One item missing from The Time Traveler's Almanac

This week I listened to a radio interview with Ann Vandermeer, the editor The Time Traveler's Almanac. Goodreads describes it as "the largest and most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled."  I am sure it does not include my story, which was published in The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas in 2008.

"Now and Forever"

The time traveler’s first heroic action occurred just days after he discovered his special abilities. He was standing on the riverbank, fishing by himself, when he saw a pickup truck crash through the railing of the nearby suspension bridge and plunge onto the ferry that was passing right below it. The truck crashed through the roof of the crowded ferry and something exploded. He saw the fire and the bodies flying. He heard the screaming and saw the people thrashing in the flames. The time traveler knew he had to do something. He knew instantly that this must be the moment he had been created for, or at least moments like this were the reason. So he blinked his eyes three times and waved his hands in a circle before him in the little ritual he had invented for himself to conjure this special power.

When he opened his eyes the third time, the ferry was a good half-mile up the river, and so he ran to the bridge to stop the truck before it could crash through the railing. On the roadway of the bridge, he spotted the pickup truck approaching and he bravely stepped into the lane waving his arms. The truck stopped, and he ran to the driver’s door only to see that the older, heavy-set man was in some distress – a heart attack! Should he go back further in time? Could he stop this too? He did not know. He was new to being a hero.

Then he hears a monstrous grinding of metal and the roaring protest of engines. The ferry has crashed into the bridge. He runs to the railing and looks over in time to see the ferry burst into flames, and then something explodes. He sees the fire and the bodies flying. He hears the screaming and sees the people thrashing in the flames. The time traveler steps back from the railing – flames shoot straight up at him. Traffic is stopping on the bridge, backed up behind the truck. Drivers are honking. He hears the deep bellow of the ferry’s horn, but it is coming from the far side of the bridge. He looks over the railing again, but the ferry is gone. He runs across the bridge, and he sees the ferry passing beneath him, unscathed. No flames. No bodies. How did that happen? He thinks to himself, “Is there another like me?” Has someone else traveled back in time and stopped the ferry from colliding with the bridge? Perhaps it is even himself! Perhaps some earlier version of himself has traveled back in time to stop the ferry accident.

Is this possible? He wishes he knew.

The time traveler looks over the railing, wondering if he will spot himself standing on the ferry, perhaps even looking up toward the bridge to spot himself, too. But there is no ferry. It is gone. It is further up river. It is a mile down river. He turns and sees the traffic on the bridge and it seems to pulse. The cars become trucks, the trucks cars. They change size, number, and speed. How many of him exist now? Or are there others? An army of time travelers, all unknown to each other? A sedan that had stopped behind the truck drives past him. It is headed in the opposite direction. It is driven by a woman in a scarf. It is driven by the same woman but with flowing hair. It is driven by that woman with three children in the backseat, fighting over a stuffed lion. It is driven by the woman in the car by herself. It is gone. The bridge is solid with cars, none of them moving. The bridge is deserted. The time traveler turns slowly round and round, looking, looking. There is no bridge at all, and as he falls toward the river he sees that there is no city, just an expanse of trees. He is standing on the bridge, but he is a woman. He is a man, but he stands next to a beautiful woman in a yellow dress, and they hold hands. There is no woman, but he holds the hand of a little boy, whose quizzical, uplifted eyes suggest that he has just asked a question. Before the time traveler can answer, the boy is gone, and a dog sits next to the man and watches two seagulls float on the breeze. He turns to the city and it is noisy with construction and traffic and shining in the sun. The rain pours down. The river rises dangerously close to the bridge’s roadway. The river is bone dry and the city is surrounded by desert. The city is larger than he remembers. The city is smaller. The city is a blackened, silent skeleton, murdered by some apocalypse, and the bridge teeters beneath him, swinging on tattered cables. Standing on the humming, invisible bridge, he sees the pulsing silver city and its flying cars.

He stands on the bridge, mesmerized by the eternal now.

Lone Survivor and the Post-Vietnam War Syndrome

Flag waving is something many of us expect to see in Hollywood war films.

By "flag waving" I do not mean mindless patriotism or jingoism. I mean those moments in a film when issues of national identity are raised in a positive way. War is a national effort, and so we should expect to see signs of national values, beliefs, and causes in films about war. Some of that flag waving is done gracefully or artfully and some of it is not.

