The Illiterate President

American history is a long, absorbing tale made up of countless episodes and intriguing characters. The republic began as a radical dream of economic freedom and political independence, cooked up by a handful of East Coast intellectuals who were exuberantly aware that they were committing treason against the British Empire. These ideas spread until they became a cause that enough citizens (although nowhere near a majority) were willing to fight for. The story continued to unfold on a landscape that encouraged westward expansion, a movement that seemed inevitable, yet presented many obstacles and challenges. Several decades after its founding, the young republic was put to the ultimate test when it became plain that two diametrically opposed economic systems, one based on slavery and the other on paid labor, could not remain one. A long, bloody civil war was fought to settle this issue in favor of freedom.

The story never stops unfolding. Democracy is continually threatened by both internal and external forces. In the present day, an unfortunate set of circumstances has elevated to the presidency a kleptomaniac with an untreated mental illness. He was assisted by an anachronism known as the Electoral College, a system originally designed to ensure that under-populated areas of the country would be given a voice. It has served this purpose, but in the present day, long after the nation has ceased to be predominantly rural, it continues to give these areas inordinate power. The electoral process in 2016 was further disrupted by interference from a foreign adversary, probably with the full cooperation of the winning candidate and his campaign. Donald Trump’s ultimate goal is to install a Fascist dictatorship, answerable only to him. Our place in history will depend on how well we resist this threat.

One of Trump’s worst qualities, apart from his extreme narcissism, is his ignorance. These traits are actually two sides of the same coin. His lack of knowledge is something that could have been remedied in school, or by reading books. But how can you educate someone who seems to think he was born knowing everything there is to know? He must have been a nightmare to his teachers. This man is emphatically not a reader. That would require a level of concentration, and an ability to immerse himself in another person’s ideas, that seems beyond him. The American story reads like a novel, with its twists and turns and nuances. It takes real effort to absorb all of its moving parts and get it whole.

Trump recently exclaimed over his incredible discovery that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. “Does anybody else know that? I bet nobody else knows that!” Actually, that is a fact well known to any halfway attentive school child. He wonders why “nobody” has thought about the causes of the Civil War, which must be the subject of millions of books. Has he ever cracked one open in his life?

Abraham Lincoln was indeed a founding member of the Republican Party. The newly minted party of the 1850s took in both abolitionists and the more moderate proponents of “free soil,” a movement to stop the spread of slavery into territories that were yet to become states. Lincoln at first adhered to the free soil platform, and only gradually became a full-fledged abolitionist. As president, he held back until it suited his military strategy to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The Democrats of that time were generally a pro-slavery party. They continued to hold the south through Reconstruction, and for many years after that, until a gradual realignment began to take place. This movement picked up speed just before and during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and included a major shift in the alliance of African American voters.

The idea of party realignments that unfolded over a period of more than a century would make Trump’s eyes glaze over, if someone were foolhardy enough to try to explain it to him. How to make him understand that the Republican Party has evolved into something that Lincoln wouldn’t recognize? That would be beyond the capability of an extreme narcissist who doesn’t believe in anything except his own life story, suitably embellished to remove any fault.

I like the idea of a president who values the truth that can be found in books, including novels that don’t claim to be the literal truth. When I first read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father shortly after his election to the presidency in 2008, I thought it read like a novel. Some critics have gone so far as to call it historical fiction. It’s a youthful autobiography, first attempted after Obama’s election as the first black president of Harvard Law Review. By his own admission, it gained only modest attention and lukewarm reviews. A second edition came out during his campaign for the Senate in Illinois. In the foreword, he admitted that some of his writing in the first edition made him cringe in retrospect. Judging by that statement, he showed more self-awareness in his thirties than Trump has ever shown in 70 years.

Obama admitted in that foreword that he occasionally used fictional elements. “There are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work; the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others, selective lapses of memory … I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully … the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me. For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Again, Obama acknowledges falling short of perfection, something that Trump seems incapable of doing.

Can you even imagine Trump reading a novel? That would require him to embrace a world not his own. He’d need to exert some imagination, to develop an attention span of longer than five minutes, to stick with a narrative that stretches beyond 140 characters. Trump is too busy reigning over a fantasy world in which he is the unquestioned supreme dictator of the United States, if not the galaxy. He is Superman and Batman rolled into one, a godlike creature who ordered the sun to come out at his inauguration. Soon he will command the Israelis and Palestinians to embrace one another, and ISIS to disband and give us all their oil. How can they not obey? He is the all-knowing, all-powerful Trump, who surpasses any hero in fact or fiction.

Going Hollywood In Maryland

My first self-published novel, Secretarial Wars, took forever to finish. I started working on it around 1990, before self-publishing became a real option, and I didn’t finally dispose of it until 2003. It was inspired by several awkward office experiences I lived through during my first full-time job after college. Considering how humble the job was, and how frustratingly long it took to get anywhere in my professional life, it seems incredible that a small slice of that story has now been dramatized in a short film called “The Investigation.”

Secretarial Wars was actually my third attempt at a novel. I had spent years struggling with two hot messes, a college story and its sequel, that were trying to become novels and not really succeeding. I finally reflected that I might do better by grounding a story in my more recent real-life experiences. So I conceived a tale based on my secretarial life at the quasi-government Fulbright grant program from 1974 to 1979.

Fulbright grants were awarded mostly to university professors and researchers with the goal of disseminating American ideals and values abroad. The viewpoint character in my story, Miriam, was a somewhat confused but ambitious young woman who chafed at the limits of her secretarial role. She had two best friends in the office, based on pals of mine who were nearly polar opposites in personality and worked for the organization at different times. One of these girlfriends was a dedicated secretary, and the other, to put it mildly, was not.

