From Santa Barbara to Badaun: Misogyny and Masculinity

It’s been a bad week for women. They found out, in sunny California, that when they do not dispense sexual indulgences to those who seek (or demand) them, they can provoke murderous rages; they also found out, in India’s central provinces, that their bodies remain to be taken by others, used, and then finally, strung up like broken rag dolls. Elliott Rodger and the as-yet-convicted rapists and killers of two teenage girls–separated by time and space–had this in common: they disliked women intensely. They hated them enough to kill them.

Elliott Rodger begs for cruel mockery about what goes terribly wrong when you don’t get laid. But the killers of Badaun weren’t sexually deprived; they had had their fill of the girls before they tossed them aside. Indeed, if Rodger had gotten his way and been dispensed the favors he seemed to be so desperately seeking, there is no guarantee he wouldn’t have killed anyway. Perhaps he would have channeled his rage against women some other way; perhaps he would have chosen to have gotten angry because one of his sexual partners wanted to break things off and just move on. The kind of anger so clearly visible in his disturbing video is not so easily assuaged as might be imagined; its roots lie far deeper. And the killers of Badaun made this rage manifest; it was not enough for them that they raped the girls they had abducted, they also hung them from a tree to strike fear into the hearts of anyone–especially other young women–who saw their limp, lifeless bodies. Women should know their place in this world: keep shut, spread your legs. (It is an additional complicating factor in the Indian case that the young women were Dalits, and their killers were probably members of an ‘upper-caste.’)

Many years ago, in a documentary on Mike Tyson, when speaking of his rape conviction, Joyce Carol Oates had noted that the modern man–in his sexual interactions with women–is animated by a rage qualitiatively and quantitatively distinct from that which tormented his predecessors earlier. Then, when a woman declined to sleep with you, you could convince yourself it was because she wanted to be a ‘good girl.’ Now, that same rejection has a personal sting: she is choosing someone else, not you, not now. Rodger had internalized this resentment for sure, but he had also inculcated in himself a corrosive Whore-Madonna complex of sorts: women wouldn’t stop being ‘sluts’ just because they had slept with Rodger. Perhaps they’d sink even lower in his eyes. Perhaps because, despite his protestations, Rodger didn’t think very much himself, he might have regarded them as especially contemptible for having slept with him.

Among masculinity’s worst contributions to our culture–and it has many terrible achievements–has been its degradation of sexual relations, its notion of sexual ‘accomplishment’ where men succeed via promiscuity and women fail. Over time, women have ceased to be persons and have merely become prickly, uncooperative owners of bodies, who refuse to play the game. As defined by men.

The teenage girls of Badaun, it’s ‘strange fruit‘, learned that the hard way: once their bodies had been used by those who wanted them, they weren’t needed any more. And no one else could have them. Not even they, themselves.

It’s no country, or world, for women (old or otherwise).

Keep Marijuana Illegal; It Might Be Used to Aid Sick Children

This is how morally depraved the anti-marijuana legalization debate has become.

The New York Times reports:

For the fifth time in seven years, the State Assembly on Tuesday passed a bill legalizing medical marijuana, backing a measure that would far surpass a program Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced this year.

But with less than four weeks left in the legislative session, the prospects for passage in the State Senate remained uncertain.

The bill allows the possession and use of up to two and a half ounces of marijuana by seriously ill patients whom doctors, physician assistants or nurse practitioners have certified.

“There are tens of thousands of New Yorkers with serious, debilitating, life-threatening conditions whose lives could be made more tolerable and longer by enacting this legislation,” said Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried, a Democrat from Manhattan who heads the Health Committee and sponsored the bill.

But enacting any bill on medical marijuana may be difficult. The Assembly, where Democrats are a majority, has passed such bills as far back as 2007, but Republicans in the Senate have been chilly to the concept.

Why?

In the Assembly on Tuesday, the debate was less about the bill’s fate and more about potential ramifications.

Assemblywoman Jane L. Corwin, a Republican from the Buffalo area, suggested hypothetically that a drug kingpin, if certified as a caregiver, might be allowed to give marijuana to his sick child.

Mr. Gottfried, seemingly bewildered, offered a grudging yes and said, “I would hope that we would not prevent that child from having his or her life saved because of the sins of the child’s father.”

So there you have it. We should prevent the passage of a bill that would facilitate the use of a palliative, a pain-killer, which would help the residents of this state who suffer from “serious, debilitating, life-threatening conditions” because doing so might help a drug dealer provide comfort to his “sick child.”

