#nor is it the excoriating literary take that you think it is

[loveandlegacy]

i really think that if your read on mel is that she's manipulative and abusive even after she says (to a character who is in-text coded as a sex worker no less!) that no one is expendable you might actually just be like. stupid

[buzzdixonwriter]

I've Told You A Million Times To Avoid Cliches Like The Plague

Recently a year old re-print of a 1959 Writer’s Digest article by Donald Westlake started circulating on social media.

First off, if you don’t know who Donald Westlake is, go find out.  You like rough edge crime stories, try his Parker books published under his Richard Stark pseudonym; you like funny crime, dig up the Dortmunder series under his own name; you like odd ball history, check out Under An English Heaven “being a true recital of the events leading up to and down from the British invasion of Anguilla on March 19th, 1969 in which no one was killed but many people were embarrassed.”

Second, Westlake was a serious writer in that he took the craft of writing Very Seriously indeed, no matter how light hearted and funny some of his books could be.  He wrote a blistering letter (later turned into an essay) in the fanzine Xero (starts on page 97) where he excoriated  the sci-fi field of the era as being neither artistically nor commercially viable.*

So who am I to challenge this master’s assertions?

Well, I take the craft of writing Very Seriously indeed myself, and to quote a late, lamented friend:  “Fools rush in, and there we are…”

The Writer’s Digest article is a mixed bag, partially a quick off-the-cuff job for a few bucks, partially a valid observation on pitfalls in writing popular fiction in September of 1959.

Bear the date in mind, it’s crucial to this discussion.

This was an era when Americans read a lot.  Millions of people subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post or dozens of other slick magazines (not to mention the digests, which are what the form the old genre pulps mutated into), and this meant each week dozens of new short stories or serialized novels were available to them (and that’s not counting non-fiction).

Westlake in 1959 was commenting on an over saturated market, one where too many writers and editors simply replayed old tropes over again and again because they knew a significant portion of their audience felt comfortable with them (this is particularly true in the slicks, more so than the digests).

Westlake divides his 36 plots into three groups:  Mysteries, science fiction, and slicks.

My first quibble lays in what Westlake means when he says “plot”.

From the original article:

“A plot is a planned series of connected events, building through conflict to a crisis and ending in a satisfactory conclusion. A formula is a particular plot which has become stale through over-use.

“My own working definition of plot is what I call “5C.” First, a character. Anybody at all, from Hemingway’s old man to Salinger’s teenager. Second, conflict. Something for that character to get upset about, and for the reader to get upset about through the character. Third, complications. If the story runs too smoothly, without any trouble for the character, the reader isn’t going to get awfully interested in what’s going on. Fourth, climax. The opposing forces in conflict are brought together. Like the fissionable material in an H-bomb and there’s an explosion. Fifth, conclusion. The result of the explosion is known, the conflict is over, the character has either won or lost, and there are no questions left unanswered.

“5C: Character. Conflict. Complications. Climax. Conclusion.”

All well and good, but in his article Westlake provides almost no examples of same.

To me, a plot is a quick summary of a story that lays out beginning, middle, and end:   G.I. Joe captures a Cobra secret weapon but doesn’t realize what it is.  Cobra needs to get the weapon back without alerting the Joes to its potential, and the Joes must figure out what Cobra is after before they can get their hands on it.

(There’s a lot you can do with that plot.  It can be a slam-bang action oriented story, a techno thriller, or a slapstick farce depending on your angle of attack.)

What Westlake presents are more along the lines of story springboards:  ”What would happen if…”

A lot of the situations Westlake presents are rife with potential: “John Smith is sitting in the park, feeding the other squirrels, when a beautiful girl runs up, kisses him, and whispers, ‘Pretend you know me.’”

Okay, let’s list the possibilities, shall we?

She’s being stalked by a creepy guy and needs protection…

She’s been hired to set Smith up for some reason…

She’s mentally disturbed from trauma in her past…

She’s a flipping psycho intending to kill Smith…

She’s a secret agent slipping a secret code in Smith’s pocket…

She’s a silly college girl doing this on a dare, unaware Smith is a serial killer…

Six stories right off the top of my head, and each one could be played in several different ways, from deadly serious to over the top farce.

That’s a lot of potential in a single trope.

Here’s another: “John Smith, private eye, is sitting at his desk, when Marshall Bigelow, thimble tycoon, trundles in waving thousand-dollar bills and shouting, ‘My daughter has disappeared!’”

Well, d’uh, isn’t that what private eyes do?  Find missing people?  Or uncover who committed a crime when people don’t want the police involved?  Or find out if a spouse is cheating?

Name a private eye story that doesn’t play off some variant of this.  From Murder, My Sweet to Harper to Shaft, hiring a private eye to find a missing person is a perfect way to get a story started.  “You find my Velma.”

Of the dozen story springboards he offers in his mystery section, none are unworkable, though two remain overly familiar to this day and probably are best avoided unless the writer can provide some incredible new spin.  

The science fiction section is more problematic, and here’s where I suspect Westlake was slumming (there ought to be an article on the type of articles one shouldn’t write for Writer’s Digest that includes articles like the one Westlake wrote).

Seven of the eleven clearly reference classics of the genre, and if this wasn’t a deliberate dig at those authors on Westlake’s part, one can only argue that while they may be shopworn now due to retreads by the untalented, these ideas remain strong enough to support a good story.

The other four remain headscratchers.  Two -- Adam & Eve and “atoms are tiny solar systems” -- are indeed hoary old ideas, burned off by EC comics earlier in the decade. 

I can’t say there weren’t thirteen year old aspiring sci-fi writers who submitted these to publishers and editors back in the day, but they seem more likely to have been found on the pages of fanzines (i.e., what sci-fi geeks had before the Internet) than a professional slush pile.

We know Westlake was active to some degree in sci-fi fandom of that era; could those two tropes have come from seeing those stories in the pages of amateur magazines?

The remaining two ideas represent a ribald attitude I don’t recall seeing in sci-fi digests of that era.

Oh, sex was starting to rear its beautiful head in science fiction, and there were a few cutting edge stories, but these two seem more like set ups for smutty fanfic, not genuine submissions of the time.

Again, something I’d expect to see in a fanzine, not a professional market.

Like I said, I think this tips off that Westlake is having us on, that this whole article came off the top of his head in a matter of minutes instead of being carefully thought out.

On the other hand, his critique of slick magazine fiction seems pretty spot on and devastating.

While he covers several sub-genres, his primary focus seems to be on stories written for a female audience, the type found in McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal.  He doesn’t come close to a dozen examples, however, as several (even those labeled as sub-examples) are just the same story springboard in different settings.

Two of his bad examples, however, stand out quite clearly as a dislike (whether personal / professional / aesthetic, I can’t tell) aimed at a specific series of stories found in The Saturday Evening Post, i.e., the Alexander Botts, tractor salesman stories of William Hazlett Upson.

