Zen and the Perfect Beta Reader

Growing up wanting to write was easy for me.  I just locked myself in whatever refuge of the moment I could find and started jotting down scenes in my spiral notebook.  I was about eleven or twelve years old when I remember I started on my first scribblings.  Something about flying an experimental jet -- this was around the time that Clint Eastwood starred in Firefox -- so I count myself lucky that author Craig Thomas and Warner Brothers Studios didn't sue me at such a callow age.

Ernest Hemingway with sons Patrick and Gregory in Finca Vigia, Cuba, circa 1942; ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; photo in the public domain)

Years later I found a stack of those drafts in a dusty box on a shelf, and littered among the entrails of dialogue, I noticed that I actually wrote this line:  "He looked at her with his eyes."  I read that several times over and thought, holy fuck this shit was bad.

Hence the need for beta readers all these years later.  They are today's literary DEW line, the censor chip that keeps you from getting laughed at, assaulted, or lambasted in a death-by-Facebook-post screed.

Another reason for beta readers is the changing landscape of digital publishing, where now any Tom, Dick or Ibrahim can go to Amazon or Goodreads or what-fuck and broadcast their self-styled ravings to the world.  Traditional publishing, despite its quasi-caste system of selection and induction, at least offered the hallowed halls of venerable editors, those learned men and women who helped a budding writer navigate prepositional phrases, onomatopoeia and other words that are really hard to spell.  Relying on your own sense impressions is far riskier these days because the myopia toward your own shortcomings will burn you down the road.  It will cost you either readers, or worse: the lost impact of an intended emotional effect.

Maybe you feel you don't need one.  Maybe you like to write and run it off your inkjet and just throw open a window and toss your stuff out to drift down to the waiting masses like scraps of confetti.  In which case you probably don't need any kind of filtering process, just a blog and the directions to the nearest Amazon KDP signup page.  More power to you.

But for the rest of us who are either too narcissistic or too dense to recognize our own faults, that quasi-private fourth wall is a critical component of story engineering.  It can range from realizing that you're using the word now too often, to finding out that you completely missed wrapping up the story thread of a particular character.

Now here, the matter mustn't be bungled, as Tom Wolfe wrote of proper death notifications in The Right Stuff.  You don't want to land a beta reader who doesn't know what the fuck his or her job is.

Do you know what that job is, though?  If you want to screen your readers carefully, you need to know what you're looking for.

But am I taking you on a philosophical jaunt, prescribing idealized qualities and quoting Spinoza and Walzer like those arrogant sacks of shit who permanently roost on college campuses to toil on their seventh master's degree?  Fuck no.  Extolling the so-called virtues of pedigreed knowledge and tallying the sum total of a person's worth based on how much ivy grew on the walls of their overpriced institution is not my thing.  A beta reader could come from any walk of life: butcher, baker, chicken sexer.  If you're going to be that picky about your beta readers' typology, you're going end up writing for an audience in the single digits.

Which is not to say that you want to land just any pig off the farmer's market, either.  Let's go over what a beta reader should not be.  I'm not asking anyone to be elitist here.  Consider these less as qualifications and more as red flags.

• The ones who are "just so busy right now."  Probably the loomiest of red flags that ever loomed.  These are likely the people who tell you constantly that they love to read in order to appear erudite in the waiting line at Starbucks, but you never see a book in their hands and they like to text while you talk to them as if they're afraid of missing out on something more financially beneficial than the conversation you're having.  Strong though the temptation may be to ask them to peruse a few chapters, resist that impulse.  They'll give you the same pat excuses they use for every dimension of their lives.  The rule of life in general applies here as well: if you have to beg them, it isn't worth it.
• The ones who are "still working through it."  Let's be blunt, these people may have started reading the first few pages but they have no intention of finishing your magnum opus.  Maybe they agreed to read your stuff just so they could see how crappy your writing might be and laugh about it with their friends on Facebook; maybe their efforts are well-intended and they are kind-hearted; in either case, if they can't provide feedback they are not helping your predicament.  If they are in the latter category, they may feel a little hurt when you tell them that you want your stuff back; the best bet is to just say you rewrote the material entirely and they needn't worry about reading any further.
• The ones who sound like they know more than you do.  Run.  With these, you just fucking run.  These people read Catcher in the Rye and will wax on about the cultural zeitgeist of Holden Caulfield's isolation in the post-World War II economic boom.  They watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and will compare Kubrick's epochal, antiseptic approach to futurism with Blomkamp's grittier ethnocentric pathos in District 9; they will assure you that they've "kept up" with Stephen King's latest works but all they can remember is that really scary clown.  This last motley set of cohorts is particularly pernicious because their brand of venom poisons you with self-doubt and extorts you into thinking you've made major blunders in writing style, dialogue, scene arrangement, etc.  They question everything without a fundamental understanding of the genre you're working in or the general wheelhouse of the creative writer.  These loose-cannon editors may have some tidbits of helpful advice for you, but they take it too far and ultimately it may cost you your motivation to keep writing.