We should, in short, keep this drug illegal because otherwise sick children might benefit from it.

My Mother’s Books: Symbols of Resistance

Among the many old books on my shelves are a couple of dozen especially battered ones. Some belong to my father’s collection (I will write on these on another occasion); some belong to my uncle’s. And then there are another two, especially fragile, their pages browned and brittle, also brought back from India, just like those previously mentioned, one missing a cover, the other about to lose it.

The former is: Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (Forum Books, Columbia University Press, 1946; republished by Forum Books); the latter, Albert D. Van Nostrand (ed.), Literary Criticism in America, Liberal Arts Press, 1957. Their former owner’s name is visible inside the Nostrand book, along with a note indicating her program of study at the time: Satish Sabharwal, MA Final.

Satish Sabharwal was my mother. She would change her names–first and last both–after her marriage to my father, after she had completed that final year, the ‘MA Final’ of her master’s degree in English Literature (with a specialization in American Literature).

It is an enduring legend about my mother, in my mind, that she resisted two attempts by my grandfather to get her married off before she had finished her graduate studies. He had first attempted to do once she had finished high school; then, she had indicated she wanted to attend university and obtain her BA in English Literature. My grandmother was suitably supportive then; later, when my grandfather again attempted to marry her off after her BA, she agreed to back my mother up when she rejected a suitor for her arranged marriage, claiming that she wanted to keep studying and earn her MA next. (That young man, recently returned from the US with a graduate degree in engineering would instead marry her younger sister and return with her to that distant land.) Finally, after she had finished her MA, she agreed to her father’s suggestions that she meet a young man, a dashing air force pilot, who seemed like a good ‘match’ for her.  She liked her potential groom, even though she thought he was a little stuck-up and distant; he, for his part, expecting a small-town girl to be considerably unsophisticated, was pleasantly surprised by her keen interest in his flying and his European travels. That pilot, of course, was my father.

I brought these two books back from India several years ago. Occasionally, I take them down from the shelves and glance through their contents. The Schneider book has chapters–among others–on ‘Platonism and Empiricism in Colonial America,’ ‘The American Enlightenment,’ ‘Nationalism and Democracy,’ ‘The Transcendental Temper,’ ‘Radical Empiricism,’ ‘A New Naturalism and Realism.’ The Nostrand book includes essays by–among others–Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, H. L. Mencken, Robert Frost, Edmund Wilson.

I do not know why I still have not read these books. They seem very fragile and I fear they will fall apart in my hands as I read them. My wife has often urged me to bind them and I suppose that if I want to own them for much longer, I will have to do so soon. But I resist; binding will shape their form, turn them into something else. As they are, they maintain a certain kind of continuity with their past, and thus, with their former owner. By doing so, they continue to remind me of very particular and distinctive acts of resistance, conducted many years ago, against someone who would have been surprised to have seen his directives so withstood.

These books aren’t just historical narratives of intellectual traditions; they are also testimonials to a life sought to be conducted on its own terms.

Saba Naqvi on A Supposed Crisis of Indian Secularism

Saba Naqvi has offered an interesting critique of Indian secularism; in it, she writes of the need to:
[C]onfront the great crisis of Indian secularism, that is now so hollowed out that it makes it easy for communal forces to grow….Indian secularism is not about some utterance of the soul as a Jawaharlal Nehru may have once imagined it. It appears to be mostly about electoral management by secular parties that involves first seeing Muslims as a herd and then trying to keep that herd together.

And goes on:

Beyond that, there is nothing much that the Indian secular state has given the Muslim community except perhaps to ensure that they live for eternity in the museum that displays our secularism. That museum is full of stereotypes, most notably that of the clerics as representative of the community, those men with long beards, and women in burqa. Despite being so all-pervasive, the stereotypes are so flat they at times look like caricatures.

Since Inde­pendence, sec­ular parties in India have approached the Muslim community through clerics and in the process given them legitimacy. The maulanas, in turn, have used the cover of “secularism” to keep retrograde personal laws in place and thereby their own relevance intact till presumably they land in paradise. They rarely talk of jobs, employment, modernity. The result now is that having been given “secularism” to eat and a vote to brandish, the Muslims of India have been left in their ghettos with many “sole spokesmen” of the community. It is these clerics who promise the deliverance of that herd during election time. Their projection of their own clout is often a fraudulent exercise.
 
