Before Libya and their insane and murderous dictator started grabbing all the headlines, the Pakistani government’s treatment of Mr. Raymond Davis was news.  First, the media in our country lamented that the Pakistanis arrested someone with diplomatic immunity.  Second, we suddenly saw an about face when reporters discovered that Mr. Davis is really a contractor with the C.I.A.  To these mentally challenged members of the Fourth Estate, I say: so what?  Nearly every embassy and consulate of every industrialized nation maintains spies working undercover as diplomats.

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Amidst the discussions to-and-fro about the Iraq War, the slovenly state of VA hospitals became a hot topic.  The moldy and dingy state of Walter Reed, the top VA hospital in the country, only emphasized the deteriorated state of a system that was a big news story in 2007.  The VA system had languished ever since WWII.  Veterans were calling the state of their hospitals their Katrina moment.  The system was incapable of handling the wounded vets that were returning home, first with Iraq and then with Afghanistan.  Although steps were taken after 2007 to improve the system, it is still woefully inadequate to treat veterans’ mental health issues.

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With the Middle East crises and the three stooges, Michele, Sarah, and Christine, the last few blog posts have been a little on the heavy side, so today let me sail into smooth seas and soft breezes to discuss a trivial thing that sometimes irks the hell out of me:  series in fiction.  It’s a criticism of my own writing profession—a self-criticism, in a way.  We all have our favorite characters and we tend to look for sequels where they appear again and again.  However, what I’m complaining about is when writers’ do it just for the almighty dollar.

Fictional characters become famous largely due to series, of course.  Sherlock Holmes would not be as famous if Conan Doyle had only written one Holmes mystery.  Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot would not be as famous if Christie had only written one of their mysteries.  John Carter, nearly forgotten by now, I suppose, would not be as famous if Rice Burroughs had written only one Martian story—and probably Star Wars would never have been made for lack of all those names lifted from them.  We readers love our series because we love the characters in them.

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Much of human history took place after the invention of writing.  The progress from Babylonian cuneiform to the gilded manuscripts of the Middle Ages represents a span of many centuries.  Gutenberg instigated the first paradigm shift by inventing movable type and a printing press around 1439, inventions that made mass book production possible.  Up to Gutenberg’s time, book production was generally done by monks and academics, for monks and academics.  After Gutenberg, more people had access to the written word, a definite factor in the general increase in literacy over many centuries.  But there were no real paradigm shifts again until digital printing became commonplace.  Sure, color was added and multiple fonts (the medieval Book of Kells, found in Trinity College in Dublin, possesses rich colors, lavishly done by hand by Irish monks), but digital printing is now having a bigger effect than Gutenberg’s inventions.

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Just in time to detour the national debate from Arizona, the media is touting the virtues of the newly crowned Miss America Teresa Scanlan, a seventeen-year-old who looks and acts twenty-five.  From second-hand sources (I found her name with a quick google), I have learned that she is an accomplished pianist, is focused on getting a law degree, wants to be a Supreme Court judge, and looks ravishing in an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini.

It’s the last part that bothers me.  While I’m one of the first to decry the plight of women in other cultures who are treated as sex objects (we’re probably more familiar with Middle Eastern cultures, but Latin America, India, China, and Southeast Asia should be considered in our class of misogynist strongholds), is the whole Miss America, Miss Universe, and other beauty pageant nonsense not the same thing?  Yeah, I know, the bikini bit was to show how fit the women are, wink, wink.  It’s a fitness show.  Bull!  What it does is give many men and not a few women some place to aim their testosterone beyond guns and politics, just what we need to heal from Arizona.  Yeah!  God bless America!

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Like three hundred million other Americans, I was moved by the untimely and senseless death of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the Arizona shooter.  Perhaps the syrupy media attention and Mr. Obama’s moving words, which dominated his eulogy of the victims and praise for the heroes, is just what we need to pull this nation back together.  However, the rational part of me, not the emotional, tells me that this is an impossible task unless we come to some consensus based on cold logic and unemotional compromise.

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The events that took place in Arizona on Saturday offer yet another datum for the experimental evidence that supports the thesis of my title.  That is an abstract statement of scientific fact.  On the human level, American’s infatuation with guns leads to personal tragedies that affect survivors, friends and relatives of victims and survivors, and the local communities where shootings take place.  On one hand, we relish violence in our TV shows, movies, and video games—it makes villains more evil, allows us to empathize with the victims, and glorifies the hero who meets violence with violence, and wins—all the better if all the violence is directly related to Sigsauers, Glocks, Berettas and Uzis.  On the other, this fictional tradition makes us thick-skinned about violence, especially gun violence, in real life.

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(Sven Michael Davison, State of Mind, Bedouin Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9666149-2-3)

With State of Mind, Mr. Davison has written a bloody and mind-blowing tour de force, both literally and figuratively.  It is both entertaining and thought-provoking but definitely not for the faint of heart.  What happens when future bioengineering technologies permit doctors to embed a chip in the head that can help the average joe control his cravings and better his life while at the same time create a more efficient and programmable soldier to fight terrorism?  The author supplies one answer.

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Some people might think I’m talking about body attributes here or plastic surgery.  Heaven forbid!  (Or hell, for that matter.)  I am a little envious of David Baldacci, for example, but it’s not because he’s a chick magnet.  It’s because he’s able to produce two or three bestsellers each year and has been doing so since Absolute Power.  I can’t keep up with the guy.  I am also envious of J. K. Rowling, but it’s not because she’s the quintessential English female that almost, but not quite, drives me to like the British.  (Of course, even if she weren’t cute and mysterious, she’s wealthy enough to buy Angelina Jolie’s body parts for a complete makeover.)  My problem with Ms. Rowling is that she was able to write a successful fantasy series and I can’t even write fantasy.

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