First Thing We Do, Let’s Change the Theme Song: The Newsroom Season 2

July 16, 2013July 18, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 4 Comments

Aaron Sorkin took his fair share of flack over Season 1 of The Newsroom. Some of it was merited, some of it was the inevitable result of riding high on an impossible sense of public anticipation. If you had The West Wing and a fresh Oscar for writing The Social Network on your CV, you’d be hard-pressed to come anywhere near meeting, let alone exceeding, those expectations. It also does not help that Sorkin is on record in several places as a hater of the Internet in a world where that’s the equivalent of proudly declaring your undying allegiance to the carrier pigeon in the face of the emergence of the telephone. It’s too bad, too, that he gave up on Twitter after a mere two messages – an ignominious third was a hacked spam fragment about some working-from-home scam. Be that as it may, it was probably just as well, as more than a few of us scribes have bemoaned how much Twitter eats into our productivity. And he’s got an entire season of television to bang out, not to mention a movie about Steve Jobs.

As an Aaron Sorkin aficionado (Sorkinado? If that term doesn’t already exist I’m trademarking it) it’s often difficult to separate the work from the man, for his is not a style that disappears easily beneath the veil of the proscenium. In terms of recent efforts, Moneyball was probably him at his lowest key, but in fairness he wasn’t the final writer on that movie. Compare him to other prominent TV showrunners – would you be able to distinguish, say, Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner’s writer’s voice in another work? With Sorkin the tropes stand out. In a way, watching a Sorkin program is a bit like television geocaching. Or, more crudely, the stuff of drinking games. “Musical theatre reference! Do a shot!” And so, as Sunday night’s “First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Lawyers” unspooled, we saw an old favorite return – the flashforward/flashback and catch-up, set in a familiar Sorkin environment, a lawyer’s hearing room. For those of you really paying attention, one of the lawyers’ names is “Gage,” and at least three prior Sorkin projects (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Social Network) feature – wait for it – lawyers named Gage. Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) finds himself in a hearing with a $1500-an-hour attorney played by the wonderful Marcia Gay Harden, over a colossal cock-up apparently committed by his NewsNight broadcast – the airing of a false story accusing the U.S. government of using nerve gas against Pakistani civilians – which will, it seems, form the main thrust of this season’s story arc. We then race back to the aftermath of Will’s Season 1-ending remark accusing the Tea Party of being the American Taliban, which has resulted in Atlantis Cable Media being shut out of Republican-led House hearings on the SOPA Internet copyright bill, much to the disgust of ACM president Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda). Changes are in store around the newsroom as well as the lovesick Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.), despondent over his failure to win over Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) asks to be reassigned to the Romney campaign bus (we’re still in mid-2011, show time), resulting in the arrival of a new producer who sets the wheels in motion for the revelation of something called Operation Genoa, which can “end presidencies” according to the TV panelist who first drops the hint. We also see the ever-hungry Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) trying to get executive producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) interested in the rumblings of something called Occupy Wall Street. And there’s the usual lightning-speed banter, reversals, repetition, what you’ve come to expect when you sign on for a Sorkinfest, with the occasional F & S bomb since it’s HBO.

My ongoing issue with The Newsroom is that I’m finding it difficult to latch onto any of the characters. I can’t even remember their full names at any given moment. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare it to The West Wing, but as an ensemble, that cast was considerably stronger than this group, who still haven’t learned how to sound like they came up with the words spilling from their mouths. Ironically, far less attention was paid to the personal lives of the Bartlet White House staff, but we still managed to get a better sense of who they were and what they stood for. The archetypes emerged fairly quickly: Sam Seaborn was the idealist, Josh Lyman was the scrapper reveling in the fight, Toby Ziegler was the conscience, and so on. By contrast, The Newsroom‘s second tier doesn’t seem to stand for or want anything, and their personal lives are deadly dull. I’m still not sure why Thomas Sadoski’s Don Keefer is even there, as Don officially abandoned NewsNight in the series premiere and Sorkin seems to be struggling to find excuses to have him hang around – and since he’s now broken up with Maggie in this episode, his raison d’etre is even less. Rather, the characters are little more than rotating mouthpieces to deliver Sorkin’s judgments. I was particularly let down to see young Neal (Scott Pilgrim reference! Drink! Okay, that’s just me…) belittle the Occupy Wall Street organizers with the same line conservative media ultimately used to discredit them, a surprising and condescending sentiment from the left-leaning writer of the “American Taliban” line and a little out of character for the wide-eyed Neal, especially when he called it America’s own Arab Spring earlier in the hour.

Similarly, the center of the show, Will McAvoy, remains a cipher. What he wants and why we should care about him remain gray. Despite his willingness to make bold statements from time to time, i.e. the sorority girl rant and his opinions on the Tea Party, he is forever sliding back into inertia and uncertainty, sitting on his balcony listening to Van Morrison and smoking joints in the middle of the night – unreachable, impenetrable, aloof. Fundamentally, one must ask, what is the worst thing that can happen to Will, or any of the people he works with: NewsNight gets cancelled and they all go home? Screwing up on The West Wing usually meant a cost in human life. On The Newsroom mistakes mean the unspeakable tragedy of lost rating points, the same flaw that doomed Studio 60. When the stakes are so low, it’s difficult to find reasons to care overmuch for these people. The only person we then find ourselves caring about is Aaron Sorkin, and what he is saying about the state of news and the delivery of information in the world, which, at its worst, is all The Newsroom is anyway. Would not a simple documentary suffice, then?

Off-screen, Sorkin made much of the revamping of the show which now includes a much larger staff of writers and consultants to assist him. One change I’m disappointed with though is the remix of the great Thomas Newman’s beautiful theme music. When you’re lucky to get music at all in most programs nowadays, a lush and lovely theme is a rare treat, and they’ve gummed this one up by remixing it to make it faster-paced and sound more like breaking news. Aaron Sorkin of all people should know that slapping on a fresh coat of paint ain’t gonna fix rotting timber, and that if one is relying on an update of the theme to draw in new viewers (a la Star Trek: Enterprise Season 3) then one is going to be sorely disappointed, not to mention the target of the wrath of folks who thought the old one was just fine. Imagine a similar choice on the part of the makers of Game of Thrones? Red Wedding anybody? Besides, one should not mess with Thomas Newman. Period. (To quote the panelist from this episode.)

I’ll stick with the show, of course, as television is always better with even a mediocre Sorkin offering than without it. But these characters need to find something to go after with real stakes attached, and soon, otherwise they, and the show with them, will continue to flail under accusations of being nothing more than a weekly lecture on how news is Doing It Wrong. We don’t want to be lectured, we want to be captivated for however long you’ve asked for our attention. Please, Aaron, this stupid basement-dwelling blogger* begs you. Learn how to captivate us again. And for the love of Gilbert and Sullivan, don’t f*** with the theme song anymore.

*For the record, I have a basement, but I do not live in it. I am unfortunately, however, a blogger. Stupid, not stupid – that decision is entirely up to you.

“How I Got A Literary Agent by Being A Passive-Aggressive, Bridge-Burning Ass”

July 13, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Author’s note: This is a (satirical) response to a gauntlet thrown down by literary agent Jessica Faust in response to a tweet I sent her. So I guess really it’s a convoluted response to myself. Anyhoo. Any resemblance between this person and myself is purely coincidental – well, there is in fact NO resemblance between this person and myself – and not at all reflective of my own opinions of literary agents, who are really quite delightful people, except for the scammers who soak up thousands of dollars in “reading fees” before changing their names and moving out of state. Those ones suck and should suffer significant chronic foot pain.

