Romance and You

Is Romance worthwhile? Or does it destroy those who love it?

This essay is not an easy one for me to write.

All my life I have loved Romance. When I wrote, I wrote Romances. My favorite tales have been Romance. Eartherea itself I could call ‘the land of Romance.’

Many years ago, I grappled with the question of ‘escapism.’ The genres of Romance have long been accused of providing their audiences with mere escapism, a sort of narcotic to soothe the pain of their real troubles, an antidote to solving those troubles, and a waste of time and thought. “If wishes were horses, we would all ride as kings.”

My answer then was grudging, but I accepted that Romance was toxic, and I stopped creating it or even enjoying it.

Years later I came back around.

What had changed? There was no conscious argument on my part, I never re-thought that topic and reached a different conclusion.

Now I consider that Romance may be of some help, but only if treated the right way. Only if we look at Romance in the right way, and only if we take from Romance its proper lessons, can Romance be a boon to our real lives.

The problem is that so few of us do treat Romance in this way.

An example will provide some chilling lessons.

There is a popular television show that has been running for half a dozen years, called 24. This depicts the efforts of heroic Jack Bauer, a spy and counter-terrorist agent for a US federal agency, against some grave threat. Each season involves a different conspiracy, which Jack must uncover, track down, and thwart. Along the way Jack captures many of the conspirators, criminals, terrorists and other enemies of the State (in and out of official government). He must get the truth out of these captives, and being under an imminent deadline, Jack uses the most expedient methods at hand, including torture.

It has been widely reported (though I don’t know the truth of this) that Vice President Cheney loves 24 and has mixed up in his own mind the fictional agent Jack Bauer with himself and his minions in the government. It is also reported that the Vice President has strongly lobbied for the use of torture by government agents and soldiers, because torture works for Jack Bauer, so it will work for others as well.

Consider this report, if you will. The Vice President is no impressionable youngster, with an immature mind, unable to tell the truth between fantasy and reality. He is not insane. He is rather a grown man, father, husband, grandfather, who has spent many years in government and a few in a armaments company, who is highly educated, highly competent. And yet he takes the two highly dubious assumptions of a fantasy television show, first that the suspicions and intuitions of a trained US agent are infallible, and second that torture always elicits truth from an enemy captive, and he applies them to his advocacy of official policy involving the torment, mutilation, and destruction of real human beings, many of them, as it has later been shown, entirely innocent of any wrongdoing or knowledge of wrongdoing.

As I say, I don’t know if these reports are true. They represent only the potential harm that Romance can bring us, if we learn from it the wrong lessons.

What are the proper lessons that Romance holds for us? I’ll talk about them tomorrow.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 15, 2008)