Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

The Year That Tried to Run Away

They chased the old year down to the edge of the earth.

They chased the old year down to the edge of the earth. It wasn’t easy, but they cornered the suspect in a gas station just outside Sarasota, Florida, where the year gave up his hard grip on global chronology. The suspect, known to the authorities as “2018,” dropped the can of Pringles, the energy drink, the four packs of beef jerky, the soft box of Newport Longs from which he had fiendishly fired up a fresh one in open contravention of local law, and the twelve pack of MGD under his right arm. He hoped these provisions would give him a few more days of life after December 31st.

He longed to make it to January. Maybe February if he was lucky. He wanted to convince the human species to abandon their calendar system and maybe try out a fifteen month year for once. Maybe a few more evil acts would frighten them into accepting his tyrannical conditions.

He was dressed in tattered rags by the time they nabbed him. A couple returning home to Vermont from a happy holiday, their son filling up the family Prius on Pump 3 just outside, felt the burning jolt of the perp’s vicious scowl and instantly dropped dead of heart attacks. Plop plop. Tears from the kid. Grief that would scar for years. Work for the Brattleboro obituary writers.

A twelve-year-old girl buying a pack of gum was lucky enough to escape merely with a premature mane of white.

The suspect snapped his fingers. And the man in the restroom, already unsettled by the heavy brick attached to the key that he balanced on his knees, discovered that there was no toilet paper and that the faucets had stopped worked. The man’s anguished cry could be heard as far away as Long Boat Key.

“Come out with your hands up!” shouted the squad leader through this megaphone. “You’re surrounded! December, you got this guy?”

December, the most stoic of the twelve lieutenants, nodded and gave the hand signal to Units 29, 30, and 31 to lock their sniper rifles on the rogue year. The team had been doing this for more than two thousand years and they weren’t going to let any goddam year make it past January. Not on their watch.

The criminal had taken out so many promising people (Franklin, Bourdain, Lee, Le Guin, Ellison, Marshall, Shelley, Spade, Roth, Hawking, Lanzmann, Forman, Reynolds, Kidder, Simon, Roeg, Rain, Jay, Mack, Locke, Swift, Ditko, Crimmins, O’Riordan, Hutchison, Anderson, Kao, so many others) and his other acts had caused so much crippling anxiety and torment. But he was quite happy with his accomplishments. The Kavanaugh confirmation. The zero tolerance policy on DACA. He had even persuaded Kevin Spacey to lose his mind on Christmas Eve. He strived for evil excellence even in the final days and he was particularly proud of that last touch. But he wasn’t done with his work. No, sir. Not by a long shot. He knew that 536, believed to be the worst year in human history, was the year he had to top. He wanted to stand out, win awards, be recognized by the historians. So he made sure that the West Wing invited him over every day and he whispered terrible sentiments into the President’s ear and somehow everything the year said ended up on Twitter. It had all been remarkably easy.

But all years, good and bad, do have to retire. Which is why he was in Florida. Tax incentives. Shuffleboard. For all his malevolence, he did like shuffleboard. 2018 was a bona-fide dickhead, but you had to give him shuffleboard.

Couldn’t they see that he was an innovator? Well, some of them did. He had won great acclaim from the Republicans and the Nazis. 2016 had texted him days before. “Dude! You’re making ME look like one of the good ones.”

Couldn’t they see that he was just getting started with his misery? That there were still more lives to ruin?

But in the end, he gave himself up peacefully to the chronological police, allowing his wrists to be manacled. The chron cops snapped the tracking bracelet to his ankle. There were still a few days left before the new kid would take over.

“Nice work, December,” said the squad leader.

December grunted back and held up three fingers.

“How’s the training going with the kid?”

“Who?” asked a special day unit He munched on a donut. It was the twelfth one he had eaten that day. He felt an inexplicable need to eat at least eighteen more.

“Nineteen. I mean, he’s the one closing out this decade.”

“Oh, yeah,” said the day unit. “Well, I think he’s still watching the orientation video.”

“The sixteen hour one?”

“It’s a new one. HR updated it with the bubonic plague, Holodomor, the Trail of Tears, the Rwandan genocide, and there’s even a few minutes on the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. We’ve got to make sure that the new kid’s better than this guy.”

“Okay. Well, see to it that he’s ready at midnight! We can’t have any more screwups!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Eighteen? He’s not saying anything.”

“Let him stew. He’s finished.”

But the criminal smiled in the back of the police car. There was one thing he knew that they didn’t. For it was the custom of each year to draft a handwritten letter to the next year upon completing the 365 day term. And he had written words. Evil words. Seductive words. Words that would corrupt anyone. Words that no video could ever erase. He steepled his fingers, loosened a maniacal laugh into the fresh ocean air, and looked forward to settling into house arrest and observing what the new kid would do once he started his shift. He was feeling incredibly confident.

