Guns, Grief and Heroes

On Friday, long-time National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre gave the official NRA response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Among other things, he called for Congress to appropriate funds to provide an armed police officer in every school in America. He blamed Hollywood and the American cult of violence as contributing factors to the shooting. He pointed to the need to separate guns from criminals and mental cases, and called for the creation of a National Shield School Program to protect the lives of students. Part of the program would be new designs for safer schools.

This was not at all what hard core gun control advocates wanted to hear. They wanted to hear the NRA finally say that certain types of weapons, notably assault rifles, should be banned in the United States. Mr. Pierre noted that the country already had enacted some 20,000 gun laws and a few more would not make any difference. He said that the only answer for a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was the perfect storm of gun violence. Adam Lanza, 20, was the stereotypical loner who had access to quite a cache of weapons legally purchased by his mother, a gun enthusiast who had purchased the weapons, including a Bushmaster XM-15 .223 caliber assault rifle, to protect her somewhat isolated $1.6 million dollar home from home invasion. Instead, she was shot by her troubled son, Adam, in her sleep, who then carried her weapons to the elementary school he had apparently never attended and went on his shooting spree.

Much has been made about the clip capacity of the assault rifle. Adam Lanza used 30-shot clips. The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, carried two hand guns, a 9mm and a .22 caliber, with much smaller capacity clips, and killed several more people than Lanza.

The school and principal and other administrators were away from their offices at Sandy Hook Elementary, so if they had guns there in locked cabinets, they did not have time to get to them. Three women including principal, Dawn Hochsprung, heard the shots that shattered the locked glass entrance door to the school. Ms. Hochsprung and two other women, including the school psychologist, confronted the gunman, who promptly shot them, killing the principal and psychologist. Gunman Lanza, having already murdered his mother, was on a tight kill schedule before committing suicide, so he was in no mood to negotiate.

The teachers did as they were trained to do, shepherding their first grade students into their classrooms, locking the door and trying to hide them in closets. One teacher, Natalie Hammond, pressed her body against the classroom door to keep it closed. Lanza shot Hammond through the door in the leg and arm, for which she was later treated at Danbury Hospital. Mark Natalie Hammond as a hero. She actually accomplished her mission, however hastily conceived, by isolating her students from the gunman, even though wounded.

The principal and other adults acted bravely, confronting the gunman without carrying any weapons themselves, and were killed. Teacher Victoria Soto got her students to hide in closets and cupboards before the gunman came upon them. When asked where her students were, she replied, they were in the auditorium, which might have worked, except that some of the students betrayed her by running for it, and were immediately gunned down. Their actions got themselves killed and also their teacher. Their teacher has been hailed as a superhero, which is kind of comical inasmuch as we generally think of superheroes as comic book characters. She apparently faced the gunman with composure and courage, but died without stopping the gunman, although some of her students remained quiet and survived.

In fact, none of the adults stopped Adam Lanza, or significantly slowed him down. Generally speaking, in classical literature, a hero is noted for accomplishing something important. The hero wins the day, defeats the enemy. David slays Goliath. Yet, the hero “badge,” if you will, was liberally distributed that awful December 14th, as though it were somehow compensation for so many lives lost.

Mr. Lapierre’s call for police in every school would be very expensive to carry out. The Democrats will not support it, as it will appear that they are on the same side as the NRA. They want money to paint schools and hire back teachers laid off due to budget cuts, not put armed guards in every one of the thousands of schools in this country.

But the people are already ahead of Congress, in this regard. In some schools, selected teachers carry concealed handguns. There are schools in dangerous areas in New York City that are patrolled by city cops and are equipped with metal detectors meant to protect teachers and students from armed students; sad, but true.

LaPierre’s idea of designing safer schools architecturally merits consideration. If Sandy Hook Elementary had been constructed with a locked vestibule, Mr. Lanza would have been stopped right there. It would not be farfetched to have a guard post by the front door manned by a retired police officer or military veteran, who could sound the alarm in the school, put in a call to the police and repel the invader with armed force, if necessary. Parents will support measures that appear affordable and sensible to them.