Naqvi’s observations are acute but I do not know if I agree with her diagnosis. To wit, it is not clear to me if the situation at hand indicates a crisis of secularism–the Indian one in particular, which seeks to cater to all religions equally as opposed to finding a rigid separation between church and state–as much as it it is an indicator that bad things happen when the pandering almost invariably associated with electoral democracies meets organized religion, or a community in which the pronouncements of clergy are taken seriously as a guide to social action. Political parties approaching communities (read: voting blocs) through clerics alone do not give the clergy legitimacy; that standing is dependent on the social structures within which the priestly order finds a space within which to exert power. I wonder if Naqvi is putting the cart before the horse here.
 
On an intemperate side note: Many are the times when I wonder if organized religion–with its almost inevitable machinery of interpretive authorities, doctrinal mavens, and holy men–is, everywhere, all the time, a pernicious burden on society. Perhaps Diderot had it right: Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Gary Wills has written what seems like an excellent book about how the Catholic religion could and should get rid of its priests; it’s a model worth emulating elsewhere. (I am well aware that Islam is not similar to Catholicism in this matter.) 

Waiting for Jury Duty: Crowd Observation Notes

A curious fact about the crowd enduring the interminably long wait to be called for jury duty selection  at Brooklyn’s State Supreme Court building today was how its interactions slowly began to resemble those of passengers on an airliner stranded on an airport tarmac.

Before lunch, some folks had already dozed off (I had taken a nap myself thanks to a 0530 AM rising induced by my daughter’s wails); many others sported the ubiquitous pair of headphones (tinny notes of hip-hop, metal and dance music could be heard issuing from these);  some had laptops open on their, er, laps, and indulged in either entertainment or work; some played cards; and yet others read newspapers, books, and magazines.

It was a garden variety crowd in waiting; patient, occupied,  indulgent of the judicial system’s call on them to perform their civic duty. (The orientation video, though hokey in many ways, was also curiously moving in its sincerity.)

But after lunch, despite having sought and procured nourishment qualitatively and quantitatively better than that available on the floor’s vending machines, the mood was more disgruntled. Some, like me, wondered whether we’d be called for a second day of waiting (this query was loudly answered with indignant “No way!”s); some muttered about the wages lost for the day and refused to find solace in the news that they would be paid $40 per day of jury duty;  some veterans were telling war stories of much longer waits ‘back in the day’; one young man struck up a conversation with the young woman sitting next to him and seemed to be keeping her reasonably well entertained with his quip-a-minute manners. Little groups had started to form; boredom and exhaustion was writ large on most faces, threatening to turn at any time into full-blown irritation.

One gentleman paced about, complaining about how he had exhausted the bag of tricks he had bought with himself to keep himself entertained; his work was taken care of and he had finished reading his book. On hearing this, a young woman spoke up, “I can loan you a book to read if you want.” Our hero was suitably responsive, “Sure, what kind is it?” The young woman almost giggled, “Do you like Shakespeare? I have Romeo and Juliet if you want.” A little nonplussed, the seeker of  diversions quickly recovered, “Sure, what the heck, hand it over. I’ll give it a read.” The young woman beamed, reached into her bag, and did so.

An hour or so later, the master of ceremonies for the day walked out, pulled the microphone to her and wished everyone a good afternoon. The waiting throng answered in unison; it was like being back in grade school. When she made the announcement that we could go home, that we had fulfilled our jury duty service requirement for the next eight years, a loud cheer broke out.

A few minutes later, I had left the courthouse, my certificate of service secure in my backpack; my civic duties were done for the time being.

Childcare duties still remained, but at that moment, they seemed considerably less tedious.

Yosemite and Sequoia: Visiting John Muir’s Playgrounds

Last week, my family and I traveled to California; more precisely, to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks. (We visited family in Los Angeles as well.) Superlatives for national parks are a dime-a-dozen, so most writing on them is doomed to cliche. But let me press on regardless.

The landscapes of these parks, like those of Monument Valley on which I wrote last year, have become iconic–captured innumerable times in photographs and movies.  Your first encounter with them is tinged with that familiar sense of bewilderment: you have seen this all before, many, many times. And yet, of course, it’s novel.

Consider Half-Dome, that splendid granite centerpiece of the Yosemite Valley, here viewed from Glacier Point (now, mercifully free of the hotels that once defiled it):

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This is an exceedingly familiar image for most Americans (and many non-Americans too, if the amount of German, French, and Russian I heard spoken at Yosemite is any indication). Still, its ubiquity does nothing to diminish one’s sense of awe when confronted by its 4000-foot face.

