"Is it good for the Jews?" A different view.

     "Given what Hamas did on October 7, Israel is completely justified in its actions, and the harm to those human shields is Hamas’ responsibility."

Yesterday's post described a dilemma facing Israel. Cameras are watching Gaza be destroyed.

In today's post Michael Trigoboff offers a solution to Israel's dilemma: Start with the premise that you shouldn't let your enemies kill you.

Is Israel's current policy good for Israel and Jews worldwide? Trigoboff argues that the policy is thought so by the people with the most at stake, the Jews in Israel. Michael Trigoboff is a retired professor of computer science at Portland Community College. He has posted here in the past, arguing for rigor and accountability in teaching and grading his students. He lives in the Portland, Oregon area.

Trigoboff

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, in the same kind of argumentative Jewish family that Jane Collins describes.

Writing from the relative safety of America, Ms. Collins expressed yesterday what one might think of as a set of “luxury beliefs.” Her life is not on the line if it turns out she’s wrong. Jews living in Israel had no such luxury. They were wrong about Hamas/Gaza, and over 1,000 of them died in the most hideous way possible.

Ms. Collins represents attitudes that were held by many Israelis on the left in the 1990s. Under the Oslo Accords, it looked like a two-state solution was possible and was going to happen. Israel offered a plan to implement a two-state solution in 2000. The Palestinians under Yasser Arafat rejected that plan. In a normal negotiation, if a proposal from the other side displeases you, you respond with a counteroffer. The Palestinian “counteroffer" was a wave of 140 suicide bombings targeting passenger buses, cafés, and pizza places called the Second Intifada.

This proved to most Israelis, and to many of us Jews in the diaspora, that the only peace the Palestinians were interested in was the “peace” that would come with the eradication of Jews from the Middle East. This Palestinian terrorist response killed the peace movement in Israel. It also killed the political left. The Labor Party used to be a strong force in Israeli politics and was often in charge of the country; it currently has no members of Parliament.

The current wave of antisemitism on college campuses and in cities across this country started on October 8, three weeks before Israel started its military campaign in Gaza. Within days, 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a letter stating that Israel was solely to blame for the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas. The Black Lives Matter chapter in Chicago tweeted “We stand with Palestine” under the image of a Hamas paraglider trailing a Palestinian flag. Jewish students were mobbed and attacked on many college campuses.

And all of this occurred before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza.

Ms. Collins mentions “75 years.” Let’s remember what happened 75 years ago: Israel was established by a UN resolution and was immediately attacked by armies from the surrounding Arab states. Is Ms. Collins implying that Israel should not have been established at all?

As a result of that war in 1948, around 700,000 Arabs became refugees from the new Israeli state. Some were expelled; some were told by the Arab armies to get out of the way so that they wouldn’t be hurt while those armies killed the Jews. This was obviously a catastrophe for those Arab refugees. But never mentioned in this context is what happened afterwards: A wave of antisemitism rose up in the Arab countries so severe that every Jew in those countries was forced to flee. There were more than 700,000 of those Jewish refugees, many of whom came to Israel and are now called the Mizrahi Jews.

The Israelis took in their Jewish refugees and made them part of Israeli society. The Arabs kept their refugees in horrible concentration camps for generations and transformed them into a weapon against Israel.

The Mizrahi now make up more than half of the Jewish population of Israel. They are the backbone of the political right in Israel. Their ancestors knew the Arabs up close and personal, and they are under no illusions about the extent and severity of Arab antisemitism.

Ms. Collins quotes statistics from Hamas (not exactly a disinterested source) about the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and how they are “mostly women and children.” She neglects to mention how many of them are Hamas fighters. Can a woman be a Hamas fighter? Is a 15-year-old Hamas fighter carrying a Kalashnikov a “child?"

Hamas has chosen to hide behind human shields in its tunnels. Given what Hamas did on October 7, Israel is completely justified in its actions, and the harm to those human shields is Hamas’ responsibility.