Notice the stages of beta reader evolution here?  The first bunch has to be forced to read your stuff at gunpoint; the second group procrastinates and never seems to get around to an actual review; and the third group, you won't be able to get them to shut up.

What about professional editing services, you say?  Well, I grew up in the days when the gifted Lawrence Block wrote the fiction column for Writer's Digest (and that was quite a while ago).  His advice on this topic then still rings in my ears today: if you want to make a decent living at writing, the whole point is for folks to pay to read your stuff, not the other way around.

I'm sure I'll be pissing off many a self-employed professional who hangs up a shingle and bills you to read the tea leaves of your latest novel in MS Word.  But I grew up learning the craft of writing and then learning that other craft of self-editing.  You're a writer and that makes you the ultimate artisan; you are expected to be well-rounded, to know your shit.  I would never cede control of my work in the early stages of development to someone who operates a fee-based service.  You may lose the authorial voice, leech out the style that makes your writing unique, and ultimately feel like it isn't what you were trying to write in the first place.  The narrative has to feel right to your ears first and foremost.

So, here is the $64,000 question (fuck, I'm old if I can still reference that): who should you get as a beta reader?  The answer is simple: someone who reads for enjoyment.  The quiet readers.  They don't brag about it, they don't hit you over the head with their reading preferences, but you see them reading a book more often than not.  They are very different people from the self-anointed priesthood of American letters I described earlier.  If you have friends or associates who are quiet readers, you risk nothing by just walking up and asking them to check out your work.

However, if you're a shut-in or just don't feel confident enough to have anyone know that you are writing anything, I recommend -- highly recommend -- that you do this: go to a bookstore or park bench or someplace where you have seen people reading on an e-reader of some sort and introduce yourself as a writer.  Ask them if they'd be willing to read a couple of sample chapters of your work.  Most e-readers today allow for reader-to-reader or email-to-reader delivery of writing, either as attachments or in formatted text.  At worst, you'll get a polite no, and at best, you will have found someone who may end up being a fan.

I don't have much to say about writer's retreats other than I think, unless you are an established and commercial success who is using them more for networking opportunities, they can be expensive bed-and-breakfast forays.  I also don't have much to say about writer's circles where everyone takes turns reading everyone else's stuff because, though it may be helpful for some people, I think the socializing becomes the centerpiece and the work is forgotten.  It all depends on who runs them and how well they abide by any ground rules, but writers are a cautious, private, distrustful lot to begin with.  I don't see much coming from such a regimented process.

One last word.  How many beta readers are enough?  Here there will be fractious debate, acrimony, threats to lock people up in the basement and subject them to the repeated gesticulations of Gustav Mahler.  The truth is you only need one; that's probably all that you'll have time to focus on, just one.  I'm not saying you can't pull off two or three beta readers at a time, but after a while, juggling the various opinions and feedback coming over the transom will get frenetic and possibly burdensome.  Start out with one and see how it goes, maybe.

No advice on beta reader selection will help you, though, if you haven't finished a fucking thing.  So if your novel or short story or screenplay is still in the throes of infancy, knocking around inside your brain, then hammer it out now.  Make it become a whole thing, pull it screaming and kicking into this world.  It's time.