Since I started writing the novel before most offices had become high-tech, and it focused on a time when stone age instruments like electric typewriters were in use, I compromised by bringing it up to the early 1990s, when the Internet did exist but was not yet at every desktop, and the few cell phones in use were clunky by today’s standards.

I ground out three novels after Secretarial Wars, and paid to have all four converted to screenplays by professional screenwriters. I thought they all did a decent job of making the stories more cinematic than the originals. Secretarial Wars was the one I felt adhered most faithfully to the original novel. I lifted a few scenes from that screenplay and enhanced them for submission to a local outfit called Bethesda Amateur Filmmakers A to Z. I called the short script “Secretarial Spy,” and centered it on a secretary’s travails at a Fulbright-like grant program. The heroine, Miriam, an aspiring investigative journalist, entertains two rather contradictory goals: to get a promotion, but also to investigate her boss for possible malfeasance in awarding grants.

The script underwent a thorough revision by a writer far more movie-savvy than me, and was renamed “The Investigation.” While the story ended up quite different from the original, I’m not inclined to complain about that. No doubt if the process had taken place in Hollywood, California instead of Bethesda, Maryland, the same wholesale changes would have occurred. The spark of the idea remains intact: a showdown between Miriam and a boss of questionable morals, Mrs. Broadwater. They work for an outfit called the Peace Council, which boasts an idealistic mission: to promote international cooperation through humanitarian projects. However, owing to the Council’s involvement in many political and financial deals overseas, it’s also vulnerable to corruption.

The film truly does bring back a humiliating episode. Fresh out of college, rather full of myself as a summa cum laude graduate, I was discontent with my secretarial position but didn’t realize that my disdain was obvious. I applied for a modest promotion, based on my ability to complete writing tasks. I was called into the office of the deputy director, a steely woman who really ran the place, and subjected to a painful interview. I didn’t have ready answers for her barrage of questions and observations. Do you like your job? All I could honestly reply was that I believed in the mission of the agency. You haven’t formed a real partnership with your immediate supervisor. I insinuated my supervisor might be partly to blame for that, while trying not to throw her totally under the bus. You never take initiative. But how, I wondered, is a lowly underling supposed to do that?

I tried to do better after that wretched interview. I was pursuing a master’s degree in political science in night school, and I decided to examine the nuts and bolts of the organization for a term paper. No real scandal turned up in the course of my research. Still, it set me thinking: what if something had looked fishy? What if grants were for sale to the highest bidder, or as a political reward? Maybe a secretary who aspired to be an investigative journalist would pursue such a theory. And maybe she’d establish contact with an underground newspaper editor who was looking for scandals, and also happened to be devastatingly handsome.

The boss who unwittingly served as the model for Mrs. Broadwater is now deceased. There’s no way of knowing how she would feel to be portrayed as a sourpuss, and possibly worse. Not that it’s a fair portrayal—she was actually a dedicated and accomplished official, who dealt with me as the child I still was. She may have looked like a witch to me all those years ago when I was her powerless employee, but the story demonstrates her growth as well as Miriam’s.

The young secretary in the film, after receiving a comeuppance much like the real-life one I endured, vows to improve her job performance. Concurrently, she picks up a habit of staying late in the office, poking around for secrets. The crusty boss nearly catches her in the act one night, but perhaps mistaking her nosiness for conscientiousness, unbends enough to offer her the long-sought promotion. When Miriam requests to be called an assistant instead of a secretary as part of that deal, Mrs. B approves of Miriam’s newfound spirit. There is even a suggestion that the boss has sniffed out Miriam’s investigatory plan, and doesn’t totally disapprove. She was once a young idealist herself.

Isn’t it amazing how re-imagining a painful situation or a troublesome person can give you a sense of power over them? When that process is aided by talented actors and filmmakers, it’s even more empowering. My (almost) fifteen minutes of fame can be viewed below:

We Need Baseball More Than Ever

I fell in love with baseball as a child. It’s been an enduring if uneasy relationship. My early associations with the sport were mostly joyful, win or lose … a good thing, since it was mostly about losing for my Washington Senators. Low expectations can make life easier sometimes. Even the Senators had their memorable moments, enough to provide an occasional lift for their long-suffering fans. But like most other relationships, my bond with baseball became more complicated as I grew up. When did I allow the love of the game to become sullied by anger and disappointment? Why did I begin to take losing too seriously? Was it because my new team, the Washington Nationals, has managed to raise expectations without totally fulfilling them?

The start of a new baseball season, being nearly synonymous with the beginning of spring, always brings an easing of the heart. I recall those Sunday mornings during the warm weather months when the anticipation of seeing a baseball game was as exciting as the reality. My dad often played golf on Sunday mornings, and I would get down in the dumps if it looked like he wouldn’t get back in time to go to the ballpark. But he usually did, and I was ecstatic. If it rained on a day when we had planned to go, I was inconsolable. My parents tried to dream up distractions, but nothing could really replace the game.

Maybe losses didn’t linger as much then because everything apart from the win-loss record fascinated me. I loved the ballpark atmosphere … and in those days, they were just ballparks, not amusement parks. That’s not to say I don’t think the Nationals are smart to try to draw in young fans by creating a carnival atmosphere on the ground floor of Nationals Park. Petco Park in San Diego, which I visited last summer, also features something of an amusement park, although it’s mainly outside the stadium. Still, I miss the simplicity of earlier times, when the green glow of an outfield underneath stadium lights had its own allure. Some of the vendors were entertainers who developed their own shtick. The phrases they used to pitch ice cream and peanuts would become so familiar that kids would start chanting the words as soon as the guys approached.

The capricious weather of spring and summer adds excitement, at least when the game is played outdoors as the baseball gods intended. Nowadays, teams can’t really afford to cancel games, so they play through or around bad weather as best they can. Rain delays must be handled strategically, since pitchers’ arms are particularly sensitive to being shut down and started up again. On summer evenings lightning often crackles in the distance, and the sound of thunder adds a sense of urgency. Certain cloud formations seem to occur only over a ballpark. And there are those sublime moments when a rainbow signals the resumption of play.

