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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