My name is Hedley Norris, and I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Well, I guess I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I realized there was serious money in it. I mean, look at that 50 Shades of Gray lady! All those millions for changing the names in some Twilight fan fiction she wrote? It seems to me that if she can do it, anyone can. I mean, I’m not really much of a reader; the last thing I pored over in detail was an Ain’t it Cool News article about the crappy special features on the director’s cut DVD of Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. But that doesn’t matter. I’m in this for the money. I figure I just need to write one successful book and I can retire to that island where the topless waitresses serve you drinks in coconut shells with little parasols sticking out of them. Sounds simple, right? Hells yeah!

First thing I needed was an idea. Vampires are hot right now, so I figured I could just glom onto that trend and bash something out in a couple of days. But it needs to be different, to stand out, so I thought, what if there were backwards vampires who actually go around injecting blood into people instead of sucking it out? Then you could do this whole allegory thing about sexually-transmitted diseases and stuff. Cool! (note to self: my friend Phil keeps telling me about a Simpsons episode I need to check out. Maybe next Thursday.) So for about two years I worked away on my story. I had a pretty solid writing regimen: open the document, stare at it for five minutes, surf YouTube cat videos for an hour, harass celebrities on Twitter for the second hour, then finally do about ten minutes of writing before bed. And one snowy December evening, as soon as I typed the final word of the first draft I started looking for publishers. I was shocked to find that NONE of those fascist, soulless corporate jackholes would even look at my manuscript. I don’t know what entitles them to think they have any business deciding what gets onto bookshelves. I mean, if they’d just take one look at my novel they’d know right away it’s a guaranteed mega-smash!

I was mentioning all this to a friend and he pointed out that most writers sign with literary agents before approaching publishers. I didn’t really like the idea – somebody getting 10% of all the money that rightfully belongs to me for what, making photocopies of my book to send out? But if the big companies weren’t going to look at me without one, I guess I didn’t really have a choice. I did some research and found that you’re supposed to write these “query letters” when you’re looking for an agent; again, I don’t see why, the book should just stand on its own. Anyway, here’s the one I wrote for mine:

To Whom It May Concern:

This is my query letter for my 223,000-word YA fantasy fiction novel, THE DARKENING DARKNESS™.

What if there were backwards vampirs who instead of sucking blood actually had to inject it into people instead? The government is really concerned about this so they put together a team of cracck secret agents to take them down. The team is led by LT. MANNY ABRAMSON, a hard-boiled former detective with nerves of steel and attitude to match. His partner is the beautiful and sexy ELIZA GOODBODY, who he used to date in high school before he was sent to the military by his parents. After three tours in Iraq and Affgaanistan he’s back to finish the job, only fighting monsters instead of enemy soldiers. Eliza still loves him but cant bring herself to tell him. There’s also three other men on the team and their equipped with the most high-tech weaponry money can buy to face this new threat.

They’re enemy is VERUSHKA KOROZOV, the beautiful and sexy head of the backwards vampires whose master plan is to inject all the world’s leaders with her blood, turning them all into zombies under her permanent control. She is assisted by her second-in-command, the beautiful and sexy ANGELA, who used to be Elizas best friend before she was turned into a backwards vampire. Now Manny has his hands full as he fights to stop the spreading plague and save the world.

In the meantime, down in Lubbock, Texas, the government sceintists who first developed the backwards vampire gene are struggling to find a cure. Through hexachromate mapping and genetic alkylating techniques, they manage to resequence the backwards vampire RNA but by accident turn it into something much worse. All of a sudden there are REGULAR vampires to deal with and when they suck the blood of the zombies created by the backwards vampires that turns them into uber-backward-regular-zompires. And the battle has just begun.

THE DARKENING DARKNESS™ is the first of a proposed 11-part series and has the potential for blockbuster movie adaptation. My writing has been called a cross between J.K. Rowling and Stephen King with touches of Dan Brown and James Patterson. I have been published in The New Yorker, The Wall Stret Journal and The New England Journal of Medicine and I come recommended by agent Lisa Jordan of Literary Treasures Agency who you know. I feel this book will appeal to fans of vampires, zombies, romantic comedies and Tom Clancy technothrillers. The entire manuscript and the outlines for the remaining 10 installments are attached to this email. I really hope you have the time to consider this book for your representation as I really admire your profile and think we would work well together. I also think this book would be of interest to Oprah Winfrey for her book club (she still does that, right?) Please respond within 24 hours so I know you’re interested.

Hopefully,

Hedley Norris

You gotta cast a wide net, so I sent it out cc’d to every agent I could find. I may have even sent it to a few real estate agents by mistake (which explains that one reply saying they didn’t want the book, but had an upscale brownstone outside of Teaneck, N.J. I might be interested in purchasing). But after two days, nothing had come back. Not a single reply. I started getting nervous. What if they had stolen my book and were going to publish it under somebody else’s name? I decided to send a follow-up just to be sure.

To Whom It May Concern (if it concerns you at all):

I sent you a query last week for my book THE DARKENING DARKENSS™ and requested a reply within 24 hours. Now you may get off on letting us aspirng authors dangle in the wind on puppet strings as we wait to hear back from you, but there’s such a thing as common courtesy and profesionalism, ever heard of it? Please respond to this email immediately or I will take necessary next steps.

Angrily,

Hedley Norris

A week went by, and then two, and two more. I was really steamed now. I just KNEW that those conniving charlatans had stolen my book. I could just see them sitting around smoking cigars on piles of money and laughing at stupid, naïve little Hedley Norris. And then this arrived in my inbox one fateful morning:

Dear Mr. Norris:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript, The Darkening Darkness. Unfortunately it is not a good fit for our agency at this time.

Good luck in your future writing endeavors.

Sincerely,

Rhianne Phillips

Thornhill McCabe Literary Agency, Inc.

I hit the roof. All this time, all that effort, all that blood and pain and sweat poured into my life’s work and all I could get in return was one stinking form rejection letter??? Well, you can darn well bet I wasn’t going to take that lying down.

Dear Miss (I’m assuming not Mrs. because God knows who would want to marry you) Phillips:

You people have got some real nerve. I suppose you think it’s funny that you can get someone’s hopes up and then crush their soul into so many fragments of peanut shells. Here I send you a GUARANTEED best-seller and you toss it aside like the wrapper from yesterday’s hamburger (which I presume you ate with extra large fries and a super-sized drink since the fact that you don’t have a picture of yourself on your website must mean your too hideous for the world.) You are a horrible, horrible person and I hope you never sleep soundly ever again knowing the many innocent people whose dreams you’ve ruined forever.

Go @#$@ yourself,

Hedley Norris

Not only that, I posted my response on my blog and spent the next couple of days bad-mouthing this Rhianne Phillips on Twitter. Every tweet, it didn’t matter; even comments on basketball found a way to include a slam against this harridan who dared call herself a literary agent: “Wow, the Knicks sucked last night. Rhianne Phillips must have been coaching.” I even started a Twitter account called @RhiannePhillipsIsEvil and used a Facebook photo of her that I found and photoshopped devil horns onto as its avatar. It got 22 followers within the first week and only 14 of them were spambots. Sure, perhaps some might consider this a bit of an overreaction, but damn, they hadn’t put two years of their lives into crafting this masterpiece only to have it dismissed in a mere 32 words that some frickin’ INTERN probably cobbled together. Man, was I bitter.