The romantic feelings I harbored as a child centered more strongly on some players than others. There was something mesmerizing about the look of strong, healthy young men in uniforms performing athletic feats. I wanted to know more about them, but there wasn’t much to know. In those days before social media exposed everything, often spreading tall tales in the process, the private lives of athletes weren’t discussed beyond the few basic facts they chose to reveal.  Besides that, baseball used to be more of a radio than a TV game, which required fans to exercise more imagination. Even games that were televised didn’t reveal every facial expression and nuance, with replays from every possible angle, the way they do now.

Maybe that’s what got me started making up baseball stories. My imagination concocted pennant races that never happened in real life. Nowadays, some of the romance disappears when you can plainly see the grimaces, pain, and occasional temper tantrums that the game brings about. Nationals fans knew that their fortunes were about to plummet when their young ace Stephen Strasburg blew out his elbow in 2010. His agony, matched by the genuine grief on the face of his pitching coach, was unforgettable. Toward the end of the Nationals’ disappointing 2015 campaign, their fans were treated to the sight of hotheaded closer Jonathan Papelbon losing his temper and putting a choke move on the equally hotheaded star Bryce Harper, who had objected to being criticized by the older player. Our dysfunctional baseball family was exposed in all its warts.

I’d like to reignite some of the old-time joy, if only because the current national mood is so grim, tense, and angry. We need distractions more than ever, and we need to genuinely enjoy them. We don’t need more anger and angst from sports, which are supposed to entertain us. If Nats fans must “hate” Mets fans, or vice versa, it should be a fun kind of hate. Sometimes I allow my dismay about other things, like the state of the country, to muddy life’s simpler pleasures, like watching a competitive game. But if we’re determined to take it seriously, we might as well learn one of the main lessons of baseball: it’s more real life than fantasy. It brings lots of pain to those who care. There is no time clock, which means that anything can happen in any given contest. You can lose a game that you led by ten runs. You can lose that game even if there were two outs in the ninth. These are not tragedies, although they sometimes feel like it.

Thomas Boswell, the superb columnist for the Washington Post, often lectures Nationals fans who devalue the team’s sustained excellence over the past several regular seasons because of their flame-outs in the playoffs. During a recent chat on the Post website, he wrote, “The first responsibility of a sports fan is to figure out: How can I get the most pleasure, the most fun, the most laughs and relaxation for my time and my dollar, for myself, my family and my friends as I possibly can while also being mature enough not to be bothered a great deal — or at least not for very long — by anything that goes wrong.” He sees this as a lack of perspective: “a kind of willful illness, a lack of basic wisdom and judgment about how to weigh our relative experiences, that troubles me and makes me wonder if we are seeing some distortion that is a characteristic of contemporary times.” Words to live by, from April to October.

Can I Call My Team The Redskins?

I’m an ardent sports fan, so it’s hardly surprising that three of the four novels I’ve self-published so far deal with sports teams and their fans. It’s challenging, to say the least, to describe the drama and excitement that live games can produce. My attempts along these lines are based, somewhat loosely, on actual DC-based baseball and football teams that I have known and loved over the years. Accordingly, the question has arisen: how permissible is it to use actual names of sports teams in a fictional work?

Most legal experts who give advice on this subject seem to think it isn’t a big deal, unless one of two situations applies: you’re a famous author whose use of the name is likely to attract widespread attention, or you have a beef with the organization and are attempting to sully its reputation. Neither of these situations is all that likely to come up in a self-published novel, or at least to be noticed by many readers. In any event, there are far too many books published each year for the legal profession to monitor.

Nevertheless, this issue is getting more attention in the self-publishing industry than it used to. In my 2003 novel Secretarial Wars, football is a peripheral part of the story, merely a stimulant to the secretaries who follow the team as fans and cherish hopes of meeting the players. My editors back then made no objections to my using the actual names of longtime divisional rivals, the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys. I didn’t use real names for my star players, although I suspect their real-life counterparts would have been easily identifiable to a long-time fan.

Fast forward a few years, and it seems the self-publishing industry has advanced far enough to take the trademark and libel issues almost as seriously as traditional publishers do. So by the time I published my third novel, Let’s Play Ball in 2010, I was advised to change the names of the baseball teams I had referred to in the original manuscript. Thus, the Washington Nationals became the Washington Filibusters, and the Miami Marlins became the Florida Keys. The story includes a well-traveled player who managed to wear the uniforms of both New York teams in the same year. They were supposed to be the Yankees and the Mets, separated only by a long subway ride, but they were called something else.

Now I have a novel-in-progress, tentatively entitled “Sycophants,” in which football is a more integral part of the story. It revolves around a movie producer operating in Washington, DC, who is married to a star football player for the Redskins. The success of her current film-making endeavor depends at least partly on the fortunes of his playoff-bound team.

By the way, I’m sidestepping the entirely separate debate currently raging about the name “Redskins,” a team moniker which has been in use in Washington since 1937, and four years before that in Boston. It seems likely that modern racial sensitivities would prevent a new team from receiving that nickname today, and would also preclude many other team names and mascots that are still in use. I sympathize with those sensitivities, up to a point. I’m a progressive when it comes to politics, but I’m not a big fan of political correctness. In cases like long-enduring nicknames, I feel that context is everything. These names have sentimental associations and historical significance to fans. By some accounts, the original Redskins nickname was intended to honor a member of the Sioux tribe who coached the team during its Boston days. Further, polls have shown that Native Americans, who presumably have the most at stake in this debate and the most reason to be offended, actually care very little.