(A version of this story was sent privately to some friends, who loved it so much that they urged me to expand it. And so here we are. Happy New Year to everyone!)

by Edward Champion

The Face of Battle (Modern Library Nonfiction #81)

In which your fateful reader tackles a reading subject that fills him with dread: the clanging rah-rah-rah stats-based genre known as military history.

(This is the twentieth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The Strange Death of Liberal England.)

Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic plough:
So perish monuments of mortal birth,
So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth;

— Lord Byron, Child Harolde’s Pilgrimage

I must confess from the outset that the study of armed human conflict, with its near Spartan fixation on tactics and statistics, has long filled me with malaise. It is among the least sexiest subjects that a polymath of any type can devote her attentions to, akin to cracking open a thick, limb-crushing tax code volume written in a way that obliterates all joy and finding a deranged pleasure within this mind-numbingly dull amalgam of numbers and turgid prose. As Margaret Atwood once quipped in a poem, the military historian says, “I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.” And when the song remains the same, why would anyone other than a ketamine fiend dance to it?

I’ve long pictured the military historian as some aging jingoistic white male whose idea of a good time involves blasting John Philip Sousa from a set of speakers that should be devoted to happening hip-hop: a lonely and humorless parasite who moves cast-iron figures across a threadbare map in some dusty basement, possibly talking to himself in a gruff tone that uncannily mimics Rod Steiger’s inebriated cadences. He seems overly enamored of the dry details of ordnance, mirthless arrows, and terrain circles. Perhaps he fritters away his time in some homebuilt shack far off the main artery of Interstate 76, ready to reproduce well-studied holes with his Smith & Wesson should any nagging progressive come to take away his tattered Confederate flag or any other paleolithic memorabilia that rattles his martial disposition. But let’s say that such a man is committed to peace. Then you’re left with his soporific drone as he dodders on about some long dead general’s left flank attack in the most unpalatable ramble imaginable. He prioritizes a detached tabulative breakdown over the more palpable and poignant truths that motivates men. He doesn’t seem to care about how a soldier experiences trauma or summons bravery in impossible conditions, or how these battles permanently alter nations and lives. The military historian is, in Napoleonic short, a buzz killer despite his buzz cut. Indeed, military history is so embarrassing to read and advocate that, only a few weeks ago, I was forced to hide what I was reading when a woman started flirting with me at a bar. (I sheepishly avoided revealing the title to her for fifteen minutes. Nevertheless, she persisted. And upon seeing The Face of Battle, the woman in question rightfully headed for the hills, even after I offered to buy her a drink.)

There are quite a few military history books on the Modern Library list. So I’m more or less fucked. It is not that war itself does not interest me. Human beings have been fighting each other since the beginning of time and only a soulless anti-intellectual fool resolutely committed to the vulgar act of amusing himself to death would fail to feel anything pertaining to this flaw in the human makeup. The podcaster Dan Carlin, who specializes in military history, is one of the few people who I can listen to in this medium for many hours and remain completely enthralled. But that is only because Carlin is incredibly skilled at showing how the paradigm shifts of war influence our everyday lives. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was a remarkable film that hurled its audience into the dizzying depths of war, but this is merely a vicarious sensory experience. I can get behind Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (ML NF #75) because of that book’s cogent observations on how war influenced literary culture. Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (ML NF #84) remains a journalistic masterpiece that I very much admire — in large part because of its razor-sharp commitment to human psychology, which in turn allows us to understand the miasmic madness of making tactical decisions (see that book’s incredible “Battle of Ap Bac” chapter). But I’d hesitate to categorize either of these two brilliant volumes within the exacting genre of unadulterated military history. I’ve always had the sense that there’s an underlying bellicosity, if not an outright advocacy of warfare, with books that are exclusively dolled up in camo.

So upon reading The Face of Battle, it was something of a relief to see that John Keegan was up front from the get-go about what military history fails to do, and why accounts of battles are so problematic. He begins the book saying that he has never seen or been in a battle. And this is a hell of a way to open up a book that professes to give us the lowdown on what war is all about. It is a genuinely humble statement from someone who has made a career out of being an expert. He openly points to military history’s major weakness: “the failure to demonstrate connection between thought and action.” “What of feeling?” I thought as I read this sentence. According to Keegan, historians need to keep their emotions on a leash. And the technical example he cites — the British Official History of the First World War — is an uninspiring passage indeed. So what is the historian to do? Quote from the letters of soldiers. But then Keegan writes, “The almost universal illiteracy, however, of the common soldier of any country before the nineteenth makes it a technique difficult to employ.” Ugh. Keegan!