One of Westlake’s verboten plots isn’t even a plot but a literary device: “Any story told in an exchange of letters”.  The other one that ties into Upson’s oeuvre is “Joe Doakes, a traveling salesman for a paper clip company, gets involved in some pretty unbelievable adventures in a small town in the Midwest. The other participants are a local belle and a salesman for a rival paper clip company.”

The two combined describe Upson’s Botts stories to a T.  The second one is richly ironic since Westlake eventually used the same basic premise for his Dortmunder series (the only change being Dortmunder is a thief, not a salesman; po-tay-to, po-tah-to).

Finally, Westlake left himself a huge out with “If you can take one of the 36 clichés listed above, and give it a brand new twist, so it doesn’t look like the same story any more, you may have a sale on your hands. If you search hard enough in the magazines on the stands today, you’ll find one or more of these variations currently in print.”

Look, I get it.  I’ve faced deadline doom before myself, and more than once have fired off a short piece that contained all the depth of a dixie cup.

This isn’t the worst writing advice I’ve seen, but it’s far from the best, and Westlake coulda and shoulda done better.

  © Buzz Dixon

   *  He wasn’t alone in his opinion, though ironically the 1960s proved to be one of the most fertile eras for the genre.  Yet Westlake and other writers such as John D. MacDonald, Frederic Brown, and John Jakes left sci-fi for other genres because it couldn’t support them either as artists or professionals.

[prolapsarian]

Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)

The great ruse of our political epoch: Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and their crows in press, scorched a set of oppositions in the minds of the people. The whole of society encapsulated in an image of “workers versus shirkers”, “strivers versus skivers.” The great tragedy of our political epoch: the Labour movement, the left, and the social democrats took the bait of these laminated ghouls. They responded simply by saying that there were no skivers: instead there was a worthy working class, labouring away ever harder, and getting ever poorer. They said the whole thing was a myth, that the shirkers were a phantom, a chimera, a scapegoat, an image invented by evil overlords to turn the working class against itself, leaving it prone to the ideologies of reaction. The labour movement talked instead only about the working poor, or the unemployed who wanted always to get back to a good job, on a good wage, forever and ever.

Few resisted the ruse, but Sean Bonney was one of them. Perhaps it was because Sean himself was a skiver, a drunk, a scoundrel, a villain, an addict, a down-and-out, a fuck up. More likely it was because of his deep political intuition and understanding. For him, the politics of class warfare was never about worthiness; it was never about what the working class deserve at the end of a hard day’s work, but instead its crucible was the hatred of the social conditions that pummelled people, silenced them, boxed them in, boxed them up, oppressed them, made them suffer. This politics was uncompromising because it understood that any compromise was a failure: there is no weekend that redeems the week, no pension that makes good on the life wrecked by the conformity and unfreedom of work.

I like to think of Sean as the thing that terrified those Tories most, as one of those beautiful creatures who so absolutely threatened them that they had to transfigure him into a phantom. His poetry too was one with this politics in this. Every line is written in solidarity with the shirking class, a class whose underground history crawls and stretches backwards, a perpetual dance, an unending squall, as anonymous as it is enormous. If Sean was a skiver he was also always hard at work, undertaking an immense labour of compression, in order to make that history heard. And this furious labour was quick and angular, because it always came with some sense that history was, already, ending. As a singular voice that resisted the ruse, his writing is one of the most important political efforts of our time.

o scroungers, o gasoline there’s a home for you here there’s a room for your things me, I like pills / o hell.

*** Since hearing of Sean’s death I have been thinking a lot about what I learnt from him. Learning is maybe a strange way to look at it. Because Sean’s poetry was not really so complicated. He stated unambiguous truths that we all knew and understood. Just like Brecht’s dictum in praise of communism: “It’s reasonable, and everyone understands it, it’s easy […] it is the simplicity, that’s hard to achieve.” This was the plane on which we met. All of us, Sean’s friends, comrades, loves, beloveds, others we did not know who all were invited, all in this common place where we know how simple these truths are, even if none of us were able to express them with such concision as Sean – even if we were all somehow less rehearsed, less prepared, less audacious. And suddenly I know it was a common place he made, wretched and hilarious.

*** So communism is simple. But running beneath all of Sean’s work was an unassuming argument, from which I have learned so much. Although argument was not his mode – his poems were always doing something, accusing but never prosecuting – an argument is there, even if it was exposed as a thesis in its own right. It is something so simple, easy, and so obvious that it barely seems worth saying. Sean’s poems made an argument for the enduring power of French symbolism – for a power that surged through history in the spirit of that movement. No surprise for a poet who rewrote Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But constantly a surprise to a world that thought that mode already dead, a world no longer animated by the literary symbol, nor transfixed by the resurrection any such symbols could herald. His writing followed the traces of this hyperhistory that wrapped around the world and back, from the high culture of decolonial revolutionism back in to cosmopolitan centre where bourgeois savages feast greedily on expropriated wares; into the dark sociality of the prison, and out again into every antisocial moment that we call “society”; sometimes making the earth small within a frozen cosmos ringing out noise as signal to nobody and everyone; sometimes bringing the whole cosmos in crystalline shape (sometimes perfect, sometimes fractured) as the sharpest interruption within the world - every poem charting a history stretched taut between uprisings and revolts. He knew the rites of symbols, the continuing practices with which their political power could be leveraged.

Sean was one of the few untimely symbolists of our time. His poems are full of these things: bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc - never quite concepts, never quite images, never quite objects, but pieces of the world to be taken up and arranged, half exploded, into accusations; treasured as partial and made for us to take as our own, a heritage of our own destruction, at once ready at hand, and scattered to the peripheries on a map of the universe, persistently spiralling, in points, back to the centre, some no place.

But if Sean was a symbolist, if he was attentive to its fugitive history, a slick and secret tradition of the oppressed, then this was also a symbolism without any luxuriant illusion. It is a symbolism in which all knowingness has been supplanted with fury and its movements. Sean’s poems are spleen without ideal. They have nothing of the pointed, almost screaming, eternal sarcasm of Baudelaire when he ever again finds the body of his beautiful muse as white and lifeless cold marble, utterly indifferent to the desirous gaze. There is no such muse, no callous petrified grimace, half terrified half laughing, ancient enough to unseat Hellenism itself - although there is beauty still but it exists otherwise, amid a crowd, darkened and lively. When I think of Sean’s monumental work I imagine an enormous bas-relief of black polished marble jutting out from some monstrously disproportioned body, angled between buildings. This great slab flashing black in the white noise of the city. This great slab as populous as the world. Flashing black and seen with the upturned gaze. There is no oppression without this terrified vision that sees in ever new sharpness the oppressor.