That leaves me with a nagging temptation to call my fictional team by a genuine, 84-year-old name. Somehow, it makes the team I’m writing about more real to me. It also complicates matters by being set in a past, around 1990, that many fans can remember. How confounding would it be to give them an altogether different past from the real one? Since it’s fiction, I can theoretically do anything I choose. Still, an author depends on the willing suspension of disbelief, and messing with that can be dangerous.

The Resistance For Writers: Part Two

I’m one of the luckier Feds, I guess. I retired from government service in 2014, well before the country elected a president who seems bent on establishing a dictatorship. An essential part of his plan is ravaging as many Federal agencies as he can and subverting their intended missions. All in all, I’m grateful not to be back in my old cubicle at the Department of Labor (OSHA), watching the effects of this first-hand, but it still makes my blood boil.

I wasn’t one of those aging employees who clung to my job once I sensed I was being pushed toward retirement. It was aggravating to see my substantive work start to disappear as my hair went gray. I saw younger employees awarded higher grades to do essentially the same work I used to do. They were pampered far too much with all-expenses-paid junkets, lunches, and “retreats,” and the more benefits they got, the more they complained. I honestly don’t mind seeing some of these high-priced whiners squirm a little in the Trump administration. But the essential, front-line work of agencies like OSHA, which relies on many truly dedicated and hard-working employees, is too important to minimize or discard just because managers have been known to make short-sighted decisions.

Trump is going after the most visible Feds first. These include Inspector Generals, who are supposed to be independent critics of agency practices. He’ll get rid of anyone brave enough to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear. Hopefully, before mass firings at the IRS can be accomplished, someone will be brazen enough to leak Trump’s tax returns, which will probably tell us all we need to know about his ties to foreign governments, his corruption, and his phony charity. That bureaucrat will be both lauded and vilified, and may even go to prison, if Trump gets his way.

I was pretty much relegated to mundane tasks in my final years, but now that I look back, it wasn’t all that bad. It means I’m qualified to star in my own proposed non-action-packed movie, “Barricades of the Bureaucracy.” Grunt work is where the true resistance lies. By grunt work I mean everyday chores like running employment reports, taking head counts of various job classifications, gathering and analyzing performance data, and writing the budget narratives and reports that explain this data. Those are the facts upon which the agency’s work is based and its effectiveness is measured. It is the best possible resistance to “alternative facts.” By any objective measures, there is no doubt that OSHA has been a success since it was launched in 1971. Workplace injuries have gone down, even as employment in dangerous occupations has risen. Onsite inspections have been proven to make hazardous workplaces safer. If Trump decides he wants to abolish the agency, he will no doubt demand falsified statistics to prove his case. How long can the heroic budget analyst hold out, insisting on the truth?

It’s a shame that true courage is not usually cinematic. We can’t all be Victor Laszlo, or even Rick Blaine, the freedom fighters of “Casablanca” who happened to love the same woman. For them, the fight meant taking up arms. The necessity of that finally superseded everything else, even their love for the beautiful Ilsa. How can a mere bureaucrat equal that? It’s not likely many of them will be forced to choose between love and war. Refusing to lie to please a tyrant is a quiet pursuit–until it isn’t.

Can you envision a courageous budget analyst waterboarded until he or she gives in? Even Trump is probably not crazy enough to institute torture for pencil pushers, although the way things are going, you never know. Admittedly, there are not enough dramatic scenes in my theoretical movie to attract big crowds to the theater. However, one image persists in my mind. Even if Trump’s minions succeed in shutting down all the websites that contain data they don’t like, I doubt if they can track down and destroy every offensive document that remains on personal drives, and every hard copy report on which the data is based. I can just see a buxom bureaucrat sneaking out of her office with documents stuffed in her bra and panties, a latter-day Fawn Hall.

The most effective resistance has never been about throwing tomatoes or grenades. The best antidotes to Trump are truth, verifiable facts, and reason. Civil disobedience, in this day and age, means refusing to succumb to lies and doing everything possible to promote the truth. If the guardians of information do this in great enough numbers, victory will be ours.

Writers Of The Resistance

It’s not exactly the Civil War all over again, with opposing homegrown armies battling one another to the death on battlegrounds like Antietam and Gettysburg. Still, with the political climate boiling and differences between factions looking intractable, a hot war isn’t as implausible as it once seemed. These days there seem to be fewer and fewer unthinkable possibilities. We don’t yet know how far President Trump will go in challenging the normal rules of society to enforce his authority. One thing is certain: he didn’t hesitate during the campaign to set his thugs on peaceful demonstrators.

Those of us with progressive beliefs are feeling beleaguered. We’re clinging to common sense in the face of a government in which facts and reason have no place. I believe there are few problems in our society that couldn’t be solved, or at least alleviated, if billionaires like Trump and his closest buddies were paying their fair share of taxes. Yet that is absolutely out of the question. To even argue the point is a waste of breath. A President who has been propelled into office on a movement depending on lies, conspiracy theories, and delusion can’t be reasoned with, and neither can his followers. He will never read reputable newspapers or listen to experts who say things he doesn’t want to hear. His only real belief is in his own greatness and his ability to do whatever he wants. The word for that is dictatorship.

With reason flying out the window, so has politics as usual. We once had two major political parties with a core of responsible leaders who saw the necessity of compromising on occasion to get things done. Now one of the parties has mastered every dirty trick in the book to keep itself in power. Thanks to innovations like Citizens United, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, and the tried-but-true Electoral College, the system is so rigged that dislodging the clowns will probably be impossible for years to come. A majority of citizens already opposes them, yet here they are in all their glory, claiming a “mandate.” Most people favor sensible gun control, Planned Parenthood, affordable health care, and clean energy, but those are looking like pipe dreams. We might as well call this system by its rightful name: Fascism.