From Ilya Berkovich’s Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe:

Considering the social origins of most eighteenth-century soldiers, one might think that literate soldiers were uncommon. However, literacy among the lower classes in old-regime Europe was becoming less exceptional. It is estimated that up to 40 per cent of the labouring poor in Britain were literate. Between 1600 and 1790, the portion of French bridegrooms singing their parish records doubled to about half of the total male population. Interestingly, the corresponding figures in northern and eastern frontier regions, which provided most French recruits, were much higher, with some areas coming close to universal literacy. Literacy rates in the Holy Roman Empire fluctuated widely, yet it is telling that over 40 per cent of the day labourers in mid-century Coblenz were able to sign their names. In rural East Prussia, one of the poorest regions in Germany, comparable figures were reached in 1800, although this was still a fourfold increase compared to only half-a-century before….

And so on. Fascinating possibilities for scholarship! It seems to me that someone here did not want to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

You see the problems I was having with this book. On one hand, Keegan wants to rail against the limitations of military history (and he should! you go, girl!). On the other hand, he upholds the very rigid ideas that stand against the execution of military history in a satisfying, fact-based, and reasonably emotional way that allows voluble chowderheads like me an entry point.

But that’s not the main focus of this book. Keegan settles upon three separate events — the Battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415, the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, and the first day of battle on the Somme (July 1, 1916) — to seek comparisons, commonalities, and various parallels that we might use to understand military mechanics. He is duly reportorial in each instance, but overly fond of taxonomy rather than tangibility. Still, there are moments when Keegan’s bureaucratic obsessiveness are actually interesting — such as his examination of British archers and infantry running up against French cavalry during Agincourt. After all, if a horse is charging its way into a man, either the horse is going to run away, men are going to be knocked down, or there’s going to be a “ripple effect” causing open pockets on each side of the horse. So it’s actually quite extraordinary to consider how the French got their asses kicked with such a clear advantage. Well, the British did this with stakes, which impaled the horses. And the threat of this obstacle caused the French to retreat with their backs to the British, resulting in archers lobbing arrows into their vertebrae.

Keegan informs us that “the force of unavoidable circumstances” sealed the fate of the French and allowed Henry V to win at Agincourt. When Keegan gets to Waterloo, we see a similar approach adopted by Napoleon near the end. Large crowds of French infantry rushed towards the British line, landing within mere yards. The two armies exchanged fire and the French, at a loss of what to do, turned around and fled. This was not an altogether smart strategy, given the depleting reserves that Napoleon had at his disposal. But it does eloquently demonstrate that battles tend to crumble once one side has entered an unavoidable choice. The rush of men on both sides at the Somme in 1916, of course, in the trenches not only escalated this to an unprecedented scale of atrocity, but essentially laid down the flagstones for the 20th century’s practice of mutually assured destruction.

These are vital ideas to understand. Still, I’m not going to lie. Keegan was, in many ways, dull and soporific — even for a patient reader like me. I learned more about Henry V’s campaign by reading Juliet Barker’s excellent volume Agincourt, which not only unpacked the incredible logistics of invading northwestern France with engrossing aplomb but also juxtaposed this campaign against history and many vital realities about 15th century life. And a deep dive into various World War I volumes (I especially recommend Richard Aldington’s surprisingly ribald novel, Death of a Hero) unveiled a lot of unanticipated sonic transcriptions that inspired me to draft an audio drama script that I hope to produce in a few years. Keegan is certainly helpful in a dry intellectual manner — the equivalent of being served a dull dish of desiccated biscuits when you haven’t eaten anything for days; I mean, there’s a certain point in which you’ll gorge on anything — but he’s not the man who inspired me about battle. Hell, when one of the most boring and pretentious New Yorker contributors of all time espouses Keegan’s “matchlessly vivid pen,” you know there’s a reason to hide beneath your blanket. Keegan is undoubtedly on this list because nobody before him had quite unpacked war from the bottom-up approach rather than the general’s top-down viewpoint. But like most military historians, he didn’t have enough of a heart for my tastes. There’s a way to present a detailed fact-driven truth without being such a detached fussbucket about it. And we shall explore and exuberantly praise such virtuosic historians in future Modern Library installments!

Next Up: Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology!

by Edward Champion

A Statement Concerning Recent Allegations

In which I address the Parsec Awards controversy.

Whenever I need to identify some quality inside myself, I ask multiple people about it until one person confirms the truth.

Here’s a benign example: Over the last two years, I regularly attended a karaoke bar, coming in each week and singing anywhere from six to a dozen tunes. People kept complimenting me on my singing. I was showered with free shots and often given four song slips for every drink rather than one. (I received a similar reaction by a hilarious KJ in Brooklyn who refers to me as “my man E” during his hip-hop karaoke nights.) I didn’t believe it. I thought they were just being nice. It was only after about one hundred people offered me fulsome praise that I started to think, “Well, maybe there’s something to this.” And that’s when I bought a guitar last August, picking up the instrument after ten years of not owning one, and I started writing a few dozen songs. I put up rough versions of these ditties onto Instagram and people really liked them.

