The politics of writing

Every era has a certain distinction that historians looking back attach to them. For this era we live in, I want to leap to the front of the line to claim the best and in my opinion only type that fits our current era–Orwellian.

Looking back to the era I am writing about in Scags at 18, there has been a tendency to look at the 1960s primarily as a time of rock ‘ roll, or of sex, drugs and rock ‘ roll, or just drugs and the devastations they caused. Yet, for me, the 1960s were more about how the upheavals from a number of social and political disturbances fed into a few tributaries and caused a generational split that we are still reeling from today. In other words, it may not have ended yet.

Turning to those days of yesteryear and beginning in the 1950s, we witnessed the rise of corporate entertainment companies like Disney. In those times of wishing for only the goodness of life to prevail, a false optimism arose. But this created in turn the beginning of this split I am talking about. We, the Baby Boomers, were raised on revisions of the classic fairy tales whose complexities had to be expunged. It became difficult to sell things if the audience was upset. What they really had to sell us was that there were truly good guys and bad guys and that they could be identified by the color of their hat.

This sanitized version of life appealed to the parents, I believe, because they didn’t want to burden us with the horrors of nuclear destruction or the images of the opening of the Nazi death camps. But their refusal to come clean about what the world was like and what they had experienced, led to more death and destruction.

Paradoxically, what the parents wanted the kids to believe was that everything was okay and would always be okay. Despite all evidence to the contrary–the assassination of a president on the streets of Dallas; the assassination of the leading civil rights leader as he stood on a balcony in Memphis one evening; the assassination of a presidential candidate who had tried to continue the slain president’s agenda; the war footage on tv, the riots and destruction of cities–these well meaning parents only wanted their kids to be happy and enjoy themselves.

Yet, this juxtaposition between the happy Disney times and the horror of war and death caused a generational split that then pursued its own both activist and paralyzing agendas.

The concerns about how all of this could be happening bred conspiracy theories. Governments never learn that by refusing to tell the truth or by telling a partial truth, they encourage lots of false and exciting ways of trying to understand what is going on. Lots of people try to take advantage of these times of distrust and uncertainty by providing a strong and capable persona to right the wrongs and repair the damage. We hear it today and we heard it then.

Yes, we hear it now and we heard it then. It comes at us every night in our living rooms on our televisions. No more potent or addictive means of manipulation and control has yet been developed as the television. In a matter of ten minutes we can watch the maiming and destroying of entire villages by a storm or a bomb and then be told that the celebrity du jour has just been married and the Yankees lost again and a message from a sponsor promising us the softest toilet tissue in the universe. This is the nature of 20th-21st century communication.

It is discordant, arbitrary, chaotic and seemingly unrelated to our every day concerns, except for the toilet tissue and perhaps our need for the knowledge of movie stars’ lives to feed our fantasies.

You can’t provide answers to tough questions and assurances at the same time, but that is what television learned to do.

This in a way is the context in which my story, Scags at 18 takes place.

In order to proceed in this arduous task, it was necessary to know that others had tried and succeeded. In a manner deserving of our internet age, we found each other online when I was looking for partners for my Itinerant Book Show. It turned out that Eric Lotke had written this extraordinary novel, 2044, and had understood in his own wonderful way how to capture what is happening to us right now.

You have no idea how much his novel, 2044, has stayed in my mind as I write my own story. Eric has nailed us and what we are fighting for right now in the most and best Orwellian terms. His book is about that lovable character who doesn’t want to get involved in things but must in order to not just save himself but clear his father’s name. This world, imaginatively created, has been taken over by corporate entities that control everything and everyone down to the last detail.

Eric Lotke’s book has shown me how it is possible to create a world that we are all both intimately aware of, that inner world where the corporate thieves have stolen our very essence, while putting also on the page the alternate reality his character must live in. It is exciting and compelling and guides us to asking the basic question: what would we do? And by following what happens when you choose to fight and to get the answers you need, he also shows us what is at stake if we act and what happens when we don’t.

Eric has shown the way to capturing a time and making it come to life. I thank him greatly for this gift.