Artists have a long history of standing up to Fascists. Art is only one weapon, but a necessary one. Political fiction has always pushed the boundaries of what seemed possible, but lately even the most innovative stories have been overtaken by events. I’ve been looking forward to the fifth season of the Netflix series “House of Cards,” but now the incredibly sleazy Underwood administration seems so tame compared to reality. Sleazy doesn’t necessarily equate to Fascist. True, Frank Underwood has murdered people who stood in his way, but he has some sensible ideas for running the country and has implemented a few policies that actually help ordinary people. He’s evil, but he’s smart enough to cover his tracks. His calculating nature and self-control tend to prove he’s not crazy. By contrast, many of Trump’s statements are utterly irrational, and he can’t seem to stop himself from uttering or tweeting them.

If the brutal election and its aftermath produce a Resistance movement, that could turn out to be a silver lining for writers. Many great stories came out of resistance to Nazism before and during World War Two. A truly creative writer could perhaps find a way to adapt one of my favorites, “Casablanca,” to the US landscape. It would involve a love triangle centered on a heroine who thinks her husband, a renowned freedom fighter, has perished in prison. She falls in love with another man, also a freedom fighter in his own more understated way, only to find out that her husband is still alive and is coming back. She must decide: which rebel does she love most?

Admittedly, it wouldn’t have quite the same punch unless there was a real war going on, with troops occupying Washington the way they did Paris. Maybe if Hillary Clinton had won the election, and Trump had instigated the violent insurrection he hinted at numerous times, that would have been the case. Or if he should lose a reelection bid four years from now, he might be unwilling to accept those results peaceably. Even in the absence of a hot war, I can envision one of my favorite scenes replicated: the singing of the Marseillaise at Rick’s café, which joyfully drowned out the German national anthem. To get the flavor of that scene, all we’d have to do is find the nearest gathering of Trumpsters, and blast it with Pete Seeger and other peace songs.

A Resistance story doesn’t necessarily involve actual combat. There are many World War Two-era stories that celebrate non-violent resistance to Nazism. A few examples include “The Book Thief” (which celebrates the reading and preservation of forbidden books during Nazi book-burning campaigns); “Rosenstrasse” (which portrays the silent protests by Christian women that resulted in getting their Jewish husbands released from prison); and “Sophie Scholl” (which depicts the White Rose student resistance movement that encouraged kids to spread leaflets and graffiti throughout Germany).

I was a bureaucrat for forty years in Federal government and quasi-government programs, and was never on the front lines of anything. So what kind of Resistance movie could I produce based on my own experiences? Many budget analysts like me are charged with producing head counts of employees in various job classifications. One of my responsibilities at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was maintaining lists of compliance safety and health officers, known as CSHOs. They were the front-line employees who performed safety and health inspections at worksites.

Now the Trump team has announced its intention to change civil service rules so that career Federal employees can be fired without cause. It can’t be a coincidence that they’ve demanded the names of Energy Department employees who have been involved in designing and implementing clean energy policies. So far, the department has denied the request. Will they be able to continue standing up to the science deniers? I envision a drama with a working title like “Barricades of the Bureaucracy.” Not exactly an action-packed thriller, it would instead be a tale of organized civil disobedience among pencil pushers.

A wide-scale resistance movement in the Federal bureaucracy could take the form of refusing to divulge the names of employees who are doing the regulatory and scientific jobs they were hired to do, such as establishing environmental protection laws and enforcing safety and health rules in hazardous workplaces. Presumably, if they can’t be identified, they can’t be fired. If their identities eventually come to light, human resources offices could refuse to do the paperwork required to terminate their employment. The prospect of firing whole departments might stump even the great and magnificent Donald Trump.

Nazi Germany was reputed to be a bureaucratic society, with the complicated administrative structure of the Third Reich existing parallel to and competitive with the Nazi Party. It seemed that everything, even genocide, had to be done by the book. Maybe it would be a good thing if the Trumpsters turned out to resemble the Nazis in that regard. We could build barricades with paperwork, and hopefully they’d smother in it.

When A Good Person Writes A Bad Book

Early in the self-publishing revolution, before social media had become a major thing, it was possible to make contact with like-minded authors through e-mail exchanges, congenial websites, meet-ups, and word of mouth. My first attempts to read self-published books were often painful, especially when I could see that the authors themselves were good people. They were, after all, the ones urging inexperienced authors like myself to band together in the face of traditional publishing intransigence, with appeals like “I’ll read yours if you’ll read mine.” It all sounded friendly and encouraging.

Still, the movement clearly had a long way to go. The first self-published book I ever bought was a natural for a longtime baseball fan. I read an article about the author in a community newspaper, and couldn’t wait to purchase and read his book. It was an account of several baseball franchises in their last year of existence, including my beloved, lamented former team, the 1971 Washington Senators. As it turned out, the book was a case study in how poor editing can ruin a great idea. It seemed the author barely took the time to reread his own work before sending it to the printer. Almost every page contained some egregious spelling, grammatical, or formatting error. To make matters worse, when I passed the book on to my dad, a man with a baseball memory dating back to the 1920s, he found many factual errors as well.

I’m not claiming that I was much better or smarter at that time than the average self-published author. However, I was just smart enough to know my books needed a thorough going-over from objective eyes—a developmental edit or two, followed by a line-by-line edit or two or three, and a final check for formatting issues. Some good, well-meaning people were writing horrendous books, but they were not stupid people. They weren’t even bad writers, so much as inexperienced ones. One author whom I read at that time dazzled me with his writing skill, and also befuddled me totally. He seemed intent on muddying his plots just for the heck of it, with clever tricks such as withholding important information until the last page.

