Whatever Happened to Miley Cyrus?

It hardly seems timely to write anything about Miley Cyrus’ performance at last month’s MTV Video Music Awards. The former child star, as she has done for the past three years, put together an exhibition designed primarily to wipe away the image that remains of her in the public as television’s “Hannah Montana.” Her appearance, such as it was -tongue wagging before a live audience, barely dressed in a flesh-colored  costume, dancing with large stuffed animals – was tiresomely familiar to anyone with their eye on popular culture. After so long performing, her music might actually be more honest now while at the same time being more artificial. 

But Cyrus is by no means unique, which is one of the reasons that even her MTV performance had a relatively short shelf life in the storehouse of pop outrages. Both the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon have spent the better part of a decade fashioning child stars and disposing of them. These stars – usually female, possessing some vocal talent and in the netherworld between child and teenager – usually figure prominently in television shows with a protagonist on the edge of “stardom.” Then they and their zany friends have relatively wholesome adventures, sing a few songs, and prepare themselves and their audience for the pressures of impending adolescence. For every Miley, there’s Selena Gomez, and iCarly, and Demi Lovato, and the Olson twins, and Amanda Bynes, and so on. Each one is packaged in a similar fashion, making their identities blur and their careers follow a familiar, depressing arc of stardom, fascination, decline and floundering before …

I was reminded of this watching “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” A 50-year-old movie starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, “Baby Jane” is a fun-house grotesque;  a meditation on the corroding influence of fame, stardom, abandonment, and role-playing. It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood does best when it wants to talk about how terrible a place Hollywood can be. (They would know, wouldn’t they?) It also offers a window into how terrible a place the world can be when we rely on false images to save us from ourselves, and how little consolation we can find within. 

“Baby Jane” opens in the golden age of vaudeville in 1917, with the sound of a crying child. Inside a theater, a crowd is watching “Baby” Jane Hudson, a sweet, blonde child on a stage dancing and singing. The audience can buy an exact replica doll in the lobby to take home for their very own. Baby Jane sings her trademark song, “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” – a Victorian-era weeper about a child writing a love letter to her dead father. But Baby Jane’s father is at that moment alive, and we see that he is more or less managing her career. We are not surprised later to find that for all her talent, Baby Jane is a spoiled little girl. When she stages a tantrum after the show, a crowd of mothers and children waiting for her autograph are also quick to pass judgment on her and her parents.

Nor is she alone in the world – she has an older sister named Blanche, and a mother. Mother makes her only appearance at the beginning, when she tells the older sister that she’s “the lucky one” – presumably because she isn’t on stage. “I want you to be nicer to Jane and your father than they are to you,” she admonishes her. Implicit in the command is both the idea that Jane will need someone in the future, and that the mother won’t be there.  Lurking in the background is the idea that Blanche is luckier because she isn’t the one on stage. 

Then the scene shifts ahead to 1935, and we are aware that the roles have reversed. Blanche Hudson is now an accomplished, sought-after Hollywood actress. She has also taken her mother’s advice, because we learn from two studio hacks that Blanche is “taking care” of Jane – making sure she has roles, in spite of her lack of acting talent. But she’s “not doing Baby Jane any favors” by doing so, one man says, before asking the question, seemingly aimed at a large automobile – “Who do they make monsters like this for?” 

Is Baby Jane a monster, or is Blanche? We think we know the answer when we see two anonymous figures – one standing at a gate, another behind the wheel of a car, and we are led to believe that one has run over the other on purpose. We know Jane is a drinker now, and we feel that these two sisters will always be at each other’s throats. So we aren’t surprised later to find what has happened – the two sisters are, years later, unmarried and living in a forgotten Hollywood mansion. Blanche is crippled physically, unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair. Jane is crippled emotionally, still comically resembling the old child star, bitter and broken. Though it is the present, the title card tells us that this is “Yesterday.” 

