Beyond ‘Refuse to be Afraid’

“They” have always wanted “us” to be afraid, and they’ve stepped up their game the past two years. It’s harder than ever to refuse to be afraid: “They” have “us” questioning every sniffle and worrying about every cough. 

The intensity of it all is enough to make a person angry. Some of the fear mongering is downright infuriating. And so many silly people are taking up the call on antisocial media, a person could stay angry all the time.

And that brings up a question: What if “they” WANT “us” to stay angry? Why would “they” want “us” angry all the time? Well, people act stupid when they’re afraid, but they act even stupider when they’re afraid and angry.

It’s been obvious for years that “they” prefer “us” to be fearful; it’s much easier to manipulate scared people. But if they can also scare us into anger, maybe we will do some of their dirty work for them, like shun or censor or even injure or kill people who refuse to be fearful or kowtowed.

What if people refused to be afraid AND refused to get angry? It would be a lot harder to manipulate “us.”

Unafraid and calm people can see through clouds of bullshit, and Powers That Be who can’t fool or manipulate people are, well, powerless.

I begin to believe the key to getting through the BS barrage is to keep your fear in check and don’t get angry. A good laugh at their expense is also helpful.

For years I’ve preached “Refuse to be Afraid.” In these “challenging” times, it has an important corollary:

Refuse to be Angry.

Recall the old expression, “Don’t get mad, get even.” It’s an ominous expression, because it seems to advocate cold, calculated revenge — but cold calculation is better than rage. When you’re not blinded by anger, you can think things through.

How do you check anger at the door? “Count to 10.” Do something, anything, that focuses your mind on not lashing back in a rage. 

Stop long enough to consider: Why does this person want you angry? Again, angry people do stupid things without thinking — seeking an eye for an eye, for example — and they do stuff that could provide a handy excuse to, say, arrest the angry person, perhaps lock him away for a long, long time.

Just as wondering why “they” want “us” to be afraid leads to insights about the nature of government and politics and advertising and such, it can be educational to wonder why “they” want “us” to be angry. Like the fear monger, the rabble rouser seeks to control and/or to manipulate. The fearful will often shut down in paralysis; the rager needs an outlet, and with a little finesse the anger can be directed and more or less controlled.

When on the verge of being paralyzed by fear or blinded by rage, the best course is often to step back and ask those questions.

Ask: Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to scare me? Why are you trying to get me angry? What is your agenda? What do you want?

What DO “they” want? What good is a scared and raging mob?

I feel like I sound paranoid, but I sincerely wonder who benefits when fear and anger washes over antisocial media and newscasts day after day. Surely, rulers and pretenders to the throne benefit when we are afraid of each other and when we are angry at our neighbors. The more we shun and/or fight among ourselves, the less attention we pay to who is pulling the strings.

I have a new theme, piled on top of the old theme.

Refuse to be Angry.

Rolling with the disruption

Should I blame the puppy for disrupting the routine around here? Red has been getting up before me, I have been journaling less regularly, and I haven’t published a book since September — when we got the puppy.

Let’s say I have not made the proper adjustments to the routine in order to maintain the publishing business. Changes in the family should not make a radical difference; after all, Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace while he and his wife were raising the first three of their 13 children.

And what the heck, Summer sleeps for 20 hours a day anyway. It’s what puppies do.

Nope, if the routine is disrupted I can only blame myself. But …

What’s the point of assigning blame? The important thing is to roll with the disruption and get back into the flow.

Watch for a post soon announcing completion of my next project. It’s that new-year time of year when processes get examined and refocused, and that’s just what imma gonna do.

The short day

Back in June I wrote, “The most bearable part of winter is that the days start getting longer. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year — sunrise around 7:30 a.m., sunset around 4:15 p.m. in this neck of the woods. As dark and as cold and snowy as it can be, the one constant of winter is that we gain a minute or two of daylight every day, so even as we descend into the cold we literally see more light every day.”