Yosemite and Sequoia are justifiably famous too, as the venues of John Muir‘s epic rambles, walks which brought him into close proximity with a wilderness of staggering beauty and which he dedicated his life to studying, eulogizing, and protecting. Reading his richly poetic descriptions of these landscapes, you realize you have made contact–through time and space–with a deeply sensitive soul, someone who found in quiet and loud spaces by stream and brook and waterfall and glacier and rockface, the perfect zones for meditation and repose and a deeper understanding of himself and his place in nature. And ours, of course.

It might sound strange to say this, but the deepest impressions on me on these travels were made not just by the awe-inspiring High Sierra, the gigantic sequoias, the verdant valleys of the Merced but also by Muir’s words and recountings of his travels and experiences. This was a man who could travel alone, for weeks and months on end, among bear and mountain lion, swim down an avalanche, stand behind a waterfall and spend a night on a tree to experience its relationship to a storm. This was a man who found his most comfortable beds on the branches of fir trees, who preferred to count stars instead of sheep as he sought sleep, who found divinity not in the Bible he had been forced to memorize by a tyrannical father, but in the living, breathing, sparkling works of nature around him. Somewhere, buried in his many, many written words, must be emotions and thoughts similar to those expressed by another visionary and mystic:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Muir clearly felt himself to be one with the beauty that surrounded him; in its endless cycles and rhythms he might have detected a kind of immortality that was also his, an acknowledgment of his genesis in age-old cosmic dust, come to rest in him and the granite and bark and cold streams that were his constant companions.

We should all be grateful he was so eloquent and so passionate, that his words helped protect and preserve the visions that are ours for the viewing.

Constantine Rafinesque’s Anticipation of Evolutionary Theory

The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for Constantine Rafinesque notes that he was:

[A] nineteenth-century polymath who made notable contributions to botany, zoology, the study ofprehistoric earthworks in North America and ancient Mesoamerican linguistics.

It then continues:

Rafinesque was eccentric, and is often portrayed as an “erratic genius”.[1] He was an autodidact who excelled in various fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer and polyglot. He wrote prolifically on such diverse topics as anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics, but was honored in none of these fields during his lifetime. Today, scholars agree that he was far ahead of his time in many areas.[2][3]

Indeed. One of most notable ways in which he was thus “far ahead” is noted by John Jeremiah Sullivan in his essay “Lahwineski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist” (collected in Pulphead: Essays):

 [H]e saw much of what Darwin saw, could feel with his antennae the knowledge that would be Darwin’s glory…Darwin himself acknowledges Rafinesque in The Origin of Species. He quoted a sentence from New Flora and Botany of North-America, albeit begrudgingly. In a letter to a colleague, Darwin writes: “Poor naturalist as [Rafinesque] was, he has a good sentence about species and var[ietie]s, which I must quote in my Historical Sketch and I sadly want the date at once.” The good sentence was this: “All species might have been varieties once, and many varieties are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and peculiar characters.”

But in reality Darwin had little idea how far Rafinesque had gone. In a letter of 1832 to Torrey, Rafinesque wrote:

The truth is that Species and perhaps Genera also, are forming in organized beings by gradual deviations of shapes, forms and organs, taking place in the lapse of time. There is a tendency to deviations and mutations through plants and animals of gradual steps at remote irregular periods. This is a part of the great universal law of perpetual mutability in every thing. Thus it is needless to dispute and differ about new Sp[ecies] and varieties. Every variety is a deviation which becomes a Sp. as soon as it is permanent by reproduction.

One reason the scope of Rafinesque’s ideas in this area wasn’t known to Darwin or anyone else for so long is that Rafinesque had buried their boldest expression in his unreadable poetry. The lines dealing with evolution are in fact some of his least awful, as you feel him, for a second, stop versifying and start thinking: “Just like a tree, with many branches, most Of genera produce the various kinds of Or[sic] species; varieties at first, like buds Unfolding, and becoming species, when By age, they may acquire the proper forms.”