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave; when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring, when the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished, will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtisan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

*** I haven’t explained what I learnt. I ask the question, What does it mean to find the late nineteenth century stillborn into the twenty-first? Why should these febrile years, from 1848 to the Commune have been so important? What was Sean leveraging when he recast our world with this moment of literary and political history? And what was he leveraging it against? I have a sense that what was important to Sean was a sense of mixedness. There were those who would read these years, after the defeat of revolution, as a dreadful winter of the world. There were those who saw only society in decline. “Jeremiads are the fashion”, Blanqui would say while counselling civil war. And then there were those for whom arcades first provided an extravagant ecstacy of distraction and glitz. These were the years of monstrocity, from Maldoror to Das Kapital. These years of the great machines that chewed up humans and spat out their remains across the city, of great humans who chewed up machines and made language anew. These years in which the fury of defeat burnt hot. These years of illumination. These years where gruesome metallic grinding and factory fire met the dandy. Few eras have been so mixed, so utterly undecided. No era so perfect to carve out the truly Dickensian physiognomy of Iain Duncan Smith. This was neither the stage of tragedy nor comedy, but of frivolous wickedness and hilarious turpitude. The world made into a barb, and no-one quite knowing who is caught on it. The great progress. The great stupidity. Street life. The symbol belonging to this undecided realm.

Marx was famously dismissive of that “social scum” the Lumpenproletariat, who he described at the beginning of this period as “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Marx saw in these figures, in their Bonapartist, reactionary form, a bourgeois consciousness ripped from its class interest and thus nourished by purest political ideology. But if he could excoriate the drunkenness of beggars, Marx failed to appreciate its complement: the intoxication of sobriety of the working classes, the stupefaction in methodism, their imagined glory in progress. Wine, as the beggars already knew, was the only salve to the social anaesthetic of worthiness and the idiotic faith in work.

If Sean were here I’d want to talk to him about this learning in relation to a fragment by Benjamin, which he wrote as he thought about the world of Baudelaire; this world of mixedness of the city constructed and exploded, and the people within it subject to the same motion:

During the Baroque, a formerly incidental component of allegory, the emblem, undergoes extravagant development. If, for the materialist historian, the medieval origin of allegory still needs elucidation, Marx himself furnishes a clue for understanding its Baroque form. He writes in Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1922), vol. 1, p. 344: "The collective machine ... becomes more and more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one — that is, the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not only by the hand of man but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of division of labor, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those processes is, on the contrary, imperative." Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may be conceived as half finished products which, from the phases of a production process, have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction. During the Thirty Years' War, which, now at one point and now at another, immobilized production, the "interruption" that, according to Marx, characterizes each particular stage of this labor process could be protracted almost indefinitely. But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of which becomes the death's head, is the integration of man himself into the operation. The death's head of Baroque allegory is a half-finished product of the history of salvation, that process interrupted — so far as this is given him to realize — by Satan.

I won’t pretend to know all of what Benjamin means here but I have some idea. And those last sentences terrify me. Modernity begins with a war that is a strike, one that repeats through history. And the shape of this strike, this war, this repetition, is the shape of detritus of production interrupted. We shift perspective and the machine is revealed as other than it was once imagined: it is not some factory churning out commodities, but a world theatre of soteriology. An exchange takes place: the half-finished product for the half-destroyed body. Although what is created (albeit as a “monument to the process of destruction”) is some monstrous combination of the two. One and the same seen with two different perspectives, and the two perspectives separated by the distance between the promise that production will be interrupted, in rhythmic repetition, and the force of the machine that completes the product, kills the body into it, sealing death perfectly within the commodity, as its catastrophe. This distance, a tropic on the edge of the end of the world, is Hell.

This is a lot. But maybe it gets close to what I learnt. That all those bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc were for Sean the emblemata of our political times. These are the monsters, half-finished, half-human, half-machine, the bird interrupting itself with a scream a silent as the cosmos once seemed. I don’t know if they are to be taken up as weapons in the battle for salvation, or as mere co-ordinates on the map of hell. But they are certainly potent, and set here in commitment to redemption, for the work of raising the dead. Sean’s writing was always ready for this task, in constant preparation, and in constant interruption. Its angles quickly pacing between the two.

This has become theologically ornate. But perhaps something of the point is clear: that in the symbolic realm of Sean’s language are staked the great theological and materialist battles of our age. He had to deep dig into our time for that, furrow and dig so deep that he found the nineteenth century still there, crawling everywhere, right up to us. And all of this was set, furiously, against a more everyday view that production has all but disappeared from sight: society fully administered slips across screens with nothing but a sense of speed and gloss. His poetry decries, digs into, a laminated world with which we are supposed to play but in which we are never supposed to participate, never mind to get drunk, see the truth, raise the dead, even now as they slip away ever further through the mediatized glare.

*** Are we not surrounded by those who cast spells? Sorcery is the fashion, if only for the blighted, the meek, the poor, the oppressed. And it would be easy to mistake what Sean was writing for just another piece of subaltern superstition; promising mighty power for as long as it remains utterly powerless and otherworldly. But this is not right. Seans symbols are not just any old sign, or signal, or sigil. They are not arcana, but materials taken to hand out of the dereliction of the present. They are certainly magic, just as Sean was certainly a seer. But this is a materialist magic, a fury, a joy. They are not drawn from some other mystical world, but from this one. And his magic was to suspend them between this world and the next, between law made in the mouths of a class who hated him, and justice. He saw more deeply than most of us dare, and invited us along. Invited everyone along, including the dead who will rise, even if we have to dig and dig and drag them out of the ground and through the streets, to show the world what streets are really for. Here in this common place, between buildings, together. This is the place of magic, for riots, for burning cars; here a wall, there a blazing comet. Let his poetry dance on, and we will dance on too.

[healthnotion]

Does Stoicism Extinguish the Fire of Life?

In August 1937, Ernest Hemingway stopped by the office of Max Perkins, his book editor at Scribner’s. Perkins happened to already be hosting another visitor: Max Eastman, a writer of commentary on politics, philosophy, and literature who had several years prior penned a critical review of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. “It is of course a commonplace that anyone who too much protests his manhood lacks the serene confidence that he is made out of iron,” Eastman had written, “[and] some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.”

Hemingway was extremely sensitive to criticism and derided those who peddled it as envious, milksop non-doers who lobbed invective from the safety of the spectator’s gallery. That Eastman had not only critiqued his writing, but questioned the thing in which “Papa” took the most pride — his manhood — made the “libel” even more galling. Though Hemingway had penned a searing rebuttal at the time, the passage of years had done nothing to dampen his sense of indignation and desire for avengement.

Now his chance had come.

Hemingway had been particularly irked at Eastman’s dig that he had created “a literary style . . . of wearing false hair on the chest.” To literally affirm his hirsuteness, Papa therefore initiated their encounter by ripping open his shirt to reveal a chest which Eastman admitted “was hairy enough for anyone.” Hemingway then tore open Eastman’s shirt, exposing a chest which was in comparison, Perkins observed, “bare as a bald man’s head.”

