Original Message
Subject:[SciFiNoir Lit] OT--Another View of the Writer's Strike
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:01:51 -
From: Chris Hayden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Strike Until You Drop
Memo to Striking Entertainment Writers
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
Dear Entertainment Writers on Strike: Recently returned to so-called
civilization from the canyons of Utah, I had the opportunity, after
long hiatus, to enjoy the product of some of your writing as it gets
shoveled into the American maw via television (no TV in my house--
shoot 'em if they get close to the porch). What a feat, this writing.
It evidenced so much that was stale, false, crass, violent, foolish,
salacious, gimmicky, irrelevant, sycophantic, complacent, compliant --
it was, in short, the perfect distraction in a dying republic fast on
its way to tyranny, the gift that keeps on giving to a government
that would hope to turn the screw on free-thinking citizens. In other
words, writers--you keep on striking! Behold: The entertainment will
grow cold and grey as the corpse that it already is, with no new
cadavers to puppeteer for the newness of each season, where nothing
is as new as the recycled dead from the last season. Like Plato's
chained slaves in the cave of shadows, let the viewers wake up, walk
into the light, starved for reality--oh writers, let no new
entertainments issue from your minds! You may just save the Republic.
Now, a couple caveats to this business of writing and what it means
to be a writer. I read in a piece posted by a television writer a few
days ago at Salon.com--the "writer," one Doug Gordon, for several
years penned trivia questions for the idiocy known as "Who Wants to
be a Millionaire?"--that at any given time 50 percent of the members
of the Writers Guild of America are "unemployed." The very logic of
the complaint here indicates that Mr. Gordon--who, I assume,
represents the mental midgetry of his fellow sufferers at the WGA,
which is spearheading the strike--doesn't understand what it means to
be a writer. To be a writer, as I conceive it--I write journalism as
a freelancer--means to be employed by no one but oneself. To be thus
constantly "employed," at every waking moment, requires discipline
and will and delight in uncertainty in the marketplace of ideas--who
knows if your ideas have too little weight or too much. It demands
steadfast energy and a pridefulness somewhere between that of an ox
and a lion. Exhausting work, sometimes self-destructive, and usually
it does not remunerate to the satisfaction of mortgages or the
stability of a home.
"Writer" Doug Gordon, however, complains that he has a hard time
holding his health insurance after the better-paid mental midgets on
the producer rung of "Millionaire" fired him. Poor Dougie. He remarks
in a moment of weirdness that due to lack of health insurance "most
people in creative professionsoften don't exercise or leave the house
for fear of getting injured." I haven't had health insurance for
years. My wife and I can't afford it. She's a freelance too, working
on a book investigating the criminality of the Department of Justice,
for which she will be paid next to nothing. She does it because she
believes in the important of the work--why else? So what does she do,
this freelance, lacking health insurance and mostly broke? The last
time I left her at the airport in the middle of nowhere in the Utah
redrock, she turned around with not a word of warning and boarded a
dual-prop with a group of random parachutists and did a skydive from
10,000 feet, her first and hopefully not her last. Huge risk and well
worth it--so said the look on her face, the sex we had after.
Meanwhile, we are effectively homeless, owning no property, having no
base beyond the place where we are.
We rent a house in the high Utah desert for the summer, from a second-
homeowner who takes pity on us with low rates. Right now we're
crashing at her father's place in Washington DC, writing articles
about the little caesars running the US government. We belong to no
union. We own little of worth except books and an old Subaru and a
kayak and two mountain bikes and a portable office in the form of our
laptop computers and a laser printer. Poor us, so rich in small
things. I like to think in overwrought moments that, severing
ourselves from service to the pettiness of editors in the offices of
newspapers and magazines, we follow in the steps of the lancer
knights of the Middle Ages who had fulfilled obligations to their
lord and thenceforth were free, serving no one, owing no fealty. The
knights were thereafter called free lancers, with their only prize
that they were indeed free to roam.
This isn't what concerns little Dougie, late of "Who Wants to be a
Millionaire?" He wants security. Wants dividends. Wants more money.
The heart of his argument, which is also the chief plaint of his
colleagues in the WGA, concerns the me
