Fictional Tale Antagonizes Reader

If the Indy thinks snide quips by the workshop coach and after the fact online (not print edition) clarification of the nature of this writing makes it right, you are wrong. It is the Indy, the writer and the writer’s coach who are the antagonists in this entire shoddy affair, not the reader who responded in a measured and restrained tone. Fiction or not the piece appeared under the opinion heading on line and fictional characters aside the first person narrative of the writer asserted than 9/11 was linked to American arrogance. There is a broad ranging multi-modal social media discussion of this writing and the way Indy handled its errors in its publication in which people from across the political and social spectrum agree this is reverse racism and slanderous hate speech directed at our community, not to mention that it was done during the holidays and at a time when racial issues and terrorism are subjects that require insight moral logic, not the ability to arouse emotion disconnected from reason, intellectual honesty and a just dialogue. The clarification notes Indy adds are best evidence you created an ethics problem but did not deal with it responsibly. Declaring success because the writing created negative reactions is pretty pathetic. I once spent some quality time in Sonoma and Mendocino with Anais Nin and some of her writers workshop pals, and she talked with us about ethics in fiction and non-fiction writing. Your editorial standards for how this was done fall far short of the principles she upheld, and you had more than one chance to come clean and didn’t do it. The Indy is diminished and less than it was because of it. But it has proven to a lot of us that the social media frees us from codependency on any news source. If there is any success in this it is that.

The Indy’s created headline “Fictional Tale Antagonizes Reader” is inaccurate, misleading, and clearly an editorial slant to infer silliness on the part of a reader reacting hostilely to a fairy tale. As long as it is not offensive, please publish the letter writer’s headline instead of injecting the Indy’s bias. As the writer of the above letter I was not antagonized, and certainly not by a fairy tale. My letter was a fair and legitimate rebuttal of the author’s obvious personal, social, political, anti-American and racist commentary; regardless whether the writing was fiction or not.
That being said, I would certainly argue that the writing is a mixed genre of essay, commentary and fiction; not strictly a fictional short story. One would need a strong “suspension of disbelief” to believe the author is not the character telling the story in the first person; relaying personal and historical facts while espousing commentary for nearly the first half of the writing.
In the second half of the writing I am happy that the post Christmas, pre-New Year party on Dec. 28 and all the characters that attended were fictional. As realistic fiction, I think the writer did a good job with the use of allegory and symbols to get her social, political, anti-American, racist views across. It is those views that I rebutted and criticized in my letter, not some fictional tale.

Mr. Hills,

Thank you for your comments. You are a Patriot!

There is another fictional story that came to mind when I read women’s writing workshop coach Fugate’s lame change-the-subject justification for the warped thinking about our town in the writing by her protege that she passed along to her pals at the Indy. Fugate quotes Aristotle and says that bad writing is great if there is a negative reaction because it falsely accusing others in our town of racism without real life evidence to support it. If it were not intended as such the story would have ended with a parable of recognition that she was not truly a victim of racism. Instead the only people she portrays who are not racists are those who don’t really celebrate the holidays but are subdued by guilt and shame because of the arrogance of America that she tells us led to 9/11. Fugate says that is empowering for Razin because it “aroused emotions in the psyche of readers.” She also tries to argue the characters were realistic, which is a joke because they were shallow cliches with no nuance, so that what seemed real was her attempt to convince us that she saw what she was describing. What she aroused was a sense of injustice and a story that did not have the ring of truth, factual or fictional. Fiction can lie just as much if not more than dishonest non-fiction.true. Fugate and the Indy try to hide behind the fictional content in an intellectually cowardly way. Ask Orson Wells about presenting fiction without letting the audience know. It creates cognitive dissonance that pisses people off, which is very different than arousing emotion or reaching into the psyche. Fugate and the Editor of Indy need to disclose if she gets paid for coaching misguided solipsists like Razin, but whether she does or not the other fictional story that arouses emotions in the psyche in an honest was that came to mind when I read Fugate’s canned Aristotle quote was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, when the anti-heroine grandly quotes Nietzsche and Mussolini, and then sends her naive student out to fight on the wrong side in the Spanish civil war. I wish I could reprint in the Indy the e-mails and social media message I am getting form people who have never agreed with anything I say but tell me I am dead on this time. I can’t believe the juxtaposition between the stories about real victims of racism and cultural bigotry as well as religious hate we are reading in the news and this essay claiming victimization without basis in reality spread across the front page of a paper in our town.