Even anti-war films participate in this. In finding fault with a particular war, the film will present a set of values as an alternative to those that motivated the war. Frequently those alternative values are presented as the "true" values of the nation; the values that motivated the war frequently are presented as a corruption of the nation's original good intentions.

So I noticed the lack of flag waving in a new film about the American war in Afghanistan, Lone Survivor (starring Mark Wahlberg). The film presents the motivations of its U.S. Navy SEALs as personal and emotional rather than national and political. The men became Navy SEALs because of the personal desire to challenge themselves. The film starts with a voice-over by the lone survivor: "There is a storm inside us.... An unrelenting desire to push yourself harder and farther than anyone could think possible."

They fight mostly for their fellow soldiers, and because it is their job to fight. Hardly a word is said about the larger mission of the United States military in Afghanistan in 2005.

(I have not read the book on which the film is based, so I cannot say if the authors handle this aspect of motivations differently.)

I recently finished leading a senior seminar that compared some literature of the Vietnam War with some literature from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Motivation was one of the biggest differences my students noted in the literature of the two eras. One student brought Lone Survivor to my attention, as his paper focused on this generational difference, and lent me a DVD "screener" of the film.

In two memoirs we read, Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic and Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter, the authors discuss their patriotic and idealistic selves before their tours of duty in Vietnam; this highlights the level of their disillusionment after their tours. The protagonist of Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato has lengthy debates with himself and others about his reasons for fighting in Vietnam, and while those reasons do include personal motivations, patriotism and politics are also much discussed.

The students noted the absence of such discussions, and especially the general absence of nationalism and patriotism, in two books written by veterans of the war in Iraq:The Yellow Birds (novel) by Kevin Powers, and Love My Rifle More Than You (memoir) by Kayla Williams. There is little talk of politics, national agendas, and patriotism in either book. The soldiers in both books seem to have joined the Army for personal reasons -- such as economic opportunities or proving their merit to themselves or to someone else. The soldiers discuss their reasons for joining the Army, but they hardly mention the nation's reasons for fighting a war in Iraq. They seem to be fighting because it is their job to fight and because they are loyal to their fellow soldiers. They are not fighting for the ideals that sent Kovic and Van Devanter to Vietnam.

My students believed U.S. soldiers in Iraq, at least as depicted in these books and in some documentaries they watched on their own, demonstrated a kind of post-Vietnam War syndrome. Kovic and Van Devanter were upset because they felt their government had lied to them, and their texts were fueled by that sense of disillusionment and anger. They had expected better of their military and political leaders. They thought they were bringing justice and freedom and democracy to South Vietnam, but their experiences told them otherwise. However, if Williams and Powers represent the contemporary situation accurately, soldiers in Iraq seemed to expect their government to lie -- or they seemed indifferent to their government's agenda, since they had their own. (Incidentally, this assumption of governmental dishonesty is shared by nearly all of my students.)

Kovic and Van Devanter told stories of lost innocence. Perhaps the U.S. soldiers in Iraq did not have an innocence to lose.

Some of these dynamics are evinced in Lone Survivor. The soldiers fight for each other, not for a national cause that is ever discussed. The reason for U.S. forces being in Afghanistan is not mentioned. They just are.

This does not mean the film has no sense of good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are clearly Al-Qaeda forces. They are bad because they have been terrorizing the local population and because they have been killing U.S. soldiers. They are not portrayed as a threat to the United States itself. The Navy SEALs do not attribute their willingness to fight to justice or democracy or freedom or any ideal other than their love for each other and their desire to challenge themselves.

This silence could be attributed to the war being represented. How do you tell a story about a war that most people do not support? One poll in late 2013 indicated that more than 60 percent of Americans felt the war in Afghanistan had not been worth the price. One way to tell a story about that war is to confine the story to the soldiers and not their cause. Americans may not support the war, but they do support the troops.

Thinking about this, I rewatched Black Hawk Down. It is the story of a war that, perhaps like the fighting in Afghanistan, seemed futile -- international efforts to help the citizens of Somalia who were caught in the collapse of their country. The film foregrounds a sense of futility with its epigraph from Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

But the film has many of the markers of the usual war film, scenes intended to justify or explain the national values that sent soldiers into Somalia. It clearly discusses the reasons for U.S. troops to be there, and it clearly presents those reasons as good -- feeding the starving population, fighting that bad guys who are withholding the food.