It is not inconceivable that Congress will renew the Brady Bill and prevent the sales of assault rifles despite the popularity of these weapons. Congress would make it unlawful to order ammunition over the internet and ban the sale of high capacity ammunition clips that can be loaded with 30 bullets or more. It could require more in the way of background checks from sales at gun shows, limit the types of guns that can be sold at these shows, or ban the sale of weapons at the shows altogether.

I generally support these measures. I believe in the right of self-defense and the right to hunt, neither of which requires a military type of weapon. Of course, the assault rifle is more deadly that most other rifles and shotguns. I don’t like it because it violates the compact between the individual and society, that the individual must be mightily armed against society, that part of society that might harm him or his property. Society goes to great length to defend the citizen against harm. Though the heavily armed police that arrived at the scene in Newtown, Connecticut came too late to save the 26 slain students and staff adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, their arrival prompted the gunman to put an end to his rampage by shooting himself.

Before the assassination of President Kennedy, it was possible to buy a World War II surplus rifle equipped with a telescopic sight from the back pages of sports magazines. Lee Harvey Oswald ordered such a gun, an Italian 6.5mm carbine, and shot the president with it. Any kid could send in a postal money order, of $29.95, or such, to the post office box address and receive the weapon in the mail—simple as that. Not after the Kennedy assassination; a ban on mail order guns remains in effect today.

So, it is possible for the state to mobilize the resources and authority to limit the use of firearms in this country—but it must have the support of legally armed citizens to successfully do so. Unarmed gun control advocates do not have the moral high ground in this debate, in my opinion, because they are satisfied to cede too much power to the state, which someday might ruthlessly use it power against its citizens. A disarmed citizenry is the mark of a totalitarian state regardless of how you interpret the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. However dysfunctional, this is still a free country.

The state, however, is nearly bankrupt. It is conducting a war in Afghanistan and must remain prepared to fight other international bad guys if the time comes. It failed badly in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in which 1,800 Americans perished. People watched in disbelief as bodies floated by in the flood waters and asked “Is this America?” Police walked off the job. Actor Sean Penn armed himself with a shotgun when he came to New Orleans to help with the rescue.

Recently, the City of Detroit issued a travel advisory, to enter the city at your own risk. The center is losing its grip. The taxpayer has spent lavishly on the public sector, to the point that millions of Americans actually want to pay lower taxes. The government has allowed millions of illegal immigrants from countries with high murder rates into the U.S., and has not enforced immigration laws other than to occasionally bust inter-state Mexican drug chains claiming turf over thousands of square miles of the United States.

With diversity is coming disorder, and millions of Americas are arming themselves against it.

Are there too many guns in America? Yes. Is it in the best interest of the state and its citizens to limit the numbers and types of weapons available to criminals and mentally dangerous individuals like Adam Lanza? Yes. There were too many guns in the Lanza household. At the center of this massacre/tragedy, was Nancy Lanza, Adam’s divorced mother. She had armed herself against civil disorder should the center not hold, when the disorder was in her own son, whom she coddled and protected from outside scrutiny. America has given over too much of its soul to guns and gun culture.

We will probably never know at what point Adam Lanza crossed an internal line from being a merely troubled youth to youth hell-bent on murdering children and the adults trying to protect them. He smashed his computer’s hard drive. His secret self became his fatal self. Maybe one Mortal Kombat too many, one girl friend too few. Maybe he was bullied and teased as a child. He certainly planned the massacre and dressed in black combat gear including a bullet-proof vest (The purchase of this kind of equipment should set of a red flag). At some point, Adam Lanza gave up trying to live and planned how to die.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting caused instant shock and international response. The people of Newtown, Connecticut have been visited by celebrities and offers of aid and sympathy from around the world. The grieving has been heartfelt, lavish, and all too familiar. After the grieving—which will never end for those most intimately affected—comes the healing cued by the TV stations that must rush to the next tragedy. You the reader/viewer will move on too, perhaps back to older news like the after affects of Hurricane Sandy, twin star of hurt in our part of the country.

Are you feeling lucky today?

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

Prometheus Undone

Normally I don’t write to pan a movie by an illustrious talent like Riddley Scott.  Every filmmaker or director has an off film.  But Scott’s latest, Prometheus, was so galling to me, that here I go.