And one afternoon, this email shows up:

Dear Mr. Norris:

Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful response. Upon further consideration, I admit that I may have been hasty in my initial judgment of your manuscript. I had failed to note that it was a guaranteed bestseller, as you so adroitly pointed out, and admit that it was perhaps indeed my insecurity about my appearance that led me to the unfortunate conclusion I drew about your work’s suitability for representation by our agency.

I believe The Darkening Darkness may indeed have potential and would be happy to discuss it with you further. If you have not already secured representation elsewhere, please advise me of your interest by meeting me on your porch in five minutes.

Best regards,

Rhianne Phillips

Thornhill McCabe Literary Agency, Inc.

My reaction was akin to the opening credits of CSI: Miami: Yeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!! It worked! My merciless bullying had forced the imperious forces of literary agentdom to knuckle under! I was on my way to fame and fortune at last! I bounded to the front hall, my smile cramping my cheeks, and flung the door open to behold the glorious sight of the uniformed officer with the warrant for my arrest on charges of harassment and making threats. I’m currently doing two to three years in minimum security with no Internet access. I had to bribe a screw to get him to send this out wrapped in a towel.

Well, on the plus side, now I have the time to work on the next 10 volumes of my series, beginning with The Darkening Darkness 2: Dark Getting Darker. And guess what? I got a letter the other day from a literary agent who’s interested in shopping my autobiography once I’m released. All I need to do is send her a $1000 advance representation fee and I’m good to go! See, what they say is true – all you have to do is believe in yourself, persevere and threaten when necessary, and your dreams will someday come true. Now I gotta go as it’s my turn in the laundry and Spike tells me I owe him a pack of smokes for protection duty today. Catch you later, haters!

Hope you enjoyed that! Now it’s your turn. Can you find all the mistakes our intrepid Mr. Norris makes in his misguided quest for a literary career? (Apart from forgetting to take his meds, of course.) Let me know in the comments!

Fill in the blanks

July 11, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

Electrostatic discharge or weapon of the gods? Lightning #3, Benjamin Stäudinger, Creative Commons license.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with another writer on Twitter; it was one of those fairly inconsequential, “let’s one-up each other with wisecracks” exchanges until something relatively innocuous happened that has stuck with me since. He mentioned his dog, and I countered with a response that assumed the canine in question was a he, only to find it was in fact a she. And I wondered why my brain had made that automatic leap. Surely I was aware that dogs are manufactured in both male and female varieties, so why did I default to the presumption that this particular dog was a boy? It reminded me, not in a good way, of the old riddle that starts with a father and son being involved in a car crash. The father is killed instantly and the boy is critically injured. He’s taken to the hospital where the doctor on call looks at him and remarks, “I can’t operate on him – he’s my son” and you are supposed to be left scratching your head at the impossibility of the situation – that is, if you’re living in 1952. In 2013 you know right away that the doctor is the boy’s mother, or that the boy is the child of a same-sex couple. So, while I wasn’t going to wrack myself with guilt about misjudging the gender of somebody’s dog, it did leave me with larger questions to ponder about how we perceive the world, and the assumptions we use to make the world make sense, if only for a moment.

Human beings have an aversion to ambiguity. You see this often in the movies we flock to – stories that resolve their plots in a neat and tidy manner with a clear delineation of the good guys and the bad guys. Nuance here is not a virtue. Whereas the artier films, while revered by critics and intellectuals, leave larger audiences cold and dissatisfied, to the point of wanting their money back, as if for the investment of that piece of their lives, they feel entitled to a satisfying conclusion. Ambiguity in these cases is the front door to the house absently left wide open after you’ve left for the day, an insect bite when you don’t have any lotion to put on it and you’re miles from the pharmacy, the missing puzzle piece you swear was in the box when you opened it. We have an innate need, as Amanda Palmer reminds us, to connect the dots, and when we can’t, it bothers us. So we provide our own answers, even if they are wildly incorrect. At least they are answers, the blanks filled in to a satisfactory point for the time being. Sometimes, those answers prove more creative than the truth, and it’s possible that the aversion to ambiguity is in fact one of the greatest wellsprings to storytelling. A mystery demands examination and explanation. Life is like a series of questions on an exam that you must complete regardless of whether or not you’ve studied. Show your work for full credit.

Despite the willingness of a great majority of us to believe without question in supernatural beings directing both our collective and individual fates, that too is an example of needing an explanation for life’s mysteries, without, ironically, taking things on faith. Yet even an atheist must, at times, marvel at the sense of imagination revealed in some of these extrapolations, like the richness of the mythology of ancient Greece spinning essentially from an attempt to figure out what lightning was and why it had a tendency to appear along with thunder. If the Greeks had been okay with lightning just being there and had never bothered to question it, would we have had Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite and the great legends that gave us the Iliad, the Odyssey and so on? Would said pantheon had arisen had they been able to look up lightning on Wikipedia (or the ancient Athenian stone tablet version of same) and seen that it was “a massive electrostatic discharge between electrically charged regions within clouds, or between a cloud and the Earth’s surface”? Not sure about you, but Percy Jackson and the Electrostatic Discharge Thief isn’t quite as compelling a title. There is magic lying hidden in the unknown, the unscientific, the story.

Assumptions in ambiguous situations can of course be wrong, and terribly so. When we leap to conclusions about a group based on the traits of a few, we’re falling into the trap of the closed-minded, the ostrich with its head buried in the sand. (Enough bloody human history has been written because of this tendency.) The ideal approach to any unknown is to enter without preconceptions or expectations and let the details fill themselves in on their own. But the instinct to grasp at conclusion, while occasionally troublesome, is part of what drives our curiosity about the world, our desperate need to understand why things are a certain way and not another way. It is what makes us turn pages faster or even peek at the end to find out whether or not the butler did it. And if the last page has been torn out, we’ll invent our own ending where it was the beautiful scheming mistress of the victim’s cousin’s former roommate. As long as the mystery remains unresolved, someone will want to posit a solution. And when the truth is unsatisfying, alternate interpretations will be suggested. For nature abhors a vacuum.

So, back to the original premise: why did I assume that the dog was male? Because it fit the joke I was making, the story I was trying to tell in that place at that time. It was my interpretation, my truth, in the moment, for the moment. I recognize, in a most deliciously contradictory manner, that in examining the human relationship with ambiguity, I haven’t fully answered the question. Instead, to paraphrase a line in The American President, I’ve kinda just left this thing hanging out there, for you to draw your own conclusions. A propos, however; given the subject matter, it couldn’t really end any other way. So, your turn. Fill in the blank: _______________________

Happy blogiversary to me!

July 5, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 8 Comments

Somewhere, someone is looking at this right now. Wave to them.

