What We Don't Talk About When We Don't Talk About Guns

I hate guns. If I had one, I’d probably find a reason to use it, and no one needs that.

But I’m not afraid to talk about guns or gun culture, or the NRA. Of course, I’m not running for office, and I don’t work for a media company, so I've got nothing to worry about.

So... hey, let’s talk school-shootings. Our latest one, in Chardon, Ohio, fits the usual pattern. Male loner/weirdo is bullied, snaps, obtains gun, brings it to school and either targets specific people or else shoots randomly into the crowd.

Or, to distill it even further: TROUBLED CHILD OBTAINS GUN; TAKES IT TO SCHOOL, SHOOTS OTHER CHILDREN.

And the outcome is that children end up being shot to death. In their school. I don’t think much more can be said about that.

Let’s talk about bullying, since everyone else is. Is bullying worse now than it used to be? I don’t know. I know that children have more access to each other during non-school hours than they once did, and that small incidents can become huge when they're spread via technology.

But let’s really talk about bullying. Let’s reach back into our souls and remember our own experiences of bullying, of being bullied, or of standing by -- or even joining in -- out of fear for our own safety.

I was bullied consistently in eighth grade, September through June. I won’t go into great detail here, because to do so would require about twelve more blog entries and a level of analysis (of family dynamics, money, religion, and other issues) that would prevent me from talking about GUNS.

My bully and her cohorts did not physically injure me (much) but they pretty well shattered my sense of self, my sense of safety, and my sense of freedom. I was terrified to go anywhere alone. I don’t even want to consider how many years it took me to shed the feeling of being watched, assessed, and mocked by others everywhere I went.

The weird thing is, I didn’t even feel angry at the time. I suppressed my anger. It took me a long time to realize I needn’t have. I don’t suppress anger now, and if that bothers anyone, I invite you to get in my face and tell me about my lack of enlightenment or whatever.

What I didn’t do then and what I won’t ever do is shoot anyone. Oh, I fantasized about it. Years later, when we were all lined up in the high school gym in our caps and gowns about to go outside for our graduation ceremony, I thought how neat it would be if I could swing down on one of the gym ropes and spray everyone with gunfire (sparing the ten or twelve people I liked or respected.)

But of course I didn't do it! I don’t even kill spiders!

I didn’t have access to a gun then, and I don't now. I don’t like guns and I don’t believe that anyone outside the military or law-enforcement needs one. Not in America, not anywhere. Angry people with guns kill people!

BUT WE MUSTN’T TALK ABOUT THE GUNS!

We are permitted to ask where TJ Lane's parents were. We are permitted to wonder why no one saw this coming. That's fine. Just don't ask WHERE THE HELL HE GOT THE GUN, because it wasn't the gun's fault that he shot it.

But PJ, you’re thinking. You were bullied. I was bullied. Everyone we know was bullied. And some of us did have access to guns. Why didn’t we go to school and shoot everyone?

—

Do you remember the first school shooting? Or, more accurately, do you remember the first school shooting that didn’t involve ethnic minorities in an inner city? Columbine was the first pre-meditated mass shooting carried out by troubled white boys in a white suburban high school.

But it wasn’t anything new. Not exactly. Terror at the hands of troubled people with firearms has been part of the American landscape since at least 1966, when a gunman climbed into the bell tower at the University of Texas in Austin and shot 15 people dead.

But the numbing frequency with which mass shootings now occur didn’t begin until the 1980s.

Here’s an incomplete timeline:

21 people at a McDonald’s in San Diego, 1984.

14 people in an Oklahoma post office, by an ex-coworker, 1986.

“Going Postal” enters our lexicon, late 1980s.

7 people at a laboratory in Sunnyvale, California, by an ex-coworker, 1988.

23 people at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, 1991.

Let’s throw the Oklahoma City bombing onto this list, because I believe it’s relevant. 168 people, including children at a daycare center, 1995.

And then Columbine.

And now several incidents every year. College campuses, high schools, middle schools. Companies from which someone has been let go. Beauty shops at which someone’s custody dispute ends in a hail of bullets.

BUT GUN CONTROL IS NOT THE SOLUTION, AND WE MUST NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT IT.

Is bullying worse than ever? I don’t know. Are we more resentful after being unfairly fired from a job than we were in 1950, or in 1930? I can’t answer that. Are people’s divorces any more painful than they were in 1970? Probably not. Life is sometimes very difficult, very painful, almost too much to bear. This has always been the case. If anything, a lot of us have it easier than anyone living at any other time in human history could possibly have imagined.

So why are we shooting each other?