A far less pleasant example of this happened over the last week. My audio drama, The Gray Area, won a Parsec Award. This was an incredible honor. I worked hard for years to make something positive and beautiful and meaningful. I designed the series to run over the course of four seasons and, to the best of my ability, explore moral questions that argued for kindness and empathy and compassion towards other people.

But someone led a campaign that accused me of being a sex offender (false, he found another man who shared my name, but not my middle name) and of committing “extremely disturbing behavior” (a charge that I was genuinely baffled by, unless it referred to a 2014 incident involving a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt, in which I have already fully acknowledged my wrongdoing and debunked many false claims, issued many apologies for, and done my best to atone for). Dozens of people aware of the 2014 incident wrote in my defense. The Parsec Committee looked into it. They upheld the award.

This ruling greatly upset the audio drama community. I was then accused of “victimization” and “threats” and “harassment.” Even though I have never possessed any intention of threatening or harassing or victimizing anyone and the messages in question involved the expression of hurt feelings, and even though many people got the details and even the tone and language of these messages incredibly wrong, the upshot is that the community decided that I was an irredeemable creep.

But as I said, whenever I need to identify some quality inside myself, I ask multiple people about it until one person confirms the truth.

So I sent copies of the messages to numerous people. I own up to every mistake I have ever made in my life. While everybody else stated that I was not in the wrong, one good friend who always tells me the truth said that there was “some ugly stuff.” And upon further reflection, I have to agree with him. I have a problem.

I can tell you for a fact that I texted “You are pure evil” to a producer who I had busted my hump for, but who nevertheless blocked me and dropped me from a role (effectively “erasing” me in the manner of Kevin Spacey, thus comparing me with a serial sex offender when I have never committed or even contemplated an act of sexual misconduct in my life) and condemned me without notice while I was completely drunk and feeling suicidal over what people were claiming about me on the evening of Tuesday, December 18th (and I barely even remember sending the text, much less the Lyft ride home (the email receipt was a surprise to me), but I do recall the good friend who was incredibly kind to talk with me at a very late hour to make sure that I was okay). Is that context even important? Probably not. The action is execrable.

I hereby apologize with total candor and full humility to that producer for four words that decimated everything. I am ashamed of what I texted and ask for forgiveness.

Now here’s the part where the situation gets thorny.

Okay, so I couldn’t help but notice that you favorite every #ADS mention of your show except mine. You (and others) seem to be practicing the Wittgenstein line about remaining silent “about what one can not speak.” I get it. And hey, that’s totally your prerogative! Just so you know, I’m not really interested in being negative. We follow each other. Who knows? Maybe we even listen to each other. (I’m currently current on [NAME OF SHOW REDACTED].) The way I see it, we have two choices. We either carry on in this shaky and uncertain manner, possibly feeling bits of doubt or meh or ugh about each other (which I really don’t want to do), or we get to know each other, finding hope, humanism, and possibility, asking each other questions and clearing things up, operating on a more positive footing. Personally I much prefer situations in which people get along, are naturally themselves, do their own thing, forge fun collaborations, and learn from each other. It is vastly superior and far more fruitful than circumstances in which people are needlessly suspicious, skeptical, scheming, seeing the worst in each other, et al. And I’d like to think that – and this may be overly idealistic of me, but I’m nothing if not inexorably sanguine at times – the AD world is noble and big and resilient enough to work past any and all differences and disputes.

Here’s the deal. I’m probably going to be making AD for the next few years. I’m sitting on four years of scripts I plan to produce. So I’m putting it out there. What do you say to a detente? For what it is worth, what I articulate here is more or less my position with anyone in the AD world. Everyone has a past. What counts and what is ultimately more important is the present. I know there has some debate about me that never involves me. Some of the deets spill my way. And this makes no sense to me. Aren’t we adults? Wouldn’t it make sense to go straight to the source and work something out? Aren’t dialogues and mutual listening the hallmark of ALL arts and humanities? Why cast aspersions on someone without at least ATTEMPTING a good faith conversation? So I’m putting it out there. The door is open. The ball is in your (or anyone else’s) court. Thanks and peace, Ed

(BTW, I truly enjoyed the [SUBJECT REDACTED] thing from a few months back.)

This was the only private message I ever sent (through Twitter DM) to a pair of audio drama producers. When I did not hear back, I simply unfollowed them. I did not follow up, harass, or communicate with them further in any way after this message. I have reviewed my records very carefully. Yet these two producers have claimed that I harassed them. They claimed, among other falsehoods, that they had “received private messages from this individual on a wide variety of social media accounts…[that] grew increasingly angry, accusatory, and carried a feeling of instability,” when the ONLY private message I sent was the one above and the tone is not angry or accusatory at all.

It is certainly within anyone’s prerogative to not wish to communicate with me and I completely and totally honor that, but it is not any person’s right to invent false allegations that other people take seriously –- especially when I have not been informed in any way of how I was coming across or what part of the benignly intended message constitutes “harassment.”