I got a little note from WordPress yesterday that I’ve been blogging with them for two years. Two whole years! It doesn’t seem that long since I was idly musing to the better half that I was thinking of starting a blog, and yet here we are, two entire trips round the sun later. Strictly speaking this is not my first blog – there were two antecedents that have long since vanished from the face of the net, and good riddance to them. (The second one actually didn’t have any posts on it, if I recall correctly.) So, two years then; seven hundred and thirty days of wondering what to write about, failing to write anything, figuring it out and writing it, being afraid to hit the publish button once written, worrying that nobody will click on it, getting mad that no one clicks on it, squirming a bit when a copious amount of people are clicking on it and sharing it far and wide.

Have I any insights to share about the experience? Well, a few, take ‘em or leave ‘em. First and foremost it’s made me a better writer (though your opinion may vary). As others have pointed out, writing is a muscle like any other and the more exercise it gets the stronger it becomes. I’ve been able to sharpen my voice and deliver my arguments in a more cogent, more impactful manner. I’ve learned also that an audience is a ravenous beast, and that you cannot drop off the radar after one well-received post and expect people to keep coming back in search of your brilliance. To that end, regular updates on a predictable schedule are a must. This past week has been quite productive and I’m not certain I’ll be able to keep up that pace, but I’m damned well going to try. The only reason not to post is laziness. There are always things to write about, and inspiration can come from the most unlikely corners. I’m finding a lot of it lately in my interactions on Twitter – conversations there can swing into unexpected and wildly amusing detours, providing more than enough fodder for posting more formally later on. Because this is ultimately a form of conversation, I’ve realized that it isn’t enough to post and forget and wait for acclaim to roll in. You need to get out there and talk to other people proactively, follow their blogs, comment when you feel you can contribute (as opposed to just saying “Great post. Check out my blog!”) and be a member of a community.

Above all else, the most important thing I’ve learned is to BE POSITIVE. Even when you’re writing about something that enrages you to the deepest core of your being, you must find it within you to locate the silver lining (and it is there, believe me). There may be a market out there for endless cynicism, for paragraphs of disgust flung at worthy targets like so many buckets of monkey feces, but Jesus, do you really want to be that guy? The nihilist who sees nothing good in or about life and spreads his gloom one kilobyte at a time, determined to twist smiles into frowns wherever he finds them? Yes, a lot of our world is unfair, unjust, even horrifying, and it does us no good to stand in ignorance of that. But the people who have managed to effect positive change have done so from a place of hope and faith in the potential good. An unshakeable trust in the nobility that can arise from the human soul. They have reached out their hands and helped lift others into greatness.

I’m not so naïve to think that I’m changing hearts and minds on a vast scale here. But sometimes I look at that stats map above and it gives me tremendous pause. Each part that is colored represents a different country where someone (and in the cases of the darker colors, quite a few someones) has lent me a few moments of their time to look over what I’ve written. Yeah, maybe some of them are accidental hits while looking for something else. But perhaps one or two of them stayed for a while and poked around a little and came away thinking they’d found something of value. The most wonderful thing about blogging is the ability we now have to touch a truly global audience – to reach out with our hands and lift someone else up, someone we may never meet or even be aware of. How is that not motivation to keep going, to keep pounding out the words, to fight through the self-doubt, the creeping ennui and cynicism and fear?

The right words can change the world. So let’s write a few more of them. Here’s to the next two years.

O Privacy, Where Art Thou?

July 2, 2013 ~ Graham Milne

This is your life. Credit Vassilis Michalopoulos / Flickr Creative Commons

On Twitter today, Joyce Carol Oates shares a quote from yesterday’s New Yorker about privacy, in which artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg opines, “we are probably the last generation that will realize what we’re losing.” You can’t help thinking that she’s right. An entire generation is growing up with their lives chronicled meticulously for the world’s perusal through Facebook, Instagram, blogs, what have you, either by proud parents or by themselves, seeking connection in the digital space. For the vast majority of the population, these connections will be benign, the consequences minor or nonexistent. Traditional media is certainly keen to hype up the instances of social media gone wrong, and certainly the latest revelations about the National Security Agency are cause for justifiable alarm at what is being collected and by whom for what purposes. To me, it seems that privacy has become a malleable concept. People are okay with sharing to a certain degree, but there is usually a line they won’t cross, and that line differs from person to person. Yet everyone is happy to abdicate at least some of what is uniquely theirs to the great unknown masses; the absolute recluse is soooo last century. (Even Thomas Pynchon lent his voice to The Simpsons a couple of times.) Is Joni Mitchell right, though? Will we not know what we had until it is gone? Or is the march to a completely open community inevitable and privacy a willing sacrifice?

The flexible line intrigues me. A while back, I read a post (I don’t remember where, sorry, or I would provide the link) in which the writer suggested that the level of detail provided in certain “mommy blog” posts about children encroached on the territory of potential libel litigation once the child reached maturity – tired moms calling their kids “little shits” online, and so forth. As a blogger and a new adoptive parent, I too had a choice to make about how much or how little detail I would include about my son in this space. Mindful of my own rule that you should never put anything online that you wouldn’t carve in concrete on your front porch, and not wanting to burden my son with a digital legacy not of his own making, I chose to be quite spare in the amount of information I reveal about him. Where I do post about parenting it’s about my thoughts and feelings – which I can control – and my son is more of a relatively anonymous factor influencing me. You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned his name, and if someone who knows me personally accidentally drops it in the comments, I delete it post-haste. (I have not mentioned my wife’s name here either, for the same reasons, though if you really want to find it, it’s not that difficult.) The siren song of the Internet is calling to him with increasing volume, and he’ll have plenty of time to forge his own footprint his own way, when he’s ready (you know, in about 30 years or so). He doesn’t need me blazing an embarrassing trail with catty remarks about cranky moods or off-color remarks spoken in innocence that will come back to haunt him in his first job interview.

Even if you are cautious about sensible things – not posting your address or phone number, or photos of your house or of you blistering drunk in a pair of your mother’s underpants and so on – you are still giving up an aspect of your privacy when you share your thoughts, whether they be in short bursts of anger at the latest dumb thing done by right wing politicians or long, carefully-reasoned pieces like this one. If someone was a diligent reader of the preceding 200-odd posts here they’d have me at a considerable disadvantage were I to meet them in real life. (Honestly, at any given time I don’t remember half of what I’ve written here.) You don’t know where I live or where I am this very second, but one could argue you know a much more intimate detail about me. You know how I think. That is, assuming you trust that I’ve been truthful and I haven’t been pulling your leg for almost two years with the old unreliable narrator gimmick. And that raises another interesting question. Given the absolute tabula rasa of the digital space for the creation of an online identity, why the presumption that the majority of folks who use it are being absolutely honest about who they are and what they think? I could have created a completely opposite alter ego just for fun and gone to town. But I wanted to be me. And I wanted the digital me to be consistent with the real me, otherwise Lucy would have a lot of ‘splaining to do at dinner parties. So I have in fact given up an integral component of my privacy. I’ve opened my mind to you. There’s an implicit contract then that you are not evil incarnate and you’re not going to find some way to use it against me in a future I have not yet conceived. And even if you do there’s not hellish much I can do about it. I’ve handed over the mallet willingly and it’s your choice whether or not you want to bludgeon me with it.

