WRITER WRONGED

A few weeks into the current WGA strike this is what I have learned: People really, really hate media conglomerates, possibly even irrationally so. Even more than they hate Hollywood writers. I'm talking about regular people here, or at least people who are in no way tied to the entertainment industry.

Over the last few weeks I've walked on picket lines in both Los Angeles and New York—experiences that were largely similar in their range of moments of both surreal (trying to avoid walking alongside Nora Ephron for fear of being unable to contain my rage at the romantic-comedy horrors she has visited upon this earth) and mundane (wondering how many calories-per-hour picketing burns; does it count as an official day's workout?). Picketing, and for that matter simply existing, in both cities has also allowed for interaction with people out there who have no horse in this race—which is to say, most people—and what you realize is this: Regular people may not like us, but they hate them.

Often when you picket, a union organizer will ask you to hand out a stack of fliers explaining the WGA's position. You do it because it's a change from walking in a circle while considering if it's possible to chant union slogans in a way that doesn't make you want to disappear. But the people to whom you hand filers generally don't bother reading them. They just tell you they're on your side. They shake their heads and say stuff like: "They trying to screw you." They're right, of course. That's what conglomerates do—whether you write TV shows for them, or you just pay them $39.99 a month for cable and high-speed Internet. But what those people really seem to be communicating is a feeling that they've been getting screwed, too, in some kind of vague but still pointedly invasive cultural/emotional way. As members of the most media-savvy and media-saturated society on earth they seem to be sharing the implicit understanding that Big Media has got us all by the balls, one way or another.

I can't help but think this is probably the way Americans used to feel about Standard Oil, or Microsoft. But media/entertainment is a million times more personal than petroleum or microchips, so it elicits a more personal response. Like the Con Edison worker in New York who watched us picket while he finished his lunch, then looked at me and shrugged, "Fuck 'em, right." Not fuck them for trying to screw writers out of a fair split of future Internet revenue, fuck them for Dancing with the Stars and Rush Hour 3 (even if you/we did write it.) Fuck them for being unable to escape any of it, all of it. And fuck them that we all lap it up and have no real intention of stopping. And if that means supporting what may be an otherwise easy to dislike, or at least disparage, group of mostly well-compensated writers of mostly-mediocre entertainment, well, so be it.