Shameful Ignorance: the USG's Abysmal VA Record

I don't like venturing into the venues of public policy on this blog for two reasons: this is a blog intended to entertain and inform in the fictional realm and its associated experiences, and I am not any kind of policy wonk possessed of a keen understanding of issues with multifaceted causality.  Nor do I want to be.

But last week was Veterans Day and I thought it would be appropriate, given that we have had many debates among people who think they are fit to run for our land's highest office, yet not a single one of them has addressed what I think is the most pressing national question right now.

What are we going to do to take better care of our veterans needing post-service health care?

2006 Rolling Thunder Run for the Wall (US Navy photo by Journalist 1st Class Kristin Fitzsimmons) 

If this topic doesn't interest you, go back to surfing for porn or sarcastic memes; I'm sure there's a joke out there already told that you feel compelled to retell in uniquely derivative ways.  For all of us who will be eventually shamed, guilt-tripped, or civic-prided into voting next November by friends, relatives, a sense of duty, or that poorly fed voter-drive volunteer hanging around outside the Chipotle, it should be appalling that the debates, particularly on the GOP side, have been fractious with the rattling of war sabers or the toning down of said rattling -- even the Donkey Party promises to rattle them a little bit.  (You know, not too loud so it won't wake the neighbors, and only when it's absolutely necessary, like an impending GOP invasion of both chambers of Congress.  But I'm digressing).

Revenge for Benghazi, the threat of a nuclear North Korea, Vladimir Putin stealing that Super Bowl ring -- there seems to be no shortage of reasons for sending in the Sixth Fleet and delivering antiseptic (for us, anyway) killing blows via proxy warfare to enemies real and perceived in the current political circle-jerk.  However, even with the new and politically fashionable option of drone strikes, there is no ignoring the hard military tenet that a country has not been vanquished until an occupying army has marched onto its soil.  It's the social security OASI/DI pay-as-you-go system as applied to modern warfare: at some point, those payments will come due and you will need to ante up with the soldiers that you brought to your chosen theaters of war.  The drones just clear the roads and flatten the insurgent nests and the daisy-cutters cut the daisies, or so we're told.

But while we occasionally pay tribute to the service of our men and women in the military with parades, memorials and bombarding them with hordes of five-year-olds waving flags, these are drops in the bucket compared to what they really need: health care that delivers on the promises, if not expressly made, then certainly implied, that a grateful nation would take care of their wounds both physical and psychological.  The truth is, though, that our government has not kept its end of the deal.  And I honestly don't know what it's going to take to get it to even start, given that this is not the first time, or even the first decade, that we have continued dropping this ball.

The Department of Veterans Affairs -- a department whose specific mission is to take care of our veterans and which is headed by a Cabinet-level secretary -- has done an abysmally poor job of delivering badly needed health care to its patient population.  Not just now, not just in the past few years -- we have sucked at this for at least the past quarter century.  The highest-ranking VA official was elevated to Cabinet-level status in 1989 specifically so that the VA could streamline care to veterans and cut through the red tape, and pare down the backlogs for those awaiting treatment.  But we still suck at it, and suck terribly.

Remember the most recent scandal?  Anywhere from 35 to 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment from Phoenix-based VA facilities in 2014; or rather, let's clarify that -- 2014 was the year the story broke.  We can only guess how many months and years it took for that backlog to ramp up and garner scrutiny from someone (in this case, it was CNN which broke the story).

Just wrap your head around that for a moment: men and women who served in the military and survived their tours of duty came back only to perish at the hands of US government red tape, delays and other assorted evasions of responsibility because they couldn't get the treatment they were promised.  It was a bad time to be a veteran in the Phoenix area.  It's an even worse time to be an American voter who keeps electing the same gaggle of incompetents to public office.  Once our shores have been defended and the hatches have been battened down, there should be no greater national obligation than to take care of our returning wounded.

But this care has been sorely lacking.  I won't rehash the litany of failures here as they are well-cataloged and footnoted in the Wikipedia page on the VA scandal of 2014.  Suffice it to say, this is a gaping, bottomless well that the Veterans Health Administration has still not managed to fill.

