without an objective, independent media such a figure is unlikely to arise.  So the problem thus becomes circular and feeds back on itself.

These are not easy problems, nor are they simple.  But despite it all, I still maintain there is cause for optimism.  The solutions, while difficult and complicated, are also logical inevitabilities: the system will break down unless they're implemented, and a breakdown in the system will directly lead to their implementation.  So, there is cause for hope.  What comfort that brings progressives like me in the meantime is pretty small, I admit, but then nothing is simple or easy in life, either.