The Loser                                             by Jeff Potter Do losers have anything to offer our culture? Everyone knows what a loser is. A loser is someone who doesn't have the money or influence he might have, due to failure of nerve. Or it's someone who can't do anything right, someone who screws up good things. Cynics say a loser is anyone who doesn't have money or influence for any reason at all. We are sometimes told to respect the loser who has high ideals. He may even win in one area while losing in another. Maybe he becomes influential even though he stays poor. This may be enough to change our view of him. Who is this "everyone" who knows what losers are anyway? C'mon, we know who "everyone" is. He is us. Who hasn't snickered at someone on the playground?  At the same time, no one is a perfect winner. We all know the sting of loss. And we'll all know the biggest sting soon enough.  Losing mostly depends on your perspective. Who's a loser in the USSR? In corporate America?  But how well do we understand the loser after all?  Our whole American reality is set up as a contest. And losers are anywhere we see a contest. So to get the whole picture of our culture we have to understand both winners and losers. You can't leave out the losers. Sure, losers have an ax to grind, are biased. But winners are, too. We have to be able to compare and contrast them both to see a little clearer what really is going on. Winners and losers are, together, the risk-takers in our contest-oriented culture. Many losers try hard and throw themselves at things in amazing ways. The middle does nothing. They're the spectators, risking nothing---or so it seems. The ground we think we're standing on is sinking-sand, pushing us into contests we try to avoid. Not choosing is a choice.  To think of life as something other than a contest, to see more shading and complexity, you have to step back. And to do that again requires looking at losers as well as winners...and spectators, too. You need to change your position to see where you are. Actually, to get the stereo affect that lets you see the depth of reality you need to be in two places at once, which is what reading can do for us. Then you can locate yourself and see through the facade, and see how the contest paradigm is mostly hollow. Cultures that aren't based on the contest probably have many more kinds of roles for people to play. But we're stuck with three---winner, loser and spectator---and two of them are kept quiet. So we can't know ourselves. What wins in our culture? Noise. Is anything of value ever noisy? Maybe. Is anything of value ever quiet. Often. So what do we lose when noise is what wins? We lose what we need. We are kept in need. Noisy winners need us to be needy because they can't give what we need. They can only develop our need. They can cater to it, but can never resolve it.  Sure, some contests are important: we need food and shelter. Those can be scarce goods. But nowadays they're pretty darn cheap and don't require that much competition. The rest of what we need is free. In fact, we get them by giving, not competing. What does this mean for a contest world? There's actually a lot of art about losers. The anti-hero is a popular concept for all kinds of winners to make art about. But do winners tell the truth about losers? Do losers themselves get to make art? Do they get to tell their stories? Are they heard? Are they worth hearing? Or is he always the one who it's fair, or at least safe, to snub and silence? I suppose so. But, ya know: watch yer back. He's evolving where you least expect it.  What would the greatest art by the biggest loser look like?  Remember, a loser is someone who gets no leverage, no help from anyone. Yet, since we're considering the greatest loser here, he would work in a medium where he gets a lot done anyway. Obviously, he'd be a writer. It's the cheapest, simplest, least mediated art. With the most potential.  Not coincidentally, writing is the greatest of all the arts. It has given the most to us. It comes with the least strings attached, for good or bad.  We give writing to the losers because no one can take it away from them. Everything that can be taken is taken from them. The writing of a loser might be a bit choppy. He's working overtime at a crappy job and that doesn't give him much time to develop his ideas. And he might be crabby, because he keeps losing jobs due to the writing. So we keep in mind the conditions under which someone works. In fact, we might even give him allowances or even credit for it. It's not so surprising when someone does good work when they have all day and a lot of money to do so. OK, so a loser can be a hero and do great work against bad odds---but he's still a loser, which means he's silenced anyway. Winners need the team concept because winning is above all a social event. Losers work alone. Or if they're a group, they're kept down...until their numbers are sufficient to finally give them some leverage. But working solo, losers have given us most of our greatest art and ideas. How can we square what losers have done versus how we treat them today? We can't. It's time for a change. Our culture offers ever fewer opportunities to work alone. Maybe this is why we haven't seen any great art lately and why we are led so easily down such twisted paths. The winners have agreed to stop no one at anything as long as it's about MORE. If this is the case then winners can keep winning. But anything that gets in the way of MORE must be stopped. Losers always show the wealth of less and that scares winners. Winners don't want projects screwed up. Winners are on teams that become bigger as they win more and more. Here again we come up with ambivalence about winning: bigger isn't always better. But if a winner realizes this and backs off he becomes a loser. It's tricky! Winners work together to create customers who respond to what they can deliver (and they can't deliver much). They're part of the cultural Zeitgeist of cooperating competitors who all agree on the ground rules. Don't rock the boat is one rule. --And the customer is included in this one. All winners need are teammates and customers. Frenzied customers are best...dumb ones who are brand loyal...these folks love a winner. Winners work smoothly with marketing, business and legal