October 7 demonstrated to Israelis that it is no longer possible to live next door to Hamas. Since Israelis are determined to live, Hamas must be eradicated, and Israel is in the process of doing so. Every poll taken in Israel since October 7 demonstrates overwhelming support for this war and the way it is being conducted.

Ms. Collins and I are both Jewish, and we both grew up in the aftermath of The Holocaust. But we take different lessons from that heritage. I take mine from the Babylonian Talmud, which tells us, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”

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"But is it good for the Jews?"

Israel faces a terrible dilemma.

A dangerous enemy, Hamas, has hidden itself among its own civilians in Gaza. 

Rooting out Hamas means injury and death to Gazan civilians, many of them young children. And cameras are filming it all.

Jane Collins is a college classmate. She graduated a year behind me because she took a year off to work on a kibbutz in Israel. She writes that there is a moral dimension arguing against the current Israeli campaign of bombing in Gaza. There is also the practical question of whether the current campaign serves the interests of Israel and of Jews worldwide.

An ongoing theme of this blog is that political messages have one denoted meaning, but sometimes are understood very differently by the public. Messages backfire. Sometimes so do actions. Collins asks the question of whether Israel's Palestinian policy is good for Jews. She writes that it is not. She post some of her thoughts at her website What We Do Now. 

Collins

Guest Post by Jane Collins

To quote Robert Burns: "O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!"

Growing up in my argumentative Jewish family, I remember most political and cultural issues were subjected, at some point, to the question: but is it good for the Jews? This question was also the punchline of many jokes. I was born three years after the Holocaust, when my relatives remaining in Poland were massacred. I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 12. So I knew about a lot of events, places, and people that had not been good for the Jews. Not all members of my family believed in God. But every one of us believed that no matter where we lived, how thoroughly we acculturated, or how outwardly successful we became, our environment might at any moment become not good for the Jews. We assumed antisemitism was everywhere, perhaps well-hidden, but endemic. 

Israel was our hope. Every other country might reject or turn against us, but Israel would always let us in and protect us. Zionism was our strategy for long-term survival. The country was surrounded by enemies, its allies were self-serving and unreliable, but Israel was backed by God (and American military aid) and would prevail, like David against Goliath. 

What many American Jews are only now realizing is that over the past 75 years, Israel has become Goliath and the Palestinians have become David. All the military might is on Israel’s side. Arab countries have paid lip service to the cause of Palestinians without offering them much actual help. They are just pawns in the great game. World sympathy, which might have been a major factor in Israel’s favor after the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, has turned to anger because of Netanyahu’s brutal response. He has bombed most of Gaza to rubble and killed around 25,000 people, mostly women and children. Many more are sure to die of bombs, famine, thirst, and disease.

Now the Jewish people, conflated with the state that claims to act in our name, only 80 years after being subject to genocide, are accused of committing genocide ourselves. Many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora (the whole world outside Israel) respond indignantly that Hamas wants to wipe out all Jews in Israel, so Netanyahu is trying to wipe out Hamas instead. And besides, they say, Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields, so it’s impossible to kill Hamas militants without killing innocent people. It’s not our fault. We have no choice. It’s either them or us. If Israel is no longer safe for the Jews, nowhere is safe. So this carnage is good for the Jews around the world. 

But the massive rise in antisemitism worldwide indicates that the opposite is true. Seventy-five years of Israel’s terrible treatment of Palestinians – forcing Palestinians off their land, herding them into Gaza and the West Bank in a virtual apartheid regime, depriving them of full citizenship in Israel, making a separate homeland all but impossible, meeting thrown rocks with bullets, finally telling two million Gazan residents to crowd into southern Gaza and then bombing southern Gaza – have had their predictable result. Nonviolent resistance has failed, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement dismissed as antisemitic. Violent resistance, i.e. Hamas, can seem the only option. The many Palestinians who hate Hamas are afraid to say so in public. The thugs would torture and kill them and their families. Meanwhile, every innocent killed by Israeli bombs or siege conditions creates more recruits for Hamas. Hamas is not, as Israeli leaders keep calling it, a snake. It is a Hydra. Cut off one head, and more will grow in its place.