The film opens with an athletically build character we will know as an Engineer, wearing a kind of loin cloth or diaper, opening a can and swallowing stuff, which makes him dissolve and topple over into the waterfall he is standing beside.  We are shown his DNA dissolving underwater. 

Flash forward to the far end of the 21^st Century and the spaceship Prometheus is flying toward a distant moon to explore it based on ancient terrestrial artworks pointing toward that direction.  Led by scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the expeditionary team quickly finds the head of a dead Engineer, and apparently can view a ghostly after-image of his demise.  Shaw checks the head’s DNA and, voila, it match’s ours!  Are you feeling the joy?  No, because this is a joyless movie.  The lovemaking scene between Shaw and a male colleague, wearing those infernal diapers, is guarded and ends badly for both of them.  The only life forms on this moon are Engineers and Alien-like species: a snake, a squid, contained in amphora like jugs, that do the humans no good.

Once we get into the sticky, burning stuff we know so well from the Alien series, Prometheus as an exploration of the man’s origins, is in the tank.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan who created man from dust and stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.  He was a friend to man, and paid dearly for it, when he was chained to a rock and attacked by an eagle daily who ate his liver, which reconstituted itself overnight; thus Prometheus suffered daily until, as legend had it, Hercules killed the eagle.

This trope has been celebrated in sculpture and grand oil paintings.   Shelley wrote a book length lyrical poem of some note called Prometheus Unbound.  In this film version, the Engineers (all one being) are dangerous to man, finally succumbing to alien creatures that grow monstrously without any known food source!  Ain’t sci fi marvelous!

An android named David (Michael Fassbender) awakens an Engineer from low stasis, who charges up his massive space ship structure with zillions of those sticky jugs.  Fearing that the Engineer pilot will return to Earth with all that alien goo and kill us all, Prometheus’s captain and remaining crew ram the rising star ship, resembling a horseshoe, bringing down both ships in flames.  The good guys have no photon torpedoes, it seems.  Dr. Shaw survives and the talking head of David, separated from its body by a mean Engineer, which she puts into a bag like a bowling ball, fires up one of those horse shoe star ships, and goes off in search of answers about the Engineer civilization.

Doesn’t anyone in Hollywood understand that a talking head needs a pair of lungs to be heard?!  I hate it when they do that.

 Writer Lindelof thought that it would be possible to combine an Alien story of action and horror with “the Blade Runner thematic”, to ask bigger questions that he felt were normally posed in science fiction films. Lindelof explained:

“Blade Runner might not have done well [financially] when it first came out, but people are still talking about it because it was infused with all these big ideas. [Scott] was also talking about very big themes in Prometheus. It was being driven by people who wanted the answers to huge questions. But I thought that we could do that without ever getting too pretentious. Nobody wants to see a movie where people are floating in space talking about the meaning of life .”

Blade Runner is a cult classic and one of my favorites.  It is a police drama.  It is not infused with big ideas but with small details, like the police man who leaves behind animals folded from Japanese origami paper.  Blade Runner featured an excellent cast playing unusual criminals, replicants, rounded up by a solid Harrison Ford.  It featured an uncharacteristically tall Los Angeles, where it rained all the time.  Uncharacteristic, but it worked.

Someone in the crew aboard the Prometheus mentions the Greek mythological Prometheus.  Clearly, an attempt was made to acknowledge the classical source material for the movie.  The film did not suffer because it lacked for people talking about the meaning of life in space.  The movie fell flat, for me, because the Engineers (really only one character) were not part of anything—they were not visibly members of a larger civilization.  They were not wise, particularly entertaining, or friendly to man.  In fact, they were downright lethal to us.

Not the meaning of life necessarily, but why not a discussion of evolution?  That would not have saved the film, but it might have demonstrated some serious of purpose in addressing the big ideas Lindelof talks about.  There was not one moment in the film equal to the beauty and grandeur of Bottacelli’s painting of Venus rising from the sea on a scallop, only small moments of small discoveries on a grim moon invested with horrible aliens waiting in a bottle to suck our faces.  Instead of celebration, we got nihilism, the bleak vision of a civilization running on empty.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

The Coptic Fragment

I find this new Coptic fragment and the discussion around it interesting. I think there was an historical Jesus, and that he was a teacher and healer, had sexual desires and may well have had a wife, especially inasmuch as he was a rabbi. It would have been considered unnatural in those days for a healthy young man not to have a family.

