Commencement speech

“With great power comes great responsibility.” – Uncle Ben Parker, sometime in 1962

With great ability comes the responsibility to use it, hone it, and make the world better, at least for yourself and those around you.

Toward the end of my book The Imaginary Revolution, after tyranny is overturned and folks sit around talking about what the new government should look like, my hero smiles and asks a more basic question.

Why do we even need a government?

I left the question to hang in the air, but the conversation may have gone like this.

“Because there are those who can’t fend for themselves.”

For this we need regulations that often have the net effect of hampering the ability to help the needy?

“Because the unscrupulous would prey on the weak.”

And what of the unscrupulous predators who use the government as their weapon?

“Because we need an educated populace.”

Yes, we do, and in fact my own philosophy depends on people being educated enough to know better. So, who will do the educating if not government agents? Here’s a thought: Teach kids how to learn and they will educate themselves. Live the free life and they will learn to be free.

Kids, you will succeed as long as you add something of value to the world. Make something with your hands or your mind. Restore something. Preserve something. Leave the world better or more enriched than you found it — every day.

W.B. at the Movies: Oz The Great and Powerful

If you’re going to do a movie called Oz The Great and Powerful, you’re inviting comparisons to “the” movie about Oz, which has stood up for 74 years. This movie compares well in many ways, but in the end I’d say it takes itself a tad too seriously.

It’s new on DVD, and having missed it on the big screen, I find James Franco is a better wizard than I’d been led to believe in the various reviews I’ve encountered. He doesn’t have the flamboyance of Frank Morgan or the over-the-top showmanship of W.C. Fields, for whom the original movie character was written. What he does present is a scoundrel who somewhat regrets he’s a scoundrel and wishes to do better, and at that Franco does a nice job.

Oz The Great and Powerful borrows some of the familiar tropes from “the” film, including starting out in black and white and converting to color when the story flows from Kansas into Oz – with the added treat of filling out the widescreen frame. That was nicely done, and done better than the film manages other links to the original.

As in “the” film, characters from Kansas find themselves in Oz but in different form. Here’s the girl he couldn’t help, here’s the good friend he doesn’t appreciate, and here’s the good woman in his life. But at the end of “the” movie, we’re presented a logical explanation of the similarities. Here those similarities are apparently little more than a remarkable coincidence.

Don’t get me wrong, as a fan of “the” movie – it’s on my short list of all-time favorites – I really enjoyed Oz The Great and Powerful, much more than Disney’s previous attempt to reboot the franchise, Return to Oz back in 1985. But I’m also one of the precious few who kind of liked Return to Oz (which actually did a better job of integrating the “real” L. Frank Baum story into the film, or at least the immortal W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill imagery, than even “the” Oz movie).

It’s all effective fantasy and a smashing good story. It just doesn’t have the whimsy of “the” film. They just don’t seem to be having as much fun as the group seemed to be having back in 1939. Here, when Oz meets the munchkins, there’s much ado and the little people begin to dance and cheer and sing. The reluctant wizard makes them stop and chill. It’s a cute scene, but it exemplifies the difference: This Land of Oz needs a little more warmth, a little more whimsy, a little more joy.

Insist on yourself

I find quite a few nuggets of wisdom in every reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortal essay Self-Reliance.

Here, he summarizes an entreaty that the reader think and act for herself, find her own way, not be content to follow in the steps of even the greatest men and women who have come before – because only you can or will walk the path ahead of you.

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”

A story idea for you

I have other stories I want to write; you can have this one.

On his way to the killing, the murderer finished his soda pop and threw the plastic bottle out the window of his vehicle.

It landed near the mailbox of our innocent protagonist, who found it in the morning and tossed it into his recycling bin.

Eventually DNA found at the crime scene will be matched to DNA found in our innocent protagonist’s recycling bin.

And oh! The adventures he will have as a result.

A fence between neighbors

Good fences make good neighbors, someone said a long time ago. It seems a cynical statement; a fence, after all, keeps you at arm’s length. Are you a better neighbor because I’ve prevented you from getting too close?

Well, yes, actually that’s true. The particular neighbors Red and I had in mind, as we toiled this weekend on the new garden fence, were the breathtaking deer who wandered through the yard last week, and the little family of rabbits that hopped through the field toward the trees.