Thus far, Hemingway had only been “fooling” around. But catching sight of the very volume which contained Eastman’s critical essay lying on his editor’s desk, he got “sore.”

Hemingway demanded that its author read the critical passages aloud. When Eastman refused, Hemingway slapped him across the face with the book. The two fell over the desk and wrestled a bit, before Hemingway broke into a broad grin and regained his good humor.

Many moderns are apt to view this episode as rather ridiculous, and Hemingway as demonstrating an insecure machoism. If not an example of faux manliness, it’s apt to be seen as evidence of misdirected emotion — why care so much about what other people thought of you? It seems like a real exercise in pointlessness.

Except for one thing.

Hemingway’s passionate hate for his haters seemingly fueled his work. After he was especially excoriated by critics for Across the River and Into the Trees, “it was Ernest’s pride that defied the naysayers and goaded him into writing The Old Man and the Sea,” his friend A.E. Housman observed. “It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies . . . who in the midst of cackling, ‘Through! Washed Up! Kaput!’ suddenly grab their groins and keel over.”

Being touchy about his honor was what ultimately catalyzed Hemingway’s greatest literary masterpiece. 

Ancient Rome, Contest Culture, and the Rise of Stoicism

“If historians long had the notion that Rome ‘fell,’ it is a notion based on the metaphor of an original firm, stable, solid structure that collapsed or disintegrated. I would argue that if Rome had a fall, it was a fall into a world dominated by exactly that metaphor.” –Carlin Barton, Roman Honor

In the present age, we’re apt to agree with Eastman that a “real man” doesn’t try to prove his manhood, and that the more he sees the need to demonstrate his masculinity, the less secure he is in its possession. We associate manhood with having a “stiff upper lip” — being unemotional, not caring what others think, being sort of “rock-like” in disposition. And we assume that manhood has always been framed this way.

In fact, though, the kind of manliness Hemingway evinced — touchy, thin-skinned, competitive, emotional, unpredictable, concerned with reputation and righting perceived wrongs — was the dominant pattern of masculinity for most of human history.

One of the central pivot points in the shift from the historic paradigm to the more modern one can be traced to ancient Rome. To understand how and why the shift occurred, let us travel back in time, taking along as our guide Carlin Barton, who, in Roman Honor, explains why “the principal metaphors expressing honor (light and fire) and those expressing dishonor (stone and ice)” became completely inverted as the republic became an empire.

Note: All quotes, unless otherwise cited, are taken from Roman Honor.

Light & Fire

“The desire for honor and glory set men on fire.” –Cicero

The early Roman Republic was an honor culture. That is, it followed the pattern which had been set by all ancient societies, wherein people were keenly concerned about their reputation among their peers.

In ancient Rome, it was not enough to live the community’s code, to say you possessed this or that virtue; you had to prove that you did — publicly, in an endless series of tests and trials. Honor was not won once, and forever retained — it had to be earned, and re-earned over and over again.

To be respected, you had to have skin in the game.

Rome was thus not only an honor culture, but a contest culture. Everything was a competition. As the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero observed of the republic’s boys:

“With what earnestness they pursue their rivalries! How fierce their contests! What exaltation they feel when they win, and what shame when they are beaten! How they dislike reproach! How they yearn for praise! What labors will they not undertake to stand first among their peers!”

Whatever could be fought over, big or small, was fought over — though not always so seriously; the Romans’ contests were full of whimsy, playfulness, and plenty of teasing.

Romans competed both with the living and the dead. They strove to not only live up to the good name of their ancestors, but to surpass them in glory. And while we moderns think it gauche to compete with one’s family and friends, the Romans thought these peers made the best fellow competitors, for they were equals with whom one shared the most in common. 

Romans competed over who was most skilled and excellent in rhetoric, in sports, in war, in wealth, and in virtue — particularly the defining quality of manhood: courage. The Roman historian Sallust described the way legionaries not only relished daunting odds, but were driven in their efforts by the desire to be the best soldier on the field:

“To men like these no ordeal was unfamiliar, no position rough or difficult, no armed foe formidable; their courage conquered all obstacles. But the greatest competition for glory was amongst themselves; each rushed to be the first to strike an enemy, to climb a wall, to be conspicuous in action.”

The Roman legionary strove not only for personal honor, but for public recognition; ancient Rome offered many different awards and commendations, and soldiers competed strenuously for them all.

Romans treated the achievement and maintenance of reputation as a contest in and of itself. Any insult or slight was seen as a challenge; “You say I am X, but I’ll prove that you’re wrong.” A Roman could win such a “competition” by pointing to past evidences of their honor; this was a culture in which politicians shamed political opponents or bolstered the credibility of their own arguments by tearing open their tunic to reveal scars earned in defense of the republic. Or, a critic might be refuted by one’s performance in a fresh showdown in which one’s bona fides could be plainly demonstrated.

Whether in peace or bellum, the dominant virtues of Roman culture and its citizen-soldiers were those of the warrior. Regardless of what one was competing over — whether civic pride, martial advantage, or the claim to a reputation worthy of respect — manhood was manifested in one’s willingness to engage. “The Romans associated virtus [manliness] with vis, vires (physical power, vitality, energy, violent or forceful action),” and “A male was transformed into a man by the willful expenditure of [this] energy.” Cicero, who took as his own slogan, “Ever to excel,” declared that “The whole glory of virtue [virtus] resides in activity.”

The placement of dynamic engagement at the heart of the culture affected even the language of ancient Rome:

“As the result of living in a contest culture, Roman ideas of truth (like Roman notions of the sacred) were more active, palpable, and embodied than our own. How much more active and embodied they were can be gleaned from a comparison of a few of our English words with their Latin cognates . . . Our ‘fact’ is passive, for us a fact just ‘is.’ The Roman factum was something made or done . . . Latin existere was to come into view, to appear, come forward, show oneself, come into being; exstare was not only to exist, it was to project, protrude, stand out, be conspicuous, to catch attention . . .

Latin sapere, to know, was to have sap, blood, juice, because consciousness was in the chest with the lungs, heart, breath, and blood. Many Latin words for knowledge express the physical aspects of what are, for us, principally metaphysical notions. Comprehendere, deprehendere, capere, and their relatives all stress the notion of grasping, seizing . . .

Verus . . . [often] meant ‘true’ in the sense of firm, capable of withstanding test or trial . . . [because] Generally, in earlier Roman thought, the ‘truth’ of what one said was intimately linked with the ability to endure a test or trial of some sort.”

The vigor of the Romans’ language points to the consolations of living in a contest culture. Existing in such a paradigm, in which your identity was neither fixed nor permanent, your worth was a moving target, and you had to always be actively engaged in proving yourself, required a greater tolerance for vulnerability, volatility, and unpredictability; yet, at the same time, it created a life that was more vivid and immediate, more active and animate — a life lived closer to the bone.

