Where Have All The Abbeys Gone?

I once had an editor tell me that my biggest (among many, apparently, according to him) weakness as a writer was that I was always too polemical, that I injected too much anger and/or humor into my writing (and too many foul words). So I lost my temper, cursed his lineage and then beat him to death with a rubber chicken. Ba dum ba! He was an asshole, anyway (he also told me that I used way too many parentheticals) (what did he know, right?).

But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the role, or lack thereof, of anger in writing, specifically nature, conservation and/or outdoor writing. This probably comes as no great surprise, but I’m a big fan of provocation, agitprop and good old-fashioned outrage. I like my comedy, my journalism and my music to be angry, intelligent and sincere.

Unfortunately, it seems - to me, anyway - that while a lot of current environmental and conservation writing is both intelligent and  sincere in its great pains toward objectivity (more on that later…), it seems to be lacking a bit in the outraged sense of justice department, as if honest emotion, heartfelt opinion or (god forbid!) offending or insulting some person, group, thing, concept, scheme, plan, entity or idea so obviously and eminently worthy of offense or insult, somehow weakens your case or disproves your thesis.

I, too, have been a willing victim of this cult of objectivity (Breathless, Self-Serving Monologue Warning).

I have stood at the base of a giant, leaking corporate hog farm lagoon, with untold thousands of gallons of fetid, toxic, bacterial pigshit swirling about my feet, and had a slick-haired, smooth-talking PR flack tell me everything’s fine even as his hired goons grabbed at my camera. Could I call him a goddamned liar? Nope, because that would have been “taking sides.”  

I have attended a David-and-Goliath environmental regulatory agency hearing in which platoons of $300-an-hour hired Gucci Guns, fresh off the Lear jet, strode into the room reeking of the kind of smug arrogance and contempt that comes only from the knowledge of a pre-ordained outcome. And when the whole obscene, set-piece Kabuki theatre was over, when the bought-and-paid-for deciders had made their bought-and-paid-for decisions and then filed out of the room in jocular, back-slapping unison and the hired guns has snapped their briefcases closed in triumph and high-tailed it back to civilization and all that remained in the room was a small, shell-shocked group of ordinary, extraordinary people for whom the word “home” had forever changed, could I write “Corrupt Kangaroo Court Fails Its People?” Nope, because that would have been “biased reporting.”  (and bad alliteration)

I have watched, incredulously, as one of my life’s abiding passions, indeed, my life’s anchor - one that once tethered me and kept me from floating out to doom on the same riptide that has taken so many other fatherless latchkey kids - grows increasingly vile, cheap and desensitized to anything resembling respect, reflection, or restraint, instead becoming ever more corrupted, rotted, ugly, commoditized, fetishized, falsified, mythologized, branded, packaged, sold, traded, digitized, distributed and wholly co-opted by those for whom the act of hunting and killing is always something to be made easier, quicker, cooler, more efficient, more spectacular, more entertaining, and above all, more profitable.  Could I point to these people and say (or write) “You, sir, are a peckerwood of the highest order, and what you represent is a disgrace to the sport you profess to love.” No, because to do so would take speaking with a discordant voice, and in that industry, media included, unvarnished opinion - or at least unvarnished opinion of the wrong sort- is an undesirable thing.

But unvarnished, even raw, opinion is, in my mind, an absolutely crucial component to effective writing, if the purpose of your writing is to get people’s attention and focus it on what you’re trying to reveal to them. If, however, the purpose of your writing is to be promptly forgotten, or not even finished, then by all means strip it of anything resembling life or vitality. And I mean journalism, too.

And that’s where Edward Abbey comes in. As you can obviously tell from my header photograph, I am an Abbey acolyte. I still remember, with vivid clarity, discovering Desert Solitaire in the paperback rack at Noble Junior High School. It’s a cliché now shared by many, but at the time it was beyond transformative for me. I had never, ever read anything like that (until I discovered Vonnegut that same year. Then Robert Ruark’s books. Then Bradbury.  Then girls. Then my hand. That was a damn educational year…)

What was it about that randy, beer-swilling, gun-toting, philosophy-spouting, monkey-wrenching, misanthropic, womanizing, unapologetically contradictory - and kinda freaky-looking- iconoclast that stoked me so?

Well, it sure as hell wasn’t his objectivity and fair-mindedness and his even-keeled approach to making sure all the various “stakeholders” in the debate were fairly represented and given voice. Shit, no. It was his words. His energy. His unfettered joy in writing exactly whatever the hell he wanted to write, and reaction be damned. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes flat wrong, but he damn sure believed he was always right, and wrote that way. Compromise had no place in Edward Abbey’s writing, and that lack of compromise about what he loved, made you love it, too.