“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is a question familiar to us. We learn of and discover media personalities, and then lose track of them. What happened to them? Why aren’t they still “around?” Did he or she die and I didn’t notice? The obvious answer is “Baby” Jane grew up. But why don’t I know what happened? How could someone with that much talent at an early age not go on to do something even bigger? The answer is understandable. A child prodigy may be a figure of immense talent who is capable of greater accomplishments as they age – one thinks of Mozart – or a gifted youngster who masters a very narrow skill at an exceptionally early age but is unable to progress beyond this. That is why being a child prodigy can be a blessing – unlimited wealth and attention that makes one “set for life,” or an impossible standard of achievement that one is burdened with for the remainder of his life. Normal people live under the sometimes mistaken impression that the best is yet to come. But what if it’s already happened? What then? What if you’re never allowed to grow up? 

One of the draws of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is its two real-life stars, famously dismissive of each other but both needing a hit to restore their careers in 1962. Joan Crawford will probably always suffer under the burden of “Mommie Dearest,” which makes her performance as the seemingly good-hearted Blanche that much more interesting. Bette Davis does her best to make us loathe the self-loathing Baby Jane, so that we laugh at her while at the same time being revolted as she serves up rats and parakeets for her sister’s meals.  Jane is still performing – as Blanche, by copying her voice over the phone and forging checks. Even then, she is nowhere near as gifted or as shrewd a performer as her sister. 

Something else is going on in a movie that is obsessed with performances. Even in private, the lives of these two women are, at best, illusions. Jane has a veneer of bitterness and brass that inadequately conceals her vulnerability and insanity. One of the unintended legacies of this movie is its appeal to camp, and that is partly because of Davis and Crawford and their careers built on strong, independent women through over-the-top performances. 

Baby Jane has not grown up, but she is Blanche’s caregiver. And even though she resents the role, there is a theatricality about it. In real life, for example, it would be ludicrous for Blanche to live on the second story of a house when she is stuck in a wheelchair. (Of course, she’s up there so Jane can presumably control her.) But by Blanche’s being above and set apart, Jane can make a show of taking care of her, bringing up the elaborate silver meal services to present her with food. And by doing so, she can presumably assuage the grief she still feels over what she thinks she did to Blanche in making her crippled. The only rule seems to be that Blanche never mentions the accident, until she feels she needs to. And because Blanche knows the truth, she will allow Jane to torture her.  

But by the movie’s end, we know that Jane didn’t really do anything to Blanche. Blanche has spent decades using the accident that ended her career to make Jane live in guilt. So Blanche is also playing a role, and a very sinister one at that. We now understand that the girl waiting in the wings, watching her spoiled little sister bow for audiences, was silently nursing her own grudges. 

Jane’s role as a caretaker is interesting too, in that it distinguishes the movie from that other Hollywood gothic, “Sunset Boulevard.” In it, the insane silent film star Norma Desmond needs caretakers in order to function in spite of the reality of her fading stardom. Here, Baby Jane need only look in a mirror and compare her face to the ubiquitous doll with her name, and she is fully aware of how far she has fallen. What good is fame, the movie asks, when a grateful public can rediscover your performances on television, only to have them interrupted unceremoniously by commercials for dog food? “All that happened a long time ago,” one of the non-show business characters assures her teenage daughter. The illusion of film makes the events of 30 years before seem ancient. 

Another facet of the movie is the act of “watching yourself.” We see Blanche admiring her own work on television, and we imagine that Jane doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, she has the dolls. One of the tragedies of child stardom is the loss of fame, and the vain scratching and clawing that results when someone tries to regain that attention. (In the act of former child stars trying to distinguish themselves as adults, their striving sometimes comes off as desperate, amateurish, and …childlike.) But why does a former star watch herself? Because presumably, no one else is. When the audience leaves after the performance, the performer has nothing left to do but become part of the audience – a potentially unwilling and unsatisfied consumer of the performance. The act of adoration was once reserved only for God – because He is the only one worthy of receiving it, and the only figure who can justify the need for it. 