Black Hawk Down also has some typical war movie scenes. Soldiers talk about their reasons for being in Mogadishu. Some express contempt for the people they were sent to help, and other soldiers express the higher -- we assume more American -- ideal of doing good in the world, protecting the innocent, etc. It also has scenes of soldiers expressing their love for each other; they agree the national motivation for the war may be cloudy, but their personal reasons are clear: to do their job and to protect each other.

War stories (fiction and films) can be seen as methods of national recuperation and rehabilitation. They attempt to heal the wounds to the national psyche by showing how the violence that caused those wounds was worthwhile or that the nation survived the violence with its basic good intentions intact. This is important to do for wars the nation won, since even victory comes with great pain, but it is especially important for wars the nation lost.

My class discussed an example of this idea of rehabilitation: Universal Soldier, a 1992 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. In it, two U.S. soldiers from the Vietnam War are involved in a massacre of citizens: Lundgren's character is killing everything he sees, and Van Damme's character tries to stop him. They kill each other, but their bodies are preserved for a secret military program. Years later they are revived as super soldiers in a secret weapons program, but when they are deployed they resume their previous fight. Finally, the good soldier wins by killing the bad soldier. (Cythnia Fuchs discusses this movie and others about the Vietnam War in her essay titled "What Do We Say Happened Here?: Memory, Identity, and the Vietnam War.")

Whether or not you admire the cinematic achievement of Universal Soldier, the film can be seen as illustrating a battle within the American psyche that results from the Vietnam War. What experiences of that war indicate the nation's true nature? Which soldier represents the heart of the nation? Universal Soldier would be the story we tell to reassure ourselves that the bad soldier in the nation's heart can be defeated; ultimately, we are the good soldier.

Black Hawk Down would be the story we tell to reassure ourselves that our intentions in Somalia were good, however messed up that situation was, and that our soldiers were brave.

Lone Survivor is oddly quiet about the reasons for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It may not be doing much of that national rehabilitation that other war films attempt. It may not be reassuring the nation of its motivations or the success of its mission in Afghanistan. Through the bravery and sacrifice of the soldiers, the film may be offering no moral larger than the national and personal survival of the ordeal.

+ + +

One interesting difference between almost all other U.S. war films and Lone Survivor is the involvement of the "native." An early scene in the film represents Al-Qaeda members terrorizing an Afghan village and beheading a local man. That same village is instrumental in saving the Navy SEAL who survives the mission, and it fights off the Al-Qaeda members who come to capture him. The leader of the Al-Qaeda attackers is killed by the village leader and not by a U.S. soldier. This differs from so many films that show Americans solving the problems of "natives." And the motivation of the villagers is their own. They are honoring their own code of Pashtunwali, whereby a guest is protected as if he were a member of that community, and not adopting some American code of conduct. In this sense, the film does not depict the Americanization of Afghanistan.

Reindeer, Brian Griffin, a Pencil Named Steve, and the Psychology of Storytelling

One day I was in a grocery store here in Southern California, and I saw a display of some Christmas
decorations -- two reindeer who were being sold at a deep discount because their antlers had broken off.

I felt sad for them. I did not cry, and I did not feel badly enough for them to buy them. But my sadness, however fleeting, was spontaneous and genuine.

I quickly asked myself if I would have felt the same sadness if the ornaments did not have eyes and mouths, if they had not represented living creatures. Suppose they had been Christmas coffee mugs with broken handles. Would I have felt sad?

Nope.

One of the truly strange things about human beings is our ability to form emotional attachments to so many different things -- other humans, animals, even objects that resemble humans and animals. Perhaps most strange is our ability to form strong emotional attachments to things that do not even exist.

Brian Griffin for example.

He is a dog, who acts like a human, and who does not exist.

Brian's non-existence did not stop many viewers of Family Guy from getting very upset when that show recently killed him, the family dog who had been on the show from the beginning. He was run over by a car, and the family quickly replaced him with another talking dog. This one was named Vinny and he sounded like a cast member from The Jersey Shore.

Social media was quickly abuzz with surprise from all and anger from some at this narrative turn.

Someone posted a picture of the tattoo that memorialized Brian. Soon there were petitions calling for the show's creators to resurrect Brian.

And they did. Though it was done so quickly that his death clearly was never intended to be permanent. His best friend Stewie has a time machine, after all, so changing Brian's fate was easily within the show's realm of possibility. The story of bringing him back most likely was being animated at the same time as the story of his death. (I have not heard what the Brian-tattoo dude plans to do now.)