The thing is, almost anyone can evoke place. There are legions of working travel, nature and conservation writers out there who (I’m guessing here, ‘cause I’m sure as hell not one of them) make a decent living by evoking a sense of place… adequately enough. Who report on a region’s issues or problems…adequately enough. Who hit all the key issues, get a quote or position statement from all the key players, maybe even weave the narrative around a little first-person longform riffing to give the piece some color, and do it… adequately enough.

But to evoke a sense of place with as much humor, rage, pathos, bravado, bullshit, outrageousness and sheer feeling as Abbey did is a rare thing, indeed. It stuck with you. But Abbey died in 1989. The world’s a vastly (or perhaps not) different place. I need a new Abbey. We all need a new Abbey to stick with. But I’m finding that not much is sticking with me these days.

Don’t get me wrong: thorough, sober, fact-based (more on “facts” later) environmental reporting is a crucial and needed thing, I guess, but I fear that in pursuing the grim, lifeless doctrinaire of objectivity, we’re losing passion. And interest. You simply cannot have one without the other. I don’t read as much nature writing these days as I probably should because it quite frankly bores me, the kind of thing you pick up, start reading and then just sort of…disengage from.

Where are the Abbeys? It’s not a rhetorical question. I really want to know, because we need some damn Abbeys, and quick.

Now, the case could certainly be made (and probably has) that we don’t need  anger and outrage, that anger and outrage are simply weak ad hominem literary devices used by inferior writers  to make up for a lack of depth, thoughtfulness and substance, and in my particular case you’d be absolutely right. I recognize my limits as a writer and thinker. Like most bloggers, I’m mostly just a polemic, ranting bomb-thrower with nothing terribly useful to offer up besides profanity and rhetorical outrage, which may be entertaining to a point, but doesn't really bring anything useful to the table.

But some writers can pull off anger, humor and deep thought, and in the process hook us and engage us totally with the issue. Abbey was one of them. And he did it the faintest pretence of “objectivity.” In fact, I’d argue he did it in spite of objectivity. Because, really, there’s no such thing. Science (and much philosophy) tells us, in a roundabout way, that there is no reality, that everything we “see” is merely an interpretation created by our brains based on patterns of light photons hitting the photoreceptors on our retinas. Those light waves are then converted to electrical nerve pulses that are sent to the brain in certain patterns, to be analyzed and decoded by said brains into mental images. Viola! Reality! So in a very real sense (such as it is…) “reality” is all in your head.

The entire concept of “facts” and/or “objectivity” is no different, really, just streams of information photons hitting receptors and being recorded, converted to electrical impulses and then sent to the brain for analysis and interpretation. And I promise you that whatever your brain’s computer spits out as “fact” at the end of this process - regardless of how immutable it may seem to you – will be contested by someone else’s equally obvious, immutable and diametrically opposed fact. Ever it was thus, and ever it shall be.  Just like quantum physics, no one’s yet managed to come up with a unified field theory of what constitutes factual objectivity, and no one is ever likely too, either. Your “fact” is my steaming pile of horseshit, and vice versa. Reductio ad absurdum…

So screw it. Don’t try. Seriously, give it up. Because you’re simply bullshitting yourself if you think facts and objectivity are effective persuasive devices. They’re not, because they don’t exist except in your head. Generally, we’re wired to accept the facts our wiring and environment predisposes us to accept. Can you re-wire yourself? Sure, but it’s damn hard, and facts in and of themselves aren’t the best tool to do so, IMO.  Just look at the world around you. Do you think it turns on fact and objectivity? No. It turns on the eternal struggle between competing fact translation processes.  As  Cassius famously said (uh,sort of, more or less…), “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our fucked-up noggins.”

That’s why I’ve always believed that opinion - pure, sweet, unadulterated opinion, the kind at which Abbey excelled - is the highest, truest and most intellectually honest form of truth. Because it’s your truth, and (impending metaphysical doublespeak gibberish warning!) there is no other truth besides the truth you believe.

And so naturally, I think the highest calling of writing, and yes, journalism, isn’t to go out and simply be a stenographer laboring under the laughable yoke of objectivity. It’s to attempt to re-wire others to see your truth, whatever it may be.  And despite what the fair-and-balanced-stick-to-the-facts objectivity cultists may say, there’s not a goddamned thing wrong with that, and much to admire (just as long as your truth jibes with mine, of course. Otherwise, you’re a lying, manipulative asshole…).

So dump objectivity. Tell the “fair-and-balanced” crowd to shove it up their asses. Go experience and write what you see and feel to be the truth regardless of who, what or how many it pisses off, offends or insults: Rage, disgust, wonder, sorrow and joy - as long as they are genuine - are far more powerful agents of change than the tepid, illusory gruel of “objectivity.” Because there’s always going to be a competing, equally “objective” truth. Make yours stronger.

 But just don’t expect to sell it anywhere, because, well, truth, even passionate, heartfelt truth, doesn’t sell for shit. Paying markets want listicles*. So write the truth for yourself, write listicles for dough.

*Oh, just Google it…