An Edge in My Voice

“Guns are not the only weapons. Control the guns and somebody will think of another method. It’s not the weapon that creates murder, it’s the mind…it’s too simplistic to say, yes, if we have gun control everything will be okay.”

I Just bad to write and thank the Chicken Little of hypocritical, yellow-journalism for enlightening the unenchanted public on the virtues of Proposition 15. (September 23–30) Thanks, Harlan. But, no thanks…

Again, serving Judgement and attempting to do our thinking for us from your security-tight estate in Encino (or wherever). Again, anguishing and accusing us for lethargy and insensitivity, clouding the reality of a very serious issue with your paranoia and persecution complexes and very few facts.

I would imagine your juvenile conspiracy theories are quite meaningless to many California merchants and citizens who are forced to make a decision involving an impending robbery or assault because they do not have the luxury of waiting for a black and white to appear or cannot afford robbery insurance. I certainly think the use of deadly force is their decision and theirs to live with (not yours, or a lone idle-minded committee of fat cats) You seem more concerned with a fetish for the “Celebrity Dead” than any concern for “John Q. Public” or his dire circumstances. You can’t expect Dean Martin to drive around West Los Angeles drunk without his .38, can you? Now really, Harlan, do you expect David Crosby to protect his cocaine or assault women without his .45’s? And Dave was at Peace Sunday, too! Oh, the irony!

Do you really believe that a state-wide ban on handguns will reduce the nature or degree of crime in L.A.? Of course, it’s well beyond your dignity to question the professional police officers (on the streets, not in the law enforcement bureaucracy) who openly reject Proposition 15 as any deterrent to crime or violence. I hardly think the average “boost artists” buy and register their hardware from Big 5 or any legitimate gun outlet. I also challenge your assumption that the limited availability of guns could stop a person who is quite willing to destroy a human life. Bremer, Chapman and Hinckley stalked their victims with premeditation and would have pursued their goals of violence with or without a gun. Some of Southern California’s most notorious “stereotypes—William Bonin and Lawrence Bittinger—tortured and murdered many young men and girls in the most heinous and sadistic manner beyond imagination without even possessing a gun. Wirehangers, ice-picks, pliers and sledgehammers are probably available in most hardware and discount stores and, to my knowledge, don’t require an investigative waiting period or registration. (Have you used any Tylenol or eyedrops lately?) I’m sorry, dear Harlan, but my surrogate penis has saved me at least once from serious bodily ham (in my own apartment) and I’d kind of like to keep it. Unless, of course, you have room for me in your security bunker?

Blaming film, the media or authors is another weary escape route. I suppose you could incite someone to murder with a Stay-Free Maxi Pad or a can of Lemon Pledge under the right psychotic circumstances. For that matter, could Son Of Sam have gotten his telepathic dog from the film “A Boy and His Dog”? Can you live with that?

In closing Harlan, shed a tear or two for those hundred of mutilated, butchered (none were shot) cats and their owners in Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks. Of course, that apparently unbalanced stereotype doesn’t discriminate as to whether the cats are female or Journalists or Jewish. I hope he doesn’t graduate to humans…Hopefully, they’ll shoot the son-of-a-bitch when they catch him.

Jon Douglas West. Dear god, what an iniquitous man. Here is what happened to him. I report it as it was told to me.

Apparently, sometime late in December someone broke into his apartment. Peculiarly, nothing was stolen, nor was anyone ever tagged for the break-in; but shortly thereafter, on a probable cause warrant requested by the office of the assistant District Attorney for Van Nuys, Mr. West was visited late one evening by plainclothes detectives representing the LAPD, who entered and searched his premises. Mr. West was taken into custody for possession of unregistered firearms. Other, printed materials, named in the warrant, were also confiscated.

Subsequently, after interrogation resulting from his possession of the printed material, Mr. West was connected to the defacement (swastikas, references to “another Holocaust”) less than a month before of Temple Beth Torah on Woodley Avenue in Sepulveda.

It is my understanding that he’s out now. He no longer lives at his former address. Though his true name and a copy of the police report are enclosed with a registered letter in the caretakership of a friend of mine who is renowned for his suspicious nature (he sees assassination conspiracies under every cabbage leaf), the whereabouts of the man who called himself Jon Douglas West are unknown to me at this time.

According to the most recent Ford Foundation study, sixty-four million Americans are functional illiterates. That’s better than 28 out of every 100.

I have been asked repeatedly why I write essays such as those appearing here, why I’m such a pain in the ass, why I seem cynical and troublemaking. I respond: we are in a time of crisis.

Here are some words from a long-ago issue of The New Yorker (unsigned as to authorship) on the subject of crisis:

This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don’t turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we’re stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period—sometimes only minutes, sometimes hours, rarely as much as a day—nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody.

The more you agree with what a columnist has to say, the less effective the columnist is for you. The more closely the opinions of a columnist coincide with your own, without his / her raising questions in your mind, the less valuable the work is to you. Every column that you read, during the course of which you experience no anger or contentiousness, is a column you never needed to read.

“I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?”

The value of a columnist, of an essayist, is in his / her viewpoint; the quirkiness of his / her insights; the originality, the freshness of his / her sense of what may underlie the obvious. Reading one more review in praise of, say, Lucas-Spielberg films…is merely the use of paper. But reading a column in which a cinema critic suggests that films by these men vacillate between a supersweet, lachrymose sentimentality that is as cloying as a Sammy Davis, Jr., homage to his show biz buddies or Richard Nixon, and a genuinely vicious cynicism and fascination with violence, as demonstrated in the scenes of brutalization of children in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and nakedly, blatantly in most of Gremlins…is to look at the received world in a different way.

As John Simon noted in 1981: “…there is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said.”

(It should be noted that I don’t think merely being negative in one’s insights necessarily makes for valuable criticism. Crankiness is unbecoming and unproductive. For instance, most of the attention garnered by the recently-deceased comedian Andy Kaufman, during the last five years, was negative. No one seemed to notice that he was our most valuable comedian because, like Lenny Bruce, he was our most adventurous, our most dangerous funnyman. He expended more courage, took more chances, developed more unsettling original forms of presentation of his material—which dealt exclusively with aspects of the human condition we’d rather not acknowledge—than anyone working in the medium of stand-up humor.)

As John Le Carré has pointed out in terms of writers—and it goes doubly well for columnists—“a good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.”

This has been the week-by-week record of the world as I saw it for more than a year. It was your world, too. And though I would not have you deface a synagogue, or bomb the Washington Monument, or reveal in print the secret affairs of the government agency for which you work, or even smile were you pounced upon by a Bengal tiger, I would hope these random thoughts unsettle you and move you to informed disagreement. And what about that edge in your voice?

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-4976-0474-2

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