The kindest thing I could do for my self-publishing “friends,” when it was all too plain they had by-stepped the editing process, was to not review their books. One such novel featured a feisty but unlucky heroine, a theme which would ordinarily attract me. She encounters all the perils of Pauline in the space of a month, while suffering from panic attacks through it all. Her husband dies in a car accident, she discovers she’s pregnant, and then she gets raped by a prominent lawyer and nearly miscarries.

She bounces back with spunk and determination. She starts dating the ob-gyn who saves her pregnancy. The ethics of this is never questioned. Not only does the heroine seem to forget about her dead husband at the drop of a hat, but this hot-to-trot doctor isn’t above leaving a waiting room full of patients in order to have a tryst with her. Their attraction to each other is presumably so strong that it overrides every other consideration. I’m not saying the heroes and heroines of a story can never behave this stupidly and self-destructively, but the consequences of such behavior must be shown. Would it be worth it if one of the doctor’s patients filed a complaint, and he had to fight to keep his license? A real story could be made out of that.

Nor do I mean to make fun of this well-meaning author, since I’ve committed my share of whoppers too—or plausibility issues, as a member of my critique group more politely puts it. Here and there the author hit on sparks of ideas that could’ve resulted in a decent book if she hadn’t been in such a hurry. The heroine’s success at bringing the rapist-lawyer to account are a case in point. Although he’s supposedly a prominent man in the community whom most people would never believe capable of committing such a crime, she wins the case easily. Everything about it—jury selection, testimony, deliberations—gets wrapped up in record time. The entire jury goes for her story after a few minutes’ deliberation, apparently finding her honest face and manner a stark contrast to his.  Too bad, because this really could have been the basis for a compelling story: the heroine’s long fight for justice, during which she discovers how strong she is, panic attacks notwithstanding. Instead, the resolution must come with breathtaking speed, so that the author can get done writing one day and publish the next.

I read another book at the request of an author. Again the editing was spotty, which was a shame because the story itself was haunting and tragic. It centered on a man with promise and ambition, whose alcoholism destroys his own and others’ lives. He goes to prison for a fatal drunk driving accident. The author’s description of the prison experience, especially the despair that envelops the new inmate, stuck with me long afterward. The real tragedy, however, took place after the book was published, when a predatory marketing service took advantage of the naïve author. Apparently believing this outfit’s promises to make his book a best-seller, the author borrowed money from relatives and went into debt to pay for this “service.” Needless to say, the book didn’t sell, and the money might as well have been thrown down the drain.

Sadly, I don’t see much evidence, from a quick amazon check, that most of these authors have done much since their early efforts. Maybe harsh criticism deterred them. That’s a shame, since every author is much better than his or her first draft. If I could go back in time and advise my fellow neophytes, I’d say take your time with both writing and marketing. Realize that instant success is a one-in-a-million thing. Study real life, and do the research. If your primary aim is to get rich, you will almost certainly fail. Tell a good story, and make it as real as you can. Get as many reliable editors as you can on the job, so that in time mediocre can at least open the door to pretty good. The learning process in this business is agonizingly slow, but it does happen.

Where’s The Glamour?

I’m a lifelong East Coast girl who finally got around to visiting California in June 2016. My previous travels took me as far east as central Europe, but I had somehow neglected to take the westward trek in my own country until a full two years after retirement. Los Angeles was an important goal on my bucket list, mainly because of my love for movies and my interest in the business aspects of movie-making. Also, I’ve been making a fairly desperate and pathetic effort to buy my way into the industry by paying professional screenwriters to convert my four novels into scripts. Having waited so long to see the city of my dreams, I went there with stars in my eyes, determined to soak up as much glamour and creative energy as I could.

Warner Bros and Paramount were major sites on my wish list, since they advertise themselves as working studios rather than mere theme parks. What struck me immediately was that they are, indeed, workplaces. You can tell that sound stages, when they’re not in use, are the province of crews. Highly skilled technicians are required to work all those overhead lights and wires and microphones. Besides the stages, there are rooms full of props that are being collected for possible use in upcoming films. Those that have already been earmarked for a project are tagged and copyright-protected from being photographed. Someone has to oversee these cavernous rooms, which were not well air-conditioned on a hot day. Overall, you get a feel not for glamour, but for the real labor behind the scenes. It hardly seems fair that the actors get to memorize their lines in the comfort of their palatial homes, and then swoop in at filming time to scoop up all the accolades and applause.

This feeling that LA is a hard-working city, and not just a partying hub, was enhanced by the fact that it was hovering around 100 degrees the day I hit the studios, easily the hottest day of the year there. Much of the tour is necessarily outside, as an open-air trolley is used to transport visitors in between lots. You’re not allowed to enter places where the “filming in progress” lights are on, which limits your options to get relief. Luckily, the tour directors had the foresight to set up free water at several stops.

It was not only a hot city that day, but a smoky one, with fire bellowing out of the nearby hills. A little smoke doesn’t bother the residents until it threatens to get out of hand, which tends to happen later in the summer. Likewise, the earthquake that hit San Diego a few days before I visited there didn’t cause much concern, although it was almost as strong as the one that set off major panic on the east coast about five years ago. It wasn’t the Big One, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. As for driving in LA, there are memorable songs about its roadways. I can’t vouch for everything in Sheryl Crow’s description of all-night partying in LA, which she tops off with the chorus, “All I wanna do is have some fun till the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.” But no driver in LA can deny that Burt Bacharach spoke the truth in his song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” when he proclaimed, “LA is a great big freeway.”

My trip also featured a tour of movie star homes, although most of them are hidden behind extremely tall hedges. Once in a while you can peek through the foliage and catch a glimpse of a landscaper or gardener. There’s no question Beverly Hills is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods I’ll ever see, yet it’s not all that different from the nicest parts of Bethesda, Maryland or McLean, Virginia. Somehow the east coast seems more modest, since the residents don’t go out of their way to hide from prying eyes, and can even on occasion be seen doing their own lawn work. To be fair, it must be much more difficult to keep up a huge lawn in that dry southern California climate at the height of summer, where the grass is practically tumbleweed.