This from a government whose requirements upon enlisting or being commissioned into service can result in death, impairment, long periods of hardship, protracted combat missions, long hours, low pay, frequent separation from their spouses, children and loved ones, and deployments to dangerous duty on short notice -- honestly, these men and women deserve, and have deserved, much better from us.  There is not a single person in this country who has not been touched by the experience of a returning veteran in need of care -- family members, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, the person who fixed your car, sold you life insurance, or rescued your cat from a tree.  Veterans are everywhere, if you look.

It makes the frequent calls for war all the more noxious, regardless of which political party blasts the trumpet.  We have no business committing another single boot to foreign dirt or another single bullet to a foreign firefight until this country's leaders ensure that the Department of Veterans Affairs finally gets its shit together.  The injuries are not always physical; having the same limbs and appendages upon returning is no guarantee that the mental wear-and-tear of what you went through won't resurface, sometimes years later.  The costs of combat are indeed high and involve much more than just a guaranteed ration of beans, bullets and band-aids.

Congressman Charlie Rangel once suggested bringing back the draft as a way of putting the brakes on what he called at the time the Republican's penchant for committing troops to the conflict du jour.  But I call bullshit on that logic; although a few members of Congress actually served with distinction in the military, others have sought to use their influence to get their kids plum assignments stateside, far away from the front lines, particularly during wartime (I'm looking at you, George W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, Jr.).  Rangel's draft idea would only hurt the same people it has historically hurt; the poor, the underprivileged, the ones who can't afford college for any number of reasons.

But not a single candidate running for office in this year has even broached the issue of the VA's failures.  It's not sexy, it's not what sells, it's not what people care about in this election cycle.  And don't give me talk of reform or a pretty little gussied-up legislative bill -- we don't need to reform a system, we need someone to go into the VA's ivory towers and make the existing process work faster and better.

That may be the real tragedy in all this; not that politicians are up to the same old bag of tricks, but that nobody cares to hold them accountable for the responsibility this country has to look after those who came back wounded and just want to not die or go broke waiting for treatment.  So excuse me for not giving a shit about an email scandal or a voting record or even if some asshole's comb-over is covering up a bald spot.

Right or left, our veterans deserve much better than the current spate of pandering clowns who think they have all the answers.

The Increasing Irrelevance of Lives on AMC's The Walking Dead

I know, I know.  It's sacrilege to say this in the aftermath of (SPOILER ALERT) confirming that Glenn is probably dead.  This assertion alone will release the wrath of loyalist hounds.  Haters gonna hate but fuck it.

First, if you love all things zombie and don't really care for content the way hardcore multiplayers don't care that the Halo 5: Guardians storyline was a huge bait-and-switch disappointment from what was marketed, then you can stop reading because there is absolutely nothing here that you will care to read.  Your mind's made up and I'm not going to waste time trying to change it.  (Also, I just had to get that off my chest about Halo 5).

Frank Darabont signing posters at San Diego Comic-Con in 2010; Darabont was one of the initial developers of The Walking Dead from its comic-book start in its first season before being fired under reduced budget pressure (photo courtesy Wikipedia: CC BY 2.0, uploaded by Abu-Dan via Flickr upload bot)

Second, calling out a TV show on its shortcomings has become a national pastime.  It's the habit of cultures with everything at their fingertips to start complaining about stupid bullshit and I'm not above succumbing to the sins wrought by the horn of plenty.

Third, I used to dodge critiques of creative content on general principle: fellowship of the tradecraft and all that.  But this year I saw firsthand how a really good idea goes through a push-pull process of becoming a Frankenstein end-product.  A camel was a horse designed by a committee, and despite the best of intentions, you could really end up with an ugly baby, too.  And you want to know that your baby is ugly so that you can get the kid some braces, maybe invest in some piano lessons, and prepare them for the overpriced therapy that will eventually be in store.

On to the reasons:

1.  Failing the Cardinal Rule:  It's a zombie show, AMC.  You need to put the zombies front and center, and that means showing more of them than you did back in seasons 1, 2 and 3.  Granted, the showrunners have gotten better at this in later seasons, and I understand that there's a budget for SFX which can't be blown in every episode.  But still.

This particular sin was especially apparent in the second season, during the whole extended-stay sequence at Hershel's farm, when AMC and the showrunners gave us bookend zombie action: a zombie opening gambit; a zombie closing gambit which may or may not have ended in a cliffhanger; and a bunch of meaningless two-character dialogue sandwiched in between.  (They still haven't quite outgrown that habit).