I don’t believe the miracles reported in the New Testament because I don’t think the world works that way. Natural laws were not suspended during Biblical times so that Jesus could work miracles.

To the Catholic Church, as well as to evangelical Christians, Jesus was primarily a miracle worker. Therefore only a minimal depiction of Jesus as a man is acceptable in the Bible. The Catholic Church carries forward the tradition of miracles, and therefore its own authority, in the beatification of persons known to be humans at birth. I find their so-called miracles unconvincing, not on the order of walking on water, turning water into wine, rising from the dead.

Yet, the Church has been more successful in preserving belief in miracles than it has in regarding religious men–and women–as human beings, with the needs and failings of human beings. The Church’s massive failure to admit the sexual outrages committed by its priests, and abuses by nuns as well, is causing it enormous, ongoing problems, possibly bankrupting it in the end.

I doubt very much that Jesus molested children.

By Hudson Owen. All rights reserved

 

Beware BookRooster.com

Late in August, I contacted BookRooster.com, mentioned on this board, and signed up for the package: $67 in exchange for an unspecified number (maybe 10) authentic, unbiased reviews from “readers who love to read books.” The readers don’t get a dime. The money is to fund the selection of reviewers, to arrange the online event. I filled out a form describing the book and received a McCheerful email, giving dates when I could expect the reviews to start and the date for a progress report.

Days passed, and I sent a what’s happening email. No response. Days later, the first review appeared on my novel Dear Cynthia. It was brief, contained a disclaimer “I have reviewed this book on the basis of a free copy,” a favorable comment, and low star conclusion. Days later, a second review arrived with the same disclaimer. This review was much more detailed, from an experienced reviewer, with an identical disclaimer, a few sops to the author, and one star. Is Amazon running out of stars, I wondered?

I shot off an email to Martin of BR, expressing my dissatisfaction with the disclaimer. I said it was graceless and hinted at a bribe: free book for review. No response. Days later, Kaynine Mom sunk her teeth into my novel, shook it, and dropped it like a dead rat. At that point, in fear of destruction of my novel, I told Martin to stop the reviews, just stop them. No email response. Not a peep. As of this writing, no more BR reviews.

Re-reading BR’s guidelines for its reviewers, I discovered that they claim the disclaimer is required by Amazon. So, this is yet another clumsy attempt to authenticate the customer review. Of course, any sock puppet can swear on a stack of Bibles that his or her review is the true grit. Does Amazon now require provenance for all reviews? “I obtained this book for free on Kindle Select.” “I am a Premium reader and only read free books.”

This sort of reviewing arrangement is a difficult dance. The company wants to demonstrate impartiality in its sponsored reviews; and the client wants something (good) for his money. If Kaynine Mom kills off too many books as “confusing,” the word eventually gets around. The unwritten understanding between company and client should mean something in the two-three star range. If the reviewer doesn’t quite get it, maybe she should take a step back and tack on an extra star. Is the reader always superior to the book? The author wants a review that at least sniffs out the sensibility of the work, gives the reader something to chew on. Otherwise, why should the paying customer stand and watch his book being put to the sword on the world’s largest book forum?

I wonder what the attraction is for the reviewer, who supposedly does not receive a kick-back, and must pass on free books she might prefer to read, submitting to BR selections what might confuse her, waste her time and damage her mind?

Of course, not all books are equal, are they.

Dear Cynthia is an epistolary novel, always rare, but most of us have read letters. Much more worrisome for me, is the possibility that the general or literary reader no longer recognizes the Romantic imagination–not identical to the Romance imagination. Americans once read Proust and had a concept of the remembrance of things past. Are books of memory obsolete? Speak, Memory, no more? So I have my marketing work cut out for me.