I guess it all goes to prove that Hollywood is a vibrant place, but hardly magical. We idealize the people who work there without always considering how workaday their lives can be. For example, our young tour guide at Paramount Pictures, whom you might expect to be star struck, is working multiple jobs in order to pay off his humongous student loans. His long-range plan is to get involved in the business rather than the performing side of the industry. In the meantime, he conducts tours by day and reads screenplays for the studio by night. He doesn’t get to know many stars on the job, since they rarely have time to chat, so his stories about them are mostly hearsay.

Did I manage to glimpse any stars myself that day? Maybe future ones. Our tour guide pointed out the back door of a lot where a kid was being admitted to audition for a youth-oriented show. I could only imagine the striving that lays ahead for that ambitious youngster. If she manages to pass this first hurdle, there are so many more to come. All in all, I figure showbiz is a lot like writing, considering all the sweat it takes to make the end result look easy and fun.

My Classic Rock Soundtrack

I’m a music fan of the baby boomer generation, so how could I possibly resist writing a novel about a rock band? Handmaidens of Rock (2014) centers on a musical outfit that forms at a suburban Maryland high school like the one I graduated from in 1970. Before they can legitimately call themselves a band, the three members—lead guitarist Preston, keyboardist Neal, drummer Brad—must first prove they can hang together long enough to play a gig at a school dance. Once onstage, they must come up with a name on the spot, so they call themselves Homegrown. They amuse their classmates by mocking the local singing star they’re supposed to be backing up, mutilating the cheesy songs he attempts, such as “Love Potion Number Nine” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

To that point, the story is perfectly recognizable and plausible. No doubt there were bands forming all around me at my high school, but since I wasn’t intimate with any of them, I had to make up one of my own. The late 1960s-early 1970s era was a time of improbable rock dreams. The music we were hearing on the radio provided plenty of inspiration to push the envelope of our placid suburban lives. Musically, at least, we could revel in free love, dream in psychedelic colors, and march the streets to demand an end to the Vietnam War and all forms of civil strife. Those songs became closer to true life as many of us moved on to college, the military, and other real-life experiences.

Startup bands have always been lucky even to get a taste of local fame. To make my imaginary band compelling, I had to portray it as more talented than most, or at least extraordinarily lucky. One way Homegrown distinguishes itself from the musical dregs is to pick up some classy groupies, the “handmaidens” of the title. Candy, Hope, and Theda have more going for them than a strong determination to ride the band’s coattails. They’re “handmaidens,” but with ambitions of their own. They aspire to be a journalist, a fashion designer, and an actress-musician respectively. One of them, conveniently, has a powerful attorney father with connections to the music industry.

Any band that aspires to long-term success must write its own songs. How could I get my musicians to do that realistically, when I’m not enough of a musician myself to hear original songs in my mind? One technique was to keep classic rock stations playing on my computer for inspiration. Listening to songs that were popular back in my day, I’d imagine my band trying to write similar tunes. For example, “Time of the Season,” a seductive tribute to the Summer of Love by the Zombies, turned into a piece by Homegrown called “Grooving under the Desk.” The Status Quo song “Pictures of Matchstick Men” used to pound in my head all the time, since I heard it daily on the cafeteria juke box in high school. My band’s take on this was a psychedelic sex dream called “Hot Teacher in Tights.” I always loved the Doors tune “Tell All the People,” a catchy but vague call to arms with shout-outs to youth that could mean almost anything (Set them free! Follow me down! See the wonder at your feet! Your life’s complete!) My take on that was “Revolution for Amateurs,” which might or might not be an actual call to revolution.

Sad songs were part of the band’s repertoire. My lead guitarist Preston, having lost his mother at an early age, mostly hides his feelings behind a hard exterior but occasionally exposes them in song. His heartbreaking “Signals from the Clouds” bears a resemblance to King Crimson’s “I Talk to the Wind.” Idealism is also part of the musicians’ mindset. In “Peace Conquers All,” they envision a new era of free love in the streets, irresistible to the public and cops alike, as in the Animals’ “Warm San Francisco Night.”

Fresh out of high school, my band makes an amateur mock-detective movie with a witchy theme song called “Hex” (something like a popular Cream song, “Strange Brew”). With that in the can, they start writing songs with feverish speed and come up with an eclectic album inspired by that same band’s classic, “Disraeli Gears.” Further adventures follow, including trips to England, Scotland, and California. Scotland proves the most fruitful in terms of new musical directions. They spend time in a commune run by a defrocked priest known to have harbored draft resisters. Their near-worship of him inspires a spate of religious-themed songs, like the one called “Peace Warrior,” inspired partly by Jethro Tull’s “Hymn 43” (with the same refrain, “Oh, Jesus, save me!”) and partly by the Animals’ “Sky Pilot.”

The band changes its name to AMO, which sounds more grownup, and tries to find itself. While attending UCLA, the musicians become involved in a rock festival that ends tragically. Ironically, this is the event that propels them to national fame. Despite their newfound notoriety, the effects of the violence are devastating enough to send them flying off in different directions. The girls break up with their respective musicians and move on to presumably more adult relationships. Still, the wildly creative and romantic ride they took as “handmaidens of rock” can’t be forgotten. A five-year reunion concert takes place in the same high school gym where they first made a jubilant mess of backing up a semi-famous singer. Preston, emerging from a turbulent and fallow period, experiences enough of a creative resurgence to come up with two new songs: one about his inner turmoil called “The Stranger Within” (a take-off on Traffic’s “Stranger to Himself”), and one that celebrates his new marriage to a free spirit, called “Free Spirit of the Road” (which somewhat resembles the Doors’ “Queen of the Highway”).