Each day, each encounter, each interaction, each challenge had stakes, had weight; the ancient Roman regularly found himself caught up in the discrimen, “the moment of truth when, before the eyes of others, you gambled what you were.” This was a life of risk, shot through with the exhilaration of constantly walking the line between honor and shame, glory and destruction, success and failure.

Out of these crucibles, “truth was not so much revealed as created, realized, willed in the most intense and visceral way.” In the agon — the test, trial, ordeal — you not only discovered your true position, your status in the pecking order, you discovered your strength, who you were. The contest established your being. It constructed reality.

In a life in which reality is made fresh every day, one remains radically present:

“A Roman’s hyperconsciousness of his or her ‘face’ produced a keen sense of embodiment. The person who underwent surveillance in a contest, who risked death or humiliation, lived critically in the moment. . . . For the Roman on the spot, up against a wall, the world was sharp, immediate, visceral. As in archaic Greek thought and much of Japanese thought — and for similar reasons — the Romans tended to physicalize everything, to make everything present. Reality was immanent; it was spectatus, expertus, probatus, perspicuus, argutus, manufestus. It hit you in the face; you could smack it with your hand.”

As the friction of contest culture ultimately made life incandescent, the Romans associated this way of living with light and fire. The man who exulted in activity, who embraced the agon, who ever existed in the arena, became a “glowing spirit”:

“Virtus and honores won in the crucible of the contest were shining and volatile; the refining fire of the ordeal produced a heightened sense of vividness, a brilliant, gleaming, resplendent existence. The man of honor was speciosus, illustris, clarus, nobilis, splendidus.”

In contrast, “The absence of energy (inertia, desidia, ignavia, socordia) was nonbeing. Inactivity froze the spirit.” The Romans associated dishonor — a disregard for reputation, an indifference to shame, an unwillingness to engage in the contest — with stone and ice. “Hardness was associated with impudence, stupidity, cruelty, numbness, and stupor,” and in fact “Stultus (stupid) was cognate with stolidus (inert, unmovable, dull, senseless).”

Stone & Ice

“Otium, vacatio, immunitas, withdrawal, leisure, the absence of tension and disturbance, became values in Roman society at the moment when it became impossible to maintain one’s being by contest and when the isolation of withdrawal was less painful than the humiliation that came with the active negotiation of one’s honor.” –Carlin Barton, Roman Honor

“From the time of Augustus, there begins a period in which the primores civitatis themselves often regarded inertia as sapientia [wisdom].” –Zvi Yavetz, Plebs and Princeps 

The Romans distinguished between “good contests” and “bad contests” and for the cultural paradigm described above to remain viable, the latter had to prevail. Good contests adhered to the following restrictions: “a) framed and circumscribed within implicit or explicit boundaries accepted by the competitors, b) between relative equals, c) witnessed, and d) strenuous.”

As the Roman Republic fell, civil wars broke out, and an empire was established, “a” and “b” became untenable, making citizens unwilling to live up to the requirements of “c” and “d.”

An honor culture can only function in a society in which there is a shared code — clear rules, standards, and expectations for interaction and engagement — and within a closed community of equals. But as the Roman Republic transformed into a sprawling, porous, far-flung empire, its society became increasingly large, complex, and diverse, and “The citizen of Rome became a citizen of the world,” this common, level playing field disintegrated.

In an honor culture, you can only be insulted by someone you consider an equal. But in Roman society, discerning who deserved this level of respect, and whose slights to take seriously, became increasing difficult and unclear. If someone possessed a different set of values, was a citizen still honor-bound to care what they thought?

Early Romans had shared rules of engagement — boundaries that checked their competitions and kept them civil. In the greater chaos of the empire, in the absence of shared norms, citizens made the rules up as they went. It was every man for himself. In fact, the less a man cared about honor, the more unable he was to be shamed, the more strategic advantage he gained. Early Romans had not played to win, but for the sake of engaging in a good fight; now, citizens were prepared to win at any cost.

Romans thus came to see contests as unequal and destructive. Those who engaged in competitions under the old assumption of participating on a level playing field, found instead that the odds were stacked, and this gap between expectation and reality engendered great bitterness. As did the fact that it seemed more and more men began receiving commendations, laurels of honor, who hadn’t actually earned them.  

As a result, Romans became disillusioned and began to withdraw from the contest, from active engagement with their fellow citizens and civic life. “When competition was insupportable, then paralysis, the desire to hide, and the desire to be insensitive and autonomous became widespread cultural phenomena. With the loss of the good contest and the rules that framed it, cold, callous, brazen shamelessness became a cure for shame.”

“Shamelessness” for the Romans did not necessarily mean, as it does for us, to be unvirtuous, but rather to literally be incapable of being shamed. That is, the shameless care nothing for what others think of them.

While today we tend to admire this kind of radical indifference to public opinion, to the Romans unbounded autonomy was the mark of a man whose energy had been drained, whose being had been destroyed; as Cicero put it: “To take no heed of what other people think of you is the part not only of an arrogant man but, to be sure, of a dissolutus.” How could someone who remained unmoved even in the face of legitimate criticism, who refused to be ashamed even when confronted with their culpability, ever be trusted?

Still, even Cicero, though himself a political leader, was sympathetic to the impulse to become callously disengaged, rhetorically asking, “what spirit trained in these times, ought not to become insensitive?” Elsewhere he quotes a line of Euripides: “If this mournful day were the first to dawn for me, had I not long sailed in such a sea of troubles, then there would be reason for anguish like that felt by a colt when the reins are first imposed and he bridles at the first touch of the bit. But now, broken by miseries, I am numb.”

In this self-imposed withdrawal and “the collapse of conditions for healthy competition in ancient Rome . .  . various strategies [had to be] devised by the Romans for creating a new emotional economy and redefining their spirit.” Said another way, “With the loss of the rules and conditions of the good contest, the entire language of honor ‘imploded’ and had to be ‘reconstructed.’”

This reconstruction process would involve nothing less than a complete inversion of values, and produce multiple radiating effects on Roman society.

First, the values associated with virtus shifted from effective energy, potency, gameness, to those we now associate with our modern idea of virtue — patience, sobriety, temperance, chastity, endurance. Values which had been externally directed and both volatile and valorous were replaced with those more stable and internal in nature. Honor centered around control, constraint, consistency; the ideal man becomes he who is poised, tranquil, disengaged. The passive values were elevated above the active.

While “Virtus often beg[an] to stand for or [was] replaced by the notion of honestas,” the words described two very different types of character:

“The new ‘honest’ man was not tense and dangerous. He was a man who could not be shamed and yet, simultaneously, posed no threat . . . man’s dignitas was no longer his presumptive claim to honor but rather an autonomous well of reserve. The tiger was declawed, the fire extinguished.”

The honest man could not be shamed, because of a second change in Roman culture: the arbiter of a man’s values — his honor in its newly constituted form — became not one’s peers but one’s conscience. Only oneself, or one’s God, could judge a man’s character.