The hideous ambitions of Netanyahu give credence to South Africa’s claim of genocide. Meanwhile, the People of the Book have forgotten the words of one of our greatest teachers, Rabbi Hillel. When challenged by some joker to teach him the Torah while he stood on one foot, Hillel responded: “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to you. The rest is commentary.”

American Jews have pushed our government to support Israel no matter what it does. We should remember that we are Jewish before we are Zionist, and human before we are Jewish. What Israel is doing to Gazans goes against everything Judaism has always stood for. It is beyond horrible for Palestinians. It’s time more of us realized that it is also very bad for the Jews.

 

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Purging the GOP

 Kiss the ring.

"It would be a shame if something terrible happened to that nice Republican career of yours."

 

Two weeks ago my U.S. Representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican, announced that he endorsed  Donald Trump and supported his election. Bentz spoke to my Rotary club meeting on Wednesday. He didn't address that endorsement, and I didn't ask a question about it in the question-answer period. I thought it would inevitably have come across as a "hard question" from a Democrat. It would be inhospitable in that Rotary situation, where I am a 43-year member of that club and he is our guest speaker. 

Bentz

After the meeting I heard from two different club members friendly with Bentz, each sharing a supposed explanation for Bentz' Trump endorsement. One told me that he had heard that Bentz had been threatened with a primary opponent if Bentz didn't endorse Trump right away, and Bentz buckled under that threat. That might be accurate. Who knows?

Another club member said there was no threat of being "primaried." It was just that Bentz knew he would need support from fellow-Republicans on issues of importance to his District. An early public endorsement of Trump would solidify Bentz's position on the GOP team. It might mean better support from fellow Republicans for maintaining dams on the lower Snake River, or protecting timber harvests on Bureau of Land Management lands, or any of the other issues of interest to the Congressional District. That explanation, too, might be true. Who knows anyone's real motivation?

What we know for sure is what Bentz did. He endorsed for election a man who orchestrated an effort to overturn the 2020 election by pressuring people in seven states to sign false affidavits claiming to be duly-elected electors. He then pressured his Vice President to use those documents to justify discarding the votes for Biden, allowing Trump to retain office. None of this is a secret. Bentz joined other GOP leaders by hopping onto the Trump train anyway, and did so when there were still GOP alternative candidates.

Here is where we don't need guesswork: Bentz acted in an environment of pressure to show loyalty to Donald Trump personally. Trump is calling out RINOs. Trump published this warning on his Truth Social platform:

Nikki "Birdbrain" Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country. Her False Statements, Derogatory Comments, and Humiliating Public Loss, is demeaning to True American Patriots. Her anger should be aimed at her Third Rate Political Consultants and, more importantly, Crooked Joe Biden and those that are destroying our Country - NOT THE PEOPLE WHO WILL SAVE IT. I knew Nikki well, she was average at best, is not the one to take on World Leaders, and she never did. That was up to me, and that is why they respected the United States. When I ran for Office and won, I noticed that the losing Candidate's "Donors" would immediately come to me, and want to "help out." This is standard in Politics, but no longer with me.

Trump finished with this: 

Anybody that makes a "Contribution" to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don't want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!

The Oregon GOP used to be a diverse party. Republican Senator Mark Hatfield opposed the Vietnam War. Republican Senator Bob Packwood supported abortion rights. Republican governors Tom McCall and Vic Attyeh were moderates. Trump has ushered in a new era of party discipline and loyalty. If you aren't with Trump, you aren't a Republican. You would be on the outs. Trump is purging the party of people of independence or weak loyalty. It isn't enough to support Trump-initiated policies. One needs to support Trump personally. 

It is happening right in the open.