Because we are awash, every hour and every day, in violent, paranoiac rhetoric. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that mass shootings have become commonplace since the advent of the modern Republican Party, with its enablers in the world of Talk Radio, and its adherents in the most geographically or psychologically insular corners of the country.

And let us not forget the deep pockets of untouchable National Rifle Association and its extremely powerful Political Victory Fund.

The fact is, we live in a society in which for the last thirty years the paranoia and fear of the white working class has been intentionally ratcheted-up by opportunistic politicians, organizations, and media outlets. Fox News was launched in 1996. Think about how the tone of our political discourse has changed since then.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly will tell you that if you're white, male, and just barely squeaking by, there's always someone to blame. The feminazis are coming to take your job. The "illegals" are coming to take your job. And the Black people? Let’s face it, they get everything handed to them. (Even the presidency.)

The “jack-booted thugs of the federal government” are coming to take your guns away. The college-educated elites on both coasts are laughing at you. The abortionists didn't even want you to be born. And the Muslims? Don’t even look at them cross-eyed. They get everything. (Even the presidency.)

Add to all this persistent myth that America is the last great frontier, and that the descendents of the original white settlers all pulled themselves up by their bootstraps without the slightest bit of help from anyone. And now all these newcomers and women and gay people and non-Christians want to get all that good stuff for free? On your dime?

White guy, you’re being bullied. You gotta protect your stuff.

Sharron Angle, the delightful former assemblywoman who lost the Nevada Senate race to Harry Reid in 2010, said the following on Bill Manders’ radio show:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Yes, that’s the way to deal with people we don’t like. “Second Amendment remedies.”

This attitude is the source from which adults in small-town America -- whether geographically small, like Chardon, Ohio, or small like Staten Island, New York City’s most conservative outpost -- take their cues. And children take cues from the adults around them.

If the adults are frightened, angry, and arming themselves to the teeth, what should the children do?

So wring your hands at each new school shooting. Blame the school, the parents, the therapists, the people who should have noticed that something was wrong.

BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE, DO NOT SPEAK OF THE GUNS.

We're Back!

Back from the SOPA/PIPA protest. Still no real content. Sorry. In the meantime, I leave you all with the following image.

SOPA-dopa-fly!

I'm not sure it's worth turning my blog black today when I haven't actually updated it since 1973, but this is an important issue that goes to the very heart of what we hold sacred as Americans. Please visit Stop American Censorship and add your name to the petition. Thanks.

Here goes...

I still exist!

I have been taking a rather extensive summer hiatus from blogging, obviously. But I'll be back as soon as I have something interesting to share.

Yep, this could take a while.

Thanks for your support.

"The Changing of Stories is a Cheerful Affair"

I'm thinking about turning this blog into a Colum McCann fansite. I wrote about him here once before, after being left bruised and battered (in the best possible way) by his novel Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award in 2009.

Having subsequently devoured Everything in this Country Must and This Side of Brightness, I have moved on to Zoli.


I'm not sure why this man doesn't win awards for everything he writes. He has not yet failed to pull me entirely into a new world with an opening sentence. An Irishman who has settled in New York City, McCann sings in the tongues of these places and of the people who inhabit them, better than most. But Zoli is the tale of a Roma woman -- a poet, no less -- who came of age in what we now call Slovakia during the 1930s and 40s. As she recounts the story of her life, McCann recedes. He is a mere ghost in this book. Maybe not even that.

I can't say very much else yet. I picked Zoli up at a loud corporate book store yesterday and I'm glad I did, as I needed to escape my own life into something big, dark, difficult, bright-red and reeling. I will, however, quote freely and without fear of repercussion.

I was writing things down then, on any paper I could find, even the labels from bottles. I dunked them in water, dried them out, and filled the emptiness with ink. Old newspapers. Brown butcher sheets. I dried them out until the bloodstains were faint. It was still a secret, my writing. I pretended to most that I could not read, but, I thought, then, surely it could do no harm? I said to myself that writing was no more nor less than song. My pencil was busy and almost down to a nubbin.

Wash your dress in running water. Dry it on the southern side of the rock. Let them have four guesses and make them all be wrong. Take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. Cook haluški with hot sweet butter. Drink cold milk to clean your insides. Be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you were. Don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. Ignore curfew. Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. Dress in oiled cloth around sickness. Adore darkness. Turn sideways in the wind. The changing of stories is a cheerful affair. Give the impression of not having known. Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur.

