Kayla Blaze: A Tale of the New Southwest

Kayla Blaze was written in response to the incident that’s portrayed in the novel. It’s a roman a clef, though not all the characters are one-to-one representations of actual people. The Gillian Greenback character, for example, is just a type that many people in academia are familiar with (though I did picture an actual colleague when I wrote her, and she really did/does have gorgeous eyes). The department chair was based on my actual chair, a very decent, humane, and “liberal” man who I believe to have been something of a dupe—and definitely a dinosaur in his profession. Nowadays you have to “advocate” to survive. He did not advocate; he educated. The civil rights organization in the novel is FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, whom I had been following for years and continue to follow and support, and I saw the notice on “Warren Kefauver” on the FIRE website. 

My motive for writing the novel was very simple. If you remember your Democracy in America, Tocqueville shrewdly predicted that the biggest threat to all democracies would be the rise of authoritarian factions. Because democracies are ostensibly egalitarian, they don’t have formal hierarchies of authority and thus lend themselves to the rise of powerful factions that take over and impose rigid conformity (James Madison had of course predicted the same thing). Tocqueville’s proposed repellent for such freedom-killing developments was free expression: the more of it, the better. Your best chance to stay free is to keep shooting your mouth off and make sure others can keep shooting their mouths off as well. Moreover, as Richard Wright suggested, to censor people is to invalidate them as human beings, and I believe people are still human beings even if they disagree with me or see the world differently from the way I see it. So as you can probably imagine, I think having all the crazies on the Internet and TV and radio is a good thing, not a bad thing. It makes life messy, but life is better, at least for the little guy, when it’s messy. FIRE advised me to publicize the incident as widely as I could. I concur with both Tocqueville and FIRE: Free expression is the most important factor in maintaining a free society. Hence I wrote Kayla Blaze as a contribution to that cause. 

If you remember your sixties radicals, you probably also remember that the bulk of their strategy was to undermine the bourgeois culture of their (our) parents and thus destabilize our society. Hence the Kayla Blaze character, who’s a “rebel” without a cause—much like Orwell’s Julia. Kayla is neither a revolutionary nor a victim. She’s cynical, and she’s savvy. There is much to like about her—if, like me, you’re attracted to cynicism, to people who recognize humans for the self-interested animals that we are and don’t mind saying so. But to like somebody is not necessarily to admire her. I don’t know if she’s admirable (and don’t give a shit). In my world, very few people qualify as admirable. The girl on whom Kayla’s character was primarily based was smokin’ hot, knew it, and seemed to resent it. She knew what boys like and seemed at times to regret having it. So, like Julia in Orwell’s famous novel, she sometimes seemed to use sex almost as a weapon—not a gesture of intimacy but a sort of contest to show you how good she was at getting you off. (Let’s face it, sex is always something of a competition, and when it’s done well there is, at least for men, a feeling of being vanquished—or at least spent—when it’s over). Like some other folks who have an ample supply of something other people crave almost to madness at times—money, power, celebrity, a talent of some kind, or looks that every man or woman lusts after—Kayla resents the attention she gets from men even as she’s proving she can deliver what they crave. Does that make her a sex object? If you insist—but all of us are objects for somebody. That’s the nature of the human beast. (Actually, it’s the nature of all beasts. You should see how affectionate my cats get when they want food.) In any event, it’s hard to tell what Kayla is really looking for—in life or in her relationships with men. But I think there’s more to her than just “low self-esteem.” That kind of analysis is the stuff of pop—and pat—psychology. It’s tidy, and it makes the analyst feel competent, but it does not explain a complex human being. 

As for the story’s narrator, he is of course just the perfect human being in every respect. 

Actually, he comes from a blue-collar background and resents people who bitch a lot about the state of the world when he really doesn’t think they have much to bitch about. They have elite sensibilities and elite sentiments, and in general they look down on the kind of people he came from. He sees their hubris as unjustified and hence doesn’t like them very much. He feels closer to the groundskeepers and custodians on campus than he feels to his colleagues. He knows that the people who benefit most from free expression are the people in the lower strata of society, not those at the top. Among the extraordinary array of prescient observations Tocqueville made, he noted that there was a stratum of elites in all the democracies he was studying that just hated democracy. It made things too messy and difficult for the elites to run the show. Though an aristocrat himself, Tocqueville admired the cacophony of voices in America. He was sympathetic with the rabble—as is the narrator of Kayla Blaze, who is hence angry and resentful when elites start talking about placing “limits” on expression. He knows whose expression will most likely be limited, and he knows that limiting expression is ever and always a means for controlling people. That pisses him off.

In fact, I started writing a novel about the Kayla Blaze character based on a graduate professor I knew who was notorious for shacking up with his female grad students, presumably providing them the kind of education a gal just can’t get in the classroom. I meant to make him and his ilk look bad—like the self-serving egotistical pricks some of them are. For that matter, the novel was and still is a commentary on the self-serving nature of bureaucratic institutions in general. It will not be a surprise that I am a big believer in public choice theory. Bureaucracies serve themselves first, their other constituents later. That’s just the way people are. 

When the “Warren Kefauver” incident occurred, I changed the novel into a twenty-first-century retelling of one of my favorite American novels, The Scarlet Letter, by probably the best-ever American storyteller (Flannery O’Connor, a fellow admirer of Hawthorne, would be up there with him if she’d lived longer). If you remember, Hester Prynne, like Kayla, hates the people who have held her in contempt and punished her, but the problem is that she continues hating them long after they have forgiven her (and even forgotten what the scarlet letter stands for). Eventually, she comes to accept them as they have accepted her (which is why I think the A stands for “acceptance”). Does Kayla ever come to terms with the uptight assholes in the secular postmodern church where she hooks up with her own Arthur Dimmesdale? Good question. This Arthur bails on the church, unlike his Puritan predecessor, who cleaves to his belief that his own sacred institution, the church, serves a higher purpose worth serving. He dies for his faith, and Hester embraces the community that once banished her. We don’t know what becomes of Kayla. I guess we’ll have to save it for the sequel.