When you think about it in that context, sharing online is an enormous gesture of trust, and an encouraging one, for it speaks to a deep-rooted optimism that our fellow human beings are good people who can be relied upon to be responsible caretakers of the information we’re providing them. Is it possible that the desire for community, connection and having our voices heard outweighs the wish to protect privacy? For it seems that today, you cannot have both. Certainly, those who shun the digital space wind up missing out on a heck of a lot. There are terrific people I’ve met through blogging and through Twitter that I never would have known about had I chosen to retract my head into my little turtle shell and keep my own counsel. My life, then, has been enhanced by forfeiting aspects of my privacy. In her TED talk, Brene Brown talks about how the people who are the most willing to be vulnerable are those who experience the richest love in return. Yet there’s that catch – being vulnerable. Putting it out there. Extending your hand knowing there is a possibility (however remote) that it might be bitten off. What is worrisome to many, as Heather Dewey-Hagborg suggests with her quote, is that in the future, there simply may be no choice anymore. We need to know if we’re okay with that. The reward of a closer-knit human race is a tempting carrot indeed, but the trouble is, no one knows what it will feel like to be hit with the stick.

The followers game

June 21, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 4 Comments

Western Bluebirds by Julio Mulero. Creative Commons license.

“How to get more followers fast!” is the 21st Century equivalent of “How to make money in real estate with no money down.” In social media, we measure success not by dollars earned, but by reach – by the size of our audience. Given that the vast majority of those who use social media are looking for bigger numbers, it’s unsurprising that the vultures would swoop in and begin releasing endless volumes of “how-to” schemes. Though widespread, the advice is more or less the same – use some variety of app to follow large numbers, unfollow people who don’t follow you back, rinse and repeat. Presto, tens of thousands of strangers hanging on your every word, a massive untapped market ready to lap up whatever variation of widget you want to push on them.

Or is it?

What these “get followers fast” folks won’t tell you is how many of these new people are truly engaged with you – if they care about what you have to say, or if they just followed you because they have a similar app building a following for them. I’ve posted before about what I look for in people I choose to follow, and when I see someone new following me who has almost identical following/follower numbers, my red flag is raised (especially if their feed is nothing but requests/pleas/desperate cries to buy their book). Often I won’t follow back, and a few days later I will react with not a shred of surprise when that person disappears from my followers list. Sayonara, nice to know ya, sorta. The question I would ask is, what is ultimately more worthwhile: 100 engaged Twitter friends or 100,000 “followers” who never retweet you, never click on your links and never reply to anything you put out there? 100 people who like and care about you or 100,000 who consider you nothing more than a digit?

By any measure advanced by every social media “guru” or “ninja” (aside, isn’t being a ninja antithetical to the concept of social media? I mean, you want people to know you’re there, right?), my Twitter presence is a failure. I have been on Twitter for over two years and I have just over 400 followers. Not exactly Lady Gaga numbers (she probably garners that many every twenty minutes). Yeah, we love the electric charge we feel when we open it up one morning and see an uptick, and we loathe the disappointment of watching the counter tick down. I can point to three incidences when I’ve seen a surge in new people coming on board – two of them involve being retweeted by famous people (Justin Trudeau and Russell Crowe respectively), while the third was tied to a Huffington Post article of mine about airline travel that was featured as a headline. Other than that, it stays pretty steady. One wonders from time to time if there’s something one is doing or not doing that is keeping the digits immobile. Am I not funny/irreverent/profound/snarky enough? What do I have to do to mimic the example of Megan Amram who started from nothing and parlayed a massive Twitter following into a professional TV writing career?

The truth is, nothing. You can’t be anyone but who you are, as people will be able to smell phoniness ten miles away. And pretending to be something you’re not is exhausting. It will suck you dry, because you’ll be forcing yourself to live up to an unnatural standard, and you’ll begin resenting having to fake it day in and day out. Twitter shouldn’t be a duty, it should be entertaining, thought-provoking, and fun. Because Twitter has no societal strata barring entry, you can jump right in and chat with whomever you please (of course, customary manners still apply, or you’ll find yourself on a lot of “blocked” lists really darn fast). Thus you get a chance to befriend and talk with people you might otherwise never meet. I look back on my Twitter experience and I think of some of the amazing, generous people I’ve encountered, some of the stimulating conversations I’ve had, some of the fantastic writing I’ve discovered, and above all, the quality, not the quantity, of these interactions. The enrichment of one’s life through being able to communicate with kindred spirits far and wide. That is Twitter to me, not a race to ratchet up a follower count.

I cringe every time I see one of these automatic updates about someone’s day on Twitter that consist of nothing other than an accounting of their new followers and unfollowers (in the past, I have unfollowed otherwise interesting people who’ve overdone it with these waste-of-Tweets). It’s plain old boasting, and the height of narcissism to assume that anyone else cares about your self-applied sense of awesomeness. What I would consider to be a successful day on Twitter consists of more intangible statistics. If I’ve made someone laugh, if I’ve moved someone to tears, if I’ve helped someone to think differently about a difficult situation, if I’ve provided a little bit of inspiration, or I’ve motivated someone to make a positive change in their life, that means more than numbers ever will. So the gurus will cluck their tongues, the ninjas will fling throwing stars at me and tell me I’m Doing It Wrong, but truly, just as everyone is meant to find and follow their own path in life, so too is everyone’s social media experience whatever they choose to make of it. Mine works for me. How’s yours going?

Twitter Story Challenge #1: Ruby Red

May 13, 2013May 14, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

So I had this idea today, that you take someone’s random tweet and use it as the first line of a short story. I haven’t written fiction in a while and have not written short fiction in particular in even longer (I’m thinking maybe since early in the last decade, horror of horrors) so this might turn out to be a complete hot mess. But practice makes perfect, and here goes. The tweet I chose was from Brian Ray, who’s a member of Paul McCartney’s band as well as an accomplished musician in his own right. And a very nice guy whom I’ve had the fortune to meet in real life. I don’t know why, then, the story turned out to be so dark. I’m actually having a really nice day. Anyway, first the tweet, and then the story.

I dreamt we were in a hallway and everything turned red. Not blood red, my dreams aren’t that morbid. But I looked at Ruby standing next to me and watched shades of persimmon, crimson and coral slither across the walls like oily tentacles, infecting the drab greens and browns of the drywall and the peeling old paintjob. Spilling out onto the floor, the rush of red seeped into the pile and coiled itself around the ashtray at the far end, in front of the window. I couldn’t be sure why this was happening now, or why this peculiar maroon plague had chosen to intrude upon my mind at that particular moment. Was there some unknown, buried, Freudian reason for it, or was it just my unconscious mind’s way of redecorating an otherwise boring scene? I mean, red is hardly my favorite color. Give me a deep royal blue or a fresh, citrus yellow.

Ruby didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. Long, toned legs strolled down the hallway on thin leather heels, oblivious to the changing colors swirling around her. “Room 444,” she whispered, her eyes flitting across the brass digits nailed to the doors that were mutating into burgundy as we passed them. She stopped at the last door on the left, swiped a keycard through the lock, and stepped through. I followed, my steps languid and halting as if someone had turned up the gravity a touch too high. Red continued churning in front of me. I wanted to be out of this hallway, somewhere safer, less vivid. I longed for the placid tones of builder’s beige.

Room 444 had no red in it. It was an executive suite with a raised queen bed done in blacks and browns. A wooden desk, or at least a plastic-that-looks-like-wooden desk, was shoved into one corner. There were no windows. Ruby was sitting on the bed, legs crossed, hands folded on her knee, facing me with the sense of calm that usually only comes at the behest of a large injection of horse tranquilizer. It could easily be mistaken for boredom, but that couldn’t be the case. We’d been looking forward to this for a long time. She’d planned every last detail. She’d told me through instant messages for weeks and weeks how excited she was. I had to disable all the sound and vibration alerts on my phone to keep my wife from finding out.