All Filler, No Killer

I've been trying to save my energy for The Book Which Demands to be Written but Skips Away Like Mango in its Little Dancing Shoes When I Open its File. However, I hate to see a blog that hasn't been updated for months. Un-updated blogs are like beach cottages closed up for winter while their owners wheel-and-deal down in big, nasty Facebook City. It's depressing.

Here then, is a very short sample of the type of overwrought stuff I sometimes produce in writing workshops, with similes piled up in all the corners. Though to be fair to myself (and if I'm not, who will be?) this was supposed to be a prose-poem. Or flash fiction. Actually, I can't remember what it was supposed to be.

But my book doesn't sound like this at all! I swear! Well, maybe just every couple of pages or so.

Take it away, Meg!

At midmorning on Tuesday Meg announced she was going for coffee. She asked if anyone wanted anything; no one did. She rode the elevator down. Today was her birthday. Not a milestone, just a birthday. Nobody in the office knew. This was fine, really. She pushed through the lobby, through the revolving doors, through the smell of polished brass and Windex, out into the cold sun.

At Café Dolce she drank her coffee by the window. Why rush back? Birthday, after all. But she had to stand as neither table was free. One held an old-fashioned adding machine, a shoebox of receipts, a chewed pencil. At the other, a man and a woman strained toward one another, two sections of open drawbridge.

Across the landscape of the woman’s back — the apricot blouse through which vertebrae and the hard points of shoulder blades pressed — Meg saw the man's face and recognized it. She couldn’t say from where. Something knocked in her like a fist when he glanced up, his hair fallen forward, shirt open at the neck. She turned away and watched the sun climb the buildings across the street, the taxis moving like yellow fish, but knew anyway that the man had taken the woman’s hand between both of his. His chair rasped against the floor. He swallowed.

The woman's voice darted up like birds. She said, "next time I see you I'll only talk about happy things." A small silence. The man said, "It's all right. When I don't see you, the light goes out of the world."

Just that. Meg put her hand on the window, leaned her weight against it, spread her fingers dark against the sunlight. When the man and woman left she studied their table: a cup smeared with lipstick, a plate, two forks, paper napkins tossed like bedding.

Hey kids! Read it again, and this time don't forget to Spot The Similes™! Fabulous prizes for those who spot 'em all! (Similes must contain "like" or "as." Metaphors not included.)

The Most Literary Rent Party Ever...

I am sad as hell tonight. And I'm shocked. And I might also be angry, though I'm not sure whether that's an appropriate feeling to have just yet.

Before I explore that, let me clue you in.

It was nearly three years ago, on January 27, 2008, that the New York Times Magazine published an incredible story about a writer named Charles Bock, who only a few years earlier had been my instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop. Those of you who read my old blog might remember how excited I was to hear him read from his wildly successful first novel, Beautiful Children, at New York City's Three Lives & Company.

Well, Charles was recently in the New York Times again, and I nearly missed it. I just now (on Tuesday night) picked up last Saturday's "The Arts" section and ran across this tiny story crammed in among the movie ads on page 8.

It seems that Charles' wife, Diana Colbert, was diagnosed with leukemia last fall and subsequently underwent a bone marrow transplant. At the time, Charles' writer pals (and he has made a great many, because he's a great guy) pitched in to offer household help to the couple.

Unfortunately, Ms. Colbert's leukemia returned and she is scheduled to have another transplant next month.

"We said everything that can be done should be done," said novelist Fiona Maazel, a friend of the Bocks'. So on February 6 the Bock friends are giving "the most literary rent party ever" at Performance Space 122 in the East Village.

Among those who will be auctioning off their services, literary and otherwise, will be the writers Susan Cheever, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Price, Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, Rick Moody and Gary Shteyngart. (OMG, right???) If you're so inclined — and I think I am, despite slightly shallow pockets — tickets go on sale January 10, here.

The article ends thusly:

"'The literary world is filled with good and generous people,' Mr. Bock said. 'But then that's what writing is all about — empathy.'"

But I did mention feeling angry, and here's why: nowhere in the article does anyone say it, but I worry that this fundraiser is not about "household help" at all, but about the cost of the medical procedures. I could be wrong about this and I sincerely hope I am, but if I'm not?

Bestselling author in 2008. Catastrophic illness in 2009. "Rent Party" in 2011.

Only in fucking America.



ADDENDUM: It's been pointed out to me over at The Big Book of Face that I don't know that the Bocks' fundraiser has anything to do with covering medical procedures. However, I think it's safe to assume that were we not dealing with recurring leukemia and two bone marrow transplants, there would not be a fundraiser taking place at all. The United States is the only western nation in which a person's finances can be wiped out due to a catastrophic illness. This has to change.