The season finale of season 1 -- the respite at the CDC building in Atlanta -- is a sharp dividing line for fans of the show's comic-book and television incarnations.  The legacy comic-book fans argued that the whole scene wasn't in Robert Kirkman's tales (neither were the Dixon brothers) yadda yadda.  Yet the beauty of that episode, for me, was the scientific take presented for the zombie outbreak.  The scene of that normal brain shot and subsequently zombified on a live CAT scan screen was a great story element.  For once, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a great plotting point: you have a zombie problem, you need a zombie solution.

That episode, in my view, was the best of the entire show to date.  Yes, I said it.

But no, the showrunners had the doctor blow up the building with him still in it and the rest of our survivors ran to the hills and certain death in the final countdown.  Way to go, AMC.  I should have known this would become a pattern.

What's become obvious with each successive season since is that the zombies are the backdrop, that the show has migrated to a happy medium of wandering through the woods and fighting human-on-human fights.  An astute observer on the IGN website's comments section said that The Walking Dead wasn't referring to the zombies, it was referring to the survivors, to the harsh decisions and cruel fates which needed to be meted out.

But the problem is The Walking Dead stops being a zombie show and becomes what it has been turning into: a soap opera.  Sure, there are cute little terms tossed around like "slow burn" to justify the sluggish pace of the plot points, but I don't buy it.

No one bothers to explain or speculate how the outbreak began (in the case of Shane's death/transformation, there was even a confusing twist wherein you can become a zombie without getting bitten); no one bothers to think maybe if Rick's group could find some virologists or epidemiologists or microbiologists somewhere; no one bothers to explain jack shit.  It's a person-on-person Atrocity Olympics, and if that's what the showrunners intended all along, they could have picked a better format instead of luring fans of zombie lore to this show and using the premise as a gateway drug for American Playhouse: Zombie Town.

2.  Filler Dialogue:  There is absolutely no point to most of the one-on-one character conversations on that fucking show.  Character development, you say?  I say bullshit.

A great writer and writing instructor named Leonard Bishop once wrote that a novel should be careful to not include too many two-character scenes.  The advice always lingered in the back of my head when I wrote my stories, and it was a blaring klaxon every time I saw Rick and Shane discussing who was better at surviving calamity and coping; or Glenn and Hershel discussing how he could be a great post-apocalyptic snuggle buddy to Hershel's daughter; or Lori and Carl discussing some inane pre-zombie/post-zombie coming-of-age-too-quickly melodrama; and meantime it was often poor T-Dog just waiting to have a conversation with anyone.

The dialogue, the characters' actions, the subsequent transformation from one person to another, the emerging from some kind of chrysalis -- the change relevant to the storyline is what we expect with dialogue that takes swings at characterization.  But my biggest gripe with the dialogue on The Walking Dead is that I really think it's a ham-handed, contrived placeholder for the next commercial sponsor, letting the producers catch their breath before they need to fund another zombie money shot.

No doubt it's expensive to shoot this kind of show, I'm sure.  Could they afford to put zombies in every shot?  Probably not.  Do we expect zombies in every shot?  I don't know.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The showrunners should have thought carefully about what audience expectations would be and planned its story arcs accordingly.  As it is, they are succumbing to what we can call the " 'Lost' syndrome."  That is, the propensity to make up new shit because your old plotlines painted you into a corner.

3.  Where the Hell Are They Anyway:  I guess the shooting budget trade-off for all the increased zombie SFX is the perpetual rurality of our hapless groups' environs.  I doubt we will ever see them reach the edges of a major metropolitan area, where it is likely that the kinds of things they need to continue surviving (canned food, dry goods, medicine) are in more plentiful supply.  That's too bad, because a group of hardened zombie fighters like Rick's group would face some very interesting challenges working their way through city streets teeming with undead.