I wanted to say something suave and masculine, but I felt confidence drain out of my body like an accidental stream of urine down a pantleg. “Uh…” dribbled out from between my lips with the vitality of the world’s most timid prairie dog, any pretense at me taking charge of the situation vanishing as quickly as the sound of that single syllable in stale hotel room air.

“Well then,” Ruby said, and she leaned back on her palms, uncrossing her legs and tilting her head back, allowing her tantalizing ginger mane to tumble backwards. She was bored, I could tell now, and I wondered where the playful, seductive minx who’d lured me away from a loving wife of fifteen years had gone. In a way, it seemed just as well. I wasn’t in any condition to do anything. I couldn’t understand why I was so tired, why lifting a foot for a single step was like trying to wrench a fifteen hundred pound anvil from the floor. I lurched towards her and crumpled to my knees.

That’s when the red invaded again. Encroaching onto the safe blacks, browns and beiges of the executive suite in a gentle tide, lapping and retreating, moving further inwards with each wave. I felt a warmth slide up my insides as the red moved closer, parts of me turning fuzzy, feeling like one of those TV channels in the upper 800’s with no signal. My breathing sounded louder, harder. Air in my lungs was soup I had to push out with the muscles in my chest. Ruby did not react. Her eyes watched the popcorn ceiling above us as its hue too darkened from driven snow to Mouton Rothschild, the kind we’d shared together the night we met at that conference in Frisco.

My hand went to my side as the TV static spread over me, fuzzing the loudest at a spot just below my ribs. Gravity pulled on me now with the force of a thousand suns, and as I struggled to force a plea of help up through my throat, Ruby stood and let me see the white flash of the stainless steel blade hitherto concealed in her left hand. “Take that, you cheating son of a bitch,” she spat, and she placed a heel on my shoulder and shoved.

I was too numb to sense the tile floor meeting the edge of my spine. Too numb to notice the click of Ruby’s shoes as she made her exit and let the door close quietly behind her. And too numb to be truly aware of the warm pool that now spread out from beneath my body to meet the narrowing sea of vermilion that mixed with it, using swirls and splashes of what was left of my life to scrawl an eerie abstract design around what the police would undoubtedly find a few hours later, once the guy in the next room noticed the smell. They say red is the color of passion. Yet even passion has many different tones, and can drive different people to different ends.

I laid my head back down in the sticky warmth and watched all the reds come together. Shades I’d never seen and would never see again. Cerise, blush, dahlia, russet, titian, garnet.

But not blood red. My dreams aren’t that morbid.

Twitter bios: Who are you, really?

May 9, 2013October 31, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 11 Comments

@MobyDick. Whale. Love eating krill and plankton. Not fond of one-legged captains. #GetOverItAhab

On Twitter, we are what we say. We have the opportunity to craft a complete online identity through what we talk about, who we talk with and what we share. I have met some amazing people through Twitter and had some engaging, thought-provoking and downright hilarious conversations, with folks I might otherwise be terrified to approach were I to see them out on the street (Russell Crowe, looking in your direction, mate).

Disappointing on occasion though are the Twitter bios people write for themselves. A mere 160 characters to sit on your Twitter account permanently and try to encapsulate who you are and why people should be interested in you. Folks who are using Twitter strictly as a marketing tool are the worst, describing themselves as flatly and as soullessly as the plastic widgets they’re attempting to push on you. And some traits are dropped in so commonly and so lazily as to lose all meaning – “coffee drinker,” for example, which is about as distinguishing as saying you’re an “oxygen breather.”

I’m also puzzled as to why some Tweeps waste characters with “Tweets are my own,” “Retweets are not endorsements” and “I follow back!” I understand that if you want to mouth off about how badly last night’s Stanley Cup playoff game went, you don’t want anyone to possibly infer that your profane criticism of the refereeing reflects the official views and positions of the ABC Company. I think most people are smart enough to understand that although we all work, we all have private lives as well. My Twitter life is entirely disengaged from my work life, even though there are people I work with who follow me (and I follow them). But I don’t talk about work. EVER. I don’t say where I work and I don’t bitch about work. Look, I’m at work all day, every day, and I have enough of it on my mind without it spilling into my social media life too. Saying “Tweets are my own” is just dumb though. Of course they’re your own. They’re not Phil’s, and they’re not Uncle Frank’s, and people get that.

“Retweets are not endorsements” is another one that to me, is a waste of space. I mean, I suppose there’s the fear that you might retweet somebody’s joke about airline travel only to find out a few weeks later that he once got arrested for masturbating in a park, and suddenly you’re a supporter of public self-pleasure by association or some such nonsense. Look, I can think Braveheart is a great movie and no one would ever accuse me of sympathizing with some of the reprehensible views that Mel Gibson has espoused publicly. When you retweet something, it’s because you thought that particular statement was worth sharing again. You’re not suddenly a staunch enthusiast of everything that person has ever said. I think this is one we just need to agree on collectively and then, just as collectively, remove it from every single Twitter bio on earth.

Finally, announcing “I follow back” or using the hashtag #TeamFollowBack is, as Ricky Gervais has said, a little bit sad. It pretty much guarantees that people will only follow you to bump up their own numbers, and not because they are truly interested in hearing what you have to say. I know I’m going against the advice of every single Internet marketing specialist here, but I think of Twitter as what the cable companies will never offer: an opportunity to pick your own channels, a la carte, without having to pay for or suffer through programs you don’t want. You can very easily build up a massive following by just following everyone you can and unfollowing those who don’t follow back, but what does that get you in the end? An awful lot of noise. I follow people who will add value to my day, and that’s my sole criterion.

So, what should you put in your Twitter bio? Well, I’m not saying mine is the epitome of awesome, but I think it’s pretty good, and here’s why. When you click on my profile, this is what you’ll see:

Writer, novelist-in-waiting, HuffPoster, Anglo, James Bond and Aaron Sorkin-phile, happy liberal, lover of martinis, women and song, preferably all at once.

1. Writer, novelist-in-waiting, HuffPoster: Chuck Wendig has a great line about how you’re either a writer or you aren’t, the word “aspiring” sucks, and that you shouldn’t differentiate just because you may not necessarily get paid for your words. Right now, I don’t make money for anything I write. I hope that will change soon, but it doesn’t stop me from writing. Ergo, I am a writer. I say “novelist-in-waiting” because I do have one finished novel, but to me, “novelist” suggests that you have more than one. I don’t yet. When I do, the “in-waiting” will fall off. And again, just because I haven’t published it and no one’s paid to read it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a novel, I wrote it, it exists. Finally, I should think it’s fairly obvious why “HuffPoster” is there. 23 articles and counting, so yeah, that one I can back up with solid evidence and the hateful comments that go with it.

2. Anglo, James Bond and Aaron Sorkin-phile: A small sampling of my popular culture interests. I have been enamored with all things English since probably the first time I heard someone speak in an English accent, which, given the second item in the list, was probably in watching a James Bond movie. It also covers Monty Python, the Beatles and the majority of my taste in music, movies, books, the lot. And I’m an Aaron Sorkin fan because his writing helped me find my own writing voice. (Which reminds me, I must get to that in another post sometime as I believe I did promise it a while back.)

