Unless you have a boat of your own, there is no liberty on an island…
So you pull into the drive-thru. And you wait. And wait. And wait. And the kid running the joint can’t take your order with any competence. Nor can he assemble it correctly. Nor can he make change. And, of course, no one under the age of 25 can even conceive of using a napkin while eating.
What should have been a treat has turned into a huge disappointment. A waste of time and a waste of money but still worse a waste of your serenity and a total loss on your investment in anticipated joy. This is the DQ experience, all but uniformly, a triumph of anti-marketing: Eager, avid patrons are turned into lifelong enemies one botched transaction at a time.
This is kinda like my experience with Liberty Island Magazine, a brand new literary magazine devoted to “conservative” art, with “conservative” rendered in scare quotes to denote the debilitating ambiguity of the word.
My fiction is egoistic, humanistic, but it sure ain’t liberal. I stopped trying to sell it to the mainstream publishing world a long time ago, not because it could not sell, but because I would rather not do what it would take to make it sell. Not every girl can get a husband, but any whore can snag a john. Not me. The entire publishing industry puts up a huge warning sign for me with one simple word: Submit.
I would prefer not to.
That much is not that big a deal. I write for my own ears. I’ve never had feedback from readers or editors, but I’ve never missed it, either. After three years on a desert island, you might still expect rescue someday. After 30 years alone, not so much.
And none of that is a problem. When you don’t get what you didn’t expect, you’ve lost nothing. It’s Dairy Queen that’s the disappointment, the anticipated treat that treats you to a let-down instead.
Even so, I was interested in Liberty Island from the first I read about it on Instapundit:
we promote the values of personal freedom and public liberty, and reject all forms of orthodoxy, dogma and political correctness
Imagine that…
I shot off a story to editor David Bernstein. He said he really liked it (which should have been a warning to me!) and asked for more. I put together a batch of stories for him (in Microsoft Word, which also should have been a warning). And then I waited. And waited. And waited.
What little news leaked out about LI made it clear to me that the big brains behind the project have zero web experience. They could have launched the magazine when they announced it, using WordPress or Drupal. Instead they pissed away a year-and-a-half on a bug-ridden custom CMS that is not as good as WordPress would have been straight out of the box. Not inspiring.
The editorial whispers were not encouraging, either. Bernstein had asked if he could run some of my stories as ‘coming soon’ teasers, and that would have been fine with me. Never happened. What appeared instead was the usual “conservative” fare, blood, guts ’n’ gore effected effortlessly by swaggering Nietzscheans, “freedom” brought to you by one charmingly dictatorial reimagined John Wayne after another.
Take note: I’m sure that characterization is unfair. Through this entire extended pre-natal period and now, post-launch, I have never been able to read more than a few paragraphs of anything published in Liberty Island. It’s not that the writing is awful, though what I have seen of it is, but that didactic fiction is tough to write even when your preferred stylus is something smaller than a baseball bat. The purpose of a story is the story. If you’re writing an op-ed, write an op-ed.
Anyway, my relationship with Bernstein was like a modern marriage: Our initial attraction to each other was our best day together, and everything has been downhill since then. Love your work, send more! Then nothing for a long, long time. Then an offer to run a story, but not one that I wanted begin with. Then more nothing. Then I got to worry out the fact I would not be in the debut issue, which was of concern to me because I was pretty sure the arc of my “marriage” to Bernstein would pre-figure the arc of Liberty Island’s popularity: Never better than opening day.
Oh, well. You don’t miss Dairy Queen until you make the mistake of wanting some. And then you never miss it again.
I had to bug Bernstein to get him to tell me that he didn’t intend to “buy” any of the other stories he’d asked me to send him, but the only surprise for me was the thought that someone might “buy” my fiction. I wrote this twenty years ago, and I don’t see that anything has changed since then:
The actual recompense I get for sending something like “Reflecting His Radiance” to a publication is knowing that some poor overworked, underpaid junior assistant asswipe is scratching his head and saying, “What the hell is this?”
