Over the years I have been witness to a sad situation, but recent trends have the potential to turn the sad into something tragic. Watching the slow decline of any human being in need of help, but not having the wherewithal to offer that help, can wear on the conscience of any feeling person, but to watch delusion bring human beings to the brink of self-destruction without the power to lend aid and comfort is maddening. The first step, as always, is to raise awareness. I am talking, of course, about liberals without guns. Many liberals grew up with guns, own them and know how to use them. However, many more underprivileged liberals grew up in households without guns. Many have never even held a gun. Such deprivation and unfamiliarity has led to attitudes that range from the squeamish to outright rejection of firearms of any type. For much of our history, these attitudes caused little harm. Most liberals were able to lead fairly normal lives, only being subjected to the occasional roughing up by authorities at protests or a light neck stomping for confusing a right-wing counter rally with the left-wing protest they originally sought. But the times, they are a’changin’. As violent Tea Party rhetoric heats political discourse to the boiling point, there emerge real threats to the physical wellbeing of liberals, threats for which they are completely unprepared. The “rogue individuals” impelled to act by this violent rhetoric, are “acting alone” but against little effective resistance. Unarmed liberals tend to run, scream, bleed and die when faced with a concrete expression of 2nd Amendment rights. This is where you can help. Won’t you please donate your lightly used revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, riot shotguns and assault rifles to Guns for Liberals™. All clean and well maintained firearms in good working order are acceptable. You may also wish to donate ammunition, and new, brand name ammo is greatly appreciated, but please, no reloads. (Not everyone is as conscientious about reloading as they perhaps should be) With your help, every women’s clinic, coffee house, Democratic election headquarters, food co-op and Unitarian church can become a liberal redoubt bristling with firepower. Can you really justify owning fourteen assault rifles and a veritable arsenal of handguns of every caliber and type when so many liberals must go without? Please find it in your heart to donate just one weapon to Guns for Liberals™ today. You may or may not regret it.

Cop Show Cliché

You’ve seen it a hundred times without questioning it. Maybe you’ve seen it so many times you no longer noticed it, but after you read this, it will jump out at you every week. A cop draws down on the bad guy with gun, or the bad guy draws on the cop, but however it comes about, we have a bad guy with a gun pointed at the cop, and a cop with a gun pointed at the bad guy, both caught in an apparent standoff. The cop usually says, “Drop it or I’ll shoot,” or the bad guy says something similar, as the tension builds with the passing seconds. Here’s my problem with that: no cop is going to put down his gun or offer the bad guy a couple of choices. He or she is going to shoot the guy. The police officer will not take the time to tell someone pointing a gun at his or her chest, “Put down the gun!” They will aim center mass and fire, they hope, before the bad guy does. To do anything else is contrary to their training and stupid beyond belief. So why do we keep seeing this scene over and over, even in “good” cop dramas? It’s an easy tension builder on which mediocre writers can rely. TV writers get a check whether they come up with a new way to do this scene or not. It’s an old stand-by, however unrealistic. But “realistic” cop dramas do it, too. Just once I’d like to see a bad guy pull his gun on a cop and say, “Drop it,” only to have the cop double-tap him in the chest and say, “Nope.” There are many plausible tense situations for police officers. Leaning on this weak and unrealistic premise is an early indicator of shitty writing throughout, with stilted dialog, cliché situations and stock characters aplenty. So when you see this scene, change the channel. Or read. You won’t find that kind of cliché standoff in many cop, crime or mystery novels. A decent editor somewhere would have cut it or rejected the manuscript. I don’t ask much from television: divert me from everyday life for a little while and make me laugh or cry or sit on the edge of my seat. Watching one more too-good-looking cop act like anything but a cop will not do any of the above.

Why do writers write?

1. Attention. A more mature aspiration in this regard would be the recognition and respect of critics and one’s peers. Most of us just want a lot of people to tell us how special we are.

2. If a male writer, to get laid. This is especially true if you teach in an MFA program in creative writing. Creative writing programs are full-up with dreamy eyed women still young enough to succumb to the purple-est of prose or naïve enough to be impressed by the short story collection you published seven years ago that sold 940 copies in hard cover, but is still listed on Amazon.

3. To indulge your most embarrassing fantasies. You’d be humiliated to tell your friends about the recurring daydream in which you, bare to the waist and armor pec-ed, slaughter a dozen men twice your size with your magical sword nicknamed “Big Hard One” and then make love to the harem of grateful, huge-breasted alien women you just saved from rape and ruin. But if you put it in a screenplay, suddenly people talk about you like you have a respectable job rather than wasting your day spinning spank material.

4. To go on an uninterrupted, book-length rant without having to answer annoying questions about your weak premises, faulty logic and questionable conclusions.

5. To publicly embarrass your family with plausible deniability. Of course the drunken whore who slept with her brother and stole his inheritance isn’t Aunt Betty. The character’s name was BETSY.

6. Because if we didn’t write, we’d have to work. I know we claim that writing is hard work, but can we really compare writing with hauling buckets of mortar up a ladder in the sun all day or gutting chickens on an assembly line for a living? No.

So why do YOU write?