At a critical time following the 2020 election Republicans in key positions -- in the military, in the Justice Department, in the White House counsel's office, in the cabinet -- said "no" to Trump when he tried to carry out illegal acts. Those people won't be there in his next administration, and they wont be in Congress, either.

Republicans cannot reform themselves. They are afraid to buck the team. It will take an election. When Trump is clearly marked as a "loser" the Republicans will find their courage. 

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A progressive flat tax.

Here's an idea.

Maybe there is a tax policy that would appeal to both Democrats and Republicans.

It would give a boost to low-income Americans -- a plan of wealth re-distribution dear to the hearts of Democrats. It would also put a low cap on tax rates paid by wealthy Americans, a longstanding Republican goal. 

My college classmate Jim Stodder left college to travel the world and to work as a roughneck in the oil fields. He returned to school a decade later to finish up, then got a Ph.D. in economics at Yale. He argues we should re-visit an old idea for a tax plan. The tax plan is simple enough to describe in a few sentences. It gives an income floor to the poor and working poor. It removes the disincentives to work built into rising tax rates in a progressive tax system. By lowering the top tax rate the plan reduces incentives for the wealthy to find un-economic, wasteful tax shelters. The plan seems fair and equal at first glance, since everyone pays the same rate. Jim Stodder posts from time to time at www.jimstodder.com.

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

Reducing income inequality through the tax code could be made simple and virtually cheat-proof. It is so simple that the most famous left-wing and right-wing economists of the later 20th century -- James Tobin and Milton Friedman -- agreed on it.

 

It's called a fixed-sum transfer. Or to sound worse, a "lump-sum transfer" or, worse still, a "negative income tax" -- as George McGovern called it. It sure didn't help him in 1972 against Nixon. I think we can blame that name on Milton Friedman. Click negative income tax.   

 

Here's an example of how it works. Total personal income before taxes is about $20 trillion. (Source: statista.) Let’s say taxes take 20% of that, yielding $4 trillion. Now instead of our current mildly progressive rate, based on tax "brackets" that rise with income, let's just give the average household $10,000. Say there are 100 million households, so that's $1 trillion.

 

To get the same net tax of $4 trillion we'll have to tax at a higher rate of 25%, yielding $5 trillion. So the rate has risen, but look what's happened to taxes relative to your income. If your family made $40K, you just broke even. $10K transfer minus $10K tax nets out that you get nothing and owe nothing. Above that income level you begin to pay a net tax. Below that level you get a net transfer.  

 

So if your family made $20K, you'd pay 25% in tax ($5K) and get $10K in transfers, for a $5K net transfer. If you made $80K, you'd pay $20K in tax, and with a $10K transfer your net tax is $10K. So your net tax rate is not 25% but half of that:10K/80K = 12.5%.  

 

Income taxes would approach the overall 25% pre-transfer rate only for the very richest households. So if your income was $4 million, you'd give the government  $1 million minus the $10K, a post-transfer net rate of 990,000/4,000,000 = 24.75%.

 

Look what we've done. We've got a "flat rate" with no "bracket cliffs." You get to keep 75% of every dollar you make, plus a bit more after the transfer. But we now have a highly progressive tax system, where the post-transfer rate rises very gradually up to 25%. Basic economics says the tax rate won't affect your income-work decision because you can’t change your flat rate of 25%. And you can’t change that fixed transfer of $10K -- everyone gets it, rich or poor.

 

So the "Negative Income Tax" was a brilliant idea with a god-awful name. The public reaction to McGovern's plan was similar to what yours would be if a passer-by in a big city offered to take your wallet, put $100 inside, and then "give it right back" to you.  

 

Fifteen years after he lost to Nixon, I went to a testimonial dinner for George McGovern. The Yale economist James Tobin, who had been my teacher, gave a speech. Tobin had been one of his advisors. He apologized for not having suggested a name change.  

 

However, just because something is simple and helps most people doesn't mean it will happen. As Milton Friedman, one of the original advocates of the plan, recognized, the U.S. Congress lives and dies by crafting little tax favors for their wealthy donors.

