The Big Fix

This is my favorite passage from the TMFTML post I linked to yesterday:

Every article you've seen in the news lately about bloggers refers specifically to a certain subset of bloggers: Let's call them polibloggers. These are the angry white guys who crapped their pants in fear when the Twin Towers came down and decided that the new climate of intolerance-masquerading-as-patriotism would allow them to give voice to the blatant racism and hatred of the lower classes that they were previously forced to keep in check due to societal norms and basic politeness.

It's a given that the people most terrorized by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were right wing columnists, pundits, and bloggers.  Children who lost parents in the attacks have faced life since that day with more courage, hope, mercy, charity, and forebearance than these cowardly lions who have been scaring themselves witless every day since by pulling their own tails.

"Oh, it's hard believe me, missy,

When you're born a Right Wing sissy..."

Wait.  Where was I?  Oh yeah.

It wasn't hard to terrorize them, since I'm afraid there's no denyin', they were just some dandy lions to begin with.  That's why they are attracted to the Right.  They love the love of power and the willingness to rain down, at least the willingness to wish out loud for, death on all enemies that has become the hallmark of Right Wing rhetoric.

Enemies being anyone who scares them, which is to say anyone who is not them.

Their basic cowardice has been exposed day in and day out since 9/11.  Most of them are young and none of them have enlisted to go fight the enemies they want dead, dead, dead.  And although many of them are working journalists---Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, for example---you don't see them rushing off to Bagdad to report on the war like the man who ought to have been their hero and role model Michael Kelly, the editor of the Atlantic who died covering the early days of the invasion.  You'd think that even if they're too chicken to fight, the least they could do would be to spend a month or so in Iraq to bring back all the good news they claim the rest of the media is failing to tell us about.

But it wasn't just the already yellow-bellied young conservative types who were so frightened by 9/11.  Some liberals, many moderates, a whole slew of people who espoused no particular politics on September 10, 2001, became unhinged by fright.  Dennis Miller is one example.  Roger L. Simon is another.

Simon is the writer of an enjoyable series of detective novels starring the ex-60s activist Moses Wine.  The first book in the series, The Big Fix, was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and it was, like the book, not great, but pretty darn good.  I liked both.  I've liked the other Moses Wine books I've read too.  They're lighthearted, funny, smartly written, and full of interesting characters.  I think only two things have kept Moses Wine from being as popular as Robert Parker's Spenser or Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware.

When I say Simon's mysteries are smartly written I mean that the story proceeds from paragraph to paragraph in a logical and coherent way, with no glaring inconsistencies in characters' behavior and no outrageous plot devices suddenly being dragged in to save the writer from himself---that is, unlike a lot of thriller and mystery novelists, Simon avoids over-plotting himself into corners he can only get out of by writing in previously non-existant windows, doors, and convenient air shafts to escape through.

The commas and periods are all in ther right places and the sentences parse.

But the prose doesn't sing.

Bad writing, of either kind---pedestrian or ungrammatical---doesn't disqualify genre novels from popular or even critical success.  In fact, many thrillers and mysteries seem to succeed because they are badly written.  These are the books readers and critics usually refer to as "great reads."  They mean books that they can skim without missing anything.

But Simon's prose isn't bad.  It's just a bit bland and that is a failure in the kind of mysteries he writes which are aimed at readers who admire Parker, Chandler, the various MacDonalds---Ross, John D., and Gregory, who for some reason left the first "a" out of McDonald---which is to say readers who read mysteries along with all kinds of other books, as opposed to most genre fans who know what they love and stick with it exclusively.   Readers who put down a history, a biography, a book of poetry, or a novel by Dickens to pick up The Long Goodbye know what good writing sounds like, music, and they want to hum along.

Like I said, Simon's prose doesn't sing.

Well, mabye it would be better to say that it does, but it's Vic Damone.  Parker's Dean Martin, Chandler's Joe Williams, and MacDonald, John D., is, needless to say, Sinatra.

Elmore Leonard's Lou Rawls.