Within the movie’s internal theme of acting, we see both sisters as not living up to their parents’ wishes – Jane, singing about her father, knows she is no longer everybody’s baby doll and that she can’t get that back, even if she goes out on the road again. Her talent, the one thing her father assured her she would never lose, is worthless. Blanche, because of her use of the accident against her sister, has betrayed the promise she silently made to her mother. 

The other characters share the stars’ marginality and brokenness. Elvira, the housekeeper who sides with Blanche, is black. In 1962, her race and her occupation make her somewhat disposable in society. In spite of this, Elvira stands up to Jane, telling her, “You gotta act like a grown woman, just like the rest of us.” The pathetic Edwin Flagg, played with wonderful pathos by Victor Buono, poses as an aspiring entertainer who longs for show business because he is really a man-child living at home with his mother.  His character gives Jane an outlet to resurrect her show business and romantic aspirations, but she realizes nothing will come of them. Flagg reaches the same conclusion, drunk when he thinks Jane has abandoned him, and running from the house when he realizes what kind of people Jane and Blanche are. 

What eventually happens to child stars? In the case of the Hudson sisters, death and insanity, we assume, as the camera draws back from the busy beach when the police at last discover what they’ve been witnessing. A bewildered circle of sun worshippers stare at an old lady singing a forgotten song, while a body lies nearby waiting for someone to notice it. With her last words, Blanche has just told us that her greatest fear for her sister is that Jane will be alone, with no one to look out for her. (That tells you what Blanche considers to be her version of “caretaking.”) But for our own real-life stars, we expect them to fall into lives of crime, drugs, failed marriages, loneliness and neglect, unless their careers continue. Then we still expect the same, only on a perhaps larger scale. We aren’t surprised when Michael Jackson orders his physician to give him more of a drug than a human being can stand, presumably because he is something more than mortal through the power of his voice. And we aren’t surprised to see him carried out of his mansion in a body bag, as though we knew that was where he was headed from the moment we first heard him sing. We allow ourselves to be outraged by Miley Cyrus, or spellbound by her, but we keep watching, because we expect something entertaining to follow – either a song, or a morality tale, or maybe both. We have reached a stage as a society when either one will serve to amuse us.  

It is the forgotten Elvira who inspires “Baby Jane’s” ultimate comment on fame. At the picture’s end, when a group of people at the beach -the same crowd that will moments later be Jane’s final audience – learn that Elvira’s body has been found, one of them remarks, “Sure is a rotten way to get your picture in the papers.” I’m sure Miley Cyrus, and legions of child stars along with her, would agree. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The Art of Celebrity Apologies

I did a recent interview with The Clyde Fitch Report which dealt with the phenomenon of celebrity apologies. If you'd like to see it, click here. But the topic brings up a couple of complementary issues which I'd like to explore.

First off, what do we mean when we say a celebrity apology? I think we would all agree that when a celebrity gets some kind of blowback from the media for a statement, that's usually a good time for an apology. The level of apology can depend on several factors - for example, how were the offensive comments communicated? Did they come in the form of a court deposition, such as Paula Deen? Were they conveyed second hand, through another source, and if so, how credible is that source? Were they in the course of an interview, such as with Marlon Brando's comments on live television with Larry King about Hollywood being controlled by Jews?

The next factor is the likeability of the celebrity - and this is crucial. This can be controlled by many things, such as the celebrity's good looks (or lack thereof), their charm, their public persona. Athletes, if they are still active, can wipe away our misgivings simply by performing at an unusually high level or winning a championship. As was said of Babe Ruth, "You can't boo a home run." I would argue there is vaguely a political component at work as well, but this depends on what was said, and the person saying it. Paula Deen's case illustrates this.