The outcry reminded me of the famous death of Little Nell, a frail little girl from the Charles Dickens novel The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens serialized that novel in a magazine in 1840-1841, and his audience could see her death approaching (unlike Seth McFarlane's audience). Readers begged him to spare Little Nell, and many were heartbroken when she finally died. William Macready, a famous actor of the time, wrote in his diary: "I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain."

One of the many powers of storytelling is its ability to tell us false things and evoke true emotions. Although the deaths of Brian Griffin and Little Nell were unreal (as were their lives), the audience reactions were very real.

Storytelling depends upon the very human and psychological process of identification. When someone says,"I could identify with that character," we usually take that to mean "I could see aspects of myself or my experiences in that character's personality or experiences." But identification is more complicated than that.

Identification can also be called a type of introjection, which is the process by which someone absorbs into their psyche, behavior, or beliefs some aspect of the outside world. That is, a character on the big screen or the small page may experience a great deal of fear, and then members of the audience feel something very similar -- even though they are under no threat. Similarly, they might feel anger, even though nothing bad has happened to them; but something bad has happened to the character in a story, and the audience absorbs those sensations into themselves, even if only temporarily.

But this process also involves an element of projection, which is the psychological process by which a person believes his/her own emotions or ideas are possessed by another person. This can be positive or negative. A person could reject his own feelings of guilt and project them onto another person, assuming the other person is behaving in a guilty manner when he is not. Conversely, a person could feel happy and assume the people around him are happy too, even though they are not.

In the example of representations of living things, this is a strange, mirror-like dynamic. In the grocery store I saw the broken reindeer, and since they resembled living animals that I would feel sympathy for, I was able to project onto them what I would have felt in that situation -- sadness or vulnerability, as if they were those lonely inhabitants of The Island of Misfit Toys on the Christmas TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Having projected those human experiences onto non-human objects, I then identified with that sadness and vulnerability.

When I talk to my classes about the powers of storytelling and its dependence upon this human obsession with relating the world back to ourselves, I illustrate it with a great example: Jeff Winger's "Steve the pencil" speech in the pilot episode of Community (watch the speech here).

Winger tells his friends that "people can connect with anything." To illustrate this point, he says, "... I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is Steve and go like this [breaking pencil] -- and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside."

So true, Jeff. This type of gullibility -- this desire to be told lies in order to experience real emotions - makes humans different from other creatures and gives storytelling its greatest power.

Fix the NFL -- Limit Substitutions

Is it worth the cost?

Football is my sport.

I like it so much that I was even a fan of the USFL.  That is, until Donald Trump got hold of it and, like his hair, made a mess of things.  Before he stepped in, the USFL played during the months that the NFL did not, and that gave me pretty much year-round football. Trump helped move the league to direct competition with the NFL, which quickly killed it. But while it lasted, I loved having two football seasons, and the USFL even gave me a pro team in my hometown: The Oklahoma Outlaws played in Tulsa.

However, even though I love the game, I do not want people to sacrifice their health for my entertainment.

Many sources have reported the number of concussions in the NFL and their long-term health effects.  Some reports have asked whether the size of players has contributed to this problem (such as this NPR report).

So if the NFL cannot find a solution to the problem of concussions and brain degeneration among  former players, I propose this possible (but very unlikely) solution: Allow limited substitutions so that most players play both offense and defense.

Nearly all of the rules would stay the same, but changing the roster rules would change the players and the play on the field.  I am not proposing the details of how that limited substitution would work; there are many possibilities.  And I really doubt my idea would ever implemented, but the plan is something to think about.

(The Arena Football League does something similar, and I must admit I never have been a fan of that game.  But that it because its game is significantly different from traditional football.)

Alan Page, DT, 245 lbs., 1967-1978

I doubt a 300-pound lineman would have the stamina to play for nearly the entire game. He would need to shed weight in order to play that long. If the game were changed this way, we might see player weights closer to those in 1960s and 1970s. Offensive linemen then weighed about 250 pounds.  Today they consistently weigh 300 or more. The same numbers are true for defensive linemen.

For example, Alan Page was a Hall of Fame defensive tackle who played at about 245 pounds in the 1960s. He was even voted the league's Most Valuable Player at one time.

Linebackers and running backs have gained weight. Wide receivers and defensive backs have perhaps gained the least weight, yet even those players are heavier today than in the past.

How might lighter players reduce concussions?

Physics.