 

Why should they give up that power by making taxes simple?  As the billionaire publisher of Forbes magazine, Steve Forbes, once said, the tax form would be so short you could print it on a postcard. (Forbes loved the flat tax -- just not the inequality-reducing transfers!)

 

But just because people in power hate it doesn't mean it can't happen. That's been true of almost every good idea.  

 

 

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Superlatives. The very, very, VERY

 "Make no small promises."

Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary last night. 

In his victory speech he told us the consequences of a Trump victory in November. America would be great. Now it is terrible -- the very worst.

Readers are waking up to news that Trump was less than gracious in victory last night. The consensus of commentary is that Trump appeared more irritated than joyful. He was flanked by Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, who had dropped out. They took the stand to praise him. Nikki Haley was not joining the coronation.  

Trump is "otherizing" Haley. She isn't part of his team, or even America's team, he says. Trump has been hinting that maybe Haley was not a native-born American qualified to be president -- the birther gambit he used against Obama. She was an "anchor baby" and therefore part of a fraud. He began using her given first name, Nimarata. He took up calling her a "birdbrain" puppet of Democrats. Last night he hinted that he knew dark secrets that she would not want revealed:

“Just a little note to Nikki. She’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes, and I could tell you five reasons why already. 

“Not big reasons, little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, that she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron [DeSantis] have been, but he decided to get out.”

The bullying nativism may distract Democrats from seeing the power and effectiveness of Trump's salesmanship. Trump follows the core observation of my college classmate Tony Farrell, who has done guest posts here. Farrell had a long, successful career in marketing. He supervised the Trump Steaks account when he was at The Sharper Image. A lode star in marketing on TV infomercials is the command: Make No Small Promises. 

Trump's victory speech in New Hampshire

Rationally, a consumer should be wary of extreme, grandiose superlatives. We have all heard the caution to be wary of a promise that is too good to be true. We need that advice. Humans respond to forceful, decisive certitude. Trump seems genuinely to believe what he is saying, and his certitude is infectious. At minute 10:20 he says he got millions of votes but was cheated out of them in the 2020 election, and then at 11:10:

We're going to have the greatest election success. We're going to turn our country around. If you take a look around the history of our country. If you look at the ten worst presidents in the history of this not-great-country-right-now, it's a country in decline, it's a troubled country, it's a failing country, frankly -- but if you took the 10 worst presidents and put them together -- the 10 worst, the absolutely 10 worst -- I used to say five, remember I used to say five -- they would not have done the damage that Crooked Joe Biden has done to our wonderful country. They would not have done the damage. There's never been anything like it.

Say, are they stupid people? I don't think so, because nobody can cheat that well if they are stupid. Do they hate our country? They must hate our country because there is no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look. They want to raise our taxes times four. They want to let the Trump tax cuts, the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, they want them to expire. Your taxes are going to go through the roof. Take a look at regulations, they are throwing regulations, you can't breathe, you can't even breathe with what they're doing. Take a look at our border. There's never been a border like this in the world. Four years ago we had the safest, best border in the United States. . . .

Superlatives. This style persuades some, not all. I cannot imagine a board of directors or hiring committee that would hire Trump for any position of leadership. Not a school district board hiring a principal or superintendent. Not a search committee for a city manager, hospital director, or college president.  Any hiring body would see Trump as an unreliable blowhard and a danger to the institution.

But such a person succeeds in some roles. I reflect on super-salespeople in my former work as a financial advisor. A person like Trump might have an extraordinary -- but likely brief -- career. He would find clients, overpromise, take giant risks in concentrated positions, and then, as we would describe it in the brokerage industry, "blow up his book." Brokerage management is on the lookout for such people, both seeking them and hoping to control them, but wary. Super-salespeople are brilliant and profitable employees for a while, but they are too persuasive. Clients get talked into things they regret, clients lose money, they complain and sue, and they bring down the super-salesman advisor and the managers who were supposed to supervise him. 