You will recall in John Irving's "The World According to Garp," Garp's mother Jenny Fields writes a book entitled "Sexual Suspect," about the plight of women who do not allow themselves to be defined by their associations with men. Some celebrities are what we might call "cultural suspects" - in other words, you don't know what their politics are, but you think you do. If the media perceives the person as progressive, (and this can depend on any number of factors) they may be willing to believe or accept their apology. But if they think the person is conservative, even if the celebrity isn't particularly conservative or even political, then their leeway may be a little more tenuous, especially if they've said something that can be interpreted as racist, bigoted, homophobic or otherwise offensive. I don't mean to say that ideology is the total determining factor. I just think it's one of them. It should be said that ideology has for some replaced personal conduct as the determining factor in whether someone is morally good or bad. Activism for some causes can overshadow an injudicious word or a few bad decisions.

Once you determine the level of apology needed, then it's time to decide how abject the celebrity should be. A pet peeve of many people I've talked to is what we might call the "non-apology apology," which goes basically something like this:

"When I was on camera, I made a few statements about the killing of small kittens that may have offended some people who were watching. If someone was offended, then I sincerely apologize." 

This is the kind of apology that is usually crafted by a publicist and e-mailed out to the bloggers. There is very little here that acknowledges any kind of wrong. It basically telegraphs that the celebrity does not personally feel they have said anything that was, in fact, offensive. Instead, it merely apologizes for the bruised sensibilities of those idiots out there who obviously need to grow up.

There is the opposite extreme, as exhibited by Ms. Deen. It's interesting that her weeping on the Today Show was deemed somehow insufficient to the moment. Which brings up another question - when is it appropriate for a celebrity to cry? One might argue that the celebrity is caught in a Catch-22 - If they cry, it illustrates their humanity and makes them more than just a name that we either celebrate or resent. However, humanizing them may in fact make us more susceptible to our harsh judgments, since we no longer see them as larger than life.

In his book "Popular Crime," Bill James makes a point that American media has entered what may be termed the second golden age of yellow journalism. Yellow journalism flourished in the world of towns with multiple newspapers, which eventually competed with early radio. In an attempt to get eyeballs, newspapers were as gritty, turf-protective and territorial as the newsboys who literally fought for space on sidewalks. This inspired some papers to make up news, or to distort minor news out of proportion to its relative importance. Remember Charles Foster Kane's famous line - "If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough." This ended, James argues, with the excesses in the coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and trial of Bruno Hauptmann, and with the consolidation of some newspapers. By the coming of television, the classy way of journalism - objectivity, understatement, deciding the relative importance of news items as opposed to celebrity gossip - was ascendant.

That is until the coming of cable television, and eventually the Internet and social networks. Now, a giant beast needs constant feeding for information. And rather than a few outlets deciding how to categorize the importance of this or that item, instead the page views and search engine optimization do the task. Crime and entertainment news is once again ascendent. That doesn't mean that celebrity kerfuffles aren't worthy of our attention - as James points out, we gravitate toward them because they usually illustrate larger narratives. In the case of most celebrity apologies, they reenforce the dominant story of public discourse in American society over the last fifty years - the revolution in civil rights among race, gender, class and sexual lines. And an emphasis on supposedly trivial news is by no means a new phenomenon brought on by the Internet. Just a cursory reading of Mark Twain's autobiography will tell you that.

The celebrity apology, as I indicated earlier, hinges on a crucial point - how much do we look up to these people? Do we idolize them? Do we want to be them? Or do they simply serve as a convenient target for our disgust? Does their presence in our collective consciousness illustrate for us some great truth about the good or the bad in the world? The scene in Oliver Stone's Nixon, when Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) has just decided to resign personifies this struggle. Nixon, wandering through the White House, unintentionally finds himself confronted by the portrait of his nemesis, his one-time colleague, the ghost hanging over his presidency, the martyred Jack Kennedy.

"When they look at you, they see what they want to be," he tells the portrait. "When they look at me, they see who they are."