It would also create opportunities to fashion some new and curiously sourced weapons.  But again, unlikely that we'll ever go there.  From rural road to corn field to farm to outlying prison to fortified suburban gated community, these will be the setpieces of future doom.  It's curious that they are still supposedly somewhere in the Georgia countryside, possibly skirting Alabama or South Carolina; so when are we going to see a hurricane episode?  Or did the zombie outbreak alter weather patterns, too?

4.  Dying for a Living:  This is probably the show's greatest sin.  Even if all the hours of scriptwriting devoted to characterization create layers and nuances that hint or howl out the characters' motivations, it is all for naught when exploited for cheap thrills at guessing who will be the next recurring character to get the axe, pun intended.  Currently the comment boards are speculating if it may be true that Daryl Dixon is going to be killed off, since actor Norman Reedus is poised to start a travelogue show featuring his passion for motorcycles.  (It's doubtful that AMC will kill off such a hugely popular character, and one for which the network owns the full intellectual property rights; more likely, Reedus' show will be testing for audience potential for Daryl Dixon's character in his own The Walking Dead spinoff).

That's the point of reference for watching the show now, that's its churn: get the audience to tune in by any means necessary, and that means creating characters in whom readers are emotionally invested, string them along, and off them.  Ooh, it's the cruel dark world they live in now, ooh you can't feel sympathy for anyone, ooh the rules are out the window.

What a cheap carrot-and-stick game the producers have fashioned.  It illustrates that they really don't think audiences are intelligent or mature enough to ask about the larger, more obvious questions of where this entire group of self-styled survivalists is going, that all they care about is what's over the next hill.  I guess in the final season, maybe once this concept has jumped the shark, they'll wrap everything up with a quick ending.

I was among the hopeful plenty who saw Greg Nicotero and his team's excellent SFX work in making the zombies as realistically scary as possible back when the show first aired in 2010.  But since then, this show has devolved into a constant set of disappointments interrupted by the occasional decent script.  See you in syndication, The Walking Dead; hope you reach your 100-episode watermark.

Now I'm off to see what Ash and his Evil Dead have been up to.

Drunken Epiphany: Let's Outlaw All The Cars

The other day I watched the Republican Presidential candidates talk over each other in the clamor to solve problems they didn't seem qualified to understand, and it got me to thinking how many of the world's current ills could easily be solved by outlawing all motor vehicles.

That's right, it's about time for the US to build a National Metrorail System.

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, like I'm advocating for an amped-up RPG run-through of Rush's "Red Barchetta."  But hear me out and tell me this madness doesn't make sense on some instinctive level.

Outlawing vehicles would mean no more reliance on oil or oil production, from anywhere.  No dependence on foreign oil, no hand-wringing over using domestic oil reserves, and no useless debates about whether or not to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Because we would no longer need any of it.  You didn't really think a politician was going to figure out a solution to that problem anyway, right?


Did anyone have any idea there were so many of these already?
(Source: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0)

You think a world without cars is impossible?  You have an aunt in Poughkeepsie and you live in San Francisco?  Guess what?  The government might just have to stop spending so much on the defense budget and begin what they did in the 1950s: reinvest in an upgrade and modernization of a national public transportation infrastructure.  Not highways necessarily, either -- start building train tracks across the landscape linking major city to major city, high-speed bullet trains (we're looking at you, Japan and China) that will finance themselves through ticket sales and mass-commuter usage.  A National Metrorail.  Am I repeating myself?  Never mind.

But this gets better: gone are those other pesky and feigned political debates that get shoe-horned into the oil-dependence arguments about alternative energy resources.  Because let's face it, all that noise is about the backdoor maneuvering and big-business shell game of who will end up reaping profits among the renewable-energy cartels-in-waiting.  Wind farms, low-yield nuclear reactors, plug-and-drive cars, and even the retro-70's debate over grain alcohol would be properly marginalized as things that will only matter among the punditocracy in their self-perpetuating haggle pedestals at CNN and Fox News.  And the only people who benefit are the industry insiders who line up for the dole of government contracts, tax-expenditure financing and bankruptcy law bailouts when their big ideas fail to work.

Outlawing vehicles would also mean no more subsidies to the auto industry, and would keep individuals from digging themselves deeper into debt by having to finance a car.  Even a used car needs gasoline, insurance, and roughly one fourth of your annual wage.  Not a promising move for the young and upwardly mobile who will already have like five million dollars in college loans to repay.