Today is that shortest day of the year. Here in the Frozen Tundra, sunrise is due at 7:25 a.m. and sunset at 4:15 p.m. The sun will be above the horizon for a few seconds more than 8 hours, 49 minutes. The only good thing to say about a day this short is that tomorrow we will have three more seconds of daylight, and Thursday we will have seven more seconds than that, and another 12 seconds on Friday, until we reach the spring equinox and we start getting more light than dark every day. (Info from timeanddate.com)

I don’t especially enjoy winter weather, but I appreciate how it makes summer feel. As Richard Nixon said on the day he resigned, “Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” Only if you have trudged through a snowstorm when it’s 10 below zero, can you ever know how magnificent it is to stroll in the sunshine when it’s 75.

Dejah and Summer (pictured) love the snow. Dejah goes out on the deck and rolls in it. Summer eats it and eats it and eats it. They chase each other through the white stuff until we worry that they’ll get too cold.

We could learn a lot by following their lead. It’s going to be cold and snowy anyway, so we may as well have fun.

The joy of Godzilla

A ranking of the Godzilla movies made me curious about how many of the big guy’s films I actually own. It turns out I have 17 of the 33 flicks on DVD or Blu-Ray here, not far from the shores of Green Bay.

I’m in the process of making it 19, because as soon as I saw that I don’t have Matthew Chernov’s #2 movie — Godzilla vs. Destoroyah — I made arrangements for Amazon to deliver it Tuesday — and it comes with a second film that’s lower on the list.

The list got my attention in part because, duh, Godzilla, but also because Chernov highly rates the original film, Gojira (1954), and Shin-Godzilla, the outstanding 2016 film that shows a series of incompetent government officials making hilariously wrong decisions about how to cope with the growing kaiju problem approaching Tokyo.

If I were to do my own rankings, I would have a tough decision about which has been the second-best Godzilla movie, between Shin-Godzilla and the 2014 American film Godzilla, and there’s my main beef with Chernov’s list. He doesn’t share my love for Gareth Edwards’ film at all, placing it way down at #22.

I thought it was the best depiction of Godzilla since the beginning. I love that suspense builds for nearly an hour before we finally see the monster in all his ferocious glory; that seems to be the part that Chernov hates most. I literally (yes, I literally mean literally as in this actually happened exactly as described) giggled with delight when the big reveal came, so brilliantly had the film built to that moment.

Truth be known, most Godzilla movies are disappointing to me in the wake of the original. I grew up watching the American version with its cleverly-inserted scenes featuring American reporter Steve Martin (!), played by Raymond Burr, and I thought it was great fun, but when I saw the original Japanese cut — many of the same scenes in a different order — I was awestruck. It’s compelling science fiction with a powerful anti-war, anti-nuclear-bomb message.

I liked Marvel Comics as a kid because I loved the characters and the soap opera of their interaction. I tended to get bored by extended fist fights. (Hulk vs. Thing again? Ho-hum.) I’m weird that way.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings about the Godzilla movies, which often feature very very long battles between gigantic creatures. Except for the three I mentioned, there’s not a whole lot of character development in these things.

But I keep coming back, because they all hearken to the original fun of seeing humanity cope with a huge force of nature that knocks down buildings and breathes fire. Godzilla is indeed the king of the monsters and, for whatever reason, I’m pleased that I own more than half of his movies to slide into the disc player whenever the mood strikes.

A vision of smoke and mirrors

© Alain Lacroix | Dreamstime.com

I opened my eyes and saw a vast plain of people climbing over each other, scratching and clawing and seeking approval and validation, looking for love in all the wrong places, people talking without speaking and hearing without listening, a crowd lost in their loneliness, and a monolith in the middle that they struggled to touch, to worship, to — what’s that word where you follow blindly without realizing you’re following anything? They made a great din of absolute quiet, and I choked back my fear and turned away.

A little while later I could still hear the shouting and braying of donkeys and elephants, nary an eagle nor a lion among them, and the farm animals fattening themselves up to be eaten, but I was walking across a barren field searching for green against the beige. Not the beige of a desert or late autumn, just a plain of dried mud, no moisture, no nourishment to be found — arid and empty and what has become of the land that was made for you and me?

This cacophony of silence, this celebration of despair, and where is this coming from? I know gladness is infectious, I seek hope in all things, I see the light in the darkness, and yet the mob screams nothing and their contagion creeps into the corners of my mind.

Am I some naive gump who sees the trees of knowledge and understanding but misses the forest of desolation around them? Am I in denial, waiting to be angry and bargain before I accept the death of whatever is dying? Is it time to abandon the cause and fall into discouragement and despair and expiration? Is that what’s troubling me, Bunky?