When should a celebrity apologize? Any celebrity has to realize that there is a battle of warring percentages out there for anyone with fame - the slice that like them, the slice that doesn't know they exist, and the slice that hates their guts. For some celebrities, a misstep can upset the delicate boundaries of those percentages. Some people will only know them because of their impolitic words or deeds. Others will have liked them in the past, but write them off. There may even be some people who didn't like them, but come over once they see the media piling on, in effect. For some, a celebrity will be their stand-in on the world stage. A threat to that person is a threat to them, personally. Or conversely, that celebrities success at avoiding public persecution will be a personal affront to them.

On a spiritual level though, the celebrity apology can leave us with one indisputable fact. Many seek solace in the promises of Christianity because of the assurance that Christ's sacrifice allows for free, unlimited grace. The idea of an entire lifetime's sins washed away and forgotten forever is staggering to us, because we know that it is beyond our own abilities to offer the same to anyone else, even ourselves.

We can forgive the famous - and even the infamous - many things, but at some moment, there is a point of no return. To apologize means to seek forgiveness. Our reactions to these apologies, which grow more ridiculous seemingly with each new occurrence, remind us that while God may freely forgive all things, we are more exacting, and less gracious.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Bob Dylan - Voice of Every Generation?

I saw Bob Dylan as part of the Americanarama Tour last week in Atlanta. I wrote this last year for an event on the occasion of Bob Dylan's birthday. I previously wrote about Dylan here.
 

This is not going to be your standard celebration of the greatness of Bob Dylan. On the occasion of Bob's birthday, I'm not here to give you something you're probably read a hundred times about all of his folk anthems, or his artistic fearlessness, or his political significance. I don't really care, and I'm not interested if you do care, about how his music has made the world a better place or given it meaning. If it has, you probably haven't been paying enough attention to what his songs actually say.

You see, Bob Dylan was not the voice of my generation. Not at first, anyway.

A little background, and then maybe you'll understand. I was born in 1970, the year Richard Nixon entertained Elvis Presley in the White House. When I was born, Bob Dylan released his "Self Portrait" album, the most universally loathed release of his career. He was in a creative slump and unsure of himself after producing a string of seminal albums, any one of which would have been enough to cement anybody else's career. A myth endures that Dylan was intentionally trying to sabotage his image at this point, to demystify himself from the folk god, then rock god, he had become. He was a married father trying to turn a page.

By the time I was conscious of him about 15 years later, he was charitably called a legend, which is a polite way of saying what he called himself later - "a worn-out star." He had just alienated many of his most ardent fans with a trilogy of uncompromising Christian albums, and he was settling into a string of late eighties works with a bloated band and lackluster songs. My high school classmates used to give their best imitations of his portion of "We Are the World."

And to top it off, frankly, he annoyed me. I was a child of the eighties, which meant that I grew up viewing the sixties through a jaundiced eye. Dylan, frankly, symbolized everything I detested about the Baby Boom generation - its endless self-celebration, its elevating pop culture to the status of religion, its obsession with refighting the same political battles over and over. Besides, the guy had a voice like a rusty chainsaw running out of gas.

So I politely declined in the fall of 1990 when Dylan came to Tuscaloosa to perform at homecoming while I was a student at the University of Alabama. I rolled my eyes as I heard friends talk rapturously about hearing him sing "Tangled Up In Blue" and thought to myself, yeah sure. Ban the Bomb. Make Love, Not War. Blah blah blah.

I really knew it all, didn't I?

Almost immediately after that, two things happened. First, I began to really discover Bob Dylan. Not the legend that I was already sick of hearing about, but the actual artist. And second, Bob started yet another career renaissance, the most improbable of his life.