Another figure in the audio drama world claimed I was “victimizing” her, but a review of a March 29, 2018 Twitter thread in which this figure and I participated revealed no victimization whatsoever and, in actuality, a cordial consideration of her viewpoint. She “came forward” and I’m sorry she feels this way, but she didn’t produce any tangible evidence of wrongdoing on my part that I am aware of. And people believed her, including the host of an audio drama showcase podcast and a noted playwright who also writes for the ear, even though I have never spoken with her or met her and our communications were exclusively written and thus unquestionably upheld by concrete evidence that was neither produced to me nor given the specific “victimizing” context.

Some producers claim to have “seen screenshots,” but these have never been revealed to the public. My polite requests to see these screenshots for myself — (a) to corroborate that I said what they believe I said and (b) to determine how people could form these takeaways and address any perceived transgressions with atonement and contrition — have been repeatedly refused. I don’t even know if these screenshots actually exist. As I told one producer who, upon hearing all these stories, asked me to stop my Patreon contribution (I swiftly honored his request), “By your standards, we should imprison any random person walking within three blocks of a crime scene for murder.”

I have never attended a podcast conference in my life (only a barbeque party involving several audio drama producers in which I drove up with three homemade salads and in which I cheerfully cooked breakfast for everybody the next morning and a live performance at a Pittsburgh crime convention that I drove 100 mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to make on time after getting tied up in traffic), yet I have been accused of “threats of physical violence at podcast conferences [plural], stalking and intimidation of creators AND their families,” and so forth. This simply did not happen. The only thing I can think of that comes anywhere close to anything along these lines was when, at the barbeque, another producer and I staged a mock argument for the camera and I was photographed waving my hands as the other producer reacted with theatrical shock as many people surrounding us were clearly laughing. Did someone interpret this fabricated photo as me threatening other people? I don’t know. But this did not happen.

I am happy to issue any apology and ask for forgiveness to anyone who has ever felt wronged by me. But I cannot do so when the events or the actions haven’t happened. Is that so unreasonable?

Moreover, because I have done something terrible in the past, which again I have fully acknowledged and atoned for, I am held to an impossible existential standard where any mistake I make in the present deserves neither pardon nor understanding. And, hey, I’m going to make mistakes. There isn’t a single human being on this planet who is perfect. But I’m telling you that all I can do is try to be the best man I can.

This is not a case where I am Kevin Hart, who upon accepting the Oscar hosting gig, whipped up a justifiable frenzy for arrogantly refusing to apologize for his homophobic tweets in the past. I have apologized for my past and I will apologize again and again and again to anyone who needs to hear it. As long as it takes. What I did in 2014 was disgraceful. I am trying my best to curb any remotely similar tendency.

Here is what I have done to address the present state of affairs:

I have formally written to the Parsec Committee to reject my award for the greater good. I have deactivated the social media accounts that continue to land me in trouble and am unlikely to return.

Additionally, since the trouble I get into usually arises from feeling and expressing deep hurt, beginning today, I will refuse to correspond with anyone who demeans or debases me in any way. This need to defend myself and respond with everything I’m feeling in my heart, which works a lot better when it’s put into a story or an essay, has scared the bejesus out of people when it’s personally directed – so much so that months and even years of unimpeachable good will and kindness are erased by a mere sentence. My feelings don’t matter. That has been made clear enough. But as of now, if you’re corresponding with me and you haven’t heard from me for some reason, I’m not taking the bait. You’re going to have to be the one to follow up and figure it out. I’m tired of letting the hurt that others casually eke out to me, all this while feigning innocence, and my stupid responses to it overwhelm the considerable good that I do and I cannot have my relationships with others become grossly distorted and tarnished due to this unflappable tendency to respond to everything. I accept that some people are mean and some people will always despise me. There is nothing I can do about this, except choose not to react. It’s a waste of time and energy trying to get through to people who have already made up their minds. If they want to feel that way, it’s perfectly within their rights. This is something I should have started doing years ago. Because I never would have landed into so much trouble. But, hey, better late than never.

The fate of my life and the second season of The Gray Area, which I spent more than a good year working on and for which I had recorded about 70% of the dialogue for, is now incredibly uncertain. I would very much love to complete the second season. Because it’s been a bountiful joy to work on. The actors I work with are incredibly kind and talented and I treat them all as well as I can, maintaining a fun and relaxed environment committed to creative freedom and immediate compensation, and there are stories I need to tell. But this recent business has poisoned the well. And I’m going to need some time to figure out where I go from here. I don’t know how long.

Do I deserve anything? I don’t know. What I do know right now is that a number of people believe that I am deserving of hatred and humiliation and condemnation and, in one case, even death, and I have to listen to that while also looking out for my mental health and wellbeing.

The one thing I do want to do right now is to state unequivocally that, if you feel I have wronged you in any way and it is based on something I have actually done or said, please let me know right now and I will immediately and forthrightly apologize. You can contact me by email. If you’re not too crazy, I’ll even do it by phone.