Assigning a genre to Handmaidens of Rock has been somewhat challenging. No doubt it can be called “chick lit” or “women’s fiction,” but how about “contemporary women’s fiction”? That is one of the more popular classifications these days, yet it doesn’t quite fit an early 1970s story. Some reviewers and advertisers have called the book “historical fiction.” That makes me feel ancient, since I remember the era so well. Still, maybe it’s the best way to describe a story with a classic rock soundtrack.

In Search Of Victories

Baseball is the most romantic of all sports, for many reasons. What other game unfolds in a space that fans and players refer to as their “field of dreams”? Unfortunately, those dreams are often shattered. Here in the Washington DC area, baseball has a long, melodramatic history, interrupted by 33 years of non-existence from 1972-2004. We’ve lost three franchises, a record few cities can match. Our most recent pennant was won in 1933. My late father used to recall that team nostalgically from time to time, but those memories are now lost to me. Decades of futility followed, not limited to incompetence on the field. Throughout its history and non-history, Washington baseball has been continually betrayed by bad owners and bad faith from the sport’s authorities, and some of those grievances have lingered into the present. Luckily, there is something poetic about suffering. Early in the 2016 season, when young slugger Bryce Harper struck out with the bases loaded, it was somewhat of a shock. He had hit two grand slams recently, and it had started to seem automatic. For the moment, pitchers had “figured him out.” Mighty Casey struck out that time, as he has many times before and will do again.

Baseball is more up close and personal than other sports. Except for catchers, the players play without masks, which makes it easy to imagine you know them. You would know them if you saw them on the street. When I was growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, there were quite a few sightings of Senators star Frank Howard. Once he signed a dollar bill in the local grocery store for the mom of a friend. My parents saw him once in the Anchor Inn Restaurant, a huge man dining with his comparatively tiny wife. My mom, who was prone to exaggerate on occasion, claimed she almost tripped over his leg.

Baseball harkens back to childhood. Even the bad teams, then and now, exhibited exquisite, often breathtaking skills just to make what are considered routine plays. I used to fantasize about living at the ballpark. How cool would that be? I associated the game with warm summer evenings, rain delays, and rainbows arching over the stadium after the rain delays. At DC Stadium (later RFK Stadium), an accordion-like contraption called a Cordovox used to play “You Gotta Have Heart” and “I Know A Place.” Every time I hear those songs now, I’m back there.

Even the heartbreak was romantic. The Senators had such a unique way of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. One afternoon I overheard one of our neighbors, known to be an ardent Senators fan, screaming at her husband. They were a nice couple, never known to raise their voices to each other. It turned out that the wife was yelling, “How could they have lost?” Her poor husband had just broken the news he’d heard over the radio, that the Senators had blown what she had assumed to be an insurmountable lead. That dear lady died far too soon, of complications from diabetes. My mom speculated that the horrendous game hastened her demise.

It’s easy to take the sport too seriously, especially in the current era of rising expectations. I’ll admit that as I get older, I’m less patient with failure. Do I really love baseball, or do I only love winning baseball? I can’t seem to rediscover the pure enjoyment of the game I used to have, win or lose. I’m ashamed to admit defeats can seriously cast me down. I almost care more about the Nats holding on to their divisional lead during these difficult final weeks of the 2016 season than I care about the upcoming election, although I truly believe that one of the candidates poses an existential threat to the nation, if not to the planet. I can tell myself I’m being ridiculous, but I’m not a psychologist, so I haven’t really figured out why I’m like this. Maybe it’s just that time is growing shorter for a championship through which I could live vicariously.

Losing streaks feel like curses, and sometimes it feels like they’re my fault. Back in June I took a trip to California with my brother and a friend. Our main objective was to soak up some Hollywood vibes, but we also had a chance to catch the Nationals on a West Coast swing. They were playing the Padres and the Dodgers, two teams they should theoretically have been able to beat. Petco Park in San Diego is a particularly fun place, featuring an amusement park outside and a beach-like plot of grass beyond center field. Since so many good seats were unoccupied, we never made it to the cheap seats we had bought, instead grabbing a prime spot in the lower deck. I was afraid we’d be busted for cheating, but there were no ushers around to enforce the rules. Did we really get away with it? I later feared the baseball gods had taken note, because that game helped to set off our team’s seven-game losing streak.

We went on to Dodger Stadium (sometimes more romantically called Chavez Ravine), which provided a totally different experience, as ballparks usually do. It’s the biggest ballpark in the major leagues and one of the oldest. On that first day of summer, the hottest day of the year in Los Angeles, fire billowed from the nearby hills, but once the sun went down the conditions turned surprisingly pleasant. This contest was slated to be an epic pitching matchup (Clayton Kershaw vs. Steven Strasburg), two legitimate Cy Young contenders earlier this season, who have both been bitten by injuries since. Strasburg was scratched that night for unknown reasons, replaced by a journeyman who did his best but was no match for the star.

The fun aspect of baseball is jeopardized when we take it too seriously. The season is brutally long, and sometimes the games are, too. Not much can be done about shortening the games without altering basic strategies, but how about shortening the season? It’ll never happen, because it would cost the owners immediate revenue, but I feel sure the quality of the day-to-day product would improve. Maybe we’d have to endure fewer gut-wrenching losses that might have been more mistake-free if the players hadn’t been dead on their feet after a long summer of exertion. The drama tends to return in the autumn, and the level of play sharpens with the cooler temperatures and the greater excitement of pennant races and playoffs. For Nats fans, though, playoff appearances in 2012 and 2014 brought more agony than ecstasy. What if one of these years, our team actually does win the World Series and gets to march down Pennsylvania Avenue in a never-before-seen baseball parade? It’ll outshine any Inaugural Parade. On the other hand, maybe it’s better to have something left to yearn for.