Adventures in Television

… and we’re back!

Sorry for the radio silence.  Of all the bad habits I’ve developed as an adult, sitting still and shutting up seems to be the worst of them.  Everyone I know seems to be doing something, millions of somethings, all the time at a rate that I find terrifying.  I used to be prolific as fuck.  During my MTV heyday, I was used to churning out 40-45 minutes of stories for airtime each day, in addition to long lead reporting I was working on, in addition to stories I was writing for Spin or Vice, in addition to at home experiments in literary fiction and screenwriting.  I was a one-man, tech-saavy cusp-riding creative machine.  I had that feeling which is the best feeling you can have in New York City: that you are somehow present in some impossibly important great and fascinating now and that the velocity of life’s potential is carrying you in its thrall towards an unimaginably fantastic end.  It’s fucking glorious.  It’s physically palpable.  It’s what addicts people to New York and their 20’s, or worse, both.  Even your dreams catch the light of it.

But then it stopped.  I stopped.  And, in the weird, drowsy way crash victims learn how to walk again, I feel like I’m only now beginning to take my first steps back towards being a person.  I turn 34 next month.  I’m nearly broke.  I’m mostly gray.  I watch my colleagues and peers and friends mate and breed and actualize success in a way that brings me incredible joy.  But mostly I sit in a vacuum writing and then tearing up whatever I make, okay with being my own worst enemy because then at least its me breaking my own heart.  It’s a miserable way to live.  Well, it’s not living, really.  But it’s changing.

If I could pinpoint a time where it all started, it was an article I was working on on spec for ‘The Believer’.  It was 2005 and I had just returned from an excursion to chaos doing coverage of the tsunami that hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia.  It had been a weird trip, one filled with mass graves and nuclear air craft carriers and a look at the destructive power of nature that was so severe it struck a primal fear that I can only describe it as the sensation of seeing the night sky for the first time.  I wanted to get it right, the whole experience, but got hung up on two things: if I told the truth I would embarrass myself and people I worked with.  This was a big deal because, as experience with other employers has taught me, the work environment at MTV News was so hostile and intimidating that you got threatened constantly for doing anything that might bring shame to the great company brand.  The other thing was that I just couldn’t get the first paragraph right.  I was trying to capture the sensation of being jet-lagged and on a hallucination-inducing anti-malarial drug called Larium but the words just failed me.  I wrote a whole account of the trip, disbelief, disgust, delirium and all.  But I buried the thing because of that paragraph.  I would write it over and over and over and over.  And then I just stopped.

I spent the rest of that year hopping from conflict region to conflict region, Colombia, Katrina, Pakistan, Africa and I could write nothing but that first paragraph.  Everything I touched turned to shit: shows I developed died in limbo, I wrote screenplays that went nowhere, I wrote stories and plays I couldn’t bring myself to submit to anything.  Not that I didn’t try pouring my heart out or giving it the best possible shape.  Quite the contrary.  I just learned that what I had to say wasn’t worthwhile or important.  I did everything they tell you to do if you’re trying to make something great.  I shouted from a mountain top.  But no one shouted back and the echo I heard was a keening negative feedback loop that made trying again very difficult.  So I did drugs, went broke, alienated women, got weird and psyched myself out every time I picked up a pen.

It’s odd to see how prodigious the world is now, coming out of that hole.  It’s foreign to see the demands it makes, especially that the internet makes, on young writers.  I’m not sure how I can reconcile the demands for content with some kind of correlative quality.  I’m now on to my second spec script in six months and four chapters deep into what I believe will be my first novel.  But letting go of it is tough.  Still there are some people who manage to feed the beast in ways I don’t understand.  Maybe it’s a generational self-esteem thing: the gold star for trying kids can play zone, not man, and tweet/write/co-write/photoblog/socialize because they’ve been conditioned to believe everything is always gonna work out awesome.  If you don’t know any better, than you don’t know any better to fear.  And I miss that so much.

Nothing of any meaning belongs in or a vacuum.  Imperfection is meant to be shared.  Getting back in to clip of it is just taking me a minute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ2En_1IfhI 

Traffic Cops of Baghdad, or, A Loving Rebuttal to Libertarianism

Four years ago, when a massive case of burn-out and a mild case of PTSD had me stuck on a couch watching the elections as a civilian, I would occasionally have regret pangs about hanging up my spurs whenever I watched two candidates in particular.

One was Barack Obama.  The whole narrative of his campaign was epically American.  It was raw, uncut, red, white and blue symbolism, the kind that any news junkie goes instantly crazy over.  Most journalists I know endure the shitty pay, the shitty hours and the shitty public pillory of the job so they can get a front row seat at history.  And that was Obama.  The whole thing reeked Lincoln.  14 years earlier, the guy had been living in a South Chicago apartment over a place called Jimmy’s Chicken Shack and drove a used Buick with a hole in the floor.  By February of ‘08, he had gone from long shot candidate to harbinger of 21st Century America.  Journalists, like everybody else, want to feel like they are significant: that their lives and their work have meaning.  You get that soaked in the adrenal tide of breaking news that’s ultimately pointless, you do that many stories about how the world is quickening to chaos, you compromise any and all idealism about journalism as a mechanism for social change and all you’ve got left is the good fortune to say “I was there”, “I saw that”, “That was me who wrote the first draft”.  And those are the good ones.