Under normal circumstances the 2020 election and aftermath would have been the career-ending finish for super-salesman Trump. But Fox and other conservative media did the equivalent of assuring investors that their account statements were wrong, that the stock prices they see were fake news. Don't believe what you see. Trump retained his base, and indeed consolidated it. 

He talks in superlatives, and he persuades. He will make a sugary, low-nutrition breakfast cereal sound g-r-e-a-t. People know better, but they buy it anyway. It sounds SO great.

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Downsizing, example three: The pump repair.

Epiphany.

Sometimes the smallest things can be the trigger telling one it's time to make a change.

Today's Guest Post would be funny if it weren't for the palpable frustration that John Flenniken describes. 

A generation of Baby Boomers is deciding if and when to downsize.

Every homeowner knows the situation. Things break and need maintenance or repair. A gutter clogged with leaves. A drip in the kitchen sink. Moss on a shady side of a deck. These are things one can fix on a Saturday.

For 30 years Penny and John Flenniken, my sister and brother-in-law, enjoyed their Portland home. It had bedrooms for guests and room for extended family get-togethers. They raised children and grandchildren there. They made the house fun to live in -- and complicated -- with decks, garden sitting areas, and a fish pond. 

John painted the house himself every five years. The job required a long extension ladder to get to the area under the eaves of the two-story home, but two summers ago for the first time he hired a painting contractor to do the job. That wasn't the catalyst for change. In fact it confirmed for him that he and Penny could stay in the house so long as they used common sense and hired people to do the big things.

Hiring a painting crew did not break the code of homeowner self-reliance.

Penny and John moved into an two-bedroom apartment in a retirement community in December. The catalyst for change came from a little thing.

Guest Post by John Flenniken

March of last year, around spring break for Portland, is a good time for this old 78-year old body to start on yard projects. The first project was to hook up the above-ground pond pump and filter that I had stored in the shop.

I placed the pump and filter in position and reconnected the pipes. I noticed the pump on the concrete pad sloped toward the pond, not allowing a good fill on the priming pot. I added water to the priming pot, then adjusted it to accommodate the slope. I tested it to see if everything worked. It did! 

Water flowed into the upper pond, and it began to fill. That’s when I noticed a small leak in the pump intake line. Not good. I dismantled the connections to the pump and inspected the intake. It was all good, though maybe not tight enough. My adjustment with a spanner worked! No more leak. 

Now to level the pump. My attempt to level it I knocked the priming pot off vertical. Easily cured! Just disconnect, inspect and remove the accumulated crud it sucked up in the short five-minute runtime of the test. I reassembled the unit and attached the lid to the now-full priming pot. Thinking I was home free, I started the pump. Nothing! Repeated twice more. Nothing. 

Confused, I researched the problem online. Advice pointed to a pump or impeller failure. A new pump was available, with free shipping and arrival in three days, for $1,200. A new pump arrived and I found it to be incompatible. I sent the pump back and got credit to my account for the purchase and free shipping both ways.  

Back to square one. My son stopped by, saying he uses pumps all the time, bigger than this 7,200 gallon per hour pump. He was convinced the on-line advice was correct, and what I had was a loss of vacuum pressure to a broken pump or impeller seal. Frustrated, I researched new pumps again. I learned the exact model and make added an external grounding junction box to the pump, requiring a certified electrician and permit to install. That meant a separate circuit running along the outside wall of the house from the electrical panel in the shop. I wrestled with the idea of new pump and rewire job and the additional cost and time. Was it worth it? How much longer could I keep doing this work? I slept on it. 

The next day, thinking I might quit, I went out again to remove the base and pump house supports. I found a black object. I dug it out and washed it off. It’s an o-ring about 6 inches in diameter. Could it be that simple? That the o-ring fell out of the priming pot lid? I took it into the shop and opened the lid on the priming pot. Yes, it fit perfectly. Two weeks had past from suspected pump failure to a functioning pump and water feature. It worked!! The pond filled!! That water cleared and the fish that wintered over began swimming around looking for food.