The other problem Simon has had in breaking into the top tier is taste---he has too much of it.  Tact, too.  He can't be vulgar enough.  He holds back on the kinky sex and graphic violence.  But he's not writing Agatha Christie style Murder Among Nice, Staid Dull People Living in Cozy Little Villages Where Just the Mention of Sex Causes Grown Men to Blush and Women to Feel a Little Faint Who Done Its.  He's writing Tough Guy Working the Mean Streets and Getting Laid A Lot When They're Not Getting Beaten to A Pulp pulp style murder mysteries/thrillers.  There are rules, and Simon doesn't follow them.

There could be a third problem getting in the way of increased popularity.  He doesn't write often enough.  I've been pleased to see that he's picked up the pace over the last ten years, but genre fans demand a least once yearly fixes from their favorites and Simon hasn't delivered consistently.  Which might be a vicious circle problem for him.  If he was more popular he would be moved to write more often and if he wrote more often he'd be more popular.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

I believe Simon started his blog as a fairly standard writer's blog.  He posted about writing, his books, the problems and tricks of the trade.  That's how I remember his blog anyway.  That's why I used to read it.   I don't remember much politics creeping into it, before 9/11.

I can't tell from his books what Simon's politics were before 2001.  He was disenchanted enough with 1960s style radicalism to satirize it angrily.  But he also satirized capitalists, yuppies, suburbanites, and other members of what constituted the Republican base before the election of Bill Clinton radicalized the Party.

I'd guess that Simon himself was experiencing the all too typical drift from youthful idealism to middle age premature old fogeyism that his hero, Moses Wine, seemed to be suffering, with the same sense of self-disenchantment and regret that Wine has.   I don't know if he'd moved so far right that he was actually voting Republican, but he was definitely more sympathetic to conservative values than he had been and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he was a Republican.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd stayed a loyal Democrat either.

Whatever he was, he sure didn't seem to be the hysterical looney he's shown himself to be since 9/11.

But up until just before I began writing this post I would have said that all that had happened to Simon was that he got an awful fright on 9/11 and came unglued.

I think that's true.  But a lot of people did.  It took many of us a while to calm down enough to start thinking clealy about what needed to be done, and it was in that period that the Bush Leaguers made their big move.  But people like Simon never calmed down, never came to their senses.  In fact, they grow more and more hysterical by the day.

Not surprising as they've had to watch as their hero President botches the war that was supposed to save us all and makes a hash out of everything else he puts his hand to.  If you are scared to death it can't be much of a comfort to have to rely on George W. Bush to protect you.   And if you are so scared that like a terrified sailor in a storm at sea you can't bring yourself to let go of the mast even though you can hear it cracking and splintering and you know your best chance is to run for the lifeboats now you will start screaming at everybody trying to pry you away and drag you to safety that No, the mast is strong, the lifeboats are leaky, the first mate manning the nearest boat doesn't know what he's doing, he's an effete crypto-French snob who didn't really win those medals he got for navigation and seamanship and bravery!  Only the Captain can save us, and you're all wrong about him being incompetent and the one who ran us aground on these rocks, mutiny, mutiny, mutiny!  You will all drown and you deserve it, now leave me alone, dear God, leave me alone, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!

But now I wonder if something else hasn't happened to Simon.

Popularity.

Simon's right wing ravings have won him the audience and the fandom his mysteries never could.

He's famous.

He's more famous than Robert Parker, or so it must appear to him every morning when he reads his comments and emails.

But popularity has its drawbacks.

It's addictive, for one thing.  It's awful to feel it slipping, even a little bit.  You experience withdrawl symptoms.  You get desperate to get it back and then increase it so that you won't have to worry about any slips in the future---except that it's the fact of the slip, not the amount or the meaning, that tortures you.  You can have had a million fans yesterday, but if today you discover you are down to only 999, 900, those hundred lost fans suddenly become the most important people in the world to you.

People are this way about most everything they prize---money, love, fame, sex.  Once addicted, you can never have enough.

Along with his new popularity, Simon has to deal with the exact same temptation he'd have faced if he'd continued with his novels and won as big an audience through his writing as he has through screaming for the blood of liberals and Muslims.