But the other candidate was Ron Paul.  At the time, I was still licking my Iraq wounds, reading a lot of Chalmers Johnson and thinking about the end of empire.  So when I heard Ron Paul go off on the echo chorus of conventional wisdom Republicans that year, I sat up and took notice.  They say a mistake in politics is when a politician says something that’s honest.  So by that measure, Paul was making mistakes left and right.  Only he wasn’t.  Because as John McCain displayed in 2000 and then utterly forgot in 2008, straight talk has an enormous appeal with the American public.  Whether you agreed or disagreed with Paul, the guy laid out intelligent positions simply and didn’t fudge principle.  Whodathunk, in the cynical world of Washington, an actual politician stood for a well thought out political creed and acted accordingly.  Later, when the newsletters from the 80’s and 90’s came out with him either penning or endorsing racial and homophobic invectives, the bloom fell off that rose.  But I still contend that Paul’s well organized, philosophically intact, grass-roots campaign was the great under-reported narrative of 2008.

My suspicion is that many of Paul’s supporters agreed as well.  Because it was the Ron Paul mailing lists that quickly turned into the Tea Party hue and cry spamming my inbox.  The anger at TARP, the anger at special interests, the rage against imperial expansion at the expense of domestic improvement, that was all textbook Ron Paul.  But Fox decided a rebrand of the word Libertarian was in order.  So in early 2009, after CNBC’s Rick Santelli lost his shit on the CME floor, the word Tea Party became the default.  And what was once the product of several decades of thought out Libertarian policy based on founding documents became a hodgepodge of inchoate rage, populism, Jeffersonian fear of government, Jefferson-era bigotry and the most huah “let’s stick a boot in it’s ass, it’s the American way” Toby Keith-isms of Big Government Republicanism under Bush Deuce.

Poor Ron Paul.  It must have sucked so back to have his entire school of thought co-opted by a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor waving a misspelled sign.  But Paul made his mark in time and it was called the 2011 Congress.

Watching the hostage negotiation that was the latest debt deal, I got the nagging feeling that there wasn’t enough of an examination of the ideological underpinnings to the debate: namely a rebuttal against the laissez-faire confidence that shit just works itself out in human governance.  To watch the news was to think all that mattered was the political play-by-play, a bunch of rival teams battling for dominance, not the best interests of the country.  And as for the logic behind either side’s position, well …

#Humblebrag, one time late at night somewhere between Lesotho and Rwanda, I found myself on an airplane listening to President Clinton wax philosophic about Harold Holzer’s book “Lincoln at Cooper Union”.  The thing that lit the President’s eyes up was the way that Lincoln, in his career-making 1960 speech in New York, vaulted himself into the political mainstream by “lining up his opponents positions and taking gut shots at their logic”.  That kind of political discourse is impossible now.  Nobody takes gut shots.  Nobody aims at logic.  They carpet bomb soundbites and hope the media is too lazy or ADHD or too in the pocket to take a step back and frame the larger issue.

But the message behind the message of the Paul ‘08 campaign, nee Tea Party, nee Freshmen Republicans in 2011 was, at its core a lively debate about imposing Libertarianism.  Which I contend is lovely in theory but a horrible practice.  And here’s why.

The basic premise of Libertarianism is that society is essentially a self-governing mechanism and that government’s logical end is tyranny.  Less government, less potential for tyranny.  So, practically applied, that’s less taxes, less regulation, less overseas influence, etc. etc.  Let the people do what they want and it will all work out. 

Sounds awesome in a college dorm or a cocktail party at CPAC, right?  Plus you automatically make yourself sound punk rock because now your debate opponent has to, on some level, prove that government *doesn’t* equal tyranny.  That’s hard.  The other guy automatically looks like an asshole defending the status quo.  And whoever made friends arguing for things like water treatment plants or food inspection?

But then there is the reality about letting that theory run its course.

After the invasion in Baghdad, there was a traffic cop I used to refer to as ‘My Hero’.  He worked in the roundabout outside my hotel, the Ramaal.  Day in day out, in blistering heat, this guy marched into Al-Saadoun Street, the main thoroughfare in what used to be called the Red Zone, and directed traffic.  He was a big guy, easily two bucks fifty, but he blew his whistle and worked his hands and moved like a dancer in what appeared to be the Baghdad police equivalent of a Class A dress uniform.

You have to understand that traffic in post-invasion Baghdad was abject chaos: people driving on the wrong side of the road, snarls everywhere, camels, tanks, Blackwater dudes in white vans shooting at people to get the fuck out of their way, the occasional car bomb.  Nothing worked.  Not traffic lights, not power grids.  Look at the CPA questionnaire of Iraqis before Bremer cut bait.  The total absence of government is why we lost Iraq before the surge.

And yet, into that chaos, walked the Traffic Cop.  And every time I saw him I thought to myself “this right here is the logic behind libertarian conservativism.  Maybe when you do strip government to nothing, there is an automatic physic of self-governance.  Maybe private enterprise does rise to fill the void.  Maybe it’s this guy”.  And he was impressive as shit.  The guy owned.  But the fact is, one traffic cop couldn’t hold back that entire city from falling apart and could barely regulate traffic beyond his tiny roundabout.  And, man, did that city fall apart fast and hard and with a nasty body count.

So I invite you, if you find yourself having a reasonable disagreement with an advocate of libertarianism, to ask them what comes after.  What do you get when all you have is, in Grover Norquist’s words, a government you can “strangle in a bath tub”.  Is it a self-governing Utopia?  Does it have even the potential for chaos?  And why socially experiment with America when those policies have failed when applied to other countries in recent memory?

Funny story about ‘My Hero’.  I asked Khaled, my fixer, what happened to him when one day, towards the end of a trip, I didn’t see him around anymore.  Apparently some fundos shot him for “collaborating with the enemy” for trying to keep Baghdad from crumbling.  So much for the invisible hand.

http://youtu.be/YUCNsZXCd58