Plus which, I had seen the magazine’s launch by then, and I knew there was no place for me in it.
This sounds like a lament, but that’s just because I’m a writer: I can elaborate anything. But I’ve known all my life that people might never read my work, not while I’m alive and possibly not even after I’m dead. By this I am undismayed. Most “artists” strive to please everyone but themselves. I work the other way. I always have. It’s easy to scorn the people who scorn you, but it’s easier still for me to ignore them entirely. I don’t like what they buy. Why would they buy what I like? Press on regardless.
So that’s what I did. In the rejection letter I had to pester Bernstein to get, he said
We’re happy to have you on the creator page roster
Okayfine. I put up a dozen stories, one a day, on the ‘Open Range’ section of the site, a virtual slush pile. I wanted to see if there is an audience at Liberty Island. This is hard for me to judge, because I normally write into silence, eliciting very little reader reaction. I got next to none there, but no one else seems to be getting any traction, either.
Meanwhile, I’ve been writing and speaking at length about how a liberty-seeking art could work, and what is wrong with current ideas on the subject. Cliff’s Notes: Preaching to the choir of “conservatives” will not change any minds, nor any votes – will not change anything. The only way to achieve the changes that conservatives and libertarians seek is to change people from unwitting anegoists to fully-conscious egoists, and the only art that can achieve that objective is comedy. Not farce, not satire, but the dramatic arc that moves from worse to better as the protagonist learns, applies and masters better ideas.
I took this argument up with Bernstein last Summer in the hopes that he would engage the debate, but he did not respond to my overtures, nor did anyone else. “We’re setting forth on a grand adventure, a perilous journey, and the very last thing we want is a map!” And again: Oh, well. Sometimes we downsize and sometimes we decimate, but there’s always work for Cassandra.
And thus come we here. Earlier this week, I published a parody of the rules to a Liberty Island-like writing contest to make the argument for an evangelical “conservative” art:
Conservatives and libertarians will only get what they want when many more people live up to middle-class ideals and values, hence the only art that can move them toward their goals is an art that makes people better over time. This is how the plot of comedy writes itself into individual human lives. Preaching to the choir will change nothing, except to make the choir more dour and despairing over time.
A lively debate ensued? No. I write into silence, and this was no different.
Notably, neither Bernstein nor anyone else associated with Liberty Island responded in any way at all.
Except to ban me from the web site. Without any sort of notice. And obviously without any violation of Liberty Island’s Terms of Service. A wannabe alternative to the left responds to criticism just as the left does, by sticking its fingers in its ears and intoning, “La, la, la, la, la.” Nice.
And I expect it’s a briskly Siberian day for other writers who might hope to gain some attention at Liberty Island: “You will sit down, shut up and do as you’re told, or we will cut off your every opportunity to give us your free content along with the affiliate income from your books!” Unless you have a boat of your own, there is no liberty on an island…
I stopped putting big efforts into writing for other people’s web sites a long time ago. No matter how well I do, and no matter how much traffic I draw, eventually I will be banned, almost always without ceremony, often without any sort of notice to me except my failed log-in credentials.
That was my experience at Liberty Island yesterday: My creator page gone, my log-in wiped, the pages of content I had put up half-deleted (plausibly because the people trying to eviscerate all memories of me didn’t know how to finish the job on their crappy custom-made CMS). The only evidence I have that anyone at LI read my post was this unceremonious unpersoning. I was thrown off the island of putatively better ideas for the crime of having actually better ideas and saying so out loud.
Once more: Oh, well. I’m never going to fit in where anything else does. I consider that not just a virtue but a treasure highly to be prized: I have not let other people whittle away the things I love best about being alive. But that’s why I should never expect to find a Dairy Queen on the roads I travel, and why I should never expect anything but disappointment when I do.
Meet the new editor. Same as the old editor. More fool me that I was surprised by this. More fool him to soil himself so blatantly, behaving so much like the people he purports to oppose. More fool you to have expected anything else.