The proper forms-you see his needle start to twitch there. Also, “constant characters,” in the sentence Darwin references. He got close. Often when he approaches this question you can watch him–with a sudden flourish of meaningless, euphonious adjectives–trace a broken silhouette around the answer, as when he talks about “the natural evolution of spontaneous vegetable life exerted in wisdom thro’ ages” or about “fixed forms, and those that may vary to produce breeds or proles, until these assume the specific rank by important features, united to permanency, multiplicity of individuals or insulation in distinct climes.” Distinct climes! He was almost there–but the interior of the silhouette remains forever a vista of fog.

A remarkable anticipation of the central principles of evolutionary theory, even if not clearly and distinctly articulated.

Urban Climbing: Over And Above A Dead-End World

If you are hankering for a serious attack of nausea consider viewing the Channel 4 documentary Don’t Look Down (featuring James Kingston) or the RT documentary ‘Russian Daredevils’ or, perhaps, best of all, go to Mustang Wanted’s webpage. The folks in these documentaries are ‘urban climbers’ – young folks, invariably men, who free-climb up skyscrapers, cranes, bridges, television and cellular towers, and then, at the top, perform further stomach-churning feats: hanging off ledges, back-flips, riding skateboards, push-ups and pull-ups. I’m prone to sharp attacks of vertigo when confronted by heights so the mere viewing of these films is a task calling for some backbone; and yet, I find myself–strangely and perversely perhaps–drawn to them again and again.

Reactions to these sorts of feats are invariably polarized: some describe these young men as ‘idiots’ who are ‘irresponsible’ and wish them a speedy death, preferably captured on live television; yet others write glowing comments on their Facebook pages, wishing them the best and admiring the size of their manly parts. The responses of the urban climbers also follow predictable patterns: don’t copy us; we are all going to die someday so talk of death is neither here or there; we are only doing what we think we are capable of; and so on. (Some of the contempt directed at urban climbers seems particularly vicious; methinks those who articulate these sentiments doth protest too much and should simply change the channel and move on.)

I have only two observations–inter-related–to offer. First, the Russian and Ukranian climbers clearly seem to be articulating a felt need for an activity that promises a form of deliverance from their otherwise dreary surroundings and prospects: conventional modes of escape such as hanging out at street corners, drinking, clubbing, and the like have lost their charm and seem merely to draw them into further zones of boredom and disillusionment. (Interestingly, at least two of the climbers I saw featured in these documentaries–Russian and English–lived with their mothers in scheme housing, their fathers having walked out of their lives a long time ago.)

Second, and perhaps more interestingly, the climbing is ‘urban’; it does not take place in conventional venues like rock faces and the like; it happens on cranes, buildings under construction, bridges. Sometimes these sites are abandoned, sometimes they are active; often, the climbers are risking arrest for trespassing. I find the climbing on construction sites the most intriguing: these are invariably of corporate office buildings or apartments, places where the urban climbers will almost certainly not find a place to work or live. But while they climb on them, they develop a relationship with these buildings that their eventual residents will never have. They turn these venues of rejection into their own.

Down on the ground, there’s just rejection and boring jobs and dead-end careers. But as they climb (and prance and cavort and hang and dangle) they raise themselves up above a world in which, down at ground level, there is little for them anyway; while they are up there, they can tower above it all.

Academic Writing In Philosophy: On Finding Older Writing Samples

Yesterday, while cleaning up an old homepage of mine, I found some old papers written while I was in graduate school. Overcome by curiosity–and rather recklessly, if I may say so–I converted the old Postscript format to PDF, and took a closer look.

The first is titled ‘No Cognition Without Representation’; its abstract reads:

A critical look at the emulation theory of representation [due to Rick Grush] and its claims to have shown a) the dynamical thesis of cognition to be incomplete and b) to have provided a necessary condition on cognition.

The second is titled ‘Quantum Mechanical Explanation, Nonseperability and Causality’; its abstract reads:

Does using non-separable processes (as quantum mechanical processes might be understood) in scientific explanations violate some crucial methodological principle? I argue that the answer is no.

The third is titled ‘Folk Psychology, Connectionism and Constraints on Believers’; its abstract reads:

An examination of the argument that connectionism leads to eliminativist conclusions about the mind; I argue further that often, constraints placed on believers by proponents of folk psychology seem to be arbitrary.

The fourth is titled ‘Contextualism, Skepticism and Kinds of Possibilities’; its abstract reads:

A sympathetic examination of contextualist claims to have solved the skeptical puzzle.