Third, just as the possession of certain values became something that didn’t need to be proven through trial and test, neither did one’s manhood; being a vir was no longer something that had to be earned, but rather was innate.

Fourth, there was a retreat from the public sphere to the private one. “Political quietism” increased. The sentiment expressed by Cicero was common, “If we cannot enjoy the Republic, it is stupid not to enjoy our private affairs.”

Fifth, as Romans collectively withdrew from participating in a contest culture, they ironically began to lionize the individual who continued to play the game, and did so with a “winner-take-all” disregard for the old rules. The “man not prepared to lose” was idolized.

Instead of competition being something in which every average citizen took part, the masses mounted the bleachers, to cheer on, and live vicariously through, the few “gladiators” still in the arena. As spectators, they both worried over and felt excited by the rise of would-be tyrants who were willing to crush anyone who stood in their way; the thrill of the cult of victory, the stimulating spectacle of a man willing to go for the jugular, outweighed concerns about the political implications portended in the rise of such a rex.

As Dr. J. Rufus Fears argues, “When men came to believe that the charisma of victory no longer resided in the collective entity of the res publica but rather in the figure of an individual leader, communal authority and republican government were doomed and monarchy the only reality.”

Instead of citizens feeling collectively proud of their society’s successes, “Victory became profoundly personalized”:

“In his speech on behalf of Marcellus, Cicero explicitly refutes those who suggest that victory in war is the common achievement and honor of the Roman army and the Roman people: ‘This glory, Gaius Caesar, which you have recently acquired, no one shares with you. All of it, as great as it is (and it is undeniably very great) — all of it, I say, is yours. No credit belongs to centurion, to prefect, to cohort, to squadron. Not even the mistress of human destinies, Fortune herself, claims any partnership in this glory. She yields it to you; she confesses it to be yours — wholly and personally.’”

Sixth, the energy that was once directed to external contests was re-channeled into internal ones. The retreat into private leisure didn’t quite scratch an itch which stubbornly remained, nor soothe a sense of shame the late Romans tried so desperately to ignore; “Even while they praise[d] withdrawal from an untenable public life, they dreaded lest they appear to others as inactive or inert.”

And so competition was re-framed as something you could have with yourself — how well could you discipline your baser impulses and attain the new virtus? The will was still active, within. Ascetic practices took off, as ways to engage in a personal kind of battle, for though the ancient heroic virtues had been eclipsed, the Romans “never stopped wanting to be warriors.”

If one did not have to train for the contest, one could still exercise self-control. And one had to — on an almost inhumanely consistent basis; the self-control of late Romans had to in fact be far stronger and more unrelenting than that of their predecessors, who were allowed some lapses, some impulsivity. The irony, however, is that “Complete self-control [only] becomes an ideal — and a necessity — precisely when all control of one’s destiny is wrested from one.” That is, the Romans increasingly sought to master themselves, the less able they felt to master the world around them.

In this upside-down and enervated cultural landscape, the philosophy of Stoicism — begun by the Greeks centuries prior — found ready reception.

The maxims of the Stoics didn’t necessarily sanction this kind of withdrawal, but for those already inclined to adopt a more passive approach to the world, their philosophy provided a ready, even ennobled rationalization for their choices.

Whereas early Romans sought to create reality through sheer will and saw little limit to what was within their power to control, Epictetus said that one should not “demand things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do,” and counseled against being “concerned with things which are beyond your power.”

Whereas the early Romans believed that one should rise to any challenge, Seneca argued that “If you do not wish to fight, you are permitted to flee,” while Arrian, a disciple of Epictetus, reasoned that it was wise to be like children, who, “when things do not please them, say, ‘I will not play anymore.’”

Whereas the early Romans believed that when you were struck, you were honor-bound to strike back, Seneca argued that “The blows of the powerful must be born not patiently merely, but even with a cheerful face,” and recommended developing “the endurance of the ox and of the horse obedient to the rein.”

Whereas the early Romans found their identity in community, in being part of an honor group, the Stoics idealized complete independence: “Beyond the last inner tunic, which is this poor body of mine, no one has any authority over me at all,” Arrian declared. Stoicism endorsed the new “shamelessness — in the form of apathy and autonomy.”

And whereas the Romans had cultivated an intentional touchiness — a literal and metaphorical blush in the face of shame — the Stoics advised cultivating an “impenetrable mask of indifference”:

“When the Romans begin to talk about salvation, the stone — once the image of callousness and stupidity — becomes the ideal. There was a hardness of the spirit, like a hardness of the body, that, when it burned, could not feel it.”

“Stand by a stone and slander it: What effect will you produce?” Arrian asked. “If a man listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?”

Seneca suggested imagining oneself as withdrawn behind a mighty citadel:

“Surround yourself with philosophy, an impregnable wall; though fortune assault it with her many engines, she cannot breach it. The spirit that abandons external things stands on unassailable ground; it vindicates itself in its fortress; every weapon hurled against it falls short of its mark.”

In a time of upheaval, anxiety, and uncertainty, in which the “shock of embodiment” remained, but there no longer existed the rituals once attendant to a contest culture to manage it, Romans sought safe harbor in a stable standard that wasn’t contingent on other people. They wanted to find a way of being that did not require either competition or collaboration. They wanted to beat a retreat to an inner citadel. They wanted to grow a thicker skin.

“With the idea of survival or salvation came the idealization of natural man and of living according to Nature. Natural man did not have to prove he was a man, and so he did not need the contest. But the life of a natural man was, paradoxically, the life of a rock.”

In assimilating the principles of Stoicism — “a desperate strategy to preserve both life and honor” — the reversal of early Roman values was complete: “the worst imaginable spiritual condition for an ancient Roman — petrification, the cold stony unbeing of dishonor — inverts and becomes the ideal and honorable condition of the Roman soul, the ultimate remedy for dishonor — salvation.”

Walking on Coals

“If the ancient ideal was the make of oneself a target, to say in effect: ‘Here I am, come and get me,’ the Stoic ideal was to declare, ‘I am not what you see; you can’t get me because I’m not here at all.’”

Stoicism’s popularity rose in ancient Rome as citizens began to feel that it was less painful to disengage than to continue to put themselves out there. When the rules of the “contest” became unclear, and the playing field seemed tilted. When participation in civic affairs, in society, seemed an exercise in futility and frustration. A sucker’s game.

Stoicism has surged in popularity today for the very same reasons. When it seems pointless to engage, we are drawn to a philosophy that says that becoming callous and indifferent is not only okay, but noble even, honorable.

It is of course a question of great debate as to whether or not the “pure” philosophy of Stoicism does or does not endorse and encourage a more passive approach to life. For all the lines cited above that point to the fact that it does, other evidence could be marshaled to reach the very opposite conclusion. Stoic philosophy is much like the Christian religion (or any religion); people can use the same scriptural source to come to completely divergent theological conclusions. But while I think legitimate arguments could be made on both sides of the question, I’m actually not interested in making a quixotic attempt to “settle” it.

