My friend and Hobo History producer, Incognegro, was so excited that Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga was being made into a TV miniseries that he called me right away and told me he was going to start working on something of mine being made into a movie. He called me a few days after and bemoaned the resulting work in non specific tones that suggest standard Hollywood shlock has been heaped upon Jordan’s admirable work.

Briefly, I read Jordan’s first two books in that saga, beginning with The Wheel of Time, a mass market paper back of some 580 pages bought at the Rite Aid drug store on Frankford and Belair Road around about 1990. [1] I recall that halfway through that edition, a page was printed twice. I enjoyed his work very much and did not finish following the series for the reason that I soon was working six jobs and reading more and more nonfiction, as fiction, especially good fiction, read when exhausted, would put me to sleep as surely as a baseball game.

Jordan wrote one of the best posthumous Robert E. Howard collaborations, when he wrote a Conan novel set on the steppes, in which Conan becomes involved in Mongolian blood politics. Jordan did realistic violence, in which hyper-masculine men, as in REALITY, dominate physical violence.

In The Wheel of Time, Jordan, who seemed to have some form of hand-to-hand combat experience, cast a hero of classic hyper-masculine type as a guide, not the protagonist. Imagine a Fellowship of the Ring, in which there are no hobbits, and that the sympathetic protagonist is something like a Frodo—innocent—but fated to become an Aragorn, a warlord against evil. Further imagine, that instead of foolish Borimor to protect the young innocent seeker against evil, that the knight assigned by fate to help the innocent into manhood is as rock solid as Strider was. In essence, Jordan took Arthur and cast him as a potential wizard, under the care of a warrior, inverting that relationship of shamanic-guide to warrior to warrior-guide to shamanic figure.

The above mechanic was a genius stroke to permit the heroic warrior a place in the stilted collective imagination of late 20th century sissydom, by making him the ass-kicking side kick of the ascendant youth. Another genius and really authentic move was to place magic, largely in the hands of the Ais Sedai [butchering the spelling I’m sure] a cult of matronly magic-weavers that walked like counter-norns among men, without acting like men, to help the warrior guide and the potential savior against the Dark Lord. Jordan used the power of a woman’s approval to motivate men to heroic action in a strangely wrought rule of gender as accessing filters and portals into the field of magic. [2]

In a time when we all knew, that shadowy men that we did not know by name, ruled us and despoiled our planet and degraded out society for their own power-hungry motives, late-stage Boomer fiction readers and Gen-X readers of both genders could really get on board with Jordan’s unique and textured rendering of classic fantasy as a cosmic struggle. I knew two father-and-son pairs who followed the saga together.

Jordan wrote good stuff—he wrote true, and thus, his work must be rewoven into the brilliant texture of the American Lie. I have not and will not see what has been done with his work.

I bet, that the combat is dominated by an athletic woman.

Some one has to be gay.

I will not waste my imagination on the rest of the distortions. I would rather note that the most important elements of our current lie-based story-telling in movies and TV have their roots in the American Cult of the Western Hero, with Gary Cooper, James Arness, John Wayne, Yule Brenner depictions of the cucked gunfighter. These elements will be seen in almost all late 20th century and early 21st century action films:

-The hero may not be the first to act. The bad guys must act first.

-A domestic setting must be under threat, some cozy place of women and children and [in the old trope clean and in the new trope] easy living, must be targeted by evil.

-A Caucasian male hero may only act in extremes as a means of protecting women and children and non-Caucasian men from the evils of Caucasian men.

-Once evil is defeated, the Caucasian hero, being a distillation of Nordic evil into temporary civic service, must, absolutely leave, preferably leaving a woman of his kind behind as the guide and caretaker of a child or guiding companion of another kind of sub-violent low-agency man. This trope was firmly established in Shayne and High Noon, and reached its apex in Rio Bravo [3] and The Magnificent Seven, in which the doomed gunfighters, before riding off into the sunset and out of society, declared that they had fought and seen most of their fellows die, to protect the real heroes of the children, the unarmed serfs who toiled so that better men might live in great splendor. Nothing affects the fusion of communist and capitalist values more cleanly than such anti-heroic movie tropes.