BookRooster posts a list of a dozen or so testimonials from happy authors. Joe Konrath endorses BR. Your book might sail through their system with five gold stars and a 21-gun salute. If BR was trying to get rid of my, they succeeded, requiring only three reviews to do the job; so they could quickly reassign those valuable reviewers to new projects. Our online progress report date has passed. I don’t expect to hear from Martin & Company again. They have my money, I told them to stop the reviews, I cannot demand better reviews, they’re not worth suing, goodbye.

There is an old saying in the business world: The customer is always right. I hate doing business with people who don’t answer my emails. There might be sufficient number of hungry sparrows out there that Book Rooster can survive despite poor customer service, even zero customer service, for awhile. But usually, in a competitive business environment, poor service will eventually show up on the bottom line.

This was originally posted on the Kindle Writers’ Cafe.

 

Dear Cynthia (Excerpt)

18 May 2045

Dear Cynthia,

My mind reels back, at what velocity I do not know, into the past, into the origin of my life. It intrigues me that here, thousands of light years from Earth, I have this access to myself.

I am sitting in front of my versatile console link to the central computer. I have a small material synthesizer connected to the computer, which can produce virtually anything, even things that have never existed before. Say you wanted a fine piece of Waterford crystal, or a cameo pin of lustrous cornelian shell, or a musical trout that can sing The Star Spangled Banner in any key. Or something new, however you think of novelty, an abstract shape or a device that has never existed before. You can have it. My fingers skim across the symbols and in five seconds I have a photograph album, my photograph album. Something not new.

You remember. The paper is black, thick and soft. The glossy black and white and color prints are mounted by gummed brackets at the corners. It was started by my parents and given to me. Page by page, I am going over these snapshots of the timeless present from my life so many years ago.

I am looking at the house in which I was born. I mean, the first house I lived in, since I was born in a hospital like you. It has two stories, is clapboard, and resembles a box. Smack in the middle is the front door set into a shallow relief, pilasters I believe they are called, and some crude fretwork. The pair of upstairs windows is flanked by ornamental shutters and is capped by gables. Some of the windows have shades and some frilly curtains. A drainspout comes vertically down the front in one corner. In the driveway is a beetle-like automobile built in the 1940s. The front yard is deep in snow. Snow! When was the last time I saw real snow? A snow shovel is sticking up in the middle of the scene like an enigmatic marker. The picture was probably taken by my father with a small portable bellows camera.

Now the house in which I grew up. The front door has a letter slot and a concrete stoop. I see aluminum windows and a chimney for the oil furnace. In the small front yard is a deciduous tree, probably gum. I am standing in the yard with a baseball cap on my head and a grin on my face, wearing shorts and a striped sleeveless shirt.

I was happy in this house. I got along with the neighborhood children, playing cowboy and Indian, marbles and improvised games of a group nature that were often competitive and involved rubber band guns and similar harmless makeshift weapons. I caught frogs, crayfish, minnows, water spiders, and poison ivy in the bushes. I played outside after school, watched television in the evening and did homework.

I can almost go back and sniff the purple lilac in the side yard, see how the forsythia has grown that started as a switch I picked up at the nursery. I remember standing in the back yard and looking up at the clear night sky brimming with stars over the silhouette of the peaked roof. I felt small, as I was, overwhelmed by the sky and house. A child’s picture of the world is full and rich. I turn the page.

Now the two of us, you and I, standing in someone’s yard. We are in high school. You are wearing a light print dress and I am in a dark madras jacket. Though our bodies are touching, our minds are not yet together. You are serious, self-possessed, your broad intelligent face canted to one side, your head crowned with a chaplet of ivy at a silly angle. You are looking through the lens, through the photographer, through time, already knowing things that you would not need to articulate for years to come and happy in the secret knowledge of possessing them.

Twenty-some years have passed, not quite that quickly. We have been married for some time. I am in a tuxedo and sport a new moustache, and I am gazing admiringly at you. You are wearing a full length white gown, pendant earrings and a string of pearls, and are launching out to greet someone with an exaggerated expression of interest. He probably was an academic bore. You are lean; I have put on weight. It is flash, outside at night, a bad picture.