Penny is convinced this was THE MOMENT I knew I wanted to sell the house. I agree, it was time to downsize.

 

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Guest Post: Writing for money.

"Aesop's fables! Aesop's fables!
Stories from so long ago!
Aesop's fables! Aesop's fables!
Still have much to show!
We remember all his tales
Filled with morals true!"

Opening song in Gerald Murphy's "Aesop's Fables -- The Musical"

By writing this blog I have joined the ranks of "content creators" in the modern world of small-scale media. 

I like writing this blog. I try to be serious and fair. I get one or two new readers a day, but I've never gone stratospheric. I don't write click-bait headlines. ("Five signs you have cancer -- that your doctor won't tell you!")  I haven't attempted to monetize this blog. I would rather have more readers than more money.

Some photogenic, articulate people are "influencers" by means of their YouTube channels, TikTok videos, and Instagram. My son, Dillon, has been doing a Portland Trail Blazer-focused podcast, "Holy Backboard," for years. If one's audience is big enough, one can monetize content creation.

Gerald Murphy is a playwright. He is a retired high school drama teacher and now lives in Medford, Oregon. He calls himself a "hack," but that is tongue in cheek and lighthearted, like much of his writing. He writes short plays of the kind school and church groups perform.

His plays are copyrighted and Murphy gets paid when people choose to perform them. Organizations like Lazy Bee handle the paperwork of making the plays available, with product inventory sorted by style, play length, cast sizes, and sets to meet the demands of the marketplace. 

Murphy wrote me about writing for money.

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

                       Confessions of a Serial Hack

I have several habits I engage in immediately after my first cup of coffee each morning. The first thing I do is crank up my little laptop and work on my “Wordle” puzzle. My wife also plays this game, and she beats me more than is acceptable to a fragile ego. The next step is to check Peter Sage’s political blog, which is always interesting, even if the name Donald Trump appears far too frequently. I imagine half the country is longing for a day when this narcissistic ex-casino owner disappears from the public view.

And finally, since I am a playwright, I scan my emails to see if any of my publishers have good news for me. Good news means one of my plays has been picked up by a community theater or school drama program. And that means I’ll be getting royalties. Doesn’t happen that often anymore, but when it does, I’m a happy camper. Does it bother me that it’s very hard to make money in my chosen field? I have to admit it does. I like writing, but as Woody Guthrie wrote: “California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not, you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do re mi."

Saw "American Fiction" yesterday, which brought up a problem I share with the hero of that movie. Should I write to make money, or do I write for one of many non-monetary reasons (self-satisfaction, love of literature, you can't stop yourself, etc.)? I'm aware that some people write what they need to write but still make money, but I think this is rare. Heck, getting published or produced is rare. But let me tell you where I ended up in this debate. 

First of all, I write to make money. That means I pander. Since I write plays, I go where the money is -- schools and community theater. I would never purposely set out to write a play for Broadway because that road is filled with broken glass, sharp nails and wasted lives.

I always have at least a two-to-one female-to-male ratio in my shows. The clients most likely to put on my shows are middle and high schools, sometimes elementary. My sets are always simple. Complex sets and costumes are beyond most budgets. You probably know the rest of my story. Keep it simple. Don't include any prop that a teenager couldn't find in some uncle's garage. Stay away from heavy drama and avoid tragedy at all costs. Comedy works best. Go for short attention devices like sight gags and easy-to-understand puns and jokes. Above all, remember the words of Moss Hart: "If you have a message, call Western Union."

I'm sure my words here will appall many serious writers. So be it. I'm a hack, so this is what works for me. If you can write well-enough to be produced without pandering, you have my sincere admiration. But remember that the writer in "American Fiction" closes his show with a cheap and tawdry Hollywood ending.

 

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