Fans---as opposed to mere appreciators and likers and enjoyers.  Fans aren't even merely lovers.  They are obsessives.---Fans of anything like what they like and that's all that they like and woe be to the object of their devotion should that object attempt anything new or different.

Fans of genre writing are even more demanding of the same old thing.  They want each new book to be just like the last one, only more so.  It's very hard to slip something different by them.  It takes great strength of will and seriousness of purpose and very few genre writers possess either.  This is why over time even the best of them sometimes devolve into parodists of themselves.  (Read The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald, if you can stomach it.)  They try harder and harder to give their audience what it wants and at the same time top their last trick, and then one day, they attempt the quadruple back flip without a net and they fall.

They become hacks.

Simon found himself with an audience all of a sudden, an audience he enjoyed having and which he became desperate to keep.  Trouble was it was an audience of frightened, bloodthirsty Right Wing loons and what they liked about him was the fear, bloodiness, and Right Wing lunacy that 9/11 had brought out in him.

To keep his new fans happy and coming back, Simon has had to deliver the same goods over and over again while at the same time keeping it fresh and exciting.  So he's done what desperate genre writers do all the time.  Whatever worked well the last time out, they do again only they double it.  The explosions get bigger, the body counts get higher, the sex turns kinky and then kinkier.

Simon could not achieve the popularity he'd have liked with his mysteries partly because he could not give in to readers' expectations of blood, gore, sex, and violence.  He had too much artistic integrity.

But now as a blogger he's become what he steadily resisted being as a novelist.

A hack.

Related blogging: Scott Lemieux, riffing on a post by Matt Welch, finds Simon and Dennis Miller, among others, guilty of "The Horowitz Fallacy." 

These are types, sez Scott, "who believed a lot of indefensible things when they were leftists [who since] becoming right-wingers [have been] projecting their old beliefs on something called 'the left' and trying to beat the strawman constructed from their ex-selves to death."

And James Wolcott catches Simon suffering from incontintence in more than just his rhetoric.

Comments

[blue girl]

Did you see Dennis Miller on The Daily Show last week? It was sad. When he first came out, he said, something like -- "Gee, I wish I had an audience like this." He seemed very deflated -- until Jon Stewart let him just ramble -- I guess to let him take advantage of a studio audience that used to be into him. I, of course, just yelled at the TV like I usually do, "Whaddya expect, you Bush-defending half-wit!"

I have right-wing friends SO proud Dennis is "on their side" -- a lot of good it's doing Dennis....and now all the talk about "South Park Republicans."

[sfmike]

The attack on 9/11 was very specifically aimed at the Jewish community in New York which understood it as such. The rest of the country was never clued in that this was the case, even though Osama Bin Laden's videotapes made it fairly clear, when they weren't being censored into unintelligibility by our thoughtful federal government.

This may help explain why people like Simon and Goldberg and Horowitz and Dennis Miller are still so hysterical about the issue. They're taking it personally, and if you've ever perused the Old Testament, the current revenge scenario is nothing new. Unfortunately, the whole world is being dragged along on this vendetta and it's very creepy.

And of all the Mystery MacDonalds, John D. was my all-time favorite. Ross was good, but it was the same frigging story every time.

Oh, and cats probably like you because they know you're an Irish witch without a "familiar."

[Scott Lemieux]

Excellent post, although the fact that Simon wrote "Scenes From A Mall" must be relevant somehow.

It seems to be that the "South Park Republican" concept sits very uneasily next to the Senate Majority Leader speaking at "Justice Sunday"...

[blue girl]

Scott L: I would think so -- since my son told me last night that there's an episode where the Devil and Jesus beat each other up with sex toys!

[harry near indy]

as for ratching it up, as you say roger simon does, i refer you, readers, to the ann coulter horrorshow.

[Margaret Romao Toigo]

Context is such a wonderful thing. I came here from The American Street to read the rest of this post. The observations about the easy fame found in pandering to "frightened, bloodthirsty Right Wing loons" are most interesting and, sadly, accurate.