I do not suggest that publishers and movie makers have all conspired in some way to use story telling to render us into more governable ciphers of the System of Control. Rather, I suggest the following:

That capitalistic worship of the dollar as All Holy will drive any and every purveyor of reading or viewing narrative, from sports, to novels, to Movies and TV, relentlessly into the cultivation of a self-important parody of a professional wrestling fan. The economics of a consumption-based society, when applied to story-telling, will gravitate towards passive acceptance of the most outrageous possibility. Indeed, postmodern literature students are taught that a story that presents a normal character is not worthy of being written.

Like a keel rights a ship as it plows through the sea, the lie, the presentation of the in-authentic as good and right, as human society plows through the reality of Time, induces the viewer or reader to more passive, and more consumptive habits. The basic economics of viewing as an activity rather than doing, makes him a more easily molded marketing target. Thus the heroized supporting character fixture of mid-20th century war movies, the U.S. GI [4] who could be trusted to know who the evil German impostor was by quizzing him on who had beaten the Yankees in the latest baseball game, was, despite his participation in actual heroic action, already a trained spectator to a mere game. In such games the best physical specimens of his nation played at ball rather than engage in war...because, it was far more important to the technocrats that knew that the U.S. could not lose WWII to cultivate man-as-spectator-to-faux-life through passive worship of sports heroes than to dragoon prime men into conflict.

Thus the ship of the Lie plowing the Sea of Time needs to have an almost religious belief in the importance of falseness in order to stay the course. How else, could a nation in which most people do not know a healthy person who died of the dread disease being used to control them, field a population of whom most believe that they are suffering from a plague to rival the great medieval pandemic, despite two years of normal death rates?

The answer is, in cultivating a person who will sit in an easy chair, watching a telecast of a football game, in which millionaire goons fight over a ball, and comment in the collective, “We should have run the ball instead of passing.”

This person is mentally constructed, in equal parts through sports spectating, advertisement media and entertainment narrative [5]. Only after being collectively modeled by such means is She then manipulated through news reporting into the lurching emotional meat-puppet of Post Modernity. The above does cultivate a person who is easy to lie to using media of the same type as employed by entertainment and advertising and is thence harnessed by the lie-weaving machine of state and corporate control.

Eventually inauthentic norms evolve, such as women, who as a general rule do not have an instinctive understanding of violence, being placed as the judges of the appropriate use of violence [first in story and then in civics], a role they play in almost every classic western, most modern adventure movies, and has recently expanded to them being depicted as the supreme super-hero actionist and doer of violence. This story telling trope has expanded into the actual running of the U.S. Military as it is retooled for use in suppressing domestic dissent rather than overseas resource extraction.

Aristotle does remind the potential poet that “Homer taught us how to lie” in convincing narrative form. Like the young hero in The Wheel of Time, we should keep in mind that in striving against this Grand Malediction we run the risk of becoming one of its lever-pullers of control. [6]

…

Notes

-1. I was waiting for my wife to buy something and I was being shadowed by a short black security guard twirling a billy club and glaring at me.

-2. It has been some 30 years and but a single read and I did not begin the third novel and may not have completed the second. So, Wheel of Time, nerds, forgive any blasphemy on my heathen part. What remains was his initial etching of a powerful womanly class of spirit guide, a masculine order of knighthood dedicated to actual world balance, and the ominous idea that the powers being explored to counter the ultimate dark power, might in their turn corrupt the hopeful good-worker.

-3. John Wayne’s later work in Big Jake and The Shootist attempt to counter balance this as did The Last Hard Men with Coburn and Heston. Clint Eastwood’s entire body of work may be studied as a counterpoint to this dominant American ethos, and was ironically not permitted through American film making entities until after Eastwood made Italian movies and parlayed his earnings into his own production outfit. He would continue to market his counter-hero, walking the margin between authentic heroism and American heroism with his Joe Kid, High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wells, Pale Rider and Unforgiven movies, in which his spaghetti western Man With No Name was toned down to effect a compromise with American notions of a hero as a reviled and thankfully temporary civic servant.

-4. A man named Government Issue.

-5. Including video games, which are passive, not active, and cause the same hypnotic state as mesmerism.

-6. I see the United States of America as the greatest evil to ever rise from the bowels of civilization, not because of anything IT has done. But because almost everything it does is cloaked in lies [the stated cause of almost every war, for instance]. To the story teller, who uses lies [Like Middle Earth and hobbits] to weave a portrait of Truth in motion, the prospect of using little truths to serve a great lie, as does THE NEWS, is the very shambling definition of infinite horror.