The question for our purposes is not whether Stoic “doctrine” necessitates passivity, but whether, when it mixes with human nature, it can have a tendency to do so. Lived philosophy, or lived religion, can be something quite different than how it is ascribed on paper, e.g., lived Christianity is much different than Christian theology. So it is with what is better termed “stoicism” — with a small “s.”

The question of how Stoicism affects human behavior is certainly not an academic one, or a niche one, limited to wholesale subscribers of the philosophy. No, we are all arguably stoics now, whether consciously or not. Shades of its principles have in fact become axioms that seem so self-evidently true, they needn’t even be examined.

But, they should be.

It’s axiomatic that we shouldn’t care what other people think, and that no one’s opinions can harm you. But what if there’s actually something to be said for feeling ashamed, at least if the one shaming you is someone you respect — and they actually have a point? What if the hurt of an insult can actually be a good thing, a spur to action? What if “I’m going to prove you wrong” can sometimes be the best possible source of motivation? What if revenge isn’t always a misguided, destructive pursuit, but, especially in the form of critic-silencing success, can be a productive endeavor?

It’s dogma that personal conscience is superior to the opinions of others as a form of moral authority. And yet research shows that shame — the penetrating eyes of the public — is a stronger motivator of ethical behavior.

It’s a truism that the best kind of contest is the one you have with yourself, and yet here again research contradicts this sacred shibboleth, showing that in fact, you absolutely cannot push yourself as hard or achieve as much of your potential when by yourself, than when you’re competing against others.

It’s accepted that self-mastery is one of the best and highest qualities, but what if a focus on self-control rises in inverse proportion to how much control we have in the world around us? What if a retreat to an inner fortress is simply a way of stuffing down one’s disappointment, fear of being hurt, and sense of impotence? The historian Ira Berlin argued that this was the real source of Stoicism’s popularity:

“When the road towards human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. This is certainly what happened in Ancient Greece when Alexander the Great began to destroy the city-states, and the Stoics and Epicureans began to preach a new morality of personal salvation, which took the form of saying politics was unimportant, civil life was unimportant, all the great ideals held up by Pericles and by Demosthenes, by Plato and by Aristotle, were trivial and as nothing before the imperative need for personal individual salvation.

This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province — the prince — confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachment, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface — you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.”

It’s taken for granted these days that stoic values are simply superior: competitions are just pissing contests for the insecure; being anxiously engaged in proving yourself makes you a “try hard”; caring about what others think, being thin-skinned, is the mark of an inferior man who lacks real confidence. Is it possibly too convenient, though, that the values which are put down, which were once considered the heroic, warrior values in ancient times, happen to be the ones which make men dangerous and unsuited to the modern capitalist economy?

“In contemporary American culture, the ‘honorable’ person is ‘honest and true,’ someone who is above all consistent. He . . . is conscientious, predictable, stable, solid, four-square, a rock, a brick.” We need bricks to stolidly build society. We need men willing to keep their head down, accept their role, be completely unruffled by the ding-dong in the cubicle next to them. We need men who will choose to retreat into their inner citadel, who, rather than becoming completely unhinged by the banality of modern life, will constantly repeat incantations that the meaninglessness of modern work, the irritation of a daily commute, the loneliness of an empty apartment cannot ultimately harm them.

It seems objectively true that you shouldn’t try to change what is outside of your control. But dive just a bit deeper, and a sticky question arises: what is and isn’t up to us? Stoics would say that things like wealth, health, and reputation are not completely within our control, and that we should only concentrate on the things that are: our desires, judgements, will. But of course many aspects of wealth, health, and reputation are up to us: we can’t completely control whether we get cancer or not, but we can choose to exercise and eat right; we can’t completely control what other people think of us, but we can choose to act in a way that generally garners respect; we can’t completely control our cash flow, but we can work hard and save.

The Stoics will say that even though we should accept things as they are, we can strive to make the best of the lot which falls to us. But what exactly is the line between submitting to our Fate and trying to change it? The Stoic answer is unclear, and it is in this ambiguity that the philosophy, in its lived form, can become an excuse for inaction.

Stoicism is certainly not all wrong; there is much in the philosophy that is right and true. Adopting some of its principles, in some circumstances, is arguably a necessity for surviving and staying sane in the modern world. But to say something is a necessary way of living, is not the same as saying it is the best way, or the only way, certainly not in all circumstances. 

It doesn’t have to be an either-or thing: you can decide to keep a stony face towards those you do not respect as equal peers, but to be more emotional, more vulnerable, more competitive with those you do. To care, and care deeply, about what some people think. You can choose to restrain your emotions in some circumstances, and yet decide you want to feel it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — in others; you can decide that you’d rather feel deeply, even when such emotions sear the soul, than live a life that is peaceful, but flat. You can accept the whims of Fortune in some things, and yet decide you want to be the best in others, even if it means fighting Fate tooth and nail, even if in attempting to will a new reality, you burn yourself up.

For there is a risk in taking a stoic approach in every area of your life.

Every code of ethics, every philosophy, every religion, involves certain existential tradeoffs — you gain certain energies and perspectives and powers while losing others — and with stoicism it is no different. In embracing the philosophy we gain certain strengths, certain abilities to deal with life. But we also shut off other currents of existence.

In stoicism we lose some of our fellow feeling. The interesting thing about an honor culture, a contest culture, is that you only challenge someone, and respond to the challenge of another, if you consider him an equal; the challenge thus confers respect. The more competitive a culture is, the more intimate, paradoxically, are its ties. If, however, no one can penetrate our mask of indifference, then no one is our equal; all are beneath us. Others risk becoming inanimate objects, projectiles that can assault our fortress, but only succeed in dashing themselves upon the rocks. “Why should I care what you think?” is a question that de-values the other. When it’s hard to discern which opinions and forces to care about, it’s easy to decide not to care about anyone, or anything. “What could be more dishonorable,” Cicero asks, “but now we harden ourselves to these humiliations and shed our humanity.”

In stoicism we also lose some of the wildness, the immediacy of life. In active engagement there is radical presence, there are stakes, there is weight. There is tension, there is conflict, there is risk. A life of volatility and unpredictability and danger is certainly more challenging than the tranquil life, but it has its own consolations. If one path can be said to be “happier” than the other, it is based entirely on one’s particular definition of happiness.

There is security in being a rock, in being immovable, but is that ultimately what we want — at least in all areas of our lives? Is it better to be safe and inert than vulnerable and alive?

There can be honor (redefined as integrity) in stoicism but no glory.

In ancient Rome, men found that “The ideals of peaceful autonomy and hardness remained ever poor seconds to the contest. . .  . If the Roman Stoic wanted to be a rock, he longed to be a flame . . . [for] there remained for the Romans, even after the adoption of radically new ideas of honor, a nostalgia for life on the edge, for the Roman way.”