Please let me know how I can do right. I’m asking for your help. I’m listening very carefully right now and I’m open to any guidance or suggestions.

Please understand that I am truly trying to be as honest, as fair, as open, as sensitive, and as graceful as I can here. And I also realize that there are some people out there who I will never please or satisfy. If you feel that this statement is woefully insufficient, well, I did the best I could to genuinely own up to every perceived transgression I have ever committed and I further apologize if you feel that nothing I have said here is enough. On the other hand, if you really want to believe the worst about me, then maybe you’re not my audience. So why are you here and why do you even care? You always have the choice to ignore me and live in peace.

by Edward Champion

The Strange Death of Liberal England (Modern Library Nonfiction #82)

George Dangerfield was the master of the interregnum history. His mordant wit and his keen eye towards specific events that triggered political movements are very much worthy of study today.

(This is the nineteenth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: Vermeer.)

It was a picnic-perfect summer in 1914. The rich flaunted their wealth with all the subtlety of rats leaping onto a pristine wedding dress. The newspapers steered their coverage away from serious events to pursue lurid items about sports and celebrity gossip. A comic double act by the name of Collins & Harlan recorded an absurd ditty called “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” which Thomas Pynchon was to describe fifty years later as “the nadir of all American expression.” Few human souls twirling their canes and parasols in these conditions of unbridled frivolity could have anticipated that an archduke’s assassination in late June would plunge Europe into a gruesome war that would leave twenty million dead, permanently altering notions of honor, bloodshed, and noblesse oblige.

But even a few years before the July Crisis, there were strong signs in England that something was amiss. Politicians demonstrated a cataclysmic failure to read or address the natural trajectory of human progress. Women justly demanded the right to vote and were very willing to starve themselves in prison and burn down many buildings for it. Workers fought violently for fair wages, often locked into stalemates with greedy mining companies. They were intoxicated by a new militant brand of syndicalism from France then popularized by Georges Sorel. The atmosphere was one of increasing upheaval and escalated incoherence, even among the most noble-minded revolutionaries. The influx of gold from Africa inspired both lavish spending and an inflated currency. The liberals in power were supposed to stand up for the working stiffs who couldn’t quite meet the rising prices for boots and food and clothes with their take home pay. And much like today’s Democratic Party in the States, these tepid Parliamentary wafflers past their Fabian prime revealed a commitment to ineptitude over nuts-and-bolts pragmatism. They allowed the Tories to play them like rubes losing easy games of three-card monte. Amidst such madness, England became a place of oblivious tension not dissimilar to the nonstop nonsense that currently plagues both sides of the Atlantic. With the middle and upper classes keeping their heads in the clouds and their spirits saturated in moonbeam dreams and a bubble gum aura, is it any wonder that people were willing to incite war and violence for the most impulsive reasons?

George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England examines this crazed period between 1910 and 1914 with an exacting and quite entertaining poetic eye. Dangerfield, an erudite journalist who parlayed his zingy word-slinging into a teaching career, is somewhat neglected today, but his remarkable knack for knowing when to suggest and when to stick with the facts is worthy of careful study, a summation of the beautifully mordant touch he brought as a historian. He describes, for example, the “dismal, rattling sound” of Liberalism refusing to adjust to the times, and eloquently sends up the out-of-touch movement in a manner that might also apply to today’s neoliberals, who stubbornly refuse to consider the lives and needs of the working class even as they profess to know what’s best for them:

[I]t was just as if some unfortunate miracle had been performed upon its contents, turning them into nothing more than bits of old iron, fragments of intimate crockery, and other relics of a domestic past. What could be the matter? Liberalism was still embodied in a large political party; it enjoyed the support of philosophy and religion; it was intelligible, and it was English. But it was also slow; and it so far transcended politics and economics as to impose itself upon behaviour as well. For a nation which wanted to revive a sluggish blood by running very fast and in any direction, Liberalism was clearly an inconvenient burden.

Dangerfield knew when to let other people hang themselves by their own words. The infamous Margot Asquith, the starry-eyed socialite married to the Prime Minister who led England into World War I, is quoted at length from her letters to Robert Smillie, the brave union organizer who fought on behalf of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. Asquith, so fundamentally clueless about diplomacy, could not understand why meeting Smillie might be a bad idea given the tense negotiations.

I did feel that Dangerfield was unduly harsh on Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the key organizers behind the suffragette movement. His wry fixation upon Pankhurst’s indomitable commitment — what he styles “the fantastic Eden of militant exaltation” — to starvation and brutality from the police, all in the brave and honorable fight for women, may very well be a product of the 1930s boys’ club mentality, but it seems slightly cheap given how otherwise astute Dangerfield is in heightening just the right personality flaws among other key figures of the time. The Pankhurst family was certainly eccentric, but surely they were deserving of more than just cheap quips, such as the volley Dangerfield lobs as Christabel announces the Pankhurst withdrawal from the WSPU (“She made this long-expected remark quite casually — she might almost have been talking to the little Pomeranian dog which she was nursing.”).