I remember the party. It was at the university, yes, at the upward curve of our careers. Did we peddle influence or any of our books? Perhaps I signed a book, if anyone asked. As I recall, we kept a box of our published works in the trunk of the car, that righteous hunk of metal and electronics that could not have an accident.
The moon was full, a commanding white stone. You were standing, champagne glass in hand, by a magnolia that had just dropped its blossoms. I was in the shadow of a larger tree close by and you did not notice me. In the moonlight you were a goddess, immaculate and remote, standing in a pool of shimmering petals. I stood and stared like a school boy. Moments later you walked back toward the house where I joined you and you became the rare, loved and loving human being that I knew.

You had a magical quality to you. Things you touched worked; people you touched turned on and said the right things in your presence. Light was kind to you, as if you had the power to embarrass it. Bad weather only brought out your elemental beauty. Drenched, you joked that you looked like a wet rat, and drew extravagant praise.

Perfect? No, you weren’t perfect. How could I love someone who was?

Ah, I miss you, Cynthia. There are plenty of beautiful bodies here. Deformities are practically nonexistent. I do not lack for gratification. Nor can it be said that love here never has feeling. It’s just that my relationships now don’t quite have the depth of our life together. Is it the loss of earthly settings, our easier mores? I only know that right now I am thinking of you.

Always,
Max

Available now on Amazon Kindle.

 

Honor In Office – July 17 March on Congress

On July 17, Jerrol LeBaron, founder of Honor In Office, will lead a march on Congress in the cause of promoting transparency in politics.  The main goal of Honor In Office is to compel, members of Congress ,by law, to certify that they have read the bills they consider and sign into law, in their entirety.  Its shocking, though hardly surprising, that so few members of Congress read these monster bills from cover-to-cover–you see Congressional pages pushing carts containing these bills of several thousand pages in length because they are too heavy to carry.

I support Jerrol in his work and urge you to check out Honor In Office at http://www.honorinoffice.org.  You can read about Jerrol and his organization, make a donation or contribute your time, or join in the march.  The HIO website has up-to-date information on the march.  Honor In Office is anon-partisan grass-roots organization.  It is often said that we get the kind of government we deserve.  Honor In Office deserves your support.

Thank you.

 

Kindle Pre-Launch

In June I will launch two e-books on Kindle Direct Publishing: Dear Cynthia, an epistolary novel, and “The Fight of the Century”, a long boxing story. More books and stories will follow in the months to come. This will make a change in this blog; the essays I have written to sustain the blog will come at longer intervals as I concentrate my attention on selling e-books online.

I will open a new page, Books, where these books and stories will be listed with their covers, and I will contribute blog entries related to this experience. Eventually, I intend to publish some of the essays on the blog into a book. The first books will not be new writing but manuscripts I have attempted to publish previously that now set unprofitably in my filing cabinet.

Dear Cynthia, which I began in 1977, is currently 27,000 words in length, and has been at that length for most of its existence. Many times when I sent the manuscript or portions thereof to publishers and agents, I was told it was too short. I tried to point out that books of that length had been published, to no avail. A book is too short to publish if the title on the spine cannot be read at arm’s length on the shelf of a bookstore. That would not have been so with Dear Cynthia. I was also told that one could not mix science fiction with literary fiction. That was back then.

One of the major differences between e-publishing and paper publishing is the e-reader itself. It makes no difference to the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, or other device, what the length of the fiction or non-fiction is—the e-reader stays the same. It’s weight and dimensions remain the same. So, it doesn’t matter if your script is a 1,000 words or 100,000 words. This means, there is no such thing as a story or novel too short or too long. The e-publishing experience is open to writing of virtually any length, which is just fine with me.

Something else. The whole independent publishing experience is more open than the requirements and constraints of commercial book publishing. I can list my novel as both literary and science fiction when I upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s the traditional publishers who are now on the defensive. Their world is changing as authors jump on the e-pub bandwagon. Bookstores are going out of business; the Borders chain went bankrupt recently. The paper book will not disappear any time soon, if ever. You can order e-books in paper form through print-on-demand publishing.

Nor do I wish traditional publishers, who rejected my stories, novels and novellas through the years, ill. I am no longer limited to them. And that is a very good feeling, you betcha.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.