The only people who would lose out on this would be salespersons at the showrooms, because most of the cars sold in the United States aren't manufactured in the United States anymore.  And as the people responsible for suckering me into a new car purchase in the first place, I don't really have much piety in my heart for those guys anyway.

I know, I know.  All those jobs in the auto industry, at the remaining plants in Detroit and elsewhere, right? 

A special corner of job-retraining hell will be reserved for the auto insurance industry mafia who bilk us annually for ever-increasing premiums and ever-diminishing terms of coverage.  Make no mistake on this point -- I've had it in for those assholes since I was a teenager, and nothing would give me more pleasure than to see the insurance industry tycoons have to downgrade from their fat-cat gated communities and luxury SUVs to maybe just a couple of Schwinn bicycles hanging on the racks at a condo.

No more vehicles would require a radical redesign and de-urbanization of our cities so that the mom-and-pop corner store, the sole-entrepreneurship, and the good ol' neighborhood become the new communal pathways of familiarity.  Walking to the mall, to school, or to a neighbor's house would bring us together in different and more meaningful interactions, such that suddenly it's not so easy to smash a window and steal Grandma's PS4.

But the trickle-down benefits wouldn't stop there.  Some naysayers will chortle at this idea and call it Lilliputian.  "Who," they will say -- that collective pro-business "they" who constantly agonize over inanities and stay beyond the reach of any comfort a Starbucks latte can provide -- "will ship our Rubbermaid products and cases of Softsoap to the local Target all the way from the distribution centers in Chattanooga?"  Yeah, I guess I really am messing with big-time transportation and logistics issues here, huh?

Well then, these supply-line economies would need to be reconfigured to support local suppliers, resulting in a boom of small business investments.  And if it isn't locally available, it would be shipped in -- but not on gasoline-consuming trucks.  More on that later.

Emergency response systems likewise would be reengineered to support smaller communities, with local police substations and firehouses dotting more and more of this sun-dappled new landscape, and ensuring that our technicians responsible for showing up between 8 and noon for the vital TV cable hookups don't suffer calamity along the way.

Wait, the naysayers will decry.  We won't be able to travel such far distances anymore, and thus visit and bond with family and friends as often as we used to.  Seriously?  In this age of social media, Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat have already won.  When was the last time you picked up the phone to talk to someone, and was that someone under 60 years of age?  Those apps on our smartphones are the new superhighways of socialization, not voice communications and sure as shit not the open road of Kerouac-era adventuring.

And all that sudden walking and bicycling?  Weight problems reduced.  Maybe not gone, as we have to account for infirmity, illness, and video game addictions, but surely weight will be reduced somewhere, by some few; perhaps even plenty few.  We may even become accustomed to more daily exercise in our lives and can finally compare with the leg muscles, if not the overdeveloped biceps, of any nearby construction workers.

Climate change!  There's another box we can check off if nature can take back the highways.  The pollution caused by our carbon footprint could stave off climate change within a decade of enforcing the Anti-Motor Law.  There would be some pretty upset folks needing a job description update over at the Federal Highway Safety Administration, but it's a public policy cost that could easily be accommodated with a simple name change: the Federal Highway and Metrorail Safety Administration.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Oh sure, we'd need the highways for probably some secret-squirrel military/homeland security stuff and escort vehicles with crew-served weapons (I'm looking at you, Department of Energy).  But our highway patrol would literally be a highway patrol chasing down outlaw cars and providing real-world fodder for at least a few more Mad Max sequels.

No more dependence on foreign oil; no more drunk drivers destroying innocent lives; no more fuel emission byproducts polluting our air.  We would need to collectively suffer in stoic silence as we would watch Emilio Estevez in Repo Man with wistful regard, but we would eventually find the strength to soldier on.

You wouldn't think a fucking car would be the cause of so many modern ills, from credit ratings to the disappearing ozone layer, but there you have it.  I just solved most of the problems we are facing with one broad stroke.

Well shit, where the hell are those Nobel Prize guys when you need them?  Okay, I'll settle for a YouTube snippet on TEDTalks.  Hey, is this thing on?

It's hard out here for a blogger.