My first actually appreciation of Bob's music came when I played "Subterranian Homesick Blues." To any kid who grew up listening to rap music, what Dylan is doing here doesn't sound all that unfamiliar. But his word play, his inventiveness, the slick way he carelessly tosses off the words gets under your skin. It stays with you. He seems to be saying, as every kid ever born says at a certain age, "They really don't care all that much about us, do they?" When you're a certain age, you don't care who "they" are. "They" is shorthand for the whole world.

But Dylan didn't stay in his 20s forever, and neither did I. It's amazing how a public figure can grow in your estimation the longer he stays in the public eye. Dylan simply wore out my generation, giving hundreds of live shows a night all over the world in what became known as "The Neverending Tour." Then, there was his health scare in the late 90s when he hovered near death for a while, only to emerge with his most celebrated album in years, "Time Out of Mind."

In one of those quirks of fate he is famous for, Dylan followed that up with an even better work, "Love and Theft," which appeared on music store racks on Sept. 11, 2001. I was on vacation at the beach, but when I saw the Towers fall and heard him sing, "High Water Everywhere," you didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing that day. A few years later, here he was again with "Modern Times." But Dylan was true to form, peopling his songs with characters waiting on trains instead of sending out tweets and status updates on Facebook.

In these three albums, it would be easy to say that Dylan cemented his status as rock's elder statesman, passing judgment as he always has on a world gone wrong. But that is also one of those too-easy labels, like calling him the spokesman for his generation. Yes, of course, "Blonde on Blonde" or "The Basement Tapes" are worth hundreds of listens on your turntable or iPod, but Dylan sounds like a man who actually knows what he's talking about in "Ain't Talkin'."

He's experienced life. He's not singing some borrowed thoughts from some old bluesman. He's been kicked to the curb by his best friends and he's come back to name a few names. Perhaps the best statement you can find is his Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed." In its lyrics, he trots out the Bible, the jitterbug, a gallows, but he's never sounded so current. People are crazy and times are strange, but he, like us, has seen it all before, and he is bound for something eternal. "Don't get up gentlemen," he cautions, "I'm only passing through."

If you live long enough, you're bound to see anything. When I first encountered Bob, he was famously squeamish about interviews and somewhat aloof from his fame. Now, Bob Dylan has done a Victoria's Secret commercial. He recorded an album of Christmas music that sounded at the same time like an elaborate prank and the most fun he's had in years. He hosts his own radio show, but declines to play his own songs. He has passed seven decades and shows no sign of slowing down.

And me? I'm forty now, about the age he was when I formed my first wrong-headed assumptions about him. But I see him now as a man who isn't content to be what other people expect him to be. He isn't interested in celebrating the past. Even when he performs the songs people never tire of hearing him sing, he changes the arrangements to make them almost unrecognizable. Though he borrows from virtually every source, he manages to create something original and lasting.

A survey recently showed that one in seven people think the world will end in their lifetimes. So maybe at last I can recognize Bob Dylan as the voice of my generation. And every other one as well.

There's nothing to worry about, he says, tongue firmly in cheek, because it's all good. The answer is...well, you know the rest.

 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Orwell's "1984": The Kingdom of Big Brother Is Within You

George Orwell’s “1984” is a best seller again, thanks to revelations of government surveillance and the perpetually American belief that there is a movement afoot to subvert the nation. This instinct is one we inherited from the Founding Fathers, and it has largely served us well. It keeps large scale political movements from holding onto power longer than a generation. We get suspicious easily, and in Orwell’s 20^th century novel of totalitarianism, we have a brilliant story that caters to our fears, entertains us, and at the same time confirms our darkest suspicions.

Like many of my generation, my first exposure to the novel was in the year “1984,” when western democracy took the book off the shelf, looked around the landscape, and patted itself on the back when it did not see a figure comparable to Big Brother. But Orwell wasn’t necessarily interested in giving us a blueprint for how an all-encompassing dictatorship might happen if (or when) it does – his work’s power lies not in its ability to anticipate those fears to their logical conclusion. Instead, he may have inadvertently stumbled onto the logical end, not of totalitarianism, but unlimited freedom.