Still, Dangerfield was the master of the interregnum history. His later volume, The Era of Good Feelings, examined the period between Jefferson and Jackson and is almost as good as The Strange Death. One reads the book and sees the model for Christopher Hitchens’s biting erudite style. (The book was a favorite of Hitch’s and frequently cited in his essays.)

But it is clear that Dangerfield’s heart and his mischievous vivacity resided with his homeland rather than the nation he emigrated to later in life. In all of his work, especially the material dwelling on the United Kingdom, Dangerfield knew precisely what years to hit, the pivotal moments that encapsulated specific actions that triggered political movements. As he chronicles the repercussions of the June 14, 1911 strike in Southampton, he is careful to remark upon how “it is impossible not to be surprised at the little physical violence that was done — only a few men killed, in Wales in 1912, and two or three in Dublin in 1913; in England itself not a death. Is this the effect of revolutionary methods, and, if so, do the methods deserve the word?” He then carries on speculating about the pros and cons of peaceful revolution and ties this into the “spiritual death and rebirth” of English character. And we see that Dangerfield isn’t just a smartypants funnyman, but a subtle philosopher who leaves human possibilities open to the reader. He is a welcome reminder that seeing the real doesn’t necessarily emerge when you lock eyes on an alluring Twitch stream or a hypnotic Instagram feed. It comes when you take the time to step away, to focus on the events that are truly important, and to ruminate upon the incredible progress that human beings still remain quite capable of making.

Next Up: John Keegan’s The Face of Battle!

by Edward Champion

The Disease of Male Self-Pity

The current sweep of male self-pity essays fails to address the considerable hurt suffered by women. I bring my own experience into play, arguing that male self-pity is a terrible disease that requires a lifetime of learning and humility.

In the last week, two magazines have opened their tony doors to two former radio show hosts who abused their power and harmed women. The first piece was published in Harper’s. It was written by John Hockenberry, the former host of The Takeaway who was fired after facing numerous sexual harassment allegations. Hockenberry had clearly learned nothing from his experience. He painted his behavior as “something once called romance” and even had the temerity to quote from Lord Byron.

Days later, The New York Review of Books published “Reflections from a Hashtag,” a 3,500 word essay from former Canadian radio icon Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi, whose career ended after he faced sexual assault allegations from more than twenty women, was similarly without contrition or rigorous self-examination. He failed to mention the apology he was ordered to give to Kathryn Borel. And there was ancillary cluelessness from the top brass people who had commissioned the essay. In an astonishing interview with Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner, NYRB editor Ian Buruma cheapened Ghomeshi’s baneful manipulation of women by referring to sexual behavior as a “many-faceted business.” What Buruma and Harper’s head John R. MacArthur failed to see, both in authorizing and publishing these essays, was not only the extremely necessary climate shift ushered in by the #metoo movement, a reversal of patriarchal abuse that has been too long in arriving, but the manner in which these abusers retreated to self-pity and defensiveness. Both Hockenberry and Ghomeshi expressed zero concern for the women they abused. And if one is to reckon with the truth, then it means owning up to the totality of how one has harmed.

I have some first-hand experience with what Hockenberry and Ghomeshi are going through. In 2014, I was someone who operated in the literary world and I suffered a mental collapse. I wrote a terrible essay streaked with misogyny that I did not recognize, threatened to reveal an embarrassing personal detail about a woman on Twitter, and attempted suicide. I deservedly lost everything I had. Because what I did was disgraceful and barbaric and unacceptable. It has taken me years to come to terms with this, years of changing patterns of behavior (not always successfully) that I now understand to be very wrong, so wrong that any pain or hurt that I have experienced, however crippling, is completely insignificant and does not justify your compassion or consideration. As a man, I meted out harm to women through words, not fully understanding what I was doing. I wish that someone would have pulled me aside and told me that what I saw as satire was actually being perceived as abuse and that this was a viable interpretation. I was smart enough to read and understand Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. So why was I so gormless in failing to recognize this? To not understand that people (including women) were terrified by me and that my behavior fit into a terrible historical pattern of male privilege that we very much need to correct? My occasional harsh words not only blotted out everything good that I had ever done, but it was a complete betrayal to the many women who I genuinely held up with great respect.

I should have used whatever limited talent I possessed to establish trust rather than fear. But people in the literary world became very afraid of me. Many still are. And I had no real ability to understand this. Stupidly, I could not comprehend that the votes of confidence that many editors gave me did not just involve my writing chops, but their faith in me as a professional and as a person. And while I delivered lexical pyrotechnics and never once blew a deadline, I failed to live up to my responsibilities as a man. I became a shitty media man. I hurt people, often unknowingly, including people who were very close to me and who will now never talk with me. I did not understand how fierce my words came across, even though what poured from my fingers on a red hot night felt far too often like the illusory comfort of a concealed gun tucked neatly beneath a duster.

