RARA-AVIS: Drama in Reality

Ted White (tedwhite@compusnet.com)
Sun, 18 Oct 1998 13:16:00 -0400 Fred Willard mentions going out on police raids where "the activities
seem to draw as much from the participants' sense of drama as from the
needs of police work."

I've noticed this myself in contacts with the local police and in
other situations. Perhaps the most striking was when an attractive
woman of my acquaintance (well, we were seeing each other, but I was
well aware that I was only one of several men in her life)
precipitated a situation which resulted in about a dozen of us (all
men) gathering in her apartment and waiting for a guy to show up who'd
been harrassing her. He's been harrassing her over a drug debt she'd
defaulted on; she'd defaulted to get back at him for ripping her off
on a prior occasion. She was a cokehead.

This gathering of men -- all in their twenties to their fifties, some
of them conspicuously armed -- struck me as nothing more than a gang
of pre-school boys, gathered in a vacant lot to plan something against
the bully who lived up the street. There was a lot of braggadocio
and hot air vented, a lot of strutting and macho showing off.

The unlucky bully arrived and was seriously taken aback by the
gathering. The script was played out: he was warned she had
powerful friends and he split. Minutes later the phone rang: a
warning that on leaving he'd gathered some friends and would be
waiting for our exit -- supposedly from a third party. Like little
boys playing games, everyone hurriedly departed by separate ways.
Nothing ever happened after that. I was struck by how much all the
men involved had acted like self-important little boys. It's my
belief this is true in most situations: we are all secretly children
playing at being grownups, and this comes out most strongly in those
situations which ape the dramas we've seen on TV. So we dramatize
-- or melodramatize. We were lucky things didn't blow up in our
faces.

How does this contrast with the hardboiled ethic? Or does it? The
PI as Knight Errant -- a childish, boyhood concept, grown up?

Bill Hagen mentions Sharlyn McCrumb in passing as an example of those
who began as a genre writer "and then move into 'novels'." I come
out of the SF world -- in which she is generally despised for her take
on SF conventions and fandom in two of her books, although there is
some argument over the accuracy of her unflattering observations --
and I wonder how she is regarded here. Any comments?

--Ted White

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