In “1984,” Oceania exists because of a great war, which has wiped away the previous governing powers and replaced them with an emergency government. The regime must have a perpetual crisis in order to continue its existence. The nation is ruled by a charismatic leader, and certain kinds of conduct are forbidden in order that the state survives. Citizens are constantly watched for disobedience (not only by a secret police but by each other), and that vigilance later escalates into a search for mere unorthodoxy at every level. Class or individual distinctions are seemingly wiped out in order to blend everyone together, and technology is used to keep the state in a position of power. Scarcity and want are repackaged as privilege and prosperity. History is controlled, even language is controlled, and there is always an enemy who must be defeated. There is enough here to make the easily fearful on either the left or the right in 2013 America suspicious.

Winston Smith’s life has been copied in various works of dystopia that followed – there is a minor character who mimics the rhetoric of the leader. There is a forbidden book that hints at another way. The hero is allowed to entertain the idea that the world might be rescued, or at least, his world. And that world turns at the moment the hero asks the unthinkable question, “Am I happy?”

Thomas Pynchon points out that one of the parlor games of “1984” is looking at the current landscape of this or that society and pointing to what Orwell got right, and what he didn’t anticipate. We have to remember that Orwell didn’t set out to write a definitive critique of totalitarian communism – he was a far-left socialist. What he was interested in was the ability of modern society and ideology to go a long way in wiping out the ability of the individual to define himself. When the novel opens, Winston Smith indulges in perhaps the most subversive thing he can do, outside of his affair with Julia – he begins keeping a diary. Why is this subversive? Because the individual cannot define events, or his own life, in a state-controlled environment. That is the sole privilege of the ruling power. What Oceania attempts to do is wipe out the individual, systemically at first, and if that proves unsuccessful, eventually through torture and brainwashing.

While Orwell got the technological aspect of the “Big Brother” state correct – in its ability to define the past and watch its citizens – there were a few things he didn’t even bother worrying about in his pitch-black future. For example, ethnic tension seems absent. The Party, we are told, has people of virtually every class in its ranks and leadership. But any government that encompasses multiple ethnicities and cultures will always feel tension, especially in the central question of who is making the decisions. What Orwell needs for his dystopia to work is a very docile populace, but he can get that, since he’s its creator.

Also absent is religion – any religion. Instead, devotion is poured out to the state. It is a feature of leftish visions of the future that religion is easily disposed of. The idea behind it is that enlightenment rationalism will eventually triumph and people will understand that the faiths they cling to are as vain as those of our ancient ancestors. One paradox of totalitarian cultures has been that, no matter how hard the state presses, the pressure tends to make faith even more passionate. Christianity survived in Shogunate Japan for centuries despite the best efforts of the executioner, and the church thrived in Communist China even in the crucible of the Cultural Revolution. One can make a case that Christianity surviving the Inquisition in any recognizable form is as much a facet of the faith as the zealotry that inspired the evil in the first place. A completely atheistic Oceania assumes a great deal of the people Winston Smith puts his faith in – the proles. Faiths all over the world do not survive on the hopes of intellectuals or party functionaries, but on the rank and file, the workers; the people who make our societies, free and enslaved, work. The state, any and all states, eventually prove themselves poor repositories of our dreams. The closest the language of “1984” ever gets to religious devotion is during O’Brien’s torture of Winston. Consider:

“The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’”

Only later does O’Brien inform Winston that “God is power.” By this time, the use of the word “God,” even by the state torturer, seems utterly subversive.

But another faith is absent from “1984,” and that is the defining characteristic of democracy, socialism, communism and even fascism: faith in the inevitable triumph of human civilization. All governments are based on narratives, and the stories they tell must be hopeful in order to keep the population convinced of the state’s viability. Think of any speech by any president – even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech ends with a ridiculous flourish calling on Americans to say something good about the country, and to renew the nation’s spirit. Orwell’s vision of the future is not hopeful and does not end on a happy note – Winston is happy, but he is happy because he has totally surrendered to Big Brother and the idea of Big Brother. He knows that with this triumph, he no longer has to worry about running afoul of the state. Think again of O’Brien’s words:

“The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. … the object of power is power.”   