Warren Sapp, DT, 300 lbs., 1995-2007

The force generated by the collision of two men weighing close to 300 pounds is greater than that of two men weighing 250. The force of today's collisions influences injuries to the brain.

Alternatively, the NFL could simply limit the size of players: no one on the team above 250 pounds. But would that result in a lawsuit claiming discrimination?

I think limited substitution also would change collisions because of self-preservation. At various points in the game, players would need to conserve their energy. So bringing a ball carrier to the ground would be sufficient; there would be no need to "blow him up" on every play. Watch game film from earlier decades, and the tackling was different; it was more often a matter of form than force.

In general, I think that would hold true for other parts of the game -- form over force. Technique would be more important than brute force.

I am old enough to remember the players from the 1970s. I cannot say that I enjoyed the game less then than I do now. I cannot say the increased violence of the game has enhanced my enjoyment of the sport. I think the game is most enjoyable when players demonstrate skill more than strength -- when they leap, dive, change direction, spin, etc.

One also could argue that my change would turn NFL players into "true" athletes, in the sense that they would need well-rounded skills. There would not be the specialists we have now -- like pass rush specialists who are in the game for 15 plays, perhaps.

Without those specialists, some might say, the quality of the game would drop. An analogy: Those who compete in the decathlon in the Olympics probably cannot win medals in the individual events, so in that sense they are not as good as the specialists. But specialized athletes cannot compete in as many sports as the decathletes. There would be trade-offs. But hopefully there would be one big advantage: fewer concussions.

Other changes would come about. Team rosters would be smaller. There would be no need to have 53 men on a team. So the players union would not like the new rule; it would mean fewer jobs.

However, smaller rosters might mean players are available to form new rosters. That is, the league could be expanded to a couple of new cities. Or we could bring back the USFL and have year-round football again.

I could go for that.  

Walking Dead: Forget the Math, Close Your Mouth

Dave Stopera at BuzzFeed feels that AMC's The Walking Dead is bad at math.  The zombie apocalypse should be over by his calculation, which he presents in "Here's Why The Walking Dead Doesn't Make Any Damn Sense."

Swinging in the Rain

While he presents an enjoyable puzzle to consider, I think one of his basic assumptions is proven
wrong by the show.  He assumes that 99 percent of the population has become zombies, but the show indicates more than that have become the walking dead. We have seen several episodes where the humans are outnumbered more than 99 to 1.

But I am not worried about the math.  I am more worried by the flying zombie goo.

Watch when the humans attacks zombies with a knife, baseball bat, ax, or some weapon other than a gun.  They do so at close range.  And they do so with a grimace on their faces and their mouths open -- frequently grunting like Monica Seles on the tennis court.

This bugs me for two reasons.

The Fine Art of Fencing

1. By this time each person has killed dozens of zombies. It seems that this would be rather routine, perhaps even tiresome.  Even when they kill zombies through the fence at the prison, when they stand no chance of being bitten or scratched, they grimace and grunt.  Why?

2. More importantly, why are they not concerned about getting zombie goo in their eyes or their mouths?  Not only would the putrid fluids be unpleasant, they would pose the threat of turning the humans into walkers, no?

We know from the group's time spent in the Centers for Disease Control that all living humans are infected.  We know that everyone who dies is reanimated as a walker.  We also know that humans who are bitten will soon die from the bite and turn into walkers -- unless the bite is isolated from the rest of the body, as Rick did for Herschel when he chopped off the bottom portion of the older man's leg after it had been bitten.

Rick's action tells us the zombie virus is something like snake venom.  It travels through the victim's blood stream, perhaps to the brain, where it takes over the host (as we learned from the CDC episode).  Let us assume the introduction of a new infection from a zombie will somehow trigger the pre-existing infection. Since the new infection seems to originate from a zombie bite, we can assume that the zombie virus is transferred through a bodily fluid -- saliva or blood.

So, why does the flying goo from the various zombie battles not cause new infections in the humans?  At that close range, there must be zombie goo spraying into their open mouths and open eyes.  There it can easily get into the blood stream.

And if the zombie goo does not cause the humans to turn, it should at least cause them to turn away.

We should hear complaints of "Ooh, I got some in my mouth!"

And one more thing: anatomy.

I'm fine! Thanks for asking!

Many times the humans dispatch zombies by stabbing them in the eye.  They stab them in the eye and the zombie falls.  But not all such attacks would reach the brain.  The Governor is proof of this.  He was stabbed in the eye, and his brain is fine (relatively speaking).