3. Happy liberal: I don’t talk about politics on Twitter (or here) as much as I used to because the anger and hate that it stirs up on occasion (read: constantly) is becoming a bit stomach-churning in my old age. But in a way, this is a shorthand message to politically inclined folks who might like to follow me that this is where I start from. If you’re a worshipper of all things Ronald Reagan, free market libertarianism and neo-conservative warmongering, I don’t think you’ll find me very interesting; in fact, I may make your blood boil. I certainly won’t be seeking you out so I can crap all over your home feed with bleeding heart, namby-pamby communism. Let’s just agree to disagree and leave each other alone then. On the other hand, if you think we should base decisions on science, ensure that the rich pay their fair share, stop paving planet Earth indiscriminately and live in a society where we look after each other and help boost each other up, if you believe that government can be a force for good when the best people are involved in it, if you believe that a small group of committed citizens can change the world because it’s the only thing that ever has, then sign on up, glad to have you, I might even follow back.

4. Lover of martinis, women and song: Yes, I do love me a martini. All kinds – dry, fruity, decorated with chocolate shavings or plastic parasols, doesn’t matter. It’s a drink of sophistication that makes a man feel comfortable in a jacket and tie – a throwback to the era when class and erudition was the real swag. I’m old-fashioned that way, I suppose, but in a time when being a man seems to be a race to the bottom of a beer and nacho-cheese soaked barrel, I’m proud to be an anachronism. A lover of women? Yes, dear goddess yes, in all facets. Not a day goes by where I don’t ponder a particular woman or women in general with awe and admiration. I love them for their indomitable strength, their ability to take every setback life throws at them because of their gender and say, “is that all you’ve got, little man?” I love their minds, I love their senses of humor, I love their ability to see right through us, to strip away our phoniness and our pretend selves and force us to figure out who we really are. I love the music in their laughter, the poetry in their tears. I love their connection with who they are and the world they live in. I love the scent of their hair, the softness of their skin, the tone of their legs, the elegance of their hands. I love that I’m married to the most incredible woman on the planet, that I’m the brother of the second most incredible woman on the planet and that I’m privileged to know so many of their sisters. And I love to celebrate women in the words I write – which, I suppose, is the meaning of the “song” here.

5. Preferably all at once: Because a perfect evening is listening to my wife croon Ella Fitzgerald while I sip a Vesper.

There you have it – not saying that it’s perfect or that it won’t ever change. But if you want to get to know me, it’s a good place to start. Then you have to let my words do the rest.

Putting it out there then: How do you describe yourself on Twitter?

Fishing for the little pellets of love

March 28, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 6 Comments

Some depressing Graham’s Crackers statistics to start off with. Total posts, March 2012: 26. Total posts, March 2013: 2 (including this one, 3 if you include the piece I did for HuffPo about International Women’s Day). And the frogurt is also cursed.

Yes, I know, oh mighty gurus of blog, you’re not supposed to post about how you haven’t posted in a while. But this is my sandbox and my rules and prithee, I shall beg indulgence while I raise a kerchief to my brow and lament in plaintive tone the lack of productivity shown these past fortnights. It isn’t as though there’s nothing to write about, after all. Nay, verily, my literary cup runneth somewhat over. I do admire though, those who can juggle the heavy spheres of work and family and simply keeping up with the pace of life and still churn out a few thousand words each day. Something one should aspire to as well, if one were not such a piss poor scheduler of one’s time (guilty, Your Honors).

To that end I am raising a metaphorical glass to my friend Tele Aadsen of Hooked for her much-deserved accomplishment of landing a publisher for her memoir. Now, Tele and I have never met or spoken to one another and our interaction has been entirely in reading each other’s writing and exchanging comments and tweets. But ours, I think, is a kinship of letters, of recognizing and appreciating the power of the written word and how we can use it to connect across otherwise impassable chasms of time and distance. Would I, a dude of a somewhat insular urban upbringing in the Greater Toronto Area, have ever assumed that I would have the slightest thing in common with an Alaskan fisher poet? Yet I do, and I’m grateful, and my life is the better for it. Anyway, there was a Twitter hashtag that was trending a few days about people you’d most like to meet, and predictably, the most common answers were celebrity names (Bieber again? REALLY?) Tele’s at the top of my list. Someday soon, I hope – that is, if I haven’t now come off sounding like Creepy Stalker Guy™. If for nothing else than just the chance to say thank you. And get a personalized, autographed copy. It’s not for me, it’s for my friend of the same name.

Onwards and upwards then. Amongst my pursuits I am occasionally fortunate enough to attend digital media conferences. Toronto held its second annual Digital Media Summit last week, gathering a roster of experts and thought leaders from across the industry of ye olde cyberspace – names like Don Tapscott, Erik Qualman, Cindy Gallop, Amber Mac and Neil Shankman among dozens of other luminaries delivering informative addresses to hundreds of lanyard-wearing, smartphone-tapping digital worker bees. I was there on behalf of my employer, of course, but I still view things through the filter of writing and how what they were all saying could be used to further a writer’s reach (who are we kidding – my reach) in this rapidly advancing age. You know, sometimes one can get a bit cynical as one carefully strings his words together and hits “publish” and… nothing much happens. Admit it; on the surface, we’re all happy for the blogger who rejoices “I got Freshly Pressed on my very first post!” while inside we seethe that our own 189 pearls of literate wisdom usually go unnoticed by all but a select (if wonderful) few. If you can take your ego out of the equation, it’s not difficult to understand. Time is precious, an individual’s time is even more precious, and in order for them to grant you even a few seconds of theirs in between bathing the dog and walking the baby, you have to touch them with something that inspires real passion. There was an interesting statistic revealed at DMS that on Facebook, even posts by the most famous, highly-liked brands only reach about 15% of their followers. (That’s why, even though in between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ or whatever else you’re linking your blog posts to you may have a thousand connections, hits on your latest and greatest might not top a hundred. At least, that’s how it works for me.) And just because you get them, it doesn’t mean you’ll keep them. I’ve received a couple of (relatively) huge traffic spikes that have come from famous people tweeting links to my blog. But they don’t last – after a few days the hits drop to their usual, more stable level. Maybe you retain one or two, but the vast majority treat you like a cheap motel along I-75, moving on once the new day has dawned and the open road beckons. And that’s cool. I mean, how many blogs have I looked at once because they posted something I wanted to learn more about only to forget about them thirty seconds after hitting the red X? It’s life, and if you want to be loved, adopt a golden retriever.

Those moments when you do tap into something and really connect with people, well, I suspect there are few varieties of crack cocaine that can measure to the high. Someone at the DMS called them “little pellets of love”; you know, the tiny charge that you get when you open your Facebook and see the little red number in your notification section. “People are interested in me! Yay!” Same goes on Twitter when we get a retweet, or a new follow, or a reply from a celebrity we really admire, or on WordPress when we get the notification that somebody liked, commented or shared our work. When one finally does cross that fabled Rubicon from giving it away for free to receiving the first cheque for something we penned, does that vindication truly compare to the spiritual fulfillment of knowing that someone, even a stranger, really digs us? I suppose in those cases by contrast when we’ve written something that really pisses people off, the money compensates for the death threats.