At any moment in a democracy, there are millions of people who feel out of power. They can respond in many ways – contempt for the ruling party, belief in the opposition (or anger at its powerlessness), pessimism that the current rulers are changing the country beyond salvation, or optimism that the nation is too strong to be destroyed. Indeed, there may be the temptation to feel all of these emotions simultaneously. That is why “1984” continually finds enthusiastic readers, no matter who is in power.  

But the work is pliable enough to give comfort and warning across the political spectrum. Take the three slogans of the Big Brother regime – War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. If you do a quick Google search, you will find all three slogans used ironically in blogs, tweets or postings against each of the last three presidents of the United States.

Modern governments all over the globe convince themselves that a constant state of preparation for war is a deterrent to war, even as they are already engaged in war. The idea of finding freedom in complete obedience is, curiously enough, a religious idea, borrowed from Christianity with the state replacing the divine as the seat of devotion. The third slogan is more pertinent to our time – the idea that not knowing the whole truth, or even a partial truth, means that you rely totally on another to tell you that which you need to know to survive. What should be frightening to modern society is that, in our society which thrives on information technology, such a thing is already happening.

Think about it – how many people, on both left and right, rail against the news media for hiding the truth about this or that issue? But when they look for information to back up their opinions, they invariably turn to the same news media, which presumably can’t hide everything from those clever enough to see through it. Ideologies have now caught on to the idea that by having networks of bloggers, news services, polling services and other information networks, they can perpetually create a narrative that reinforces their beliefs, regardless of the facts. What results is a society where people never recalibrate their ideas based on new information, but instead explain away challenges as being extraordinary. Where no one ever wins an election or an argument, because whoever wins is illegitimate. Circumstances that might otherwise contradict their most closely held beliefs are instead examples of how right they are. In “1984,” the citizens engage routinely in conspiratorial thinking – trying to pick out the real news behind the fake, and interpret the real aims behind this fact’s prominence and that one’s obscurity. “What is the design behind the news? Where are we headed? What don’t they want us to know?”

Orwell’s great fear is of a society of automatons – incapable of thinking or feeling for themselves, eager to believe whatever is fed to them and unconscious of a common past or future. His great mistake was in probably believing the state was necessary to make this happen. There are now more ways than ever before for human beings to define themselves, a power that was unthinkable in the past. In modern society, people can differentiate themselves by fashion, by material wealth, by speech, by their sexual preference (and even their gender), by transcending class, by gaining fame or infamy, and by isolating themselves from it all. There is belonging available to virtually every role through communication. Every avenue is available, with only a little effort and luck. This is what almost total freedom looks like, on a scale even Orwell would have found unlikely.

But how many of your friends’ Facebook statuses look exactly the same? How many times do they share with you the same images, videos, or faulty facts? How often do we dismiss a certain piece of news because it does not fit into our neat ideological categories? How many tweets do you read that seem like an untold number of other tweets? How often do the same stale jokes clog up your phones from people who have all convinced themselves they are original, funny, and utterly unique? The danger of modern society may be not of automatons created by the state, but created by the culture, who all look utterly alike while they are all the time convinced they are different. Add to that an atmosphere of cynicism and irony, where even the worst news about society gives us new fodder for snarky comments, an atmosphere where history is dismissed as irrelevant, the product of a conspiracy. Where people stay in barely defined roles or avenues handed to them by their politics or culture because they do not believe there is any way to something else. Suddenly you don’t need Big Brother watching you – “1984” is within you. 

I also wrote about the NSA surveillance scandal in relation to Francis Ford Coppola's film "The Conversation" here. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.