I sweep away a layer of dust, rub my eyes, and see what’s really there — a powerless little creature behind a curtain, turning wheels of fear and thunder and fire but utterly without substance, sending minions to do his bidding with the God-given abilities they always possessed and not telling them the truth until his bidding was done, his foe slaughtered — the truth that they already owned what they were looking for and didn’t need a wizard in the first place.

“Save me!” the crowd shouted, and the answers they sought were already at hand, in their hearts and minds and souls, waiting to be tapped — but the smoke and mirrors confused them, and few saw through the fog, and even fewer looked behind the curtain, and only a little dog even noticed the curtain was there.

But it only took that one brave little soul to scurry over and begin to save the day. Had all this happened in one day and night lost but now found and rescued? If it only was only a day, but today and tomorrow are still full of possibilities, so stop to mourn the past, then seize the day — carpe the diem — strike for the iron is hot — but go in peace, go in peace, act in love, and peel back the curtain.

All the pretty toys so shiny

I had other stuff to do on Friday, but something snapped.

For a long time I identified myself as a “journalist, wordsmith and podcaster,” but somewhere over the past five years I stopped saying that last word. 

After all, the last segment of Uncle Warren’s 78 revolutions per minute was sent into the ether more than five years ago now. How dare I call myself a podcaster?

OK, if you sniff around the interwebs, you can still find The Imaginary Bomb, Wildflower Man, 80 episodes of Uncle Warren’s Attic, 150 episodes of Ikthuscast, and 13 episodes of 78 rpm. Ancient history now.

I bought a new microphone about three years ago, picked up the reel-to-reel machine and the mixing board at estate auctions this year. It’s all been sitting around my room, gathering dust.

I had other stuff to do on Friday, but something snapped.

I (gently) swept what was on this shelf and stacked it on the floor until I can figure out where to store it. The electronic toys are in place, half of it connected and waiting. I have the wiring to finish connecting the other half.

And then … ?

I have some ideas. Some of those ideas are two, three, four years old. Inertia is a terrible plague on humanity.

Watch this space. In my mind, it won’t be a long wait. Of course, in my mind, I finished the 13th episode of 78 Revolutions a couple days ago.  

On the other hand, you don’t hook up electronic toys for the purpose of looking at them, all shiny. 

Hand me that microphone, will ya?

W.B.’s Book Report: The Shadow

When the library delivered the audiobook of The Shadow by James Patterson and Brian Sitts, I thought, uh oh, I don’t want this to be the precedent-setting 100th book I read this year. I’ll wait to finish Several small sentences about writing until after I listen to the widely panned reboot of the iconic 1930s and ’40s pulp hero.

But no, Verlyn Klinkenborg had to hook me with the second half of his clinic about writing brilliant sentences, and the next thing I knew, it was the 99th.

And so I hit triple digits for the first time in my life with a book best known as “NOT THE SHADOW!” All caps. The consensus is don’t bother reading this if you love the old pulps or the radio show. 

“The Green Lantern movie of Shadow novels. Avoid at all costs” reads one of the dozens of one-star reviews at Amazon. 

The thing is, I kind of liked the Green Lantern movie. And like the film, the Sitts-Patterson Shadow is not terrible after all.

OK, if I were to reboot the Shadow, I would not drag him out of 1937 and plop him in a dystopian 2087. I would not give him a feisty teenage sidekick, and I would not pull new Shadow superpowers out of my hat. I haven’t immersed in the source material, but even I can tell the authors have taken liberties with the legend, unforgivable liberties for many readers.

But taken on its own merits, it’s OK. It reads more like a young adult novel than a pulp adventure, but I like young adult novels.

The book is more respectful of Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane than I was led to expect. And the villain of the piece is a figure who appeared in four of the classic pulps.

And of course, I’m a sucker for stories where the government is the source of all that is wrong with society and led by a megalomaniacal fiend who schemes to kill as many innocents as he can. You know, just like real life. 

I’m not sure I would recommend avoiding The Shadow at all costs, and I do suspect my time would have been better spent finding and reading one of the original Walter Gibson novels. But if you’re curious, go ahead and try it. 

Or hunt down The Golden Master, where Shiwan Khan first appeared. That’s what I plan to do.