departments. Do losers? Losers are crabby. They're ahead of or behind their times. They're annoying either way. Their essence is to rock the boat. (In a culture of chaos, calmness and civility are disturbing.) So even if a loser has something to offer, winners don't want him. Losers are sometimes allowed into a project edgewise, but then they're isolated, not allowed to let their loserness rub off. This might be the screenwriter for a big movie, who is allowed no other influence on the project. The novelist whose novel is adapted by the screenwriter is even kept away from the screenplay. But losers in a field like moviemaking are winners compared to typical losers. It's all relative. We have to work hard to keep our eye on the loser. Do winners *only* need customers? Let's not forget that winners are people, too. They might be wrong about what they want and believe. (They chant "diversity" or "novelty" when unity is what their souls really need.) Everyone knows that losers are often right. So the winner paradigm is not as complete as winners would have us believe. Let's not forget that what loses today can win tomorrow. A great idea can finally break through. Also, if a loser gets co-opted, his art might be let through, but the effect is lost, or maybe he just sells out. Either way things can start to go well for him, he can start winning. Many times it's only a matter of if he's willing to make that deal. Ask Robert Johnson about that one. But a gain can be a loss and vice versa. Everything new and true starts out losing, then wins. If... If the culture gains from it. But the stronger a culture is, the more the best loser ideas are kept out. A culture wants to perpetuate itself, the status quo. And losing means change. Winning means change, too. Is there a difference in the kind of change? Many great ideas are never known or developed: cultures suffer as a result. These ideas have to wait for a better culture, one that can deal with them and their loser authors. The winners make what we get to see and their change is that they make more of it. Winners change only quantity (more stuff, more performance), not quality. A real writer in an post-literate culture is a waster of paper. People stare at him: what are all those silly words? That's not a how-to manual, that's not a thriller, that's not sensitive. They laugh. He's a loser. They give his paper-handling job to someone who doesn't mess it up with offensive, useless scribbles. The winner in a post-literate culture promotes illiteracy, is king of the illiterates, uses books for job-training, TV-simulation and fun. But it's the kind of reading takes more than it gives. In the end it's always less fun. Soon it's fun plus Paxil. Fun is a downhill slope, taking, needing, shopping. It takes work to live, but that doesn't feel like fun. But feelings aren't everything. Didn't your momma teach you that? What, the TV told you otherwise? In the case of writing today, reaching the public requires publishing which requires working with winners in the above-mentioned marketing, business and legal sectors.  But what if the writing questions the winners? What if it trespasses against marketing, business and legal? What if it wants to be read without the approval, filtering, editing and censorship from winners? What if it has too much loser about it for the winners? What if it's right and the winners are wrong? How can it get past the winners? All great writing has faced this challenge. The problem is that today the winners are winning more than ever before. They are perfecting their game. There are fewer ways for truth to get through.  The only thing the loser has is a chance. And that chance is a big risk to the racket being run by the winners. It's a big risk to the paradigm that the winners believe in. Losing is about reality and reality gives winners a scare. Sure, there are better or worse winners. And we can compare losers as well. Truth and beauty are what really matters, not winning or losing. --But winning wants us to forget this. How to tell when writing has truth and beauty? Well, we have critics to help us evaluate this. But critics have jobs and jobs are part of winning in our culture, so they only recommend what their bosses, toadies or professors tell them to---or else they become losers. So we don't give criticism to the critics. Unless it's to the ones nobody knows about, the losers. Critics might be able to hide some truth in their work, but who wants to strain, dig and read between the lines? What you want is for them to lay it on the line. But no one can print any of that today. So how to sort it out? I'd say to listen to serendipity and to word of mouth---and pay attention to who's doing the recommending. Look to the kind of writing which has less mediation, fewer middlemen. Look to zeens and the internet. That's the kind of writing that can stand on its own---even though it's hidden, cloaked and laughed at by the winners, and even though 90% of it is crap. The 10% that's good more than holds its own against the 100% winner stuff in the elite media. Look for any revolutionaries who are already working on this subject. It just so happens that there's a group that's dedicated to just such a mission: the Underground Literary Alliance. They're a group that seems to include a significant number of alcoholics, hicks, hookers and low-wage-earners, along with a distinct lack of social climbers. They're promoting the writings of an SSI recipient and an old unemployed person on Social Security *sans* pension or safety net, among others. Yet they've made a cover story of the NYT, and major national media are interested in what they do next. I think they can help us. Here's an excerpt from a Jack Saunders novel to ponder in light of these notions: Go your own way. Be true to your vision. Look to the lodestar and create. Do that and you'll live in poverty, die young, your neighbors will think you a loser. Kerouac was beat. Waylon and Willie were outlaws. The Flower Children were freaks. Tom Pain was a loser. But it was paradoxical. Was St. Francis a loser? Only by losing all do we gain Eternal Life, he said. Was Whitman a loser?  Yes, they were, and so was Pain. Born to lose? No, he wasn't a born loser. He was a self-made man. He had acquired the ability to lose, through diligent and unceasing effort.