What then, is the lesson for today? It’s karma, sports fans. Ya gotta put it out to get it back. And as my learned better half is wont to tell me when I sink into the occasional bout of self-pity, you need to write to touch people, not to prove how smart you are about things no one cares about. You’ll see, I’m sure, when Hooked is released, how Tele does it. Hopefully as I continue along here I’ll get better at it. And we’ll see where the ocean takes us.

The road from ideology to idiocy is paved with tanks

January 18, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

So this morning, I’m following this Twitter exchange between Van Jones, former advisor to President Obama, and some mostly anonymous American gun lovers who are blowing collective gaskets (or is that muskets) over measures announced by the President this last week to try and curb armed violence in America. The righties are coming at Jones with the suggestion that ever-more-powerful arsenals are needed by “the people” to combat government “tyranny” (the latest buzzword, like socialism, used to define a paranoid’s impression of some indefinable monster lurking in the shadows: “I sure don’t know what it is, but I’m damn sure agin it!”) Jones counters by asking what would be enough for these same people to be able to successfully subdue U.S. soldiers acting on behalf of this hypothetical tyrannical government – chemical weapons, nukes even – and calls what his opponents are suggesting, i.e. firing on American servicemen and women, treasonous. At which point one individual says Jones is being ridiculous and in the event of this prophesied calamity of Biblical proportions, “the soldiers will be on our side.” To which I’d say, please see Square, Tiananmen. But it got me thinking about the course of the entire discussion, where no minds will be changed, no needles will be moved and no one will come away with anything but a heated temper and a more intractable position on the issue. We act like this is a phenomenon unique to the era of Fox News and infinite blogs and talk radio shows, but the power and the rigidity of belief, whether it is political or spiritual, is one of the defining aspects of humanity. We’ve seen in countless examples how it is both our greatest gift and our greatest curse. The noblest accomplishments we have ever achieved have come from strong beliefs, and sadly, so have our greatest evils.

As a liberal humanist, I’ve chosen my spot on the spectrum and have as much of an ideology as the next guy. Yet I temper my beliefs with reason and my own personal notion that faith unchallenged is not faith: one must question everything and back up one’s claims with concrete, scientific, provable evidence. And one shouldn’t linger in the comfort of one’s own “side,” as it were – you owe it to yourself to look at what the opposition thinks and try to figure out the reasoning behind their points of view. As I mentioned in my piece a few weeks ago about the Newtown shooting, the obsession with guns comes from a place of fear – as does a great deal of the conservative mindset. Fear of the untrustworthy, the indigent, the other. Bad people. Bad people are coming to hurt you, so you need a gun to protect yourself. Bad people want to steal your money and spend it on other people, so you want taxes cut. Bad people overseas want to blow you up for reasons you can’t understand, so you want a huge military arsenal to defend your shores. Bad people want to force you to sleep with men. Bad people want you to stop going to church. Bad people this, bad people that. There seems to be a need to collect all this fear and focus it against a single, identifiable target, hence the evil liberal menace, stoking this fear into the hatred that naturally follows.

Fear, of course, isn’t unique to conservatives. Liberals fear plenty of things – the devastation of our planet due to wars, environmental pollution or outright greed, religious extremists forcing antiquated and in many cases physically harmful doctrines on the masses, losing our democratic voice to an ever-encroaching corporate plutocracy. The major difference I see in how a liberal approaches the world is that for liberals, there are no absolutes – and we are more willing to admit that we might be wrong. On Real Time with Bill Maher a while back, someone, I can’t remember whom, was sparring with a climate change denier and made the argument that if he was wrong about global warming, no big deal, but if the denier was wrong, everyone and everything on Earth would die – so why not try to mitigate the problem anyway? But a conservative will cling to the same tenets no matter how many times he is proven to be in error; for him, flexibility is weakness. There was a story a few months ago how Senate Republicans suppressed a study that proved conclusively, through decades of evidence, that tax cuts do not spur job growth. Canada’s Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, during our 2011 federal election, kept insisting that corporate tax cuts were desperately needed or this hazy figure of “400,000 jobs” would be lost. The meme was repeated, unquestioned, ad nauseum by friendly media and likely helped throw more than a few votes his party’s way. Less than a year later Flaherty was out begging corporations to please oh please if you wouldn’t mind sir, kindly use your hoards of cash we just gifted you to hire a few folks, y’know, if it’s not too much trouble. Yet you won’t see Flaherty calling for his tax cuts to be repealed, no matter how much red ink is generated, how much proof he is shown that said cuts are as helpful to the economy as fairy dust. Night after night conservatives yell the fallacy that “tax cuts increase revenue!” as government after government that follows their approach spirals down into deficit and debt (see: Greece). Either it’s a massive conspiracy to “starve the beast” – personally, I don’t think most people are that clever – or these folks genuinely believe the fiction they’ve been sold, and like all conservatives, won’t change their minds no matter how often their approach flounders in the practical world.

Ironically, there is a singular example of a near-universal experience of a belief being undone by reasoned analysis. Nearly all Western children grow up believing that Santa Claus delivers gifts to them every Christmas Eve. Yet as they age, cracks begin to appear in the story; perhaps some wisenheimer at school brays snottily, “You know it’s just your mom and dad, right?” (I still remember the name of the kid who did that to me – thanks a lot, Chris Campbell, wherever you are.) Perhaps they start to do the math and realize it’s physically impossible for one man with one sleigh to deliver billions of toys in less than 8 hours, and they’re less and less satisfied with the explanation that it’s because Santa is magic. How many adults, even conservatives, still believe in Santa Claus? But the same method of examination and deduction fails for almost everything else, resulting in decade after decade of the same flawed ideas being offered up regardless of how badly they’ve gone in the past. It’s like how in Ontario, Conservative leader Tim Hudak has reignited a debate on privatizing the LCBO (the government-owned corporation that manages the sale of alcohol throughout the province and generates loads of income to fund our social programs), despite the utter financial shambles that was his party’s decision to sell off our only toll highway to a Spanish corporation for a song when they were in power, and which we’re still paying for. And just like how for the National Rifle Association, the answer to the problem of guns in schools is more guns in schools. Part of this, as I’ve pointed out, is their executive looking out for sales opportunities for gun manufacturers, but this absurd notion would still be defended to the death (or to the cold, dead hands, as they like to put it) by regular rifle-lovers with no financial interest in the outcome. Apparently, to admit one’s logic is perhaps flawed is to expose a chink in the armor – to risk the entire house crashing in on top of you. Perhaps that’s the ultimate fear. Fear of the shell being stripped away to reveal… absolutely nothing.

So long as we’re speaking about shells being ripped away, it’s an interesting happenstance of linguistic evolution that the words “ideology” and “idiocy” both begin with “id” – Freud’s concept of the impulses of the inner self unleashed, at their wildest, with none of the rational examination of said self needed for it to function within the framework of a civilization. Likewise, beliefs – and indeed, faith – cannot function to the betterment of ourselves and those with whom we share the planet without critical examination. Be open. Be open to being wrong. Those who enter into a debate should entertain the possibility that their beliefs may be changed by the discussion that follows, as much as you are attempting to change the beliefs of those you’re debating with; otherwise, you’re left with people hurling abuse at one another for no perceptible reason other than getting one’s rocks off by being an idiot. And we all remember the last time being an idiot worked out toward the improvement of the human condition.