I’ve come to understand that I do not deserve forgiveness. That is the democratic consensus and, if I believe in egalitarianism and humanity, then I have to carry on accepting this. I can either flail against the plurality like a stubborn outlier who learns nothing or accept the wisdom of crowds and become the best man that I can, even though I know that this will probably never be enough. And that’s just as it should be. Because my suffering is nothing compared to the people who were terrified of me or who, in a few cases, were reduced to hurtful tears because of pieces I wrote or alcohol-fueled tweets I fired off or phone calls I made to seek what I perceived at the time as justice but what I now understand to be that most commonplace trait of abusers: ego incarnate.

And I don’t need three thousand words to say all this. Because all this is very simple to understand, although it takes a very long time to shave off your repugnant stubble with Occam’s razor. But that’s what male self-pity does. It cajoles your identity into complacence and keeps you believing that everything you do is right or that all transgressions can be justified. And you get so caught up in this endless excavation of the self, which is often one of the few ways you can survive because so many have ostracized you, that there is little room for considering the more important viewpoints of those who you harmed.

It lacerates me to the core to be lassoed in with sexual predators whenever a big magazine publishes one of these male self-pity pieces, but the finer details of how I deal with this anguish are not something I should share. To do so would be to give into hubris (seen in Ghomeshi’s egregious humble brag “But I was the guy everyone hated first”) and self-pity. For this reason I have placed myself with Hockenberry and Ghomeshi in the photo accompanying this article. If the people have decided that I am a monster, then I am a monster. Doesn’t matter if it’s the past, the present, or the future. Time is immaterial. What’s more important than any personal struggle I experience is to understand how I have hurt people and to continue to do everything in my power not to do so again. You don’t get to come out of the woodwork after four years and pretend as if nothing had happened with what The Cut‘s Ruth Spencer has smartly identified as a “charm offensive.” This is something that takes a lifetime.

10/12 ADDENDUM OFFERED IN RESPONSE TO STEPHEN ELLIOTT’S LAWSUIT AGAINST MOIRA DONEGAN:

You try and move forward with your life: listening to women, including women, reading women, learning from women, writing mostly women characters (far from stereotypical), hearing from women who listen to your show, donating to women, volunteering for women, doing all sorts of things for women that you never tell anyone, making sure that the women you run into always know they are respected and valued and that they are awesome, singling out women before men in social functions to atone for centuries of sexism and patriarchy. And you still feel that this is not enough. But you must do all this when your name is included on a list. Because you must always learn. The rumors themselves don’t matter. You know what happened. But the truth you know isn’t as important as the truth of what others intuit about you. You know what you have to work on and what you’re still working on. But the more important thing for you to understand is how your name came to be associated with this vile masculine strain and put on a list. Because you want to rid yourself of the taint and learn. And time passes and people see what you’re doing. And it seems like everything’s okay and it is. Because you’re learning and listening and understanding more than you ever have before. And this is good and positive. Your eyes are opening and you’re becoming a better man and people remark upon this. Not that you’re looking to score points. You’re just trying to be a better man. And that takes a lifetime. And then some repugnant talentless writer, a cruel selfish man who thinks of no one but himself and who has learned nada, who once threatened you with violence and harassed a friend of yours and threw a beer into the face of a decent man, and who is out for nothing more than petty revenge, does the unthinkable: he threatens and terrorizes women who had the guts to speak up so that an important perspective could be offered to the world and bad things could stop. He threatens these women with a lawsuit. And your name is somehow the second one on the GoFundMe legal defense list, which is the real list you want to be on so that the world can know that you’re learning even though your presence on that list doesn’t matter and even though this freshly dredged up anguish and your fury towards the man for halting the vital learning that you and far too many others need must remain insignificant because the women rightly matter more than you do and this is their moment and it must always be until we fix this, if we ever can. Because the situation doesn’t look good when guys like Kavanaugh get a free pass. And you feel as if this monstrous act by a truly shitty media man sets you back in your learning and sets women back in their necessary moment of justice. And you wonder how you and the world can ever learn because there are truly shitty men out there who don’t get what you are starting to know even if there’s a good chance you’ll never know enough and you’ll always be shitty even as you learn. But being shitty, you must avoid self-pity. No accident that it rhymes. This isn’t about you but it is about you, but you take your lumps and you remind yourself that the women always come first and that this fresh attention-seeking demon must be fought with all resources. And then you go grab a beer or three and you carry on with your learning, hoping that one day it will be enough, even though it may never be. And this, I think, is the last I have to say on the matter. Besides, it’s the women we need to hear from, not me. But I needed to write this. Because I am angry on their behalf.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to make a contribution to Moira Donegan’s legal defense fund.