We have dreams, you see, of eating carrots and radishes and beets and lettuce and peas and beans that we planted in this soil with our own hands. And without this fence, our neighbors most likely will eat them first.

So yes, good fences make good neighbors. The fence tells them they can eat anything they like that they eat on this land on their side, just leave this little plot alone. With any luck we’ll live a long and harmonious life side by side; they will eat what grows wild out there, and we will eat our homegrown vegetables.

I know there are good analogies to be had and dots to connect about fences and neighbors and limits. My mind is beginning to form connections about a fence between my harmless phone calls and neighbors whose job it is to keep terrorists at bay and whose invasions of privacy turn them into terrorists themselves, for example.

But at this moment we’d just as soon sit and rest our weary arms and knees, admiring the new fence. And look, it’s just about time to thin the carrot plants.

Cross-posted to Door County Advocate

A barricade of one's own making

There is no writer’s block. There is no mysterious force that prevents words flowing from the mind of an author to her fingertips and onto a page. There is only willful decision, in this case a choice not to make the choices that will allow the words to flow. A conscious hesitation, a deliberate procrastination.

Why? As I’ve stated in the past, procrastination is fear. Fear of what? A fear of making the wrong decision? In fiction, a fear of sending beloved characters in a direction you will regret. In nonfiction, a fear perhaps of irrelevance – who cares what you have to say and what if you’re wrong anyway?

And of course there is the opposite fear – a fear of sending the characters in the right direction. To tell the right story, beloved Romeo and Juliet both had to die. Rhett Butler had to leave Scarlett and not give a damn. Rick had to make Ilsa get on the plane. In nonfiction, the fear of changing the world for the good. Ask Jesus and Gandhi and King how that works out.

These of course are the extremes, but the fears work themselves in similar fashion in the writer’s mind – and so the stories don’t get told and the essays don’t get written.

And the myth of writer’s block is born. The myth is that this is out of the writer’s control. What has happened in fact is that the writer has chosen to second-guess himself, to pause: He has chosen that not writing is more comfortable than making the moment by moment decisions of putting one word after another and then choosing the next one and the one beyond that.

Last summer and fall, after years of procrastination, I threw caution to the wind and told the story of The Imaginary Revolution. I wrote every day (at least until the willful hesitancy began to interfere), and then I set a deadline to compile it all into a story, and I shipped the story to the world on Bill of Right Day (Dec. 15) 2012, and I let it go.

Then, so I wouldn’t stop writing, I returned to my old friend Myke Phoenix, and in two and a half days in January revived his career in a story called The Song of the Serial Kisser, and three weeks later I completed another superhero story about Myke and the Firespiders.

And then the “writer’s block” set in. And I wondered: What am I afraid of?

None of these stories are bound for the writer’s hall of fame – although the themes of The Imaginary Revolution complete a sort of trilogy that, with Refuse to be Afraid and A Scream of Consciousness, describe the philosophy by which I’d live what I estimate to be my best life – and although I have come to care very much about the characters who inhabit Astor City, the setting of the Myke Phoenix chronicles.

So, why did I stop writing as the ideas for another, and then a second, and then a third additional Myke story began to bounce around in my brain?

Why did I stop writing as the story between The Imaginary Bomb and The Imaginary Revolution coalesced after 20 years and a possible sequel began to nibble at the edges of my consciousness?

Why did I stop writing as new ideas and new characters with new stories whispered in my ear?

What am I afraid of?

What an interesting question.

And, by the way, what is stopping you from following your own dreams and your purpose? That may be a more interesting question, especially in your mind.

Let’s explore it together.

Or best yet, I’ll start writing again, and you get started on your dream. We’ll meet up the road a ways. Deal?

W.B. at the Movies: The 25 seconds that I enjoyed in 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey'

I'd rather not dwell on one of the longest 170-minute stretches of my life and the likelihood that I will not hurry to watch the second and third segments of "The Hobbit" motion picture experience. I guess I just wasn't prepared to see what I remember as a charming and enchanting novel converted into an action film packed with computer-generated images of slashing, slicing and dicing, one after another after another.

But in one of the quiet scenes I found one 25-second statement that was worth hearing and repeating. When Gandalf the wizard is asked why hobbit Bilbo Baggins is along for the ride, he replies, at first, "I don't know," but adds:

Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I've found. I've found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay – simple acts of kindness and love.

 Amen!