As might be expected, as I looked through these papers (written between 1994-1999), I experienced some mixed feelings. One of them–the first above–was presented at a conference and featured in its proceedings; I submitted it later to Philosophical Psychology and was asked to revise and resubmit, but never got around to it; a publication opportunity missed.  I was advised to rework my conclusion to the third paper into a longer piece and submit to a journal; again, I was overcome by lassitude. Clearly, I didn’t seem to have been overly eager to add lines to my CV, a rather self-indulgent attitude.

Far more interesting, I think, was my reaction on reading my writing and its so-called ‘style’: I write very much like a generic Anglo-American analytic philosopher. There is a forensic quality to my analysis; I pick arguments apart with some care and precision, deploying the tools of the trade that I had learned, not just by reading journal articles but also by observing verbal disputation at philosophy colloquia (a paper I wrote on Michael Slote‘s From Morality to Virtue was found particularly devastating by my professor; he suggested I had ‘really gone to town on Slote’); I use standard turns of phrase; like all good ‘analytic types’ I sprinkle abbreviations and faux mathematical symbols throughout; my writing has little ornamentation or flourish; it is also not distinctive in any interesting way.

By that stage in my education–as I worked through the large amount of coursework required in my program–it is apparent I had started to learn some of the tricks of the trade: writing in a knowing voice, subconsciously taking on the verbal mannerisms and tics of the writing that I had been exposed to. I was seeking to blend in, to become part of this new group I was seeking admission to; emulation seemed like the best way to do so. There is little doubt in my mind that had I continued to travel in roughly the same philosophical neighborhoods as above–philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and epistemology–I would have settled into a writing groove, perhaps churning out papers on what I saw as the latest trends and topics in philosophy. (Each of the four topics above was in ‘vogue’ in the 1990s.)

Success–such as it is–in academic writing can very often be a matter of writing in a way that does not induce too much dissonance or discomfort in your referees, your peers; these were, very often, trained just like you were. They regulate membership and admission; to be heard you often must sound like them.

Guns and Speech, Gunslingers and Writers

Patrick Blanchfield examines some of the troubling constitutional questions raised by the gun-toting folks who showed up to protect Cliven Bundy in Nevada:

According to open carry advocates, their presence in public space represents more than just an expression of their Second Amendment rights, it’s a statement, an “educational,” communicative act  — in short, an exercise of their First Amendment freedom of speech. (See this, from the group Ohio Carry, and this Michigan lawsuit.)

This claim bears serious consideration.  The First Amendment has historically been much harder to limit than the Second, and so extending the freedom of speech to the open display of weapons raises several urgent questions about how we understand the relationship between expressing ideas and making threats, between what furthers dialogue and what ends it.

But are guns speech?  Is carrying a weapon as an act of public protest constitutionally protected under the First Amendment? And if so, what do guns say?

These are very important questions and they deserve a serious answer. Much to the relief of gun advocates everywhere, I will argue the analogy holds quite well.

Guns are pens, pencils, styluses, word processors, take your pick; bullets are their words; gun users are writers. Those who use guns are rightly distinguished by their manner of employing them. For instance, your garden-variety, pistol-packin’ gunslinger is akin to a popular tabloid writer, perhaps emptying a few magazines–see what I did there?–in the direction of the target of his polemics; the sharpshooter armed with a high-powered rifle is a much more accomplished wordsmith, able to use expensive precision equipment with style and delicacy alike to bring down his quarry. (Remember how we used to speak of the ‘cut, thrust, and parry’ of verbal jousters? Swords, foils, and rapiers then, guns now.)

Many words of wisdom, dispensed to writers and sharpshooters, are analogous to each other. For instance, the sage advice that you should wait till you can ‘see the whites of their eyes’ is like telling a writer to wait for the right moment to publish his book or essay or blog post, or share it on Facebook or Twitter (the wise ones always share links during work hours, when you can be sure the salaried worker is busy killing time with social media.) Sometimes, just like in writing, you should show, not tell; let folks know you are carrying heat; there is no need to say any more.

Brevity in gunfire, as in writing, is always appreciated: don’t be profligate in your consumption of ammunition; never use two words to do what you can do with one. After all, a well-placed bullet between the eyes is always better than spraying a whole clip of ammo at the target; you are more likely to go home with a kill that day.

Who are the readers? The targets, of course. A good writer needs good readers. And good shooters need good targets, a fact we are always reminded of whenever we see those wonderful photographs of hunters standing over their dead prey–such noble, brave, beautiful, splendid animals, their brains blown out and splattered all over the ground.