Today we too experience a similar longing. As “like the Romans of the early Empire, we are walking on the coals of a fire that is not yet out.”

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[rfhusnik]

Cheated In The Middle

                                        Written By: F. John Surells

             I’ve learned that cheaters aren’t always those mortals who copy answers off the papers of other mortals. Nor are they always the humans who enter the test area with certain replies written on their hands. But sometimes they are such people as manipulate responses, yet even they probably aren’t as wicked as those who try to cheat the orderly process of time passing by; that is, they who try to alter what should be an orderly process.

           And the leader said “Give us order now. Only order can help those who exist today with one economic class above them, and another economic class below them.” But my friend Rashon, who’s of a different race than me, told me that sometimes he feels that a lot of this stuff is simply philosophical baloney. And then he added that while some of his friends seem to have minds that quickly bounce from one topic to another, the real heroes of society are those who simply “take care of business as best as they can.”

           So, anyway I guess that cheating is almost always wrong, yet, isn’t it true that one could only cheat about things one has known or experienced? Thus, maybe not all cheating is dishonorable, perhaps a small portion of it is hopeful.

           And I must confess to having cheated after the original completion of this piece.  Unsuspected musings led me to consult a close friend concerning these words, and his input then motivated me to add certain paragraphs herein which hadn’t been a part of the initial written effort. And, I’ve renamed this piece “Cheated In The Middle.” And the reason I’ve made these changes,  lies in my belief that the middle class always suffers when people of either great or no power defile  society through the use of their words and actions, just as outside lovers disregard marriage vows when they take to bed one of the promisers who spoke those vows to one another.

           I showed these words to my friend Rashon Leyf shortly after I’d written them. And of course he’s been a collaborator with me on previous literary projects. “Rashon,” I said, “I’d like you to read this short piece and give me your opinion of it.”

           “Okay” he said. And after reading it he said “This was instigated by the president’s recent words concerning national anthem protests, wasn’t it?”

           “Yes” I said.

           “You know,” said Rashon, “I think that in the end those remarks may have a galvanizing effect upon America and its diverse ethnicities. At least I hope so. But John, your handing of these words to me for my consideration now gives me a chance to tell you something I’ve hesitated to say to you for some time.”

           “What’s that?” I asked.

           “Sometimes the things you write actually scare me. I mean, I don’t often disagree with your words, but sometimes it seems to me as though you’ve become the modern day answer to Zelda and Scott, as well as to Ted and Sylvia.”

           Well, maybe Rashon was right when he said I have a mind that strays from the important to the non-consequential. But I’m very sympathetic to those who’ve recently suffered the wrath of storms. And my prayers are with them. Nevertheless, I always stand when their song is being performed. And I don’t believe in blanket condemnations. Thus, I won’t allow myself to be automatically grouped in with racists and political extremists. Oh, and every time something is perceived as having gone wrong in America, I won’t immediately contend that the large nation whose landmass encompasses both Europe and Asia was necessarily involved in the creation of the problem, regardless of whether that problem was actual or fabricated. And, if I were the spouse of an ex-president, I wouldn’t claim that all members of my sex voted incorrectly if they voted for the candidate of the political party which is in opposition to the one I and my spouse represent.  

           Nonetheless, in an era of fake news and phony controversies, as one sets aside one’s footballs and protest signs, one thing one can rely on is that America’s middle class will continue to be the real loser in all its nation’s domestic disputes and contentions, just as it’s always been ever since a basically kind, but sometimes flawed nation came into existence. And picture now the middle class American. He or she gets up in the morning, transports him or herself to a workplace, and then spends long hours toiling at a job which no doubt is either physically or mentally (or both) demanding, and then comes home to find that yet another so-called “minority group” is complaining because its life is getting too difficult. And when the difficulty being complained about is evaluated by that member of the middle class, here is what is always discovered:  Certain groups, usually consisting of either very poor or very wealthy individuals, are blaming the everyday common American citizen for not showing enough “care” for minorities, common criminals, drug and alcohol abusers, and people living illegally within the boundaries of the United States.

           And yet, of course, despite this, life goes on for working class Americans. And every day, that large portion of America’s citizens struggles with problems which seemingly can’t be solved, as well as with allotments of personal earthly time which grow shorter with every passing second. And there are no medals or Oscars handed out to the middle class. But there are instead “special television programs” during the broadcast of which the middle class is continually lambasted when such medals and Oscars are given to supposed great performers whose performances have supposedly done a lot to further better living in the states of America.

           But here’s probably the greatest slap in the face, or kick to the behind of all such Americans as would probably be classified as neither rich nor poor. Because someone or some group determined that certain people living inside the U.S. deserve, for one reason or another (and usually it’s because their ancestors couldn’t accumulate enough wealth to pass on to them), to be given a “free ride” throughout their earthly existences, America’s liberal news and entertainment media have now singled out working class Americans as the real culprits behind all that’s wrong in America today. And, of course while this blame is being affixed to those who do work in America, numerous others of working age simply refuse to get jobs. And, while those types continue to remain unemployed, other individuals continue to sneak into this nation, only to then face serious struggles here which ultimately are resolved by increased taxes on the middle class.  

           And, while what is spoken of in the preceding paragraph continues to unfold, lawbreakers continue to sidestep the rules of society, causing them to eventually become incarcerated, which then places them at the mercy of America’s workers, while all the while multi- millionaires, usually from the entertainment sectors of performance art or sports excoriate America’s working class for not sympathizing enough with the downtrodden.

           Well, here’s a few “answers” to America’s chronically rich and poor complainers. First, America’s working class wants to spend its leisure time in justified and earned rest and relaxation. It doesn’t want to come home from work each day only to hear, and then have to worry about the either real or supposed problems of either very rich or very poor crybabies.

           Second, the American working class doesn’t want to be blamed for the misfortunes of certain people who today find themselves in peril because yesterday they abused drugs or alcohol, broke the laws of America, or entered America illegally. Third, what can the American working class do to help the disadvantaged anyway? Does some “lip service” to, or acknowledgement of problems whether real or supposed really help? Fourth, if it’s really acknowledgement that’s being sought here, then let’s acknowledge this: Both extremes of the political spectrum are equally as dangerous to all Americans, no matter their economic class, race, or sex. But let’s not leave this unsaid – America’s liberals have been far more tolerant of communists and far left-wing extremists than have its conservatives been of neo-Nazis and far right-wing extremists. And fifth, (and the one that’s no doubt the most controversial), since of late there seems to have been an interest in tearing down statues to leaders who’ve fallen out of grace in this era of “what can you do for me today,” let’s also remember the wealthy landowners of many years ago who, for one reason or another (but I’m guessing usually arrogance and laziness) couldn’t or wouldn’t harvest their own crops, and then felt compelled to import slave labor to do that work for them. And then let’s also remember the authorities of recent times who didn’t enforce America’s immigration laws, and by not doing so allowed this nation to now face the immigration crisis it currently struggles with.  

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